Who Is to Blame?

by Theodore Dalrymple (August 2011)


Some years ago I had a patient who kept all his appointments dressed in military costume, including boots. His camouflage made him highly conspicuous in the streets of the city, but he was obviously a soldier in the way that Marie Antoinette was a shepherdess. He no more wanted to live under military discipline than Marie Antoinette wanted to herd sheep. On the arm of his shirt was sewn a little West German flag, and I could not help but wonder whether this was a metonym for something rather more sinister.

He was a great lover of animals, as were many leaders of the Nazi Party and as, indeed, am I. He was so incensed against meat-eaters, he said, and about the cruel conditions in which meat is produced, that he often felt like shooting the people at the meat counter of his local supermarket. To this end he had joined a gun club, for it takes practice to kill carnivores selectively in a crowded supermarket.

I did not think his threat an entirely idle one; he was one of those people for whom the love for anything is always accompanied by a countervailing hatred of something else. He caused me considerable anxiety, not the least part of which (I am not proud to say) was the public opprobrium to which I should be subjected were he to open fire and kill people en masse: for everyone would ask why I, supposedly in charge, had done nothing to prevent it? In a vain attempt to spread or share the public responsibility for what he might do, I took legal advice: was it my duty to inform the police or to maintain patient confidentiality (I hoped the former)? The advice might be different today, after so many terrorist incidents and mass killings, but I was told then that I had no grounds for going to the police. The burden of anxiety was mine alone to bear.

I am glad to say that he did not carry out his threat; but would the moral problem of the treatment of animals raised for meat have ceased to be a real one had he done so? If he had shot dead twenty people in as supermarket, say, ostensibly to improve the treatment of animals raised for meat, would the monstrosity of his action have meant that we would now be entitled to disregard the question altogether?

It is surely a moral duty (if anything is a moral duty) not to inflict avoidable suffering on sentient beings, if that suffering is inflicted merely to give us some later gratification. If we caught someone inflicting pain on a cow or a pig, or even a chicken, merely for the sadistic pleasure of doing so, we should be appalled and rightly so; therefore we should not shut our eyes to the conditions under which meat is raised so that it should be easily and cheaply available to us all. To this extent, the animal rights activists are justified.

Of course, the problem is not an absolutely straightforward one. Most farm animals owe their very existence to the fact that they are of economic value to the farmer; without that value, much of it derived from our carnivorous habits, they would have had no existence and therefore no progeny. At what point it is better for a creature not to have existed at all than for it to have the life that we think is horrible, is not easy to determine. Most people do not commit suicide in the very worst of circumstances; this may be because they believe that life has an intrinsic value that outweighs the experiential content of that life, or because they are afraid of death, or because they retain some hope for the future. None of these feelings or beliefs can be attributed to the consciousness of animals, but the fact is that most creatures flee or resist death as if life still had some value for them. We cannot be absolutely sure, therefore, that it is better for a certain pig never to have lived at all than to have lived the life that it actually did live. We can, however, be pretty sure that it suffered.

For most of us it is self-evident that the mistreatment of animals could not possibly justify killing people, whether or not at random, and whether or not they were personally responsible, directly or indirectly, for the mistreatment. One of the first moral precepts that any child learns is that two wrongs don’t make a right, a fortiori if the second wrong is greater than the first. And if a greater second wrong is committed, it does not mean that the first wrong has thereby ceased to be a wrong.  

It follows, therefore, that even if my patient had acted out his fantasy, even if he had committed the monstrous crime that was in his mind to commit, the moral problem of the treatment of animals would not have been solved. And the fact that there are monomaniacs who look at the whole world through the distorting lens of that problem also does not mean that it ceases to be a problem.

Even monomania has its uses or benefits as well as drawbacks, not only for individuals, but for society as a whole. Monomania answers the difficult question for individuals of what life is for: life is for the pursuit of whatever goal the monomania suggests is desirable. Where this goal is harmless or beneficial, the monomania is harmless or beneficial; no doubt it is an excellent thing for society that a variety of learned or inventive monomaniacs till their tiny fields to the exclusion of all others, for otherwise those fields might not be tilled at all, at any rate not so well-tilled. As for myself, I think my wife would say that I am a serial monomaniac, obsessed – though for a relatively short time on each occasion, from one month to three months – by a single subject upon which I happen to be writing something. The danger of monomania is when a single idea not only crowds out other subjects from the mind, but appears to the monomaniac to be of unique and even sole moral importance.

It is also important to remember that the psychological provenance of an idea, or the political circumstances in which it is propounded, does not determine its truth or validity. The dangers of smoking, for example, were first appreciated in Nazi Germany, where the first epidemiological research into those dangers was done. (This is all recorded in Robert Proctor’s excellent book, The Nazi War on Cancer.) Indeed, one of the most eminent post-war British researchers into the connection between smoking and lung cancer, among many other diseases, Richard Doll, went to Nazi Germany in his youth and listened to lectures there on the subject. He was subsequently somewhat coy about the origin of his ideas, either though amnesia or fear that the origin might contaminate them in the eyes of his colleagues (or some combination of both, the human mind being a marvellously subtle instrument). But the fact is that smoking is harmful to the health; and the fact that it was doctors working in Nazi Germany who accepted, ex officio as it were, the removal of Jewish doctors from the profession, does not alter the conclusion.        

All this is but a prolegomenon, not to a confession, exactly, but to an acknowledgement of unease: for yesterday evening a close acquaintance of mine informed me that I had been quoted, albeit indirectly and quite possibly inaccurately, by Anders Breivik, in his 1500 page manifesto, posted on the internet shortly before he went on his terrible rampage in Norway. I was quoted only en passant, and much less than many others (some of my acquaintance); but no one likes to be thought of as even a remote inspirer of such a man or of such an action.

Needless to say, I am clear in my mind that nothing I have ever written could be taken as a justification for, much less an incitement of, mass killing. No minimally sensible person could derive a reason for such a killing from my words. But this does not entirely dispel my unease, precisely because I have spent much of my writing career propounding the view that ideas have consequences, and that many contemporary undesirable social (or antisocial) phenomena are caused not by ‘objective’ economic or physical conditions, but by the ideas that people have in their minds, often instilled into them by intellectuals without much thought of their adverse consequences if taken too literally or distorted.

Is it possible, then, that by emphasising the less attractive aspects of modern society and culture, by repeatedly drawing attention to the deleterious social and psychological effects of welfare dependence, by criticising multiculturalism as a doctrine and as corrupt bureaucratic opportunism, I may have contributed, if only a mite, to the poisonous, paranoid, narcissistic, grandiose and resentful brew in the mind of Breivik, who took what I wrote, even if at second-hand, in completely the wrong way and drew ludicrous but murderous conclusions from it? And if I did contribute that mite, does it mean that I should now retire into guilty silence, lest there be other Breiviks in the world?

In writing on the subject of immigration, for example, I have always felt an undertow of anxiety and guilt, not only because I am myself the descendent of a long line of refugees, but because I know that this is a subject on which the vilest passions and basest emotions are quickly aroused. There is, after all, a long history of such vile passions and base emotions in many, perhaps in most, countries. Thus to say anything about mass immigration other than it is an excellent thing is potentially to give intellectual succour to some very nasty people.   

But while history provides us with analogies, they are never exact. As human beings, we are condemned – it is both our glory as well as our burden – to live in perpetual near-novelty, and therefore to have to make continual leaps in the dusk if not in the total dark. We cannot treat the present as if it were a mere repetition of the past. To be mesmerised by precedent is as foolish as to take no notice of it whatever. It is said that generals always fight the current war with the strategy and tactics of the last; in like fashion, social commentators and reformers are reluctant to let go of past problems in favour of the problems that confront them now. A phenomenon – immigration – can keep its name while changing its nature; and it is obvious that the social consequences of immigration depend on the qualities of the immigrants as well as on the quality of the society into which they immigrate.

To be reduced to silence on an important subject, to decree in effect that only one opinion on it may be openly expressed, for fear of filling the minds of the unstable with murderous resentment, is to place a great deal of subject matter hors de combat. It is true that as yet no climate activist has killed people, and that ‘only’ three bank employees lost their lives in the riots in Athens (and probably not by the direct intention of the rioters at that), but there is no reason to suppose that extreme climate activists or protesters against finance capitalism are, and must forever remain, immune from murderous impulses. The human mind is capable of finding a casus belli in almost anything, and of rationalising violence when it wants to commit it. If an environmental activist were to act in imitation of Anders Breivik, I should not blame those who warned against global warming, nor even Anders Breivik himself.

As all who have ever suffered from anxiety know, however, rational considerations rarely soothe it away altogether. And if I were really free of it in this instance, it would be a matter of indifference to me that Breivik had referred to me in his preposterous manifesto; but it isn’t. I will have to live with that anxiety, as I once lived with the anxiety that my patient might mow down shoppers in the supermarket.     

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