The Battery Farm Ideal

by Theodore Dalrymple (June 2026)

I was riding in a taxi recently when I caught a glimpse of someone in the rearview mirror. It was my father, which was odd because he had been dead these past thirty-four years. He hadn’t changed in the slightest in the intervening period and even his facial expression was just the same as I remembered it.

Then I realised that it wasn’t my father I had seen, of course, but I myself. This realisation did not entirely please me: my father, though a talented man—more talented than I, in fact—had not, for reasons of character, made the most of himself, just as I have not. It is as if we were both determined to prove what the ancients knew, that character is destiny.

Naturally, I started to think of the reasons for my close resemblance to my father, not just physically, but in expression and gesture. I  found it difficult to believe that it was attributable to mere imitation, and thought it must be genetic, as was my physical resemblance to him.

This brought one of the most difficult questions of philosophy to the fore: the existence and scope of human freedom. We all experience ourselves as free agents, at least in advance of our actions. It is only in retrospect that we think of them as having been determined by that combination of genetics and circumstance that is often supposed to explain all human behaviour. This is especially the case when the behaviour to be explained is discreditable or criminal. I have found that even the least imaginative person, however slow of comprehension, is almost infinitely inventive when it comes to making excuses for himself and blaming others for what he himself has done. His sense of injustice done to him is always far more acute than his sense of justice done by him. His good actions require or call forth no such explanation.

But it does not follow from this that we often falsely rationalise the reasons for our bad actions by blaming circumstances that are infinitely, invariantly and unconstrainedly free, at least if we do not adapt the very rigid conception of freedom that Jean-Paul Sartre once propounded. We always have a choice of action, he said; even a man with a gun to his head can choose to be killed rather than accede to the demand of the man with the gun. Since, indeed, the man with the gun to his head cannot know for certain that the man holding it will actually pull the trigger, even duress is not a complete excuse for his choice. He might always have acted differently from how he did act.

This extreme view does not recognise many limitations on our choices, limitations that themselves were not chosen by us. I cannot, for example, be taller than I am (for, as Jesus put it in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’) I would never have been Mozart, whatever my education. I could never have been a mathematical physicist. I could never have been either a heavyweight or a flyweight boxer. Age imposes its limitations, too. When you are a child, you cannot do what an adult can do; when you are old, you cannot do what a young adult can do. I could not have been born in a place and time other than the place and time in which and at which I was born. This much is obvious.

I doubt that many people have precisely the God-given characteristics that they would have wished, if they had been asked in advance. If we were clones, we should all look the same and would not have any awareness of physical beauty in persons: the very idea of it would be impossible for us. If every woman were Greta Garbo, no woman would be Greta Garbo.

As the world is constituted, however, there is no possibility of uniformity in physical appearance, at least until the cloning of humans is not only possible but mandatory and universal. The variation in appearance from the point of attractiveness is probably on something like a normal distribution curve, with few at the extremes both of great beauty and hideous ugliness, with most of us (including the author of these lines) clustering around the mean. Needless to say, this is grossly unfair, since physical beauty confers unmerited advantage on those who possess it, and ugliness undeserved disadvantage.

Unfairness is not the same as injustice, however, for it is under no one’s control. The conscious attempt to adjust for or even eliminate it, given that it is inscribed in the very nature of our existence, leads to mental contortion, intellectual dishonesty and tyrannical interference with daily existence, to say nothing of inefficiency and incompetence.

Now of course, everything in human affairs is complicated, philosophically, morally, empirically and practically.

For example, a God-given gift that we would deem desirable, physical beauty, is no guarantee of a happy life. It may be allied to mediocre intelligence or bad character. Bad luck may pursue the beautiful as it may pursue anyone else. Physical beauty may be correlated with success, happiness and health, and indeed there is a plausible element of causation in this correlation, but the correlation is certainly not one-to-one: and the same is true in the opposite direction. Thus, unfair distribution of characteristics is not the same as inescapable destiny.

Those who do not recognise any difference between unfairness and injustice—those who seek what Thomas Sowell has succinctly called ‘cosmic justice’ —would object to the advantages that the undeservedly beautiful undeservedly enjoy. They would seek to counteract by means of regulation and policy the advantages that the beautiful spontaneously enjoy under the present dispensation. They would even hope eventually to destroy the prejudice that confers those unfair advantages on the beautiful, engineer them out of the human soul, as it were.

How could or would this be done? In the first place, there would be discrimination against the beautiful in hiring people for desirable or prestigious jobs: what would once have been an advantage to them would henceforth be a disadvantage, a black mark against them. The ugly would be favoured, not only to counteract the current prejudice against them, but in recognition of all the unfairness, the injustice, done to them in the past. Applicants for jobs would be scored on their physical beauty (I am sure that Artificial Intelligence quickly could produce a scale that was both valid and reliable), a high score counting against them whatever their other characteristics.

Naturally, there are complications of which this simple model to increase cosmic justice takes no account. For example, notions of physical beauty are apt to change, both in time and place. I have mentioned elsewhere in my voluminous writings my experience in Zululand, where young women who wanted, or were forced by circumstance, to live the traditional, rural life desired to put on as much weight as possible, whereas those who wanted to live a modern, urban life wanted to lose as much weight as possible, and both wanted medical assistance to attain the bodily shape that they, and no doubt the men they wished to attract, thought attractive.

It is not only cultures that differ in their conceptions of human beauty, but individuals. Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but not all gentlemen. My observation of young men is that they customarily go for the same physical kind of girl before making their final selection (if any of their selections is final).

Now insofar as men are attractive to women for reasons other than their physical attributes, for example in their financial prospects or actual situation, and the most attractive men have themselves preferences for certain physical types of women, it is clear that there is another layer of unfairness (which is injustice) introduced into human existence. To heal this crying wound, to extirpate this very deep injustice, radical reform will be necessary. Preferences themselves will have to be equalised by re-education.

By the time someone is an adult, even a young adult, it is too late. Preferences are formed early and, once established, are difficult to change.

Hence children must be educated aesthetically—indoctrinated, if you will, let us not be afraid of a mere word—into preferring the most common type of person. It is not only the voice of the people that should be good, but the face and figure as well. If children express an aesthetic preference for any type, it must surely be possible for cognitive behaviour therapy to change that preference. We should never lose sight of the goal, cosmic justice. There may be hiccups at first, failures, but no great goal was ever reached without difficulty.

There is a further complication, however, namely that physical attractiveness is not determined only by genetic endowment. People, after all, can make the best or worst of themselves. Even their gestures, their facial expressions, contribute to, or detract from, their beauty. They may look angry or serene—recently, a friend in America sent me a short video of a Congresswoman whose face seemed to wear bitterness and anger like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. I once knew a famous journalist whose face was always contorted by anger even when he thought he was unobserved: he was, so to speak, existentially angry, so that when, on occasion, he tried to be affable, his affability had something sinister about it, as is the gentle plume of smoke emerging from a volcano that is not at present erupting.

There is also the matter of facial and other bodily adornment. A ring through the septum of the nose, for example, is enough to destroy anyone’s personal attractiveness, and to cause the gaze of anyone to be averted. Equalisation of physical attractiveness, albeit in the direction of unattractiveness, by means of facial and other ironmongery has much potential for bringing about the final triumph of social justice. The truth must be faced: it is easier to increase one’s unattractiveness than one’s attractiveness.

It is obvious that facial expression and gesture can be taught, though not all characteristics are as easily taught. For example, anger is much easier to arouse, instill and express than serenity: indeed, it is possible that serenity, unlike anger, is not teachable to all. Very few are those who cannot be led to anger, bitterness and resentment, and therefore expressions of such should be the goal of the teachers of gesture and facial expression. They can be taught to all.

The universally acknowledged goal of equal opportunity requires that the differential in advantages conferred by genetic inheritance be eliminated, for how can equality of opportunity be said truly to exist when so much of a person’s fate is affected, if not absolutely determined by, the throw of the genetic dice? In the absence of cloning, and of upbringings in hatcheries under carefully controlled conditions (which would not have to be good conditions, incidentally, for the goal of equality of opportunity could be reached as well, perhaps better, by absence of opportunity as by its efflorescence), the best we could do would be to instruct, or indoctrinate, children in the lowest common denominator.

So long as circumstances have an effect on a human’s destiny, the search for perfect justice, conceived as universal fairness, will not only be futile, but harmful. It will distort effort, diverting it into useless channels, and harm real and possible progress. As a goal, its very impossibility of accomplishment will provoke resentment, and indeed is already doing so.

Generally, equality of opportunity is uttered, without further examination, as a desideratum of political policy—even as the desideratum of political policy. When did anyone last hear of a politician, or even an academic, criticise equality of opportunity as something not desirable? And yet, if one to take it seriously, au pied de la lettre, it is the most totalitarian ideal possibly to imagine, even worse than, say, equality of income.

It used to be said by radicals that the law was open to everyone, like the Ritz, or in the way that everyone was free to sleep under a bridge. They derided formal freedom, equality under the law, because under that kind of freedom, not only results, but beginnings, were so unequal and unfair. But they rarely stopped to consider what the alternative was, namely a system that equalised circumstances, namely cloning and growing up in the conditions of battery farms for chickens. Equality of opportunity is, and must be, an attack on difference, and therefore of freedom; but those who propose it think that they will be the ones in charge of the battery farm.

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Theodore Dalrymple’s latest books are Neither Trumpets nor Violins (with Kenneth Francis and Samuel Hux) and Ramses: A Memoir from New English Review Press.

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