The moral we should draw is that if we want well-functioning communities, we cannot be naive about our nature. We must fully accept the depths of our destructive, antisocial feelings. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by the police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. We should be allowed to talk gibberish, fasten woollen penises to our coats and set out into the night to party and copulate randomly and joyfully with strangers, and then return the next morning to our partners, who will themselves have been off doing something similar, both sides knowing that it was nothing personal, that it was the Feast of Fools that made them do it.
5.
We learn from religion not only about the charms of community. We learn also that a good community accepts just how much there is in us that doesn’t really want community — or at least can’t tolerate it in its ordered forms all the time. If we have our feasts of love, we must also have our feasts of fools.
Yearly moment of release at the Agape Restaurant. (illustration credit 2.18)
III
Kindness
i. Libertarianism and Paternalism
1.
Once we are grown up, we are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. A key assumption of modern Western political thinking is that we should be left alone to live as we like without being nagged, without fear of moral judgement and without being subject to the whims of authority. Freedom has become our supreme political virtue. It is not thought to be the state’s task to promote a vision of how we should act towards one another or to send us to hear lectures about chivalry and politeness. Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.
In his On Liberty of 1859, John Stuart Mill, one of the earliest and most articulate advocates of this hands-off approach, explained: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.’
In this scheme, the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members. The foibles of citizens are placed beyond comment or criticism — for fear of turning government into that most reviled and unpalatable kind of authority in libertarian eyes, the nanny state.
2.
Religions, on the other hand, have always had far more directive ambitions, advancing far-reaching ideas about how members of a community should behave towards one another.
Consider Judaism, for example. Certain passages in the Jewish legal code, the Mishnah, have close parallels in modern law. There are familiar-sounding statutes about not stealing, breaking contracts or exacting disproportionate revenge on enemies during war.
However, a great many other decrees extend their reach dramatically far beyond what a libertarian political ideology would judge to be appropriate bounds. The code is obsessed with the details of how we should behave with our families, our colleagues, strangers and even animals. It dictates that we must never sit down to eat a meal before we have fed our goats and our camels, that we should ask our parents for permission when agreeing to go on a journey of more than one night’s duration, that we should invite any widows in our communities for dinner every spring-time and that we should beat our olive trees only once during the harvest so as to leave any remaining fruit to the fatherless and to the poor. Such recommendations are capped by injunctions on how often to have sex, with men told of their duty before God to make love to their wives regularly, according to a timetable that aligns frequency with the scale of their professional commitments: ‘For men of independent means, every day. For labourers, twice a week. For donkey drivers, once a week. For camel drivers, once in thirty days. For sailors, once every six months’ (Mishnah, Ketubot, 5:6).
The Jewish legal code advises not only that stealing is wrong but also that a donkey driver ought to have sex with his wife once a week. Moses receives the Tablets of the Law. From a French Bible, c. 834. (illustration credit 3.1)
3.
Libertarian theorists would concede that it is no doubt admirable to try to satisfy a spouse’s sexual needs, to be generous with olives and to keep one’s elders abreast of one’s travel plans. However, they would also condemn as peculiar and plain sinister any paternalistic attempt to convert these aspirations into statutes. When to feed the dog and ask widows over for supper are, according to a libertarian worldview, questions for the conscience of the individual rather than the judgement of the community.
In secular society, by the libertarian’s reckoning, a firm line should divide conduct that is subject to law from conduct that is subject to personal morality. It should fall to parliaments, police forces, courts and prisons to prevent harm to a citizen’s life or property — but more ambiguous varieties of mischief should remain within the exclusive province of conscience. Thus the stealing of an ox is a matter to be investigated by a police officer, whereas the oppression of someone’s spirit through two decades of indifference in the bedroom is not.
This reluctance to get involved in private matters is rooted less in indifference than in scepticism, and more specifically in a pervasive doubt that anyone could ever be in a position to know exactly what virtue is, let alone how it might be safely and judiciously instilled in others. Aware of the inherent complexity of ethical choices, libertarians cannot fail to notice how few issues fall cleanly into unassailable categories of right and wrong. What may seem like obvious truths to one party can be seen by another as culturally biased prejudices. Looking back upon centuries of religious self-assurance, libertarians stand transfixed by the dangers of conviction. An abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the public sphere. The impulse to question the behaviour of others trembles before the likely answer: who are you to tell me what to do?
4.
However, there is one arena in which we spontaneously favour moralistic intervention over neutrality, an arena which for many of us dominates our practical lives and dwarfs all other concerns in terms of its value: the business of raising our children.
To be a parent is inevitably to mediate forcefully in the lives of one’s offspring in the hope that they will some day grow up to be not only law-abiding but also nice — that is, thoughtful with their partners, generous-spirited towards the fatherless, self-conscious about their motives and uninclined to wallow in sloth or self-pity. In their length and intensity, parents’ admonishments rival those laid out in the Jewish Mishnah.
Faced with the same two questions which so trouble libertarian theorists in the political sphere — ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ and ‘How do you know what is right?’ — parents have little difficulty in arriving at workable answers. Even as they frustrate their children’s immediate wishes (often to the sound of ear-splitting screams), they tend to feel sure that they are guiding them to act in accordance with norms which they would willingly respect if only they were capable of fully developed reason and self-control.