Essayists From England

"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we can presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to become."

"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it will become purely an issue of post-human decision whether negative modes of consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever."

"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."

"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality."

"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional world where only a pinprick, minor pains, or even just "mild" suffering exists. In the real world, frightful horrors as well as humdrum malaise occur every day. The intensity of suffering is sometimes so dreadful that its victims are prepared to destroy themselves to bring their torment to an end. Each year, some 800,000 people across the planet kill themselves while in the grip of suicidal despair. Tens of millions of people are severely depressed or suffer chronic neuropathic pain. By way of contrast, the genteel conventions of an ethics seminar in academic philosophy, or the scholarly technicalities of a journal article, simply fail to come to terms with the enormity of what's at stake. To talk of a "pinprick" is to trivialise the NU ethical stance."

"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfilled - [negative utilitarianism] seems achievable in full."

"Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharing each other's joys?"

"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demonise and demean our non-human victims - and those who try to help them - now that our previously well-nigh unquestioned right to kill and exploit them is being challenged. Bloodsports enthusiasts, for instance, currently spend a lot of time cataloguing the alleged depredations of our victims on the environment. Recreational animal-killers go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid admitting that they themselves enjoy hunting and killing other creatures for fun. But then until a few years ago such rationalisations seemed scarcely called for. Selfish DNA had honed our intuitions so that the most agonising bloodshed seemed simply "natural"."

"A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions. In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today."

"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and travelogue-style voice-overs. They impose significance and narrative structure on life's messiness. Wildlife shows have their sad moments, for sure. Yet suffering never lasts very long. It is always offset by homely platitudes about the balance of Nature, the good of the herd, and a sort of poor-man's secular theodicy on behalf of Mother Nature which reassures us that it's not so bad after all. That's a convenient lie. If you had just gone through the horror of seeing your loved one eaten alive by a predator, or die slowly of thirst, you would find such clichés empty. Yet in Nature this kind of thing happens all the time. It's completely endemic to the prevailing red-in-tooth-and-claw Darwinian regime. Lions kill their targets primarily by suffocation; which will last minutes. The wolf pack may start eating their prey while the victim is still conscious, though hamstrung. Sharks and the orca basically eat their prey alive; but in sections for the larger prey, notably seals. An analogous scenario in which intelligent extraterrestrial naturalists turned the stylised portrayal of our death-agonies into a lyrical spectacle for popular home entertainment is repugnant. Yet as long as we revel in the production of animal snuff-movies in the guise of wildlife documentaries, that is often the role we play in the tragic lives of photogenic members of other species here on earth."

"[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...]."

"Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?"

"It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings."

"Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture ("what it feels like") of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness."

"A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation."

"The great men of that time agreed with Burke that petty thoughts go ill with a great empire, and that greatness in thought brings with it naturally some dignity of expression. On the famous occasion when Neville Chamberlain announced that ‘Hitler had missed the bus’, I happened to be listening with Granville Barker, and Barker murmured: ‘Asquith would never have said that’. Limehouse and Liverpool and post-war habits have accustomed us to a more colloquial idiom, which may be easier for an uneducated audience to follow, but does, I think, unconsciously lower the tone of thought."

"I am pleased with the election result. Nearly all the educated people I meet are Liberal, but vote Conservative."

"[I had] signed the letter of protest against Britain joining the war [but] then doubted, and was finally convinced the other way by Grey's speech on August 3rd [1914]."

"I am one of those many millions who believed, and believe still, that, amid all sorts of confusions and inconsistencies, the World War was on our part essentially a fight for justice in international relations, as against naked Machpolitik; an attempt, in Mr. Gladstone's words, to “establish public right as the common law of Europe.” If the League of Nations stands, the War will have been justified, or at least compensated; if it comes to nothing, our whole action will have been a series of vain cruelties and blunders."

"The Commonwealth is the Sermon on the Mount reduced to political terms."

"[T]he action of Italy towards Abyssinia threatens us with a catastrophe. ... One member of the League is openly planning against another member, under the eyes of all Europe, aggression of the most extreme kind, and is claiming the right actually to prohibit any consideration of the matter by the League. If the League submits there is no law left between nations. The Covenant is gone. ... I do not see what will be left of the Covenant, or what will remain to show that the Great War was anything but a battle of kites and crows, if Signor Mussolini is allowed to set his will above the law and make war as if no League existed."

"[I]f we lay at all too much stress on the need of warlike preparations for quelling the peace-breaker, we find ourselves on a very slippery slope. ... It is all a perpetuation of war, not a planting of peace: a hardening in old error, not a change of heart. One of the most advanced French advocates of the League once said to me that the true guarantee of peace in Europe was a strong French Army and a strong British Navy. The sort of man who thinks that is the sort of man who ought never to be allowed to touch international affairs. Remove that implication. Accept freely, and put into practice, the principles of genuine and equal Disarmament, and then your preparation for Sanctions is perfectly right. To put crushing Sanctions in the hands of two particular Powers, or of an alliance of certain highly armed Powers, would be a crime against humanity."

"The real difficulty of the situation lies in the practical working of the coercion. Let it be laid down that the League as a whole will take the necessary action, economic or military. Well and good; but the League is not a military or economic unit and possesses no central executive. It is a society of independent sovereign states, their independence somewhat modified by treaty obligations and a habit of regular conference, but none the less real. I doubt whether the League as a League could declare war or wage war. The force would have to be supplied by each state separately, of its own deliberate will. ... One cannot expect Siam or Canada to mobilize because one Balkan state attacks another. And if the duty is not incumbent on all members, who is to decide what members are to undertake it? The Council has no absolute authority. No nation will be eager to subject itself to the strain and sacrifice of coercive action unless its own interests are sharply involved. But the question is whether, in a world that increasingly detests war and mistrusts force as a instrument of international policy, the various national Parliaments or Governments will in general have sufficient loyalty to the League, sufficient public spirit and sense of reality, to be ready to face the prospects of war not in defence of their own frontiers or immediate national interests, but simply to maintain the peace of the world."

"Whether or no man might be made perfect, he certainly might be made better and happier than he is; and the conscious pursuit of that object became an accepted source of inspiration to politics and literature. With it went the conception that the necessary condition of the pursuit was freedom: set man free, let him have room to move and external conditions which do not starve or cramp him, and human nature of itself will strive to rise higher. This spirit shows itself in almost all the best English fiction of the period, from romantics like the Brontës, and realists, like George Eliot, to satirists, like Dickens and Thackeray. It had been utterly lacking in Fielding and Smollett, and even in Jane Austen. It shows itself in the immense increase of charitable institutions, of religious missions, of societies for the education of the people. There is no question of hypocrisy. To suppose there is, is the mere petulance of jealously. Shelley's or Gladstone's love of moral improvement was just as genuine as Falstaff's love of sack. But an age of moral earnestness seems in our own day to have been succeeded by an age of relaxation; and one can see in, for instance, such a book as Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians that the moral earnestness of Gladstone or Dr. Arnold is felt by the author to be a hateful quality and not easily to be forgiven."

"I am always a little surprised at the common habit of attributing “the failure of the League” to small defects in the Covenant or to the timidities of the French and British Governments in 1931 and after; the primary cause was obviously the disunion of the Great Powers on whose union everything depended. America withdrew; Japan turned traitor and was too strong to coerce; Italy after a period of blackmail went over to the enemy. Whether Britain and France together might still have saved the situation is of course open to doubt; I am disposed to think they could, but one must not forget how great the difficulties were."

"Of course I cannot work as I did. Still, there has never been a day, I suppose, when I have failed to give thought to the work for peace and for Hellenism. The one is a matter of life and death for all of us; the other of maintaining amid all the dust of modern industrial life our love and appreciation of eternal values."

"Is it pedantic, is it the mere result of my special education, that I fall back again upon Aristotle? He tells us that Happiness in the highest sense, or the true end of human life, is first activity, next unimpeded activity, and lastly unimpeded activity "according to virtue"; that is to say, on right lines and for good ends. Surely we want, both as individuals and as a community, to pursue that quest for the attainment or the creation of "a good life for man"; we want to get to that work unhindered and uncrippled, and therefore, apart from other reasons, we need above all things peace."

"This service of civilization is our true work; the occupation that gives meaning to life. We need peace, inward and outward, because peace leaves us free to attend to it; while war—or, indeed, any violent hatred—interrupts and wrecks and perverts."

"As we get further away from the England of the nineteenth century, and see it separated from us by the great gulf of the war, we shall perhaps be better able to see it as it really was, to appreciate its extraordinary greatness, its peculiar faults and flaws, and to a remarkable degree its unity. Beyond question it was a very great age indeed. For Great Britain especially it marked the zenith of national success, the widest expansion over the world of British government, British commerce, British political thought, British morals, philosophy, science, poetry and prose literature. It was a time when Indian rajahs and Chinese mandarins learnt to play cricket and read Macaulay, as now they are learning baseball and frequenting the movies."

"Have you read Keynes on the Economic Consequences of the Peace Conference? I think it is important as giving in a clear and definite form the criticism of a Liberal-minded man who saw the proceedings from the inside... I can not help thinking that it really gives the scheme of a bold Liberal policy in foreign affairs. Aim, the re-integration of Europe, both political and economic. Method, the correction of the Versailles settlement by the L. of N. [I]t gives us a real fighting policy which has the further advantage of being right."

"It seems to me important that liberal feeling in England should keep fully in touch with the war...for the sake of the peace settlement afterwards. ... If we win, as seems on the whole probable, we must do our very best for a generous treatment of Germany. ... I think we ought also to go for a strengthening of the Concert and reducing armaments by treaty. Anyhow, whether it is practicable or not, it is enormously important not to have a mere grabbing or jingo settlement."

"[T]he main work of life lies in carrying on worthily the great common task of civilization: to play one's due part in the enterprise of feeding some hundreds of millions of men, in seeing that they are protected against violence and fraud, that they have access to justice, and as far as may be to education, that they have some freedom to pursue life and happiness, and are not cut off altogether from the wonders and beauties of the world and the mind of man. To succeed in doing this is civilization: to fail is the defeat of civilization. For civilization is, ultimately, the process whereby a human society in search, as Aristotle puts it, of a "good life for man", gradually overcomes the obstacles, material and other, that stand in its way and makes man increasingly master of his environment."

"[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind."

"There ought to be some sanction behind international law, and the League of Nations is there to supply it... The problem is not how to concentrate somewhere sufficient force to quell a peace-breaker—that already exists; it is to produce a general state of mind in which the possessors of force will really use it for maintaining the general peace and not merely for supporting their own interests."

"It is hard on many people, on naval and military circles, on Philistine newspapers, on smart society in London, just as it is hard on similar circles in Berlin, to have to give up their favourite dreams and admit themselves definitely defeated, defeated even in the Tory Cabinet, by dull middle-class pacifism. ... all parties are pledged to the League...all Prime Ministers and ex-Prime Ministers support it...no candidate for Parliament dares to oppose it openly."

"In sum it seems to me that the Covenant, though not without certain ambiguities and loop-holes, is on the whole a wonderfully successful instrument, flexible, comprehensive, and exactly directed to the main evil which it was desired to cure. It does aim straight at the heart of the international anarchy; and it does so by a method which is calculated to stir up the very minimum of opposition. Its normal sanction is the public opinion of the world; its most effective weapon publicity. You cannot punish a nation; you cannot even coerce by force any moderately strong nation. But you can exert a very severe pressure on even the strongest to mend its ways by simply putting a question to its representative at the Assembly, or at one of the permanent Commissions, and publishing its reply."

"The great War was certainly not caused by financial interests. ... All the international financiers that I know are terrified of war and revolution, and anxious for things to work as smoothly as possible."

"I do not think that war has much to with capitalism and socialism."

"The advance in humanity and care for the alleviation of suffering is also, so far as I know, without a parallel: in England alone in this period we find the abolition of slavery—at the cost of £20,000,000 of public money willingly given: the sweeping reform of the old criminal law and the barbarous penal system which accompanied it... We find the reform in the treatment of lunatics; the laws against cruelty to children and to animals; the Factory Acts; the Married Women's Property Acts; the immense spread of education in all it stages, both by public authority and by private experiment; the beginnings of the care for public health; the...greatly decreased consumption of alcohol... [I]t was, of course, the great age of Liberalism."

"Now the Victorian Age, or the nineteenth century as a whole, was a great moral reformer... It proclaimed that men, even courtiers and noblemen, ought not to be drunken or dissolute or even corrupt, that politics were really concerned with the welfare of the people, that the rich had duties towards the poor. The transition from George IV and his unpleasing brothers to the young Queen and the Prince Consort was typical of a much wider change. When Lord Palmerston was caught chasing a maid of honour into her bedroom, the excuse made for him was: "Your Majesty should remember that he is a very old gentleman and accustomed to the manners of the late Court"."

"An old eagle, a blind eagle, who waits hungry and cold and still; He seeks nothing, he fears nothing: he stands lone on a lonely hill."

"The Victorian Age was in its essence liberal, a time of continuous progress in humanity, in enlightenment, in the welfare of the masses; a time in which an aristocracy was, on the whole, in power but was continually resigning its privileges or extending them to classes hitherto excluded. The statesmen of that time thought of themselves not as leaders of a class, but rather as ‘Shepherds of the People’, concerned with the good of the flock but somewhat aloof from it. Men like Peel and Gladstone made a definite impression of greatness, both in character and intellect, and Asquith was emphatically in the same tradition."

"First it is a question of International Law. The UN was intended to have a means of enforcing the law. It has no such means. Egypt and Israel have been breaking the law for 9 years without correction. Secondly, the Nasser danger is much more serious than a local friction. The real danger is we should be faced by a coalition of Arab, Muslim and anti-Western states, led nominally by Egypt but really by Russia. ... Such a danger, the Prime Minister saw, must be stopped."

"There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age."

"In Athens and Rome...every ultimate problem was theirs, as it is ours, and the more you open your soul to their appeal the more profound your pity for stumbling humanity, the more eager your effort to bind together the family of man rather than to loosen it. It is no blind chance that has led one of our greatest scholars to devote his life to the ideal of the League of Nations. Rather it is his desire to make his contribution to redeeming the failure of those very Greeks whom he, more perhaps than any living man, has helped this modern world to understand."

"There was the Temperance cause, a plain duty if there ever was one. ... There was the emancipation of women. ... There was Home Rule for Ireland. There was the protection of all who were, or were likely to be, oppressed: Russians, Egyptians, subject nations and coloured races and of course 'the poor' everywhere. I was more than ready to absorb this atmosphere. I had learnt philosophic radicalism from J. S. Mill and much the same faith in a more idealist and less critical form from Shelley."

"He is devoted to the study of literature; but, if I am not mistaken, this devotion is the expression, not merely of his taste and pleasure in reading, but of his whole moral nature. Classical education in his hands will not be a mere engine of literary culture, but a general training of the character and affections."

"Dr. Murray was like Wilson a professor, a Liberal, an idealist... Because of the confusion of thought that has surrounded the word ‘pacifist’ he was often thought of as a non-resister, a believer in unilateral disarmament, whereas those who know him and have studied his speeches realize that he was from the first a believer in League action and in clear-sighted preparations for sanctions. Distinguished as his services have been, the label ‘doctrinaire’ has been affixed to his policies."

"I find him oppressively virtuous and intellectual. He is too self-conscious about it. There is something feminine in his conviction that he is right and that all who differ from [him] have a touch of wickedness about them. He would make an admirable Father Confessor to a Nunnery."

"Gilbert Murray, just retired at Boar's Hill as Regius Professor of Greek, became a friend. As a young man, Bernard Shaw had taken him as the model for Adolphus Cusins, the hero of Major Barbara. A tall courtly Edwardian, with the exquisite diction of his period, he was an active Liberal, and a supporter of the League of Nations... All these men [Louis de Brouckere, Camille Huysmans, Martin Tranmael, Otto Renner, General Koerner, Leon Blum] had a serene humanity and a broad culture which is all too rare in modern politics. They were also gentlemen in the truest sense of the word. The only man I knew in Britain with a similar quality was Gilbert Murray."