Anthony Burgess

1985

It has always been easier to point to examples of evil than of good. An Augustinian might say: inevitably, since evil is in our nature, and good not. Good, anyway, is a word with a wide spectrum of meaning: we are liable to confuse ethical good with what, for want of a better term, we must call aesthetic good. One of the great human mysteries is supposed to be provided by the Nazi death camps. A commandant who had supervised the killing of a thousand Jews went home to hear his daughter play a Schubert sonata and cried with holy joy. How was this possible? How could a being so dedicated to evil move without difficulty into a world so divinely good? The answer is that the good of music has nothing to do with ethics. Art does not elevate us into beneficence. It is morally neutral, like the taste of an apple. Instead of recognizing a verbal confusion we ponder an anomaly, or, like George Steiner, assert that a devotion to art renders men less sensitive to moral imperatives. 'Men who wept at Werther or Chopin moved, unrealizing, through literal hell.' There is no real mystery.

When we say, 'God is good,' what do we mean? Presumably that God is beneficent and works directly on his creation to secure its happiness. But it is difficult to imagine and harder to believe. It is far easier to conceive of God's goodness as somehow analogous to the goodness of a grilled steak or of a Mozart symphony—eternally gratifying and of an infinite intensity; self-sufficient, moreover, with the symphony hearing itself and the eaten also the eater. The goodness of art, not of holy men, is the better figure of divine goodness.

The goodness of a piece of music and the goodness of a beneficent action have one thing in common—disinterestedness. The so-called good citizen merely obeys the laws, accepting what the State tells him is right or wrong. Goodness has little to do with citizenship. It is not enacted out of obedience to law, to gain praise or avoid punishment. The good act is the altruistic act. It is not blazoned and it seeks no reward. One can see how it is possible to glimpse a fancied connection between the goodness of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—composed in deafness, disease, squalor and poverty—and that of the saint who gives his cloak to the naked, embraces the leper, dies to save others. But Beethoven's goodness is outside the field of action, to which the saint is so committed. Art is a vision of heaven gratuitously given. Being quasi-divine, it is beyond human concerns. Unlike the heaven of Christian doctrine, it is as freely available to the morally evil as to the morally good: the equivalent of St Augustine's God's grace, impartially bestowed. This, to the narrower moralist, renders it suspect.

What, then, is the good act? To clothe the naked, tend the sick, feed the hungry, teach the ignorant. These separate acts add up to a concern with promoting, or restoring, in a living organism its native capacity to act freely within the limits of its natural environment. These acts are always good, but they are not always right. Ignorance is strength, says Ingsoc. The Nazis said: let the Jews shiver, starve and die. The good act admits no differentiation of race or species in its object. It is good to mend the broken wing of a bird or to save the life of a Gauleiter. The goodness of the saint is characterized by total disinterestedness; the goodness of lesser beings may have motives mixed, unaware, not clearly understood; but the good act tends to grow wild and be unrelated to expediency, policy or law. The good intention, as we know too well, may have evil consequences. Charles Dickens, involved in a train crash, went around pouring brandy indiscriminately down the throats of the injured, thus killing several. He was not, however, a murderer. But the capacity to perform the truly good act is related to a high degree of intelligence and knowledge. Progress may be regarded as a gradual increase in human capacity to understand motivation and free good intentions from the evil of ignorance.

Evil, in its purest form, shares with good this attribute of disinterestedness. If good is concerned with promoting the ability in a living organism to act freely, evil must be dedicated to taking such freedom away. If we are Pelagians, we accept that man has total liberty of moral choice. To remove that choice is to dehumanize. Evil is at its most spectacular when it enjoys turning a living soul into a manipulable object. To confer death is evil enough, but torture has always been regarded as worse. The State has a considerable interest in dehumanizing. It tends to arrogate to itself all matters of moral choice, and it does not care much to see the individual making up his own mind. It is essential that men in power maintain a distinction between the will of the ruler and the will of the ruled. The will of the ruler must, ideally, be totally free; that of the ruled of a greater or lesser freedom, according to the greater or lesser autocratic nature of the State. The State is the instrument whereby the ruler manifests power over the ruled.