Cole Berlin: An Elegy

Cole Berlin, towards the end

Who remembers Jobriath? Who listens to his music now? And yet, for a brief summer afternoon in popular culture, he was an occurrence in fame’s sky, as present and as cosmically superfluous as a solar eclipse. The eclipse appeared in the year of my birth, 1973 and was officially over by 1975. Jobriath is now only a very small footnote in the history of glam rock. He was overhyped, he was cursed with stupendously bad management, and just as importantly, he was very openly gay. He was not half-assed about his homosexuality. He was never bisexual, as the other glam rockers of the time played at being. No, Jobriath took pride in his self-description as the “Fairy Godmother of Rock”. He was musically talented, though his music — much like the man himself — was complicated. He was a showman, and he had an aesthetic sense that makes Lady Gaga seem rather jejune. But the world simply was not ready for Jobriath. Would it be ready now? It's hard to say. But alas, Jobriath is no more.

Jobriath’s real name was Bruce Wayne Campbell. For reasons I can only partly explain, I am less interested in Mr. Campbell’s glam career than I am in the persona he adopted later, the New York City piano player and cabaret singer named Cole Berlin (the name is a portmanteau of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin). Cole Berlin plied his trade in the lounges of New York City, with a regular gig at a restaurant called The Covent Gardens. He lived in a pyramid-shaped apartment on the rooftop of the Chelsea Hotel. He supplemented his relatively small income by occasional prostitution. He also wrote plays, without success, and he tried to start an acting career, to much the same effect. At some point in 1981 Cole began to feel ill. The disease from which he suffered was new at the time, and as yet it had no settled name. By the time it killed him in August of 1983, it was being called AIDS.

To my knowledge, there are only two songs of Cole Berlin’s available in recorded form. One of them consists of his performance in a 1981 BBC program about the Chelsea Hotel and its inhabitants. He is interviewed in his pyramid apartment, and he plays a ditty called “Sunday Brunch” on his white piano. He looks a bit puffy, maybe from the booze and pills, and it’s possible that he was already feeling ill (I’m not sure precisely when it was shot, although it was possibly as early as 1979). But still, you can’t help noticing that he was a natural performer.

Why does the story of Cole Berlin fascinate me? I’m not sure. I suppose it’s because all such stories of abject failure fascinate me. You see, despite all the lies that theologians and self-help gurus profit from peddling, failure — not success — is nature’s default position. No matter how fortunate and successful one may be, each and every one of us eventually ends up a failure, even if only in that one thing we generally try hardest to succeed at: remaining alive. The sad ending of Cole Berlin merely administers this valuable lesson to us in distilled form.

Sad as Cole Berlin’s ending sounds, it gets even sadder. Consider this story, told by Hayden Wayne, a musician who had been in Jobriath’s band. After Jobriath’s career ended, Wayne lost touch with him.  A certain actress had landed a big role in a popular soap opera. Her career was flourishing. She recently moved into a new apartment in New York City, which happened to be in the Chelsea, and she was proudly showing it off to some friends, one of whom was Wayne. This was sometime in December 1983. She pointed out all the furniture and the white-lacquered piano and mentioned that she had managed to buy the contents of the flat for a mere $4000. Her lawyer advised her that she could get it even cheaper. However, she didn’t wish to haggle with the seller, a man who was plainly distraught at the recent death of his son.

The Chelsea Hotel… the white piano… the rattan furniture… the pyramid-shaped apartment. It suddenly dawned on Wayne whose apartment this had been.

The actress went on to relate how the man’s son had been dead for four days before they found him. The neighbours had apparently been complaining about the smell. And thus ended the life of Cole Berlin, a.k.a. Jobriath, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne Campbell.

What does one do with a story so sad? Well, I wrote song lyrics. I woke up at 3:15am one day with these lyrics in my head. I had to write them down. I know many people claim to write lyrics or poems in such flashes of inspiration, and often they are not telling the strict truth. In my case, I do not exaggerate. Well, except for the “West 23rd” line — I had to look up the address. Although I write a lot, I have little inclination towards the sort of writing that rhymes or has a meter (my Christmas haiku are a rare exception).

I have no music for these lyrics, nor am like to. So if you can set them to something, be my guest. I only ask that you credit me and that, if recorded, you send me a copy.

*    *    *    *    *

I rang the bell, she let me in
To her pyramid in the New York dusk.
She dragged me through from room to room,
I trailed in her complacent musk.

“I just love this place,” she said.
“Isn’t it divine?
The furniture’s all rattan,” she said.
“And all of it is mine.”

Cole Berlin, the Pharaoh’s boy,
Two-twenty-two, West 23rd,
Was NYC’s new Sunday brunch,
The Covent Gardens’ native son,
The Hotel Chelsea’s naked lunch.

“Don’t you love this place?” she asked.
“Isn’t it superb?
The white piano’s a baby grand.
It was headed for the curb.”

Living in a pyramid
Kept Cole’s razors very sharp.
His coughing bounced around those walls,
But no one heard him in the end.
No one was listening in the end.
His hand was unheld in the end.

“I think I’ll put a bar right there —
I must apologize for the smell.
My cleaner has been everywhere,
But that smell, my God! It’s always there!”

Cole Berlin, the Pharaoh’s boy,
Two-twenty-two, West 23rd,
Was NYC’s new Sunday brunch,
The Covent Gardens’ native son,
The Hotel Chelsea’s naked lunch.

© James Pratt, 2012.

Noble Savages and Jesuitical Relations

Jesuit Relations

Sainte-Marie

In the winter of 1985, I went on an overnight class trip to Sainte-Marie among the Hurons (Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons), a reconstructed 1640s French Jesuit mission near Midland, Ontario. The purpose of the mission was to bring Christianity to the local Huron Indians. We were there in February. It was cold. As such, it gave a very good idea of the kind of harsh conditions the blackrobes would have endured. Although I must have learned a lot about life in the early seventeenth-century Canadian wilderness, mostly what has stuck with me is the constant desire to be warm. At night, I seriously wondered whether I would still be alive in the morning. We slept in sleeping bags on cold pallets that were only about four feet in length (apparently the blackrobes were rather short of stature), so besides being cold, I was also very stiff and sore.

I remember a few other things about the trip. For instance, I can recall the film we were shown upon arrival at the site. It told of how the Hurons were ultimately destroyed by smallpox and war with the Iroquois. And of course, we learned in great detail about the death and martyrdom of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant at the hands of Iroquois captors in 1649. They died bravely, we were taught, without uttering a cry or groan, after suffering the most savage of tortures. I use the word “savage” advisedly: the Jesuits were scalped, they had boiling water poured over them, they were forced to wear “necklaces” of red-hot axe hatchets, and they were flayed and otherwise mutilated. After death, their hearts were removed and eaten. Such gruesome stories seemed tailored to the imaginations of eleven- and twelve-year-old children, especially boys. In any case, it was made clear to us who wore the white hats and who wore the black ones in this story. The blackrobes were the good guys, the Iroquois were the villains, and the Hurons were caught somewhere between them. Obviously, the real story must have been rather more complicated than this film would have us believe.

Brébeuf and Lalemant must have been men of almost superhuman faith and strength of character, or so we were instructed. Imagine, then, my surprise on a return trip to Sainte-Marie nearly two decades later, when I again sat down to watch the film. You see, it has since been heavily edited to tell a different story. First of all, the Indians the mission served were no longer called “Hurons”; they were now “Wendat”. This makes sense, since it is what they called themselves. We learned about how the Wendat were a peaceful people who lived at one with nature, how they thrived, and how everything was just idyllic for them before the Europeans arrived on the scene with their diseases and their new religion. Of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant we now heard next to nothing; they were killed by Iroquois, end of story. No martyrdom, no gruesome torture. As a matter of fact, the film even somehow managed to blame Europeans for the warfare between the Wendat and the Iroquois that led to the destruction of the mission (on very tenuous grounds, to put it charitably). The historical interpretation throughout the Sainte-Marie site seemed to follow the film’s change of focus: the mission now had little if anything to do with the Jesuits who built it and lived in it. Instead, it was a merely a prop, a slightly embarrassing backdrop to showcase Canada’s First Nations peoples and their preternatural nobility in the face of diabolical European evil. The purpose of Sainte-Marie now seems to be to make its mainly white visitors feel a due sense of shame and regret for nebulous crimes they had no hand in.

Seeing the film was an excellent lesson for me in how history may be shamelessly re-written to suit the tastes of civil servants and lobby interests, and how certain unpalatable facts can be made to disappear down the memory hole. Now don’t get me wrong. I am all for having the history of the Wendat taught in more detail. They were an inextricable part of the Sainte-Marie story, and in precisely the same way that the Jesuits were. Without both the Jesuits and the Wendat, there is no Sainte-Marie. However, we do no favours to anybody in erasing or whitewashing facts. And the fact is, Brébeuf and Lalemant were brutally butchered, and the Indians were every bit as capable of savage violence as the Europeans who were arriving on their shores in ever greater numbers. I am a firm believer in the notion that as human beings, we are all savages or potential savages. There is very little of moral superiority in the history of any people when it is looked at in the harsh sunlight of truth.

Mantle

About eight or nine years ago my wife and I spent a day helping with the archaeological excavation of a Huron (Wendat) village near Stouffville, Ontario, dating to the period from 1500 to 1530. At the time we were there, the excavation was at a fairly early stage, but it was already evident that this village was huge. The dig was fascinating. Here are a few things we learned: The Wendat were obviously hooked into some extensive trade links, as was made evident by the large quantities of flint on the site, of a kind that would need to have been imported from hundreds of kilometers away. We learned that in order to build the defensive palisades of the village, and to clear the land to grow enough corn to support a large population of some 2000 souls, they must have cut down all the forest within an 80 to 100 kilometer radius of the site. The fact is that all of these villages were temporary; the inhabitants would remain on a site only until the soil was exhausted, or until they could no longer walk the vast distances necessary to gather the remaining wood or to plant and harvest corn ever further afield. Once they had stripped the land bare, they would pull up stakes and moved on. Like a plague of locusts. Like a plague of… us.

These Wendat paid great attention to the building of palisades and used a staggering quantity of wood in their construction. That fact, in addition to the prevalence of carbonized post holes representing layers of palisade that had burned down, made it plainly evident that warfare seemed to occupy the inhabitants almost as much as trading or cultivation. So much for the image of the peace-loving noble savage, living at one with nature.

Nevertheless, even the archaeologists at the site, who knew better, wanted us to believe in this “noble savage” mythology, for they kept a sort of Indian-for-hire on site. His role seemed to be to burn a little sweet grass and pray native prayers on command, all to assuage the spirits that inhabit the place. It was all nonsense, of course, but white folks tend to find such mumbo-jumbo somehow spiritually edifying. It was all part of making the experience “authentic” for us weekend excavators. I could have happily done without it. It stank of fraud. It was about as “authentic” as a cheap plastic dream catcher. The only real question was whether this Indian actually believed in this nonsense, or whether he simply knew how dumb and gullible white people are. I suspect the latter.

What’s worse, this particular Indian-for-hire was Iroquois. The archaeologists didn’t trouble themselves to find an actual Wendat elder. After all, an Indian is an Indian, right? The supreme irony of having Wendat culture interpreted by someone from a tribe that was the Wendat’s mortal enemy was not lost on me, I can assure you.

Interestingly, the village we excavated, now called the “Mantle” site, has recently been in the news. Besides the fact that it ended up being one of the biggest such villages ever excavated, archaeologists recently found an iron axe buried very deliberately beneath one of the longhouses. Thanks to a maker’s mark, the axe could be identified as being of Basque manufacture. Astoundingly, the axe must have made its way, through long and complex trade linkages, from a Basque whaling station in Newfoundland, all the way along the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, and up into the interior. The Wendat acquired the axe in the pre-contact period, a century or so before the actual arrival of Europeans in their territory in 1610.

CBC radio ran a news piece about Mantle that was notable mainly for its adherence to what is now a standard narrative structure when any Canadian media outlet runs a story about “First Nations” people and culture.

(The very term “First Nations” is dubious. Even if it makes sense to call them “nations”, many of these so-called “nations” are of relatively modern construction. And many of them were not the first such nations at all in the territories in which they now happen to reside. Many of these so-called “nations” fought each other to the death over those lands before the arrival of those Europeans from whom they now claim them. As far as I’m concerned, “First Nations” is pure Canadian political cant, inflationary linguistic nonsense foisted on gullible and well-meaning Canadians of European descent by their cowardly political class. I avoid using it, much as I avoid such other terms from the CBC Newspeak lexicon as “sex worker” (prostitute) and “sovereigntist” (separatist traitor). Be advised that whenever I use the term herein, it will always be within scare quotes.)

The CBC narrative structure for stories involving Indian history and culture involves interviewing one or two white experts, whether archaeologists or historians, followed by a self-appointed native “elder” or other Indian-for-hire who is allotted space to make absurd statements with zero plausibility, and backed by zero evidence, but which are presented by the CBC as if they represent objective fact, because based on supposed oral tradition that never existed until this “elder” was invited to speak on the CBC. These statements usually involve magic spirits, demons, and further peddling of the “noble savage” myth.

Here’s how it played out in the CBCs story on Mantle. An archaeologist in charge of the excavation dutifully describes the site, the finding of the axe, how its provenance was ascertained, the likely route it would have taken in arriving at Mantle, etc. Why was it buried under the longhouse? Don’t really know, he says. It’s a bit of a mystery. You see, he’s an archaeologist, and the material record simply doesn’t allow him to answer this question.

 Now cue the obligatory wise old Indian, brought in to fill the gap in the evidence with fairy stories, prejudice, and superstition. The wise old Indian proceeds to weave a tale about how the Wendat were a peaceful people who lived in harmony with nature, thereby directly contradicting the material evidence. And then he offers his theory of why the axe was buried beneath the longhouse. The Wendat buried it there because of its bad karma, because it shadowed forth mysterious omens of the coming doom the natives would suffer at the hands of the white devils. And so they naturally buried it to protect themselves from the evil. Or something like that. In all honesty, what he was saying made little sense to my narrow Western mind, hobbled as it is by the curse of critical thought.

It was all very predictable. After all, what CBC story with a “First Nations” angle would be complete without a reminder of how evil the white man is, and how morally and naturally superior are their hapless native victims? Yet they rather outdid themselves this time, managing to work an “Indian good/white man evil” subtext into a story that had little if anything to do with white men (the meaning of the term “pre-contact” seems to have been lost on the producers). Apparently, the Wendat lived in a topsy-turvy world of backwards causation, where white people whom the Wendat had never met are held morally responsible for bad things they won’t be in a position to do for another century.

Yet, this native man’s nonsense was peddled by the CBC with the deepest gravity, as if it had some kind of validity by virtue of the mere fact that it spewed forth from the mouth of an Indian.  One man’s half-baked tale of spirits, premonitions, and bad juju magic was presented as if it were a valid or useful complement to the archaeological evidence. That is like presenting astrology as if it were a valid or useful complement to astronomy.

Even on its own terms, the “bad mojo” theory of the axe’s burial there doesn’t hold together. If its possessors truly believed the axe to be evil (and leaving aside the question of why they would acquire — presumably at great expense — such an evil object in the first place), would they not bury it far away, at least beyond the village walls? Would you bury such an object right underneath your home and hearth? Would you bury nuclear waste within your town’s limits, or would you want it as far away and as deep underground as possible?

The fact is, we can never know for sure why the axe was buried where it was. Any conjecture on the subject is just that — conjecture. Other opposing theories can be offered which have as much plausibility, or more. For example, the owner might have thought that the axe would bring good luck, and so buried it under his house, much like we might hang a lucky horseshoe over a doorway. Or else, it might have been buried there to hide it from thieves or from Iroquois raiders, precisely because it was such a treasured object. After all, it is not hard to believe that whoever acquired it didn’t get it cheaply. I don’t imagine metal axes from Europe were a commodity easy to get one’s hands on in Ontario circa AD 1500.

There is a sort of cultural schizophrenia in the way a story like that of the Mantle village is typically presented. On the one hand, an Indian-for-hire spins an outlandish tale for the consumption of a largely white audience; the audience is meant to find the story enchanting while finding the Indian people depicted in it as quaint, innocent, vaguely noble, and very much a valorized “Other”. At the same time, archaeologists stress the ways in which the lives the Indians led and the structures they built are little different from ours. Thus, the village is described as the “Manhattan of its time” or as a medieval European walled town of the same period. Their society and economy are described as being highly organized, complex, productive, sophisticated. In short, their form of life is made out to be recognizably our own.

But it is a double-edged sword: If the Indians were “just like us” in all these ways, then it is likely that they were just like us in their vices too. They polluted their land, they depleted their resources, and they devoted a lot of time and effort to slaughtering one another. Their problems were our problems, only on a smaller scale.

I sometimes think we do neither ourselves nor “First Nations” peoples any good by pretending that the latter are anything more than human beings with human problems. Of course, at least this is better than the old way, of pretending that they are something less.

The Sociopath as Character Type

Exhibit A?

I find psychopaths fascinating. I’ve known one or two in my time, as most likely have you, since best estimates are that psychopaths comprise somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of the general population. Being in the presence of a true psychopath is an experience which, once you realize it’s happening, is not quickly forgotten, even where the realization is not the result of having been harmed or ripped-off by one. To be alone in a room with a psychopath is to be, well… alone in a room. I once owned a boa constrictor for a brief period, and it projected about as much presence as a psychopath generally does. I imagine the experience is much like the feeling the PMO Chief of Staff gets from being alone in a room with Stephen Joseph Harper.

Psychopaths are people almost without qualities. Take Gillian (this is not her real name, but it is one of the actual aliases she uses). Over the course of the many years I knew Gillian, she never once laughed genuinely at anything except the misfortunes of others. She smiled when she needed to, and a few times she laughed in a very controlled fashion at her own ill attempts at humour (while others cringed). But the humour or joy of others never seemed to positively affect her in the way that their misfortunes, their pains, and their humiliations did.

Although I have thankfully lost touch with her, if I wish I can still track Gillian’s dubious activities online, through the fake presence she has created for herself there: the many blogs she begins but never continues for more than a post or two, and on which she posts material she has cut and pasted from other websites and passed off as her own; her narcissistic, shallow and puerile online philosophical musings, obviously cribbed and bowdlerized from the latest self-help books; her multiple profiles on LinkedIn, each with its own fabricated CV (despite the fact that Gillian is a high school dropout); her Facebook accounts under multiple aliases; the online chatter of web users warning each other about her cons; her criminal and demi-criminal business ventures. What little I know about how she earns her living makes me want to know less.

I heard Gillian lie so often, so brazenly, so incoherently, so pointlessly, that I stopped even trying to keep track of what was true and what wasn’t. It was safer simply to assume that whenever she spoke she was lying. So many were her lies in fact, that to this day there is a sense in which I’m not really sure if there is a real existing Gillian. Once all the lies are peeled back like the layers of an onion, it is doubtful that anything that is truly Gillian would remain. She is all persona and no person — a person without qualities.

Even her tastes could be described as quality-less: she liked whatever current tunes were in the top forty at any given time, simply because, being unable to respond affectively to any kind of art, she simply “liked” whatever songs the charts told her that a reasonable facsimile of a person would statistically like. The same goes for her tastes in reading. Her “personality” only seemed capable of being projected through brands, through her choice of clothes, purse, smartphone, or sunglasses. And she would quickly let you know what these brands were, just in case, like me, you couldn’t care less and therefore failed to give her the respect she thought she deserved for possessing them. Someone whose only way of differentiating their character is through mass produced items is someone who fails to have a character at all, at least insofar as character individuates a person.

Gillian aside, my interest in psychopathy is as much academic as personal. My doctoral research was in moral psychology, and in particular, the moral psychology of character. Central to the concept of moral character is the notion of integrity. Since integrity is something conspicuously lacking in psychopaths, I’ve always seen them as a limiting case of lack of character. This is in contrast to lay views of the psychopath as a person of single-mindedly evil character. Even single-minded evil is a form of perverse integrity, and psychopaths lack even that. I contend that a necessary condition for the possession of character is to have the well-formed capacity to experience the so-called “emotions of self-assessment”, pride, shame, and guilt, for example. Since for the most part psychopaths lack this capacity, they are largely incapable of possessing moral character. Indeed, it’s an open philosophical question whether they can even be considered moral agents at all.

In what follows, I will give you the draft of a paper I have long given up hope of finishing. I simply lost interest in it. Since it was intended for an academic audience, I apologize for the unsociable scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliographical citations. It is very rough. For instance, you’ll notice that it doesn’t have a proper introduction, and I’m no longer even sure what the intended thesis was. It was never even given a title. It was stillborn. However, it may contain a few arguments and observations which may serve to divert the interested reader. Since I don’t know what else to do with it, I give it to you.

*    *    *    *

DRAFT

First off, we must clarify our terminology. Generally “sociopath” is used interchangeably with “psychopath” in psychological literature. If there is a difference it tends to lie in researchers’ differing beliefs as to the etiology of the phenomenon. Those who study psychopathy tend towards biological explanations of its causes (Hare 1999: 23-24). However, such academic disputes need not detain us here. For our purposes, I prefer “sociopath”, simply because it is relatively free from distorting media-generated preconceptions invested in the term “psychopath”.

A sociopath, in lay terms, is often described as a person who knows the difference between right and wrong but does not care. “Knowing the difference” between right and wrong is here intended in the purely intellectual sense: they know what is considered by people generally to be right and wrong, but that is not to say they understand the concepts in the way we understand them. It is the phrase “but does not care” in the definition that most interests us. Sociopaths lack the moral scruples that constrain the rest of us; particularly, they seem to lack what have been called emotions of self-assessment (Taylor 1985). Thus, they do not feel guilt or shame at having done things that would cause the rest of us to lose sleep. Again, like their “knowledge” of right and wrong, they “understand” emotions only on an intellectual level. They may spend much time and effort learning to simulate emotions that they do not actually feel. Their emotional deficits have been demonstrated experimentally (see for example Levenston et al. 2000). Because they are not constrained by moral sentiments, they can at best be constrained through fear (of the consequences of getting caught doing bad things). In fact, part of their intellectualized concept of “bad” is “things people tend to punish”. Thus, constraint may come from fear of punishment, not from an aversion to shame, which they are incapable of feeling. And even when they are caught and punished, they feel no remorse, only perhaps resentment at having their intentions thwarted.

Conceptually speaking, we could divide sociopaths into two types: a) those who lack moral constraints and do bad things, and b) those who lack moral constraints but do not do bad things, or at least no more so than the rest of us. I have never seen the existence of type b) remarked on in the literature on sociopathy, but it is at least a logical possibility. Such a person would be prevented from wrongdoing only because, for whatever reason, he lacks the sorts of desires commonly associated with such wrongdoing. Owen Flanagan alludes to a similar phenomenon in his discussion of Plato’s famous example of Gyges and his magic ring (Flanagan 257-259). The figure of Gyges was used by Glaucon in the Republic to show that if a person were to have all external restraints removed, he would no longer attend to justice, and that therefore, justice is a merely artificial virtue. Given a magic ring, we are all Gyges. Flanagan argues that the conclusion does not follow. Gyges’ motives for wrongdoing are underdescribed (indeed, they are not described at all). Why does he seem to have so many evil desires in him that he instantly acts on when he gets the opportunity? Why does he perceive his self-interest to lie only in such antisocial ends? And why should I believe that I would do no differently were I in his shoes? It is at least conceivable that not everybody who had Gyges’ magic ring would behave so deplorably, for the simple reason that they lack the same antisocial desires Gyges seemed to have. Perhaps it is also possible that a sociopath lacks Gyges-like countermoral desires, and so would commit no wrongs, even though they are morally uninhibited. I suppose such people, if they exist, do not come to the attention of psychologists because they do not cause anybody any trouble. [1]  Let us return to the other, full-blooded wicked sociopath.

The moral sentiments, including the emotions of self-assessment, can serve to lend integrity to our agency, making our actions intelligible and reasonably consistent. They enable us to pursue our ends across changing circumstances. Thus, we should be able to predict that someone who lacked the capacity for such emotion is apt to be impulsive, flighty, seemingly unable to focus on longer-term goals, unable to meet obligations, unable to form emotional bonds with others, and less likely than most to keep promises (making them untrustworthy). These are exactly the kinds of qualities characteristic of sociopaths: “Psychopaths tend to live day-to-day and to change their plans frequently. They give little thought to the future and worry about it even less. Nor do they generally show much concern about how little they have done with their lives” (Hare 1999: 59). They tend to drop out of school, to be unable to hold down jobs, or to think beyond immediate gratification. Indeed, even their criminality tends to lack consistency. One of the characteristics of the sociopathic criminal’s arrest record is its diversity: petty theft, burglary, assault, drug and weapons offences. Contrary to the media images of single-minded serial killers, the criminal sociopath is typically not a specialist, nor is he particularly good at what he does.

One of the conspicuous things people notice about sociopaths is their unshakeable belief in their own cleverness. They honestly tend to believe they are the smartest people in the world, despite all objective evidence to the contrary, such as the lack of accomplishments, the steady string of failures, the lack of intimate relationships, the long arrest record. Whatever goes wrong is someone else’s fault, never their own. This is all to be expected of someone who lacks the emotions of self-assessment. Someone who, for example, never feels guilt or shame lacks the “early warning system” that most of us have, which tells us that we are about to do something for which our conscience is apt to bite us; a sociopath’s conscience never bites. And because he feels no shame, he has no inkling that anything about himself is in need of change. [2]  This singular lack of capacity for honest self-assessment has led some researchers to recommend that resources not be wasted on trying to rehabilitate sociopaths. As a matter of fact, such rehabilitation may have the effect of helping the sociopath to become more skilled at manipulation (Hare 1999: 192-205).

It is hard to tell whether this sort of self-delusion should be properly characterized as a rational or an emotional deficit. It is likely a bit of both: it is a rational deficit aided and abetted by an affective deficit. Even if the sociopath is candidly apprised of his shortcomings by a third party, because he will be unable to feel the bite of conscience, he is likely either to rationalize his conduct, or to infer that the third party is mistaken. We will have more to say on the relation between rationality and affectivity below.

Media images often portray the psychopath as an alternative character type, an evil but sometimes slightly glamorous one. What I wish to contend by offering the above rough sketch of the sociopath — and I may as well be frank about it — is this: Sociopaths lack character. They are not an alternative character type. They are not characters at all. They represent what we might call the limiting case of the person without character. I shall offer some reasons why.

First, let us bring to mind for a moment the notion of a character in the literary sense. It has been remarked on by some that sociopaths are singularly uninteresting as literary characters; they are too thin. Robert Hare, the foremost expert on these people, tells the following story about how he was a consultant on a Hollywood film project about a couple of sociopathic serial killers:

The filmmakers had great concern for accuracy and had researched the subject as thoroughly as they were able. But the scriptwriter phoned me one day in near desperation. “How can I make my character interesting?” he asked. “When I try to get into his head, try to work out his motivations, desires, and hang-ups in a way that will make some sort of sense to the audience, I draw a blank. These guys … are too much alike, and there doesn’t seem to be much of interest below the surface.”

In a sense the screenwriter had nailed it: As portrayed in film and story, psychopaths do tend to be two-dimensional characters …. The philosophy of life that these individuals espouse usually is banal, sophomoric, and devoid of the detail that enriches the lives of normal adults. (Hare 1999: 140-141)

If we take the poor screenwriter’s words at face value, the sociopathic “character” lacks enough depth for it to perform the individuating function that the concept of character plays. Similarly, if the screenwriter for a Star Trek episode were to take the implications of the “character” of a Vulcan seriously, without deviating from it (as happens all too often), she would find it difficult to differentiate one Vulcan’s character from another’s, short of dressing them in different coloured uniforms. There is no depth, and therefore room for a character ascription that points to the agent’s identity as a person.

Not only that. The screenwriter’s comments offer the tantalizing possibility — which would take another complete study to explore — that some depth of character is a requirement for the mere intelligibility of others’ complex behavior. Without being able to attribute complex and essentially human motivations to others, we find ourselves unable to understand or explain their actions and practices. With sociopaths, it is not that they are too complex to understand; rather, they are too simple, too reptilian.

Second, sociopaths lack the integrity or unified agency that enables them to form and carry through longer-term goals and projects. This is shown in the fact that, though they often express extremely grandiose intentions, few of them ever bear fruits, usually because the effort required is too much for them. The result is aimlessness, lack of concrete accomplishment, and lack of close relationships like marriage and parenthood, which require a large investment of time and effort.

Third, because the sociopath lacks the capacity for self-assessment, both emotionally and intellectually, he is incapable of moral progress. We all do bad things from time to time, but the psychopath typically does not learn from his mistakes. If he were participating in the Milgram experiments, he is the obedient subject who would feel no remorse; indeed, he may even feel a twinge of sadistic pleasure (because he has never learned to associate causing pain to others with shame or guilt), and if so, he might even be that rare bird who would shock again on a reiteration of the experiment. He has not acted out of character when he has shocked a subject. He has no character. Nor is he likely to follow what I call the Characterological Imperative:  “Always choose a course of action as if you were setting a precedent or laying down a law for your character”. He is unlikely to do so because he cannot honestly or accurately assess what sort of person he is or what sort of person he would like to become. Instead, he can at best decide what sorts of things he would like to do and have — at least until other sorts of things usurp them.

At this point someone might wonder what difference it makes. The sociopath cannot see that he is wrong, and cannot be made to see it. If he is satisfied with his life and does not care what we think, then, character or no character, so what? The sociopath seems to undermine the claim that character is, all things considered, a good thing to have. He seems to bear witness to the possibility that character is a moral concept that does no work. We may be justified in doing what we must to protect ourselves from him, but what we cannot do is truthfully claim that we are right and he is wrong, morally speaking. This is because whatever moral arguments we could possibly offer him would be to no effect. At best, we could convince him using prudential arguments that appeal to his present interests — a sort of Parfitian Present Aim Theory applied to sociopaths (Parfit 92). [3]  What can be said in response to this?

First, I would say that the objection is absolutely correct in a certain respect: we probably cannot convince the sociopath that he is morally wrong. But why should that undermine morality? I do not know where the burden of proof should lie here. I confess, it is not immediately clear to me that it is our duty to justify morality to such a creature, any more than he perceives it as his duty to justify his amorality to us. Either way, we would be talking past each other. If he is incapable of understanding morality, then the deficit is his, not ours. We understand something that he does not, much as I understand morality in a way that my cat does not. My cat does not make me question my commitment to morality, so why does the sociopath? This seems like a case of the tyranny of the weak over the strong.

But even if I should feel the need to futilely engage with the sociopath on this point, I might point out to him a peculiar incoherence in his position. So many of the games that sociopaths play, such as the grasping for power and advantage, the preening, the joy at the pain and sorrow of others, the egoistic desire for praise and esteem at all costs, all of these I say, depend on the existence of other people. It is the attention of other people that he wants when he seeks attention. It is the pleasure derived from being richer than others that drives him to steal. All his games are played with (or at the expense of) other people. He does not play them with rocks and trees. Therefore, we ought rightly to ask the sociopath why we matter so much to him. And if we matter so much, then why are we treated with such contempt?

Sociopaths are not the perfect example of people who utterly lack moral sentiment; they are merely the closest that we can get, empirically speaking. For instance, they are able to experience certain emotions, anger and resentment being conspicuous among them. But if morality is a sham, then why should one feel resentment at another? Imagine feeling resentment at the actions of another, and thinking “How could he do that to me?” while at the same time not believing in the possibility of moral wrong. It takes some doing. That is perhaps part of what makes sociopaths incomprehensible. They suffer from a kind of blindness, caused by their inability to empathize. For example, a sociopath is capable of suffering “injustice”, which he might define as “that which is done by others against my own interests”. The blindness here consists of an inability to see that others can also feel injustice at the things that he does. [4]  We should not waste time convincing the blind of the existence of colours, nor should we waste time convincing sociopaths or amoralists of the existence of morality. We can argue over its content, but not its existence.

In any case, the sociopath will not be convinced. His lack of sentiment contributes to his inability to be convinced by any non-prudential argument for morality. This in turn illustrates one aspect of the necessity of the moral sentiments to the moral life.

Before taking our leave of the sociopath, I should clarify my position with regard to a certain debate in the literature on sociopathy (among both psychologists and moral philosophers). The debate is between those (e.g. Nichols 2002) who see sociopathy as a phenomenon involving primarily an emotional deficit, a deficit in affective capability, and those (e.g. Maibom 2005) who view is as primarily a systematic deficit in practical reasoning. For convenience’s sake, we may call the former “sentimentalists” and the latter “rationalists”.

At the risk of seeming bland, I fall somewhere between these two positions. In the foregoing I have stressed, for purposes of my own, the sentimental side of things, characterizing sociopathy as a systemic failure of emotions of self-assessment. However, it is not so easy to separate sentiment from rationality. For one thing, emotions are often — if not always — heavily laden with cognitive content. Second, there are complex connections between sentiment and reason that are often overlooked and which the study of phenomena like sociopathy can shed light on in interesting ways. For example, it was noted above that the sociopath has the tendency to believe that he is much cleverer than the regular run of mortals. He overestimates his talents and abilities. Put another way, he is blessed (or cursed?) with a tendency toward positive self-delusion. As such, we could categorize this as a deficit in practical reasoning, as it involves blindness to certain pertinent facts, which will tend to lead to other mistakes in practical reasoning (for example, irrational risk-taking). It is exactly the sort of deficit that supports the rationalist position.

However, to complicate matters, we can also say that the sociopath’s inability to feel emotions of self-assessment is implicated in the persistence of his lack of capacity for psychological insight. He lacks the emotional “alarm-bells” that might direct his attention to areas of his personality that might not be perfect. People who are positively self-deluded but who are not necessarily sociopathic also lack insight, but the world from time to time “corrects” them through means of mistakes and subsequent negative emotions like regret and shame, which may (though not always) lead to psychological insight. The sociopath, lacking such emotions, lacks an important means of self-improvement. Thus, at the same time that the sociopath believes himself to be clever, he leaves in his wake a trail of failed relationships, incarcerations, lost jobs, and lost opportunities that put the lie to this belief. More to the point, his lack of capacity for shame or guilt manifests itself in an unhealthy lack of cognitive dissonance between his self-assessment and his actual accomplishments (or lack thereof).

Even a supposed rationalist like Heidi Maibom admits that there is room for both sentimentalism and rationalism. [5]  Indeed, I would go a step further and assert that a plausible characterization of the disorder must involve both, and my stress on the emotional deficits of sociopaths should not be taken as a repudiation of rationalism. Antonio Damasio characterizes sociopathy as an “example of a pathological state in which a decline in rationality is accompanied by diminution or absence of feeling” (Damasio 178). In fact, I would say that the rational and emotional deficits do not just happen to accompany one another, but are in fact related to each other.

Much, much more could be said about the relation between reason and sentiment. For example, while we often normally think of them as in some way diametrically opposed, there may be models of emotions available which close the gap quite dramatically. It is worth briefly mentioning one of these, as it may be a useful antidote to the possibly crude picture of the emotions of self-assessment I have laid out thus far.

Using guilt as an example, Jon Elster (p. 303 ff; see also Tesser and Achee 1994) proposes a “catastrophic” model of emotion. Rather than thinking of guilt as a dark, irrational — or at least arational — feeling that wells up from some unknown place inside us (a common lay view), we ought rather to think of it as the experience of a perception of dissonance between our conduct and our values. Here, guilt is experienced as a sort of alarm bell (that metaphor again) bringing to our attention the possibility that all is not well. It is the awareness of dissonance. However, because behaviour tends to be path-dependent (i.e. we tend to continue in a set pattern of behaviour based on previous behaviour), an agent will tend to continue on a course of conduct, looking for reasons to support it. If such reasons cannot be found, the tension caused by the dissonance increases until a behavioural “switch” occurs. Such path-dependency followed by sudden switching is what I call “moral hysteresis”. It could be the subject of another paper on its own.

On the simpler “cost-benefit” model, an agent engages in some conduct, experiencing displeasurable guilt as a negative utility. On this model, provided the guilt is felt strongly enough, we should expect immediate change in conduct. On the other hand, the catastrophic model accounts for the path-dependent nature of conduct: there is delay while the agent rationalizes his current course; meanwhile tension builds up, precipitating a switch — that is, unless the tension can be resolved by rational means. I have oversimplified the model, but its implication is clear: practical reasoning is not trumped by a strong emotion. Rather, reason and emotion work hand in glove.

Elster rejects the cost-benefit account of emotions in favour of the catastrophic model, by reasoning along the following lines: if guilt were merely experienced as a disutility, as an experienced or anticipated cost, then if guilt prevents me from, say, stealing a book (which I otherwise desire to do), I should be willing to purchase a guilt-erasing pill. But someone who is capable of feeling guilt will also feel guilty about buying and taking the pill, because “taking the pill in order to escape guilt and be able to steal the book would be as morally bad as just stealing it” (Elster 303). It just turns stealing the book into a two-step rather than a one-step operation. If I feel guilty about having stolen a book, thereby experiencing tension, I would — where possible — prefer to resolve the tension not by taking a pill, but rather by finding reasons not to feel guilty. Guilt is, on this model, an integral part of practical reasoning, not an epiphenomenon to be dealt with by erasure.

Before ending, since we have been discussing the sociopath, a brief glance at his fictional cousin, Hume’s “sensible knave”, might be in order. Perhaps much of what was said about the sociopath can be said about him. But we might be able to say more.

Hume introduces the knave as follows:

And though it is allowed, that, without a regard to property, no society could subsist; yet, according to the imperfect way in which human affairs are conducted, a sensible knave, in particular incidents, may think, that an act of iniquity or infidelity will make a considerable addition to his fortune, without causing any considerable breach in the social union and confederacy. That honesty is the best policy, may be a good general rule; but is liable to many exceptions: And he, it may, perhaps, be thought, conducts himself with most wisdom, who observes the general rule, and takes advantage of all the exceptions. (Hume 1957: 282-283) [6]

I would characterize the sensible knave in this way: he differs from the sociopath in that though he understands morality, and for the most part is motivated by it in the way the rest of us are, yet, he is overall better off than us because on the occasions where morality does not pay (in terms of overall personal utility), he can disregard morality. He is morally motivated like the rest of us, except where he can get away with something without getting caught. In this sense, he is more complex and troublesome than the sociopath, because we cannot simply write him off as morally blind. In fact, it could be argued that his sight is better than ours, more evolved.

Hume attempts to meet the challenge by in effect saying that such a knave would not always get away with his cavalier attitude to morality. However, Hume speaks as if the knave is more or less equivalent to our sociopath, in that he is not motivated by morality (“If his heart rebel not against such pernicious maxims, if he feel no reluctance to the thoughts of villainy or baseness…”, etc.). My construal of the knave is as someone who is motivated by morality the way we are, but only when it pays. When immorality pays, he can turn his conscience off. So Hume’s rather weak reply will not do.

I believe that such a creature as I have described is probably empirically non-existent, or at least very improbable. For one thing, we must ask ourselves how one could become such a person. One must first become the sort of person who can participate in morality at all, in order to become the kind that can turn it off. But part of becoming a moral person involves the sort of development and habituation that makes violating morality difficult without experiencing consequent feelings of shame and guilt. In other words, before we can become a sensible knave as I have described it, we must become inculcated in morality. This will involve at least two things.

First, it will involve a degree of habituation to moral conduct that may then be harder to break. One will occasionally break it, as we all do. But we do not all do it in the systematic way the sensible knave is supposed to do it.

Second, it will likely involve an internalization of the morality he has learned in such a way that he will not be following it merely from self-interest. Self-interest is not his main moral motivation. This makes it highly implausible that he would systematically violate that morality on the basis of self-interest. If he has properly internalized his morality, he believes that moral conduct is not based on mere self-interest. So self-interest cannot be a motivation for violating it, at least not in a systematic way. And not without emotional consequences. Morality does not come with an on-off switch. Even if one could turn morality on and off at will, I suspect such an agent would more often than not, like Hume’s version of the knave, be tempted to use the switch too much, making fatal mistakes and ending up violating morality more than is helpful. He would be a sub-optimal sensible knave.

Furthermore, it is still difficult to see how having received anything like a proper moral training, he could escape the negative moral sentiments like shame and guilt that come with violations of morality, once he turned his moral switch back on again. Such sentiments would, at least, represent a considerable disutility that would have to be factored into his moral calculations, or at least factored into our assessments of his overall flourishing. The only way around this would be to imagine that there is a radical discontinuity between the knave when he is morally “switched on” and when he is “switched off”. Basically, the former would have to be either unable to remember the latter’s deeds, or else would have to be “disengaged” enough from them to essentially regard them as the deeds of another agent. Either of these scenarios describes a condition of agency which can only be characterized as pathologically dissociative.

A related observation applies to a person of evil character, such a person being one whose values are largely the inverse of ours, but who still has the capacity for the moral sentiments, and has achieved a certain (perverse) integrity, of the kind outlined in this chapter. Such a person would not only desire and value evil things, but would also feel guilt or shame at having been weak-willed enough to, say, miss an opportunity to harm or cheat someone.

We would have to ask a couple of things about him. First, where might his uncharacteristically kind impulse have come from, that leads him to act “shamefully” by refraining from harming or cheating? Perhaps it is randomly generated akrasia (weakness of will), pure and simple, a nervous tic of the will, and thus is not really a “kind” impulse at all. But if his practical reasoning was accompanied by even a momentary thought like “perhaps this is not quite right”, then this is what we call conscience. Might this betoken some “sparks of better hope” within him, as Shakespeare might describe it (Richard II V.iii.21)?

Second, how did he manage to avoid all of the training and character-enforcing messages that we all receive, even the most dissolute among us, if only by accident in the course of our development? There is something perverse in his ignorance, something willful about it. He would somehow have to have systematically failed to acquire the most basic moral training that we are all exposed to in our lifetimes. And not only this, but to separate him from the mere sociopath, he must have somehow, learned the opposite of what he was taught, to have somehow ended up attaching his moral-affective responses to exactly the wrong things. When a student of any other art, science, or skill does this, we say he is extremely stupid. We shrug. We cannot explain it.

Maybe this is the essence of the evil character; he has an original seed in him that makes him averse to what we consider to be the good. I admit I cannot explain such a person. But perhaps just as tellingly, I have also never met or heard of one living and breathing. R. M. Hare once considered a literary example in Milton’s Satan, who famously said, “To do ought good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight” (Paradise Lost I.158). However, as Hare pointed out, Satan would have had to play for both teams before he could switch from one to the other (Hare 101). At the risk of sounding Platonic, I cannot imagine him wishing to make such a switch after truly having had such knowledge of the good, unless he was never a committed member of the good team to begin with. But my lack of imagination is no argument against its possibility. All I can say is that, if Satan knows what is good but consistently prefers evil (and if he is not a sociopath — whom we have already considered), then he is responsible for this character. He will possess integrity of a kind, according to the scheme of this study, and he may accrue whatever advantages go along with that integrity. But we will tend not to like him, and we will do what we can to ensure that he does not flourish. Speaking counterfactually, his life may very well have gone better for him overall if he had any talent for goodness. But we will be unlikely to convince him of this.

Before we take our leave of the moral sentiments, an apology should be made to the reader. We have merely scratched the surface of an important topic; much about the role of emotions in the moral life had to go unsaid. For example, we have mainly focussed on a particular kind of moral sentiment, what were called emotions of self-assessment. Obviously, the moral emotions run in wider circles than this. The reader might, for example, be dismayed by a lack of attention devoted to that major moral player, sympathy. Obviously, sympathy will have a large role to play in the functioning of moral character. Just as obviously, it is a capacity which the sociopath also conspicuously lacks. And historically speaking, much has been written about sympathy by moral philosophers. However, I was more interested in the emotions of self-assessment, mainly because of their close connection with integrity, which, as I have hopefully made clear, I see as being at the core of the concept of character. I therefore apologize to those who hunger after more, but some matters had to be sacrificed in the name of economy.

Bibliography

BUCKLE, Stephen. Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

DAMASIO, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994.

DOLAN, M. and R. FULLAM. “Theory of Mind and Mentalizing Ability in Antisocial Personality Disorders with and without Psychopathy,” Psychological Medicine 34 (2004), 1093-1102.

ELSTER, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

FLANAGAN, Owen. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

HARE, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.

HARE, R. M. “Satanism and Nihilism,” in Essays on Religion and Education. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
 

HUME, David. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (2^nd edition). L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

HUME, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

LEVENSTON, Gary K. et al. “The Psychopath as Observer: Emotion and Attention in Picture Processing,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 109 (2000), 373-385.

MAIBOM, Heidi L. “Moral Unreason: The Case of Psychopathy,” Mind and Language 20 (2005), 237-257.

MILGRAM, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

NICHOLS, Shaun. “How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism, or Is It Irrational to Be Amoral?” The Monist 85 (2002), 285-304.

PARFIT, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

RICHELL, R. A. et al. “Theory of Mind and Psychopathy: Can Psychopathic Individuals Read the ‘Language of the Eyes’?” Neuropsychologia 41 (2003), 523-526.

TAYLOR, Gabriele. Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

TESSER, Abraham and John ACHEE. “Aggression, Love, Conformity, and Other Social Psychological Catastrophes,” in Robin R. Vallacher and Andrzej Nowak (eds.), Dynamical Systems in Social Psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1994.

Notes

[1]   However, these people would seem pathological in other ways. For one thing, they would be unable to form any close relationships with others that are based on sentiment, the capacity for which they would lack. On the other hand, it is unlikely they could be made to see that they might be missing out on something that the rest of us enjoy. But to others, they would seem a rather empty and one-dimensional figure. Aside from criminality, many of the characteristics of criminal sociopaths would still apply to them: lack of depth, impulsivity, coldness, underachievement, etc.

[2]   I am aware that another of the emotions of self-assessment is missing from this picture, namely pride. I presume that sociopaths have the same capacity for this emotion as the rest of us, though researchers do not devote any attention to it, mainly concerned as they are with the sociopath’s morally salient incapacity for shame and guilt, which tends to get them in most trouble. If sociopaths have the same capacity for pride as non-sociopaths, then this shows that they are not exactly the limiting case of the person without character I have made them out to be (though they are still closer to that end of the spectrum, and therefore still make for a good case study).

[3]   The Present Aim Theory of agency, according to Derek Parfit (1984), says that my future self at any given future time has the same relation to me as another person does at present. Thus, a future desire has less of a claim to normative priority than a present desire does. This is because my present desire is my desire, whereas my future desires are in relevant respects the desires of some other agent(s): “when we are considering theoretical and practical rationality, the relation between a person now and himself at other times is relevantly similar to the relation between different people” (Parfit 191).

[4]   Some have framed this phenomenon in more technical language by claiming that sociopaths lack a “theory of mind” (Dolan and Fullam 2004). I would avoid such terminology as being overly rationalistic and because there is research disputing the claim (Richell et al. 2003).

[5]   “Since it is clear that psychopaths have emotional deficits of the sort relevant to sentimentalist view of morality [sic.], the question I will be concerned with is whether they also have deficits in their practical reason…. I will argue that although psychopathy supports sentimentalism it does not speak against rationalism” (Maibom 238).

[6]   There is a similarity of form between Hume’s sensible knave and his account of the artificial virtues. An artificial virtue (like justice) has the general tendency to contribute to the overall good, while on particular occasions it can actually be detrimental to it (Treatise 3.2.2; Buckle 259-260). The sensible knave recognizes that virtue may be generally to his benefit, but takes advantage of those occasions where it is not, by acting counter to virtue. In both cases, the problem turns on how to keep people loyal to virtue even in the face of seeming exceptions to it.

Moral Eugenics

Exterminate the brutes?

The Spectacled Avenger has his moments of misanthropy. Sometimes it is difficult to look upon this human comedy and call it good. In my lighter moments, I can at least view it all as a sort of vast carnival of rutting monkeys — very undignified, but undeniably funny. At other times that lighter side of things is much harder to see.

A typical occurrence of the latter happened the other evening on a crowded subway train, as I watched a repulsive little rat-man of dubious moral and genetic quality aggressively elbow a very pregnant woman out of his way in order to beat her to a vacant seat. This low specimen of humanity caused me to wonder how it is that “eugenics” ever became a dirty word. At such times I cannot help but entertain the notion that a little thinning of the social herd might do little harm and much good. It sometimes seems as if the vile and baseborn are crowding out the more noble exemplars of our species. You see, when I’m in my misanthropic mood, when the human comedy seems more like tragedy, I am more prone than usual to reflect on eugenics with indulgence.

Speaking of thinning the herd, consider this story, perhaps a sign of the times, recounted to me by someone whom we had over for dinner last week. She told us of a couple who are of her acquaintance, and who recently made an appeal over Facebook for their friends to contribute to a fund to help them pay for their fertility treatments. No doubt they are possessed of very superior genes and wish very much to grace the world with their continuance, believing furthermore that you and I ought to be willing to pay to ensure that they are passed on.

Of these would-be philanthropists to humanity, I cannot help but think the following: First, if they cannot afford their own fertility treatments, perhaps they cannot comfortably afford to support a child either. Second, adoption might be cheaper and might do more for the common good. Third, if they are unable to see the utter tastelessness of their financial appeal, then I humbly submit that the quality of our species would likely be the better for their not reproducing themselves.

This story is an example of that human comedy — of the rutting monkeys variety — I spoke of. But in such farce lie the seeds of deeper pathos, which becomes evident when we reflect upon the following paradox: much as Plato said that the ideal ruler would be the man who had no desire to be ruler, I am led to think that perhaps the ideal people to continue our species are precisely those who least value doing so. This paradox, from a God’s eye point of view is doubtless very humorous, but from an intelligent human’s viewpoint it is tragic. For what does one see all around one, but the spectacle of the lowest specimens of our genetic and moral stock spreading their seed to the four winds, while their betters, who have other priorities, or other more worthwhile contributions to make to society, have their genes gradually snuffed out over the course of generations?

In that vein, I’m afraid I cannot help but express some degree of sympathy for the following words of Herbert Spencer, that grand old man of Victorian Social Darwinism:

“Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good, is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing-up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.”

(Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (9th edition). London: Williams and Norgate, 1880, p. 400).

In other words, by allowing the transgenerational proliferation of Morlocks, we ensure the future misery and ultimate extinction of the favoured Eloi. Of course, in the eugenic universe, it is almost always left unexplained how it is that supposedly degenerate and “inferior” Morlocks are always threatening to outbreed and swamp the “superior” Eloi. After all, in the natural kingdom ruled by natural selection, “superiority” is cashed out in terms of reproductive success. Reproductive success is the only good coin in the evolutionary realm, and by this standard, it is the Morlocks who are clearly superior and the Eloi inferior.

In any case, Spencer’s is an interesting recasting of typical 19th-century laissez-faire arguments against welfare schemes to help the poor. The typical argument holds that the poor are undeserving of such help, because they are somehow morally undeserving, or because it would be pointless to help them, as they are essentially inferior and can never be improved, and/or that it would be economically inefficient to do so. Instead, Spencer characterizes welfare redistribution as an instance of intergenerational injustice: by helping the poor, we are enabling them to breed in greater numbers, at the expense of our morally healthy and more deserving descendants.

There are of course at least a couple of glaring flaws in Spencer’s reasoning. First, he hasn’t shown that the qualities that make for moral superiority are genetically heritable. Notice that in the slippery wordplay of the Social Darwinists, there is constant equivocation between the descriptive language of physical and genetic inferiority, and the normative language of moral inferiority. Hence Spencer’s “aiding the bad in multiplying” could mean aiding the genetically defective, or it could mean aiding the morally defective. Genetic defects are heritable; moral defects are not obviously so, or not in the same way.

Second, Spencer assumes that policies that will alleviate the lot of the supposedly inferior will also cause them to have more children. Again, the evidence for this claim is lacking. True, other things being equal, in the natural world the longer a creature lives the more offspring it is statistically likely to produce. But among humans, who are capable of procreative choice, a different dynamic may apply. There is some empirical support for this, since development economists will tell you that raising the living standards of the poor tends to reduce their fertility rates rather than raise them, at least in the longer run, perhaps by giving them options for living a meaningful life beyond the mere production of offspring.

(Trivia: the term “proletariat” comes from the Latin proletarius, which was the lowest class in the Roman census. The proletarii were the ones who produced proli — “offspring”. Hence, the proletarius was a mere “producer of offspring”. Since the proletarius owned nothing, his children, his proles, were the only “property” that would be recorded in the census, as they were the only things of value he had to offer the state. They were legion fodder.)

Of course, in reply to this latter point, it is enough for Spencer’s argument if the inferior are enabled to have any offspring as a result of such policies. Welfare needn’t increase their birthrate; that they have any children at all is an evil to be avoided. If the inferior have a birthrate no higher than that of their superiors, say two children per female, but welfare enables them to live long enough to have those two children when they would otherwise die without reproducing, then Spencer could argue that welfare would be socially mischievous. There would exist two more inferiors than should by rights exist, to compete against our healthy descendants for resources. Such is the brutal and inexorable logic of Social Darwinism.

I truly wish that people like that little rat-man on the subway didn’t exist. But sterilizing such vermin wouldn’t solve the problem, because his failing is moral, not genetic. We could sterilize him, but once he had healed from his surgery, he would be back on the subway, pushing pregnant women around. Meanwhile, other genetically “healthy” people would still be passing their bad morals on to their offspring. You see, bad morals can be passed on from parent to child much as bad genes can be; but bad morals don’t reliably track bad genes, nor do they reliably track lack of wealth. This is another of Spencer’s mistakes, for whenever he uses the royal “we” (e.g. “maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies”), he seems to imply those who are affluent or at least solidly middle-class; in effect, he speaks to those who were capable at the time of buying and reading his books, and who were more likely to believe in their contents. To these people it must have been flattering to be counted among the “healthy” or “superior” types. But, Victorian assumptions aside, being solidly middle or upper class is not equivalent to either genetic or moral superiority.

The fact is, the rich are just as capable as the poor of moral inferiority. The main difference is that the rich have material advantages that deflect many of the worst consequences of their vices. The poor are not so lucky — their vices tend to stick. Vices that cause fits of unhappiness or, at worst, depression in the rich, may be utterly life-destroying for the poor. Vice is a luxury the rich can often afford and the poor cannot. The rich substance abuser can pay for a bed in a private rehabilitation clinic. The poor substance abuser will find his bed in a prison or eventually in the gutter. The difference in the two cases is one of circumstance, not of the moral quality of the abuser. Similarly, when the rich neglect their children, they often do so with the aid of nannies and boarding schools. Since the poor cannot afford nannies and boarding schools, poor parents who neglect their children may be thrown in jail and are likely to have their children taken away from them.

Actually, if we must compare the two kinds of viciousness, we might go so far as to say that the viciousness of the rich is worse. Since the rich are less often exposed to the full consequences of their bad behavior, they grow confirmed in their bad habits, less likely to learn from experience they never acquire, and — what’s worse — they encourage such bad behavior in the poor by their seemingly glamorous and consequence-free example.

We cannot discuss sterilizing the morally inferior until we get better at identifying them. As a society we are very good at identifying a subset of the morally inferior — namely those who are poor. These tend to be visible, which is why it was so easy for Spencer and his ilk to see them. He was less good at identifying the ones that were sitting in the House of Commons or the boardrooms of the nation.

Once we have developed better methods for identifying moral degeneracy, we must not shrink from calling it what it is. We must get better at denouncing the morally degenerate. The ability to feel shame was given to us for a reason. Shame is a great teacher; the morally inferior ought to be made to feel it more often.

In an ideal world, each of us would be equipped with a chip embedded inside us, along with some kind of transmitter with a button (perhaps it could come in the form of a phone app?). The latter would be used to administer a small but painful electrical shock to people like the rat-man, who violate those small social norms that the criminal law does not concern itself with. The purpose of the embedded chip would be to receive these electrical shocks from others. In such an ideal world, the rat-man would have received separate shocks from all those on the train who observed his sub-human behaviour. I’m sure it would be a lesson he would not soon forget. And the anticipation of such unpleasant sensations would tend to keep us more aware of the effects of our actions on others. We would have a very concrete incentive not to be the source of displeasure.

If everybody came thus equipped, perhaps we could eliminate the most common forms of incivility in fairly short order. And since I believe practice of the smaller virtues conditions us for the exercise of the greater ones, I can’t help but think we might end up with a better society. It would certainly be a more amusing one.