PERSONAL COLUMN
Swinging together
CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
One of the most important and one of the most oddly overlooked of the sayings of Christ is that which forbids us to judge. It is not only good ethics but sound common sense. Since the beginning of the world men have debated with one another about necessity and freedom. The debate has never been resolved nor will it ever be resolved. On the one hand, if there is a Reason Why for every action—and still more, if there is an Omniscient God to Whom all the future is foreknown—how can there be any room or freedom? On the other hand, wherever he argument may lead, no one can believe hat he is no more than a machine. It is of a question whether there is a ghost inside e machine. If we have to make a stark hoice, it is, as even Thomas Huxley dmitted, far more certain that there is a host than that there is a machine. We know at we have ideas. It is only an idea of ours at we have a body, and we know that mong our other ideas is the obstinate cer,. ainty that in some way—we cannot say how we have some sort of freedom. 'We know ur will's free, and there's an end on't.' That being so, the common-sense attitude owards the problem that is intrinsically nsoluble is indeed to attempt to regulate I, ur own conduct by an assumption of e sponsibility but to spend as little time as : nsible in passing judgments on other ople. To that extent I cannot quite agree ith John Braine and A. E. Dyson (writing the SPECTATOR of 13 September) in finding e Moors murder case 'a turning point'. Our aracters are products of strange stories of redity and environment and, in so far these murderers had impulses that were only horrible but impulses which to rmal people were wholly incomprehensible, means that, far from being people whom e could complacently call wicked, they re people on whom we should be abnorm- y hesitant to pass judgment. Of course, if ey were responsible at all they were very cked, but to say that they were very cked does not explain why they chose that rticular form of wickedness.
Nor can I agree with Mr Braine and Mr son in so wholeheartedly repudiating the Lion that society is to some extent respon- e for the sins of the individual. Mr Dyson ects this notion as a modern extravagance be contrasted with traditional Christian id. I should have thought that the share responsibility of society was a most damental Christian belief. 'There but for grace of God go I."No man is an island' back once more to the most basic teach- of the New Testament 'We are members of another'. We are all in a measure Ponsible for one another. The other rives of the Christian religion are tters of choice—to be accepted only as a ain venture of faith. The doctrine of final sin—that we are all born with a acity to prefer the evil to the good—is, Chesterton once truly said, the one istian doctrine that is absolutely demon- ble—that can only be rejected by a, son who either does not understand what eans or who is mentally deficient. Lit thenceforward I am mainly on Mr on's side. In so far as the 'progressives' ibe the sins of individuals merely to the
economic evils of society—to 'bourgeois society'—they are, as near as makes no difference, dotty. If I remember rightly, there was no question of the Moors mur- derers suffering from any especial economic deprivation. Where there are economic evils they should of course be remedied, but the notion that original sin will be abolished simply by nationalising the steel industry or by giving everybody a lot more money— that perverted extravagances of this sort are less likely to occur under one sort of regime than another—is too absurd for discussion. Indeed, I cannot see why people who are continually asserting with a good deal of justification and (for what they may consider it worth) with a good deal of biblical authority that the rich are very much wickeder than the poor, should imagine that all the evils of society would be automatically cured if only they could make the poor rich.
Similarly of Mr Dyson's castigation of the modern extravagance which holds everyone guilty except the perpetrator of the crime— and, it seems, the speaker. Of course the man who says 'We are all guilty, therefore you are guilty. Therefore I am innocent' is absurd. One's only doubt must be whether he exists, or whether he is a man of straw invented by Mr Dyson for the pleasure of knocking him down. I must admit that I have never met quite such a fool as that.
Mr Dyson thinks that the modern fool derives his anarchist beliefs from the theories of Rousseau and the Noble Savage. 'Man was born free', thinks Rousseau—and has subsequently been corrupted by 'institutions'. It is obvious nonsense. If primitive man, the Noble Savage, was absolutely good and perfect without any institutions, if he had no original sin in his nature, why did he ever accept these institutions? For to accept evil was itself a product of defect. (Admit- tedly one might equally ask of the traditional Christian story, if Adam had not yet got original sin, what could have persuaded him to eat the apple, but that is another matter with which we are not here concerned. Our concern is not with the Fall but with the certain fact of original sin.) Yet the practical question is not how far such people as the Moors murderers are guilty in the eyes of God but what should be done about them. It is not for us to anti- cipate the verdicts of the Day of Judgment. We are warned in the Gospels that we shall find some of the verdicts there very surpris- ing—people who were generally thought to have been very wicked surprisingly com- mended and people generally thought to be very respectable surprisingly con- demned. It is not for us to pass judgments of this sort on those who are civil criminals, but this reluctance to pass judgment ought to work both ways. If it is not for us to judge, then we ought not to say that a man is guilty; but then we equally ought not to say that he is guiltless. The refusal to judge ought indeed to cause us to refrain from unnecessarily brutal punishments, to pro- vide whatever remedial treatment is possible. We ought not to treat as crimes acts which, though we may dislike them, are not self- evidently intolerable to society—to enforce the old anti-homosexual Acts, for instance. WA also ought to invoke the courts as rarely as possible for another reason. Power corrupts. It may not do the criminal much harm to be punished, but it does both society and the individual officers a great deal of harm to punish him. The legendary school- master is supposed to say to his victim, 'It hurts me more than it hurts you'. If 'hurts' means to feel pain, this is of course merely a piece of comic cant. If 'hurts' means 'harms' it is very true. We may not have done such things as the Moors murderers did, but we have done such things that we cannot take it on ourselves to punish another without danger to our own souls—still less to rejoice in punishing him.
Yet, whatever may be true of other acts for which society punishes, the Moors murders were clearly, if ever acts were, acts which society could not tolerate ; and even if in this indirect way which we have dis- cussed society had its share in the guilt for what was done, that in no way means that society has not the right and the duty to defend itself against such people. The courts of law have no qualification to decide on the ultimate mysteries of human freedom.
Which of a man's actions are free and how far, no one can say. But it is only pragmatic common sense to treat a defendant as res- ponsible for his actions, save in the rare cases where medical opinion testifies that he is not. Indeed it is not only common sense to treat him as responsible but an insult to him to say without full cause that he is not responsible—that he is not, that is to say, fully a man. And responsible or not, society has the right to defend itself against him by shutting him up. It has the right to submit him to treatment and to demand that, unless and until the treatment is wholly successful and beyond all question effected, he shall remain shut up. It has a right also to give an example which may be a warning and a deterrent to others.
Indeed, the less that the criminal is judged to be responsible for his act, the stronger the case for his detention. For if he has succumbed once to irresistible impulse, it is only reasonable to fear that he will succumb again. It is at least possible that the free man will repent. The unfree man cannot in the nature of things repent because if he is un- free, he is not guilty.
So we must have penalties, though invok- ing them with reluctance and as infrequently as possible. I agree with Mr Dyson that 'tout savoir, c'est lout pardonner' simply is not true and, even if true, would be of no practical value since no one but God can know all. There is, it is true, a certain generosity in the maxim. But it is only generous if it is all-embracing. I agree with Mr Dyson that there is nothing particularly generous in the man who applies the maxim unhesitatingly to criminals and is as un- hesitating in his condemnation and debunk- ing of all those who are generally held to be respectable. We need in our impulses of
charity to remember the saying of Anatole France: 'La misericorde de Dieu est infinie ; it sauvera mime un riche?
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