Another voice
The ants and the slugs
Auberon Waugh It was Flaubert, of course, who said everything which needs to be said about modern China: 'A mesure que l'humanite se perfectionne, l'homme se degrade'. Don't ask me where Flaubert makes this perceptive remark, or in what context. It is quoted in The Unquiet Grave which I am re-reading for the second time this year, for my own nasty purposes, and I only hope Connolly gets it right. The more I read about China, the more it seems obvious that by a process of ideological indoctrination the socialists have succeeded in creating a race of sub-humans.
Plainly, this is a grave accusation to make, and one which requires substantiation. The vulgar mind may be persuaded that there is something a little odd about the modern Chinese when it learns that in obedience to public policy, the entire nation has voluntarily renounced its sex drive until reaching the age of twenty-seven. But that is not my point. Christianity has always urged exactly such self-restraint, even if with rather less conviction and infinitely less success than the socialists in modern China. My reason for suggesting that Chinese-style socialism is reducing mankind to the level of insects is rather more theological.
It has always been held that an essential mark of human identity is possession of free will—that is to say man has an innate perception of good and evil and the ability to choose between them. It is this characteristic which distinguishes him from the animal creation and which invests him with the individual dignity which invites speculation about the immortality of the soul and permits even humanist philosophers to talk of the sanctity of human life. The Christian tradition, of course, is rather more complicated, but there is no respectable precedent in Western philosophy for suggesting that the life of a mosquito is sacred, or a caterpillar, or even a rat. Such creatures may be exterminated at will to the extent that they are a nuisance to the human race. Thomists, as I understand them, would go even further and argue that the llama of Peru (as opposed to the Lama of Tibet) reaches its consummation as a rug on the floor of a Texan dude ranch; that a seal pup has no higher purpose than to decorate the collar of some male interior decorator in South Kensington. Similarly, I have met young women—usually very thin ones, and often in hospital—who have wept bitter tears to think of all the ants, slugs and field mice they may inadvertently have trodden on in the course of their lives. But I do not wish to discuss the stranger twists of personal morality, important and interesting as they may be, so much as the general ethical consensus, which strikes me as far more worrying. At the beginning of this article I compared the socialist Chinese with insects because they have destroyed their essential human characteristic of free will and subordinated all intellectual and ethical perception of their own to communal discipline. Plainly, however, it is a gratuitously offensive way to refer to creatures who have so many other properties which are recognisably human, and it may well have antagonised many nice and reasonable people from the main direction of my argument. Am I, perhaps, going to suggest that it would therefore be morally permissible to spray them all with DDT or some other, even more noxious, chemical and exterminate the species ?
My point is exactly the opposite one, that contempt for human life grows in the same proportion that we allow ourselves to become less human. Even if the Chinese have become as dehumanised as I think they have, Christian tradition will always give them the benefit of the doubt.Human robots —if such they be—are in the same position as foetuses and congenital idiots who, although apparently possessing none of the properties of reason, free will or moral selfdetermination which might be held to make their lives sacred, are nevertheless protected by Christian tradition through being given this benefit of the doubt. Take that away, and there is no stronger moral reason for saying it would be wicked to kill deer, seal pups and koala bears—that they are attractive and endearing creatures towards whom one wishes no harm—a quaint species, like giraffes, perhaps, to be preserved for sentimental reasons.
All of which may seem rather far-fetched since nobody has yet suggested we should sprinkle the Chinese with DDT or botulinus toxin, and nearly everybody would recoil from any such suggestion. To argue from the fact that the general consensus of opinion in Britain now favours abortion—not as an agonised and guilt-laden individual decision but as a general convenience—to the proposition that genocide will soon be accepted as a reasonable means of protecting our living standards may, indeed, seem to belong to the wilder fringes of debate. But my point is that it has already happened.
The most significant aspect of events in Cambodia since the victory of the Khmer Rouge is surely how little anybody is interested. It may be completely untrue that the entire educated class has been systematicallY murdered, that the population of the capital has been turned out, that a culture has been utterly destroyed and so many millions of people introduced to an entirely new dimes' sion of terror and misery. Every available source of information suggests that this IS the case, but what is interesting is that nobody cares whether it is true or not. To take an attitude involves making an effort, and to make an effort might endanger oar wonderful living standards. At the time of the Nigerian civil war, man,Y people refused to believe that a Britisa Labour government was actively assisting la the blockade which eventually over two and a half years starved to death two million innocent civilians, mostly children. Journa" lists like myself and Richard West who hart seen it happening went round shouting about it, and although there was a certain amount of lying propaganda from the Foreign Office, it was confirmed by all the independent bodies concerned—the tutor' national Committee of the Red Cross, the World Council of Churches, Caritas, etc.; But for everybody who refused to believe11‘, was happening, a hundred people sirrilly weren't interested—and about ten, perhaPs' thought it quite a good thing. If the Chinese have degraded their hurriaric potential by this fanatical acceptance 01 uncouth doctrines which we all find so dia. tressing, I think something very similar ha5, happened to the English where the forces °Id idleness and self-indulgence have produce a moral inertia which is every bit as fright/ ing in its way as the positive evil whic, emanates from Russia and very nearly a: inhuman as the robot activities of thce Chinese. There are those who look int° ihr face of Young England and see all sorts.0' terrible things—neo-Nazism, pointless v1.°;1 lence, illiteracy, sexual promiscuitY,rae antagonisms. I see nothing but paralysol"' suffocating wetness. for Next week I shall be arguing the case ..1 the reintroduction of National Service, huis my disagreeable thought for this weektot that before we denounce the Chinese '01. having degraded themselves to the level to ants we should also recognise the extent A which we have degenerated into slugs. Ail'
ter
anybody who has watched an eflC0lI between ants and slugs in his garden know the invariable result.
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