AND ANOTHER THING
The syllogism of the age: less God, more crime, police, prisons
PAUL JOHNSON
Moth-eaten politicians now go to weird lengths to avoid the obvious in explaining the decline in behaviour. The Home Secre- tary blames yobbos on the Empire. Of course, this is one of the many subjects about which he knows nothing. Among the virtues of the Empire was the way in which it placed exceptional responsibilities on young men. An 18-year-old fresh from school might have to take charge of the welfare, for instance, of 20,000 Sudanese; and wonder- fully did most of them rise to the challenge. The moral vice of the Empire was rather dif- ferent: a certain pomposity among the higher ranks; the kind of self-importance which leads a minister to be driven at over 100 mph because he is 'running late for a meeting with the Prime Minister'.
The reason why the young are often cruel, nasty and violent is that there is no longer any force of religion to restrain their lower instincts. Francis Bacon put it pithily: 'They that deny a God destroy man's nobility: for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.' The base and ignoble football hooligans have been deprived by the state which runs their schools of what ought to be a basic human right: a moral education. It is no accident that in big, prosperous cities like London and New York, parents, whatever their religious belief or lack of it, struggle to get their children into schools where morals are taught and enforced, chiefly Catholic and Jewish. They find that where the school insists on good behaviour, academic stan- dards are automatically higher and the pupil's chances in life much enhanced. Crit- ics of the economic polarisation of society, who have accepted the analysis of The Bell Curve, that the gap between the underclass and the educated affluent will widen, have tended to leave out the religious dimension altogether. But it is the most important.
Moreover, I do not think you can separate belief in God as an omnipotent and perpetu- al justiciar, external to mankind, from the observance of morals. Karl Rahner was right when he argued that, 'if men not only cease to believe in God, but allow the very idea of God to vanish from their consciousness, they will become nothing more than a set of fantastically clever monkeys, and their ulti- mate fate will be too horrible to contem- plate'. It was the fallacy of the 19th-century agnostic, a term first popularised by Profes- sor T.H. Huxley, that belief and morality could be separated. Indeed, Huxley said that, shorn of religious 'superstition', morals would actually improve through secularisation.
But his faith on this point was pretty shaky, and with reason. Huxley was always terrified that his strident propagation of Darwin's theory of evolution would be linked in the public mind with immorality if his opponents could find any peccadilloes in the lives of himself and his supporters. A powerfully attractive man until he lost his teeth, he walked a tightrope, when the first 'liberated' women were on the prowl. I have been reading about Huxley since I came across a passage in the diaries of his relative by marriage, Lady Monkswell. Under Satur- day 29 June 1895, she writes, 'I hear that Professor Huxley has died, aged 70. He has been the cause of immense trouble, sorrow, expense and estrangement in this family, and has destroyed the faith of many.' This bitterness is all the more striking in that when Huxley's daughter Marion, or Wady', married Lady Monkswell's brother-in-law, the painter Jack Collier, RA, she took an instant liking to the professor.
But the fact is that the Huxley family was egregious, and Collier was drawn into its singularity. Mady was a clever painter her- self, who insisted on depicting and display- ing for sale young women in a state of com- plete nudity, then a rarity from a woman artist. When one of her nudes attracted attention at the avant-garde Grosvenor Gallery, a censorious society lady marched up to it and addressed the naked girl in a loud voice: 'Get up, you hussy, and put your clothes on!' Mady's behaviour became increasingly erratic, she had to be confined, and died mad while still in her twenties. Poor Collier wished to marry her youngest sister, Ethel; but this was considered incest under the law of marriage as it then stood. Attempts to change the law, though voted through the Commons, were invariably killed by the bishops in the Lords. After two years the couple went to Norway, where the law had been altered, and got married. But 'Take care. Make sure the Blairs aren't in the background.' when they came back to England, the other Colliers refused to recognise the union, and the couple risked a charge of incest.
Whether insanity ran in the Huxley family is unclear — the professor himself suffered several of what were then called 'nervous breakdowns' — but there certainly seems to have been some gene of inebriety. When Huxley was depressed, 'carrying on lengthy conversations with unknown persons living within his brain', his wife had to lock up the cellar. His widowed sister hit the bottle and spent the rent-money he gave her on gin, besides running up a slate as 'Professor Hux- ley's sister'. Her daughter Nelly also liked gin and had an illegitimate daughter by a rap- scallion army captain. Mother and daughter were later accused of raising the grandchild 'in wicked ways'. All three females were liable to invade the Huxley home on, for instance, Christmas Day, and keel over. The sister was eventually banned from the house, but could force her way in. There were family punch-ups, with Polly, a sister-in-law, high on morphia and brandy, whacking away at the professor and screaming, 'No wonder you drove Mady mad!' He took refuge in chloral, quinine and strychnine. Beatrice Webb noted that he seemed to scream failure — 'melan- choly has haunted his whole life . . . there is a strain of madness in him' — and blamed his 'indifferently dutiful' children for failing to understand their father. Perhaps he did not understand them. It is a strange tale, rich in misunderstandings and paradoxes, high and low comedy, with the Grim Reaper looking on from between the skeleton-stand and the fossil-cupboard. Maybe Tom Stoppard should write a play about it.
The decline of moral education proceed- ed much more slowly than might have been expected. When I was a boy in the 1930s, the overwhelming majority were still brought up strictly and were exceptionally law-abiding and decorous by historical stan- dards. The change came well after the war — perhaps in the 1960s — and was both reflected in and reinforced by the decline in the family. A sizeable minority of our youth now constitute the first post-Christian gen- eration, who know no prayers, cannot list the Ten Commandments, do not easily dis- tinguish between right and wrong, and therefore find that distinctions between what is lawful and what is not are arbitrary and unfair. So the syllogism of our age is: less religion, more crime, police, prisons.
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