Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Perhaps; but it was very difficult to take the nuanced view after looking at the photographs. Portugal looked indeed a paradise which gave joy to the eye but also a sadness to the heart, for such unspoilt beauty has now almost certainly passed from the world.

  Of course, the photographer (a man or woman called Yan) pointed his camera in such a way as to exclude all that was ugly or discordant. Fifty years ago, perhaps, people did not yet suffer from the diseased feeling that the ugly is somehow more real, more authentic, than the beautiful, and therefore worthier of capture on film and in book. We now believe that to search out only the beauty to the exclusion of the ugly is in some sense a wilful derogation of duty when ugliness exists alongside the beautiful, as it almost always does in this life (let alone in the Portugal of 1956). And if one had to choose between the willing suspension of the perception of the ugly and that of the beautiful, the former would be morally worse, for it is an implicit denial of the suffering that often goes along with ugliness.

  In development economics, there has long been a theory, indeed by far the most popular one to judge by the books available in most of the larger bookstores, that the wealth of some countries is bought at the expense of the poverty of others; and that it is not wealth that is in need of explanation, but poverty. Likewise in aesthetics: beauty is bought only at the expense of ugliness, the ugliness being the natural consequence of social injustice. To side with beauty is therefore a betrayal of suffering humanity, the exploitation of whose misery was and is the precondition of the creation of beauty. It would be interesting to know how many modern educated people would react to Le Portugal by Yves Botinneau, with photographs by Yan, by saying, ‘It couldn’t all have been like that.’

  No doubt it couldn’t; and yet I don’t think a sensitive person could fail to notice the importance of aesthetics in Portuguese life—an importance that may well have been unconscious, but none the less real for that—at the time the photos were taken. For one thing, they are not just of the odd corner of life or of towns or of cities or of landscapes: many of them, including of the townscapes, are of extensive views that stretch for miles into the distance where there is literally nothing that offends the eye to be seen, no excrescence that spoils the panorama. I haven’t been to Portugal for a long time, but I very much doubt that it would be possible to take such photographs, certainly not so many of them, now. Surely there would be highways or tower blocks or something to spoil the view, that does to the eye what a stone in the shoe does to the comfort of walking.

  I once had a discussion with a young student of philosophy with whom I happened one day to walk into a graceful square in an English provincial town that was (for me) entirely spoiled by a single sub-Mies van der Rohe glass building of fortunately stunted proportion, that was clearly built not in spite of being out of keeping with the classicism of the rest of the square but because of it, that is to say as an act of subversion or deliberate vandalism.

  The young philosopher asked me why I could not still enjoy that part of the square that still existed; after all, the rest of the buildings were the same as ever they had been. I thought of an analogy.

  ‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘you are in a restaurant and the meal is delicious. Suppose also that someone at the next table to yours suddenly vomits copiously. Would it be reasonable of me to say to you, ‘Why do you not continue to enjoy your meal? After all, the food on your plate and the décor in the restaurant is still exactly the same as it was before the man on the next table vomited?’ An aesthetic experience is more than the sum of its individual components, and in fact the bad building in the square would not have caused me such pain if the other buildings had been equally bad. It was the contrast that made it painful.

  Be this all as it might, the photos of Portugal taken in 1956 or just before showed nothing ugly, not even in the smallest detail of peasant life. For it is clear from the pictures that peasant life still existed in Portugal then. There were peasant fishermen, for example, whose large wooden fishing boats—rowed, not powered by engines—were objects of great beauty and elegance. It is unlikely that, during their construction, anyone thought specifically or consciously of elegance of shape or beauty of decoration, but nevertheless the constructors achieved them, as if they could do no other. The aesthetics were woven into the tapestry of their lives.

  It was obviously a time of transition, for though the women, even in the port of Lisbon, still wore peasant costume that was distinctive according to the region from which they came, the men no longer did so. Women still carried baskets of bread under their arm and large and graceful earthenware pots of water on their heads which, whatever the inconvenience or drudgery of it, did wonders for their posture, which was dignified and upright.

  But it was the architecture that most struck me. Even quite humble homes in ordinary villages were elegant in a way that no modern housing, at least for the poor, is elegant. It achieved both uniformity and distinctiveness at the same time: one looks at it and immediately says to oneself ‘Portugal.’ It could be nowhere else.

  The grander buildings, gothic, baroque and eighteenth century classicising, testify to a magnificent aesthetic sense down the ages; the taste changed, but it retained its perfection. Everything harmonises, an eleventh century castle with an eighteenth century church; nothing offends.

  The other thing that astonished me was how beautifully and immaculately cared-for everything was. Nothing was out of place, everything was clean; but this orderliness gave no impression of anal retentiveness, as Switzerland does, but rather of a genuine aesthetic concern. Of course Portugal at the time was a dictatorship, that of Salazar, a near-fascist who nevertheless kept the country neutral during the Second World War. Was the country so beautifully kept because Salazar imposed his will on it by means of his secret police, or was it a spontaneous manifestation of the people’s love of what they had inherited?

  Portugal at the time was deemed a very poor country (it is still the poorest in Western Europe). But when one looks at the picture of Lisbon taken from the city’s river, the Tagus, one has no impression of poverty but rather of a tremendous wealth that could have been accumulated only down the ages (perhaps it does not do to enquire too closely how it was accumulated). It must have been a rare privilege, though one hardly noticed as a separate datum of experience, to live among such beauty.

  Yet people turned their back on this world as soon as they were able to do so. The peasants’ world, where machines scarcely existed, where large boats were still dragged onshore by teams of oxen and launched into the sea by the collective strength of scores of men, where barrels were made by hand and large quantities of wine moved by non-mechanised transport, where women had to go down to the well to fetch water, where they had to wash clothes in the communal troughs, and where everyone made his own entertainment, was very picturesque but also very hard, and not one such as I, who am physically lazy and find most tasks other than reading and writing intensely boring, would wish for myself. Lisbon may have been rich but not in the modern sense: few televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, telephones, cars, etc. and all things which have proved irresistible to mankind everywhere.

  One of the questions that I have never been able to answer satisfactorily is why peasants the world over lose their aesthetic sense the moment they move from the country to the town, and become aficionados of kitsch. Those who until then had an instinctive understanding of form and colour seem to care about them no longer: I have observed this in India, Africa and South America. Indeed, they not only lose their instinctive good taste but acquire instinctive bad taste to replace it. What is the explanation for this? Is it that abundance and cheapness of acquired goods means that one no longer has to look at them with the same concentration as in conditions of relative shortage? Is it that, making almost nothing any more for oneself, one loses the appreciation of form and colour? Is it that, in the new conditions, all that belongs to the p
ast comes to seem retrograde and associated in the mind with poverty and oppression? Is it that everything from the past—the earthenware pots, for example—come to seem almost childish by comparison with the modernity of aluminium pots and pans? Is it that life loses in intensity what it gains in extension?

  There is certainly no turning the clock back: you cannot make eggs from an omelette, to reverse a well-known saying. Nor should we romanticise the lives of others by preventing them from voting with their feet and their purchases. But it would also be wrong to deny that in progress there is also loss. And Le Portugal by Yves Bottineau reminded me just how grievous that loss can be.

  14 - Morality, Hawk-Eyed and Pigeon-Toed

  There were scenes of ferocious violence not far from my house yesterday. They were unexpected because I live, when I am in England, in an ancient and peaceful close around a church. Next door to me but three is a charming sixteenth century timber-framed building on whose whitewashed walls are inscribed the words ‘In this house lived the learned and eloquent Richard Baxter 1640–1641.’ For a number of years I misread the words ‘learned and eloquent,’ as ‘learned and elegant,’ probably because I found them more interesting and—well, elegant.

  Richard Baxter (1615–1691) was a Puritan divine who published 130 books in his lifetime. His productiveness was in part the result of, or at any rate his response to, the ill-health that pursued him throughout his life, for though he lived to a good age he expected from quite early on to die shortly of his many complaints, real or imagined. The fear of imminent death spurred him on in his literary endeavours:

  A Life still near to Death did me possess

  With a deep sense of Time’s great Preciousness…

  And:

  The frequent sight of Death’s most awful face,

  Rebuk’d my sloth, and bid me mend my pace.

  As might be expected, Baxter inveighed against ‘Drunkards, Swearers, Fornicators, Scoffers at Godliness &c;’ though, as might equally well be expected, at least from the standpoint of three and a half centuries later, he did so with indifferent success. I regret to say that he did not think much of my townspeople, ‘a very ignorant, dead-hearted people’ full of ‘obdurateness.’ I daresay he was right; little has changed, probably, except that we might be more inclined nowadays to use the word obduracy than obdurateness (which, however, still does exist).

  Baxter was only a moderate Puritan: he believed that God had given Man his five senses in order that such qualities as beauty might lead him to God, so that he was by no means as opposed to elegance as one might easily have supposed. That he was eloquent is sure; but perhaps in a restrained way he was elegant also, certainly in his prose. Here is a sentence taken at random:

  No man is a wicked man that is converted; and no man that is a converted man that is wicked; so that to be a wicked man and to be an unconverted man is all one; and therefore in opening one, we shall open both.

  Of course, it must be borne in mind that truth and elegance (or eloquence, for that matter) are most certainly not one.

  But to return to the shocking scenes of violence enacted near my house yesterday: I am glad to say that they were not enacted by humans but by birds, sparrowhawks to be precise. These were the birds that the Duke of Wellington advised Queen Victoria were the solution to the problem of sparrows caught in Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, though he did not say what the sparrowhawks would have done after the elimination of the sparrows.

  These birds, small raptors themselves sometimes the prey of larger raptors, were once endangered in Britain but have now recovered fully, possibly thanks to greater pesticide control. Yesterday, out of the blue, they attacked the pigeons in our church close that on fine days coo us gently awake, and took no fewer than seven of them, leaving scattered feathers on the grass where the unsuspecting pigeons had been peacefully doing whatever it is that pigeons do. This morning the pigeons—other pigeons, that is—were back, cooing as if nothing had happened yesterday. I suppose this is the avian proof of the old sayings that no one is indispensable and that life must go on.

  Almost certainly the offending raptors were females, for the female of the species is much larger than the male and only the females are large enough to take pigeons. By all accounts even they are not powerful enough to kill a pigeon at a single strike; rather they capture their victim and it dies as they pluck its largest feathers and then tear at its flesh. This is a far cry from the kind of civilised behaviour we expect in our church close, though to do the sparrowhawks justice they airlifted their prey elsewhere to conduct the most savage part of their operation.

  The attacks on the pigeons were so swift that one couple, walking in the close, did not realise what was happening. They looked up and, seeing some of the finer pigeon feathers floating in the air, mistook them for snowflakes, which they found strange because it was by no means cold enough for snow.

  The strange thing was that I felt morally outraged by the behaviour of the sparrowhawks. I know that this is absurd, and I know also that I have animadverted previously on the poor behaviour of pigeons in my garden, that (or is it who?) self-importantly and greedily dominate the bird table and drive away the smaller birds to take all the seed for themselves, even though they seem to me quite fat enough already. But between self-importance and greed on the one hand, and outright murder on the other, there is quite a difference, at least in the sub-lunary world. It is the difference between sin and crime.

  Now of course it will be said that the sparrowhawks have to live; they cannot be expected to understand Louis XIV’s famous riposte to the petitioner who said, ‘But Sire, I have to live,’ namely that he, Louis XIV, did not see the necessity. Sparrowhawks are not properly the object of moral condemnation for, like Luther at the Diet of Worms, they can do no other than they do. They are obligatory carnivores; you cannot expect them to commit species suicide or turn vegetarian.

  Rational as it is to view their behaviour as devoid of all moral significance whatsoever, and absurd as it would be to consider those birds as morally reprehensible, I find it almost impossible entirely to clear my mind of the irrational notion that the scene had a moral significance or meaning. If, for example, I had been able by some means or other to protect the pigeons from the unprovoked attack of the sparrowhawks upon them, I should have done so, even though saving the pigeons meant harming the sparrowhawks. It seemed to me terrible that the peaceful pigeons, bullies of my bird-table as they might be (though of course I did not know that these particular, that is to say individual pigeons, had ever visited it, and one should not infer the characteristics of an individual from his membership of a group), should have been subjected to so vicious an attack, and to so gory and painful a death.

  I have experienced such visceral moral outrage, or at least revulsion, at the natural behaviour of lower creatures before. For example, on my land in France (I can hardly call it a garden) I once came across a snake that was in the process of swallowing a baby rabbit which, presumably, it had killed with its poison. I was furious. Not being a farmer, or even a gardener, I am still stuck at the Peter Rabbit stage in my attitude towards these creatures, viewed as a plague by those who must wrest their living from the land, or even with merely to grow a few vegetables. Though I am in the evening (the early evening, I hope) of my life, I still see rabbits as adorable, sweet and inoffensive furry animals, an adornment to any rural or pastoral scene; a fortiori are baby rabbits the objects of my affection.

  Besides, I still have in my mind, ineradicably as it were, the view of life that I first learnt from Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia. According to this view, Man was at the apex of a pyramid, and all forms of life below him were strictly graded in their moral worth in proportion to their nearness to him. Thus mammals were morally higher than birds, birds than reptiles, reptiles than fish, fish than insects, insects (and other arthropods such as ar
achnids and crustaceans) than molluscs, molluscs than coelenterates, coelenterates than protozoa. And I therefore thought, or felt, that it was wrong—morally wrong, against the moral order of the universe—that a lower creature should make a prey of a creature from a higher group than itself. In other words, reptiles should not eat birds, much less mammals; and likewise, birds should not eat mammals.

  There was clearly (in my mind) a gradation of wrongdoing by animals. It was wrong for any animal to eat Man, of course, morally wrong; but—to take two recent cases—it was far worse for a python to have swallowed a boy in Indonesia than for wolves to have attacked and killed a boy walking home in Siberia. That is because pythons are much lower on the evolutionary scale than wolves which are, after all, close to dogs, sharing as they do 99.6 per cent of their DNA with dogs. And so I made the snake on my land in France disgorge its baby rabbit, though this could do the dead rabbit no good, to teach it, the snake, a lesson, a moral lesson that is. I was perfectly aware, I need hardly add, that reptiles are ineducable, that they are worse in this respect than the worst of congenitally antisocial humans; but anger or righteous indignation got the better of me.

  What, then, of sparrowhawks attacking pigeons? Could I object to it on the same grounds as I objected to the snake killing and eating the baby rabbit? Here my evolutionary biology is a little hazy. Are hawks more highly evolved than pigeons? As far as I can remember, Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia had nothing to say on this important question, for its evolutionary tree or pyramid was rather schematic and contained not many more types of creature than did the model Noah’s Arc that I had as an even smaller child (though of course they were all mammals of the larger sort, such as giraffes and hippopotamuses, rather than, say, shrews or voles, let alone centipedes or scorpions, which would have been difficult to coax up the gangplank). In a very crude way, I suspect predators to be more highly evolved than their prey; after all, the latter must have existed first for the former to have had anything to prey upon. I realise that there is something wrong with this logic, though; predators may have evolved first to prey on creatures lower on the scale than themselves, and then switched their attention to those higher.