Dexter and Philosophy

by Greene, Richard; Reisch, George A. ; Robison, Rachel

  You’ve heard that it was said, ‘Don’t commit adultery’. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:27–28)

  (What the actual? God’s going to bill you for the goodies before you’ve even opened the wrapper? Might as well go the whole hog, then.)

  So Christianity makes you responsible for your thoughts, even if unacted upon. The real test of a person’s morality is not their actions nor the results of their actions but what goes on, unseen by their fellow-humans, inside their skulls. By this standard, hypocrisy (outwardly being good while inwardly having bad thoughts) becomes one of the worst of sins.

  A moral dilemma is no longer simply ‘What ought I to do?’ but more importantly, ‘Am I thinking and feeling the right way? Are my intentions pure?’ This opens up a vast new scope for self-examination, guilt, self-flagellation, and self-doubt, especially as thinking is, by its very nature, frolicsome and uncontrollable.

  Enter the Man-Devil

  In early eighteenth-century England, Dr. Bernard Mandeville was denounced as the most evil person alive. His enemies—almost everyone—branded him “the Man-Devil” (Get it?). Nearly all the most eminent thinkers of his day wrote ferocious denunciations of the Man-Devil. Just as anyone who wants to be recognized today as a stand-up guy has to denounce racism, Islamicism, or sexual abuse of children, so anyone who looked for minimum cred in the eighteenth century had to express their horror and detestation for the Man-Devil.

  His bad reputation was only to be matched by Jack the Ripper, nearly two centuries later. Dr. Mandeville was Public Enemy Number One. No, he wasn’t a ritual serial murderer. He was something far more dangerous than that!

  The Man-Devil’s great crime was to say something that had never been said before. He proclaimed that wicked behavior by individuals is good for society as a whole, or as he put it, private vices are public virtues. And he made it sound very convincing.

  Far less is now known about the life of the mysterious Man-Devil than about anyone else of comparable importance at the time. But we do know that he made his living as a doctor specializing in nervous diseases. He was married and had children. He was at home in four languages and had read a lot in each of them. He died of the flu in 1733. As far as we know, aside from what he wrote, he led a blameless life.

  This was an age of new media and information explosion. The thousands of London coffee houses were like today’s Facebook. The thousands of London bookstores, with a printing press in the back, and with a coffee house attached, were like today’s blogosphere. Printers were the IT nerds. The presses turned out a flood of new leaflets, pamphlets, and magazines, soaked up by the denizens of the coffee houses, who debated them endlessly. Mass literacy had arrived, and with a sure instinct the masses turned to the vile and disgusting. The world had seen nothing like it before. Could the human mind possibly withstand the weighty burden of information overload?

  Many of the new printed works were irreverent, mildly but persistently erotic, and satirical. Their goal was entertainment, but their authors understood, with the Dexter scriptwriters, that to truly entertain people you have to make them think.

  The coffee houses charged one penny admission. “Runners” went round the coffee houses, from table to table, reciting the latest news reports. There was a turmoil of new ideas. No one could predict where it was all going. One coffee house, Jonathan’s, started posting stock prices on the walls, and this coffee house eventually became the London Stock Exchange. People of different walks of life and social standing mingled and debated in the coffee houses (which, however, did maintain minimal standards: women were excluded, except for professional ladies who looked after customers in some of those little rooms in the back). A powdered wig and a penny a day—and you were online!

  The new media were effectively unregulated and we all know what that means: something terrible’s bound to happen. As the anarchist Dave Barry says, without government people will start having sex with dogs. Well, that didn’t happen in eighteenth-century London, but something almost as appalling did occur: the coming of the Man-Devil.

  A Poem that Will Live in Infamy

  Dr. Mandeville came over from Holland at the age of twenty-nine, and fell in love with London. Within a few years, no one who met him would believe he wasn’t a native Englishman. He wrote a number of satirical publications before he penned The Grumbling Hive in 1705. This is not a poem of polished elegance like those of Alexander Pope (who like nearly everyone else stole some of Dr. Mandeville’s ideas while personally attacking the Man-Devil) but conversational and street-wise, in line with coffee-house chatter.

  The Grumbling Hive tells of a fabulous beehive in which all the bees do, in miniature, exactly what eighteenth-century English people do. The bees are immoral though hypocritical: they practice all kinds of vice, while paying lip service to virtue. The hive flourishes, and becomes a beacon of prosperity, much like England.

  Every part was filled with Vice

  But the whole Mass a Paradise.

  Then, overnight, the bees all become virtuous; they begin to practice what they preach. The economy of the hive collapses, and the hive is depopulated. A tiny remnant of the original population of bees leaves the hive and flies off into a dead tree-trunk. Since the bees remain completely virtuous, there is no indication that they regret the catastrophic consequences of their reformed behavior.

  The Grumbling Hive did not immediately make Dr. Mandeville notorious. In 1714, he republished the poem with an extensive commentary, under the title The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Still no scandal. In 1723 he brought out a new edition, with even more added material, including “A Search into the Nature of Society.” A few months later, the Grand Jury of Middlesex referred this book, as a public nuisance, to the Court of King’s Bench, recommending prosecution of the publisher.

  No prosecution went ahead, but the hour of the Man-Devil had struck. The Fable of the Bees was reprinted five times in the next few years. Suddenly, everyone in Europe (and its outposts like the North American colonies) had heard of the Man-Devil, and every respectable person felt obliged to make outraged comments about him. All across Europe, people became aware of the horror perpetrated by the Man-Devil, as printed translations of his work appeared in every civilized language. When a French translation of The Fable of the Bees came out in 1740, a copy was ritually burned by the public executioner.

  The leading philosopher of the moment, George Berkeley, living in Rhode Island at the time, wrote a vigorous denunciation of the Man-Devil (this was before Berkeley had been made a bishop and long before the town of Berkeley, California, had been named after him, immortalizing his name in a mispronounced form). Berkeley’s attack unfairly misrepresents Mandeville’s argument, but then, exactly what Mandeville’s argument was is still being debated.

  A few things are clear. Dr. Mandeville did not think that morality was a crock, and did not want to encourage people to practice vice. He thought that morality was useful, and that it made its impact by appealing to people’s desire to gain the approval of others. He thought that people would always naturally practice vice (love themselves more than their neighbors and try to satisfy their own appetites before caring about anyone else). People need no special encouragement to practice vice: they are naturally vicious. Mandeville could have said that what was generally thought to be vice was not really vice, but was partly morally neutral, in itself neither good nor bad, and partly good. But that would have ruined the joke.

  Only a few of the Man-Devil’s literary contemporaries did not denounce him. One was Sam Johnson, compiler of the first dictionary. Reading Mandeville opened his eyes and changed his life. He reported that every young man believed The Fable of the Bees was a terribly wicked book, and therefore had to have a copy on his shelves. Another was Ben Franklin, on a visit to London, who had a few drinks with Mandeville, and called him “a most facetious, entertaining companion.” So in
the flesh he seemed just as he does on the printed page.

  The Man-Devil wrote many satirical pieces. It’s not always clear just where he’s coming from, for two opposite reasons. First, he’s careful to avoid saying anything that would get him executed or imprisoned, so we can’t always be sure when he’s pulling his punches. Second, he’s trying to be entertaining by being shocking, so we can’t be sure when he’s exaggerating his own audacity to keep up the reader’s interest.

  There’s also the fact that what he wrote was mostly either in verse or in the form of dialogues, and in dialogues we can’t be sure whether he completely agrees with what any one of his characters is saying.

  Mandeville wrote a fun piece called The Virgin Unmask’d, a long conversation, with a touch of mild pornography, between an elderly woman and an adolescent female, in which the older woman tries to convince the younger to have nothing whatsoever to do with men, ever. Mandeville published this piece without finishing it, and we don’t really know where he’s going with it, except that it would be amusing to get there.

  Among his other productions was a hilarious piece arguing for the provision of public stews. (A stew, at this time, was the popular name for a house of prostitution. Brothel—stew, get it? Those witty Londoners.) In this pamphlet “by a Lay-Man,” pun intended, Mandeville pointed out that the suppression of prostitution would naturally lead to an increased incidence of rape. So harlots, by doing it for money, are incidentally helping to protect and defend virtuous women. As The Grumbling Hive put it,

  The worst of all the multitude

  Did something for the common good.

  Or as Mandeville explained with mock-earnestness:

  I am far from encouraging Vice, and think it would be an unspeakable Felicity to the State, if the Sin of Uncleanness could be utterly Banish’d from it; but I am afraid it is impossible. The Passions of some People are too violent to be curb’d by any Law or Precept; . . . If Courtezans and Strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much Rigour as some silly People would have it, what Locks or Bars would be sufficient to preserve the Honour of our Wives and Daughters? . . . some Men would grow outrageous, and Ravishing would become a common Crime.

  At this time the penalty for rape was death, and neither Mandeville nor anyone else expected that was going to change.

  Did Dr. Mandeville really want government-run bordellos? We can’t be sure. His more serious arguments for this policy are phrased as comical parodies of the then-fashionable arguments for economic policies that promote national greatness. But the Man-Devil was nimble enough to make fun of arguments he actually believed in.

  Later in the eighteenth century, most of those who could read (eighty percent of males and twenty percent of females) had read Dr. Mandeville, and even as they fumed with righteous anger, many of them pirated his ideas. The Man-Devil invented economics, sociology, social anthropology, sociobiology, utilitarianism, liberalism, evolution, postmodernism, psychiatry, sex education, the social philosophy of Rousseau, the ethical theory of Nietzsche, and the class theory of Marx. In the spirit of the Man-Devil, I’m exaggerating only very, very slightly. He also, sad to say, invented Keynesian economics and the theory of the stimulus package, the dumb notion, refuted many times since in a recurring nightmare, that government spending can get you out of a slump. But here, I like to think, the Man-Devil was just kidding around.

  Many of Mandeville’s ideas are developed fifty years later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, especially the idea that acting out of self-love and self-interest can lead to the public benefit. Smith wrote that:

  It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

  Smith finally comes out with what Mandeville had only slyly hinted at: that so-called private vices are not really vices at all. It’s ethically okay to love yourself, to be predominantly self-interested. Smith replayed a riff that had done the rounds of the coffee-house chatter: “A man is never more innocently employed than when making money.” And Smith described how an individual could be

  led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

  In his first book, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Smith had included an entire chapter devoted to a rebuttal of Mandeville. Smith, unlike Dr. Mandeville, had to make sure he could keep his university teaching post. While sharply criticizing Mandeville, taking the Man-Devil’s provocative over-statements with deadpan seriousness, Smith commented that The Fable of the Bees couldn’t have impressed so many people “had it not in some respects bordered upon the truth.”

  Mandeville’s and Smith’s theory that everyone will benefit if each person acts in his own self-interest can easily be misunderstood. A more complete statement of what Mandeville and Smith believed is that since most people are going to act predominantly in their self-interest anyway, laws ought to be designed so that, as far as possible, everyone will benefit if each person acts in his own self-interest. This is, they believed, the test of good law.

  So the point Mandeville and Smith are really making is one about which laws are best. It’s easy to overlook this because both Mandeville and Smith believed that the laws of England and Scotland in the eighteenth century had come quite close to being the best laws, and could easily be brought closer. Whereas Mandeville believes (or pretends to believe—you never quite know with the Man-Devil) that good laws are devised by clever politicians, Smith has a theory that law, especially judge-made common law, evolves and tends to improve as it evolves.

  A country’s laws fulfill a function like Dexter’s Code: they direct individual human appetites that are very far from benevolent into actions which benefit other people, without trying to change the appetites themselves. The Man-Devil’s insight now dominates most of the world and is rapidly mopping up the few remaining holdouts. If you want living standards to keep rising, then you have to give up the idea of making people morally better, in their inmost souls, by law. Instead, you design the law so that it takes people as they are, and gives them an incentive to be productive—to serve the good of other people.

  We live in a world the Man-Devil has made. In some ways, the Man-Devil is like Jesus: he draws attention to the difference, and the possible antagonism, between inner thoughts and outward behavior. In other ways, the Man-Devil is just the opposite, a true Anti-Christ: he teaches us something we can never forget: that what really matters for humankind is not the purity of people’s intentions but the actual results of their actions, results which may be, and most often are, no part of their intention.

  A Second Look at Dexter’s Motives

  So far I’ve been assuming that Dexter is a psychopath reined in by a Code. His motives are foul, though his deeds are salubrious. This is the way Dexter thinks of himself. Dexter continually tells himself this, and as he does so, continually tells us. But could Dexter be misled himself and then misleading us?

  The show’s appeal hinges on the fact that we both accept this story and simultaneously feel it to be false. We know that Dex is no soulless psychopath. How do we know it?

  Here’s one example. Dexter kills both Jorge Castillo and his wife Valerie. The chopped up Jorge goes into the regulation six Hefty bags, but Dex doesn’t chop up the wife because she’s a bit of an afterthought and he can’t afford the precious minutes. This dreadfully impolite and inconsiderate couple certainly deserve to be disassembled (though my inner economist can’t help wondering whether it could possibly be profit-maximizing for them to murder so many of their clients), and there’s the hilarious bit where Dexter asks them for the secret of their successful relationship, and then murmurs, “Thank y
ou, that’s very helpful,” just before slaughtering them both.

  Then what does Dexter do? He walks up to the door of the shed where the Cuban immigrants are imprisoned without food, water, or sanitation, and unlocks it. A brief pause. As we watch, we automatically think, ‘Thank God those poor people will now be able to get out, but maybe they won’t notice the door’s unlocked and will still spend hours of torment in there.’ Dexter obviously has just the same thought, and opens the door wider, before driving off to dump the Castillo corpses in the ocean. We see one immigrant come to the door and peer out, fearfully and wonderingly.

  Dexter has nothing to gain by this spontaneous action. He’s very pressed for time, and the quicker the disappearance of the Castillos is reported, the more danger he’ll be in. As it turns out, there were actually two eye witnesses to Dexter’s capturing the Castillos and loading their bodies into his car. Admittedly, Dexter couldn’t be expected to know that one of them would dive down to the ocean bed, recover Valerie’s corpse, and replace it just where Dexter had killed her, but still, he has informed us that his motto is ‘Be Prepared’. Someone with no empathy, a psychopath, or even someone who over-rides his empathy in pursuit of pure self-interest, would have left the door locked and let the Cubans perish miserably, without giving it a thought.

  Dexter keeps telling us he has no feelings, but we keep seeing that he does have feelings. It’s true that his feelings are not entirely typical, and he’s not fully in touch with them. Dexter, in fact, belongs to that procession of characters which includes Pechorin (in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time), the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Meursault (in Camus’s The Stranger). These characters are all very different, but in their different ways they have problems with their feelings. Meursault gets his head chopped off because he doesn’t make a conventional display of the feelings he’s expected to show in conventional settings, while Dexter, more intelligent and more controlling than Meursault, chops off other people’s heads while working hard to simulate the appropriate feelings, to blend in and appear normal.