10
Meaning
What are we to make of Joe and how should we treat him? These pages have invited reflection on a range of commonplace but amazing human capacities – all described in direct contrast to Joe. Allow me a deep breath, for having chased that contrast so far, I’ve found myself up a garden path facing some thorny questions: if Joe shows our most distinguishing features in such sharp relief, is he still one of us? If I accept the arguments of philosophers that we define ourselves as humans not in the Linnaean fashion by our appearance but rather by what goes on in our heads, then I’m forced to a grim conclusion: Joe, my son, does not qualify.
Humans have rich self-consciousness, says philosophy; Joe, quite likely in my view, does not. Humans have sophisticated moral codes; the case for Joe’s innocence is that he does not. Humans have language or, better still, deep structured language; Joe does not. Humans have elaborate culture, indeed they continually remake their own culture at an express rate, including their own history. I have never managed to share with Joe any communication about the past, and its singular purpose in him, such as it is, seems to be to reinforce habit and obsession. Culture has been found to be the feeblest of humanity’s distinguishing characteristics as a vast array of creatures, from birds to dolphins and other primates, turns out to share and pass on cultural understandings. If we restrict ourselves to saying that humans have higher culture – art, literature and the like – then Joe, once more, does not.
I confess, as I said at the outset, that this problem gives my head some trouble, though my heart – following a less ponderous course – couldn’t care less for my head’s pretentious scruples. Come off it, says heart, Joe is your son. Ah, but you need more robustly objective measures than that, says head. Oh, sod all that, says heart. And yet I would like to reconcile heart and mind, in favour of my heart naturally, but preferably with something approaching intellectual respectability. How to do it?
In my case, by wandering through the main gate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, five years ago. Emma’s low-rise sandstone quadrangles lack the huddled, lowering insularity of don-dom, and breathe the beeping diesel air of the bus station next door. Few pretensions, Emma, even the name being abbreviated to sound like a friend. It still strikes me as less aloof than most – nothing to do, I suspect, with either architecture or residents, but down to the three years I spent at the place just along the road. We were neighbours, and though I knew few of its students and seldom visited, Emma suggests to me even now a still-remembered hospitality from the times we lumbered late at night onto the slippery floor of a strip-lit basement bar for frothy pints in shivering plastic glasses.
So I arrived cheerfully that day to see an academic vicar who had very publicly ceased to believe in God some years previously, then survived a subsequent campaign to defrock him. In spite of his now long-acknowledged atheism, it was as if a spiritual poke in the ribs kept him awake at night. In the years since declaring God dead, he’d found himself unable to go the whole hog and embrace unvarnished materialism, but spent the time instead continuing to call himself a vicar and labouring to name his metaphysical itch, trying in all modesty to redefine religion. In the year or two before I met him, he’d tended towards a variation of nature worship but seemed halfhearted in this conviction as in others. He was a man of spirit undergoing refurbishment, like the shell of a shop, not much on sale. Being uneasy with certainty myself, I knew how he felt.
I was interviewing him for a programme about the durability of religion, and he was delightful: thoughtful and honest, trying painfully to give substance to a feeling too airy to be nailed down. Afterwards we had lunch together in one of the cheerful cafés along St Andrew’s Street where taste had mattered to us as students less than calorific value.
‘Do you have a family?’ he wondered. I told him the basics. He inquired further. Whenever I find myself describing Joe to someone for the first time he comes out sounding odd and troublesome. Watching the effect of Joe’s short story on the vicar across the table, I wondered whether he’d attempt a rationale with whatever kind of theology still worked for him. He did.
‘Oh, bad luck,’ he said. ‘Bad luck.’
And that was it. He stared down into his plate and gently, silently shook his head. I wondered for some time afterwards if that was the limit of spiritual consolation in his cosmos or if he was simply avoiding the awkwardness of saying something trite to someone he presumed had tired of hearing patronising consolations years ago, or then again if it was meant as a kind of sensitivity – ‘let’s not dwell on such sorrow’. I think now it was probably all three. ‘Bad luck’ seemed to be the sum of meaning he attached to Joe’s life.
‘Bad luck.’
Is that it? I thought, and my bad luck at that, not Joe’s?
I make no secret of my desire for meaning. But there are risks in such wishful vanity. One is the hideous peril of falling for Hollywood-grade philosophising about mental disability and the cloying redemption of films like I Am Sam or Forrest Gump in which invariably sweet-natured simpletons are put on earth to do the rest of us good. God wants it that way, it’s implied. They’re useful, these people, like Swiss army knives for the soul. One has to resist the temptation to think that Joe’s value lies in therapy for the rest of us, a gift to help us rise above the trivial gripes of our spoilt lives.
Hollywood is at one solipsistic extreme, ‘bad luck’ used to strike me as being at the other, both essentially relegating Joe to the role of bit player in the lives of others. He is either the bad in my luck or a guide to self-improvement.
I have changed my mind, not about Hollywood, but about ‘bad luck’. ‘Bad luck’ now seems to me a persuasive and concise statement of the case to include Joe in the human community, though we need to be clear that it’s Joe’s luck we’re talking about.
One of the most articulate advocates of this line of argument is Kenan Malik. He is that rare thing these days, a humanist who retains faith in reason, faith in the ability of people to rise above nature, despite a limpid understanding of the science of genetics. He thinks about Darwinism and human nature with rare sophistication.
Part of his answer to the problem of how to address serious mental disability is that we regard these people as being like us because they once had the potential to be like us. Potential is a useful thought. It idealises humanity and claims there’s a germ of the ideal in us all. That Platonic promise, though cruelly frustrated in the event, should nevertheless be taken as a determining factor in our identity. And if, by bad luck, potential is savagely unrealised, it should make no difference to our fundamental moral judgements of one another, since to some extent we all fall short.
But potential has problems too. It reminds me of the Jane Austen character who could have been a great pianist, if only she played. Potential, it may be argued, is nothing if not realised. If, as seems likely, Joe’s problems are genetically based, he may have been potentially like us only when he existed before conception as a nice idea. ‘It could have been different, if only it was different.’ Yeah, right. ‘I could have been a contender.’ Sure. We might regret what might have been, but we don’t often end our judgement there. On the contrary, we forget potential with surprising ease in favour of the pianist who actually plays.
The philosopher Mary Midgley writes: ‘If we contrast a world in which life is still going on, though it will soon cease, with one in which actual life is permanently extinguished, but the seed stores and the sperm banks remain untouched forever, we cannot intelligibly say that the real value lies in the second. Potentiality only matters because of what will happen when it is actualised. Could we think of the blueprints as more important than the building, the mix than the pudding, the match than the fire?’
More important? No. And yet … suddenly I feel an unreasonable sympathy for the match that won’t strike.
Midgley must be right that potential is not the only or even the most important test, but it surely plays a part. It draws on sentim
ents notoriously hard to extinguish: hope and expectation. They thrive before conception as much as after. Even if time has rendered them futile, their memory lingers, and memories make identities too. We hold on to them with phrases like ‘I once hoped …’, and even though the hope be dashed, it remains expressive of us that we once held it, and descriptive of the child of whom we hoped. For me, the non-striking match genuinely belongs to the class of things that are meant to burn brightly, and the gulf between potential and unfulfilled event fills with a pity almost too great to bear. Those seed stores forever untouched are an image of pure agony, and their potential stays with us whatever their ultimate fate. Why define entirely by accident rather than design? There is, I think, some place for potential in the measure of others, far into the past though it may have died. And if potential has been frustrated? Well then, ‘bad luck’ is all the difference. This thin phrase, casual in everyday use, does not diminish Joe; rather it shows how narrow is the gap between us.
But I think there is an even better case for Joe than frustrated potential. It comes, inadvertently, from Francis Spufford who we met in an earlier chapter as a wonderful anthropologist of the story. He writes in his autobiography of childhood, The Boy that Books Built, about his younger sister, who had the kind of chronic illness that consumed his parents’ energy and attention but led him to retreat from her into books. She was allergic to food and so had to be kept on a diet that held her just above starvation while provoking her immune system as little as possible, trailing tubes and wires wherever she went.
‘Ever since,’ says Spufford, ‘I’ve hated vulnerable people … It’s the slow people, the learning disabled, the much-euphemised fucked-of-wit I find unbearable, locked in their innocence, tottering through a world they don’t understand in the misplaced confidence that it’s safe.’
He remembers seeing on the bus a twenty-year-old girl with some undefined mental disability.
‘I would have taken away what afflicted her if I could,’ he says, ‘but since I couldn’t I hated her for what she made me feel and wished her dead, or at least segregated somewhere where the sight of her didn’t burrow at the long-buried roots in me of an intolerable pity: a pity I can’t live up to and can’t bear to be reminded of.’
The attitude, apparently hostile, is intriguing. For when Spufford talks of hating, or turning away, it isn’t others he hates, but what they show him of his own frail humanity.
‘I loved my little sister,’ he says, ‘and felt that I owed such a lot of attention to her state that I had better pay none.’
This, to borrow an analogy, is Caliban staring in the mirror. There lurks somewhere in Spufford a sense of how he should appear but doesn’t, a duty perhaps, a standard of behaviour that he finds too onerous and so hates the sight of himself for failing to uphold. What is intriguing is the power of this sense to induce so much self-loathing. He doesn’t hate his sister, he hates himself for turning away from her. Some powerful moral archetype plays hell with Spufford’s self-respect. He calls this archetype pity. I suggested duty, but on reflection I think it’s quite simply fellow feeling. I doubt that he feels with the same intensity the same pity for animals. No, it’s the specifically human vulnerability he hates. Bravely admitting that he was unable to rise to it tells us what he thinks humanity should normally expect of itself.
And what is that? I sense it is that Spufford feels that his sister’s humanity depends on him, and maybe that’s enough to frighten anyone.
Having called Spufford a Caliban, I’d better admit that the same feeling ravages me from time to time too. My life with Joe is not all about love, and when love seems exhausted what sometimes keeps me dutiful is not pure devotion but fear of the vicious remorse I’d know if I too, having so little excuse, turned my back on Joe. There’s not much credit in guilt but it can keep you in attendance when times are hard.
But to call it guilt and leave it at that doesn’t begin to do justice to the notion of fellow feeling. Nor does it tell us what we’d be guilty of. There’s something more.
I think John Hapgood, the former Archbishop of York, gets close. In his book Being a Person he writes that ‘personhood is not just a quality, or a set of qualities, given to us. It is a state of being rooted in, and developing through mutual interaction with other persons.’
His central thesis, though he makes no claim to originality, is that we are defined not by our biology alone, but also by our relationships. As he suggests, the notion has been around for a while, given arguably its most lop-sided expression by Karl Marx, who suggests that human nature is entirely social. ‘The human essence of nature exists only for social man,’ wrote Marx, ‘for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with other men, as his existence for others and their existence for him, as the vital element of human reality; only here does it exist as the basis of his own human existence.’
Hapgood, writing in 1997, prefers to take his quotations from John Macmurray, a Scottish philosopher. In his 1954 Gifford lectures, Macmurray said:
We need one another to be ourselves. This complete and unlimited dependence of each of us upon the others is the central and crucial fact of personal existence. Individual independence is an illusion; and the independent individual, the isolated self, is a nonentity. In ourselves we are nothing; and when we turn our eyes inward in search of ourselves we find a vacuum … It is only in relation to others that we exist as persons; we are invested with significance by others who have need of us; and we borrow our reality from those who care for us. We live and move and have our being not in ourselves but in one another; and what rights or powers or freedom we possess are ours by the grace and favour of our fellows. Here is the basic fact of our human condition.
Macmurray enjoyed a revival in the same year, 1997, when he was said to be Tony Blair’s favourite philosophical reading and Blair wrote an introduction to a Macmurray anthology. Whether the philosopher’s influence on the politician has been apparent is not something I want to go into. And in any case, these left-ish associations need not imply that the social underpinning of our nature must end in collectivism and higher taxes. Relationships are private affairs too, and so to call us social beings who are defined by relationships is only to assert that we all make better sense when seen with others; it is not to determine the character of those relationships, or who they’re with.
As Hapgood points out, Macmurray, like Marx, also goes too far: we need to be something before we can relate, but it is a position to which one can grant a little overstatement, for so far have we been influenced by a perverse notion of genetics as implying some kind of chronic individualism that we sometimes lose the sense of humankind as also essentially composed of social beings. No respectable Darwinian actually believes the full human being is a genetic atom, or that our social lives are created by genetics with one-directional causation. Not even the brilliantly but unfortunately named selfish gene can function in isolation in a hostile environment. As the eighteenth-century philsophical bishop Joseph Butler put it, we must resist ‘the speculative absurdity of considering ourselves single and independent beings’. We need to loosen just a little the garrotting notion of individual substance. We need to resist the temptation to elect one facet of life, one biological snippet, and declare it life’s purpose when there are so many to choose from. In fact, none of the philosophical distinctions with which we began this chapter makes sense if seen as defining us from the inside alone, as if the gift for language is a biological capacity without social purpose, as if the necessary neurons sprang into being and thrived without some conducive environment, to idle away the millennia in nothing more than self-congratulation, the irrelevant fruit of one double helix to the next, as if language even has meaning except in a social context, as if culture is the eternal, unshared property of individuals.
The traditional definitions of humanity mostly reach outwards, yet strangely often without acknowledging what is out there to reach; namely, other people. Yes, we have language to an ext
raordinary and probably unique degree of complexity, but what for? What else but because there are others to talk to?
Joe may not think so but he needs human society, he could exist in no other. His daily routine is largely set by others, his desires are facilitated (or not) by others, his needs are by and large answered by others. His survival depends on us and even his most idiosyncratic behaviour has evolved among the sparks of abrasion against others. As Macmurray said: ‘There are few things that I desire to do … which do not depend upon the active cooperation of others … I need you in order to be myself.’
Since relationships flow in at least two directions, the conclusion for Joe is as follows: he is defined partly by those who have relationships with him, not by himself alone, but also by me, by his carers, his family and those who know him, by what we do with him, for him, to him. It’s not practical help for children like Joe at which Francis Spufford winces, it’s the sense that their humanity depends on him and his own depends on accepting them. That massive obligation would alarm anyone. Easier perhaps to wish it would go away.
And lest it be thought that the definition goes in only one direction, that Joe, wanting certain characteristics himself, is defined with our help but that we are already defined by ourselves quite without his, recall once more his mind-blindness. Without ever having confronted it, I believe, we would never have understood so much of the richness of our own consciousness or how it worked. We were not inclined to reflect on what often seems obvious as thoroughly as we now do until autism showed us it wasn’t obvious at all. I once flattered myself that I was self-aware, before I knew Joe, but I had scant awareness of the way I understood others. I’m a little better acquainted with myself now and have Joe to thank, for one of the greatest aids to self-understanding is the differences in others who give us something to compare. If we need them, as Macmurray says, to be ourselves, we also need them to know ourselves.
Joe Page 16
