I read to be educated. I find it very hard to read for pleasure. It seems like such a waste of time -- especially since there are so many great minds out there that have put great thoughts to paper. John Fowles, whom I mentioned in my last talk -- He wrote The Collector & The French Lieutenant’s Woman -- is one such great mind. I’ve just been reading his collected essays entitled Wormholes.
In one of his essays he says “The three most foolishly conjoined words in history were surely “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” I assume all of you know those were the words used during the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. I never thought much about these words. They sound good. We are all for Liberty; we are all for Equality; we are all for Fraternity--but as he points out “Liberty is individual, and the deadly enemy of the two social virtues.” Think about it. Liberty is the right to do whatever you want--and the minute people do whatever they want they become individuals--fast, smart, rich, poor, avaricious, lazy. People become anything but equal if they are allowed to be free, and in America we see this in the great divide between the rich and the poor.
I am not against freedom, but as Fowles points out, the word freedom should not be conjoined with the other two words, Equality & Fraternity. If people are going to be equal, someone will have to work hard to make them equal. They aren’t born equal and the more freedom you give them the less equal they will be as they progress in life. Society will have to exercise a high degree of control over people if it really wants people to be equal, but it is clear that we really don’t want to make people equal -- not in America, not in France, not in England.
Over the many years I have taught I have had countless arguments with my students who believe that we are all equally able to succeed if we want to, and that if we don’t succeed the fault must lie with us. John Fowles says that the fact that many people still hold that belief “after a century of major discoveries in genetics and psychology, defies belief.” A century of major discoveries in genetics and psychology tells us that mathematical abilities, writing abilities, skin cancer, our sense of humor, the clothes we wear -- all these and a million more are, to some extent, pre-determined: We do what we do because of the parents who raised us, the world we were raised in, our genetic make-up. The most foolish belief in the world is that we are all equally able to succeed, and one of the most foolish of all slogans is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Equality and Fraternity are Social virtues -- society must exert power over individuals if there is to be equality & fraternity -- and to exert power over people is to limit their freedom.
Someone once explained that we will stop waging wars when we stop eating animals. Some of you who are listening think these two things are wildly unconnected. What does eating animals have to do with waging war? To others of you listening you know exactly what the man meant: if you are able to kill and eat animals you are able to wage war and kill human beings.
I thought of the preceding when I read the following sentence by John Fowles, the British writer whose essays I have been reading lately: “You may think there is very little connection between spraying insecticide over your flower beds because everyone else on your street does the same, and spraying napalm over a Vietnamese village because that’s the way war is. But many more things than we know start in our very own backyards. Social aggression starts there; and so does social tolerance.”
Social aggression does start in our backyards. His essay is about gardens and he believes that “the first thing to ban from the gardening shelf is all insecticide, which has been in at the start of the nastiest exterminatory chain reaction of this century. Running a very close second is the weed killer. Every scientific statement about this or that product’s comparative harmlessness can be treated as so much barefaced lying, since all such products aim to upset the natural balance.”
Before I go any further, let me admit that I am not a gardener, and if I were, I’d probably be the nastiest of gardeners: I’d take the easy way out and kill all weeds, zap all insects with insecticides. I’m a city boy, and the behavior of city people is best exemplified by the lady in New Jersey who bought this beautiful house with a wonderful lot full of tall trees and immediately chopped down forty trees so she could have a better view and not have to deal with the nasty insects that live in trees.
It is her attitude, my attitude, the attitude of all of us, that is upsetting the natural balance, setting off the nastiest exterminatory chain reaction of this century.” When we don’t like something in our back garden we zap it with weed killer, we spray insecticides indiscriminately. This attitude towards our gardens made it easy for us to use napalm. We didn’t like the trees in Vietnam cause the nasty gooks hid in the trees, so we zapped the trees with napalm -- a great defoliant -- and we set off a chain reaction that, according to one article I read recently, killed 40,000 American soldiers. The Vietcong only managed to kill 54,000 Americans. Our own defoliant ended up killing almost as many Americans as the enemy did.
But back to my main point. Social aggression starts in our backyards. Those who use insecticides in gardens have no trouble choosing napalm to fight a war. Those who butcher animals to feed their hunger have no trouble butchering people to feed their beliefs. Social aggression starts in our backyards -- and so does social tolerance.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein