THE MODERN STOIC: AN ILL-NATURED DUOLOGUE.
(From the _Outlook_, 1913.)
“Well, I can only say that to my mind it’s just another appeal to false
emotion; pandering to the softness of our times. This mawkish
humanitarianism is undermining our virility. I protest against all this
agitation and rot about suffering.”
“Suffering of _others_ is what you mean, I believe?”
“How do you know they suffer?”
“Forgive me, but where there is all the _primâ facie_ evidence of
suffering, it is surely ‘up’ to you to prove its non-existence. Now, if
you yourself were to try these various experiences of animals which you
tell us it is mawkish to concern ourselves about, then when you say they
are nothing, we shall perhaps believe you.”
“Ah! Will you be good enough to suggest how I can do that?”
“Get yourself chained to your study chair—as a watchdog is to its
kennel—for a year or so. You could then write convincingly on our
morbidity for desiring to do away with your chain by law. ‘It is
nothing,’ you would say; ‘no virile person——’ Or, better, cause
yourself to be taken down a mine and kept there all your life working
goodness knows how many hours a day, like one of those pit ponies, to
gush about whose sufferings you told me was effeminate. The papers would
be delighted to get a letter from your death-bed saying that it was all
greatly exaggerated.”
“Your suggestions don’t excite me, so far.”
“Very well. Why not, in the interests of science, submit your body to
some of the less exacting vivisections, in order that you may reinforce
from personal experience your remarks about the squeamishness of cranks,
and the efficacy of curare. For, think how much more valuable to us all
experiments on the human _you_ would be! I won’t go so far as to suggest
that you should be killed for food; for even under the comparatively
slow present methods, which, in contempt of morbid sensibility I suppose
you would uphold, you would not be in a condition (though you might
possibly have time) to write a letter to the paper saying that your
suffering was really nothing. No! I should rather advise you to have
little bits cut off your ears—a pity you have not a tail!—but the
effect can well be got by having your hands tied behind you on a hot day
in a fly-infested field. We should then get from you a definite
pronouncement that the sufferings of being nicked and docked are
nothing, instead of the mere contemptuous silence with which you at
present regard our mawkish attempts to stop these processes. Oh! there
are lots of things you could experience, so that your letters to the
Press might acquire that convincing quality which at present seems to me
rather lacking.”
“Quite finished? You forget a little, don’t you, that a human being is
not an animal; so that if I followed your charming suggestions I should
still be no nearer knowing whether or no animals suffer, as you say they
do.”
“Oh! there’s no necessity for you to restrict your experiences to those
which you advocate for animals. I’ve noticed that you are always
complaining of the morbid twaddle talked about the sufferings of
criminals, the unhappily married, and the poor. It would very much
increase our respect for your pronouncements if you would cause yourself
to be confined in a space eight feet by twelve, in your own company, for
twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, for those nine months, whose
reduction not long ago, in the case of convicts, I remember you
disapproved of. Or again, if you would marry a hopeless inebriate, or
merely grow to hate your wife—a letter from you to some well-known
journal to say that it was all really of no consequence would then be of
incalculably greater value than it is at present. Or dare I hope that
you might be induced to embrace the career of making match-boxes, or
carding buttons, or sewing shirts or trousers for, say, twelve or
fifteen hours a day, on a wage of seven shillings or so a week, in order
that we might have the benefit of knowing that your strenuous remarks
about the mawkishness of believing that the poor really suffer were
inspired by a thorough and personal knowledge of the subject.”
“You’re unfortunate in your choice of sufferings. Those you mention are
all necessary—society being what it is.”
“Oh! then you admit that they are sufferings?”
“To an extent—much exaggerated.”
“Very well! You have not yet, I perceive, grasped my points: First, what
gives _you_ the right to say these sufferings are necessary to society,
and to interfere with our attempts to reduce them so far as we can?
Secondly, what makes _you_ an authority at all on the nature and degree
of suffering?”
“I refuse to answer your first question, which I consider insolent. As
to the second, which is also insolent, of what use is one’s imagination,
if not to gauge the experiences of others without experiencing them
oneself?”
“My dear sir, imagination is not, believe me, a mere capacity for
failing to grasp what you have not yourself experienced. It is an active
quality, and even when stretched to the utmost is a little liable to
fall short of the poignancy of experience. Let me remind you of Poe’s
tale about the man on whom the walls of a room gradually closed in. That
tale, I am sure, made even you feel that his sufferings might not be
_nil_—though I honestly believe it only roused you because it was so
obviously romance. But do you think your imagination when you read the
story really provided you with the intensity of the sensations of that
man, especially at the moment when the walls were grinding his bones?”
“That was, as you say, romance. But you humanitarians are always
magnifying and distorting into the dreadful what is very ordinary
experience; your imaginations are your masters, not your servants. What
you want is to be familiarized with the ordinary sights of Nature, and
the look of blood; we shouldn’t then have all this namby-pambyism to put
up with.”
“You recommend that we should be familiarized with the sight of blood?
Might I suggest that no blood could be so educative as that of one who
propounds the doctrine: Suffering is _nil_! Let your own blood flow for
our enlightenment. Believe me, we shall pay a much more rapt attention
to it than we should to that of any other creature.”
“That, as you well know, is an absurd suggestion.”
“Yes! Quite. But what I want you to appreciate is, how tiny the
difference between us is. _We_ think, that a man should make light of
his own suffering, but make light the suffering of others. Now,
transposing that first ‘of’ would make our philosophy identical with
yours.”
“And how do you know that I have not sufferings, made light of—hidden
from every one?”
“Have you? We have, you see, no means of knowing; and you must prove it
if you wish for the luxury of having attention paid to you when you make
light of suffering for others. But if indeed you have, are you not a
most unhappy person in that you do not let a fellow-feeling make you
wondrous kind?”
“Ah! I thought that was coming. Shall I tell you my opinion of you, sir?
You are a sickly sentimentalist.”
“My feeling about you, is not so hackneyed. With your philosophy of:
‘_I_ am all right. Let _them_ suffer!’—you are—the Modern Stoic.”