Many Roads Lead

By now, the capacity for one moderately sensible human being to blame and castigate another for not being good enough according to their personal standards shouldn’t amaze and distress me, but it does. It seems that we identify the hypocrisies of others to reinforce our own sense of worth and justify our own choices, which, as no human being can hope to be absolutely consistently ethical, are just as likely to be full of inconsistencies and moral holes.

‘You can’t be a feminist and a Zionist’; ‘you can’t be a socialist and a carnivore’; ‘you can’t be a Christian and a Conservative’ are all examples I’ve heard lately. Of course people are all these things, and more, including perhaps more troubling combinations. Such inconsistencies, if that’s how we should we think of them, may be down to personal experience – which particular injustices we feel most keenly – or deliberately not thinking about some issues, or to ignorance about them; blind spots, conscious or not. Certainly how we actually behave is constrained by practicalities: a person only has so much time, energy and money, and what they devote them to is never down to a completely free choice between all the possible options they might select from, if all other things were equal. As I get older I worry less what people care about, and more that they care about something. It helps if that ‘something’ has the capacity to open them to caring about wider things, but whether it actually does is due less to any intrinsic qualities of the thing, whether it’s trade-union activism or fly-fishing, than to the spirit with which the person approaches it.

When Portia says in The Merchant of Venice that ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’ she means that it isn’t worn out by being used: a person can’t exhaust compassion through being compassionate. They might become tired by the actions that result from compassion, of course: they might run out of the finite resources we’ve already mentioned, time, energy, or money; but they can never run out of compassion as such. When we learn to care about one person, or one thing, we learn, at least potentially, to care about others, a bit like Edmund Burke’s vision of our ‘affections’ expanding from the ‘little platoons’ we find ourselves in naturally out towards society in general.

You might point reasonably to examples of this clearly not being the case: that close affections, far from promoting general wellbeing, actually narrow and constrain it. The inquisitor loves God and Christians and so tortures the Jew; the mother loves her children, and so pushes drowning orphans away from the lifeboat. Every decision to define some people or things as ones I will care about, defines others as potential objects of cruelty or indifference: creating the Umma generates the Infidel.

I say this is to mistake what’s actually happening. Exactly because we are, in Christian terms, fallen beings, and even our best and purest motivations are fraught and mingled often with our worst, then, when the inquisitor orders the rack to be tightened, or the mother prises the freezing child’s hands off the lifeboat rail to see it slip back into the water, it is not love that makes them behave this way, it is the fear and desire wound up with that love: the fear of loss, the desire to hold on to security or self-image. Sometimes this terrible world presents us with choices in which no option is without some cruelty, while at other times we deliberately harm others out of our own motivations: but loving one thing can never actively promote harm towards another. If we love those we define as close to us, that love cannot itself generate cruelty and indifference elsewhere in our experience: it’s the limitations of our character or of the world that do that. Equally, cruelty and indifference towards those close to us can’t generate more generalised love towards others; though it might free more time to pursue it, as in the case of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, one could reasonably question what was going on in such a person. Equally, the obsessive fly-fisher or My Little Pony collector or, I don’t know, fan of PJ Harvey, neglects their other relationships not because of the nature of what they love, but because of the insecurities and qualities of possessiveness and competitiveness they might bring to it. Cruelty and indifference essentially spring from other soil than love, and vice versa.

I’m learning, slowly, to value the enthusiasms and commitments of others, no matter what they are, and to see what in them is capable of being opened out to something wider: to see where love resides, and where it can grow. If I can give vicarly advice about this, it is: join something. Care about something. Love something. And don’t be too afraid of what others join, care about, and love.