Table of Contents
For David and Jenny Armstrong
FOREWORD
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, isthat, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolenceof mankind does most good or harm. Great good, nodoubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil.It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering,it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to bevicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be notan evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellentpeople fancy they can do much by rapid actionthat theywill most benefit the world when they mostrelieve their own feelings.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Benevolence is the heroin of the Enlightened.
DAVID STOVE
THE MOST THRILLING intellectual discovery of my adult life came in 1996 when I chanced upon the work of the Australian philosopher David Stove (19271994). I have recounted the details of that discovery, and the reasons for my excitement, in the introduction to Against the Idols of the Age, the anthology of Stoves work that I edited in the late 1990s. Here it will suffice to say that I found Stoves combination of philosophical insight, polemical bravura, and astringent impatience with political correctness as novel as it was refreshing. Stove brought an extraordinarily keen intellect, bolstered by commanding historical scholarship, to bear on subjects as diverse as the philosophy of science, philosophical idealism, and neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, not to mention a wide range of topical issues. The spectacle of rigorous cognitive activitybristling arguments deployed in the service of truthwas gratifying to behold.
There was also the attraction of his prose. David Stove was a stylist of the first water. Reading him, said one admirer, is like watching Fred Astaire dance. The union of skill and seeming effortlessness is a thing of beauty. Stove could also be extremely funnyassuming, that is, that you were not the object of his scarifying wit: The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney, he wrote in one essay, is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. Stove went on to quote from, and ridicule, the work of several of his colleagues. He cheerfully identified one egregious offender by name, concluding that, intellectually, the sum of Marxism, semiotics, and feminism is 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. True, all true, but hardly balm for the advocates of Marxism, semiotics, feminism, and the rest of what Stove rightly called the intellectual slums.
The present work, written toward the end of Stoves life, looks behind the smiling, self-satisfied countenance of modern Western societiesall those plump beneficiaries of Enlightened aspiration, instinctively committed to secularism, utilitarianism, and everything compassed by the emetic phrase social justice. We who enjoy the many perquisites of those societiesthe staggering affluence, the cornucopia of indulgenceseldom ask what stands behind it and whether it is (to poach a term from the snippy lexicon of the environmentalists) sustainable.
David Stove rather specialized in embarking on such disobliging inquiries. Imagine writing a book that explodes the intellectual claims of Thomas Mr. Paradigm Change Kuhn, that darling of bien-pensants cognophobes everywhere! Imagine ridiculing feminism and affirmative action in an environment in which their espousal is the only sure litmus test for political correctness, concluding that Feminism is a disease of the rich: it is born of idleness, hence of leisure, hence of money! Imagine investigating the contemporary welfare state and identifying benevolence as its besetting and unsustainable liability!
That is precisely what Stove does in the pages that follow. But wait a minute: Benevolence a liability? Isnt benevolence, on the contrary, a
good thing? Lets think about that for a moment. Benevolence is a curious mental or characterological attribute. It is, as Stove observes, less a virtue than an emotion. To be benevolent meanswhat? To be disposed to relieve the misery and increase the happiness of others. Whether your benevolent attitude or action actually has that effect is beside the point. Yes, benevolence, by the very meaning of the word, is a desire for the happiness, rather than the misery, of its object. But heres the rub:
the fact simply is that its actual effect is often the opposite of the intended one. The adult who had been hopelessly spoiled in childhood is the commonest kind of example; that is, someone who is unhappy in adult life because his parents were too successful, when he was a child, in protecting him from every source of unhappiness.
Its not that benevolence is a bad thing per se. Its just that, like charity, it works best the more local are its aims. Enlarged, it becomes like that telescopic philanthropy Dickens attributes to Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. Her philanthropy is more ardent the more abstract and distant its objects. When it comes to her own family, she is hopeless.
The sad truth is that theoretical benevolence is compatible with any amount of practical indifference or even cruelty. You feel kindly toward others. That is what matters: your feelings. The effects of your benevolent feelings in the real world are secondary. Rousseau was a philosopher of benevolence. So was Karl Marx. Yet everywhere that Marxs ideas have been put into practice, the result has been universal immiseration. But his intention was the benevolent one of forging a more equitable society by abolishing private property and, to adopt a famous phrase from President Obama, by spreading the wealth around.
An absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination. My epigraph from the great nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Bagehot underscores the point: it is a melancholy occupation, observed Bagehot, to ask whether the benevolence of mankind actually does more good than ill. It makes the purveyor of benevolence feel betterwhere by better I mean more smug and self-righteous. But it is unclear whether the objects of benevolence are any better off.
Just so with the modern welfare state: a sterling incarnation of the sort of abstract benevolence Stove anatomizes. It doesnt matter that the welfare state actually creates more of the poverty and dependence it was instituted to abolish: the intentions behind it are benevolent. Which is one of the reasons it is so seductive. It flatters the vanity of those who espouse it even as it nourishes the egalitarian ambitions that have always been at the center of Enlightened thought. This is why Stove describes benevolence as the heroin of the Enlightened. It is intoxicating, addictive, expensive, and ultimately ruinous.
The intoxicating effects of benevolence help to explain the growing appeal of politically correct attitudes about everything from the environment to the fate of the Third World. Why does the consistent failure of statist policies not disabuse their advocates of the statist agenda? One reason is that statist policies have the sanction of benevolence. They are against poverty, against war, against oppression, for the environment. And why shouldnt they be? Where else are the pleasures of smug self-righteousness to be had at so little cost?