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My battle with Mencap
People whose brains are damaged cannot have equal rights
It is tempting, sometimes, even for a columnist, to turn away from real controversy. Controversy is so wearing. It seems to drag everyone in directions they never dreamt of, without necessarily achieving anything. So I am tempted to stop writing about the rights of the mentally handicapped; I don't like the feel of the animosity I sense coming in my direction. And yet I feel I cannot turn away. Mental handicap is not a subject I chose. It chose me, for family reasons, as my sister is mentally handicapped. And, for those same reasons, I cannot abandon it.
Last weekend I found myself on the Today programme, defending something I had written on mental handicap in The Daily Telegraph to Lord Rix, chairman of the charity Mencap. Lord Rix's tone was not friendly. I have taken issue before with Mencap, and it with me; this time Mencap was angry at what I had written about its new constitution, under which mentally handicapped members of this large and complex charity can become trustees of it. It seems that they could also have done so under the previous constitution, which I did not appreciate. That does not in any way alter my point; it is quite astonishing to me that Mencap, or anyone else, should think it right to allow a mentally handicapped person to take on serious legal, financial and moral responsibilities, which he or she could not possibly understand, let alone fulfil.
Under the new constitution Mencap will have a national assembly, an enlarged, policy-making body of about 50, a third of whose members will have learning disabilities; there will be a smaller group of trustees "ensuring effective governance", any one of whom could in theory be a person with a learning disability - the more recent term for a mental handicap. I don't doubt the good feeling and good intentions of all involved, but how can one fail to doubt their common sense? Either this is just window-dressing or tokenism, in which case I think it's demeaning to all concerned, or else - well, or else what? I think we are seeing a strange shifting of the goal posts here, in the name of equal rights, and while it may be well-intentioned I think it's extremely misguided.
Mencap has been a leader in campaigning for equal rights for the mentally handicapped. Its chief executive, Fred Heddell, said in a letter to me that Mencap's aim has always been to create the opportunity for people with a learning disability to be equal citizens in all respects (my italics). That includes the right to marry and to have children, the right to vote and now the right to be a trustee.
In a discussion with a Mencap official recently, trying to think of some right so inappropriate that even Mencap would not aspire to it, I said that I supposed he would not include the equal right to be a juror. To my astonishment he said he would. When I protested that a fair trial depended on following the arguments on both sides, he said he thought there were already many jurors who did not understand the arguments in court anyway.
Mencap is not alone; its approach is the new orthodoxy, and not only here but in other parts of Europe and the United States. I have spent the past week in Holland discussing this with others who campaign for full equal rights and even claim that the mentally handicapped contribute equally to society. This dishonest thinking fills me with grief; it's a simple case of psychological denial. Their general view is that there isn't really any difference between people with learning disabilities and the rest of the population. There are probably lots of dozy and incompetent old buffers sitting on boards here and there as trustees, but supposedly normal, and there are lots of juries who don't know what's going on. Indeed, there is a move to take juries off complex fraud cases because they can't understand them. This doesn't seem to me to a good argument for including yet more incompetent people, but you get the drift.
The notion of being different, of having special needs, is being broken down, in the name of equal rights. I don't understand the motive. But one thing I do know. People whose brains are damaged, whose intelligence is seriously impaired, do not have and cannot have equal rights. They cannot undertake the responsibilities that go with rights, and for many of them there is little that they can do at all without a great deal of support and encouragement. Most of them need round-the-clock support, even when living fairly independently, and those few that don't still need a great deal of expensive help and monitoring. (The bright and articulate people who speak in learning disability pressure groups are highly unrepresentative.)
In this sense, sadly, the mentally handicapped have fewer rights. But in another sense - if we must use the language of rights - they have more rights than other people. The mentally handicapped have more rights than the rest of us to public money, to state support, to better opportunities and to special consideration of every kind. In Britain today most of them do not get nearly enough of any of those things. In justice to everybody, we should be campaigning not for their equal rights but for their greater needs. If that is wildly controversial, then I am Alice in Wonderland.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 29, 1998 | Comments (4)
Taking our last rights
The Church's best deal is the Anglican drama of death
Unaccustomed as I am to sympathising with exciting new initiatives from the Church of England, I do think it is right about funerals. At the General Synod last week the diocese of Southwark introduced a motion expressing regret at the way that undertakers tend to put pressure on bereaved people not to have funerals in church. This ushered in a spirited clerical debate on the Anglican way of death, which appears to be under threat; either parish priests tend to rely too heavily on the answerphone, or they seem indifferent or unimaginative, or commercial undertakers want to cut out the religious middleman, or many people don't know that they have a legal right to use their local parish church for funeral services. So this great service - not to mention this great industry ( pounds 13 million a year) - is slipping away from the church.
It is a laughable excess of zeal, typical of Anglicans these days, to suggest an 0800 hotline on which the bereaved can dial-a-vicar. Nor do I really like the tone in which the general secretary of London dioceses suggested setting up "Church of England Funerals Ltd". These faint flickerings of misdirected commercialism and half-hearted vulgarity are perhaps the most depressing aspect of Anglican attitudes today. But I do strongly agree with the synod that the convention of Church of England funerals ought to be preserved, for everybody, and even - horrible thought - promoted. I think there really is no better way in this country, unless one belongs firmly to another faith, to mark and to accept somebody's death.
I am rather surprised to find myself feeling this so strongly. I have always been an agnostic, so much so that I felt I couldn't get married in church or have my children christened. But recently, according to her wishes, my mother was buried in the churchyard of her parish church, which was also our parish church when we were children, heathens though we were. She was not a church-goer either, though always very much concerned with parish matters and the PCC. So it might have felt odd for her to have a proper funeral service, and odder still for me to arrange it, since I haven't darkened the church's door since the Sixties. Yet it was exactly right.
To say that might seem to say very little, but actually it is to say all that matters. No matter what she, or we, have thought about the teachings of the Church, or the existence of God, or the impossibility of life after death, this old and beautiful service was exactly right. The harsh poetry and the plain ceremony are right. It was right too to be able to choose our own readings, and to find that we chose what countless others have chosen before us. It is our tradition, and a tradition that has continued to accept us, no matter how little we have accepted it. And it is a tradition that sustained us, no matter how little we have sustained it. And otherwise, what do the Godless do? My unbelieving late father-in-law insisted on no fuss. His sons took his body to a crematorium alone, and then scattered his ashes on the finishing line at Newmarket; as alternatives go, that was pretty good, but I have never felt this gave a proper sense of an ending.
I had no idea that everyone has some sort of legal right to a parish funeral: I suspected the opposite, and felt awkward about asking the vicar, whom I hardly knew. And the first time I called him I did indeed get his answering machine - hardly surprising when he has five other parishes to look after. However, he soon called back and could not have been more understanding. He also, fortunately, is a man; I don't think my mother would have felt she had been properly buried if the vicar had been a woman. He made it clear that the funeral could be arranged exactly as we wanted.
I don't see why there needs to be any unseemly competition between the vicar and the undertaker. Our vicar in the country village and our undertaker in the market town appeared to know each other well, and to be in tactful communication, more or less unknown to us; they seemed to have things well arranged between them, with the undertaker as banker. Both parties must have made some money out of it, and I feel certain they had the satisfaction of having done something important well. I don't suppose there has been a funeral yet without a moment, at least, of black comedy, and we had ours - a little glimmer of Alan Bennett - but it hardly seemed to matter. The right spirit was there, the tradition was there and the awesome solemnity of the service was there; it made what was such a difficult thing seem oddly easy. It works so well, and I don't see that it shouldn't work equally well in cities too.
If the Church wants to keep all this alive, it should abandon the ring-a-rev scheme. It should concentrate on reminding undertakers of the advantages, to them of co-operating; there is no better and no more emotionally satisfactory deal the Church can offer than the Anglican drama of death. And it should keep reminding vicars of the advantages to them; a funeral is the one time when a good vicar is unequivocally needed by people who are usually indifferent and, I would guess, the one occasion likely to incline them, at last, to the Church.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 22, 1998 | Comments (0)
How cruel are you being to the pet you love?
It must be said that keeping animals in unnatural conditions, simply for the comfort and amusement of human beings, is highly questionable.
It's a dog's life. That is the expression people use to describe an existence that is particularly wretched. Yet at the same time, in an equally well-worn expression, the dog is supposed to be man's best friend. The co-existence of these two cliches pretty well sums up the tremendous confusion that people seem to feel about dogs, and about pets generally. We think we love pets, but we constantly abuse them; we torment and exploit them in time-honoured ways. We half-understand that, but we choose to ignore it. I've always suspected that keeping pets is rather cruel, though I've rarely been brave enough to say so in print: for one thing, I don't like hate-mail and, for another, I know many cats and dogs which appear to have good relationships with their owners.
All the same, keeping pet animals in unnatural conditions, simply for the comfort and amusement of human beings, is highly questionable. It took me a long time to understand this, because I grew up in the country, where pets and working animals have a better life than urban pets, and where people are rigorously unsentimental about animals anyway.
The first time it struck me forcibly - the first time I truly understood what a dog's life some dogs lead - was when a London neighbour stopped to talk to me while walking her canine chum. He was whining and trembling, and constantly straining at the lead. She, who claimed to adore him, kept pulling sharply at the lead, and tapping and smacking him. "Oh Squiffy," she said, or some such patronising name, "you are awful. Bad boy. No! The silly boy," she went on, turning to me, "is such a bore. There are a couple of bitches on heat in the street, and he's gone mad. He's a complete sex maniac. It's quite hysterical." And, laughing loudly at him and smacking him a few more times, she went on down the street, yanking him brutally away from any hedge or lamp post that caught his attention.
Squiffy lived in a flat. He was taken for two walks a day, on a lead. He might be let off for a few moments. Sometimes children played with him, intensely, for a short time. Mostly he was left alone inside, sometimes for hours on end. If not castrated yet, he soon would be. Millions of dogs across the country lead lives like that. Millions more lead lives that are only somewhat better, lives that still repress and punish dogs' most powerful instincts. Pet dogs are not allowed to hunt, or mate, or to pursue their intense interest in the powerful scents and sounds around them, of which humans know almost nothing; they are brought to heel as pampered, sickly, sensorially deprived eunuchs. One does not need to be a supporter of animal rights, or a dog lover, which I certainly am not, to feel that this must be wrong.
Yet for some reason it is usually overlooked. There are several pressure groups that concern themselves with the fate of animals used for food or sport or research, but "very little public concern is expressed for the degradation to which pet animals are routinely and continuously subjected", according to the vet David Coffey. Writing in a new anthology on Town and Country, edited by the writers Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton, he describes, in his courageous Confessions of an Urban Vet, the abuse of pets by their well-meaning but myopic owners.
Bored and confined, they suffer sexual mutilation and genetic mutilation, practised to suit the convenience and fancy of their owners. As well as this, I think they suffer a most insulting trivialisation of the idea of an animal - the recent glamour shot of Monica Lewinsky posing with a tiny, purple-tinted poodle, currently fashionable in Hollywood, springs to mind. Animals in that universe are funny little sqeaking bundles of fluff, no more than easy-care fashion accessories; if they stop being funny, they are dosed with Prozac. This trivialisation may not directly hurt the animal, but I am sure it is bad for humans; it is impossible to understand something, and to respond to it properly, if one does not know what it actually is. The proper treatment of animals depends on proper respect for what they are.
What animals are appears to be far more complex than humans have usually thought. Many animals appear to have a far greater capacity for learning, for using tools and for complex communication than was thought even 15 years ago. Some chimps can learn and use human language. Many animals appear to feel for each other, to anticipate and to grieve; for example, female elephants take care of each other during pregnancy and console bereaved mothers. And the film The Horse Whisperer popularised an idea that horsemen and women have understood in part for centuries, that humans can have fairly complex communications with horses.
Anyone who has been lucky enough to live with horses or ponies will know that it is possible to ride really well, that is to say with the horse's willing co-operation, only if you know the horse and "talk" to it. When I used to ride, as a child and a teenager, I never had a hundredth part of the powers of observation of the famous horse whisperer about how a horse accepts authority and understands requests, but I did somehow guess at a form of communication, including a way of breathing at the horse.
Horses need very careful understanding from humans, and familiarity if possible. Not long ago, reluctantly at a riding stable, I found that my little horse, already tired and sweating, would only go very unwillingly, whereupon the young woman employee, who "adored" horses, instructed me to kick the creature hard and handed me a crop to beat it with, until it stopped "trying it on". I was suddenly flooded with memories of my childhood horror of commercial riding stables. They are cruel, in ways that I couldn't possibly understand at the time; they go against the social and instinctual nature of horses.
Deprived of the wide expanses of their natural habitat, forced into solitary confinement, cramped into tiny prison cells often too small to stretch out in, infertile, lonely and ignored, all kinds of pets - rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, budgerigars, parrots, cats and dogs - drag out a miserable life, a dog's life. I don't want to be unduly sentimental; after all, I am prepared to kill animals and eat them, and I do not believe that animals have rights. However I do believe that we have responsibilities towards them, most of all when we claim to love them.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, November 19, 1998 | Comments (0)
My mother made me
It's no business of the Government to appoint role models
Three cheers for the actress Emma Thompson. She has wisely turned down the preposterous invitation of the interfering Lady Jay, our Minister for Women, to become a role model for teenage girls. To be more precise, she made it publicly clear on Thursday, having heard rumours that such an invitation was on its way, that she refuses to be considered for this dubious privilege. Apparently Baroness "Big Sister" Jay considers it her duty to mould the minds of the nation's girlhood by appointing people like Geri "ex-Spice Girl" Halliwell to teach them - well, one hardly knows what. This kind of heavy handed New Labour dirigisme ought to be treated with the greatest contempt. Apart from being alarming, it is deeply stupid.
Role models cannot be designed or constructed. Role models cannot be appointed. And in any case, it is no business of an honest Government to try. Role models simply appear; they are conjured up out of ordinary people's admiration. They may be perfectly ordinary themselves, or at least they may seem so to those who are dazzled by wealth and fame. And they are all around us. All the great female role models of my younger years were ordinary people, and part of my ordinary life. They were no less heroic to me for that.
None of the women I greatly admired was famous. None of them had careers, though many of them took on work. None had any status, as people talk of status now. None was rich. Most of them were single, or single parents, or widows. Many of them were formidable, so that I never felt that a woman needed money or status to be truly powerful. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did a sketch in the 1960s about an upper-class woman called Lady Beryl Strebe Grebeling, who mercilessly bullied her drippy son Sir Arthur into ambitious enterprises, including a project to teach ravens to fly under water. "A very powerful woman, my mother," said Sir Arthur glumly. "She can break a swan's wing with a blow of her nose." This had a great deal of resonance with my brothers, my sister and me. Our mother, who died last month, was wearingly resolute, especially on our behalf, so we sometimes called her Lady Beryl.
Our mother was astonishingly strong. She brought up four children, all on her own, after being widowed at 30; her youngest child was mentally handicapped. There was no darkness that frightened her, no piece of furniture she could not move, no smoking chimney she could not make draw, no obscure book she could not extract from Dorchester public library, no anxiety that overwhelmed her, no homework she could not help with, no cause of ours she could not fight. We did not dare fail. There was a little painted china dish on her dressing table. "Au coeur vaillant, rien d'impossible," it said. To the valiant heart, nothing is impossible.
My mother was not by any means the only powerful woman of my childhood. Her sister my aunt, though different, is also rather overwhelming. Her vitality makes one feel quite feeble. Ceaselessly energetic, striding across the Dorset fields, farming, bee-keeping, jam making, involved in village activities, she also, with four children, found time to do community work in London, and to set up a small scheme 20 years ago for trained volunteers to help schoolchildren with reading difficulties; it is now a nationwide scheme, and has just been given more money by the Minister for Education.
Then there was the redoubtable Mrs Stockley, who used to clean for people, including my mother. For all her menial job, she commanded instant respect; she was tall and powerful and hugely competent; I still remember the exact style with which she washed the stone floor, so quick and so precise. She also taught me how to cut the thinnest sandwiches, with the buttered loaf under her arm; she told me she had learnt it in service at 14, and her face as she spoke told me far more complex things than any glib right-on diatribe about social justice. We thought she had Gypsy blood, but in any case she had black curls and black eyes, and though her face was often sad and stern, because her husband had a terrible illness, she also loved to laugh and to tease, which not all sorrowful people can do.
Then there was Bice Crichton Miller, crippled young with painful arthritis, and an inspired, if savage history teacher - living proof that a woman's mind can be as rigorous as any man's and her physical courage just as great. Or there was Mags, a student teacher in London's East End and our holiday nanny, beautiful and warm, tough and funny, galloping with us all round the county and scandalising us with stories of her romances with members of the Household Cavalry.
Or there was another aunt, in sharp contrast to most of the women in my life - gentle, tactful, tolerant and glamorous, the only woman I knew when growing up who painted her nails. And there were formidable women everywhere I went, in shops, in schools, on farms, and just across the road, some kind and some very unkind, but almost all capable and uncomplaining.
As powerful female role models go, I don't think that Geri Halliwell is quite in the same league as any of these.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 15, 1998 | Comments (0)
We forget to remember
Teachers don't seem to want to teach British history
Today is Remembrance Sunday. Remembrance is not simply remembering. It is investing memory with meaning and feeling, and rediscovering a relationship between the past and oneself and a sense of identity. Remembrance Sunday does this in a very public way; in commemorating all our dead, it reinforces not only personal and family identities, it evokes a national sense of identity too. I wonder how much longer it will continue to do so. There seems to be a tendency in this country to abandon public memory and public history. This may not yet have affected the memory of the First and Second World Wars, but there is an unmistakable desire to junk facts and dump history.
Teachers don't seem to want to teach history, least of all British history. Children and students don't seem to know any. I feel sure that this is dangerous; it is not just that those who know no history are condemned to repeat it. It is also that independence and freedom depend on having a sure sense of identity, which in turn depends on historical remembrance; and shared memory brings a shared sense of identity and values. It is no coincidence that in Brave New World whole departments devoted themselves to erasing history and then rewriting it. It is no coincidence that it was a thoughtcrime to remember even a nursery rhyme; the traditions of a shared past can bring solidarity against an oppressive present. Yet imperceptibly, this country has also been subjected to a process of forgetting.
There is plenty of evidence for this gloomy view. Only a couple of weeks ago The Daily Telegraph reported claims that Oxford history graduates know very little history. "It is largely a matter of bits and pieces," according to Dr John Madicott, a fellow in modern history at Exeter College. "It certainly cannot be assumed that they have a working knowledge of how their own country has evolved." It is now possible to get a good degree in history without knowing anything about Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Industrial Revolution. In the name of freedom of choice, undergraduates can now construct their own incoherent programmes of this and that, without any concept of a common culture, or any knowledge of the major signposts in the history of our country.
This view is widespread in Oxford, and what goes for Oxford goes just as much for other universities. And the same goes for schools. Schoolteachers seem reluctant to subject children to even the simplest historical facts, presumably under the post-modernist misapprehension that there cannot be such a thing as a fact, or indeed any such thing as objective reality. The preference is for subjective little forays into personal experiences - life in the castle keep or in the servants' quarters. A survey in 1996 found that children and young people were alarmingly ignorant of history. More than a quarter of the 16- 24-year-olds questioned had no idea of the date of the Battle of Hastings, could not name the designer of St Paul's, and did not know who invented penicillin. Less than half knew who sat on the throne at the time of the Armada.
It really is difficult to imagine what inspired this mass flight from intellectual honesty, and this astonishing lack of true curiosity. Of course I agree that it was high time that children (especially non-academic children) were freed from the burden of learning by rote lists of obscure battles and monarchs - so beautifully satirised in 1066 and All That - that were meaningless to them. Of course history teaching needed reform. But that doesn't explain the indifference, and sometimes the hostility, to our country's past, and to the past of any successful country such as the United States. Third World countries, other faiths and oppressed cultures, by contrast, attract lots of interest and, curiously enough, lots of angry insistence on facts. Those with historical grievances are encouraged to remember: those with outstanding historical achievements are bullied to forget.
I don't, as one prominent historian I know, see in all this a conspiracy to wipe out our national memory, in the name of multiculturalism, anti-colonialism and class resentment, but I do see signs of all those things in a common, misguided, lazy and ignorant pull in that direction. It is a powerful pull, and much of its force comes from the US.
This sort of nonsense has been common in American university life for some time. Last week, for instance, it was announced that a distinguished male professor in the department of theatre at Arizona State University has been sacked for teaching Shakespeare, and refusing to stage, instead, a production of Betty the Yeti: an Eco-Fable, the department's favourite feminist play. At Arizona State, it seems, Shakespeare is an unperson, consigned to sexist white European male oblivion in favour of Betty the eco-warrior yeti. And the students will have no memories of Shakespeare to draw on.
Today is a particularly good day to insist on remembering - on remembering not only our dead and the sorrow and the pity, but the traditions for which they fought, and of which we have good reason to be proud.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, November 08, 1998 | Comments (0)
Is this the end of evil?
Ron Davies's sad resignation speech was a clear sign of the huge shift that is now taking place in the idea of personal responsibility.
We may never know, and may not much want to know, precisely what Ron Davies did on Clapham Common, or why it is so unspeakable, but we can safely guess that it was nothing very unusual: the London night is full of all kinds of indignities. What is, however, unusual and very striking about his strange story is his justification of it. "We are what we are," he told the House of Commons, in his curious plea for understanding and tolerance. "We are all different, the products both of our genes and our experiences." While that seems to me perfectly obviously true, I think this must have been the first time that an important public figure in disgrace has publicly blamed his genes for his downfall, or at least mentioned genes in a plea in mitigation.
How quickly things have changed. Not so long ago, the very idea that genetic factors played any role in our destiny would have been considered perfectly ridiculous, especially by anyone in the Labour Party. In the old nature-nurture debate, the Labour Party and anyone of Left-wing tendencies was firmly on the side of nurture: any mention of inherited tendencies was sneered at as unscientific, and fascist to boot. Suddenly - almost overnight, it seems - genetics and brain science have changed all that; now it is conventional wisdom that nature matters just as much as nurture, and possibly more. But after all those years of obstinate Left-wing abuse of anyone who expressed the faintest hint of biological determinism, it gives me a jolt of surprise to hear a former Labour minister blaming his genes, as well as his miserable childhood, for his disgrace. Now it seems that, instead of one excuse for one's actions, there are two.
Mr Davies's sad speech in the Commons was a clear sign of a huge shift that is now taking place in the idea of personal responsibility. If Mr Davies was driven to do whatever he did, not only by the abuse he suffered as a boy, but also by the forces of his own inherited nature, there is a sense in which he cannot be held entirely personally responsible, and that is surely what he was suggesting. The fact that so many people appear willing to accept this view is proof of the enormous shift in our perspective. An immense change is occurring in the idea of why a person behaves as he or she does, which is rapidly eroding the idea of free will; beyond that, there is a radical upheaval going on in our idea of what a person is.
As with all major change, there seems to be an enormous amount of public confusion. While Mr Davies has so far received a great deal of sympathy for giving in to these biological and social forces, Michael Stone, for example, recently convicted of the murders of Lin and Megan Russell, has received very little. He, too, had a horrifying childhood, far worse than Mr Davies's; he was abandoned and sexually abused in council care, and he is known to suffer from a serious personality disorder, of the sort that is generally thought to be innate. It seems obvious that this very disturbed man has little or no control over his behaviour, and was therefore, in conventional terms, not strictly personally responsible for that terrible crime, if indeed he committed it.
But the public seems deeply ambivalent about such matters; Mr Davies was excused, whatever he may have done, while Stone was vilified in the media as an evil monster, a man who is simply wicked. This may be partly because psychiatrists currently believe that personality disorders such as Stone's are untreatable, and that he is not precisely mentally ill, in a way that might be controlled or relieved by psychiatry; a crude popular conclusion from this has been that, if he is not mad, then he is bad and very much to blame. But that is clearly quite inadequate, and inhumane as well.
It came as a great shock to hear Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, saying on the radio that, since the public must be protected from people with serious personality disorders such as Michael Stone's, such people, if likely to commit violent crimes, must be locked up even before committing them. The same has been suggested in the United States about young children; there is a quite common syndrome of restless, anti-social behaviour in children, especially in boys, called attention hyperactivity deficit disorder. Brain scanning (in somewhat controversial studies) has been able to observe and identify what goes on in the brains of such children, and brain scanning has also shown that a significantly high proportion of violent adult male offenders suffer from the same syndrome. In other words, from brain scanning you could predict which little boys are (to use the old expression) born to be hanged - or, rather, you could at least know which boys are at serious genetic risk of turning to violent crime. America being what it is, there are some who have already suggested that you might as well lock them up young.
That is all both shocking and unacceptable. But it might also be a glimpse into the future. The Judaeo-Christian assumption on which our civilisation is based is that we all have free will, and that we are all equally and personally responsible for what we do, and equally answerable for it (apart from the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped). On this belief depend freedom and equality under the law, not to mention tolerance and respect for the individual. But these assumptions are becoming less and less adequate. The belief in free will has always been subject to philosophical doubt, but has never before been seriously challenged in common understanding. But now, in the face of what is being discovered about genetic tendencies and the working of the brain, I think that the belief in free will is at last truly failing.
It has even been suggested by some scientists that there may be centres in the brain that are especially active in the perception of free will, one of them near the anterior cingulate sulcus, in a fold in the cerebral cortex. The experience and the exercise of what one might call free will can be damaged by injury to this area. To put it like that is to put it very crudely, but it gives a hint of the powerful explanations to come.
And I suspect that these will be explanations that exclude whole categories of Judaeo-Christian thought, such as free will, and also the notion of good and evil. I believe that this may be the beginning of the end of moral understanding as we have known it, but, human invention being what it is, it may also be the beginning of something new.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, November 05, 1998 | Comments (0)
