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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
