Analysis
Anthony Holiday
It should surprise no one that the real culprit behind the acts of terror that have traumatised the United States and the global hamlet it effectively governs is not some group of Islamic fanatics but a philosophical doctrine, wholly occidental in origin, which is now rampant, not merely in academia but in the theory and practice of governance throughout those reaches of the world that call themselves civilised.
This doctrine is inscribed on the actions of those who deliberately flew passenger planes at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. It is displayed in their utter disregard for human lives (including their own), in their stealthy ingenuity and implacable firmness of purpose. Its tenets are that all means may be justified by ends thought to be sufficiently noble; that omelettes necessitate the breaking of eggs and that one may be required to do evil so that good may come.
This philosophy doubtless has origins in classical antiquity, especially in the consequentialism that some commentators attribute to Aristotle, but its real origins lie in 19th-century Britain, where its inventors dubbed it utilitarianism. Its founding father was the political radical, Jeremy Bentham, who devised a “felicific calculus” whereby the moral worth of all actions was to be judged by their tendency to promote future pleasures and diminish future pains.
Bentham’s system was refined and perfected by John Stuart Mill, whose father, James, had been Bentham’s close companion. It fell to Mill to expand Bentham’s hedonistic notion of pleasure to include intellectual, aesthetic and altruistic satisfactions and to formulate the famous “principle of utility” on which this entire ethical system turns.
This principle is easily grasped, even by persons with no training in moral philosophy, which perhaps accounts for its popular appeal. It simply states that a good action is one which promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in a scenario where each individual’s happiness is equal in value to that of any other individual.
The chief upshot of adopting this principle as a guide to action is that there will be no act, no matter how evil, which one would be absolutely forbidden to perform, provided it was done in pursuit of the end of maximising overall human happiness and minimising suffering. This is because it will always be possible to imagine predicaments in which deceit, or torture, or mass murder are permissible, providing the end sought is the avoidance of misery or the promotion of happiness on a scale sufficiently large.
The principle also has the effect of focusing attention fixedly on the future. This is because the question it addresses is not, “What is the good life?” but “What ought I to do?” It enjoins us to calculate probable consequences of our actions in the superstitious belief (fostered in our time by Marxism and the so-called social sciences) that we can predict the future in human affairs just as we do in the natural sciences. Once we embrace utilitarianism, we rapidly find ourselves practising a sort of moral arithmetic in which the numbers grow terrifyingly large.
This was the sort of calculation the Nazis were about in devising the “final solution” which sent six million Jews and Romany to an extremely modern death. The United States politicians and military strategists played the same numbers game when they decided to drop atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the dying days of World War II. And, of course, the architects of up-to-date guerrilla strategies do the same sort of sums when they send their minions to live “like fish in water” among the millions of innocents, whose only crime is to be minding their own business.
Sadly, South Africans cannot congratulate themselves on having foresworn the utilitarian ethos. Cecil Rhodes and Lord Alfred Milner were steeped in it when they plotted to bring about the Boer War and so capture the gold and diamond fields to feed their dream of a global empire. Hendrik Verwoerd’s administrators were under its spell when they shunted millions of people around the country in fealty to his crazy vision of racial segregation. And the African National Congress (despite a recent claim to the contrary by President Thabo Mbeki) did not condemn the use of the “necklace” in the townships to burn suspected collaborators alive. What its then president, Oliver Tambo, did was, at first, to refuse to either condone or condemn these vile executions, and only much later in the day pronounce that the necklace “rightly or wrongly” had done its work.
This same calculus is churning out its estimates of profit and loss in the minds of those whom President George W Bush has instructed to plan the US responses to what he has termed an “act of war” by a “faceless coward”.
What is clear is that if he and his kind have their way, the rest of us will not be permitted to do what we need to do most, which is to live in the present and to contemplate in sorrow and sobriety the evil that has befallen us.
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris