Morality, Garbage, Gum, Bike Baskets and Emigration

I half-expected my remarks about litter in my bike-basket to excite the religious bores who congregate in the nice warm bar on the ground floor at the back of this blog, with its agreeable coal fire, worn leather armchairs, patient staff and well-kept ales, and above all the ready audience and the reliable regular wiseacres who can be relied to give them the sort of argument they want. No wonder they never leave. Other members of the club flee upstairs when they see them coming and hide in its stately, austere library, where they can read in peace.

But I didn���t expect them to pile in to the extent that they actually did. Most of those who expressed views on this entirely missed the point. First, I was not talking about picking up litter as such. Under the laws of common decency, anyone might reasonably pick up litter in his own neighbourhood (I do, from time to time, and I don���t expect any praise or credit for it, as I recognise that my motives are selfish). Litter near one���s home encourages more litter, vandalism, graffiti and other bad behaviour. By picking it up we make these things less likely, and maintain the price of our houses and the good character of the neighbourhood on which these prices, and many other good things,  tangible or intangible, depend. Some of us do this, though you will find, when you do, that you get some funny looks from the silent majority, who find such actions incomprehensible.

We might also pick up the occasional bit of garbage left disfiguring a rural beauty spot or park  which we are visiting, so making the experience more pleasant for ourselves. Few of us, by contrast, will bother to pick up litter dropped on a  busy city street which is already liberally scattered with rubbish, blobs of gum, used tissues, fag-ends and disgustingly grease and sauce-smeared fast food containers. We���d need a barrow to cart it away, and the bins are often overflowing , if there are any. So please don���t lie about this. Hardly anyone does it.

I wasn���t talking about any of these things, though I cannot see why an atheist would think it ���good��� to do any of them since atheists have no basis to define any action as ���good���. That���s the whole point about being an atheist. Good and bad shrivel into ad hoc relativism and cease to have any meaning.  Why else would anyone bother to embrace this spiky, arid faith, lacking as it does any consolation or aesthetic joys.?

I was talking about an entirely specific thing, quite different from litter being left thoughtlessly on the ground (I���ve seen people doing this. It falls from them or emerges from their cars much as sleet falls from the sky, impersonally. They are wholly unaware that they are doing anything wrong and, if challenged, are often enraged).

It was about finding, in the basket of my bicycle, litter left there by people who both lack the nerve to dump it on the ground and the manners and consideration to put it in a bin. Not merely that. They know perfectly well that my bike basket isn���t a bin, and that they have passed to me the burden of disposing of these objects, which are quite often unfinished buckets of sickly sweet fluids, or grease-dabbled remnants of fast food meals. Sometimes it���s just free newspapers they have abandoned.

This takes place just off a busy street in one of London���s richest boroughs, but (and this is their only defence) one very poorly provided with litter bins. I know this because I now know exactly where they are, having to visit them so often.

The streets are pretty untidy, partly as a result of this shortage. One more cardboard cup, one more cigarette packet, one more handbill, one more wrapper, won���t make much difference. The street cleaners (who are quite active and busy) will eventually come along and take it away, just as hugely expensive devices will trundle by every few weeks trying to remove the gum. The vaguely ���good��� (those who know that dropping litter is sort-of wrong but have other things on their minds)  often give up before they find a bin. The same kind of garbage is left on sills and in corners and doorways.

Putting this muck in my basket is a deliberate act of petty spite, aimed against me as the owner of the bike. I imagine them sniggering as they do it. Under the rules of common decency, why should I do what these people aren���t prepared to do,  and take their muck to the bin for them?  It wouldn���t make the streets any filthier or any more untidy than they already are.  I reckon I���m absolutely entitled to take it out and put it where they lacked the guts to put it themselves, on the pavement.  

And yet my conscience told me this was wrong, and in the end I heeded it. There is, as I say, no serious prospect of being caught or prosecuted. The action makes no material difference to the general squalor of the street. It is just a small, civilised act which I do only because I believe my action is absolutely good and right regardless of these immediate effects. And if I were an atheist, I���d dump the stuff on the pavement with a flourish, and enjoy doing so because it would help me express my anger at the people who have put me to this trouble.  

As I said, this is just one of the millions of things people do (and don���t do) , which are right and good absolutely in themselves and have no other evident purpose, and no conceivable advantage to those do them or restrain themselves form doing them, and if they were all left undone, or all done without restraint, you���d notice.

The atheists often erect a particularly silly straw man to avoid this argument, and claim that the believer is saying that there can be no morality without religion. I say nothing of the kind. Common decency and the golden rule can be observed without any religious impulse.

But these forms of morality, based on enlightened self-interests, involve no conscience (a concept which is meaningless if there is no God, for if it is not divine in origin, why should you pay any more attention to such promptings than you pay to your bile-duct, your appetites,  or your bladder?) or knowledge (on the part of God ) of the true state of the human heart.

And so in practice the golden rule amounts to ���appear to do unto others what you would wish them to do unto you���.

As I said in the interview, this has many weaknesses; ���If we exist in eternity, then what we do here matters somewhere else, and at some other time, and the immediate consequences of our actions aren���t the most important things about them.  It might lead to more public acts of self-publicising ���goodness���, but this is the problem of all Godless ethical systems. They rely on the appearance of goodness rather than on the inner heart seen only by God, and anyone who has attended a school or worked in an office will know that people are not always exactly as they seem to be.���

 

This is why I get into so much trouble when I say, quite candidly, that morality is about how you behave when you think nobody is watching. People really dislike hearing this, because they know in their hearts that it is absolutely true.

Of course this doesn���t mean that a post-Christian society immediately descends into a cauldron of murder and robbery. These things are initially only available to the strong and rich, who will in many cases hire others to do the killing and robbing for them.  But they spread down the scale of strength and wealth, in the end. Don���t be weak or poor in the society to come. Neil Kinnock was dead right about that, at least.

 

You end up with the situation so evocatively described by W.H,Auden in what may be his greatest poem, in my view, 'The Shield of Achilles'

'A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who���d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.'

Finally, why am I so exasperated by the dingbat response  ���But where should I go?��� to my point about emigration? Because it is a stupid, trivial response to an important point.  I am actually saying, as graphically as I can, that a whole civilisation is finished. And people want travel advice?  It���s like asking if there���s a dining car  on the train to the gulag.

Anyone dim enough to respond in this way has entirely missed the point of what I am saying, and will as a result ignore my advice while it is valuable, and so possibly be among those clutching the sinking dinghy and wondering whether he will get ashore wherever it is that a harsh fate has driven him when the moment comes, and his education, savings and status are all so much shrivelled paper and thin, cold, air. Work it out for yourself, who may take you in, if you get the point. This is truly serious.