John Gardner - Freddy's Book

“Of course you have” said the bishop warmly, leaning forward in his saddle as if trying to see into his vision more clearly. “It’s an excellent theory, or so it seems at first glance. I could argue it myself! Say a mother is beating a child before my eyes. What should I do? Should I use force against the mother? But what is the evil in the beating I am witnessing? That the child feels pain, or that the mother feels the torments of malice instead of the joy of love? Surely it’s both, by the theory we’ve just advanced. A man on his own can do no evil; evil is lack of communication between people. If I want to act, then, I should act to restore communication between the mother and the child. If I use force on the mother, do I get rid of the lack of communication? No, I introduce a new lack of communication, between the mother and myself. I must reason with her, then. But suppose that, in her fury, the mother is screaming as she beats her child, and the child is also screaming. How do I get their attention?” Quickly, to prevent Lars-Goren’s interrupting, he raised his hand. “I know, I anticipate your answer: I use force, but only such force as is needed to stop the ruckus and make the two pay attention. I use measured response. Then we sit and rea-on.

“It may be inconsistent,” Lars-Goren said, “but it’s reasonable enough. One must be sure of one’s motives, needless to say. But it seems to me a man knows when he’s acting for justice, not out of personal fury — that is, when he’s acting by the Golden Rule and when he’s not.” His tone had an edge, as if he suspected the bishop of hair-splitting.

Bishop Brask stretched his arm out, conciliatory. “Say that’s true,” he said, “though of course I’m not as sure as you are that we always know our motives. But say it’s true! You must surely see the problem it raises for me, a city man. Say there are four mothers, all beating their children at the same time, each for a different reason. Say there is also a small group of cannibals, over on a street corner off Ostengräd, not far away, preparing to put a priest in their boiling pot, and just beyond them there’s an Arab who, misunderstanding the language, believes he has just purchased some fisherman’s wife. What am I to do in this case? Whip the various offenders to submission and tie them to cartwheels till I can get to them, one by one, and argue them to reason? Suppose I do this and then you come along just as I’m tying up the last of the offenders — you come along, that is, and see me tyrannizing these innocent strangers, as it seems to you. Do you knock me unconscious to get my attention and run around untying the people I meant to reason with? My example annoys you; I’m making things more complex than they are, you think. I admit the examples are a little facetious, but life in the city may be even more complex than I’ve suggested. What is one to do to get open communication where Swedes, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Finns, and even an occasional Lapp are mixed together like leftover herring sauces, each with his own way of thinking, his own old codes?

“That’s why I said earlier that it’s unreal, this Eden you live in, this Platonic Form of right behavior. It’s refreshing, I don’t deny it! It fills a man with hope and good sense, rejuvenates his spirit. But what if it’s all snare and illusion? I don’t mean to offend you, I hope you understand! No one could be more grateful than I am for the numerous kindnesses you’ve shown me, this glimpse you’ve given me of the pastoral life. No one could be more worthy of love than your wife is — I’m honored to have met her! But you see my reservation. We like to say gloomy, grim cities are the haunt of the Devil, but tradition is against us: it places his home in the unpopulated North — perhaps some such pastoral scene as that valley there below us, shining like a garden.”

Lars-Goren smiled oddly, an expression Bishop Brask could not penetrate — perhaps annoyance, perhaps rueful acknowledgement that it might be as he claimed. With anyone else, Bishop Brask knew, he would at this point have fallen silent, withdrawing to his familiar hopelessness, for clearly he had won; but Lars-Goren had, and had had for some time, a queer effect on him, a way of forcing him — or inspiring him — to say more than he’d intended, as if arguments that only made him weary at other times took on interest when advanced against Lars-Goren. However certain Lars-Goren might be about the motives of his actions, for the bishop there was always some doubt, and never more than now. Whether he continued in the desperate hope of corrupting Lars-Goren, smashing his ill-considered optimism, or in the hope that Lars-Goren might somehow, by his stubborn innocence, “save Brask’s soul”—a distasteful phrase, to the bishop — he had no idea. It was perhaps both at once. Whatever the case, he found himself arguing on, urgently, gesturing like a man selling relics to a man with no faith in them. The dog looked up at him in alarm, and he lowered his voice.

“Who can say ideals aren’t the Devil’s chief trick?” he asked. “Isn’t it possible that in the country, secure in the love of his family, a man learns faith and serenity that outside the country can only produce madness or tyranny or both? Think about it, that openness of heart or willingness to communicate that we’ve defined as the root of all good. Let us consider what we mean by it, exactly. Where do we put ignorance in our ethical scheme? The ignorance of the miners of Dalarna, for instance, or the pirate Sören Norby. What good is the willingness to communicate in a man who’s got his facts all wrong? There may be no evil in the hearts of such people, but surely they put evil into the world. Never mind, you say; ignorance can be overcome by education — another form of communication, in this case communication between the culture and the individual. Yes, perhaps. But perhaps it’s precisely this education which makes the soul fold its wings. Perhaps education leads inevitably to weariness and despair. As we civilize a child by beating or cajoling or shaming him, do we not perhaps beat, cajole, and shame what breeds hope in a man — individual will, every man’s innate sense that he’s descended from the angels — to a dreary acceptance of what’s taken for necessity, the tiresome, dispiriting laws of the docile herd?

“I will not pursue the point; I leave it to your judgment. I ask, instead, where does madness fit our scheme? The Daljunker, for instance, convinced to the soles of his boots that he’s Sten Sture’s son. How does the culture communicate with a madman? Not only does he have his facts wrong. In defense of his sacred individual will, he denies dull reality with all his might, claiming he’s King Nero or Jesus, insisting that the infirmary or dungeon where we converse is not what it is but a castle in Spain. Or this, my friend: what of the well-meaning and canny political manipulator, a man like Gustav Vasa in his early days — the man who communicates truth, or so he’d claim, by simplification: complicated truth reduced to slogans? How in heaven’s name do we communicate with him, or with those he has taught to use his methods? There’s the future, I think. Power bloc against power bloc, lie against lie, until finally no one knows anymore that he’s lying; fact and that-which-seems-desirable-in-the-long-run become hopelessly confused, and the man who tells the truth, that is, sticks to the plain facts, is dismissed as a lunatic, or troublemaker, an enemy of the good. You think it’s reason the Lutherans have introduced into human affairs? It’s a new and terrifying tyranny — I think so. In the old days we knew who the tyrants were: King so-and-so. Bishop so-and-so. Queen X. Judge Y. The tyranny was official, however covert. We knew whom to watch. In the future every dog will have his plot and his secret arsenal.”