PORCELAIN AND THE PRICE OF LIFE
Utz lived indifferently through the worst years of his country’s history. For him, the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and the communist takeover that soon followed were opportunities to add to his collection of porcelain. All his human contacts served this passion. He was ready to collaborate with any regime so long as it helped him amass the beautiful objects he craved.
Utz’s life seems strange to most of us, but what exactly is wrong with it? It is true that in many ways it is a poor one. It lacks deep friendship, abiding love or any commitment to a cause. But in these respects, how is it different from most people’s lives? It is tempting to say that what marks Utz out from the common run of mankind is his amorality. He will do almost anything to get his hands on fine china – including coming to terms with the worst kinds of tyranny. But – once again – how does Utz differ from the majority of his fellow citizens? During the Nazi and communist periods they did what most people always do – they made their murky accommodations with power.
If you are like most people, you think of ‘morality’ as something special, a set of values that outweighs all others. No doubt fine china is worth a lot, but it counts for nothing when it comes into conflict with morality … Beauty is a wonderful thing, but not if it is purchased at the price of acting immorally … Morality, in other words, is extremely important … And yet, if you are like most other people but – unlike most people – you are honest with yourself, you will find that morality plays a far smaller part in your life than you have been taught that it should.
We inherit our belief – or pretence – that moral values take precedence over all other valuable things from a variety of sources, but chiefly from Christianity. In the Bible, morality is something that comes from beyond the world: right is what God commands, wrong what God forbids. And morality is more important than anything else – fine china, say, or good looks – because it is backed up by God’s will. If you do wrong – that is, if you disobey God – you will be punished. Moral principles are not just rules of thumb for living well. They are imperatives which you must obey.
It may seem that this is a rather primitive view – one that has long been superseded. It is certainly primitive, but it is still very widely believed. Enlightenment humanists are as emphatic as old-time Christians that morality is supremely important. Philosophers are inordinately fond of asking why anyone should be moral, but somehow they never doubt that being moral is better than being anything else.
If Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz teaches any lesson, it is that the importance of morality in our lives is a fiction. We use it in the stories we tell ourselves and others about our lives to give them a sense they might otherwise lack. But in so doing we obscure the truth of how we live.
Moral philosophy has always been an exercise in make-believe, less realistic in its picture of human life than the average bourgeois novel. We must look elsewhere if we want anything that approaches the truth.
Here is a true story. A sixteen-year-old prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp was raped by a guard. Knowing that any prisoner who appeared without a cap on morning parade was immediately shot, the guard stole his victim’s cap. The victim once shot, the rape could not be uncovered. The prisoner knew that his only chance of life was to find a cap. So he stole the cap of another camp inmate, asleep in bed, and lived to tell the tale. The other prisoner was shot.
Roman Frister, the prisoner who stole the cap, describes the death of his fellow inmate as follows:
The officer and the kapo walked down the lines.… I counted the seconds as they counted the prisoners. I wanted it to be over. They were up to row four. The capless man didn’t beg for his life. We all knew the rules of the game, the killers and the killed alike. There was no need for words. The shot rang out without warning. There was a short, dry, echoless thud. One bullet to the brain. They always shot you in the back of the skull. There was a war on. Ammunition had to be used sparingly. I didn’t want to know who the man was. I was delighted to be alive.
What does morality say the young prisoner ought to have done? It says that human life has no price. Very well. Should he therefore have consented to lose his life? Or does the pricelessness of life mean that he was justified in doing anything to save his own? Morality is supposed to be universal and categorical. But the lesson of Roman Frister’s story is that it is a convenience, to be relied upon only in normal times.