CHAPTER XXVIII
The facility with which one could become a
Stiggins in modern dress! A much subtler, and therefore more detestable, more dangerous
Stiggins. For of course Stiggins
himself was too stupid to be either intrinsically very bad or capable of doing
much harm to other people. Whereas if I
set my mind to it, heaven knows what I mightn't achieve in the way of lies in
the soul. Even with not setting
my mind to it, I could go far – as I perceived, to my horror, today, when I
found myself talking to Purchas and three or four of his young people. Talking about Miller's 'anthropological
approach'; talking about peace as a way of life as well as an international
policy – the way of life being the condition of any policy that had the least
hope of being permanently successful. Talking so clearly, so profoundly, so convincingly. (The poor devils were listening with their
tongues hanging out.) Much more convincingly
than Purchas himself could have done; that
muscular-jocular-Christian style starts by being effective, but soon makes
hearers feel that they're being talked down to.
What they like is that the speaker should be thoroughly serious, but comprehensible. Which is a trick I happen
to possess. There I was,
discoursing in a really masterly way about the spiritual life, and taking
intense pleasure in that mastery, secretly congratulating myself on being not
only so clever, but also so good – when all at once I realized who I was:
Stiggins. Talking
about the theory of courage, self-sacrifice, patience, without any knowledge of
the practice. Talking, moreover,
in the presence of people who had practised what I was preaching –
preaching so effectively that the proper roles were reversed: they were
listening to me, not I to them. The
discovery of what I was doing came suddenly.
I was overcome with shame. And
yet – more shameful – went on talking.
Not for long, however. A minute
or two, and I simply had to stop, apologize, insist
that it wasn't my business to talk.
This
shows how easy it is to be Stiggins by mistake and unconsciously. But also that unconsciousness is no excuse,
and that one's responsible for the mistake, which arises, of course, from the
pleasure one takes in being more talented than other people and in dominating
them by means of those talents. Why is
one unconscious? Because one hasn't ever
taken the trouble to examine one's motives; and one doesn't examine one's
motives, because one's motives are mostly discreditable. Alternatively, of course, one examines one's
motives, but tells oneself lies about them till one comes to believe that
they're good. Which is
the conviction of the self-conscious Stiggins. I've always condemned showing off and the
desire to dominate as vulgar, and imagined myself
pretty free of these vulgarities. But
insofar as free at all, I now perceive, only thanks to the indifference which
has kept me away from other people, thanks to the external-economic and internal-intellectual
circumstances which made me a sociologist rather than a banker, administrator,
engineer, working in direct contact with my fellows. Not to make contacts, I have realized, is
wrong; but the moment I make them, I catch myself showing off and trying to
dominate. Showing off, to make it worse,
as Stiggins would have done, trying to dominate by a purely verbal display of
virtues which I don't put into practice.
Humiliating to find that one's supposed good qualities are mainly due to
circumstances and the bad habit of indifference, which make me shirk occasions
for behaving badly – or well, for that matter, seeing that it's very difficult
to behave either well or badly except towards other people. More humiliating still to find that when, with
an effort of goodwill, one creates the necessary opportunities, one immediately
responds to them by behaving badly.
Note: meditate on the virtues that are the contraries of vanity, lust
for power, hypocrisy.