{"id":4952,"date":"2016-10-15T08:24:09","date_gmt":"2016-10-15T13:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4952"},"modified":"2016-10-15T18:11:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-15T23:11:51","slug":"george-gissing-g-e-moore-and-the-good-in-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2016\/10\/15\/morality\/george-gissing-g-e-moore-and-the-good-in-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"George Gissing, G. E. Moore, and the “Good in Itself”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A limited number of common themes are always recognizable in human moral behavior.\u00a0 However, just as a limited number of atoms can combine to form a vast number of different molecules, so those themes can combine to form a vast variety of different moral systems.\u00a0 Those systems vary not only from place to place, but in the same place over time.\u00a0 A striking example of the latter may be found in the novels of George Gissing<\/a>, most of which were published in the last quarter of the 19th century.\u00a0 Gissing was a deep-dyed Victorian conservative of a type that would be virtually unrecognizable to the conservatives of today.\u00a0 George Orwell <\/a>admired him, and wrote a brief but brilliant\u00a0essay about him that appears in In Front of Your Nose<\/em><\/a>, the fourth volume of his\u00a0collected essays, journalism and letters.\u00a0 Orwell described him as one of the greatest British novelists because of the accuracy with which he portrayed the poverty, sordid social conditions, and sharp caste distinctions in late Victorian England.\u00a0 Orwell was generous.\u00a0 Gissing condemned socialism, particularly in his novel Demos<\/em><\/a>, whereas Orwell was a lifelong socialist.<\/p>\n

According to the subtitle of the novel, it is “A story of English socialism.”\u00a0 Socialism was becoming increasingly fashionable in those days, but Gissing wasn\u2019t a sympathizer. \u00a0He wanted to preserve everything just as it had been at some halcyon time in the past.\u00a0 Hubert Eldon, the \u201chero\u201d of the novel, wouldn\u2019t pass for one in our time. \u00a0Today he would probably be seen as a rent-seeking parasite. He was apparently unsuited for any kind of useful work, and\u00a0spent most of his time gazing at pretty pictures in European art galleries when he wasn\u2019t in England.\u00a0 When he was home his favorite pastime was to admire the country scenery near the village of Wanley, where he lived with his mother.<\/p>\n

Eldon was expecting to inherit a vast sum of money from his brother’s father-in-law, a self-made industrialist named Richard Mutimer.\u00a0 He could then marry the pristine Victorian heroine, Adela Waltham, who also lived in the village.\u00a0 However, to everyone’s dismay, the old man dies intestate, and the lion’s share of the money goes to a distant relative, also named Richard Mutimer, who happens to be a socialist workingman.\u00a0 The younger Mutimer uses the money to begin tearing the lovely valley apart in order to build mines and steel mills for a model socialist community.\u00a0 Adela’s mother, a firm believer in the ennobling influence of money, insists that she marry Mutimer.\u00a0 Dutiful daughter that she is, she obeys, even though she loves Eldon.\u00a0 In the end, Mutimer is conveniently killed off.\u00a0 The old man’s will is miraculously found and it turns out Eldon inherits the money after all.\u00a0 This \u201chero\u201d doesn\u2019t shrink from dismantling the socialist community that had been started by his rival, even though he knew it would throw the breadwinners of many families out of work. He thought it was too ugly, and wanted to return the landscape to its original beauty.\u00a0 Obviously, the author thought he was being perfectly reasonable even though, as he mentioned in passing, former workers in a socialist community would likely be blacklisted and unable to find work elsewhere.\u00a0 It goes without saying that the “hero” gets the girl in the end.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons Orwell liked Gissing so much was the skill with which he documented\u00a0the vast improvement in the material welfare of the average citizen\u00a0that had taken place in England\u00a0over the comparatively horrific conditions that prevailed in the author’s time. Unfortunately, that improvement could never have taken place without the sacrifice of many pleasant country villages like Wanley. Gissing was nothing if not misanthropic, and probably would have rejected such progress even if he could have imagined it. In fact old Mutimer was the first one to think of mining the valley, and the author speaks of the idea as follows:<\/p>\n

It was of course a deplorable error to think of mining in the beautiful valley which had once been the Eldon\u2019s estate. Richard Mutimer could not perceive that. He was a very old man, and possibly the instincts of his youth revived as his mind grew feebler; he imagined it the greatest kindness to Mrs. Eldon and her son to increase as much as possible the value of the property he would leave at his death. They, of course, could not even hint to him the pain with which they viewed so barbarous a scheme; he did not as much as suspect a possible objection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gissing not only accepted the rigid class distinctions of his day, but positively embraced them.\u00a0 In describing the elder Mutimer he writes,<\/p>\n

Remaining the sturdiest of Conservatives, he bowed in sincere humility to those very claims which the Radical most angrily disallows: birth, hereditary station, recognised gentility – these things made the strongest demand upon his reverence. Such an attitude was a testimony to his own capacity for culture, since he knew not the meaning of vulgar adulation, and did in truth perceive the beauty of those qualities to which the uneducated Iconoclast is wholly blind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author leaves no doubt about his rejection of “progress” and his dim view of the coming 20th century in the following exchange between Eldon and his mother about the socialist Mutimer:<\/p>\n

“Shall I tell you how I felt in talking\u00a0with him?\u00a0 I seemed to be holding a dialogue with the 20th century, and you may think what that means.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Ah, it’s a long way off, Hubert.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“I wish it were farther.\u00a0 The man was openly exultant; He stood for Demos grasping the scepter.\u00a0 I am glad, mother, that you leave Wanley before the air is poisoned.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Mr. Mutimer does not see that side of the question?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Not he!\u00a0 Do you imagine the twentieth century will leave one green spot on the earth’s surface?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“My dear, it will always be necessary to grow grass and corn.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“By no means; depend upon it.\u00a0 Such things will be cultivated by chemical processes.\u00a0 There will not be one inch left to nature; the very oceans will somehow be tamed, the snow mountains will be leveled.\u00a0 And with nature will perish art.\u00a0 What has a hungry Demos to do with the beautiful?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mrs. Eldon sighed gently.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“I shall not see it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well,\u00a0the twentieth century did turn out pretty badly, especially for socialism, but not quite that badly. \u00a0Of course, one can detect some of the same themes in this exchange that one finds in the\u00a0ideology of 21st century “Greens.”\u00a0 However, I think the most interesting affinity is between the sentiments in Gissing’s novels and the moral philosophy of G. E. Moore<\/a>.\u00a0 I touched on the subject in an earlier post\u00a0<\/a>.\u00a0 Moore was the inventor of the “naturalistic fallacy<\/a>,” according to which all moral philosophers preceding him were wrong, because they insisted on defining “the Good” with reference to some natural object.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Moore’s own version of “the Good” turned out to be every bit as slippery as any “sophisticated Christian’s” version of God.\u00a0 It was neither fish nor fowl, mineral nor vegetable.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0Moore finally got around to giving us at least some hint of exactly what he was talking about in his Principia Ethica<\/em><\/a>, we discovered to our surprise that “the Good” had nothing to do with the heroism of the Light Brigade, or Horatius at the Bridge.\u00a0 It had nothing to do with loyalty or honor.\u00a0 It had nothing to do with social justice or the brotherhood of man.\u00a0 Nor did it have anything to do with honesty, justice, or equality.\u00a0 In fact, Moore’s version of “the Good” turned out to be a real thigh slapper.\u00a0 It consisted of the “nice things” that appealed to English country gentlemen at more or less the same time that Gissing was writing his novels. It included such things as soothing country scenery, enchanting music, amusing conversations with other \u201cgood\u201d people, and perhaps a nice cup of tea on the side.\u00a0 As Moore put it,<\/p>\n

We can imagine the case of a single person, enjoying throughout eternity the contemplation of scenery as beautiful, and intercourse with persons as admirable, as can be imagined.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and,<\/p>\n

By far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.\u00a0 No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, actually, that\u2019s not quite true. I\u2019ve doubted it. Not only have I doubted it, but I consider the claim absurd.\u00a0 Those words were written in 1903.\u00a0 By that time a great many people were already aware of the connection between morality and evolution by natural selection.\u00a0 That connection was certainly familiar to Darwin himself, and a man named Edvard Westermarck<\/a> spelled out the seemingly obvious implications of that connection in his The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas<\/em><\/a> a few years later, in 1906.\u00a0 Among those implications was the fact that the “good in itself” is pure fantasy.\u00a0 “Good” and “evil” are subjective artifacts\u00a0that are the result of the\u00a0behavioral predispositions we associate with morality\u00a0filtered through the minds of creatures with large brains.\u00a0 Nature played the rather ill-natured trick of portraying them to us as real things because that’s the form in which they happened to maximize the odds that the genes responsible for them would survive and reproduce. (That, by the way, is why it is highly unlikely that “moral relativity” will ever be a problem for our species.)\u00a0 The fact that Moore\u00a0was capable of writing such nonsense more than 40 years after Darwin appeared on the scene suggests that he must have lived a rather sheltered life.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, it didn’t matter.\u00a0 Today Moore is revered as a great moral philosopher, and Westermarck is nearly forgotten.\u00a0 It turns out that the truth about morality was very inconvenient for the “experts on ethics.”\u00a0 It exposed them as charlatans who had devoted their careers to splitting hairs over the fine points of things that didn’t actually exist.\u00a0 It popped all their pretentions to superior wisdom and virtue like so many soap bubbles.\u00a0 The result was predictable.\u00a0 They embraced Moore and\u00a0ignored Westermarck.\u00a0\u00a0In the process they didn’t neglect to\u00a0spawn legions of brand new “experts on ethics” to take their places when they were gone.\u00a0 Thanks to their foresight we find the emperor’s new clothes are gaudier than ever in our own time.<\/p>\n

The work of George Gissing is an amusing footnote to the story.\u00a0 We no longer have to scratch our heads wondering where on earth Moore came up with his singular notions about the “Good in itself.”\u00a0 It turns out the same ideas\u00a0may be found fossilized\u00a0in the works of a Victorian novelist.\u00a0 The “experts on ethics” have been grasping at a very flimsy straw indeed!<\/p>\n

\"George<\/a>
George Gissing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A limited number of common themes are always recognizable in human moral behavior.\u00a0 However, just as a limited number of atoms can combine to form a vast number of different molecules, so those themes can combine to form a vast variety of different moral systems.\u00a0 Those systems vary not only from place to place, but … Continue reading “George Gissing, G. E. Moore, and the “Good in Itself””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,303,110,48,105,6,28,34,5,254,29],"tags":[368,120],"class_list":["post-4952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-bioethics","category-ethics","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-literature","category-morality","category-novels","category-philosophy","tag-george-gissing","tag-morality-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1hS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4952"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4970,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952\/revisions\/4970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}