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| Churchill who suffered from 'depression' |
When I went to school, you could either spell or you could not. (I write as one who has sometimes misspelled words and relies on Word to tell me when I have got it wrong.) Then something called dyslexia appeared and, before long, what had once seemed mere incompetence had a fancy medical name attached to it and was nobody’s fault.
Likewise, if you ran away from combat in the First or Second World Wars, you were considered a coward and were often shot for desertion. (Again, I write as someone who has never fought in a military conflict and am aware that I have little right to judge others.) Then we introduced shell-shock which meant that cowardice no longer existed. By giving something a medical name, we effectively stopped judging people for lack of moral fibre.
A mother once excused her child’s rowdy behaviour by saying that he was on the autism spectrum and had little self-control. It was not really his fault that he was behaving badly - and spoiling things for other people – because of a medical name for his condition. Pretty soon nobody will bear any responsibility for what they do because you can attach a medical name to what used to be a moral fault and thus remove the element of blame from it.
Similarly, nobody is ever in a bad mood now. Instead they suffer from depression, which never used to exist - although Winston Churchill did admit to being afflicted by the 'black dog'. Bruce Springsteen forgave his father for his bad moods because he was able to attach a medical definition to the process. He was not surly or bad tempered but suffered from 'depression'.
I am, as those who have read this far may be aware, dubious about this whole process. We eventually won the First World War because of a variety of factors, not least American involvement, but also because men were expected to go ‘over the top’, sometimes to almost certain death from enemy fire. Being unwilling to do so meant that you were considered a coward and dealt with accordingly, which usually meant the firing squad.
This was the harsh reality of a war that cost the lives of nearly a million men in the British forces, less than a tenth of the total military casualties. And this does not include civilian deaths which brought the figure up to fourteen or fifteen million altogether. This is an unimaginable amount of death in today’s terms and begs the question of whether it was worth it in the end. Many parents were keen to send their sons into the conflict, not least Rudyard Kipling, whose only son Jack was killed in his first taste of combat, one that left a shadow over the life of the poet and short story writer, one that never really lifted.
Kipling effectively sacrificed his own son who, like his father, suffered from poor eyesight and could easily have escaped military service. Yet both father and son were keen that Jack should ‘do his bit’ rather than be stained by the suggestion that he was a coward and could not face up to his responsibilities as a soldier. On such determination was victory eventually achieved against the might of a militaristic Germany that needed to be stopped from taking over Europe – and eventually the whole world – completely. Contempt for what soldiers called cowardice and the willingness to shoot deserters was sadly an essential part of this.
Do we lose something by being understanding of the causes of what used to be called cowardice but is now known as shell shock, what used to be called bad spelling but is now diagnosed as dyslexia and was once bad behaviour but is not called being on the autism spectrum? The inevitable end result of this is that nobody has to take responsibility for anything they do with their hands because they are suffering from a medical – rather than a moral – condition which affects what is going on in their heads.
The end result of this was seen in an American trial when the perpetrator’s lawyers claimed that he had a gene that determined his actions – which were not disputed and involved killing a woman who was unable to defend herself. Yet what is a gene but a determinant of the actions by which we are judged. ‘Use every man after his deserts and who shall ‘scape whipping?’ asks Hamlet in Shakespeare’s plays. (He is talking about the players and Polonius’s promise to do just that.) We all have a lot to be ashamed about – not least this writer – and we should be grateful that we are not always judged too harshly.
This begs the question of who a human being is: a moral being who takes responsibility for his or her actions or a collection of genes who cannot be held responsible for such actions. Not only do I believe that we are the former but I think that we have to treat ourselves as such or else nobody can ever do anything simply bad and thus can never be judged.
Yet, at a certain point, we have to subject ourselves to judgement or society ceases to function. Just as the British side would not have own the First World War if they had recognised the concept of shell shock rather than labelling it simply as cowardice, so no justice system could survive if the argument that we should be excused out actions because of our genes was allowed to hold sway. It did not in the end but it did allow the plaintiff to receive a life rather than a death sentence. He was white, incidentally, and I doubt if he would have been shown such understanding if his skin had been of a darker colour.
By all means, use a person’s medical condition to extend understanding towards them. But there comes a time when you have to stop excusing people and start judging them.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
