First, Do No Harm

 For many years running now, I've been a volunteer judge for an annual children's short story contest run by a friend of a friend. While we both pretend I'm doing it as a favor, the truth is I actually look forward to it every year. I find that every story, no matter how rife with misspellings or tortured syntax (and anyways, look at this sentence—I'm hardly one to talk), always contains some spark of creativity and individuality; and sifting this element out from the cuisinart of strange and at times (to me) incomprehensible pop culture references that typically surround it, is an exercise I treasure. 

When I first started reading for these contests, I found that the other judges wanted to provide more critical feedback and corrections. They encouraged the rest of us to cite specific examples of gaffes or structural problems in the story—such as the fact that many of them end abruptly, after introducing a central mystery or plot point, and long before it is actually solved—perhaps because the child-author was hoping that the solution would present itself as they wrote, and they wouldn't have to come up with it beforehand (and haven't we all been there?)

I provided this sort of "constructive criticism" for the first few years of judging the contest, as I say. Usually, I would arrange my feedback in the shape of the famous "compliment sandwich" that they taught us to offer when we were doing peer reviews in high school. I would first provide examples of things I liked about the story, then adduce a few pointers for areas of improvement, then conclude with more sweeping praise that would hopefully annul the negative emotional effects of the slight criticism—all exactly as judges of these sorts of things are supposed to do. 

But as the years passed, I found myself increasingly leaving out the middle of the sandwich. Eventually, I dropped it entirely. Now, I exclusively praise every story I read—even if turns out to be one page long and to be made up entirely of poop jokes. I do this not because I am being insincere, or conflict-avoidant (I never meet any of the contestants, so there is no conflict to be had). I do it because—as I said at the outset—there is invariably something touching and unique and human in each story—even (oh who am I kidding, especially) in the one-page poop joke stories. 

Believers in "constructive criticism" will of course fault me for this. They will argue that, by failing to offer a correction to these mistakes of grammar and structure now, I am actually doing the authors a disservice. I am ensuring that they will go on to perpetrate similar gaffes in the future, and will never learn from their mistakes. The higher form of mercy, therefore—they would say—is to be willing to offer some hard feedback. By telling people the hard truth now, one spares them from having to confront it again later on, when they may have less time remaining to repair it. 

I understand their point; but I utterly reject their counsel. I reject it partly because I think they are simply wrong about human psychology. If you point out to people their flaws, they are not helped thereby to become better. More often, they simply feel discouraged. They internalize a negative view of themselves and give up. How many careers of young potential writers were cut down in the first bud of life by a casual piece of "feedback" from such would-be "helpful" critics? How many children gave up in despair because some pedant had told them a period or comma was misplaced? 

If you emphasize the positive, by contrast—and, crucially, provide specific examples of what you liked in someone else's work—then they will receive the same message, but in an encouraging way. Your silence about the parts you didn't like will speak loudly enough—believe me. And your emphasis on the parts that you did like will encourage them to build upon those foundations. It gives them a starting place from which to proceed to even better efforts—instead of leaving them feeling defeated by referring to the one area in which they are perhaps less adept. 

But the even deeper reason why I reject the approach of the feedback-givers is that I depart from them on fundamental philosophical grounds. After all, the advice to give people potentially hurtful feedback in the present because it will "benefit them in the long run" is essentially to argue that the ends justify the means. And the ultimate ends are precisely what I cannot be so sure of. If I could know in advance that all of my words of narrative criticism were entirely accurate, then I might agree we should sacrifice present enjoyment to the future—but how can I know that? And what makes the other critics so cocksure? 

This was the other great theme of that book I was talking about in my previous post this morning—Walter Pater's historical novel Marius the Epicurean. I did not want to leave the topic of that great novel without emphasizing this other aspect of it, which I found so congenial (were I not to discuss it here, I might leave the wrong impression of the book's overall value to me). For all that Pater's novel contains some aesthetic meditations on Christianity with which I am out of sympathy, after all, it also discloses an admirable suspension of judgment—a humane, Montaigne-style skepticism—on precisely this question of "ends." 

Pater's novel tells the story of a second century Roman, as I mentioned in the previous post—but it is far from being a historical novel in the Walter Scott vein. There is little here of plot or incident. There's scarcely a line of spoken dialogue in the whole book, other than that which Pater quotes directly in his lengthy transcribed passages from various works of classical literature. It is as if he had decided he would not speak for the ancients unless it be in their own words. What the novel really is, therefore, is a kind of fictional spiritual and intellectual biography—it is a book of ideas, not of affairs. 

And one of the core ideas running through the book is the protagonist's uncertainty as to ultimate ends—and his consequent unwillingness knowingly to inflict pain on others, however fleetingly, in the service of them. In the skeptical philosophy he adopts in his youth, Marius takes it as his doctrine that we can know nothing of the future; nor of the past either. We inhabit, instead, an ephemeral present—a mere moment amidst the ceaseless change of the Heraclitean flux. And so, he concludes from this, one can never justify sacrificing the feelings of others for the sake of some hypothetical and unknowable future. 

It is a truism, after all, that the people in history who have been most certain have always been the most cruel. Those with the faith to move mountains are also generally the ones with the faith to erect scaffolds. They feel entitled to this cruelty toward their enemies because of their certainty of ultimate ends. And perhaps, if one could know they were correct about these ends, they would in fact be justified. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote in an essay on Trotsky—if he really could be sure that a Bolshevik revolution would usher in the golden age, he would be right there with them leading the OGPU. 

But the problem is that we cannot be sure of such things—no one has yet found any ground for certainty on these or similar matters. And so, one is hardly in a position to justify the suffering of others in their name. 

If one cannot be sure of ultimate ends, one cannot allow them to justify the means that bring pain to other people. What one can do, by contrast, is to live in a way that brings the least pain possible in the here and now to the people with whom one comes in contact. As Marius puts it, if the ends cannot justify the means, one can nevertheless live in such a way that "the means should justify the ends"—or the absence thereof. 

Hence Marius's utter aversion to present cruelty in any form. Some of the most powerful sections of the novel concern his sense of isolated revulsion before the spectacle of the ancient Roman blood sports—in which innocent nonhuman creatures are slaughtered in sadistic ways for entertainment—and in which human creatures will be slaughtered again with equal cruelty before the novel's conclusion. The torture of animal kind and humankind alike flies in the face of Marius's central promise to himself: "to add nothing, not so much as a transient sigh, to the great total of men's unhappiness." 

This was the same covenant that I made with myself, in refusing to offer negative feedback. The stakes all around are lower, I concede: but the principle is the same. I cannot accept the suggestions of the advocates of "constructive criticism," because there is nothing of which I feel so certain in matters of art or life that I would feel confident causing pain to others in its name. I am not so certain that my notion of the "correct" structure of a mystery story is so faultless that I would diminish someone else's. For all I know, their incomplete mystery is a great work of postmodern art. Or the poop story the work of the next Proust. 

In Pater's novel, to be sure, Marius eventually outgrows the most dogmatic forms of his youthful skepticism—but he does not shed it entirely. To the end—even as he considers joining the nascent Christian church and finds himself powerfully attracted to its rituals—he remains more an observer of the religious movements of his age than a participant. And his original determination persists: though he fail in all other things, at least he should cause no pain. The principle of "First, do no harm" could be engraved over his headstone; and it is the principle I adopt for my contest judging as well. 

To the extent that Marius sheds his skepticism as to ultimate ends, by the book's end, it is not to become convinced of the necessity of suffering or killing for some creed or sense of "correctness." To the contrary, it is to elevate the principle of non-cruelty, the covenant to do no harm, to the position of itself the one core truth—the one ultimate aim and end that justifies human existence. In all of this, Pater—though writing in the 19th century, about a man in the 2nd century—sounds much more like a man of the 20th. In the face of absurdity, he seems to imply, be can at least choose compassion. 

There is more here of Camus or Kafka, that is to say, than one might have expected to find in an 1885 novel. There are passages in which Pater seems to anticipate the themes and preoccupations of the 20th century existentialists. Read Chapter 25, with its haunting words about "man's radically hopeless condition." Read how Marius finds the only thing that can redeem this meaningless suffering to be humankind's protest against the suffering itself—its rejection of the ineradicable root evil in the world; its incurable pity for its victims. 

To the extent that Marius (or Pater) conceives of this redemptive force of compassion under the form of the deity, it is only as a shadowy "companion" figure—not a triumphant king of the universe who has already thrust down the forces of evil, but as someone who is engaged alongside humankind in the same basic struggle against the universe's abject and meaningless suffering: a "divine 'Assistant'," as Pater calls it, with "a heart, even as ours." And later: "something higher than he, yet kin to him [...] like a friendly hand upon his shoulder." 

This "companion" deity that Marius conjures (merely, he concedes, as an hypothesis, not (heaven forbid) another certainty—for Marius knows well the world cannot afford another one of those), in his final meditations before death, are not so much the Christian God as they are that mysterious figure who appears for a moment in the final passage of Kafka's The Trial, and who seems for just an instant to be uttering a cry of protest against the unjust proceedings: "Who was this? A friend? A good man? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one man? Was it all of mankind?" (Lück translation)

Pater describes Marius's ultimate belief system as "humanist," in the deepest sense. And this is surely where that humanism is most apparent. It is his belief in a humankind that finds dignity and redemption in the very fact of its continued existence in the face of an absurd and empty universe—a universe without ultimate ends or any other certainties to go on. "I wonder sometimes," reflects Marius in his confessional diary in Chapter 25, "in what way man has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far [....] It is as if the increase of knowledge were but an increasing revelation of the radical hopelessness of his position."

The fact that humankind has endured at all—and not only endured, but managed to cry out against it, with the voice of compassion—"a permanent protest established in the world, a plea," as Pater puts it—that confers upon humankind its redemption. This is the humanism of Camus. Or of the poet Stevie Smith, when she wrote of "Man" as one who "Beaten, corrupted, dying/In his own blood lying/Heaves up an eye above/Cries Love, love./It is his virtue needs explaining/Not his failing."

Does not Marius likewise conclude, at the end of his philosophical journey, that "In the bare fact of having loved, he seemed to find, even amidst this foundering of the ship, that on which his soul might 'assuredly rest and depend.'"

If that is indeed all we have to go on—and I think it is; if we can be certain in this life of no ultimate ends, except perhaps this one alone—that in a world without fixed ends, we should at least not magnify suffering; we should at least not add to each other's pains—if such is the universe we have been given, then we should never grant ourselves the unholy privilege of dealing out present suffering to others in the name of what we presumptuously declare to be the ultimate good. 

If we knowingly harm others with our barbed criticism—even if we self-righteously think it is for their own good; if we knowingly add even a "transient sigh," as Pater puts it, to the "great total of men's unhappiness"—then we have already failed in our first and chief task. Not only have we shown a dearth of charity, we have caused overt harm. We have violated the first principle—the fundamental covenant Marius makes with himself, in even his most skeptical period, and which can scarcely be improved upon by human beings. 

The lesson is not hard. It is simple. It is even trite, when you strip it of its context and philosophical preliminaries. We do not have long on this Earth; we cannot know where we have been before, or where—if anywhere—we are going afterward. So we should at least not hurt each other while we are here. As Philip Larkin wrote, in the conclusion of one of his poems: "we should be careful/ Of each other, we should be kind/ While there is still time."