‘What led
Cain to kill Abel? Murderous rage is not as we think a form of insanity. We’d
like to think it is, you know: we’d love to imagine the urge to put another
person to death is simply a species of madness, a break in the normal habits of
human thinking. We really long for it to be psychopathic.’
Bryan’s
tea cup rattled on his knee as spoke, sitting in the armchair in Graham’s
study.
‘Or maybe
the result of the forces that shape us as individuals – our deprivations or our
upbringing, or perhaps even our genes. Wouldn’t that comfort us if we could in
some way produce a kind of circuit board of causes for our actions tracing
right back into the distant past, beyond even our own coming into being; if we
could say, in the presence of a terrible present moment, as we see the body of
the one we’ve killed fall prone on to the grave stone of some long-dead child,
that this instant was already programmed in? That we had at that moment no
other choice but to do what it was that we in fact did do?
‘These are
not new thoughts’, said Graham. ‘The Greeks got there first, didn’t they?’
‘That they
did, that they did. But this thought is pressing with particular force upon us
in the present time, since the scientific academy is claiming that knowledge of
genes and evolutionary biology will be able to provide a causal explanation for
everything that is – which, in a way, is a way of blaming not ourselves but God
himself for it all.’
‘I don’t
follow you?’
‘Ah –
well, like a huge field of toppling dominos, the domino that falls falls
because the one before it fell, no less and no more. And the one before it, and
so on, right back to the start so that you can in the end say that the only
freely independent action is the first one – the act of creation itself. Which
means the only single moral act in the entire universe ever was that first act
from which all the others sprang and still spring. Cain thwarted Abel, but God
made Cain. Whoever swung the blow that killed poor Ma’afu was simply the
instrument of destiny. The horror of being human is that we are gifted with the
ability to observe ourselves in the act which we cannot it seems stop, even as
we do it. We have this feeling in our nightmares – you know those nightmares
where you are sure you have done the most terrible of things and you cannot,
even as you wake, shake the feeling that you have been exposed for the fraud
that you undoubtedly are?
‘Well,
yeah-’
‘But this
is too convenient. Of course, theology tells us that we are to be held
accountable for what we ourselves do – which implies that we are genuinely the
doers of deeds. We do, we are doers, even as we are entangled in a web of
causes and influences. Thinking apart from the theological it becomes difficult
of course; though I am inclined to say that the experience of feeling as if we
and others too ought to be held responsible for what we do is enough. Even if
we can’t give a coherent explanation for that feeling – not yet – we still have
to live within it.
‘So would
you say that even if we found out that we were living within a dream, in a
complete fantasy world, we would still be accountable for acting in that
world-’
‘Well,
yes. We are still conscious of making choices. Though we must admit that it is
more complicated than that, we still bear the burden of making them, don’t we?
Whoever cracked the back of Ma’afu’s skull is certainly a victim of living in
the world. But you can be a victim and a
perpetrator. We all are.’
