Some questions are asked in a spirit of inquiry, to obtain answers, but others are asked to intimidate or badger or coerce agreement with a point of view and establish the irreproachable virtue of the persons who ask them. I received such a question by email the other day from the Lancet, one of the most important medical journals in the world. Addressing me by my first name (already sufficient to irritate me), it asked me, “Do you care about the health of our planet?”
Frankly, the answer is that I don’t. Planets, unlike dogs, are not the kind of thing I can feel affection or concern for. My bank account occupies my mind more than the health of the planet. I am not even sure that planets can be healthy or unhealthy, any more than they can be witty or self-effacing. To call a planet healthy is to make what philosophers used to call a category mistake. This is not to say that I wish the earth any harm; on the contrary. Indeed, in a multiple-choice examination, I might even tick the box for wishing the world well rather than ill, at least if I had any reason for wanting to pass. [amazon asin=1853262056&template=*lrc ad (right)]
There is something deeply Pecksniffian about the question. Mr. Pecksniff, you might remember, is a character in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, a religious hypocrite who names his daughters Charity and Mercy—“not unholy names, I think,” he tells us. But in action, Mr. Pecksniff’s self-proclaimed love of humanity is a screen for his complete lack of scruple. He loves humanity but he swindles people.
As befits an era in which virtual reality is more important to many people than reality itself, the expression of high-flown sentiment is now taken by many as the major part or even the whole of virtue. The most virtuous person is he who expresses the most all-encompassing benevolence at the highest level of abstraction. I felt like writing back to the editor of the Lancet (only he wouldn’t read it) that I disagreed with his discriminatory planetism: that I cared only for the health of the universe, or universes, if the speculations of the astrophysicists about the existence of other universes turned out to be true.
