Commentary
One of the most remarkable, though far from the most alarming, video sequences to emerge from the events in Paris on Oct. 17 showed a young woman jogging through scenes of riot and devastation, seemingly oblivious to what was happening around her.
She needed to do her 10,000 steps a day (or whatever number she had chosen for herself) and get her pulse up to a certain number of beats per minute for a certain length of time, and she was going to succeed come hell or high water.
She wouldn’t let a large-scale civil disturbance, or smoke and tear gas, stop her or get in her way. She dodged people and things in her path with an almost superb indifference.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as I watched this video, whether to admire her devotion to completing a transcendent task or be irritated by the sheer solipsism and self-obsession she seemed to display.
We are never very far from philosophical questions. In general, I think that it is an excellent (and very necessary) quality to be able to remove or abstract oneself mentally from the flux of daily existence in order to contemplate higher matters and pursue higher ends.
The ability to lose, not to find, oneself is the precondition of a fulfilled life. On the other hand, complete disregard for others is hardly an admirable quality, either, unless one is content to be a complete hermit in the Syrian desert.
The question naturally arises as to what constitutes a higher matter to contemplate or a higher end to pursue. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who thought that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain was the whole purpose of life, and that bringing about the greatest happiness of the greatest number was the basis of morality, denied that any source of pleasure was superior to any other.
“Prejudice apart,” he wrote, “the game of push-pin [a simple children’s game of the 17th and 18th centuries] is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.”
This strikes us, or at any rate, me, as shockingly philistine and unrealistic. It is uncivilized.
Moreover, for it to work on a philosophical level, it requires that all pleasures be measurable on a single scale, as temperature or length can be measured: that the pleasure of eating a sausage can be compared directly to the pleasure of listening to a Mozart quintet. Eating a sausage gives me n units of pleasure, whereas listening to a Mozart quintet gives me 2n units of pleasure; therefore, listening to a Mozart quintet is twice as valuable to me as eating a sausage. This is all ridiculous.
On the other hand, if pleasures, or any other kinds of desiderata, are incommensurable—if there is no common unit of measure by which one can quantify their value—how can one claim that one is preferable to, or higher than, another, that actually there are pleasures or desiderata to be had preferable to or higher than that derived from playing push-pin?
I feel very strongly that this is the case, but how do I prove it? How do I avoid the accusation that I am merely smuggling in my own tastes and preferences in the guise of objective superiority?
This philosophical question is far too difficult for me to answer, so I return to the woman who jogged her way to health through scenes of chaos and devastation. My admiration for her did not last long and soon gave way to my more customary irritation.
I confess to a visceral and no doubt unreasonable dislike of joggers, who never seem to be enjoying themselves, rather the reverse, but who also manage to convey or carry with them an aura of moral superiority over non-joggers. They, at least, the joggers, are doing everything possible to maintain their health, unlike us sluggards who are content merely to walk.
After all, to stay healthy as long as possible is the moral duty of all citizens given the cost of healthcare, which is borne by the rest of the population, either directly through taxes or indirectly through insurance premiums. To fail to look after one’s health, therefore, is to impose unnecessary and avoidable costs on others, which is immoral. Joggers, though they may appear to be self-absorbed, especially when they jog with earphones to cut themselves off from everything about them, are doing the world a service.
Cyclists are somewhat similar. Of course, there is nothing wrong with cycling as such; it is even enjoyable, and insofar as it reduces pollution in big cities, it is a very good, laudable thing.
The problem arises when cyclists seem to fall in love with their own virtue and think that it confers on them rights not enjoyed by others, that is to say, their moral inferiors who do not cycle. Because they reduce pollution compared with what it would be if they chose other means of transport, they do not feel obliged to obey traffic signals. Traffic lights are not for them: They automatically have the right of way, so it is not enough for pedestrians to follow the instructions at crossings; they also have to look out for cyclists who are saving the world from global warming.
More than once, in more than one city, cyclists disobeying traffic lights have almost run me down while I was crossing the road. Far from being apologetic, these cyclists have been angry at me for my carelessness. I have a friend of nearly my age who was run down by a cyclist and who broke her hip in her fall. She was awarded compensation in court, but money cannot fully compensate for pain and lost time: another case of incommensurability.
The bicyclist was insistent to the very end that he was in the right: It was his unalterable opinion that my friend should have looked where he, the cyclist, was going, even though she had the right of way. Because cyclists emit so little carbon dioxide, the onus and responsibility always seem to fall on others.
How easy it is to claim moral impunity for oneself! The rioters in France have long claimed it and, in effect, have been awarded it by an impotent state.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
