BEWARE OF THE FINGER-POINTING DO-GOODERS

Moral prescriptions fraught with hypocrisy

A doctor in the Netherlands has made it known that henceforth he will not
allow himself to be consulted by anyone who has smoked within the past six
months. ``Spending time on people who willingly and knowingly damage their
own and others' health,'' he says, ``is a waste of energy.''

This sounds to me like a prescription for medical unemployment. What should
we doctors do without the great armies of drinkers, fornicators, gluttons
and sloths which make up the human race?

We should have a thin time of it indeed, for the lamentable fact is that,
statistically speaking, the great majority of human suffering is
self-inflicted. Whole medical disciplines, such as venereology, would
disappear overnight like ancient civilizations stricken by famine if people
were suddenly to start behaving in accordance with the dictates of such
doctors. For whom, one might ask, is our Dutch doctor conserving his
invaluable energy?

It is curious (but no accident, as the Marxists used to say) that a
Savonarola of the ashtrays should have arisen in the Netherlands, a country
which is famed for its zero intolerance of such activities as the smoking
of dope and the display of scantily clad but brightly lit prostitutes --
now known to our most illustrious medical journals as ``sex workers'' -- in
the front windows of magnificent 17th-century houses.

There is, as I have always suspected, a law of the conservation of
intolerance. The sheer joy of condemning others for what they do is simply
too great for humanity to forgo altogether. And when condemnation can be
translated into action to deny others what they want, the pleasure is
completely irresistible. Non-judgmentalism is thus a chimera: for the urge
to pass judgment springs eternal, and will not be cheated of a prey.

It isn't surprising in the circumstances that permissiveness also has its
ironies. On the one hand we have become so exercised about sexual abuse
that parents have become hesitant to embrace their own children for fear of
the lurking social worker; on the other, we incite our children to a
premature obsession with sex, as a glance at any magazine for 12-year-olds
will demonstrate, and encourage, indeed enjoin, doctors to connive at the
commission of thousands of sex crimes daily by the prescription of
contraceptives to children who are below the legal age of consent.

Or take the question of language. On one hand, organizations up and down
the land hold excruciating meetings to decide upon language which is
inoffensive to all (social workers have even been known to discuss whether
coffee without milk should be described as ``black'' or ``non-white''), it
being assumed that everyone's sensibility is composed of gossamer.

On the other hand, half the population seems incapable of uttering the
simplest of propositions without resort to the grossest of insults and
profanities. Quite often I have to tell patients to cut out the swearing
because we've only got five minutes for the consultation.

Then again, our culture is impregnated -- if that is the word I am
searching for -- with sexual images of an explicitness which would have
shocked our immediate predecessors. And yet relations at a personal level
between the sexes are becoming ever more fraught with difficulty,
accusation and counter-accusation. Jokes and innuendoes are treated as
crimes, while public displays of actual sexuality are not only permitted
but encouraged and rewarded. It is all rather odd.

I can't think of any age which has preserved a perfect balance between what
it permits and what it forbids, what it tolerates and what it does not.
There never was a golden age of wisdom, when the claims of morality were
reconciled with those of personal freedom; and the obsessions of each age
seem foolish or wicked to the age which comes after it. There is nothing
funnier, after all, than the moral panics of our parents' generation.

But what of our doctor's stand? Any practitioners following his example
could end up going further than denying treatment to smokers which their
smoking would in itself render futile; they could be denying them
anti-malarial prophylaxis if they travel to a malarious area, or a plaster
of Paris for a broken leg.

It looks, in short, as if our doctor wants to punish people for being evil
in his eyes. In this, of course, he is only a few short steps in advance of
many anti-smoking enthusiasts.

I am sure that our man did not come to his decision lightly, and wrestled
manfully with the abstract philosophical problems to which his new personal
policy is his answer.

In all other respects, he may even be the epitome of an average and
conscientious Dutch doctor: killing off his patients whenever they ask for
it (provided they don't smoke, of course).

The desire to do good in the abstract is sometimes accompanied by, or is
even a manifestation of, the most ferocious misanthropy and sadism.

It is sometimes not altogether easy to distinguish do-gooders from ill-wishers.