The Necessity of Revolution

Extract

He is an inept apologist who urges that if the poor suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich too suffer the pangs of indigestion, that surfeit is no less painful than want. It is a mischievous casuistry that reminds us that nervous prostration is as often an attendant of prolonged satisfaction as of perennial anxiety as to where the next meal is coming from. Happiness is indeed relative to our wants, which are limited by our environment and by individual and social temperament. But it is dangerous to argue that between this class and that there is nothing to choose so far as the subjective enjoyment of life is concerned. In the brute economy, the lives of sheep-devouring wolves and wolf-devoured sheep enjoy doubtless the same average of pain and gratification; we can predicate of each vessel the same fullness according to its capacity in nature’s, scale. But Dives and Lazarus are not (I mean in the subjective order) the analogues of sheep and wolf. For Lazarus is a man: Dives too: the primate mammal, homo sapiens; though each may feel some difficulty in predicating it of the other.

These are incredulous times and we must be very careful. We are most of us as fatuous when we explicate the problem of pain as when we attempt to analyse the economy of its distribution amongst men. We remember having it explained to us in early youth that pain is primarily a prophylactic whose function is to sound the alarm of lesion and disease lest (fatally) they go unperceived.