A Scorpion Circled by Fire

Not long ago I was sleeping in the same room with a young man of my acquaintance. In the night he began to thrash about. Since I could no longer sleep, I began a conversation.

‘You’re withdrawing?’

‘Yes.’

‘From smack?’

‘That’s right. Sometimes I drench the bed with sweat when I’m withdrawing.’

I could sympathise, remembering my own withdrawals from alcohol, which is itself a heavy drug. So I discussed the symptoms of alcoholic addiction and heroin addiction with my friend.

People may wonder why I didn’t go to the police, or get in touch with a doctor. The answer is quite simple. My friend might have found himself dumped in a mental hospital. And so often in this country the doctors have no cure for the drug user. The police can’t claim any capacity to deal with drug users, except to arrest, interrogate and perhaps indirectly convert them. The supply of drugs remains also relatively untouched by the police. I discussed this with my friend in the small hours of the morning in a Wellington flat.

‘Man, I could use some elephant,’ he said.

‘Why do you call it elephant?’

‘The second grade heroin from Hong Kong comes in yellow packets with the trade mark of a charging elephant. After all, it’s just part of business.’

‘Why is it the police pick up the little dealers and the little pushers but never the big men?’

‘I think the big man here who imports the smack from Hong Kong has far too much bread. Nobody’s going to arrest him.’

‘Perhaps they don’t know who he is?’

‘I doubt it. At any rate, they can’t stop the original stuff from coming out of Laos. The men who run it are high up in the Government. It comes out in C.I.A. planes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve heard it does. Does it matter? Somebody will be making a lot of bread out of it, and if they have a lot of bread, nobody can touch them. But I could get seven years for dealing to a friend who wanted a taste.’

‘Why do you use smack?’

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‘You know why. If the country’s full of smack, why shouldn’t I use it?’

‘It can hurt you badly.’

‘Does that matter? Look, the world’s fouled up. I don’t particularly want to live in it. Once I wanted to change it, but now I know that’s impossible. Nobody’s big enough to change it.’

‘I’ll just try to treat my friends well, and let the world pull itself to pieces. If I could see one good alternative, I mightn’t use smack. But I can’t see any.’

I don’t know whether my young friend’s comments on the social scene were just or not. But they did indicate his attitudes of mind. At some point he had had a failure of morale. I knew him well enough to know he was no slob. Alert, intelligent, imaginative, aware of social issues, he reminded me of the scorpion in the fable who stings himself to death when he is surrounded by a circle of burning kerosene.

The circle is there before the stinging begins. The sense of intense spiritual and social frustration comes before the drug-taking, though the drug-taking does not improve the situation. That is what one needs to remember. I have seen too many boys and girls, with no more than the ordinary share of hangups, wander in and out of houses, looking for acid or speed or smack.

Some people tell me I am a busybody and a fool to care about it. They tell me that the weak deserve whatever comes to them. But I know that many of the drug-users are not weak, unless it is weakness to have an active intellect and imagination and to find it intolerable to live in a world where ideals don’t work. And even if they were simply weak, I would still try to battle for them.

I do not think my own contemporaries have quite grasped the nature of the revolution of the young, whether the young use drugs or refuse to work or cease to marry or in some other way withdraw from the visible structure of our society. This revolution does not fill me with joy. I am a very conservative man. Catholics often are. I believe that marriage and work and worship and traditional pieties are necessary for the moral and mental health of human beings. I am not in favour of the revolution. But I do have a small and desperate hope of changing its direction, as a man tries to change the direction of a panic-stricken horse which is bashing itself to death on a barbed wire fence or heading for the edge of a cliff.

It is true that the revolution involves a minority. Nearly all revolutions do. But it is a steadily growing minority, and among them are many who have a residual salt and courage and initiative. In a different style of culture they might be leaders and creators. When they pass a semi-conscious vote of no confidence in our present society they are not going to be diverted by any argument or example that falls short of the most rigorous honesty.

The causes of this slow-burning subconscious non-political revolution are often discussed in a shallow fashion, as if subversive ideas were the problem. It would be more intelligent to compare the revolt of the young with those page 411 peasant revolts in Europe that occurred spontaneously when the material conditions became too hard to bear. The famous march of the Andalusian peasants on Jerez in 1892 had hunger as its driving force, the intense and unendurable hunger that gripped the villages in the winter. The slogans of the peasants happened to be anarchist. But to attribute the revolt simply to anarchism would be to forget that men prefer not to die of hunger.

In affluent countries such as our own the hunger is not a physical one. The revolution which is making the ground shift under our feet is a revolt of the spirit, generated by spiritual hunger, unconscious, bitter, not to be shaken by persuasion. People do not live by bread alone. It is useless to try to persuade those who are suffering a crisis of hope that they need not despair because they can easily acquire a large bank balance. I think the revolution is occurring because many practices of the present day have robbed both young and old of the spiritual confidence which should have been their heritage.

Civilisation is always founded on viable myths. I use the term myth in the sense of a semi-conscious view of one’s own activities and the activities of one’s neighbours that attributes value and meaning to those activities.

To win a war one needs only sufficient soldiers and armaments to subdue or exterminate the enemy. Perhaps that is the pattern of modern warfare. But to fight in a war and retain spiritual confidence one would have to believe that one’s cause was mainly just and that one’s people were exhibiting a genuine altruistic bravery.

The myth of the Military Hero is necessary for warfare without excessive demoralisation. We had that myth. I can remember Armistice Day celebrations in various schools. They were solemn and carried some real weight with the pupils. Most of them were prepared to accept at least provisionally the view that military heroes had died in just wars so that war might become unnecessary.

I think many young people of my acquaintance had a deep though hidden wish to believe that military heroism is possible. Their choice of Castro’s guerrilla lieutenant as an ikon to hang on the walls of their flats does not stem from any knowledgeable sympathy with Communism, but rather from the ancient sympathy for and identification with a resistance hero who dies in a lost cause fighting against heavy odds.

The body counts and the eighty per cent civilian casualties of the Vietnam War do not fulfil, in the eyes of most of the young, the prescription of military heroism. It is not even the atrocious character of the Vietnam fighting that affects the young most, though they do object to this strongly on account of their liberal and humanitarian training in our schools. It is chiefly the devaluing of a myth that causes bitterness and lack of social confidence. The man with the donkey at Gallipoli is of quite another breed from those who carry out a planned massacre of villagers. The young, after all, were told that the Nazis were peculiarly abhorrent precisely because they massacred page 412 villagers. The ethical about-face involved in acceptance of the Vietnam War is too difficult for many of them to achieve.

There are other myths equally important for social stability. The myth of the Happy Marriage is one. Even if many marriages are unhappy, it is helpful to society if confidence in the likelihood that one’s own marriage will be happy is not undermined. I observe with the deepest concern that among the young the myth of the Happy Marriage is rapidly becoming devalued. I rarely hear it spoken of.

The reason that so many young women will live with men outside public marriage does not mean, however, that the state of marriage as such is unacceptable to them. It means rather that they are passing a vote of no confidence in the social conformity which is a natural dimension of public marriage. They try instead to build a miniature alternate society within a semi-permanent liaison. Perhaps this is a marriage, but it is marriage without social confidence.

The myth of the Honest Businessman is continually being fractured by modern advertising. The myth of God’s Own Country is not surviving the massive and cynical despoliation by the Government of our natural resources.

The myth of the Empire on which the sun never sets, with its implication that England is our Mother, has been whittled away by our new military and economic affiliation with the United States of America.

The myth of indigenous Racial Equality is being shattered by the effect of our submerged Polynesian minority finding a more effective social and political voice.

I do not claim that all these myths had a positive social value. All the same, people cannot live without myths. They have to believe that the Wise, the True, the Good, the Beautiful, are somehow included in their social structure before they can give that society their subconscious support.

My young heroin-using friend knew that most of his teachers had not been altruistic sages but muddled time-servers; that Governments lie quite often to the people; that people young and old (and in particular those most devoted to social conformity) are sexual opportunists. He knew that Christians are, broadly speaking, no better than other people; that there is little heroism in war; that many marriages collapse under the weight of their own dullness.

He was not himself a revolutionary type but a frustrated conservative. The greatest myth of all – namely that All Problems Can Be Solved By The Use Of Human Reason – had been shot under him like a horse and he was not equipped to go on alone through the desert on foot. It was because he had believed in society, on account of his home training and his schooling, that he now began to despair. It might have been better not to have believed in the first place. In the absence of any viable myth except that of the Well-Adjusted Job-Getter, he did what they say the scorpion does when you ring him around with fire. He started to sting himself to death with a needle, both page 413 needle and poison being supplied to him for money by one of our left-handed businessmen.

You can make money out of anything in this country, even the means by which people commit suicide. The amphetamine pills, which cause greater brain damage than heroin, are in fact distributed quite legally by local firms.

I do not favour chemical solutions for spiritual and psychological problems, whether the chemical is obtained in a bar room or at the chemist’s counter. But I do recognise that the smashed myths have somehow to be replaced or reconstructed. That is why I have become a Christian guru, a barefooted and bearded eccentric, a bad smell in the noses of many good citizens.

I am concerned whether their children live or die, whether or not they themselves are concerned about it. Indeed I am sure they are concerned, though our modes of approach to the problem may differ. I will go on, then, as a practiser of voluntary poverty and a loud-mouthed critics of social injustices, more because the young ones need to know that some of us care about these things than because I have any hope of effective social change.

In the immediate view the effort might seem quite useless. It would seem much wiser, as well as more congenial, to shift into a cottage on the sea coast, and fish for crays and write poems about God, and let dog eat dog. But I am unable to do this. It might be for a number of reasons. It might even be because I love the country I was born in.

1972 (671)