Somerset Maugham on risk

W. Somerset Maugham
(1874 - 1965)

W. Somerset Maugham was one of Britain’s most popular fiction writers during the 1930s. He is somewhat neglected now, although his novels are still occasionally turned into films. His short stories often express the precariousness of life.

Somerset Maugham’s attitude to risk may be gleaned from his story ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman’, which describes a (presumably fictitious) book about poker. The author of this book is said to have

no patience with the persons who condemn the most agreeable pastime that has been invented, namely gambling, because risk is attached to it. Every transaction in life is a risk, he truly observes, and involves the question of loss and gain. ‘To retire to rest at night is a practice that is fortified by countless precedents, and it is generally regarded as prudent and necessary. Yet it is surrounded by risks of every kind.’ [1]

This attitude to uncertainty, and taking chances, may be compared with Nietzsche’s approach to risk-taking, as expressed in The Gay Science:

the secret of realising the largest productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live in danger! Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! [2]

1. W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories, William Heinemann, 1976.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 283.

The symbolism of the pearl

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:
Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

Matthew 13:45-46

This saying is usually interpreted as illustrating the great value of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the need to sacrifice everything in order to enter it. However, nowadays readers do not necessarily appreciate the dramatically high value that a pearl represented at the time of Jesus.

Before the invention of diving equipment, pearl fishing was extremely laborious and dangerous. Often slaves or prisoners would be forced to do the work. To obtain a few pearls required harvesting thousands of oysters, from depths of up to 100 feet. Burst ear drums were common, and many divers were killed by sharks or by drowning.

First century geographer Isidore of Parthax wrote that “pearl divers run into danger when they thrust their hands straight into the open oyster, for it closes up and their fingers are often cut off, and sometimes they perish on the spot”.*

According to Pliny’s Natural History, Cleopatra once boasted that “on a single entertainment she would expend ten millions of sesterces” and that “she herself would swallow the ten millions”. She proceeded to make good her boast by drinking one of the pearls from her earrings, dissolved in a glass of vinegar.** The value of a sestertius in today’s money has been estimated to be around one pound, which suggests that the value of that one pearl was about £10 million.

The image of a pearl probably no longer conveys the order of magnitude of value intended by the originator of the saying.

In the Hymn of the Pearl, a classic Gnostic myth, the Pearl is an important symbol. A prince, the hero of the story, is sent down into Egypt (representing the physical world) to retrieve the Pearl, which is guarded by a serpent. He charms the serpent so that it becomes unthreatening, and takes the Pearl back to his royal parents. Here the Pearl symbolises something of tremendous value which has been locked up in the physical world and needs to be released.


* Isidore of Parthax, The Parthian Stations, quoted in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae.
** Natural History, Book 9, chapter 58. If the story is true, Cleopatra would probably have had to crush the pearl first in order for it to dissolve with sufficient speed.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position.
I need people to provide moral support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Does the idea of ‘social justice’ lead to atrocities?

A couple of years ago there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled ‘Intelligence — born smart, born equal, born different’.

According to the Radio Times review of the programme,

The analysis of inherited intelligence is something of a moral maze ... [Does research on this topic] really threaten all our utopian ideas of equality?

Francis Galton
(1822 - 1911)

In 1869 Francis Galton published his book Hereditary Genius, exploring the possible genetic basis of high ability. The idea of hereditary ability had already been of long standing when Galton’s book appeared.

The concept of an ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) as a measurable predictor of academic success only started to become of serious interest with the rise in state education and the desire to grade people on a nationwide basis. However, IQ soon became unfashionable again, perhaps because some studies suggested there was a significant inherited component to it, which did not fit with the politics of the time. And so research on IQ was gradually expunged from academic awareness.

IQ began to be referred to as ‘the false hypothesis’, as if it had been intrinsically bound up with the assertion of hereditary ability, whereas in fact the heredity idea had been around since well before the nineteenth century. Dismissing the concept of IQ as dubious also made the idea of heredity per se taboo in academic circles, and it now appears to have become something that is not even ‘talked about in polite society’.

According to a review of the programme in the Daily Mail, Galton’s ideas

were taken up with lethal enthusiasm in many countries in the early 20th century, leading to the theory of eugenics, sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ and, ultimately, Nazi genocide.

This of course is the standard way in which the concepts of heritability and innate intelligence are nowadays made to seem controversial, to the point that it supposedly becomes reasonable to suppress discussion of them. The argument is that they are somehow responsible for the Holocaust, as well as other atrocities.

An alternative argument, which seems no less plausible, is that what made the Holocaust, the Gulags, and various other genocides and human rights abuses possible was support for the tenet that

the collective has a right to interfere with individuals, provided it is done for the benefit of society.

If it were true that commitment to this tenet makes atrocities more likely, and one applied the same line of reasoning as is used to justify suppression of the discussion of IQ, it would follow that concepts such as ‘the interests of society’, the ‘right of the majority’, ‘social justice’ or ‘state planning’ should be regarded as ethically dubious, since their use tends to provide support for the tenet. This would point towards such concepts being avoided in discussion.

However, in practice this line of reasoning is never applied, or even considered.

A version of this post was published in 2014.