Playing Monopoly as a child, I soon learned that being sent to jail was disadvantageous early in the game, since it prevented me from landing on unowned sites and taking the opportunity to buy them and build up my property empire. By contrast, spending time in jail was highly advantageous later in the game since it offered me a safe-haven from where I could avoid the risk of landing on property sites – heavily developed with houses or hotels – owned by my competitors. Being in jail, from time to time, was just part of playing the game, there was no shame involved.
Later in life, I learned about people who had gone to jail for reasons of principle. Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for his opposition to the Apartheid regime, more than half of which were spent on Robben Island where he was forced to undertake hard labour in a quarry, and where he was allowed one visit – for thirty minutes – per year. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an open letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, which became a key document of the American Civil Rights movement. Mohandas Gandhi, one of King’s role models, had been a regular guest of British jails in South Africa and India, deliberately breaking unjust laws and accepting imprisonment as the consequence, to draw attention to the iniquities of colonial rule. In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, from whose writings Gandhi would draw inspiration, spent a night in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes, which he feared would help to fund the American war against Mexico, to which he strongly objected. If we assume that the laws are just and that the courts follow due process, then imprisonment is badge of shame, but there are occasions when the laws are not just and the legal processes are faulty, and in these cases, I came to understand, being sent to jail might be considered a badge of honour.
A few days ago, while idly looking for some information using an internet search engine, I came across a small section of a story that mentioned someone I had known well when we were at college together. This snippet of text, from a reputable British news source and published just over two years ago, reported that he had recently been sent to prison. I was taken by surprise. What might my former friend have done that would lead to him being sent to jail? Had he taken a stand on an issue of principle, and like Thoreau refused to pay his taxes because they were funding the military industrial complex? Perhaps, it was not him at all, but a different person who shared the same name. I clicked on the link and read the whole story, immediately recognising my former friend from the photograph that accompanied the article. Then I read, with shock – I am not often speechless, but then I was – that he was now serving the first of two prison terms, each of seven years and to run consecutively, having twice been convicted of rape. No reasons of principle here, no badges of honour: I felt only shame; mostly for him but a little for me too.
I had not seen him for around fifteen years. Although we were friends during our student years, we only saw each other occasionally after we graduated, perhaps once every two years. Although we both lived in London, we both had busy jobs, had both married and started families, had both made other friends. It is not unusual for college acquaintances to drift apart once college is over. I have no recent knowledge, therefore, about what he believes, how he lives, how he behaves at work and home. What I remember clearly, however, was that he had been the leading member of the college’s left-wing student society, an activist who championed the underdog, a fierce critic of privilege, an opponent of unjust distributions of wealth and power, and a regular attender of demonstrations and protests. He and I argued about politics, for sure, but from broadly similar positions, and mostly when we were marching together, or printing and distributing leaflets, or in the college bar after a meeting on some issue that we both took an interest in. If you had asked me back then, I could have imagined that one day he might have gone to jail on a matter of principle, or as the result of an act of civil disobedience. I would never have predicted that he would end up in prison for repeated sex crimes. (Note: as far as I can tell from the news reports, he initially pleaded not guilty in both cases, but changed his plea to guilty during the second case.)
Since my initial dismay at discovering this news, I have spent several days reflecting on why I was surprised and shocked to discover what had become of my former friend, and the harm he has done to others. My daughter, who is more perceptive than I was at her age, pointed out that many young men who champion left-wing causes, often do so in a way that reflects their power and sense of entitlement. Women friends of hers are routinely lectured by self-proclaimed “feminist-supporting” men wanting to explain oppression and injustice to them, as if they were incapable of working it out for themselves, and as if their own personal experience were of less value than a stream of theoretical jargon, plucked from woke websites. She also observes that sometimes women do this too, talking over each other rather than listening to each other, ignoring the variety of different experiences that women from different cultures, classes and countries might have. Radical thought is no guarantee of radical practice; the oppressed are sometimes squashed by their friends as well as by their enemies.
That said, there is quite a big step from being a boorish lefty male student, quick to assume they have all the answers to society’s problems, to becoming a middle-aged man convicted on two counts or rape.
There is a famous ancient saying, attributed to the philosopher Heraclitus, that “character is destiny” (Fragment 119). The idea is that what we do in life, who we become and how we live, is not the outcome of fate, not something written in the stars at our birth, not decided for us by the gods, but rather the product of our own personality and choices. It is important to note that there are two starkly different ways of rejecting the idea of fate: one focuses on character as something we have, a permanent feature of our identity, the other focuses on decisions we make through the course of our lives, which might not be consistent through time. If I apply this dichotomy to my former friend, it suggests two rather different explanations: perhaps he always had a bad character, but when he was a student he disguised it by the pretence of caring about rectifying injustices, however in later life his true nature reasserted itself through his predatory attacks on women; or, perhaps when he was a young man he made good choices about his beliefs and values, and surrounded himself with like-minded people who supported those choices, but as he grew older, for some reason he lost the ability to choose well and the people around him no longer provided good advice or help. The first idea emphasises the continuity of underlying character, the second the variable quality of our decision-making.
When I worked in the financial services industry, many firms relied on the idea that each member of staff had a permanent character, details of which they tried to discover during interview processes, when they hired, and through personal development courses, when they pretended to train. One of the standard tools for working out what sort of person we might be is the Myers-Briggs test, which I have taken – reluctantly – a couple of times. I have always been sceptical about this test, in part because it seemed so easy to claim to behave in a certain way, without the need to provide any evidence that you had in fact behaved in that way. My stronger objection to this and similar psychometric tests is that they are usually based on the idea that our characters are formed through the combination of a few standard and invariant types. Likewise, I have always resisted the use of labels such as introvert and extravert, as if everyone falls into one or other of these categories the whole time. When asked in job interviews about my management style, I reject the question: I do not have a style, I used to say, the way I manage depends on the task that needs to be completed.
The idea that we have a character or personality that persists through life, is reflective of a standard move in philosophy, dating back to Plato, which consists of transforming verbs into nouns. Someone acts courageously, and to explain this action we appeal to an idea, or form, called “courage” which is somehow separate from the person, but constitutes a part of their character. We say of someone that she acted in a certain way because she has a certain character, and all her actions follow from the formal features of her character. If one day a courageous person, confronted by the enemy, decides to run away, we say she acted out of character. Once we have accepted this idea, we quickly learn to translate repeated actions into unvarying aspects of our personality. If a friend is late once, we excuse them. If they are regularly late, even though each instance of their lateness has a plausible explanation, we start to think of them as an unpunctual person. Their habitual lateness turns into a feature of their personality, what they do metamorphizes into who they truly are. James Joyce lampooned this idea when one of his characters in Ulysses observes that, horseness is the whatness of all horse.
I have written previously about habits, and the importance of cultivating good rather than bad ones. I understand that repeated behaviours quickly become default behaviours, and then we easily persuade ourselves that these are natural, normal, part of our character, over which we have no control. We change the unique action – the verb – into a permanent feature – the noun – and then stop thinking about whether an alternate action might have been possible. But this is to reintroduce the concept of fate under the guise of character. If we cannot choose or change our characters, then our destinies are never truly ours.
No-one is destined from birth to be unpunctual, for timeliness can be learned; and no-one is courageous by nature, we sometimes make courageous choices and at other times uncourageous choices, and most of us vacillate between these two extremes throughout our lives. The formal structure that we call character or personality is a linguistic convenience, but it tells us nothing interesting about who we really are and what we might do next. We make our lives by the way in which we act, or in some cases our refusal to act in a certain way. It is the verbs that describe our behaviour that matter, not the abstract nouns that are belatedly attached to us, to make sense of our actions after the event.
I believe that there is no such thing as fate, and no such thing as character, but only a succession of actions, some of which might be undertaken out of habit, but all of which could have been chosen differently. It follows that the burden of living a good life is one that we carry with us for the whole of our lives. Like Sisyphus, we are obliged to roll the rock of virtue up the mountain every day. We cannot make excuses for the actions of our youth, nor the actions of our maturity, as being out of character: they were and are all choices we have made. While our previous choices might influence our later choices, they by no means determine them. Sometimes foolish young men grow into wise old men; sometimes outspoken student radicals end up in jail for sex crimes.
What we do is who we are.