Pity, remorse – and disgust
 A
version of this piece was published in the Independent
on the 6th September 2003, under the headline ‘Something
truly disgusting has been uncovered by the death of
Dr Kelly’.
For many, the emotion that will have dominated this
latest week of the Hutton inquiry is disgust. The testimony
of David Kelly’s wife and daughter, and that of
the psychiatrist, has shown us a picture of a decent
man harassed and humiliated to the point where he saw
no alternative but to kill himself. The pity we feel
for his family has been compounded by horror at the
callousness of almost everyone else – for few of
the leading players are emerging from this investigation
with very much credit.
We may well suspect that the shoddy behaviour we have been
presented with – on the part of journalists and their
managers, politicians and civil servants – is nothing
out of the ordinary, though it is rare that it should be so
publicly, and minutely, reviewed and regretted. And indeed
I can hear a voice in my ear that protests: Come on, be realistic!
Life is always a dirty compromise. It demands hard choices,
and hard choices produce casualties. The machinery of state
is just that, machinery: and inevitably people who take risks
around it (as well as some who are just unfortunate) are going
to get mangled; but we’d all be worse off if the machine
was switched off.
And then there’s another voice that wonders if it really
is appropriate to agonise so much over the death of one man.
Thousands of others have died over the last six months in
pursuit of what this government – or, perhaps more precisely,
this prime minister – believes to be right. What does
it say of our society that we have scarcely been troubled
by all the ‘collateral damage’ in Iraq – none
of whom, it may be added, had any choice in their deaths –
while we spend weeks in an inquisition into the fate of one
Briton?
There is force in both arguments, for sure, though both seem
heartless. There is indeed something both unrealistic and
arbitrary in the huge expenditure of emotional energy we have
seen over the last four weeks. And certainly compassion can
be a misleading, and even dangerous, feeling. Most of us recognise,
for example, that we would probably not be living in the freedom
we enjoy today if our parents or grandparents had been squeamish
in waging war against not just the Nazis but the ordinary
people they pressed into their service.
I discovered the truth of this myself this week in a small
(though not, I believe, trivial) matter. On Monday, I found
a young woodpigeon, almost adult but not yet able to fly,
stranded in the gutter after falling out of its nest. No doubt
a proper ruthlessness would have left it to its natural fate,
but instead I gave in to a surge of pity. I wanted, in my
own modest way, to be like God to it: to be its saviour.
As the day wore on, it became obvious that the bird was too
frightened to eat or drink, and it seemed certain to die of
dehydration. Perhaps I should have put it back where I found
it, for a cat or a fox to kill it; but I decided it would
be more merciful to dispatch it myself. Of course, my own
soft-heartedness prevented me from doing the job quickly,
and I who had wanted to be kind ended up feeling shamed and
disgusted by my own unintended cruelty.
Of course, there’s a voice in my ear that tells me not
to be sentimental. A pigeon’s brain is too rudimentary
to register terror or pain as we experience them, however
its eye blinked at me to the end. And another voice tells
me how absurd it is to feel so badly about the fate of a bird
when the choices I make every day cause suffering to far more
sentient beings. These voices are sensible; but I can’t help
feeling that there is a deeper wisdom that eludes them.
The truth is that God calls us to live lives of compassion.
We know that if we could open our hearts fully to even a thousandth
of the distress in the world it would blow our emotional fuses
and paralyse us with remorse. How could we buy even one meal
for ourselves while we knew there was one human being starving
to death? And yet we acknowledge that, dangerous as our compassion
can sometimes be and misplaced as our self-disgust often is,
they are expressions of the best part of us.
Is it inappropriate to draw a parallel between Dr Kelly and
a young bird? I don’t think so. Inevitably, the rigours
of the world thicken our skins and harden our heads if not
our hearts. We wouldn’t survive if it wasn’t so.
But, caught in the tension between better nature and common
sense, we need to embrace those sudden shafts of compassion
and remorse – and even disgust – whenever they break
through.
However arbitrary in a way, however unrealistic, it has been
good for me to ponder the very powerful emotions stirred up
by what I did to a bird. And, however arbitrary and unrealistic,
it is crucial for the health of our society that we reflect
on the feelings of pity and horror that the fate of David
Kelly – out of all the thousands of victims of this latest
war – has stirred up in us.
© The Independent 2003
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