There is a certain innocence in Powys’s assumption that behind all our various disguises and antics we are really at heart so many introverts of his own sort, to be saved by long solitary walks. And he had not looked hard at the political scene, even in the earlier 1930’s when he wrote the passage I quoted above, if he could imagine that modern man can be safely indifferent to ‘all the Governments, all the Revolutions and Reactions, all the economic upheavals and improvements.” The Nazis would not have left him in peace among the Welsh hills. Communists might not allow him to publish anything at all. A World Organization, regarding cheerful anarchy as treason, demanding absolute loyalty to itself, might order him to be brain-washed. And a nuclear war might leave nothing to enjoy and nobody to enjoy it. We can no longer afford to ignore the politicians; they are not simply arguing a long way off; they are busy trying to mould, shape, and colour our lives; therefore we had better discover which of them would do us the least harm.
— J.B. Priestley, “The Happy Introvert,” Essays of Five Decades
This is reasonable enough. You may not be interested in politics, as the saying goes, but politics may be interested in you. And I should note that the essay is largely laudatory of Powys; this section is included more for balance and intellectual honesty.
Yet Priestley’s objection also belongs to a familiar and apparently permanent climate of emergency. The wolf is always at the door; the time for private life is always “not now.” Sixty years later, the names and parties have changed, but the demand remains: the stakes are too high for solitary walks, obscure books, private pleasures, or political indifference. Every generation appears to have arrived at the exceptional moment when vigilance must become a vocation.
Powys, however, did not imagine himself founding a mass movement of solitary walkers. He described his philosophical books as written for “individuals of my own rather anarchistic and rather solitude-loving type.” That seems the salient fact. He was painting a vivid picture of experience as he understood it and offering it to those who might recognize themselves in it. Implicit in the offer was permission to decline. This is how people like me may live; if it is not for you, be on your way.
We have difficulty understanding such an avowal without converting it into a program. “This is good for me” sounds intellectually unfinished until it has become “This is how everyone ought to live.” A celebration is mistaken for proselytism; a temperament is examined as though it were proposed legislation. We immediately ask what would happen if everyone entered a monastery, refused political engagement, remained childless, or spent the afternoon walking over the hills. Usually nobody has suggested that everyone should.
The ghosts of Kant and Bentham hover over this habit. They were philosophical antagonists, but both sought, in different ways, a moral altitude from which individual peculiarities disappear. Kant asks us to legislate for rational beings generally; Bentham asks us to calculate the aggregate welfare. One rises into universal law, the other spreads outward into social arithmetic. We have lived so long in the climate they helped create that we mistake the disappearance of particularity for clarity.
One need never have read either man to inherit the questions they taught us to ask. Can your maxim be universalized? Does your choice produce the greatest good for the greatest number? What are its social consequences? What if everyone did it? These may be necessary questions for lawmakers and administrators. They are not necessarily the questions by which a particular life should understand itself.
Powys does not have to prove that solitary walking maximizes general welfare. He walks because walking answers to some peculiar compound of temperament, sensation, memory, landscape, and imagination. From the imagined god’s-eye view, these may look like private noise to be filtered out before moral calculation begins. From inside a life, they may be nearly everything.
Priestley’s final advice — that we discover which politicians would do us “the least harm” — reveals another difficulty. Least harm to whom? Over what interval? Measured by prosperity, liberty, equality, security, social peace, cultural continuity, or relief from suffering? What weight should each receive, and what risks should be tolerated to protect it? The political calculator cannot give an answer until someone has already decided what belongs in the calculation.
There is no cosmic set of scales. Different people will rank genuine goods differently, fear different dangers, and accept different losses. This does not mean that every judgment is equally intelligent or decent. Evidence matters; honesty matters; consequences matter. But we should be modest about the extent of our certainty. I may defend my hierarchy of goods vigorously without redescribing it as the verdict of Reason, History, Morality, or Humanity itself.
Priestley and Powys may therefore both be right within limits. Politics need not possess the center of consciousness; politics may nevertheless invade its circumference and finally reach the center. That possibility warrants some awareness. But it does not require everyone to make vigilance a calling. The preservation of private life is not an activity to be postponed until public life has been permanently settled. Public life is never permanently settled.
A decent society should not protect only those activities that can justify themselves in universal terms. It should leave room for the unscalable, the eccentric, the locally cherished, the useless in aggregate — for the things that cannot explain why everyone should do them because their value partly consists in the fact that everyone does not.
Not every good must be a general good. Some things are valuable because they give a particular life its particular shape. The point of preserving civilization cannot be merely to preserve the machinery by which civilization is preserved. Powys’s solitary walk is one of the things the machinery is for.