A quarter of a century ago, following a family tragedy, a rabbi from the US wrote a book designed to help people in his situation. He called it When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and it sold millions. What Harold Kushner sought to resolve was the old conundrum of why, if God is all-powerful and God is also good, he dumps upon the righteous. The conclusion was that God doesn't actually do these bad things himself, he simply doesn't interfere to stop them -- because if he did get involved then we'd be less human.
Unfortunately, Kushner never got round to the self-help book that we all needed this week, the one entitled When Good Things Happen to Bad People, or how to deal with the unbearable spectacle of the wicked (or their families) prospering, when their victims (and us) don't.
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Just yesterday one newspaper revealed that Primrose Shipman, the wife of Britain's biggest serial killer, will -- if she lives till she's 80 -- have received ?500,000 in pension payments on behalf of her self-slaughtered husband. Norman Brennan of the Victims of Crime Trust told a reporter: "It is absolutely staggering that [Shipman] has left his wife better off than any one of his family's victims. Who says crime doesn't pay? For Mrs Shipman it appears to have paid very well indeed."
Brennan is, of course, over-stating his case. My guess is that Shipman would probably have preferred to have married a man who didn't turn out to be a mass murderer, even if it meant foregoing an early pension. But you know what he means; it don't seem fair.
And it seemed even more unfair, earlier last week, when it was discovered that Iorworth Hoare, a convicted serial sex attacker, had won a third of a ?1 million national lottery jackpot. Hoare was staying at a bail hostel in Middlesbrough when he bought his ticket, on release from Leyhill open prison in Gloucestershire, where he is coming to the end of his sentence.
Hoare was immediately punished for his good fortune by being banged up in a high security jail, supposedly in case he decided to use his money to abscond, but in reality because his win made the rest of us as mad as hell. It made Home Secretary David Blunkett furious, it made the culture secretary spit.
In Thursday's Sun Blunkett wrote: "We can't stop a prisoner or their family from buying a ticket, but we can look closely at making sure they don't benefit from a single penny while in prison."
Another Home Office minister hoped that Hoare would be taken to the cleaners by one of his victims in a civil compensation suit, though this is, in fact, most unlikely. A Home Office statement said it was "clearly unpalatable" that Hoare should have won the lottery.
But there is something about the scale, about the disproportionality of the outrage, that begs another explanation. This concentration on the one story, the suggestions of legislation to close a "loophole" through which -- given the odds -- nothing will ever pass again, conveys a sense of almost psychic disturbance.
Lotteries, we know (or we sort-of know) are precisely designed to be the most random events possible. To lament their winners is as sensible as standing next to a fruit machine complaining about who it pays out to. The word "palatable" cannot really apply; a lottery is blind to knowledge, calculation and virtue.
In the unromantic Hellenistic period between the death of Alexander and the supremacy of Rome, one of the most popular deities in the many, scattered city states of Greece, Italy and Asia Minor was Tykhe, the goddess of fortune. Often surnamed Automatia -- a name implying that she arranged things according to her own whim, and not to mens' virtues -- Tyche was depicted holding a ball (the wheel of fortune) representing the capacity of luck to go in any direction.
But why, in that case, be good, if virtuous acts were in no way linked to reward? If, indeed, you could be brought low despite your goodness? Because, said the Greeks, if you acted well and honorably, then when Tykhe whimsically pulled the rug out from under you, you would have many friends on hand to grieve with you and offer consolation. One lesson they derived from this was that he who showed mercy and leniency to others, might more easily expect to be treated well when he needed mercy to be shown to him.
The same general idea is to be found in the parable of the prodigal son. One brother takes his inheritance early, buggers off abroad, and "there wasted his substance with riotous living."
When he returns, made contrite, not by conscience but by hunger, he gets given the best robe, a ring, new shoes and the fatted calf. No wonder his brother is cross about it. He's been good and worked hard and hasn't had so much as a 21st birthday party. But this being a parable and not real life, the aggrieved son is easily persuaded that it is terrific that his brother is back and that he should join in the feast.
In fact the story of the prodigal son is psychologically intolerable. It's not just that the good son probably understands full well that, after a month or two of obedience and chastity, the bad son will be consorting with harlots again. It's also because he will believe the father's behavior to be monstrously unfair. Ask anyone whose parent has made a will leaving the bulk of their assets to the "poor" child, rather than dividing them equally. This is the reward for virtue, is it? A slap in the face.
In fact anything which divides the parental legacy anything other than completely equally may drive us mad. Long before the parables of Jesus were written up, Genesis had the brothers of Joseph insane with jealousy because their father had given the boy the coat of many colors. Now, they may have been wrong to decide to slay Joseph and throw him in a pit, but they were right to conclude that the coat represented a greater love for him than their father had for them.
So it's not the money as such; it's the love, or the lack of it -- it's the need and its non-fulfillment. As young children, said Freud, we experience the pain of dependence, of parental neglect, or parental preference, of intense rivalry with our siblings. The arrival, for instance, of a baby brother or sister is, for a young child, what some have called a "narcissistic catastrophe."
The way we deal with these terrible feelings of hatred and loss, these memories, is to repress them, to drive them underground and into the unconscious. Where they wait for some Hoare to revive them.
And this is why analysts and self-help books almost invariably (as my psychoanalyst friend explained to me) begin by pointing out to their patients and readers that this is an unfair world. Everything is unequal. Love is unequal. At the most primary level, when we are infants our mothers have power and resources that we need to stay alive, while we have none at all. Inequality, a lack of justice, is built in, and you have to deal with it or go bonkers.
This doesn't mean, of course, that you don't bother -- once out of infancy -- to try and create more just and more equal outcomes, where you can. That you don't try and treat people properly. But it might mean not getting our collective knickers into such a preposterous twist about something we cannot prevent, and that really doesn't matter. No-one commits rape because he believes that he might one day win the lottery.
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