INDIVIDUALITY AND CITIZENSHIP

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23346, 11 November 1937, Page 19

INDIVIDUALITY AND CITIZENSHIP

MUSING ENGENDERED BY AN ATTACK OF INFLUENZA By Phillida After they have taken your temperature, told you that it is your own foolhardiness that has caused the mercury to rise, looked at you with disapproval mingled, however, with concern, and forbidden you to leave your bed on pain of the worst kind of relapse, they remove all reading and writing material within reach, walk out on tiptoe, and leave you alone, staring upwards at the ceilings. Rather guiltily you recognise the justice of their admonitions and, becoming temporarily filled with the spirit of meekness, vow to yourself that never again will you so break the laws of common sense as to put yourself into this unfortunate state. Then you muse on that look of disapproval which, tempered with mercy though it was, the hale always unconsciously directs towards the halt. It appears as if such happenings as sickness and deformity were a criminal

offence. Well, perhaps they actually are. Nature, at any rate, never intended them to occur, for in the vegetable and animal kingdom the sick and deformed are not allowed to survive; it is only where civilised man is concerned that such states are tolerated. Yet the involuntary reaction of a healthy human being towards anything less than normally healthy is by no means one of tolerance. On the contrary, all sorts of curious feelings from the disapproval already mentioned to absolute anger and violence are aroused by it. Particularly is this so where the sick or deformed subject is personally connected with those who are objecting to it, and where the trouble has been brought about through the breaking of some natural law. “ How dare you! ” is the unuttereo demand. “ Where is your pride that you should sink so low? How can I be associated with anybody who falls thus short of normal perfection? ” And if it were not for the even greater feelings of compassion, understanding and affection that are part of human nature, ill would fare the sick and deformed at the hands of their more healthy, more splendidly physical companions. This displeasure is obviously an inherited one, and comes from the natural desire on the part of human beings that those with whom they are associated shall be flawlessly healthy so that the family, the group, or the community to which they belong may survive and flourish in the struggle for existence. It is curious to perceive how strong are racial prejudices, and how inbred are certain individual feelings which have relationship to the State or to the people as a whole. The State, in deed, seems to have a spirit of its own which, though we know it to be blind, deaf, and dumb yet manages to see, hear, and speak. It is almost as if there were some giant guardian the people’s rights, of convention as the people have made it, and of the moral laws of the people. Apparently, nobody is wise or strong enough to live contrary to the wishes of the people and yet remain one of the people’s beloveds. The situation in which a certain man and a woman who defied convention for love are at present finding themselves rises in the mind at this point. Love that proclaims itself openly, that wishes for marriage, and that asks nothing except to be allowed to “play the game” and live decently

and normally is surely so worthy of commendation that the people should rejoice in it. Yet, if it follows any but the recognised track, according to the giant guardian it is questionable. “It is the consequence that matters, the consequence—not the intention,” says Julie in “The Fountain.” “The sin, though it seemed not to be a sin, grows to the stature of what we sin against.” This is so with self-created sickness and deformity—sins against the physical fitness of the race—and also with the breaking of codes which the State has decreed are to be observed for the good of the people as a whole. Perhaps the primal laws of health and the laws of social convention are actually one and the same, though the free soul frets against the latter and can see no reason in their application. Can one be an individual and at the same time a successful citizen? Only, it would seem, if by being an individual one does not break the rules attendant on successful citizenship. Sucessful citizenship invests an individual with respect, a good name, and honour —all badges of approval to show that, where the giant guardian is concerned, the individual in question is in favour. To break the rules, even though all one’s reason as an individual sees it as good to do so, is to chance falling back from favour. Then, blind, deaf, and dumb, the giant guardian will assert himself, will administer punishment so stupid, senseless, and cruel as to suggest a brute intellect behind it, yet effective in making the rash individual realise how far he has transgressed, and, more than likely, will eventually obliterate him because of the offence he has committed in striving, while living as a citizen, to live also as an individual with aims contrary to those accepted as constituting citizenship. It is impossible to pass judgment on the matter. From the point of view

of the masses the law of citizenship is undoubtedly good, just as from the point of view of the race only perfect health is permissible, From the point of view of the individual, however, the law of citizenship is often intolerable with its _ sweeping disregard for cause and motive and its ruthless attempt to make everybody conform to a set pattern; and a sickly, deformed person may be a person of character whose removal would be a distinct loss to society. Yet it was individuals who first made citizens and the laws for citizens, and who enjoy and suffer according to the way such laws are wielded. The remedy would seem to lie with the individuals themselves. If they have outgrown the laws and can now think of better and more humane ones, they must find a new way of creating them and so establishing a new order of citizenship. The individual and the race, the citizen and the State—how strangely and how indivisibly they are blended together You prepare to go still further into the matter, but find that your mmd is wandering. The supine attitude, so conducive to philosophic thinking, is also conducive to drowsiness. So you close your eyes, resign yourself to the inevitable, and forget all problems in a wave of sleep.