Troubled Spirits and Weak Flesh
Celebrities
do not interest me, in part because I often do not know who they are. Not
having had a television for forty years, and having survived quite happily
without one, people apparently world famous are to me completely unknown,
either by sight or sound; while those figures whom I consider important are
often comparatively obscure and unknown to millions. I count myself lucky:
there is evidence that those who interest themselves in the lives and doings of
celebrities are unhappier than those who do not, though in which direction the
causative relationship, if any, lies I cannot be certain.
However in
the modern world, unless you are a complete hermit, celebrities, or rather news
about celebrities, will come to you regardless of your wishes or interest. And
even I, who have neither radio nor television, could not altogether avoid some
knowledge of the current trial in England of two Italian sisters, former
servants of Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, who are accused of having
defrauded the couple of $1 million by the unauthorized use of the couple’s
credit cards.
Mr
Saatchi was an advertising magnate, now art collector and dealer, and his wife
is a famous television cook and author of best-selling cookery books. Evidently
they lived in a world in which $1 million can go missing without anyone really
noticing.
The
defense case of the two accused is that Nigella Lawson knew and approved of
their use of the credit cards, on condition that they did not tell her husband
of her use of cocaine, which they claim was heavy and persistent. She spent
several hours in the witness box being examined by the lawyer for prosecution
and cross-examined by the lawyers for the defense.
One of the
latter asked her whether she has ‘a drug problem,’ to which she replied that
she had ‘a life problem.’ The lawyer asked her whether that is what she wanted
to say under oath, to which she replied that it was.
I am glad
that she stuck to her guns, for to have admitted that she had ‘a drug problem’
would have been to imply that the problem was with the drug rather than with
the person taking it (or them). And this would have been to get everything
exactly the wrong way round. It is not the drug that takes the person but the
person that takes the drug. Therefore Nigella Lawson was being absolutely
honest when she said she had a life and not a drug problem.
People
take mind-altering drugs for a variety of reasons, not the least of them
because they desire a change of mood or mental state as a good in itself,
irrespective of whether it is for the better or worse. What they fear is
stagnation rather than discomfort. But there are many other reasons of course:
the desire for euphoria, for calm, for oblivion, for excitement, for energy,
for sleep, for sexual stimulation, for perceptive distortion, for the peace of
forgetfulness, or some or all of these in quick succession. And for many people
the illusions wrought by drugs are preferable to any reality, or at least any
likely reality they think that they are likely ever to inhabit. Nor
should we be too censorious about this, however foolish we may ultimately think
the choice. For even if we ourselves inhabit:
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples…
We are still such stuff:
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
And few of
us can so much as walk down the street without illusions about ourselves.
Nigella
Lawson’s answer in the witness box was admirable because, by it, she refused
herself the status of victim of disease which so many experts on addiction
would falsely have offered her, exonerating her from her own behavior. In
effect, she admitted that she took drugs because the spirit was troubled and
the flesh was weak. Of course, if a person gives in often and long enough to
this temptation to take the short way with his or her troubles, addiction can
follow and add considerably to those troubles. But we should not forget that
people who become heroin addicts take heroin, on average, for eighteen months before
they become addicted. Addiction is no more something that happens to a person
than is having the body of Mr Universe. And the overwhelming evidence is that
people can stop if they so wish, that is to say if they have a motive strong
enough to do so. The problem is that, human life being a biography rather than
a mere series of moments each unconnected with what went before, if people
pursue their addictions for long enough no such strong motive can be given
them. Often I saw as a doctor a patient in his sixties who had permanently
alienated his family and friends, and had ruined his health and career, by his
excessive resort to alcohol. What could I say to such a man that would make the
effort to change his life and abstain from drinking worthwhile? What better
life could I in honesty claim he would have? The sixties are not an age at
which a man can refound his life; he might as well continue.
This view
of addiction, as a ‘problem of life,’ is a far cry from, and much more
realistic than, the ‘chronic, relapsing brain disease’ that the National
Institute of Drug Addiction insists, in my view dishonestly and in the teeth of
abundant evidence to the contrary, that it is. This notion, however, has all
but triumphed in the marketplace of ideas. Here is another definition of
addiction that I found very quickly on the internet: Addiction is an uncontrollable
compulsion to repeat a behavior regardless of its negative consequences.
This definition has the logical consequence that no person who ever stopped
taking a drug was ever addicted to that drug, unless he stopped taking it by
enforced geographical separation from it. But there is no drug that is capable
of producing such a state: choice is always preserved.
‘An
admirable evasion of whoremaster man,’ as Edmund says in King Lear, ‘to
lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!’ – or his neurones.
Nigella Lawson did no such thing, for a problem with life is at least as much a
problem with oneself as with life.
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