Free Jumpers by Tom Stoppard Page A

psychiatrists call ‘a cry for help’.
    BONES : But it
was
a cry for help.
    ARCHIE : Perhaps I’m not making myself clear.
All
exhibitionism is a cry for help, but a cry for help
as such
is only exhibitionism.
    DOTTY (
off
): MURDER!
( BONES
rushes to the Bedroom, which remains dark
, ARCHIE
looks at his watch and leaves towards the Kitchen. In the Study
GEORGE
resumes
.)
    GEORGE :… whereas a spell with the heavy roller would improve it from Bradman’s point of view and worsen it from Bedser’s…
Likewise, to say that this is a good bacon sandwich is only to say that by the criteria applied by like-minded lovers of bacon sandwiches, this one is worthy of approbation. The word good is reducible to other properties such as crisp, lean and unadulterated by tomato sauce. You will have seen at once that to a man who likes his bacon sandwiches underdone, fatty and smothered in ketchup, this would be a rather
poor
bacon sandwich. By subjecting any given example to similar analysis, the modern school, in which this university has played so lamentable a part, has satisfied itself that all statements implying goodness or badness, whether in conduct or in bacon sandwiches, are not statements of
fact
but merely expressions of feeling, taste or vested interest.
But when we say that the Good Samaritan acted well, we are surely expressing more than a circular prejudice about behaviour. We mean he acted kindly—selflessly—
well
. Andwhat is our approval of kindness based on if not on the intuition that kindness is simply good in itself and cruelty is not. A man who sees that he is about to put his foot down on a beetle in his path, decides to step on it or not to. Why? What process is at work? And what is that quick blind mindless connection suddenly made and lost by the man who didn’t see the beetle but only heard the crunch? (
Towards the end of this speech
, ARCHIE
re-enters and quietly lets himself into the Study
.)
It is ironic that the school which denies the claims of the intuition to know good when it sees it, is itself the product of the pioneer work set out in his
Principia Ethica
by the late G. E. Moore, an intuitionist philosopher whom I respected from afar but who, for reasons which will be found adequate by logical spirits, was never in when I called. Moore did not believe in God, but I do not hold that against him—for of all forms of wishful thinking, humanism demands the greatest sympathy—and at least by insisting that goodness was a fact, and on his right to recognize it when he saw it, Moore avoided the moral limbo devised by his successors, who are in the unhappy position of having to admit that one man’s idea of good is no more meaningful than another man’s whether he be St. Francis or—Vice-Chancellor! (
For he has noticed
ARCHIE
in the mirror
, ARCHIE
comes forward
.)
    ARCHIE : An inept comparison, if I may say so. I’m very fond of animals. (
He picks up
PAT .) What do you call it?
    GEORGE : Pat.
    ARCHIE : Pat!… what a lovely name.
    GEORGE : It’s a good name for a tortoise, being sexually ambiguous. I also have a hare called Thumper, somewhere…. By the way, I wasn’t really comparing
you
with——
    ARCHIE : Quite understand. You were going to say Hitler or
Stalin or Nero… the argument always gets back to some lunatic tyrant, the
reductio ad absurdum
of the new ethics, and the dog-eared trump card of the intuitionists.
    GEORGE (
rising to that
): Well, why not? When I push
my
convictionsto absurdity,
I
arrive at God—which is at least as embarrassing nowadays. (
Pause
.) All I know is that I think that I know that I know that nothing can be created out of nothing, that my moral conscience is different from the rules of my tribe, and that there is more in me than meets the microscope—and because of
that
I’m lumbered with this incredible, indescribable and definitely shifty
God
, the trump card of