Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
– Evelyn Waugh, novelist.
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So those who do nothing, are worth nothing?
mandrill, I guess so.
Then why the hell do we pay them so much?
mandrill, somehow, I think Waugh was talking about our judgement of character, not about payscales!!!
<pedantic mode on>
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
Is the error in number present in the original quote, or has it been misquoted? I would have expected it to be
Your actions, and your actions alone, determine your worth.
</pedantic mode off>
That made me laugh quite unexpectedly and I nearly ruptured one of my sinuses. Thanks.
And my, if a little laterally, relevant question is: who determines ‘worth’?
If Anubis isn’t around to weigh our hearts when we die (and I’ll be REALLY dissapointed if he isn’t), who interprets our actions?
I think Waugh was being a tad pompous here. Wasn’t he an Etonite? If he was, then oops! Very sorry. I must be totally wrong, prostrate myself before his grave and flagellate myself with a flail of kipper’s spines.
Waugh was a Catholic, so he presumably assumed that the Man Upstairs would have a part in judging this. As a non-believer, I think that in judging another person’s character, one does have to take account of that person’s actions. Actions, if they are congruent with a clearly stated ethical code, must be a major part of any judgement, since what else can one go on?
But if I lived by ethical code A, and you lived by ethical code B: our respective actions could not be judged by either of us, the notion of ‘worth’ becoming subjective as opposed to objective.
I believe Waugh’s position was institutional (as much as he claimed to struggle against it) and is a problem of the late victorian novelists. I loved Brideshead Revisited, but I don’t think many of us look to the canon of British Literature for guidance post 20th-Century for this very reason.
Where were the new British novelists while America gave rise to the John Cheevers (admittedly half-English) and Steinbecks and Hemingways? Shivering under the measley, aloof parenting of their forerunners, I’d say. And Where are they now? Now they dream of shivering under the measley, aloof parenting of their forerunners.
Waugh was a snob who assisted in the intellectual downfall of the British aristocracy whilst single-handedly revering it into the starving psyche of it’s middle-class, culturally bereft successors. Cheever gave flight to the human spirit in that dullest, most treacherous of modern landscapes: alcoholism and suburbia.
My point being, Waugh’s ‘worth’ is worth nothing to me. Had Cheever said it, I’d feel different.
Therefore are we perhaps judged not by our actions, but rather by what we represent: at least to the majority.
Me. I judge a person according to my moral theories and/or sence of aethetics.
Not really… I just another on the basis of my values, not his. I do not need to share a person’s ethical code in order to judge him because I will (obviously) use mine.
Sure, but so what? If what you are saying is “people disagree on what other people are worth”, well, yeah.
I regard Waugh’s remark as axiomatic (as a generality). That said, I also assign a dgree of ‘worth’ to some people because they have great legs and look good in a short skirt.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the point of the quotation is not about competing moral systems or who is doing the judging or any of that.
I think he’s talking about the trap so many have fallen into, which is judging people by the orthodoxy of their beliefs, and excusing even the most horrendous actions, if the actor is a “true believer”.
We’ve seen it repeatedly in history, in all cultures, based on religious and ideological grounds. It is especially apt in today’s world, in which the followers of the prophet are willing to do anything, no matter how gruesome, in order to prove the purity of their belief.
It is no accident that dictators and totalitarians all through history have judged their followers on the loyalty and fidelity of their professed adherence to the “true faith”, from pharoahs to emperors to popes to fuhrers to general secretary’s little red books.
Give me someone who judges actions, and doesn’t give a damn which church you go to, or who you voted for last election.
Anyway, that’s the way I read it, not as some esoteric comment on universal morality or comparative ethics.
empty mirror, whether one likes or approves of Waugh as a novelist and as a person or not is besides the point. If the quote is accurate, it fits.
I have mixed views on Waugh as novelist and social commentator. He was a terrible snob, as is often the case with the “minor gentry”. (Real aristocrats are not snobs as they don’t have to prove themselves by one-upmanship). His views on non-white races, for example, were pretty unpleasant.
His novels Decline and Fall, Scoop, the Sword of Honour Trilogy and a Handful of Dust are some of the funniest, saddest and most insightful books of the last century. Funnily enough, Brideshead, the novel many people will associate with him, I consider to be great over-rated.
BTW, I met his son, the late Auberon Waugh, a few times, and he was one of the nicest men you could meet.
I agree totally. And at the end of the day one is represented by ones actions anyway.
I just wanted to raise the inference of an institutionalist concept of “worth”: something that, as a wanna-be-free-thinker, pricks up my ears.
My point about about Waugh’s worth as a writer (I’ve only read BHRV) was to commiserate the state of modern English literature under the ruthlessly class-embedded cultural conventions dictated by the victorian canon of British Lit that still haunts us today: thereby anulling my personal sense of his worth.
And here I read it to mean that the more productively you work the more wealth you will have. Silly old me.
This is a version of the Aristotelian principle (absorbed into Catholicism through that great Aristotelian St. Thomas Aquinas) which states that, as relates to your moral worth, it is what you actually do, not what you think or say you might do, that is important.
When I first read the quote I thought the number was wrong too. Now I’m not so sure. And I’m not sure what he meant by ‘alone’.
As in, ‘It’s wrong to pee in the shower, even when you’re alone’.
Well, if Blackjack’s right, then I’m going to hell for sure.