BRIBERY AND BLACKMAIL
Two quite different words, Bribery and Blackmail, are in danger of being
redefined by their misuse. This is a favourite device of those who have an
interest in de-clarifying moral certainties.
Let us take Bribery first.
To bribe someone is to offer them some incentive to do what they know to be
morally wrong. It has, in recent years, been massaged to cover all kinds of
incentive, even the incentive to doing what is morally right.
For example, it is being put about that "heaven" or
"salvation" are bribes which are offered us for being "good"
or "faithful" or "committed", and that people ought to
"be above all that" and do all these things "for their own
sake". Virtue, they say should be its own reward.
This sort of nonsense, which is a variation of Quietism, is based on two quite
specific misapprehensions.
1) In practice, nobody goes on doing anything for very long unless it affords
them some kind of satisfaction. That satisfaction may take one of many forms:
pecuniary, sensational, "pleasing Daddy", passing the exam, or simply
"the gratifying feeling that our duty has been done".
God has, in fact, so ordered the world that a great many things which are our
duty to do are at the same time pleasurable. Eating, drinking, bathing, working,
besides the multifarious healthy recreational activities, mental and physical,
which are available to us, are all sources of incalculable enjoyment to people.
To describe these pleasures and rewards as "bribes" is all of a piece
with attributing Jesus's miraculous powers to "Beelzebub". It springs
from a deep loathing of seeing other people enjoying themselves. This of course
goes straight back to Gnosticism, with its contempt for things material and its
(misplaced) exclusive zeal for things "spiritual".
2) The second confusion arises from people's inability to distinguish between
correct and misplaced motivations.
It is perfectly correct for an architect, for instance, to design a house for
somebody, in the expectation that he will be paid for doing so. Unless he has
reasonable grounds for supposing that he will be paid, then he will not even
start the job; or he will be foolish to do so, unless of course he is doing
someone a favour.
But this legitimate expectation is not in itself the proper motive for working
at the drawing board. The proper motive should be to use his skills as an
architect to produce a building which will do what its commissioner want it to
do. If he succeeds he will also be rewarded with satisfaction.
None of these things - money, satisfaction, the gratification of his client, nor
the enhancement of his reputation as an architect can be described as a
"bribe". The worst that can be said might be that the architect has
"got his priorities wrong" if he puts the reward before the proper
application of his professional skills and produces a skimped or bad piece of
work as a result. Reprehensible such motives may be if they prevent the work
being done properly; bribery they are not.
C.S. Lewis put it rather neatly in "The Weight of Glory". He says:
"We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of
reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of
reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you
do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those
things....The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which
they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a
third case which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly
a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who
have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own
experience that this is so.
The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment
of Sophocles...He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or
to please his parents, or at best in the hope of a future good which he cannot
at present imagine or desire. His position therefore bears a certain resemblance
to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact be
a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of
course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and
nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began.
But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to
desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a
preliminary reward." (Transposition and other Addresses, Geoffrey Bles,
1949, p22).
BLACKMAIL The second misused term is Blackmail. Its correct use is to
define the process whereby the threat to reveal something scandalous about its
victim is used to elicit payment or some other favour from him or her. One
famous example occurs in An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde.
Recently however, the term has come to be applied to any kind of emotional or
other pressure brought to bear in order to influence someone's behaviour. The
words "moral" and "emotional" are often juxtaposed with the
word Blackmail.
From there it is only a short step to labelling all forms of persuasion
"blackmail", which they undoubtedly are not.
It would be better to confine blackmail to its original meaning of threatening
to reveal discreditable information if one's favours are not granted. That is
always a morally reprehensible thing to do.
It is not morally reprehensible, however, to persuade people by reason as to the
course of action they should or should not take, and this includes drawing their
attention to the probable consequences of such action. "If you do that I
shall hand in my resignation" might be described as a threat (justified or
otherwise). But it is not blackmail.
However, to say "If you don't vote for me I shall tell them that you have
been dipping your fingers in the till", is both a threat and blackmail.
And it is blackmail and reprehensible regardless of whether the allegation is
true or not.