LATER: What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

by James Surowiecki

The New Yorker

October 11, 2010

Procrastination interests philosophers because of its underlying irrationality.

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did.

There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.

It’s also a surprisingly costly one. Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time. The Harvard economist David Laibson has shown that American workers have forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never got around to signing up for a retirement plan. Seventy per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma risk blindness because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly. Procrastination also inflicts major costs on businesses and governments. The recent crisis of the euro was exacerbated by the German government’s dithering, and the decline of the American auto industry, exemplified by the bankruptcy of G.M., was due in part to executives’ penchant for delaying tough decisions. (In Alex Taylor’s recent history of G.M., “Sixty to Zero,” one of the key conclusions is “Procrastination doesn’t pay.”)

Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.

Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

Still, ignorance can’t be the whole story. In the first place, we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing. My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment. And people do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. A magazine editor I know, for instance, once had a writer tell her at noon on a Wednesday that the time-sensitive piece he was working on would be in her in-box by the time she got back from lunch. She did eventually get the piece—the following Tuesday. So a fuller explanation of procrastination really needs to take account of our attitudes to the tasks being avoided. A useful example can be found in the career of General George McClellan, who led the Army of the Potomac during the early years of the Civil War and was one of the greatest procrastinators of all time. When he took charge of the Union army, McClellan was considered a military genius, but he soon became famous for his chronic hesitancy. In 1862, despite an excellent opportunity to take Richmond from Robert E. Lee’s men, with another Union army attacking in a pincer move, he dillydallied, convinced that he was blocked by hordes of Confederate soldiers, and missed his chance. Later that year, both before and after Antietam, he delayed again, squandering a two-to-one advantage over Lee’s troops. Afterward, Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck wrote, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”

McClellan’s “immobility” highlights several classic reasons we procrastinate. Although when he took over the Union army he told Lincoln “I can do it all,” he seems to have been unsure that he could do anything. He was perpetually imploring Lincoln for new weapons, and, in the words of one observer, “he felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped.” Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.

Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel “Solar”: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem.

If identity is a collection of competing selves, what does each of them represent? The easy answer is that one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. But, if that’s the case, it’s not obvious how you’d ever get anything done: the short-term self, it seems, would always win out. The philosopher Don Ross offers a persuasive solution to the problem. For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another—one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it’s interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.

The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don’t deliver on their promise it’ll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.

Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.

Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

Beyond self-binding, there are other ways to avoid dragging your feet, most of which depend on what psychologists might call reframing the task in front of you. Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps. That’s why David Allen, the author of the best-selling time-management book “Getting Things Done,” lays great emphasis on classification and definition: the vaguer the task, or the more abstract the thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it. One German study suggests that just getting people to think about concrete problems (like how to open a bank account) makes them better at finishing their work—even when it deals with a completely different subject. Another way of making procrastination less likely is to reduce the amount of choice we have: often when people are afraid of making the wrong choice they end up doing nothing. So companies might be better off offering their employees fewer investment choices in their 401(k) plans, and making signing up for the plan the default option.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options—in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which.

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The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover

By Geoffrey Robertson QC

Oct. 22, 2010, The Guardian

No other jury verdict has had such a profound social impact as the acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial. Fifty years on, Geoffrey Robertson QC looks at how it changed Britain's cultural landscape.

The Old Bailey has, for centuries, provided the ultimate arena for challenging the state. But of all its trials – for murder and mayhem, for treason and sedition – none has had such profound social and political consequences as the trial in 1960 of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover. The verdict was a crucial step towards the freedom of the written word, at least for works of literary merit (works of no literary merit were not safe until the trial of Oz in 1971, and works of demerit had to await the acquittal of Inside Linda Lovelace in 1977). But the Chatterley trial marked the first symbolic moral battle between the humanitarian force of English liberalism and the dead hand of those described by George Orwell as "the striped-trousered ones who rule", a battle joined in the 1960s on issues crucial to human rights, including the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, abolition of the death penalty and of theatre censorship, and reform of the divorce laws. The acquittal of Lady Chatterley was the first sign that victory was achievable, and with the guidance of the book's great defender, Gerald Gardiner QC (Labour lord chancellor 1964–70), victory was, in due course, achieved.

There is a myth that freedom of speech has been safely protected in England by the jury. This is almost precisely the opposite of the truth. Old Bailey juries (comprised until 1972 solely of property owners) usually did what they were told by judges, and convicted. Until 1959, the publisher of a book that contained any "purple passage" that might have a "tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was liable to imprisonment. Literary standards were set at what was deemed acceptable reading for 14-year-old schoolgirls – whether or not they could, or would want to, read it. Merit was no defence: in 1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness was destroyed by a magistrate who realised to his horror that one line in the novel ("and that night they were not divided") meant that two female characters had been to bed together. He said this would "induce thoughts of a most impure character and would glorify the horrible tendency of lesbianism"; the prosecution had Rudyard Kipling attend the court, in case the magistrate needed a literary expert to persuade him to "keep the Empire pure". Censorship of sexual references in literature was pervasive in England in the 1930s (there was a brief respite for James Joyce's Ulysses when a sumptuously bound copy was found among the papers of a deceased lord chancellor). In the 1950s police seized copies of the Kinsey report and prosecuted four major publishers for works of modern fiction – three were convicted. In this period, books by Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connolly and others were available only to those English readers who could afford to travel to Paris to purchase them.

In 1959, persuaded by the Society of Authors, parliament passed a new Obscene Publications Act with a preamble that promised "to provide for the protection of literature and to strengthen the law concerning pornography". The distinction was to prove elusive, certainly to the attorney general, Reginald Manningham-Buller. In August 1960 he read the first four chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover on the boat train to Southampton and wrote to the director of public prosecutions approving the prosecution of Penguin Books ("I hope you get a conviction"). The key factor in the decision to prosecute was that Penguin proposed to sell the book for 3/6; in other words, to put it within easy reach of women and the working classes. This, the DPP's files reveal, was what the upper-middle-class male lawyers and politicians of the time refused to tolerate.

The choice of Lady Chatterley as a test-case was inept, but it suited the anti-intellectual temper of the legal establishment and it would mean the defeat of an impeccably liberal cause. Besides, DH Lawrence had form. Back in 1915 all copies of The Rainbow had been seized by police and burned (as much for its anti-war message as for its openness about sex). In 1928, police threatened the publisher Martin Secker with prosecution unless it removed 13 pages from Pansies, a book of Lawrence's poems. The publisher complied, but sent all its unexpurgated copies abroad. The following year police raided an exhibition of Lawrence's paintings and seized every canvas on which they could descry any wisp of pubic hair. For the next 30 years British customs erected a cordon sanitaire to keep out smuggled copies of Lady Chatterley, which by this time was being published in France and Italy. So Lawrence was entrenched in prudish English minds as the filthy fifth columnist, an enemy much more dangerous than predictably dirty foreigners such as De Sade or Nabokov (whose banned Lolita would have been a more sensible target). With parochial arrogance, the prosecuting authorities ignored the New York court of appeal, which in 1959 had overturned a ban on Lady Chatterley because it was written with "a power and tenderness which was compelling" and which justified its use of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words.

Those words were a red rag to Manningham-Buller and the "grey elderly ones" (as Lawrence had described his censors), a breach of the etiquette and decorum relied on to cover up unpleasant truths. In 1960, in the interests of keeping wives dutiful and servants touching their forelocks, Lady Constance Chatterley's affair with a gamekeeper was unmentionable. The prosecutors were complacent: they would have the judge on their side, and a jury comprised of people of property, predominantly male, middle aged, middle minded and middle class. And they had four-letter words galore: the prosecuting counsel's first request was that a clerk in the DPP's office should count them carefully. In his opening speech to the jury, he played them as if they were trump cards: "The word 'fuck' or 'fucking' appears no less than 30 times . . . 'Cunt' 14 times; 'balls' 13 times; 'shit' and 'arse' six times apiece; 'cock' four times; 'piss' three times, and so on."

But what the prosecution failed to comprehend was that the 1959 Act had wrought some important changes in the law. Although it retained a "tendency to deprave and corrupt" as the test of obscenity, books had now to be "taken as a whole" – that is, not judged solely on their purple passages – and only in respect of persons likely to read them; in other words, not 14-year-old schoolgirls, unless they were directed to that teenage market. Most importantly, section 4 of the Act provided that even if the jury found that the book tended to deprave and corrupt it could nonetheless acquit if persuaded that publication "is justified in the interests of science, literature, art and learning or any other object of general concern". The unsung hero of the trial, Penguin's solicitor, Michael Rubinstein, threw himself into the task of recruiting expert witnesses for the defence – not just professors of literature but famous novelists and unknown novelists, journalists, psychologists and even clerics.

After the case had been lost, the attorney general pretended that the Crown had disdained to match the defence "bishop for bishop and don for don", but this was a lie. In fact, the prosecution made desperate attempts to find anyone of distinction who might support a ban on Lawrence's novel. The DPP's first suggestion was to rely again on Kipling, until it was discovered that he had died in 1936. TS Eliot turned them down, as did FR Leavis (although he also refused to testify for the defence) and Helen Gardner, reader in English literature at Oxford, who told the DPP (as she was later to tell the jury) that the book was the work of a writer of genius and complete integrity. It is a measure of the narrowness of legal education in England in those days that this had simply not occurred to the lawyers in the DPP's office or to the team of Treasury Counsel, a pampered, old-Etonian set of barristers who conduct major prosecutions at the Old Bailey before their inevitable elevation to its judicial benches. Its leader, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, had no interest in literature: he was the incarnation of upper-middle-class morality, obsessed with the book's danger to social order. His famously asinine question about wives and servants was asked rhetorically and with utter sincerity.

Griffith-Jones's assumptions about society reflected his station in it, and as the trial developed he seemed more scandalised by adultery – especially with a servant – than by the four-letter words that had preoccupied him at the start. Those few witnesses he bothered to cross-examine were tackled on subjects he knew nothing about, and he tried to cover up his own confusion with gratuitous insults ("you are not at Leicester University at the moment"). Ignorant of the facts as well as the facts of life, Griffith-Jones failed even to recognise Lawrence's paean to anal sex. ("Not very easy, sometimes, not very easy, you know, to know what in fact he is driving at in that passage"). After the trial the warden of All Souls, John Sparrow, wrote an article in Encounter claiming that the jury would have convicted had the prosecution been able to identify which passage was being driven at, but he, too, did not understand the new law. Under the 1959 Act, purple passages, even on the subject of heterosexual buggery (still the "abominable crime"), no longer necessarily meant a guilty verdict. Jurors had to ask themselves the common-sense question of whether the publication as a whole would do any harm and, if so, whether its literary merit might redeem it.

The tactical superiority of the defence team was evident from the outset. In a daring move on the first day of the trial, Gardiner and Jeremy Hutchinson QC declined the judge's invitation to invoke the sexist law that allowed them to empanel an all-male jury in obscenity cases, and even used their right of challenge to add a third female juror. They realised the danger that an all-male jury might be over-protective towards women in their absence and they calculated that the prosecution's paternalism would alienate female jurors.

Gardiner's forensic performance, transcribed in CH Rolph's Penguin Special The Trial of Lady Chatterley, was a masterclass in modern barristering. He eschewed the histrionics of Old Bailey hacks like Marshall Hall ("look at her, gentleman of the jury. God never gave her a chance – won't you?"). Instead, he addressed the jury in powerful but straightforward language, respecting them but never condescending or playing obviously to their sympathy. He firmly indicated that they, not the judge, were responsible for the verdict. Had there been no jury, Justice Byrne would certainly have convicted.

Byrne directed the jury to consider whether the book "portrays the life of an immoral woman", to remember the meaning of "lawful marriage" in a Christian country and to reflect that "the gamekeeper, incidentally, had a wife also. Thus what the ultimate result there would be is a matter for you to consider."

Judges in 1960 regarded themselves, rather more than they do today, as the custodians of moral virtue. In performing this egregious function, they came to blur the distinction between literature and life. Their confusion was well represented by Lord Hailsham, in the parliamentary debate that followed the verdict: "Before I accepted as valid or valuable or even excusable the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors, I should have liked to know what sort of parents they became to the child . . . I should have liked to see the kind of house they proposed to set up together; I should have liked to know how Mellors would have survived living on Connie's rentier income of £600 . . . and I should have liked to know whether they acquired a circle of friends, or, if not, how their relationship survived social isolation."

So far as Byrne and Hailsham and Griffith-Jones were concerned, the function of the modern novel was that laid down by Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism: "the good end happily, the bad end unhappily – that is what 'fiction' means." The acquittal was a victory for moral relativism and sexual tolerance, as well as for literary freedom.

No other jury verdict in British history has had such a deep social impact. Over the next three months Penguin sold 3m copies of the book – an example of what many years later was described as "the Spycatcher effect", by which the attempt to suppress a book through unsuccessful litigation serves only to promote huge sales. The jury – that iconic representative of democratic society – had given its imprimatur to ending the taboo on sexual discussion in art and entertainment. Within a few years the stifling censorship of the theatre by the lord chamberlain had been abolished, and a gritty realism emerged in British cinema and drama. (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning came out at the same time as the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley, and very soon Peter Finch was commenting on Glenda Jackson's "tired old tits" in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Ken Tynan said the first "fuck" on the BBC.) Homosexuality was decriminalised, abortions were available on reasonable demand, and in order to obtain a divorce it was unnecessary to prove that a spouse had committed the "matrimonial crime" of adultery. Judges no longer put on black caps to sentence prisoners to hang by the neck until dead.

In 1960, Sir Allen Lane took some risks and suffered a lot of personal abuse, although his lawyers adroitly arranged for the case to be brought against the company rather than its directors in person, so there was never any danger of a prison sentence. But he put his company in peril for a principle: "my idea was to produce a book that would sell at the price of 10 cigarettes". Books have increased in price even more than cigarettes over the past 50 years and caused a lot less harm. Indeed, the message of Lady Chatterley's Lover, half a century after the trial, is that literature in itself does no harm at all. The damage that gets attributed to books – and to plays and movies and cartoons – is caused by the actions of people who try to suppress them.

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The Euro Has No Clothes

By ROGER COHEN

Nov. 30, 2010

LONDON — Is the euro to the early 21st century what the League of Nations was to the early 20th: a fine idea that became a political orphan and was condemned to unravel?

As Ireland follows Greece in the great bailout domino game, and Portugal and Spain loom, the euro can no longer take its survival for granted just because its collapse would be unthinkable.

Both the League of Nations and the euro were conceived for worlds that vanished. The League emerged in 1919 from the ashes of World War I with the aim of preventing another war. But its idealism was an early victim of Hitler’s violent nationalism. Changed forces in Europe could not be checked by its covenant.

Jacques Delors’s “Report on Economic and Monetary Union,” laying out the path to a single euro currency, was presented in early 1989 just as all changed utterly.

Within months, the Berlin Wall fell, Germany was reunited, the Soviet empire imploded and Yalta’s imprisoned European nations were freed.

The report noted that “a transfer of decision-making power” from member states to the European Community (now Union) would be needed in “the fields of monetary policy and macroeconomic management.” A currency, in other words, needs a political authority: History is unequivocal about that. The euro was conceived to complete European integration.

But with the Cold War’s end, broadening of the E.U. trumped deepening. A 12-member community grew to 27. A united Germany no longer needed deliverance through Europe from Hitler’s painful legacy: Pan-Europeanism gave way to penny-counting. Ex-communist nations that had been pawns of Moscow did not want to be pawns of Brussels. A transnational currency was birthed as European federalism ebbed.

This is the backdrop to the euro’s agony, for which the latest anesthetic is the $113 billion emergency loan to Ireland.

Certainly Alan Greenspan’s easy money, the fatal collapse of any serious regulatory culture in the United States, the “new paradigm” nuttiness as the housing bubble grew and all the intoxicating pre-meltdown ka-ching provided the context for the Greek and Irish crises. Oversight went A.W.O.L.

It’s also true, and here the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is right, that the 16-member euro zone can’t carry on this way, socializing the private losses of the banking system and engaging in a kind of multi-billion-dollar shell game that does away with moral hazard. (O.K., the U.S. has done much of the same.) After the $750 billion European Financial Stability Facility that brought no stability and now Ireland, where will the next bailout come from?

No, as Merkel says, somebody’s got to take a haircut. She wants a euro zone 2.0 birthed in 2013 — and E.U. finance ministers made clear this weekend that private creditors would not escape paying after that date. Nobody’s saying it, but Merkel wants some kind of fiscal union to ensure that states henceforth adhere to strict fiscal guidelines or are punished, along with bondholders.

Politics is pushing Merkel. She’s trying to answer the baying of the Bild tabloid: “Will we have to pay for all of Europe?” Hell hath no fury like a German not getting his money’s worth. She’s also, undercover, acknowledging that Delors’ “transfer of decision-making power” is the inevitable consequence of the euro.

But how shallow, paltry and mean-spirited has this German reaction to the euro crisis been!

I don’t recall one word from Merkel about the idea of Europe, about why sacrifices for the euro are consistent with Germany’s moral debt to Europe and stake in its united future. “If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” she says. But what, pray, is Europe to the Frau Bundeskanzlerin? A burden, it seems, a conundrum — anything but an idea.

No wonder Delors addressed a withering question to Germany in October: “Are the values which we inherited from the fathers of Europe still present?” No, they’ve given way to German contempt for “euro zone sinners.” These “sinners” are not going to endure joblessness and cuts for a tick from the German headmistress.

Merkel is right to think euro zone 2.0 but morally bereft on Europe, an anti-Delors. That makes me skeptical. The Faustian bargain Germany made for unification was giving up its beloved Deutsche mark for the euro. Now the euro is Berlin’s responsibility. Germany must consume more, carp less and conceive bigger.

If it doesn’t, we’ll see euro-zone defaults and the amputation of some of the zone’s struggling extremities.

Of course, Arkansas defaulted and the dollar survived. The United States stood behind its currency.

There’s the rub. Nothing like a United States of Europe has ever been built before, a half-billion people brought together not through conquest but by the idea of “ever closer union.” In a way it’s an inspirational blueprint for mankind; and so it would be foolish to think it would go smoothly.

Yes, the League of Nations collapsed, but it did lead to the United Nations. The euro may also unravel but the idea is too good not to return in force. Between the League and the U.N. lay catastrophe. From here to euro 2.0 is not going to be pretty.