From Luigi Barzini's The Europeans
The second half of the 20th century was not exactly the golden age of letters. Yet
across the face of this wide Sahara one great canyon cuts like a scar - an Everest in
reverse, a terrestrial Marianas, a vast sun-baked trench carved by some
unimaginable natural harrow into the parched gravel of an already-bleak century.
I refer, of course, to the 1980s. In my opinion, this decade produced exactly one
artistic achievement that will stand the test of time: Skinny Puppy. And in letters?
Though we may never know why, in the '80s it was easier for a rich man to pass
through the eye of a camel than for anyone to write a decent book. Even Hunter
Thompson was unmanned by the age - I mean, really, The Curse of Lono?
So it's with some surprise that I present this selection from Luigi Barzini's The
Europeans - copyright, 1983. The exception is easy to explain. Barzini, a hereditary
aristocrat of Italian liberal journalism, was no parbaked Boomer, but a man of the
Interbellum. Moreover, the effort must have exhausted the old lion - he seems to
have died in 1984.
Before we read Barzini, we need to be clear on the context: Barzini was no
reactionary, nor even a conservative. He was a liberal, an Anglophile and
Americanist, educated at Columbia, and an unabashed fan of European unification
under American political traditions. But he was a liberal of the old world - a
considerably looser straitjacket than the word at present implies. Moreover, when he
wrote The Europeans he was neither young nor dense, and Conquest's law had done
its usual work.
Here is a passage from his chapter on Italy. (UR readers may also enjoy Barzini's The
Italians, the work from which I learned that Garibaldi didn't unite Italy - he divided
Africa.) Note how remarkably open Barzini is about who actually called, and calls, the
shots in postwar Europe. He was certainly in a position to know.
So: a snapshot of history, not without some contemporary relevance. I have taken the
liberty of adding a few paragraph breaks for readability on teh Intertubes.
Miscalculations, sometimes irreparable, are also constantly made by foreigners in
their estimates of the Italian political and economic perspectives. Inevitably, cures
for Italian ills based on authoritative diagnoses, cures that might be excellent for
other countries, are disastrously wrong.
In the late fifties and early sixties, when the Italian economy was enjoying a boom
and political problems were being gradually solved, save one, the Communist threat,
foreign specialists decided the only hope for the country was not what common sense
would have recommended, the strengthening of the coalition of center parties, which,
with American help, had rapidly reconstructed the country after the war (all efficient
governments are, whatever they call themselves, center governments). Foreign
experts thought that a new Center-Left government would be the right medicine, a
coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists.
It must be honestly pointed out that, as usual, these foreigners were deceived by
Italian words, which seldom mean exactly what they seem to say. Italian Socialists of
that generation were not what these people imagined. They were also very dissimilar
from the Italian Socialists of today. They were then incredibly behind the times. Most
of them were verbal extremists. Many clung to the 1870 myths of La Commune and
to the excessive impossible hopes of the beginning of this century, some were
Anarcho-Syndicalists, others were pure anarchists and a few were terrorists at heart.
They believed the economy was the only motor of history but knew almost nothing
about economics. They were openly pro-Communist, resigned to accept Soviet
leadership in international affairs, resigned also to see the Italian Communists take
power, and worked strenuously to help them destroy what was left of the bourgeois
liberal state. The secretary of the party, Francesco de Martino, repeatedly threatened:
"We'll nationalize everything in the country except barber shops." (The odd exception
was probably because Professor de Martino, being Neapolitan, presumably did not
use a razor, but like most middle-aged southerners, was shaved every afternoon after
the siesta by a friendly barber, whose autonomy from the state he was
understandably determined to preserve for the safety of his own hirsute jowls.)
[...]
The plan to form a Center-Left coalition was first conceived by Italian politicians for
many different reasons of their own, but also custom-designed to seduce the
Americans, without whose approval and backing the Italians curiously believed it
could not be carried out. The Americans immediately saw in it a wonderful way to
fulfill their double vocation: the pragmatic one of leaving no problem unsolved and
their missionary obligation to spread democracy and improve everything in sight.
They spared neither effort nor money to implement the plan as quickly as possible.
They thought it was the only way to cure all the Italian ills at once, so why wait? It
would strengthen the decaying state; check rampant corruption; generally enforce
law and order; defeat the Mafia, the Camorra, and the emboldened unattached
criminals; discourage the class struggle; decrease the number of ruinous strikes;
swell production and imports; slow down inflation; levitate the standard of living;
and as a result, encourage domestic and foreign investments.
Above all, they believed it to be a certain way to isolate and weaken the pro-Soviet
Communists, by depriving them of their Socialist vassals, and free Italy once and for
all from the menace of a totalitarian takeover. A Soviet-dominated peninsula cutting
the Mediterranean in half obviously would have thrown all NATO plans and the
security of the United States itself into disarray.
[...]
The plan might possibly have produced in some other country all the wonderful
effects the Americans expected. In unpredictable Italy, it produced the exact
contrary. It was estimated that in the end the plan cost as much as a lost war and
retarded social and economic progress for at least one generation. Its failure also
came from external circumstances, to be sure, the rise in the price of oil, the revolt of
the young and the workers in the late sixties, but was principally due to the wrong
diagnosis. The state (what was left of it after twenty years of arbitrary dictatorship
and a crushing military defeat) practically collapsed under the burden of a vastly
enlarged number of new tasks, some of them admittedly useful and necessary, but
with which the bureaucracy, such as it was, was absolutely unprepared to cope.
Among them was the enforcement of some of the most ambitious and intricate
legislation ever passed outside Byzantium.
Furthermore, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, who had considered with
hostility the secular liberal democratic state since its inception in 1861, joyfully kept
on dismantling it. Too late they realized it had become an indispensable tool, not
only to govern in the ordinary way, but above all to carry out any left-wing policy,
which notoriously relies on an ever-increasing state intervention in every sector of
the economy. Corruption grew to Levantine proportions. The police were
demoralized, paralyzed, and ordered not to use their weapons even when attacked.
Only after Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed did the more responsible politicians
in power begin to realize that the dismantling of law-enforcement agencies did not
harm their "class enemies" alone but was detrimental for the whole country and
could be mortally dangerous for each of them. Law and order were violated by
everybody as a matter of course with impunity; even sedate elderly drivers allowed
themselves to cross red lights. Bank robberies and kidnappings of well-to-do
gentlemen proliferated. Terrorists dynamited trains, cars, and office buildings and
murdered innocent people almost every day. Every request of the trade unions was
immediately granted without discussion. The endemic riots, the perennial strikes,
the occupation of factories, and the continuous threats of universal nationalizations
discouraged new investments. Capital surreptitiously fled the country in vast
quantities. Production slowed down and sometimes came unexpectedly, without a
reason, to a standstill in many plants. The state deficit, incredibly, grew higher than
that of the U.S. federal government, and the inflation rate threatened to reach South
American levels. The "economic miracle" of the fifties became but a nostalgic
memory, a lost golden age.
Finally the Communists, who, deprived of their Socialist vassals and isolated in their
ghetto, were supposed to wither away, acquired instead an all-pervading tentacular
influence they had never previously enjoyed or hoped for. They seduced or terrorized
the intelligentsia, more or less controlled schools, universities, newspapers,
magazines, publishing houses, all means of communications, and through the trade
unions, the economic life of the country. They infiltrated the bench and the
bureaucracy. Many Italians, who were not convinced Communists, saw the way the
wind was turning, and prudently, resignedly behaved as if they were true believers,
naturally with the neophyte's fanatic zeal, somewhat as their fathers had done as
Blackshirts. Democratic opponents to the Center-Left, who did not fully trust the
government's programs and still thought the Communists a possible threat to
freedom, somehow found themselves without jobs or occupying obscure positions
inferior to their capacities. As a result many bright and ambitious young men
emigrated to countries where advancement was based on merit and not political
affiliation. One Italian writer I know changed language to make a living.
The Communists' source of power was principally their capacity to stage riots
anywhere at any time. The party had money enough to organize noisy and turbulent
mass meetings a few blocks from the seat of the government by concentrating
hundreds of buses and dozens of special trains on Rome within days. It could also
paralyze the whole country overnight by means of general strikes, brutally enforced
by strong-arm squads. Sometimes the party did not have to do anything. Threats
were enough, veiled threats in Unità leading articles, in a speech in Parliament, or
even unspoken threats. The saying went at the time that the Christian Democrats
could do nothing that displeased the Socialists, the Socialists could do nothing that
displeased the Communists, and, in the end, even if the Communists did not always
get all they wanted, nothing could be decided that they did not like. Some of the most
controversial laws were in fact passed with their votes or thanks to their abstention.
The idea that the Center-Left coalition could best defend the people's liberty from the
Communists was best criticized by Giovanni Malagodi, parliamentary leader of the
handful of democratic opposition deputies, with these words, "You are making the
same mistake the Romans made at the end. They entrusted part of the defense of the
empire to Germanic tribes, related by blood, customs and religion to the Germanic
tribes pressing on the border."
Specialists in Italian affairs (diplomats, journalists, and professors of international
relations in the best universities) were frightened by what they had helped to bring
about. They concluded the country was hopelessly, incurably sick, as sick as Imperial
China or the Ottoman Empire on their last legs, ready for extreme unction. They saw
it correctly as rudderless, irreparably torn by irreconcilable social strife, led by weak,
incompetent politicians, and drifting toward final bankruptcy and collapse, or at
best, a totalitarian police regime on the Soviet model. They had to conclude that the
Center-Left coalition, while inspired by the best intentions and based on sound
information, had been a costly mistake that had produced more terrifying problems
than it had solved, possibly only because its aims were too high and because it had
been set up before the country was ready for it.
The Italians surprised them again. Like the soldiers at Castelfidardo and along the
Piave, they refused to lie down and die. To be sure, most of the large basic industries
and utilities, state-owned or controlled, managed by political appointees, packed for
electoral reasons with superfluous workers who could not be fired, lost enormous
sums of money yearly, some of them larger sums than their capital.
To be sure the small and medium private industries could not really save the country
forever, but they proliferated and flourished, for a few years anyway. They invented
new products, improved old ones, and exported them all over the world. Many
specialized dangerously in chic luxury goods - fashions, shoes, leather goods - which,
being dispensable, could mean that their customers would vanish in a depression,
but others managed to beat the competitors in manufacturing advanced necessary
products that would sell well in all seasons. Italian design triumphed everywhere.
The wines beat their French competitors in the United States. The more expensive
handmade cars dominated the playboys' market. Films found a vast international
public. Olivetti carved itself an honorable place in the world of electronic office
machines. Italian companies, freed abroad from their legal entanglements, built
dams, roads, bridges, airports, canals, ports, railroads, new cities, hospitals, hotels
and universities all over the Third World. One firm even won the bids for a section of
the New York subway. One man I met on a plane told me he built museums
dedicated to local art in many newly created African republics and filled their
showcases with admirable wooden sculptures and textiles that were made in
Florence at his direction. The genuine ancient local product, he discovered, was
scarce and hard to find. Made of wood or ephemeral fibers, it deteriorated beyond
repair. The Florentine artifacts were much more satisfactory.
As a result of the well-intentioned but suffocating new legislation and of the
paralyzing, ill-informed pressure of trade unions, old-fashioned piece-work was
revived. Naples exported five million pairs of gloves a year, in spite of the fact that
there was not one glove factory in the city. Most of the shoe industry, which
practically came to dominate the world, was similarly organized. The majority of
these enterprises kept diligently within the law, and paid their taxes and social
security contributions in full. [MM: yeah, right.] The village of Castel Giubileo, near
Mantua, which produced pantyhose at extremely low prices; Brescia, where iron rods
for reinforced concrete works were made much more cheaply than anywhere else;
and other similar towns were inspected by suspicious Common Market functionaries
who found nothing amiss.
[...]
The experts were astounded. Once again it seemed Italy had saved itself in its own
inscrutable way, without any public explanation or scientific exegesis foreigners
could study. There were no reliable statistics. In fact the only way economists could
estimate the growth of the gross national product was by comparing the yearly
figures for the consumption of electric power. They concluded once again that Italy
was an unpredictable country sui generis, which reached the brink but then somehow
always managed to avoid definitive ruin and national dissolution. How did the
Italians do it? What was their secret?
I visited Francesco Saverio Nitti at the end of World War II, shortly after he had
returned to Rome from exile. A democratic liberal, considered one of the more
authoritative intellectual opponents of the Fascist regime, second only to Benedetto
Croce and Antonio Gramsci, he had spent the years of banishment in Paris, on the
Rive Gauche, reading, writing, and thinking. He was one of the wisest, most
intelligent, clear-eyed, and skeptical Italians alive. He was a revered scholar, the
author of important books on politics and economics, a professor of finance at the
University of Naples. He had been prime minister during some of the bloodiest and
most turbulent years after the first war, from June 1919 until June 1920.
The Fascists hated him because he had kept his head, reorganized the forces of order,
tried to enforce the law impartially and to strengthen the authority of the state. They
contemptuously called him by a scatological nickname, "Cagoia," and depicted him
as a fat pig in their cartoons. The real reason for this hostility was the character of the
man. He did not allow mass emotions to dictate his decisions, never tried to please
the crowd, did not share (or make believe that he shared, as others did) the fanatical
nationalist dreams that then flattered many people, consoled them in their misery,
and assuaged their incoherent fears. Above all he seldom hesitated to call things by
their ugly names and to announce unpleasant but necessary truths.
I went to see him because I hoped he, in his old age, had reached fundamental and
definitive truths about Italian life, the laws governing it, and could explain to me why
our countrymen, sober, cautious and realistic in their private affairs, could at times
join demented political mass movements (Fascist yesterday and Communist after the
war) and sometimes seemed to rush blindly, like lemmings, toward collective
catastrophe and annihilation. I wanted him to tell me whether it was possible to
figure Italians out and whether there was hope for them, one day, to govern
themselves undramatically, reasonably, diligently, economically and prudently; why
they so often preferred to be led by quacks; why so many of them were always
looking for miraculous formulas, instant cures, and shortcuts; and why men like him
were seldom entrusted with power and lost it quickly when they were.
Nitti was a small, round-bellied, bald man, not unlike, I must respectfully admit, the
cartoonists' pig, so small a man his feet barely touched the ground when he was
seated. His eyes were small and bright, as bright as gems. He shook with laughter at
my questions. I remember his answer exactly. His was not, of course, an allcompassing answer, a panorama of Italian history, an essay on the people's
psychology, which would have taken hours or days, but an epigram of only a few
words, by which he probably invited me to explore on my own the many ancient
causes of our national curse.
This is what he said: "Gli italiani sono stati ubbriacati di bugie per cento cinquanta
anni." ("Italians have been made drunk with lies for one hundred and fifty years.")
I thought I knew what he meant. First of all, he was a Southerner, born in Melfi in
Basilicata in 1868, and his bitterness represented the desperate disappointment of
his countrymen from the old kingdom of Naples, who had felt swindled by history,
deceived by "lies." After the unification, in 1861, they had seen most of their hopes of
cultural, social, and economic advancement shattered. The South had been
shamefully neglected, they thought, had sunk into even more dismal poverty, lost the
small dignity of its independence and proud local traditions without finding a
suitable role in the new nation. Thousands of its rebellious peasants, led by fanatical
legitimists, had been summarily slaughtered after the unification by the new Italian
army, in a war of Vendean ruthlessness; millions more had been driven by hunger
and despair to emigrate. At the same time, the North had begun timidly to develop
industries and had known a modest prosperity.
The figure "one hundred and fifty," while slightly inexact (it should have been "one
hundred and forty-seven") was also revealing. It evidently referred to the unfortunate
short-lived republic, the Parthenopean Republic, set up in Naples by a small
educated elite of liberal "patriots" (as they called themselves, loyal, that is, to their
country and not to their sovereign), based on the principles of the American and
French revolutions. Its weakness was the fact that it had been created, or rather,
imposed on the people with the help of the French revolutionary army which had
invaded the kingdom. The people, peasants, priests, soldiers, landowners,
aristocrats, and cautious bourgeois, considered it the invention of the devil, a
sacrilegious foreign importation, and fought it as they had fought the invaders. The
idealistic founders were tried for treason and hanged by the Bourbon king as soon as
he had been brought back to Naples from Sicily by the English fleet. Which were the
"lies" at the time, I wondered, the radiant but premature delusions of the "patriots"
or the anachronistic myths that surrounded the Neapolitan monarchy and preserved
it for another sixty-one years?
"Lies" presumably also were the grandiose expectations aroused by the
Risorgimento, which, like the Center-Left coalition a century later, was supposed to
cure all Italian ills, solve all problems, produce wealth, spread literacy, transform all
the people into democratic and well-behaved North Europeans, and open the road to
national greatness and prosperity. United Italy turned out not to be exactly what
many people had imagined, the people who had conspired, suffered jail and exile,
fought and died. The final result was a rickety, divided, shabby, impoverished and
backward nation, yet one that wasted its miserable resources trying to impersonate
one of the world's great powers.
Among the victims of such "lies" (which surely were not lies for them) had been the
good Italian citizens, a minority, Nitti among them. Their Italy, the country they
loved and served, tried with some success to prod its reluctant inhabitants toward the
modern world, democracy, incipient industrialization, progress in many fields, and
also managed to win the First World War. But this Italy was also one of Nitti's "lies,"
a thin papier-mache structure, the eggshell holding the national Humpty-Dumpty
together, a make-believe country that never obtained the complete wholehearted
support of all its incredulous citizens.
The biggest of Nitti's "lies" surely were the myths of Fascist propaganda. The regime
had created an imaginary Spartan country, in which all men had to make believe they
were heroic soldiers, all women Roman matrons, all children Balilla (the Genoa
street urchin who started a revolt against the Austrian garrison in 1746 by throwing
one stone). This was done by means of slogans, flags, stirring speeches from
balconies, military music, mass meetings, parades, dashing uniforms, medals,
hoaxes, and constant distortions of reality. The Italians woke up too late from their
artificial dream, those still alive, that is, hungry, desperate, discredited, the object of
derision, cornuti e mazziati, or "cuckolded and beaten up," governed as in the past
by contemptuous foreigners in a country of smoking ruins and decaying corpses,
from which most things detachable had been stolen and women raped.
But why were lies so necessary in Italian life? That, of course, was the problem. Nitti
did not even try to explain.
Anglo-Americans, of course, are not Italians. Which may be fortunate - because we
have been ubbriacati di bugie not for a piddling century and a half, but more like
four hundred. Or at least three hundred. Moreover, despite this remarkable career of
intoxication, we have never become so ubbriacati that we couldn't hold our bugie.
Or even export them - for instance, to Italy. Hey, Tony! If you like our "diplomats,
journalists, and professors of international relations in the best universities," you'll
love our cars...
The country that used to exist
What the hell is history, anyway?
History is just a bunch of stuff that happened. Mostly to people now dead. We owe
these people nothing. They're dead, after all. Sometimes we have some scraps of
paper they scribbled on. Sometimes we don't.
I was reading Tacitus' Annals the other week (not for any good reason; I was just
somewhere where there was a copy of Tacitus) and I was rather looking forward to
the story of Caligula. (Who Tacitus quite confusingly calls "Caius Caesar" - as if there
was some shortage of Romans by this name.) Suddenly, though, there was a gap.
Tacitus did write about Caligula. But no one knows what he said. That book of the
Annals is lost.
We have most of the Annals, though, including the opening, and here's how it goes:
Rome at the beginning was ruled by kings. Freedom and the consulship were
established by Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were held for a temporary crisis. The
power of the decemvirs did not last beyond two years, nor was the consular
jurisdiction of the military tribunes of long duration. The despotisms of Cinna and
Sulla were brief; the rule of Pompeius and of Crassus soon yielded before Caesar; the
arms of Lepidus and Antonius before Augustus; who, when the world was wearied by
civil strife, subjected it to empire under the title of "Prince." But the successes and
reverses of the old Roman people have been recorded by famous historians; and fine
intellects were not wanting to describe the times of Augustus, till growing
sycophancy scared them away. The histories of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero,
while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were
written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence my purpose is to relate a few
facts about Augustus - more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and
all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I
am far removed.
"Without either bitterness or partiality." Sine ira et studio. I doubt these words were
idly chosen, and we kids these days could do a lot worse than to imitate them. No one
gives a rat's ass about Tiberius now. But I see no shortage of either ira or studio.
Anyway, it's not too hard to lose a book of Tacitus. Nor is it any great tragedy. They
actually made a documentary about Caligula. So obviously we know something.
It's slightly more difficult to lose a country. It happened, though, and it was not
Dalmatia or Dacia, Rhaetia or Bithynia. Here's a picture of it:
(Source.) The country was called Rhodesia, and it is no longer found on any map.
Earth's crust being relatively stable, the place where it was still exists. But you
wouldn't want to go there.
The story of Rhodesia is in a strange category we might call "living history." Rhodesia
is dead, but there are still a few Rhodesians kicking around, and some of them even
have blogs. Such as this fellow - whose opinions I'm sure many UR readers might
contest.
Because that innocuous little motto, sine ira et studio, acquires a slight edge when we
come to the "living history" category. When Tacitus wrote about, say, Vespasian, he
was writing of events of a roughly similar age. You can be sure there was plenty of
both ira and studio.
History is not a list of facts. We all agree: in 1973, when I was born (nowhere near
Rhodesia - I have no personal connection at all to the place) there was a country by
that name. In 2007, as I write, there is not. These are facts. But they are not history.
If Tacitus had merely compiled lists of facts, no one would have copied his books, and
we would never even have heard of any Tacitus.
The genius of Tacitus, and his classical peers - Thucydides, for example, is even more
readable - is that they actually tell us what happened. Not just the facts, but the story.
And perhaps we have no choice but to believe them, but we do. Their voices are
credible.
So what the hell happened to Rhodesia? Why was there a Rhodesia, and why isn't
there a Rhodesia anymore? What's the story?
This is a rather large question. It involves the lives of millions of people. It's not quite
as large a question as "what the hell happened to the Roman Empire." But at least no
one involved in the fall of the Roman Empire is still alive and liable to send me angry
email.
Before we try to answer this question, you might enjoy a few minutes immersing
yourself in Rhodesian memorabilia, large piles of which can be found at rhodesia.nl.
For example, this is quite a typical story. This and this (more cerebral), or this and
this (more lurid) represent the Rhodesian Ministry of Information's view of the
conflict. Rhodesia after its unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 became
quite isolated from the Western world, and as a result even the graphic design of
Rhodesian publications can strike us as quite unusual - see, for example, this large
PDF, which is the final issue of Cheetah, the magazine of the Rhodesian Light
Infantry.
If you are willing to take a minute for this 8MB download, perhaps you will see why I
find the story of Rhodesia so fascinating. It is simply an introduction to an alien
world. It might as well have been printed on Alpha Centauri, except that it seems to
be in English. Aside from the language barrier, I am quite sure I have more in
common with Tacitus himself than with any of the odd bipeds who adorn the pages
of Cheetah. Perhaps a modern German has rather the same reaction to documents
from the Third Reich. (The last two pages of the PDF, which are quite artistic, may be
the most unusual - don't miss the selection of past Cheetah covers.)
Of course, this does nothing to answer the question. Perhaps first we should get the
official story, which we can hear from our good old friend Samantha Power. As Power
wrote, in an excellent 2003 article called How To Kill a Country:
Although Zimbabwe is as broken as any country on the planet, it offers a testament
not to some inherent African inability to govern but to a minority rule as oppressive
and inconsiderate of the welfare of citizens as its ignominious white predecessor.
I suspect the readers of Cheetah might take some issue with the word "ignominious."
But, of course, the winners write the history books. Or at least they get to teach at
Harvard. And the losers are, well - losers.
In any case, Power is no fan of ZANU-PF, and she closes with this same point:
For all their differences, Mugabe and Ian Smith share a basic misconception about
power: they both fail to realize that a government cannot survive indefinitely when it
advances the political and economic desires of the few at the expense of the many.
When I asked Smith whether he would stop leaving his front door open now that
starving Zimbabweans are prowling the city, he replied, "I'm not going to change
now." The same, alas, is most likely true of Robert Mugabe.
See, this is how bad Robert Mugabe is: he is just as bad as Ian Smith.
(Who, almost unbelievably, is still alive - though shortly after this article was
published, Smith's home was stolen and he moved, like so many of his compatriots,
to South Africa. Which presumably will survive long enough for him to at least die of
old age in his own bed. You can buy Smith's memoirs here. Be warned, he's not a very
good writer.)
Of course the idea that starving Rhodesians, whatever their skin tone, were ever
"prowling" Salisbury, is rather surprising. And quite untrue. As the Rhodesian
government put it in 1979 (bear in mind that the Rhodesian dollar was pegged 1:1 to
the US dollar):
A United States State Department Agency report says that in the decade 1965-1975,
Rhodesian economic growth outstripped that of almost all its neighbours; her Gross
National Product rose by almost 80 per cent. and the per capita income by 26 per
cent. The 1974 per capita income of $422 compared very favourably with that of
$348 in Botswana, $148 in Zaire and $126 in Tanzania.
In the purely material sphere earnings have increased phenomenally: in 1958 the
652,000 workers in the industrial sector earned an average per capita income of
$169, ranging from a high of $285 in the finance and insurance fields to a low of
$104 for an agricultural worker; in 1965 the figures were 656,000 workers, average
income $250, and by 1975, 982,000 workers had a mean per capita income of $692,
with those employed in the educational, transport and communications and finance,
insurance and real estate spheres, earning an average of $981, while the least paid
employees - agricultural workers, domestic servants and miners and quarry workers
- earned $336 on the average.
[...]
Black private enterprise is growing, particularly in the fields of transport,
distribution and agriculture: black bus-owners manage highly successful businesses
which provide transport between the urban areas and the Tribal Trust Lands; black
retailers own and run about 2,500 stores, varying in size and sophistication; and
blacks own and manage over 8,000 commercial farms.
In the professional field, there are many successful black doctors, lawyers, teachers,
accountants, etc. In the private sector of business and commerce, there are
significant examples of appropriate responsibilities offered to, and successfully
discharged by, qualified blacks and many large companies employ blacks in
management or trainee-management positions.
The Civil Service employs increasing numbers of blacks in established posts,
especially in the fields of education, health and social welfare.
I know it seems odd, and I do not have a link handy, but one of the mainstays of the
early postwar case for decolonialization was actually that European government was
artificially retarding the development of black Africa, confining native populations
to traditional pre-industrial economic, social and political structures, and preventing
them from moving forward to a modern, centrally-planned socialist economy.
Hopefully if you are a regular UR reader, I have established some credibility and you
are willing to take me on trust when I say that people actually did believe this.
Otherwise I'll have to dig up a link or something.
Of course this proposition is no longer uttered as such. But it no longer needs to be
uttered, because so few remember Africa before decolonialization, and those who do
don't exactly teach at Harvard. So it has passed into history, and fossilized in a way.
It can be assumed and included in arguments without any actual thought.
In fact, what Power really means is that a government "cannot survive indefinitely" if
it defies the wishes of the international community. Ie, of, well - Power. Here we have
the ultimate cause of Rhodesia's destruction. I believe this is a clear and undisputed
fact.
The proximate cause of Rhodesia's demise is also clear. Rhodesia was throttled by
carnations, stabbed in the back by South Africa, and finished off by Jimmy Carter.
The carnations were dropped into rifles and used to overthrow the Estado Novo of
Portugal, which then abandoned Moçambique, Portuguese territory for the last 500
years, which in 1975 reverted to the international community - specifically its Cyrillic
arm.
The Carnation Revolution left South Africa as the last ally of landlocked, blockaded
Rhodesia. As everyone in the world can surely now agree, the National Party regime
in South Africa were swine, and they thought they could appease the international
community by selling out the Rhodesians - for example, cutting off their fuel supply.
While this did them no good at all, it essentially forced the Rhodesian government to
surrender.
As this article describes, Henry Kissinger approved - or at least led the Rhodesians to
believe he'd approved - a plan under which Rhodesia would adopt a universalsuffrage voting system. Rhodesia, unlike South Africa, never had an apartheid system
or race-specific elections; the entire cause of the dispute was that the Rhodesian
electoral system, following Cecil Rhodes' dictum of "equal rights for all civilized
men," had a property qualification for elections.
However, this first plan for majority rule was designed to elect the moderate black
leader Abel Muzorewa. It was boycotted by the guerrilla leaders Mugabe and Nkomo,
and (worst of all) it specifically preserved the white Rhodesian civil service. In other
words, at least for the time being, it was essentially cosmetic. Carter, and his advisor
on African affairs Andrew Young, refused to accept the results of Kissinger's
diplomacy and forced a new election, which was won (quite violently) by Mugabe.
Of course presumably Young would disagree with this perception. As one Rhodesian
Ministry of Information pamphlet put it:
This weekend, in the worst atrocity committed against white civilians in the history
of Rhodesia's six-year war, terrorists of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe National
Liberation Army hacked and battered to death almost the entire white staff and their
families at the Elim Pentacostal Mission in the Eastern border mountains.
Mr. Young is asked: "Does Mr. Mugabe strike you as a violent man?"
He replies: "Not at all, he's a very gentle man. In fact, one of the ironies of the whole
struggle is that I can't imagine Joshua Nkomo, or Robert Mugabe, ever pulling the
trigger on a gun to kill anyone. I doubt that they ever have.... The violent people are
Smith's people and hopefully they won't be around for the new Zimbabwe."
This weekend, when local and international journalists arrived at the scene of the
massacre 15 km from Umtali and less than 7 km from the Mozambique border, the
mutilated and blood-stained bodies of three men, four women and five children including a three-week-old baby - were lying as they had been found that morning.
Mr. Young is asked how he gets on with Mr. Mugabe.
He replies: "I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only
thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned
incorruptible.... The problem is he was educated by the Jesuits, and when you get the
combination of a Jesuit and a Marxist kind of philosophy merging in one person,
you've got a hell of a guy to deal with."
So we have the ultimate cause and the proximate cause. But do we really know the
story?
All these facts are easy to assemble into the Rhodesian point of view. From this
perspective, what happened is that Rhodesia, a white British nation which extended
the benefits of peace, law and economic development to the Shona and Matabele
nations which shared its idyllic little corner of the Dark Continent, was smashed by
International Pinko Communism, which destroyed the country by handing it over to
the vicious terrorist gangs its soldiers had been bravely resisting. The subsequent
debacle of Mugabe's Zimbabwe was as predictable as it was tragic, and if God-fearing
American and British citizens had subscribed to Cheetah and read more of those
Ministry of Information pamphlets, the whole thing could have been avoided.
Do I believe this? Well, in a certain sense, I believe it. I certainly think it's a
perspective that is worth appreciating, albeit in slightly less caricatured terms, as
long as you also know the official story. I'd definitely pay good money to see
Samantha Power debate "The Last of the Rhodesians" on the subject.
However, I don't think either of these narratives is quite how Tacitus would put it.
And nor is the combination - truly ira et studio - completely satisfying.
Perhaps if there is a unifying thread to the story, it is in the life of Garfield Todd,
eulogized by the Grauniad here and described from a liberal Rhodesian perspective
here.
Because there was such a thing as a liberal Rhodesian perspective. Rhodesia was a
country, not a cartoon, and it had politics of its own. And these politics, I think, are
relevant to more than Rhodesia (which after all is dead). They are a kind of
microcosm of postwar "Anglosphere" politics as a whole, in which each faction had
its strange Rhodesian reflection.
Todd, basically, was the Universalist to end all Universalists. He was not just cryptoChristian - he was Christian, a representative of the powerful missionary system. He
devoted himself, with typical Universalist noblesse oblige, to the uplift and education
of Africans.
And he was, in fact, Robert Mugabe's boss. Mugabe got his start as a schoolteacher in
the "Dadaya New Zealand Churches of Christ Mission School," where Todd was the
principal. Small wonder that in 1972 Todd, the former PM of Rhodesia, was confined
under house arrest for having worked underground to support Mugabe's guerrillas.
His daughter Judith Todd, who among other efforts underwent a hunger strike
against Smith's government, recently revealed that during the 1983 Matabeleland
massacres - in which tens of thousands of Mugabe's tribal opponents were murdered
- she was raped by an officer of ZANU's North Korean-trained security forces.
At the time her father was a senator of Zimbabwe, appointed by his former protege
Mugabe, whose position he had done so much to obtain - only three years previously.
And Garfield Todd remained in this role for two more years.
What would Tacitus make of this? Frankly, I'm not sure he could even process it. The
whole affair is just not in his philosophy. Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk,
we would not understand him. Probably Garfield Todd, simply by virtue of being
born in 1908, had some Latin. But I'm not sure Tacitus would find him any more
intelligible than Wittgenstein's lion.
The social relationship between Todd and Smith is particularly fascinating. Travelers
to Rhodesia in its later years often remarked that it seemed like a piece of prewar
Britain, even 19th-century Britain, that had somehow fossilized and failed to develop.
A figure like Ian Smith could never have achieved any political prominence in prewar
Britain, because his origins were decidedly middle-class. Smith was an RAF officer in
WWII, but his accent was no doubt anything but Old Etonian. Much as Todd was the
ultimate missionary, Smith was the ultimate settler - and the battle between
missionaries and settlers, which ended of course in the victory of the former, was the
great conflict of colonialism.
Rhodesia can be seen as a sort of British alternate present. Perhaps something like a
Rhodesian Britain could have existed in a Europe where WWII never happened, and
middle-class right-wing movements were not considered "populist" and intrinsically
dangerous. Today's British National Party, for example, is very reminiscent of the
Rhodesian Front in its general cultural associations. (Note that, like the Rhodesian
sites I've linked to, the BNP also has the worst possible taste in Web design. This is
very petty-bourgeois.)
Smith's Rhodesian Front was a profoundly Optimate-Vaisya concoction: basically
lower middle-class, with a light spattering of degenerate aristocrats. Given the BDHOV conflict, that Smith's Rhodesia would fight a war with the Universalist "world
community," or with the likes of the uber-Universalist Garfield Todd, is utterly
unsurprising.
Remember that this is not just a political conflict, but a religious war. Universalism
and traditionalist Revelationism are the two leading clades of Christianity in the
world today. If Revelationism had any chance of extirpating Universalism, it would
surely seize it, so one can't really be too shocked and offended that the project is
proceeding in the opposite direction.
The United States is the only country in which any political force with even the
slightest resemblance to the Rhodesian Front is tolerated as a legitimate party. For
all of Europe and Britain, the analogy to National Socialism - which of course was
another Vaisya party - is simply too close to home. Today's Europeans simply cannot
understand why Republicans, at least populist Republicans, are allowed to exist
within the American political system. They look at it rather the way you'd look at
someone who kept a pet leopard in his closet.
Fortunately for Universalists, the political wind is certainly in their sails. It is
increasingly difficult for "populist" Republicans to survive in the American political
system, simply because the press they get is so bad. The likes of Tom Tancredo and
Duncan Hunter could never get themselves appointed as first-tier presidential
candidates, whereas John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani - all of whom
have proved themselves acceptable to the Universalist press - can. Even George W.
Bush outdistanced the field on the basis of his "compassionate conservatism," and
(as some commenters here have observed) - neoconservatism itself contains a
powerful dose of Universalism. Until a new outbreak of Middle American populism
creates a new McCarthy or Reagan, the Republicans are headed back toward "postpartisan" territory, where like Willkie, Eisenhower or Rockefeller they will again
serve as the Polygon's faithful lapdogs, deeply sorry that they ever even thought of
digging a hole in the sofa.
In other words, my prediction for the future: more progress.
There is only one slight problem with this picture. The problem is that, basically, Ian
Smith and his cronies were right. And basically, Garfield Todd and his friends were
wrong.
Universalist Christianity is profoundly adaptive when it comes to outcompeting its
opponents. It's very difficult for a Christian to argue against Universalism, because it
is manifestly so pure and Christlike. Even in a time and place like Rhodesia in the
'60s - when Universalism was blatantly suicidal - it was by no means easy for Smith's
insurgent party to brush the Establishment aside. The Rhodesian Front could win the
votes of Rhodesian farmers who didn't want to be murdered in their beds. It had no
chance of convincing the world.
However, Universalism also has enemies. Smith never really managed to hate the
likes of Todd - he thought they were misguided. I was brought up a Universalist, so
obviously I have the same feeling, only more so. It was not Smith, but Mugabe, who
proved the real enemy of the Todds.
And being an enemy, he saw no shame at all in feigning Christian sentiments to
manipulate his enemies. This is the permanent strategy of the militarist kleptocracies
against the Universalist democracies. Negotiate with us, we are really moderate, we
would not hurt a fly. True, we are armed to the teeth, but we only care about social
justice, all we want is our rights. We, in fact, are budding Universalists, and if you call
off your dogs, disband your commandos and accept our just and reasonable
demands, we too will learn to turn the other cheek.
If you are any sort of a Christian, this song cannot fail to charm your heart a little.
And all the more if you are a Universalist, which after all is a very fanatical sort of a
Christian. A Universalist by definition believes that the world is progressing toward a
future in which everyone will be a Universalist. When he sees evidence of this, he
wants to believe it.
When I think about Universalist support for Third World "liberation movements" hardly a single one of which turned out to be anything but evil and corrupt, and
certainly none of which came even close to providing better government than its
colonial predecessor - of course it is easy for me, rejecting Universalism, to sneer.
But this is just evidence of the same mentality. Imagine if, say, the Congo, or Saudi
Arabia, or Samoa, was taken over tomorrow by a movement which claimed to be
libertarian. Possibly even by the formalist corporate-capitalist state of my dreams. I
have trouble imagining this, of course. But if it did happen, presumably my first
inclination would be to support it. And presumably I'd have a bit of trouble realizing
that these acolytes of my preferred future were, in fact, a gang of killers and thieves.
When we read history sine ira et studio, we cannot hate the Garfield Todds. We can
describe them as stupid, hubristic, fanatical and destructive, of course, and so of
course they were - at least in my opinion. But any effort to rid human society of
stupidity, hubris, fanaticism or destructiveness is itself so hubristic that it simply
redoubles the mistake.
If certain people had thought clearly and acted effectively, perhaps Rhodesia would
have survived. They didn't, and it didn't. The only lesson we can draw from this is
that it's important to think clearly and act effectively. The past is dead; we owe it
nothing.
I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this
I usually try not to use the word "liberal," because (a) it has enough separate
meanings, most of which have nothing to do with one another and the rest of which
are mutually contradictory, to drive William Empson into a psychotic break; and (b)
it makes me sound like Rush Limbaugh. However, after Wednesday's bizarre antiAmerican screed, I feel like I'm on a roll and thought I might try and drive away my
other three readers.
So we'll give it a spin. Of course, what I mean by "liberalism" is just good old
cryptocalvinism.
Is that what Jonah Goldberg means by it? Frankly, I have no idea. Let's not forget,
here, that we're talking about a man who went to a women's college - one year after it
went coed. Can we fault Mr. Goldberg for that? We certainly cannot. Can we trust
him farther than we can throw him? My suspicion is that he's a little guy, if you know
what I mean, so this may already be placing too much confidence in the fellow.
Obviously, unlike Daniel Larison, I am much too intellectually honest to engage in
the notorious pastime of "insulting upward." (And Daniel, really. Your blog used to
be good and now it is starting to suck, because you are turning into a pundit. I'm sure
you are quite aware that it is an astonishing abuse of history to describe Hegel, who
really made no distinction at all between God, himself, and the State, as a
"moderately liberal constitutional monarchist." Nor is this an isolated misdemeanor.
If you could just stop cruelly mocking Jonah, who is not as smart as you and doesn't
deserve to be treated this way, they would probably let you onto the Corner, where
I'm beginning to think you'd fit in perfectly.)
In any case. Enough of this bitchery. Let's talk about Goldberg's "liberal fascism."
In the first place, is there any such thing as liberal fascism? Is it even responsible to
use this phrase? Does it make any more sense than, say, "rhinoceros apartheid"? We
know there are rhinoceri, we know there was apartheid, and we know that the
government of Vorster and Botha maintained a strict policy of segregating black and
white rhinos. In order to use such a phrase with a straight face, however, we have to
demonstrate some kind of an actual connection between the two phenomena preferably exceeding the level of a pun.
I can certainly imagine how Goldberg goes from Hegel to fascism, and how he goes
from Hegel to liberalism. But Whole Foods? It baffles me, it really does - especially
since the CEO of Whole Foods is a well-known libertarian. And in any case, you can
go from Newton to fascism and Newton to liberalism. This does not make fascists
liberals, liberals fascists, or either of them deist alchemist-Bibliolatrists.
For example, I think most people would agree that one important component of
fascism is an association between a political movement and racist paramilitary gangs,
such as the squadristi in Italy or the Sturmabteilung in Germany. Heck, even Stalin
was a bank robber.
If there is such a thing as "liberal fascism," where is the liberal SA? I mean, I live in
San Francisco, which, if liberals are fascists, pretty much has to be the liberal Fiume
or Munich. And yes - leather legwear is oddly popular here. But I haven't noticed any
torchlight marches, nobody seems to be being dosed with castor oil, and political
opponents of Gavin Newsom, Chris Daly or Bruce Brugmann are seldom found
floating bound and gagged in the Bay.
Actually, however...
In fact, liberalism is deeply involved with racist paramilitary gangs. Like both
Mussolini and Hitler, liberals used the gangs to come to power and have since mostly
abandoned them. However, links still remain, especially to Third World gangsters.
We ("as a society," as a liberal might say) have just agreed not to notice this fact. Not
because it's debatable in any way, shape or form, but simply because it's too
upsetting.
The most famous of the liberals' racist paramilitary gangs was, of course, the Black
Panthers. But there were many others, such as the Black Muslims (who once tried to
ethnically cleanse San Francisco) the Blackstone Rangers and Latin Kings in Chicago,
the Young Lords in New York, and so on. There were of course white gangs as well,
such as the SLA, although they were not white nationalist but anti-white nationalist.
The classic story of the relationship is Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic, though of course if
one is so inclined one can also read David Horowitz.
In the period perhaps best described as the Hippie Coup (featuring wonderfully
Orwellian incidents such as that famous peace rally, the Days of Rage), liberals
deployed the racist gangs as political weapons, adding a little kick to their Gramscian
march through the institutions. The idea was simply to intimidate their
"Establishment" enemies, who were of course just the previous generation of
cryptocalvinists, by offering them a choice between surrender and chaos. Few found
the choice difficult - the capture of Yale by the Panthers is typical. The Hippie Coup,
which is the origin of the Polygon as we know it today, was a sort of generational
autogolpe by the Brahmin elite against itself.
One of today's leading liberal politicians was involved with the Panthers' attack on
Yale. Hint: it ain't Hegel.
As in both Fascism and National Socialism, direct links between politicians and
gangs in the course of the Hippie Coup lasted only as long as it took to seize power.
Of course the gangs are still around, and of course they are still politically protected.
(I think it goes without saying that racist paramilitary gangs are not a normal
element of a healthy society, but I'll say it anyway.) And there are presumably some
links. If Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright don't know any gang
leaders, I'm sure they know people who do. But the gangs have served their purpose they are no longer deployed as political weapons to intimidate the opponents of
liberalism. There is no need for any such crudity in our new "post-partisan" era.
The most significant surviving remnants of the hippies' paramilitary wing are the
racist-studies programs, which no official university is now without. Establishing
these centers of so-called learning was one of the main demands of the Hippie Coup,
and not without reason. They now serve as cadre training programs, dedicating most
of America's most talented minorities to careers in social activism, ie, working as
political soldiers for the Polygon. However, since the rise of what Wolfe called MauMauing (I prefer the South African term, toyi-toyi), actual physical violence is almost
never necessary. The racist-studies cadre are also available to make trouble on
campus when a Larry Summers or the like needs to be gotten rid of. Again, castor oil
is not required, as we have long since learned that offering any resistance to any kind
of a mob is incompatible with our great American tradition of civil liberties.
However, we can see the liberal-gangster alliance in its active, reproducing phase
when we look at ties from liberals in the US and Europe, to gangsters in the Third
World.
Your basic definition of a Third World country is that it's a country run by racist
gangsters. The "para" drops off the "military." Robert Mugabe, for example, is a
racist gangster, and the longstanding links between him and the World Council of
Churches are typical of this bizarre, yet strangely rational, alliance. Presumably if
Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton had ever succeeded in establishing a Panther
republic in North America, as many quite sensible people once thought they would
(the closest thing was really Marion Barry's Chocolate City), it would have resembled
the regimes established by the period's many other "liberation fronts."
But it gets worse. Last weekend there was a wonderfully illustrative front-page essay,
which I really hope does not disappear behind a firewall, in the Wall Street Journal.
The essay was by one Lucette Lagnado, adapted from her new book, and it was called
Searching for My Father's Lost City.
This article really must be read to be believed. Because I'm afraid the link will break,
I will quote bits of it here. These bits are simply not credible on their own, however,
and if I read them out of context I would have to assume they were taken out of
context.
Okay, brief history of modern Egypt: captured by Napoleon in 1798, by the British in
1801, administered by the latter for the next 150 years, during which it became a
charming and extremely multicultural Levantine entrepôt - see, for example,
Lawrence Durrell. I know it sounds bizarre, but ordinary people could just move
there and live an ordinary productive life in which they had no thought of being
shot, blown up or shredded on the street by rampaging nationalist mobs. Apparently
this was called "colonialism."
All this changed in 1952, when the British Empire was disintegrating, and the
peaceful monarchy of King Farouk - who, thanks to Hunter S. Thompson, I always
envision in a huge white convertible - was overthrown by gunfire, explosions, and
rampaging nationalist mobs. Naturally, all right-thinking people in the West, who
felt about colonialists pretty much the way Eldridge Cleaver felt about white people,
applauded this liberation, which was essentially a racist pogrom in which everyone
not of Arab descent was forced to leave the country or die. The result being the
liberated paradise that is Egypt today.
One of the families driven out with baggage alone was Lucette Lagnado's. Her family
was Jewish, probably Salonican Sephardic by the name. (Many Salonican Jews
moved to Egypt during the century-and-a-half that Britain kept the peace there, not
least because they were driven out by the charming Greek nationalist gangs whom
previous generations of British liberals had chosen to sponsor. Of course, the
mandate in Egypt was not run by Byrons and Shelleys, but by loyal Optimates like
Lord Cromer, whose views on the "liberation of Iraq" I'm sure would be grimly
hilarious.)
Lagnado opens her piece thus:
As my car pulled into Suleiman Pasha Square in the heart of downtown Cairo, I
spotted it immediately -- Groppi's, the patisserie that was really so much more: A
palace of pleasure, the hub of elegant European social life, the city at its most vibrant
and cosmopolitan. It seemed exactly as I remembered it when I'd last seen it as a
little girl more than 40 years earlier, its name in that charming old-fashioned scrawl,
the entrance covered by colorful mosaics and, inside, the same cool, high-ceilinged,
marble elegance and pale pink walls.
Or maybe not the same.
The shelves were almost bare. No one stood in line at the ancient cash register. The
few trays of pastries, which seemed neither French nor Middle Eastern, looked
thoroughly unappetizing. The dining area had dozens of tables and almost no diners.
I was only six when my family left Egypt in 1963, among tens of thousands of Jews
forced to leave in a modern-day exodus. After we fled, first to Paris then New York, I
grew up on a diet of stories about our lost life. Many featured Groppi's: Part pastryshop, part paradise, a favorite of kings, colonialists and privileged Cairenes.
Now, Groppi's was like the rest of Cairo -- a museum to a bygone era.
She then works through the history. Her take is a little different from mine:
Egypt's efforts to chart an economic and political course separate from old colonial
powers was important, many Egyptians believe, for the country to purge itself of
foreigners whose influence and power were seen as oppressive. It was necessary for
the country to pursue its own destiny.
I swear, folks, I do not make this stuff up. (On my last post one commenter, with
tongue in cheek I hope, accused me of passing off a juicy bit of Mein Kampf as
Rousseau. Au contraire, mon frere. But then again, there's a reason Jimmy Page
sounds like Robert Johnson.)
For anyone who has serious difficulty with the obvious, you can try pasting
Lagnado's essay into Notepad and replacing the word "Egypt" with "Germany":
In January 1952, in what became known as "Black Saturday," angry crowds rushed
through the streets of fashionable downtown Cairo torching all the symbols of luxury
and foreign excess: department stores, cinemas, airline offices, banks, restaurants,
private clubs and hotels. Among the victims: Shepheard's, Groppi's and Cinema
Metro. They had made the average Cairene feel like a stranger in his own land,
because for those who were neither foreign nor rich nor Jewish much of the city -even a patisserie like Groppi's -- was off limits. The vast majority of Egyptians never
felt welcome and most couldn't afford it.
I ask you, reader: is there anything you can't afford? Is there anywhere you don't feel
welcome? Have you ever rushed through the streets torching these symbols of
luxury? Not to mention foreign excess? Of course, you're probably not an Arab. I hear
they're excitable.
Fortunately, idealism and rent control come to the rescue:
Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, a leader of the coup, took over in 1954 and set out to
remake Egypt. Neither foreigners nor Jews were welcome -- even those who were
born there or had lived there for decades. They were forced out as Nasser
nationalized industries, sequestered businesses and put military people in charge.
Driven in part by idealism, he instituted land reforms that took land away from the
rich and imposed rent control laws to protect the poor.
There's only a small downside to this liberation of the Egyptian people:
Within a space of 19 years, nearly all of Egypt's 80,000 Jews left. Hundreds of
thousands of Europeans also fled -- British and French who were ordered out, as well
as others who held foreign passports and had no choice but to leave because they had
been stripped of their businesses and livelihood.
One upon a time, Cairo had more than 30 working synagogues, along with dozens of
small "shuls" where men gathered to pray and study. There were Jewish schools,
nursing homes, an Hôpital Israelite and a vast ancient Jewish cemetery where
mystics were buried. These days, only about a dozen synagogues are left in Cairo and
most lie vacant and neglected. The cemetery has been plundered of most marble
headstones, so that it is almost impossible to identify graves of loved ones.
What's a little grave-robbing after 150 years of tyrannical Judeo-British oppression?
In Egypt, the Jews' departure went hand in hand with the ouster of foreigners who
had settled years earlier and turned Cairo into a capital of all-night cafes and openair cinemas, where it was possible to hear people conversing in four or five languages
-- French, English, Italian, Greek, Arabic -- in the same breath. According to Khairi
Abaza, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in
Washington, D.C., as many as a million Europeans once called Egypt home, every bit
as much as Paris or London or Athens. Their influence was profound: From British
clubs and legendary hotels like Shepheards with its graceful terrace to elegant streets
and buildings designed to resemble Parisian boulevards and cafes that served Greek
appetizers. The French, about 40,000 strong, were intent on spreading their culture.
French became the second language for privileged Egyptians. A large community of
Greeks, numbering from 200,000-400,000, prospered in the food and hospitality
business, running hotels and selling groceries, wine and liquor. There were also
100,000-150,000 Italians who specialized in import-export, accounting or finance. A
Belgian industrialist helped build the swank suburb of Heliopolis. About 100,000
Armenians lived in Egypt, and many distinguished themselves as craftsmen and
merchants. Then there were Jewish entrepreneurs like my father.
Ah, multiculturalism. But there was a dark underside to this paradise of diversity:
Many ordinary Egyptians were mired in poverty, cut off from the cafes and nightlife.
Beggars roamed the streets.
But Nasser fixed that! Oh, no, wait, he didn't:
Economically, the decline relative to other countries has been steep. In 1950, prior to
the revolution, Egypt's per capita income was 80% that of Greece's and 45% of
Italy's; now, says Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, a nonprofit think tank, Egypt has 11% of Greece's per
capita income, and 6% of Italy's.
But at least ordinary Egyptians aren't cut off from the cafes and nightlife. Or, at least,
Yehia El-Gamal isn't:
"No Egyptian would like the colonial powers to come back to Cairo -- either British or
French. We struggled for our independence," says Yehia El-Gamal, an attorney and
law professor in Cairo who first came to the city in the 1940s.
Great Britain's constant interference in Egyptian politics fueled this rising tide of
nationalism -- a sense by the average Egyptian that they weren't the masters of their
fate. Egyptians, says Mr. Abaza, who comes from a family of politicians, "felt
humiliated," and resented the fact that the British had been trying to control the
political processes since the 19th century.
In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears are frequently seen shitting in the
woods. Someday Westerners will learn that what matters about a government is what
it does, and what doesn't matter is the race, creed, color, sexual preference, or
country of origin of its employees. Unfortunately, I suspect we may have to learn it
the hard way. Egypt sure did.
The ending is most precious of all. Heedless of the copyright mafia, I paste at length:
From the moment I got off the plane at Cairo International Airport, I wanted to go to
Queen Nazli Street, to the house where I was born.
No one called it Queen Nazli Street anymore. After the 1952 revolution, Cairo's
streets were renamed to eliminate any mention of the monarchy. Stately King Fuad
Street became known as "26th of July Street," the day of the revolution. Queen Nazli
Street was named Ramses Street, after the old pharaoh. My family like so many
others always used the old name.
My father had moved to Queen Nazli Street as a bachelor in 1938, renting a spacious
ground-floor apartment. He brought my mom there when they married in the 1940s.
A handsome movie star lived upstairs, a popular heartthrob of the Egyptian cinema.
My family paid three Egyptian pounds, or $6.90, a month. The front entrance was as
imposing as I remembered it, though graffiti marred the building's facade. I pushed
the door open and found myself in a dark, dingy hallway with a large staircase.
Glancing at the stairs, I noticed with a sinking feeling how dusty and broken down
they were. The walls were filthy.
I knocked on the door marked #2 -- my home -- and almost immediately, a man
answered. It was Wageeh Androus, the son of the amiable Coptic Christian couple
that took over our lease in 1963. His father had died a few years earlier, but Wageeh
still lived there with his aging mother. Mother and son told me they were paying 20
Egyptian pounds, $3.50 or so, in monthly rent. The low rent reflects the continued
grip of Egypt's rent-control laws, even as Cairo's population has exploded from six
million in 1965 shortly after I left to about 16 million today.
The apartment seemed worn but much as I'd remembered it. The Androus family
told me an old woman upstairs, known as Om Sayeda ("Mother Sayeda"), wanted to
meet me. She had been living in the building for more than 60 years and had known
my family.
I knocked on the door and found an old woman seated in a velvet arm chair, a frail,
regal figure with her hair swept under a white head covering. I went over to shake her
hand, but she reached out to embrace me instead, her arms wrapping around me as
she kissed both my cheeks, and brought me close to her chest.
"You look exactly like your mother," she declared. "You are the same as I remember
her."
The old woman herself rose and beckoned me to join her at a balcony which she
clearly loved with its ornate canopy and panoramic views of Queen Nazli Street.
As I prepared to leave, Om Sayeda suddenly shouted: "Wait." I stopped to look at
her.
"I am old and I am lonely," she cried. "There is only me and my daughter here, and I
have so many rooms."
"Why don't you stay?" she said. "Why don't you move in here? You can have any
room you want," she added.
I looked at her, stunned. I, an American Jew, was being offered a chance to move
back to Queen Nazli Street.
I didn't take her up on her offer. But when I ran to embrace the old woman, and she
took both my hands in hers, I understood my father and his lament, "Ragaouna
Masr," take us back to Cairo.
Groppi's, Queen Nazli Street, Cairo -- they hadn't simply been places, but a state of
mind. They were home -- filled with mercy and compassion, tenderness and grace,
those qualities that make and keep us human.
Those qualities that make and keep us human! "I, an American Jew, was being
offered a chance..."
Try and complete that sentence with the aid of a little counterfactual history. "I, an
American Jew, was being offered a chance to move back to the Horst-WesselStrasse." Or change both nationalities. "I, a Mexican Catholic, was being offered a
chance to move back to Dolores Street." We are so far from Planet Reality that we
may simply choose to live out our lives here, in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
It is not just that Lagnado does not form, or even sympathize with, the Alexandrian
Liberation Front, whose suicide-bombers regularly self-detonate in Egyptian masstransit facilities, demanding a "right of return." It is that she actually thinks the
destruction of civilization in Egypt by racist mobs and military gangsters, and the
expulsion of her family and herself, was a good thing. (One wonders if her father
feels the same way.)
Clearly, the American educational system has done a real number on Ms. Lagnado.
Maybe she went to Yale. After all, it takes a village to raise a child...
Conrad reviews Africa Addio
here. Since I prodded him to this, I suppose I should say a few words.
Of course this is a lovely review - what more could one expect? Conrad's choice of
screenshots is excellent - revealing the cinematic achievement that is Africa Addio. If
not for the content and the title font, it'd be almost impossible to believe this
documentary was made in 1966. Merely as moviemakers, Jacopetti and Prosperi
(directors of the more famous Mondo films, although they consider Addio their
masterpiece) were far ahead of their time.
Addio is not merely a movie, however. It is a historical document. And this is where I
must fault Conrad slightly, because the problem is, he is misleading you a little. It is a
very pardonable reviewer's trick. The trouble is that he wants you to watch the movie
(the Google Video copy has been pulled, but it's easy to find on DVD), and so he
makes it sound a little bit like a National Geographic Special.
And you almost certainly don't want to watch this movie. If there is any good reason
for the world to have an MPAA, Africa Addio is it. In fact, I don't think an NC-17
would really do Addio justice. I think it might well be something like an NC-40.
Certainly, if you are between the ages of three and ninety-three, there's no chance
you will ever forget the experience.
Let me put it this way. In Addio, you see two men killed onscreen. (These executions
are almost certainly not faked - I don't believe any of the footage is, although clearly
some of the events, such as charismatic megafauna being hunted with spears, are
orchestrated rather than incidental.) But what's really appalling is that by the point
at which you see this, which is toward the end of the film, it hardly bothers you at all.
It seems, really, almost normal.
The genius of Addio is that it sweeps you into the welter of stupendous tragedy that
was Africa in the '60s, engaging your senses and forcing you beyond any conceivable
denial. If you saw Hotel Rwanda or Last King of Scotland, perhaps you got a small
taste of this experience. But both of these were, of course, fiction.
For example, Addio contains the only footage of actual genocide that I know of. And
it's not just footage of genocide - it's 35mm film, shot by one of the leading
documentary cinematographers of his generation, from a helicopter, of a genocide
which I had never even heard of.
The genocide is the murder of the Arabs of Zanzibar in 1964. It's briefly mentioned
on this page, which gives a death count of 5000, a number which anyone who sees
the film can tell is understated. You see almost that many people on screen, and
that's just the rolls they used. Murdering 5000 people barely counts as genocide
these days, and it hardly requires the use of large, preprepared, mechanically-dug
mass graves.
(My guess is that the memory hole in this case is due to the fact that the Arab ruling
class of Zanzibar was generally aligned with the British Empire, and the African party
which sponsored the coup and genocide was aligned with Tanzania, which Zanzibar
merged with Tanganyika to form three months later, and which was a longtime
darling of the Western left.)
Allow me to set the scene. After trying to land in Zanzibar, and being forced to make
a quick takeoff when their plane is shot at and a companion plane is burned on the
landing strip, our filmmakers rent a helicopter in Kenya and fly over the scene at a
reasonable height. We see a line of people, dark-skinned men, women and children
in white Arab clothing, walking single file as far as the eye can see, toward the
aforementioned mass graves. The soldiers guarding them occasionally look up and
take a potshot at the copter, but it's too high.
Cut to a shallow tidal flat, where hundreds at least, probably thousands of Arabs have
been literally driven into the sea. Small boats are collecting a few of them. The rest
merely stand around in water up to their ankles, presumably wondering what in the
hell to do. There is no answer. The mainland is not in swimming distance. The next
day, the helicopter returns, and where there had been people, there are now bodies still in the same white robes.
Have you ever wondered how, if the Nazis had invented some miracle wonderweapon in 1944 and actually won the war, they would explain the Holocaust?
Because I'm sure there would be a way. Hitler never ordered it. It was war, things
happen. It was the Allies' fault for not accepting Jewish refugees. The British and
Americans bombed city centers, boiling Germans alive like rats in tunnels. The
Soviets did all kinds of crazy horrible things. All of these and more, I'm sure, would
be deployed.
But if the Nazis knew one thing, it was how to distort reality. It's often forgotten that
when Hitler wrote of the Big Lie, he meant - of course - the lies of others. He, Hitler,
was debunking these lies, offering truth to the people. But of course he was
projecting, and how better to present his own Lie?
And so all educated people on the planet today learn that there was something called
"colonialism," that "colonialism" was evil, and that its death was a "liberation."
And when I tell you that, in reality, this "liberation" amounted to an orgy of tyranny
and murder which surely at least competes with the achievements of Stalin, Hitler or
Mao - that the transition from "colonialism" to "postcolonialism" amounted to a
transfer of the Third World from one Western faction to another, from Optimate to
Brahmin, Revelationist to Universalist, from indirect rule at the local level to the
same at the national level - that it replaced governments whose quality of service was
generally indifferent to good, with ones whose quality of service was disastrous to
mediocre, but whose officials at least had the right skin color - who are you to
believe? Me, or every educated person on the planet?
Perhaps I am just like Hitler. After all, Unqualified Reservations has basically the
same goal as Mein Kampf - to convince the reader that he has been fooled, that the
world he thinks he lives in is a simulacrum, a fiction, a faked documentary. True, I
don't attribute the disparity to the international Jewish conspiracy, or to any
conspiracy at all. But at least Hitler's readers knew his real name.
And this is why I treasure a film like Africa Addio. Because it's 40 years old and the
things it shows happened, and because the men who made it were mad geniuses, who
could turn some of the world's ugliest history into undeniable beauty, whose work
can still command our eyes when no sane man should want to see. Again, believe me
- you don't want to watch Addio. On the other hand, if you don't believe me, you are
free to watch it. At least for now.
Be infinitely devoted to your beloved owners
If we want to understand the Western world today, we have to start by understanding
the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Comparing the modern New Deal state to National Socialism and Communism is like
comparing a human to a chimp and a gorilla. Or like comparing a bank robber to a
murderer and a rapist. It is easy to find both categorical similarities and categorical
differences. It is also easy to abuse the analogy for polemical purposes, a trope I find
utterly boring. But at its best - as in the work of Wolfgang Schivelbusch - it reminds
us why we have history at all.
Fascism, Universalism, and Marxist-Leninism were the three movements that fought
for global dominance in the 20th century. All three developed from the 19th-century
tradition of nationalist democracy. All three would have struck almost any 18thcentury writer as tyrannous and abominable. But that doesn't mean we don't have to
choose between them.
Next to its enemies, Universalism clearly retained most of the classical European
tradition. And it's certainly my favorite of the three. I am grateful for its victory.
But the Third Reich and the Soviet Union were entire civilizations. They cannot be
dismissed lightly. Serious, sincere, intelligent and well-intentioned men and women
devoted their lives to these movements, which now strike us as perverse, absurd and
doomed.
I have personal evidence of this, because my father's parents were American
Communists. Grandpa enlisted in the Army to fight Hitler, and his letters from
Europe tend to close with phrases like "keep faith in the Party." Well into the 1970s,
these serious, sincere, intelligent and well-intentioned people used phrases like
"party line" with zero ironic intent. I find it slightly difficult to imagine Gramps as a
Great Neck apparatchik in some alternate history. But I don't find it utterly
impossible.
Serious, sincere, intelligent and well-intentioned men and women still devote their
lives to Universalism - and to the Polygon that is our equivalent of the Party. Even on
the Web, it is possible to live entirely within a Universalist bubble, in a world where
the New York Times is always right, and there is nothing under heaven and earth
which is not taught at Stanford. If you are reading UR, presumably you at least
suspect that this, too, might pass.
By far and away the best primary commentator on National Socialism is Victor
Klemperer. (Klemperer's diaries and/or LTI, plus Michael Burleigh's history, make a
pretty good Nazi 101.) I have searched in vain for any readable pro-Nazi or at least
neutral writer, but Speer's memoir is interesting if self-serving, Ernst Jünger though
an anti-Nazi is an unforgettable taste of German militarism, and Leon Degrelle is a
little too rabid. I still need to check out Celine's postwar memoirs. If anyone has any
other pointers, please let me know.
Good writing about Communism is much easier to find. Presumably this is partly
because the system lasted much longer. But it's also partly because whereas the Nazis
despised and exiled the intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks courted and employed them.
There are too many great chroniclers of Communism to count, but three of my
favorites are Lev Navrozov, Vladimir Bukovsky, and... Victor Klemperer, whose East
German diaries are perhaps his most interesting. Klemperer, no communist before
the war, actually wound up in the East German parliament. If you think your grip on
reality is so strong that you could never serve a criminal regime or choose a greater
evil over a lesser one, perhaps you are a better man than Klemperer. But who dares
such a claim should first read his books.
I thought I'd type in a bit of Bukovsky and Navrozov - first, by way of advertisement
for these heroic and criminally underappreciated writers, whose notorious pitbull
lawyers I however fear not at all; and second, to support some of the claims I've made
about the Soviet system.
First, on the relationship between the Universalist press, the dissidents, and the
Soviet regime: Bukovsky from To Build A Castle, p. 354. The setting is the late '60s
and early '70s, when the dissident movement was getting off the ground:
How hard it had once been to get this kind of publicity! Foreign correspondents in
Moscow, partly because they were afraid of being expelled and losing a good job,
partly because they had been co-opted and misled, were extremely shy of informing
their papers of the repressions that were taking place. It was much simpler and more
advantageous for them to reprint the statements of TASS and the Soviet press. There
were still difficulties now - the authorities expelled anyone who got too friendly with
us - but there were far more of them ready to take their chances. Interest in our
problems was growing in the outside world, and whereas before, an expelled
correspondent might be regarded by his newspaper as unprofessional, expulsion was
now seen as the norm and occasionally even as an honor.
Is it possible to speak of an absence of freedom of information in a country where
tens of millions of people listen to Western radio, where samizdat exists and is
regularly sent abroad, and everything said today will be public knowledge tomorrow?
Of course, we had to pay a high price for making it public knowledge, but that was
another matter.
An original radio game even came into being. People would come to Moscow from
the farthest ends of the country in order to tell us about their troubles, then would
hurry home in order to hear about them over the BBC, Radio Liberty, Deutsche
Welle, etc. Raising their hands in astonishment, they would say to their neighbors:
"How do you like that! How the hell do they find out about these things in London
[or Munich or Cologne]?"
This had much more effect than sending complaints to Brezhnev. A Moscow woman
once stopped me in a doorway and tried to persuade me to help her get her roof
repaired. "Why don't you get the BBC to criticize them, they'll soon get their skates
on then. Otherwise we won't get anywhere for the next three years at least!"
Bukovsky is excellent on the practicalities of this strategy of fighting Communism
with Western assistance. The entire goal of the dissident movement was to replace
the official intelligentsia as the apex of intellectual fashion in the Soviet universe, and
once this succeeded, it's tempting (if historicist) to say that Communism had no
chance. And the fact that the Western intelligentsia figured out that it should prefer
Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn to Sholokhov and Svetlov was a crucial ingredient in this
strategy.
As a writer, however, Lev Navrozov (whose son Andrei I pirated here) is simply in
another class. On the jacket of his Education of Lev Navrozov, a genuine 20thcentury classic, Robert Massie compares him to a combination of Proust and Orwell.
I don't find this at all hyperbolic. And Navrozov is simply unsurpassable on the world
of the Soviet intelligentsia, which he knew intimately but managed to keep his
distance from.
Here's the entire first chapter of the Education:
"The West, the West," my guest chimes, looking indolently on. "I was in the West."
He likes our country house, and he is sitting leisurely, arm winglike over chair back,
shedding words.
Oh, let us shed words
As our garden sheds its amber.
"I was in the West. I talked with Ezra Pound just as I am talking with you - I dined
with Sartre. Nothing special. You exaggerate, really."
What he also likes is our almost extraterritorial seclusion. There, outside, beyond
that fence that runs all around our estate, he is a writer, which is not what was once
meant by the word here or is now meant in the West. It means that he is an official,
or better say a ranker, attached to the department of literature in a definite rank: he
is a member of the board of the union of writers. Everyone is attached to some
department, because if he is not, he is a parasite, that is, a criminal, to be exiled to
some remote area to work there as a serf peasant. I am not attached to any
department, a circumstance I recall sometimes with the numbness of a criminal too
long and too safely immersed in his crime, and sometimes with my father's Russian
slothful despair which has been provoking my mother's high-pitched lament,
addressed once to my father and now to myself: "But why didn't you do it long ago?
You are a psychopath, a real psychopath." As a translator of literature (how metallic
is the name of my profession) I could have become a member of the union of writers
many years ago. But I did not. Horribly enough, I have not become even a trade
union member at any departments for which I free-lance. Am I a parasite? Not far
from my country house is the country house (with less acreage) of a member of the
politburo or a candidate member of the politburo (I have never been interested
which exactly). Surely parasites live in huts, not in country houses with more acreage
than that of members (or even candidate members) of the politburo?
I am a psychopath, a real psychopath, or at any rate a statistical exception - a
Poisson's rare event, eluding the departmental mesh. No department can understand
that I could become a member of some department (with all the advantages
accruing) but would not. Each department assumes that I belong to another
department, perhaps so very high that no one knows my rank.
I am the only strictly private person in the country, as my guest calls me, living on a
kind of extraterritorial estate, and he likes to come and forget his rank for a while and
simply be a temporary dweller of this island outside of time and space.
"And what is there?" he once asked, pointing at something looming between the trees
beyond the invisible fence.
"Oh, there?" I peered. "Serfdom."
Foreign correspondents stayed the night at my country house after a New Year's
party, and nothing happened. My son never joined any children's organization, nor
did he ever go to school.
"See?" my guest exults. "You are freer than you would have been in America."
"Yes. Except that I can't spare, say, one hundred billion dollars a year to defend my
freedom. I merely exist in a crevice between departments. This, by the way, is why I
get all the books from abroad and you don't. The department of literature that
watches over you will not watch over me, because I am not its responsibility."
Our timeless serenity is actually only a few miles from an airport where foreign
statesmen land, some score miles from Moscow. But as one rides from the airport, it
is all forests, and we are lost in them. We are pleasantly invisible.
I like him for his genuine - that is, self-analytic - sincerity. It is so rare. He brings his
newly published book. He knows I will not say a word about it, and he is grateful, but
he can't resist opening and admiring the page bearing his picture. Holding the open
book in his outstretched hand, raised so that he has to look up to gaze at the portrait
of an elderly man, obviously having a bad liver, he finally recites in a languishing
whisper the famous line a Russian poetess once addressed to her aristocratic
seducer: "How handsome you are, O devil."
Then he asks me apprehensively if I expect anyone today.
"People are monsters," he explains. "Mon-sters." As a shy afterthought he adds: "I
am a monster, too, of course, but at least I can abide myself."
Today he is out of luck. Very carefully I break the news. Yes, it will be that man's
wife. But she will only drop in on her way somewhere - much too important to stay
long.
My guest's rank in literature is not the highest, and he shuns people either below his
rank (because they may try to humiliate him if only to take revenge for their
lowliness) or of the same rank (because they may be even more insolent, entitled as
they are to regard themselves as his equal). But that man is younger than he - once
his rank in literature was properly lower, and now it is higher!
"I know that the man is a kind of tumor inside my brain," he says in one of those
flashes of lucidity for which I like him so much. "I am like a clerk in the department
of railroads who can talk only about another clerk promoted ahead of him. 'Injustice,'
he cries out like Prometheus to the blind heavens. But he forgets that neither his
listeners nor the blind heavens may belong to the department of railroads, and the
immensity of injustice is lost on them."
Unlike Prometheus in Aeschylus, my guest can enact his fate only in mute oppressive
gloom throughout that man's wife's visit.
"I know this is stupid," he says. "I picture myself very elegant and ironic. With a
carnation in my lapel. Saying something really devastating about her husband, but in
such a subtle, witty way that everyone is charmed. But it doesn't work."
Her husband. Well, on the one hand, he is a famous writer. Almost like Gogol,
Chekhov, or Steinbeck. On the other hand, he is a serf of a high rank, much higher,
indeed, than my guest's, and as such he is allowed to go abroad quite often, while my
guest went out once or twice in his life: this is what he means when he says that he
was in the West.
In the early eighteenth century in Russia, under the tsar or rather serf owner Peter I,
there were as yet no noblemen in the later-day sense. Noblemen too were serfs, only
they were ranked. These ranked serfs were attached to various departments.
Literally, the words serfdom and serf in the Russian language mean the right of
attachment and the attached.
Her husband is attached to the department of literature.
Private, that is, small-scale serf owners in Russia before 1861 owned serf musicians,
serf engineers, or serf actors who did not differ outwardly from musicians, engineers,
or actors in the West. Some serf owners even had serf astronomers, serf composers
and serf theologians. But serf writers - what are they for?
The answer involves a certain linguistic difficulty. Even the English language (not to
mention the Russian) carries residual servile psychology. Is this surprising? Here is
one of the numerous plaints that what the government had done was to transform
"every man not merely into an inquisitor, but into a judge, a spy, an informer - to set
father against father, brother against brother." Russia after 1917? No, England
shortly before, historically: the fathers of those Englishmen who lived in 1917 could
well remember the time.
"You Russians have never known freedom," a Britisher who had been in Britain a spy
for the owners of Russia explained to me with Byronesque languor. Like a tone-deaf
music-hating German explaining that only Germans can really create and
understand music, for did not music flourish in Germany as nowhere else?
Actually, all mankind lived in the underworld of history for millennia, and even the
English-speaking countries have emerged from the dark millennia of unfreedom
"right now" by the scale of history (and have survived so far owing perhaps just to the
English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean). It is not, therefore, surprising at all that
servile psychology is still built even in to the English language. Those who seize only
a bank transport are in this language called private persons and hence bandits
(especially if they come from the poor, did not go to college, and want money just to
live better). But those who seize one-sixth of the inhabited globe with everything and
everyone therein are called a state. Similarly, small serf owners are called private
persons and hence serf owners, while very big serf owners can only be called a state,
and their serfs subjects (or citizens).
About twenty-four centuries ago an Athenian said:
If you are caught committing any of these crimes on a small scale, you are punished
and disgraced; they call it sacrilege, kidnapping, burglary, theft and brigandage. But
if, besides taking their property, you turn all your countrymen into slaves, you will
hear no more of these ugly names; your countrymen themselves will call you the
happiest of men and bless your name...
He might have added: "and for the next twenty-four centuries even the languages of
the freest countries will be so constructed as to call sufficiently big serf owners a
state, and their serfs citizens."
In the big serf ownership that post-1917 Russia is, the state does not exist even in the
sense of Hobbes (characteristically, the Russian word translated into English as
"state" actually means "lordship," "masterdom," and the word translated as "power"
derives from the verb "to possess," "to own"). In the autocratic State of Hobbes the
subject had
the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contact with each other; to choose their
own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they
themselves see fit; and the like.
None of these seven liberties of Hobbesian Absolutism, nor "the like," exist today in
the serf ownership once called Russia.
There is an obvious benefit for a serf ownership to play on the residual servile
psychology and ignorance of the populace of democracies and simulate a state (or
even the world's only genuine democracy). In this way the serf owners are
"recognized" by democracies still playing an important role in the world, and their
serf ownership is thus "legalized" as a state. But, of course, only big serf ownerships
can afford this state simulation, and the bigger they are the bigger and better state
simulation they can afford, and the more serfs they can attach to activities like
literature (what state can there be without literature?) and not only
to theater or music, as small, private serf owners did in Russia before 1861.
What should this literature be like? On the one hand, it would be the best if it
consisted of one sentence: "Be infinitely devoted to your beloved owners," repeated
as many times as is necessary to fill in each book of a required thickness. All the serfs
in the serf ownership would read the sentence over and over again and would be
infinitely devoted to their beloved owners.
But then those nosy intellectuals in the West would say: What sort of literature is
that? The outside world remembers the Russia of the first half of the nineteenth
century essentially owing to one man: Gogol. From the point of view of foreign
prestige the department of literature should produce literature, not literature. But
the trouble was that Gogol was not a serf: he was not attached. He did not write over
and over again: "Be infinitely devoted to your beloved owners." In fact at school we
were taught: "Gogol exposed mercilessly the entire regime of Nicholas I." Having
done which, he would go back and forth between Italy and Russia, never molested or
impeded.
The department of literature does not prescribe any uniform. A writer is to be
dressed like Gogol or Chekhov or Steinbeck. This is his uniform. He should look like
a writer. Many serfs look in fact as though they were in old Russia or in the West, in
freedom. Partly the writer's rank is explicit (member of the secretariat of the union
of writers), but partly it is implicit yet decisive, just as it would have been at the
eighteenth-century Russian court.
That man. That writer-writer. Her husband. Why can he be a writer and I cannot? I
would become sick if I were to put on real tweeds and loll in a chair somewhere in
Paris or New York. Like those two serf boys of the pre-1861 times playing at
gentlemen in the drawing room when their owners were visiting somewhere.
Smoking real cigars, too. The boys so believed they were gentlemen that when their
owners came they attacked them as intruders in the agony of disillusionment, and
one boy cut his throat with a razor.
He is better than I am. He is kind, tactful, generous, a better man really, and once he
helped me without any prospect that I would ever be important enough to
reciprocate. Whenever he meets me he quotes something from a short manuscript I
gave him to read several years ago, and he says only what very considerate successful
men say to failures.
How can he enjoy being a serf writer?
It is, perhaps, simply that he comes from a poor family, yes, perhaps of a long line of
pre-1861 serfs. I am more finicky - more squeamish. I cannot eat if someone has spat
into my plate. Is this connected with my getting carsick so easily? I cannot go to Paris
or New York and play at being a writer. In him, the generations of hungry, miserable,
humiliated people clamor for what a high serf rank may give him - they devour it all
wolfishly even if serfdom has spat into his plate.
I first met him several years ago when the times were the most lenient in the last
thirty or forty years, and he was very much like any writer who had succeeded in any
country. In old Russia. In the West.
He was a success. Almost as in any other country. And I was a failure. Almost as in
any other country. Of course, I could blame the society, but what failure doesn't? At
that time I still lived in what would have struck him as monstrous superslums
compared with his new apartment with its vestibule of marble. I did not want to work
for money more than two or three days a month, and under my suitcoat I wore my
late uncle's lilac shirt which he had bought in England in the twenties. The shirt had
a huge stain, like a strange, dark, vast continent on a map, so good for navigation,
with many coves. The continent was also lilac, only a darker hue, but a commission
store would not accept the shirt for resale (though the stain was invisible under a
suit, especially with a tie), and so I got it as a gift, but I had lost one of my copper cuff
links and discreetly kept the parting cuff together. He was a success, almost as in any
other country, and success is success. He traveled abroad and had all the latest books
and magazines and records, and he said: "Salazar in his diary...," and Salazar's diary
was just out.
In a closed serf territory, even those who once belonged to the country's creative
genius finally begin to write and say something musty - something smelling of old
bookcases. That terrible, all-pervading musty smell. And here he said: "Salazar in his
diary...," and Salazar's diary was just out.
I met him and his wife perhaps exactly as a failure meets a success anywhere. He had
wanted or agreed to meet me, and that was important if I wanted to publish, and I
did want. It was the best time in the last and perhaps the next thirty or forty years,
but a failure forgets what he wants when he meets a success.
I do not know what started me off. Perhaps it was his words: "Salazar in his diary..."
Or perhaps it was his wife's stockings. As I kissed her hand (I behaved like a derelict
Russian gentleman), I looked at them, as from a bridge at a cityscape below, the
stockings (God knows from what exclusive shop in what Western capital) were finely
webbed in black like a cityscape of a French artist whose name I forgot.
I was not a nobody, a funny beggar, just a maniac most likely, holding together the
cuff of his late uncle's shirt. I was free, young, happy. I forgot about the cuff, and
when I noticed it, I would not understand how I could be so conscious about the
missing cuff link, and I almost flaunted the parting cuff. It even gave a new turn to
my euphoria: it was a note in a keyed time, both spontaneous and contrived, for
everything was unexpected and everything known in advance.
He listened, and said with genuine regret: "How you are wasting yourself. God, how
you are wasting yourself."
In hindsight I knew that this had been a good pretext for me to say something like:
"But who will publish me?" with a broad hint that I knew he had pull, and if he
helped me... But instead I did what a failure usually does. I said: "Wasting?"
The word was simply another note in the euphoria. "Wasting? Do you mean that
what I am saying to you two is wasted? And if it is published - duplicated on an
industrial scale for millions of strangers to buy - it will not be wasted?"
As a failure often does, I was making up prodigiously for years of humiliation - I was
drinking in my transient glory, I wanted nothing else. I was waving my parting cuff, it
was now my first violin, I was speaking with eternity.
To say something like: "But who will publish me?" was inconceivable.
The literary world of the West today, of course, is not at all unrecognizable in
Navrozov's rankers and members of the union of writers.
Not that the US has some petty department of literature. It vastly surpasses the
Soviet Union in this statistic. It has two thousand departments of literature, one at
each of its universities, which of course enjoy complete academic freedom. Despite
this they somehow seem to all say the same things to the same people in the same
ways. Perhaps this is because no further enlightenment is possible.
My girlfriend among her many talents is a playwright and screenwriter, and when we
saw the excellent new film about East Germany, The Lives of Others, we both noticed
something rather striking - which was that the East Berlin theater scene, circa 1970,
and the San Francisco theater scene, circa 2007, didn't seem too different at all.
Not that fat, ruthless NEA administrators force aspiring actresses to put out. But, in
San Francisco in 2007, the members of the secretariat of the union of writers are
really quite easy to identify. And the process by which one obtains such a rank?
Exactly the same. "But who will publish me?"
In my opinion, there are two main differences between the old Soviet bloc and the
present-day democratic West.
One is that the West's civil-service apparatchiks are not as strong, not as politically
secure, not as well-organized, and not as smug. This difference is slowly, but it seems
inexorably, evaporating. The change has gone farthest in the EU - as Bukovsky
himself points out.
Two is that the West has no West of its own. No 19th-century state survived the
democratic avalanche. When I say that democracy is the opposite of liberty - a
statement which would strike most Westerners today as nonsensical, just as it might
strike a faithful Soviet serf as nonsensical to say that communism is the opposite of
progress - I have no examples, even across some dog-fenced border, to point to. And
this difference is not evaporating at all.
Or isn't it? After all, I'm posting this on the Internet, a very accidental product of
democracy. Certainly no one who developed the Internet thought of it as a blow
against the state. No one thought he was programming the West's West.
And yet, through the magic of Blogger, you can hear me say, democracy is the
opposite of liberty. And while I may not be able to convince you, or anyone else, of
this proposition, I can at least defend it. And I can point to you to other writers who
say the same thing.
None of whom you will find, unless you are very, very lucky, at any democratic
university. Or in any democratic newspaper or magazine. Or on any democratic TV
or radio station.
Of course, I'm not actually serious about this. Ha! Democracy is great, and don't let
anyone tell you otherwise. Be infinitely devoted to your beloved owners.
Evidence in current history
If we believe in one thing here at UR, it is judging past and present by the same
standards. This includes standards of truth and evidence - a subject last week's post
may have raised.
Personally, I believe in judging past and present by the same standards because I
believe that the dead are entitled to the same consideration as the living. Could they
come to life and judge us, as any ancestor would, we would like to be able to answer
them honestly and with a straight face. I don't feel our society meets this test at
present - do you?
One easy solution is to apply the standards of the present to the past. This is called
presentism. In general, the results of presentism are so dire, comical, and infamous
that we cannot avoid concluding that something is terribly wrong either with the
method, or the present, or both. Surely this pattern holds true for evidentiary
standards.
For example, a common present standard of truth is that the New York Times is
always right. We could follow the logic of presentism and apply this to the past, by
saying that just as the New York Times of 2009 is always right, the New York Times
of 1909 is just as always right. This, in turn, can be easily refuted by showing that the
two occasionally disagree.
We also could be pastists and apply the standards of 1909 to 2009. This would be
much more fun, and probably produce better results. But at a philosophical level, it is
no less gay.
Rather, it is best to come up with a common set of standards for historical evidence,
one which does not implicitly trust the New York Times, or the Catholic Church, or
even USG, or any institution or set of institutions past or present. So we know we are
doing history, not PR.
Thus, to emphasize the commonality, we speak not of current events, but current
history. To even begin to know the events, even as they happen, we must think
historically.
By the standards of history, my standard of evidence is strict but hardly unusual. I
prefer single-malt sources, as it were. I want to see original documents whose
authenticity is without question, and the only lesson I take from an authentic
document is that it exists and whoever wrote it wrote it. I distrust digests, samples,
statistics, surveys, reports, encyclopedias. I would rather have one good source than
a thousand bad.
And most importantly, in history there are no reliable sources - no person is
trustworthy by definition. Without trust we can know nothing, but trust must always
be a product of reason. It can never be automatic. It must always be considered and
tested.
Here's an example of trusting authorities: Half Sigma, normally a real bastion of
common sense, assuming that because Sonia Sotomayor graduated summa cum
laude from Princeton and won the Pyne Prize for its "most outstanding
undergraduate," she cannot be dumb as a post.
This does not strike me as sound evidentiary practice in current history. Let me
explain why.
Here is a fact I trust: if we had access to Princeton's records, they would confirm the
text below (from the Daily Princetonian, February 28, 1976):
J. David Germany and Sonia M. Sotomayor are the joint winners of this year's M.
Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, the highest honor the university confers on an
undergraduate.
The prize, given to the senior or seniors who have "manifested in outstanding
fashion...excellent scholarship and effective support of the best interests of
Princeton University," carries with it an award equal to a year's tuition, $3,900
this year, which will be shared by the two recipients.
The Pyne Prize is not the first recognition of Germany's scholarship-he has won
both the Freshman First Year Honor Prize for the highest grades during freshman
year and the Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Prize for the highest academic
standing prior to senior year.
Two years ago, after winning the freshman award, Germany said, "There's a choke
factor on every final exam, and I'm really due for a big one. But I'm going to enjoy
this as long as I can." Today, his transcript shows 21 A+s and 9 A's.
[...]
Sotomayor, a history major, has maintained almost straight A's for the last two
years, but is especially known for her extracurricular activities.
Her dedication to the life of minority students at Princeton has been illustrated by
her service on the Governance Board of the Third World Center and in her efforts to
form the Latino Students Organization.
(On a side note: I bet myself, when I read this text, that the "Third World Center" is
no longer the "Third World Center." I won. Yes, dear Princeton: I know, you know,
and God knows, that "Third World" was once a term of approbation to you. This too
is on your tab - not yet summed.)
Again, I am confident that Sonia Sotomayor's transcript "for the last two years"
would show "almost straight A's." Who assigned her these straight A's? And why?
At this point we leave the domain of verifiable facts, and enter that of proof by
authority. Half Sigma does not know. Nor do I. Nor does anyone.
I am quite confident that David Germany is a smart cookie. Unless his name is
pronounced "DavEED HermANee" or even if it is, I doubt he is of Puerto Rican
descent. Which means he is just another white guy. Which is not a quality of any
value at all. But does mean that to get his Pyne Prize, he had to beat a lot of other
very smart white guys.
What did Sonia Sotomayor have to do? Whom did she have to beat? It is not at all
clear.
My judgment is that when we look at the career of a progressive race activist of the
late 20th century, institutional records and personal endorsements tell us just about
nothing. Every rule can be, and is, bent for these people. What's clear is that at
Princeton, David Germany was first and foremost a student, and Sonia Sotomayor
was first and foremost an activist. Why on earth would anyone expect her grades to
mean anything?
I will repeat the analogy I used when I questioned Barack Obama's Columbia record:
the academic records of college athletes, who are regularly found to have graduated
from reputable universities, while remaining almost literally illiterate. Trusting the
academic records of a race activist - especially when not actually disclosed, but
merely attested to - is credulous beyond belief. Behind any Sotomayor is an army of
activist professors whose commitment to la lucha is, shall we say, slightly greater
than their commitment to the academic integrity of Princeton. At least, in the
athlete's case, his coaches and his professors are different people.
This is what is truly remarkable about Judge Sotomayor: at every stage in her career,
her success is plausibly and parsimoniously explained by her mere ancestry. In every
institution in which she has produced a record of excellence, her biology below the
neck is a sufficient explanation of that record. As historians, we cannot even exclude
the possibility that she got her Princeton A's because someone helped her with her
papers. We have no evidence for this, but we also have no evidence against it - and
we are writing history, not conducting a criminal trial.
Thus I feel the best public evidence as to Judge Sotomayor's actual talents consists of
her speeches, such as this famous one (published as an essay in the La Raza Law
Journal). Here is a speech by a white male colleague of Judge Sotomayor's - ie, one
who owes his position on the Second Circuit to neurology, not dermatology. If you
retain any doubts, please compare.
(Judge Sotomayor's judicial opinions, while also notoriously bad, are much less
interesting, because they are produced with at least the assistance of law clerks.
Perhaps Judge Sotomayor does not choose the best clerks, but she has the best talent
pool to hire from. They know how to use a comma. It's not clear to me that she does.)
Similarly, Barack Obama, or someone writing under his name, produced one book
which betrays nontrivial, if hardly world-shattering, literary ability. And nothing else.
As Jack Cashill has observed, the author of Dreams From My Father, whoever it
was, misspells Frantz Fanon in a rather distinctive way - and is also fascinated by
tidal hydrology. Frankly, if someone can point me to a work in which Shakespeare
mentions "Franz Fanon" and speaks of rivers flowing backward, I'll be prepared to at
least consider the possibility that the real author of Hamlet was Billy Ayers. I know
what a solid case for literary attribution looks like. This is it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary claims require
ordinary evidence. The claim that a politician's book was ghostwritten is an ordinary
claim. Especially in the post-FDR era, when it is simply assumed that the task of a
politician is to take other peoples' words and claim them as one's own, an act that
previous generations of American would have regarded as unspeakably contemptible.
If you don't believe that John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage, why should you
believe that Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father? Because everyone says
he did? This is the evidentiary standard of a fishwife, not a historian. Why should you
regard it as true, until proven false? Why not regard it as false, until proven true?
What percentage of political memoirs are actually written by the purported author?
In fact we have almost no evidence of any historical validity that describes the early
life of Barack Obama. Take the famous "birth certificate" controversy: I believe that
Barack Obama was almost certainly born in Hawaii, but only because the converse
seems labored and unlikely. The ordinary English meaning of birth certificate is an
original physical document, produced at the actual date of birth, ie 1961. It is not a
printout of a database record, which is what we have.
Again, I am confident that this document exists for Barack Obama. The refusal to
disclose it is just as contemptuous and contemptible as everything else in the process
that produced him. Stonewalling on all life records of this man - from birth
certificates to college transcripts - is a classic Alinskyian maneuver, pure vicious
hardball. It serves the exact purpose it achieves: to generate as many conspiracy
theories as possible, most of which are false. Any actual dirt will disappear in this
cloud of vain speculation. This is the regard for truth, decency and honor which
Americans can expect from their rulers today. Were it actually discovered that Barack
Obama was born in Papua New Guinea, I would find it far less damning.
Nor is this excessive respect for institutional authority an isolated glitch in the
epistemology of current history, as most practice it today. It is actually a symptom of
a much deeper syndrome: the tendency to analyze democracy in terms of its
appearance, not its reality, even when that reality is known to everyone.
Here is a perfect example - courtesy of Powerline, which is by far the best
neoconservative blog. The authors of Powerline are top-flight attorneys with
excellent political connections, and the scholar they are quoting, Charles Kesler,
editor of the Claremont Review of Books, whose mission is "to make war on the
progressive administrative state," has a Ph.D in government from Harvard - an
honor that does not appear to have been conferred on account of dermatology. In
short, these individuals have the right talents, the right knowledge, and the right
enemies.
And yet, by my standards of evidence, all this is a waste of time. The error is at step
one:
Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler sat down last summer to read the
books and speeches of Barack Obama. Professor Kesler concluded that Obama is a
serious and ambitious politician who has set about to engineer a transformative
leftward shift in American politics and government.
We see that Professor Kesler starts his work with one completely unsubstantiated
assumption. He assumes that "the books and speeches of Barack Obama" were
written by Barack Obama.
Indeed, he knows for a fact that the "speeches of Barack Obama" were not written by
Barack Obama. Fifteen seconds on Google will tell Professor Kesler that he is, at the
very least, reading the books of Barack Obama and the speeches of Jon Favreau. As
we've seen, he is more likely reading the books of Billy Ayers and the speeches of Jon
Favreau (to name only two Obama ghosts). These certainly tell us something about
Billy Ayers and Jon Favreau. Do we care? The former, at least, is certainly no longer
employed in this capacity.
Of course it is the accepted convention of 20th-century American politics that we
refer to these as Obama's books and speeches - as if they were the work of, say,
Lincoln, or Cicero, or Gladstone. At least, I am pretty sure that Cicero and Gladstone
didn't employ ghostwriters. I have my suspicions about Herndon, Hay and Nicolay.
There is a grain of truth in this convention. We know that Barack Obama, the actual
person, has at the very least approved all the words he utters, and those published
under his name. Billy Ayers may have written his own girlfriend into Dreams, but he
at least started with Obama's notes, and Obama got to edit the result. Even if he
made no changes, this too was his choice. So in a sense, even if he did not write "his"
speeches, he is morally responsible for them.
But even this grain, when scrutinized, conceals a deeper fallacy. For even if Barack
Obama did write "his" speeches and "his" books, analyzing them as Professor Kesler
does demands another spectacular and completely unjustified assumption.
Again by convention, Professor Kesler is assuming that Barack Obama is sincere in
his words - that when he says or publishes X (a knowable, and known, fact), the best
explanation for this event is that he believes X. His speaking or publication of X
implies his belief in X; his belief in X is the best explanation of why he spoke or
published X. This assumption, quite unstated, is everywhere in almost every
discussion of all these works.
Of course, if you know anything about the actual career of Barack Obama, the most
salient quality you see is ruthless, nihilistic cynicism. "To my mind, we were just
abiding by the rules that had been set up." It is possible that the actual person,
Barack Obama, actually has some beliefs or principles, but I have seen no particular
evidence of it.
This syndrome is hardly unique to current history. One historical figure of whom
Barack Obama reminds me is Abraham Lincoln. Like Obama, Lincoln was an
extremely guarded and deeply ambitious man whom we know almost nothing about.
(Unlike Obama, he had a sense of humor.) Understanding Lincoln is not a matter of
casual observation, but serious historical detection.
And if you go to a bookstore and look at the popular Lincoln biographies, all of them
will take the Keslerian approach to analysis - assuming, without even mentioning it,
that Lincoln's words are more or less identical to Lincoln's thoughts. In the normal
Lincoln biography, you get Lincoln the saint; a good one will give you Lincoln the
statesman, or maybe Lincoln the tyrant; you have to get into actual scholarship to see
Lincoln the politician. And there is scholarship, and scholarship. The old is generally
better than the new. (My Lincoln is Beveridge's Lincoln, or possibly Masters'.)
In terms of historical evidence, I feel I know no more about Barack Obama than
about, say, Daniel Craig. Daniel Craig does an excellent Bond, but I don't think he's
actually killed anyone. Nor do I know, or expect to know, which lines were written for
him, which he changed, and which he improved.
Barack Obama gives an excellent press conference, but I have no idea what his role, if
any, is in the Obama administration. Maybe he contributes a lot in the meetings,
maybe he is just a stooge for David Axelrod, maybe it is somewhere in between.
Whichever it may be, you or I or any ordinary person has no opportunity to know.
His present is just as mysterious as his past.
The resemblance between film and politics is not at all superficial. Solid analogies
between the two are too numerous to count. There are many differences, too, and
here is a big one: if you are watching a movie, even a documentary or "reality show,"
you know that you are looking at an artifact of production. At least in 2009, the
average consumer of visual entertainment is quite sophisticated as to the entire
production process. The man in the seat may not know a C-stand from a DP, but he
basically knows how a movie is shot and edited. And he is certainly aware that he is
watching a movie, not a live performance, and certainly not an accidental happening.
Whereas: who knows what actually happens inside the Beltway? As in the old Taoist
proverb, Democrats know and don't tell. Republicans tell, and don't know. Both
parties are married, at opposite ends, to the same lie. Voting continues in glorious
bliss.
If USG is a film, it is a period film. The actors are all playing 18th-century statesmen,
by 18th-century rules, in 18th-century clothes. The production itself is a substantial
business, which is registered in Delaware and operates entirely in the 21st. Its
operations are not entirely independent of audience participation, but what you think
matters less than you think.
Obviously, as an enemy of "the progressive administrative state," Professor Kesler is
not operating under the belief that he is actually looking at an 18th-century
architecture. His failure to actively disabuse his constituency of this notion does not
reflect any actual belief in the system. No - this would be mere harmless stupidity.
No. Professor Kesler's error is far worse. Professor Kesler believes that, although
20th-century politicians such as Barack Obama are not 18th-century statesmen, or
even 19th-century statesmen, since the American system of government went from
Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama, it must be able to go back. The true, inner, ideal
form of USG is its Jeffersonian form. (Or possibly, for a muscular Claremontian like
Professor Kesler, its Lincolnian form.)
USG is our father and our mother, its bones are sound, and any pox it has will heal or
be cured. It's true that it is smelling a little, has not moved for years, and is awfully
bloated. None of these problems can't be solved with a dolly, a scalpel and some
Chanel No. 5. So, in order that USG may recover its senses, Professor Kesler
undertakes to humor it, to treat it (like a wise parent) not as it is but as it should be.
He is, in a word, Burkean. The trouble was that when Burke praised Marie
Antoinette, he was praising Marie Antoinette - not Steven Rattner. When he spoke of
reforming one's government as surgery on the body of one's own living father, he
spoke under the great oak of the 18th-century Whig aristocracy. Corrupt in its own
way this was, but Old Sarum returned Pitt - not Wade Rathke. Had Burke spoken of
an autopsy, he had spoken differently.
Professor Kesler's error is no pathetic mistake. It is a true tragic flaw. The entire
conservative movement, throughout the age of democracy, has been in the iron grip
of tragedy. If Othello could recognize his jealousy and correct it, he could cast out
Iago and reward Cassio at once. The play could end at any act. Yet it runs all five, for
that is tragedy. Similarly, conservatism could snap out of it at any time - but it won't.
The desire that leads the conservative astray is, as always, the desire for power. To
present any criticism of USG as a plan for reforming it, by returning it to its original
perfect state (a state so perfect that it has turned into what we have now!), is to
render oneself eligible for command of the small army that sees this outcome as the
inevitable future. The loyal opposition.
Gentlemen, power - as Fidel Castro puts it - is sweet, like honey. If you intend to
wrest it from those who have it, I advise one of two courses. One is to be bigger,
stronger, more ruthless, more devious and more mendacious. The other is to rely on
magna est veritas et prevalebit.
If you have the choice, by all means choose the first. It is far more effective, and
faster as well. If you have the first option and you do not succeed with it, you are
beyond any advice I can offer.
However, if the first is not an option, your only recourse is the second. The second is
certain, while never quick. It has gained a reputation for unreliability which is wholly
undeserved.
The problem is the principle of wine and sewage: any mixture of wine and sewage is
sewage. The same is true of reality and illusion. In propaganda, you may mix them
freely. Propaganda, however, is only useful as an adjunct to superior physical force. It
is not the second strategy.
Clearly, Professor Kesler does not have superior physical force. Otherwise he would
be in, and the progressives would be out. Thus his only conceivable armament is
veritas prevalebit.
While this is probably what Professor Kesler thinks he is wielding, it is not. Instead,
Professor Kesler and the authors of Powerline - and the vast, pyramidal food chain of
conservative thought beneath them - seek to replace one illusion, behind which there
is at least an actual reality, with another illusion, which does not exist at all and
perhaps never did.
USG is what it is. USG used to be what it was. USG evolved from what it was into
what it is. But this is no reason to believe it can evolve just as easily in reverse.
Furthermore, if your critical standards for assessing USG as it was are just as lax as
those you use for assessing USG as it is - since you prefer to see the 18th-century
illusion, not the 20th-century reality - your understanding of the real 18th century is
perhaps not what it should be, n'est ce pas?
Thus the conservative comes armed against one sham, with another sham. Goliath
brings a club, and David brings a smaller club. Consequence: Goliath kicks the shit
out of David, and has done for the last two centuries and change. Conservatives are
losers by definition. The locomotive steams on, Buckley's cadaver baking on its
cowcatcher.
I see this as a tragic flaw because I see it as a surrender to the desire for power. David
is just David, and he gets his ass kicked. But it was certainly fun to be William F.
Buckley. "Fun" understates this elemental lust - and, under democracy, the loyal
opposition can still confer status and even, in a sense, achieve victory. It never
achieves its goals. In order to remain loyal, it has denied itself the weapon of veritas
prevalebit - the only real weapon it can have.
Whereas if you accept veritas prevalebit, you must refuse to accept the conventional
illusions, the naked emperors, the pious frauds. You thereby render yourself disloyal.
And you lose your army, your pomp, your sceptre and general's tent.
So be it. Because sovereignty is great, the reactionary must remain loyal in body. In
soul, he is a stateless pirate - a well-armed creature of the open sea. His one authority
is his own. He does not outsource truth. He looks into the matter himself, or finds
someone he trusts; and that trust is not given lightly.
And the figure nailed to his bow is not Burke, but Carlyle. It is Carlyle's twelfth hour
of the night - and has been, for over two centuries. "Birds of darkness are on the
wing; spectres uproar; the dead walks; the living dream."
Why Carlyle matters
If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare's, it is
Carlyle.
If we need a third, we can add Johnson. (Chaucer is too foreign.) Shakespeare,
Carlyle, and Johnson: do you notice a pattern? If not, you are probably new to UR. If
you're not quite sure who Carlyle and Johnson were, much glorious learning awaits
you. Fortunately you get to learn Johnson on your own - I know very little about the
18th century.
But you will find precious few who have read all three and will quarrel with this
trinity. And all of them are fools. In my view. Then again, I named my daughter after
Carlyle. If you are wiser and reserve your judgment, please allow me to etch away one
or two of your reservations.
First, it is no daring literary act to exalt Carlyle as superhuman. Like Johnson, he was
exalted as superhuman in his own time. Indeed, the proper way to introduce Carlyle
is through the eyes of his peers.
Some of whom are still remembered. For example, one American wrote:
The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider, or try to consider,
for a moment, the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty
years as existing today, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no
artillery.
That was Walt Whitman, in his 1881 obituary. People still read Whitman, but not
Carlyle. There's a reason for this. It's not necessarily a good reason.
Because Whitman's point of view - about as close as it comes to NPR avant la lettre is so easy for the good citizen of 2009 to masticate, his introduction to Carlyle may be
the best available. You see, the basic reason Carlyle is not in your high-school English
reader, whereas Whitman is, is that Carlyle was what, here at UR, we call a
reactionary. (Whereas Whitman is a progressive, or in 19th-century parlance a
radical.)
A reactionary is not a Republican, a Democrat, or even a libertarian. It is not even a
communist, a fascist, or a monarchist. It is something much older, stranger, and
more powerful. But if you can describe it as anything, you can describe it as the pure
opposite of progressivism. True reaction is long since extinct in the wild, but it lives
in Carlyle - whose writings are now and forever available at a click, though they may
be illegal in most states and the European Union.
But let Whitman introduce us:
All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were
distasteful to [Carlyle] from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and
contemptible. For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as his, the
bearings he persistently ignored were marvellous.
For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic principle, to each and
every State of the current world, not so much of helping it to perfect legislators and
executives, but as the only effectual method for surely, however slowly, training
people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the
ultimate aim of political and all other development)—to gradually reduce the fact of
governing to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs and their doings to the
telescopes and microscopes of committees and parties—and greatest of all, to afford
(not stagnation and obedient content, which went well enough with the feudalism
and ecclesiasticism of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and
recurrent ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have henceforth
palpably burst forever their old bounds—seem never to have entered Carlyle’s
thought.
It was splendid how he refused any compromise to the last. He was curiously
antique. In that harsh, picturesque, most potent voice and figure, one seems to be
carried back from the present of the British islands more than two thousand years, to
the range between Jerusalem and Tarsus. His fullest best biographer justly says of
him:
He was a teacher and a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of
Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of
mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their
own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he
had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that
belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told
us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries,
are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a
progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his
powers. The principles of his teachings are false. He has offered himself as a guide
upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be
the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has
been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this
modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will
take his place among the inspired seers.
To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, and no matter how
completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the Englishspeaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpassed conscience,
his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and
genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political
progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect.
[...]
Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even
oppositional, living man to start from), for sending out certain speculations and
comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to—those reactionary
doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite and
sincere mind of Europe.
We slipped some Froude (Carlyle's disciple as well as his biographer) in there with
the Whitman. But the quote is Whitman's own. Is it not a measure of Whitman's own
greatness - the archpoet of Democracy triumphant - that he gives such props to such
a pure opponent? If Whitman can worship Carlyle and quote Froude - what
Whitmans are there today?
There are two ways to process Carlyle in 2009. One is to buy in with Whitman: of
course Carlyle was wrong as a prophet, though we acknowledge his importance as a
writer. (Well, actually, most of us don't. But a few professors will always have no
choice.) As another contemporary critic (this one mercifully forgotten) put it:
By common consent, or nearly so, Mr. Carlyle died our greatest English Man of
Letters. Of this claim on his behalf (which includes of course a recognition of him as
a great intellectual and spiritual force) there can scarce, I should say, be much
question. But one might very well admire Mr. Carlyle as a Litterateur (in this higher
and larger sense) yet have only a modified belief in him as a Prophet, and question
altogether his title to be called—except in a rather loose and inexact way—a great
Thinker and Philosopher.
From this perspective, just as Froude describes, Carlyle misused his vatic powers. On
behalf of "the cultural evils of nineteenth-century Britain." And has suffered that
justified oblivion which all false prophets deserve and receive. Evil having since been
eradicated in Britain, of course.
If it can be swallowed in the 21st century with a straight face, a task demanding no
small strength of gullet, this is a safe antidote which detoxifies Carlyle, and renders
him safe for antiseptic scholarship of the Dryasdust school. Alternatively, one can
embrace the dark side and simply study Carlyle, and of course his era, as the
adversary: Satan personified. This is even safer, as the dead do not shoot back.
(But Hell has a carrel and a stipend for everyone who studied the past because he
despised it, and a big corner office for those in the actual business of actual libel.
Kids: if you hate your ancestors, hold your tongues. You will not feel like such fools
later.)
The trouble with studying 19th-century Britain from the 20th-century American
point of view is that no Victorianist can think seriously of a modern career in the field
unless he shoots only through one or both of these two orthodox angles, Dryasdust or
Hesperus Fiddlestring. Either camera can churn out any amount of scholarly
product, and neither can be handled by anyone with an actual soul. The literary value
of both together is about that of Marx-Lenin studies, though the former is useful
from a strictly clerical standpoint. (Indeed, the Soviet understanding of the
Victorians was exactly the same as ours, modulo a little Marx.)
If you did not have a soul, however, you probably would not have found your way to
UR. Likewise, a brain. And this brain cannot fail to have had a certain reaction to Mr.
Whitman's argument against Mr. Carlyle. Was that reaction, by any chance, "um?",
or "what?", or "okay," or "sure, I guess?"
For example, when Whitman castigates Carlyle for not realizing that democracy will
"gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum," or "perfect legislators and
executives," or (best of all) train its own voting citizens "on a large scale" to be every
year wiser and more well-informed, did your soul leap up and shout: "very true, Mr.
Whitman! And we of 2009 know just how true it is!"
I actually did not excerpt Whitman's principal argument against Carlyle. It is two
pages of windy Hegelism - plainly free of content. Give it a go and see what you think.
Whitman always was a sucker for the mystical, a hippie in the wrong century. (He
was not alone in this.) But he was an honest man, not afraid to tell us "what a foetid
gasbag much of modern radicalism is." The good old curate's egg - but still, say more,
Mr. Whitman! Alas, men have declined, and poets too.
And when Whitman writes:
Carlyle’s grim fate was cast to live and dwell in, and largely embody, the parturition
agony and qualms of the old order, amid crowded accumulations of ghastly
morbidity, giving birth to the new. But conceive of him (or his parents before him)
coming to America, recuperated by the cheering realities and activity of our people
and country—growing up and delving face-to-face resolutely among us here,
especially at the West—inhaling and exhaling our limitless air and eligibilities—
devoting his mind to the theories and developments of this Republic amid its
practical facts as exemplified in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana. I
say facts, and face-to-face confrontings—so different from books, and all those
quiddities and mere reports in the libraries, upon which the man (it was wittily said
of him at the age of thirty, that there was no one in Scotland who had gleaned so
much and seen so little), almost wholly fed, and which even his sturdy and vital mind
but reflected at best.
Carlyle, of course, was a historian. Reconstructing other worlds from books was his
trade, actual time tourism not being an option. And his pithy little wisecracks about
contemporary America are worth more, a century and a half later, than most present
libraries.
But more to the point, I can rather easily imagine Carlyle's response to present-day
Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee or (Lord help us) Louisiana. If those states in
1881 might have shaken Carlyle's faith in the downward course of democracy, a point
on which we may defer to Whitman, I can't imagine their present successors would
achieve any such result.
In fact, if we could organize a joint tour of their ghosts, I rather imagine that
Whitman himself would end up siding with Carlyle on many (if not all points). We
have seen Whitman's honesty, and we cannot imagine him arguing for the track
record of democracy since he wrote, if only because all his arguments are plainly
falsified. If Carlyle ignores this arguments, he ignores them because they are (and
thus must always have been) worthy of nothing but ignorance.
Our society, of course, has its own mental defences against the Carlylean position.
There is certainly no shortage of arguments for "republicanism and democracy."
They are just all different from Whitman's arguments. Still, there are enough that
most intelligent people consider the case overwhelming - to the point where they
have never seriously considered it.
However, if we imagine Whitman dropping his own falsified arguments and picking
up the latest and greatest replacements, we imagine a Walt Whitman who is not a
poet but a defense lawyer. People have called Whitman many nasty names, but no
one to my knowledge ever described him as a reptilian, two-tongued bureaucrat.
This does not tell us that there exist no correct arguments for "republicanism and
democracy," against Carlyle and reaction. It merely implies that if Whitman and
Carlyle both had a chance to inspect the world of 2009, it is probably Whitman and
not Carlyle who would feel chastened, and have to apologize; Whitman who would
agree with Carlyle, not vice versa. But Whitman and Carlyle could both be wrong, of
course.
Therefore we achieve a strange conclusion in our perspective of Carlyle. We begin to
suspect that we should at least consider Froude's second alternative:
If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read
truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by
facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers.
But if Froude is right, we have only seen half the prophecy unfold. The teaching has
been authenticated. The teacher remains unknown. This, dear reader, is why Carlyle
matters.
For is this not what Froude should have expected? If democracy triumph - and it has
- why should it bother to recall its enemy, Carlyle? Does it run out of friends, of
Whitmans, to celebrate? Is it thus forced to sing the praises of its foes? What winner
was ever short of friends? Ah, if only victory implied righteousness, and might made
right. But there is no principle of which the democrat is more skeptical.
The case of democracy is a case in which the jury has heard only from the defense.
Year after year, generation after generation, democracy's lawyers trot out an everchanging dog's breakfast of alibis, character witnesses and Harvard scientists, all
singing one tune: the ironclad innocence and stellar nobility of the defendant, who is
no more and no less than Gotham's finest citizen. As for the prosecutor, his corpse
has been rotting in the men's room for years. Sometimes the bailiff, who has a ninthgrade education, a Tennessee accent and a drinking problem, picks up a few pages
from his brief and reads them out of order.
But is the trial over? It is all but over. The jury is utterly sold. If they could adjourn
and assign the defendant the keys to Gotham for life, they would. They are not even
aware that there is a trial. They think they're deciding whether to award a gold medal
or a platinum one. But alas: the verdict of history is never, ever in. Once it does find
the truth, though, it tends to stay there.
For it is a terrible thing to see a prophecy come true, but more terrible to see just the
first half. Time remains for the rest, and always will. It is never too late to read
Carlyle; it has certainly never been easier. And when he takes his place, etc, I promise
you: other things will change.
But what exactly is (I claim) authenticated? What did Carlyle believe, what did he
foresee, and how does history validate it? And what did he get wrong? For he was not
actually a god, of course. It is time to say goodbye to our Whitmans, and see the
infernal regions for themselves.
Carlyle did not believe in democracy. But he must have believed in something. What,
then, was this something? If you stop believing in democracy, quite a difficult mental
step for anyone in 2009 - or 1859, in fact, which is much of what made Carlyle
unique - what do you believe in instead? Hopefully you will hear a terrible, creaking
noise, as your brain stretches to regard the awful answer. It is not my answer, it is
Carlyle's, but I take the liberty of translating.
First and foremost, Carlyle is a believer in order. To Carlyle, the old order is not
"giving birth to the new." It is rotting slowly into anarchy - or burning fast, as in
France or later Russia. The destination is not an order at all, but a blackened waste
with clumps of singed ferns. Nor does this observation make the old order good - the
ancien regime was termite bait and a firetrap. But in Carlyle's mirror, the pattern
that the ordinary Whig historian and his ordinary student know as steady progress
punctuated by brilliant revolutions, becomes a pattern of inexorable decay
punctuated by explosions of barbarism.
Here is a characteristic passage, often quoted on this blog, from Shooting Niagara Carlyle's last great reactionary pamphlet. It cannot be quoted too often:
All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of
the Devil for a thousand years,” — laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond
stirring, as the preliminary. You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more
and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite
direction: a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty
indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and
restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for most part, but now
fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you, — with
loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another
strap is gone!”— this, I think, has mainly been the sublime legislative industry of
Parliament since it became “Reform Parliament;” victoriously successful, and
thought sublime and beneficent by some. So that now hardly any limb of the Devil
has a thrum, or tatter of rope or leather left upon it: — there needs almost
superhuman heroism in you to “whip” a Garotter; no Fenian taken with the reddest
hand is to be meddled with, under penalties; hardly a murderer, never so detestable
and hideous, but you find him “insane,” and board him at the public expense, a very
peculiar British Prytaneum of these days! And in fact, THE DEVIL (he, verily, if you
will consider the sense of words) is likewise become an Emancipated Gentleman;
lithe of limb as in Adam and Eve’s time, and scarcely a toe or finger of him tied any
more. And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium,
such as never was before, — hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.
We speak of prophecy. Well, what became of Britain, in this century of democracy?
This millennium? In which the Devil became an Emancipated Gentleman?
Britain lost her Empire and most of Ireland, and became a political satellite of
America. Her industries declined and largely disappeared. Her crime rate rose by a
factor of 50 - not 50%. Her aristocracy was decimated by two Continental wars of
unparalleled savagery, and permanently destroyed by punitive taxation. Many areas
of London and other cities became unsafe by day, and more by night. Her lower
classes, generously augmented by the dregs of the late Empire, achieved levels of
squalor, ignorance and degradation perhaps unsurpassed in human history.
Meanwhile, the Crown and the Lords disappeared as meaningful political entities,
the Commons ceased to be a genuine forum for debate and became a parking lot for
party hacks, and political power diffused into a vast, shapeless morass of Whitehall
bureaucrats, Berlaymont Eurocrats, mendacious talking heads, and professors of
incompetence.
And worst of all, most appalling of all - Britons do not feel they have a problem.
Quite the contrary. They have never been better governed. The smarter and more
informed they are, the more deeply they thank the 20th century from saving them
from the evils of the Victorian age. The educated Englishman of 2009 considers
himself the beneficiary of two centuries of steadily improving good government, from
Castlereagh to Gordon Brown.
Indeed, if any faint shadow of anything like a Carlylean view persists anywhere as a
living tradition, it is in America herself. Evaluated as pure reaction, American
conservatism is the most confused, polluted, and diluted sample conceivable, but so
long as we exclude elderly Chilean admirals it is far the most reactionary thing on
earth. There is nothing remotely like a European equivalent. In Europe, especially
the Continent, all is Left.
Yet Whitman wrote:
I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle’s ever-lurking
pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most thoroughly American
points of view I know. In my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential
and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time
and space. There is that about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the
vitality of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration to,
or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Germany,
or in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I should say, is quite the legitimate
European product to be expected.
In 2009, of course, warmed-over Walt Whitman is all we get from Europe - Britain
with a few exceptions, the Continent without. The "legitimate European product" is
not reaction, but socialism. Not Carlyle, but Pinter. Not Metternich, but CohnBendit. Ah, if only might proved right! If only! We could all take another blue pill,
and sleep with such sweet smiles.
Here we start to see the prophetic powers of Carlyle. 150 years ago it was imaginable
that American "republicanism and democracy" would eventually triumph, but
certainly not that it would eradicate every independent trace of indigenous
Continental or even British thought. Carlyle does not even quite predict this. But if
anyone could have imagined it, it was he.
Compare the great reactionary to a mere conservative of his time, if no mean one Queen Victoria herself. Victoria, if you read her letters (which are well worth
reading), emerges as no cipher either political or intellectual, and her view of the
disturbances of 1848 is much the same as Carlyle's. And yet in 1851, she writes to
Leopold I of Belgium:
The position of Princes is no doubt difficult in these times, but it would be much less
so if they would behave honourably and straightforwardly, giving the people
gradually those privileges which would satisfy all the reasonable and well-
intentioned, and would weaken the power of the Red Republicans; instead of that,
reaction and a return to all the tyranny and oppression is the cry and the principle—
and all papers and books are being seized and prohibited, as in the days of
Metternich!...
In other words: Victoria believes the cure for acute democracy is chronic democracy.
Canning and Palmerston have spent the entire post-Napoleonic era going around
Europe fighting Metternich and all other defenders of the old European order,
promoting British clients (such as Piedmont) under the banner of constitutional
monarchy. Which Victoria, and many like her, consider the cure for "Red
Republicanism."
(Yes, Virginia, our own dear Republicans originated as the most left-wing party in the
most left-wing country on earth. The name is not at all a coincidence. They were
basically socialists, they adored ethnic minorities, and if their party had a color, it
was red. How things change!)
Now curiously, today, everyone agrees that there is no such thing as constitutional
monarchy. Constitutional monarchy in 2009 is a synonym for symbolic monarchy,
which is vestigial monarchy at all - quite indistinguishable in reality from any "Red
Republicanism." Queen Victoria was not at all without actual power. Queen Elizabeth
is. This outcome would not have surprised Carlyle. Nor might it have surprised
Whitman, to whom all queens were dinosaurs. It would certainly have surprised
everyone in between.
Thus the exercise of hindsight devastates the entire political center: liberal, moderate
and conservative. Validation is available only to the reactionary and the radical (19th
century) or progressive (20th), both of whom hold the only consistent position: the
true spirit of democracy is anarchy, dissolution of hierarchical authority. To the
radical, this flame, if not snuffed out, cannot be withstood. To the reactionary, the
cancer will either kill the patient or be eradicated. To both, no stable compromise is
possible or desirable.
How will the center of 2009 hold up in the light of 2159? It is a different center, of
course - but this is hardly a promise of durability. Consider how you will react if the
center of 2009 turns out to be to the right of the center of 2029, following the general
pattern of human history. Consider the 20th century's favorite centrist tract, The
Vital Center (1949), by its favorite court historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. - a young
crony of FDR, an old crony of JFK. Then consider Professor Schlesinger's last work The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1991). You can
read these books, but do you need to?
Escaping this trap of centrism is the first and most difficult task for those tempted to
think outside the democratic box. Faced with the endless, mind-boggling whirl of
mass political mania, the assumption that there exists some Goldilocks mean, not too
hot or too cold, which just happens to correspond to the average public opinion of
the current generation (which is absurdly left-wing in the eyes of the previous
generation, and will be absurdly right-wing in the eyes of the next), and which
therefore should be correct - or at least a starting point... alas. The more we focus our
eyes on it, the more this island of seeming sanity melts and disappears.
We find ourselves in the middle of the ocean. We suddenly realize that we know
nothing at all about human politics. We are forced not just to consider the set of
theories of government which are popular now, but the set which has ever been
popular. Most have applied their minds only to two theories of republicanism, the
liberal and conservative as practiced today, between which there is almost no
distance by historical standards.
And then we abandon our centrism, and we are comforted. We read Carlyle, and we
see that there are only two logically consistent choices for our political belief. They
can be briefly summarized as Carlyle and Alinsky.
What we see instead, from both the Carlylean and Alinskyist perspectives, is a
monotonic slope. This is the slope of order. Order slopes up to the right: true right,
which is reactionary, is always the direction of increasing order, and true left the
direction of increasing disorder. It is especially valuable to have a clear definition of
this polarization, which seems to have evolved independently so many times in
history. David Axelrod would surely get along with the Gracchi, and Pinochet with
Sulla.
Since most people do not know the Carlylean theory of order, but most do know the
Alinskyist theory of disorder (I won't be surprised if my daughter is introduced to
"activism" well before kindergarten), there is an obvious temptation here. The
temptation is to derive the Carlylean theory by simply reversing its equallyuncompromising Alinskyist dual. Thus, everything bad is good, and so on. For
example, the ultimate act of good government is to shoot into a mob.
While this approach can be useful in an absolute emergency, I would encourage
readers to at least be very careful with it. The practice of defining the Right by
reversing the Left can lead one to idolize persons and practices who, in the true
Carlylean cosmos, are quite unworthy. It is definitely not for the apprentice
necromancer or candidate Sith Lord.
Indeed the Carlylean theory of order might just as well be stated as truth. Or justice.
For Carlyle, truth, justice and order are all inseparable and perfectly desirable. There
is no such thing as too much truth, too much justice, or too much order; the ideal
society is one in which all these qualities are seen to their maximum extent. In the
society that is Cosmos, truth, justice and order all pertain. In its opposite, Chaos, we
see lies and injustice and disorder.
Indeed, Carlyle is often described as not just a prophet, but a theologian. And indeed
there are 92 references to the word "God" in the keystone of his political work, the
Latter-Day Pamphlets. You may not believe in God - I don't - but until you
understand Carlyle's theology, you cannot understand his theory of government.
Carlyle was raised a true Scottish Calvinist, an obsolete form of Christianity which
actually believed in the concept of sin, and if you have some kind of irrational allergy
to Christianity you will never be able to read his books. Sorry.
Order in Carlyle is obedience to the law of God in government, and enforcement of
the law of God is the test of good government. And what is the law of God? Does it
have anything to do with mixed fibers? It does not. It is no more than truth, justice
and order - each of which reduces to the other.
While these buzzwords are easy to say, justice is a buzzword of the present regime
and truth is not far behind. Order has escaped the owl-droppings, however, unless
you live in Brazil. Thus it remains the best word with which to describe Carlylean
thought.
Let us work up from order to Carlyle's theory of slavery. If you can understand
slavery through Carlyle's eyes - and he is one of the few theoretical defenders of
slavery in the last two centuries, the only other I can think of offhand being George
Fitzhugh - nothing in Carlyle will shock you, unless you are unaware of current
results in human biodiversity.
For once, I will paraphrase, because the Occasional Discourse should not be the first
Carlyle you read, but the last. A good political education in Carlyle is: first Chartism,
then the Latter-Day Pamphlets, then Shooting Niagara, then the Occasional
Discourse. I would hate to spoil this progression. So again, I will not quote Carlyle on
slavery.
Order, for Carlyle, is the set of bonds between the humans in society. A bond is any
promise of importance. It may be a promise of payment, it may be a promise of work,
it may be a promise of marriage. Regardless, a society is orderly if it is a society in
which promises of significant human value, explicit or implicit, are made and kept.
Every promise is an obligation. By writing the promise, I compel my future self. If I
promise to pay you $1000 in 2011, I am not exercising my human right of liberty if in
2011 I refuse to pay you. I cannot say: no, man, I would rather be free. By not paying
you, man, I am exercising my human right to be free.
Consider the difference between the society in which I can get away with this hippie
shit, and the society in which I can't. The society in which obligations can be broken
is the society in which loans are either risky, expensive and hard to get, or do not
exist at all. Thus we see clearly that the society in which promises are made and kept,
the society of order, is more civilized and humane. It is a better society. Once again,
there is no Goldilocks effect, no golden mean.
We thus see that the enforcement of promises is a critical aspect of human society.
Certain promises are self-enforcing: they are fulfilled because the promiser wants to
fulfill them. Marriage, in the ideal, is such a promise. In most cases, however, a loan
is not. A society that contains an impartial and irresistible enforcer of contracts is
thus preferable to one which does not - although no contract with the enforcer itself
can be enforced by definition.
So far the enterprising libertarian will go with you, although he will certainly quibble
at the last. A society is richer if each individual in it has the right to bind her future
actions by agreed obligations, in return for which others may exchange other
consideration. Would this bother Ayn Rand? I'm afraid I've never read Ayn Rand. I
know - it's terrible - I should. It would certainly bother Rothbard, but sometimes this
is a virtue.
Once we get this far, we are almost all the way to Carlyle on slavery. We have not
agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into
slavery. That is: he can sign a contract with a master in which the slave agrees
unconditionally to obey and work for the master, and the master agrees
unconditionally to protect and support the slave.
Moreover, this contract need not be a mere expression of sentiment. It can and
should be enforced by the State, just as a loan is. If the slave changes his mind and
runs away, the State will capture and return him, billing the master for the expense.
Or at least, these are reasonable terms under which two parties might agree on the
permanent relationship of master and slave.
Such terms could also be agreed on a non-permanent basis, yielding the relationship
of indentured servitude - familiar to all American high-school students. The laws of
early America and England were indeed both more flexible, and more orderly, than
our own in permitting and enforcing this form of order. (The relationship of
flexibility to order, and sclerosis to disorder, is a common one in Carlylean analysis.)
This still does not get us to classic Anglo-American slavery in the Southern or West
Indian style, or of course the classic Greek or Roman forms. Most human societies,
and in particular most civilized societies, have had some form of slavery or bondage.
And typically this is involuntary slavery, not at all the nice libertarian type.
To despise these societies as a class is an anthropological solecism. Those who
consider slave societies intrinsically evil, a word the 20th century would be well
advised to keep well away from its tongue, would quickly change their tunes if forced,
like this man, to function in an actual slave society. We are all Horatios; this world is
not in our philosophy. When we judge it without seeing it or knowing anything about
it, we only reveal ourselves as fools.
It is only a short step from seeing the State as an enforcer of voluntary and binding
obligations, to an enforcer of involuntary and arbitrary obligations. No society can
possibly exist without uncontracted obligations.
For example, property and in particular real estate represent a class of obligations
behind which there is no principle but historical accident. I am obliged not to
trespass on your land. I did not agree not to trespass on your land, but I am obliged
nonetheless. And why is it your land, rather than my land? Because it is.
Moreover, everyone is born into a web of involuntary obligations: the family. No one
gets to pick their parents. Moreover, every family is part of a human society and thus
accepts the obligations of that society. You do not need to go to Carlyle for an
explanation of the relationship between slavery, family, and community, for you can
find it in Aristotle. Indeed, the definition of family in most times and places has
included slaves.
The relationship of master and slave is a natural human relationship: that of patron
and client. Like true familial relationships, these essentially feudal structures are
bidirectional. The client must obey and serve the patron; the patron must care for
and protect the client. On one side of the relationship is always authority; on the
other side, always dependency. Either side may violate its obligations, resulting in
state intervention.
In the most ordered and flexible feudal societies, the relationship of patron and client
becomes a true governance relationship. The patron is personally responsible for all
offenses of the client against society - this is a core tenet of Roman law, applying both
to slaves and children. In return, the patron holds the power of the magistrate over
his clients. In the old days of the Roman Republic, a father could order the execution
of his son on his own word alone. This is even a bit extreme for me, but it
demonstrates the concept.
We see the most palatable relatives of hereditary slavery in the feudal European
societies, where we have not slavery in the antique sense but serfdom, slavery
adscripti glebae - peasants bound to the soil. The 20th-century historian will
generally describe this system as if it were something like the Gulag, or possibly even
Auschwitz, or maybe just the Angola Penitentiary, and everyone was just biding their
time and waiting to be free. This is what it is to be an enemy of the past - you are
doomed to walk through life, lying. Try to imagine yourself visiting 13th-century
France and recommending the liberation of the serfs.
Thus we see the root of democracy's antipathy to slavery: its antipathy to feudalism.
These structures are clearly in the same class. Is there a difference between being
born bound to a person, and born bound to the land? There is, but not much of one.
In both cases, you are born to obligations. You did not agree to these obligations, yet
they are your inescapable burden. Had the luck of your fresh-minted soul been
different, you might have been born to privilege instead. And good luck, Carlyle will
tell you grimly, in abolishing luck.
But wait: when one is born a serf, bound to the land with obligations, one is bound
not to a person but to a political entity. In the case of serfdom, assuming the
extremity of personal restriction, this is a small political entity. This may be a
problem if you are a restless fellow and like to get around, but seeing Europe was not
the primary concern of most pre-industrial agricultural workers. Moreover,
regardless of the size or nature of the entity to which you are born bound, allowing
you to stretch your legs is no risk at all so long as that entity has the power to catch
you and bring you back. Again, this is true for both serfs and slaves.
Suddenly we see the relationship between slavery and government. Serfdom and
slavery can be described as microgovernment and nanogovernment respectively. In
government proper, the normal human role of patron is filled by a giant, impersonal,
and often accidentally sadistic bureaucracy, which is sovereign and self-securing. In
serfdom, this role is filled by a noble house or other large family business, which in
turn is a client of the State, and just as fixed to the land as its serfs. In slavery,
mastership is exercised by a mobile individual whose slaves go with him.
(Democracy here appears as simply a mechanism for controlling subjects by deluding
them into believing that they control the entire enterprise, a pretense which cannot
be maintained in the context of serfdom or slavery. In this role it is certainly
unnecessary, as physical enforcement technologies are quite sufficient. The mindcontrol state is obsolete.)
In all these relationships, the structure of obligation is the same. The subject, serf, or
slave is obliged to obey the government, lord, or master, and work for the benefit of
same. In return, the government, lord or master must care for and guide the subject,
serf, or slave. We see these same relationship parameters emerging whether the
relationship of domination originates as a hereditary obligation, or as a voluntary
obligation, or in a state outside law such as the state of the newly captured prisoner
(the traditional origin of slave status in most eras). This is a pretty good clue that this
structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted.
Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and
intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more
suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can
be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus,
Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose
sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good
slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously
explained by genetic differences.
A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or
stubborn. But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in
slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers, such as Epictetus,
shows. A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience,
which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies.
One typically does not experience emotional bonds with, say, the IRS. Unless they
are bonds of hate. There is nonetheless an emotional bond with Washington as a
whole, a sense of being part of the team that is your owner and its other subjects. All
psychologically normal subjects, serfs, or slaves feel this, so long as their
government, lord or master is both sane and competent. Otherwise, any
derangement may occur. Of course, the smaller the group, the more intense the
feelings - for better or for worse. But in general, the normal case is real affection on
both sides.
Moreover, just because the relationship of slavery or serfdom is personal by default,
does not imply that it cannot be made impersonal, like the relationship of subject to
government. If the client is not one of Aristotle's natural slaves, has an IQ over 90, is
an adult, and can provide his or her own personal guidance, the subject-government
relationship may be a better fit. The master may maximize his economic benefit by
simply allowing the slave to negotiate his own employment and living arrangements,
and taxing him. Thus the parallel reemerges.
Conversely, the subject-government relationship easily becomes dysfunctional for
clients who are natural slaves, ie, are not capable of guiding themselves to live in a
human and humane manner. It is beyond question that such individuals exist, if only
as a result of brain damage. And it is easily seen that they thrive under personal
guidance, and wilt and grow foul in the arms of bureaucrats. If all long-term welfare
cases were transferred from Washington to the authority of genuine, truly charitable
nonprofits, for example, their new human supervisors could intervene on a personal,
discretionary basis to compel them to get their acts together. This would be a step
toward humanity in our society - and also a step toward slavery.
Probably the closest most Americans have come to idealizing slavery, without of
course knowing it, is in the good press that large Japanese corporations once got for
maintaining a policy of lifetime employment. Lifetime employment and slavery are,
of course, practically synonyms, and indeed the same phenomena of reciprocal
loyalty and dependency were said - repeatedly, in my memory, in the '90s on NPR to emerge. Right down to the company uniform and song. This, too, is a Carlylean
bond, although a rather weird one to the Western eye.
We thus observe slavery not as a perversion, but as a natural relationship, like gay
marriage. (Gay marriage is unquestionably a natural relationship, although history for whatever reason - seldom has a good outcome for societies in which large
numbers of males are born gay. Whitman and Carlyle both have points to score on
this issue.)
Of course, like gay marriage (or ordinary marriage), slavery is not without its abuses.
When we think of the word "slavery," we think of these abuses. Thus, by defining the
word as intrinsically abusive, like marriages in which one party beats the other, we
can conveniently define away all the instances of slavery (or, for that matter,
marriage) in which the relationship is functional.
Carlyle is in fact ready to be as indignant as anyone over these abuses. He reasons:
since slavery is a natural human relationship, this bond will exist regardless of
whether you abolish the word. And it does - if only in broken and surreptitious
forms. However, if you are a genuine humanitarian and your interest is in abolishing
the abuses, the best way to do so is to - abolish the abuses. So, for example, he
proposes reforms such as stronger supervision of slaveowners, a standard price by
which slaves can buy their freedom, etc, etc.
In this extreme example, we see the general pattern of Carlylean order. Again, order
is about the bonds between members of society, which consist of obligations
voluntary and involuntary, which are promises made and kept, and enforced by law
where law is needed to enforce them. Especially critical to Carlyle is the hierarchical
bond, the relationship of command, which is one critical form of social glue without
which large organizations cannot function. Carlyle, who is not perfect, slightly
neglects another important class of obligation, the financial. Financial obligations
are more likely to be voluntary, but also more dependent on enforcement.
One of my own personal great moments of Carlylean enlightenment came not from
Carlyle himself, but from his disciple Froude, also a great historian. (To add to the
fun, "Froude" is pronounced just the way Keanu Reeves says "Freud" in Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure.) Someday I will read all of Froude's twelve-volume
history of England from Henry VIII through Elizabeth I, but I have only read a bit of
the first volume. That bit was so impressive and stunning that I thought I might want
to wait a year or two before taking in any more.
Froude describes a Tudor society which is completely ordered - which consists, from
top to bottom, king to knave, of these relationships of mutual obligation. They are
relationships of family, of feudalism, of guild traditions such as apprenticeship, of the
Church, of political patronage, of commercial patronage and monopoly, and of
course of law and government. It was impossible to live a normal human life outside
this tapestry, and nor is it at all clear why anyone would have wanted to.
Misfits, screwups and parasites constantly fell out of the fabric, the era being after all
primitive, and every arm of government was charged with eradicating this human
bilge. If Tudor England, or any European sovereign of the era, had tolerated
vagrants, beggars and the idle, it would have been inundated with a mountain of
them in a second. As it was, it seems there were quite a few. The difficulty of
operating in these primitive conditions demanded a social fabric at which the 21st
century can only stare in amazement, like a general contractor contemplating a
cathedral. And these people, indeed, built cathedrals. They were not libertarian
cathedrals.
Thus order turns out to equal both truth and justice, because all three equate to
promises made and kept. We have seen the reactionary end of the slope of order:
Henry VIII. We then look at the radical end of the slope, for which we will accept
three symbols: Haiti, Afghanistan, and San Francisco.
In Haiti, we see one aspect of life without promises made and kept: poverty,
corruption, violence and filth. In a word: anarchy. Haiti is the product of the
persistence of human anarchy, and an excellent symbol because it symbolized exactly
the same thing to Carlyle and Froude. The latter visited; his observations are here.
Haiti is far more anarchic than it was in 1888, of course, whose Port-au-Prince is a
paradise next to today's. Froude gets all enraged because he sees a ditch full of
garbage. The 19th century's Haiti is the 21st's whole Third World.
If you are interested in the general subject of anarchy in the Third World, perhaps
you have read Robert Kaplan's famous 1994 essay in the Atlantic, The Coming
Anarchy. Kaplan spends most of it berating the reader with a completely fictitious
set of causes of this anarchy. The real cause, of course, is decolonialization. The cause
of that was progressivism, ie, Carlyle deficiency. Of course Kaplan's little anarchies
would not surprise Carlyle for a moment.
Moreover, as Kaplan does not tell you but Carlyle would, the anarchy is indeed
coming - to you. Because every year, the border between the Third World and the
First is a little more porous. Here indeed are the seeds of true Ate, though this
thorough and Biblical ruin (already taking place in South Africa) may well run
another century. No one has yet shown me a magic pill that turns a Third Worlder
into a First Worlder.
But at least most of the Third World is not an active physical danger to the lives of
Americans. This cannot be said of Afghanistan, where Americans (and other
Europeans, and yes, Afghans too) are dying every day for lack of Carlyle. More
precisely, they are dying because America, the democratic nation, is and will always
be completely incapable of doing the one thing it must do to succeed in Afghanistan,
which is to rule the country.
Oh, no, you see. Americans are in Afghanistan to advise the self-governing Afghan
people. Ruling is the last thing they could think of doing. America is just helping the
independent government of Afghanistan, which of course it created lock, stock and
barrel, to stand on its own two feet. But why should it? Do you think these people
want America to go away, and all America's dollars with it?
You can watch a video of how this works out, here. James Mill once wrote:
The two important discoveries for conquering India were, 1st: the weakness of the
native armies against European discipline; 2dly, the facility of imparting that
discipline to natives in the European service.
But America has no Afghans in its service. Except for a few interpreters, for whom
necessity finds a way, the bond of command between American and Afghan is strictly
forbidden. It is too Carlylean. Nothing like the Philippine Scouts, for instance, could
be tolerated. As a result, Americans are running around screaming, quite
ineffectually to the sight of any experienced parent or manager, at "their" Afghan
soldiers, that they shouldn't smoke hash before going on patrol. It doesn't appear to
be working.
Thus, Afghans are privileged to receive the full Orwellian force of the 21st century.
They suffer the pains of not only anarchy but also civil war, for an indefinite time
period in the future, for the sake of their own human rights. Is this a noble
martyrdom, or what? If there is any justice in the world, the Afghans may very well
inherit it. I'm not sure they will be too nice if they do.
The Afghan experience hits a couple of huge Carlylean hot buttons. Not only is it a
clear case of anarchy, but it is also a sham. The civil war in Afghanistan continues
because of the fraud, clearly palpable to all and defended by none, that the Karzai
government is in some sense "independent." It could only be more dependent if it
was attached to Capitol Hill by an actual, physical umbilical cord. And yet, because
Washington cannot summon the strength of reality needed to couple authority with
dependency - the classic dynamic of mastery - anarchy persists, and so does war.
Thus disorder, mendacity and injustice again go hand in hand, as Satan walks to and
fro in the earth. Satan is a pretty busy guy these days.
And finally, we come down to San Francisco. This is not Afghanistan, and nor is it
Haiti - although the city fathers of fifty years ago might be excused for imagining
some relationship. But no, actually. San Francisco is not well-governed by any
reasonable standard, but I live there and I can tell you that it's a pretty nice place to
live.
Still, however, the tapestry of promises looks like a moth attack at a dental-floss
convention. About the only strong human bonds in San Francisco today are familial
bonds, and there are precious few of those. (Although the birth rate is up about 50%
in the last 10 years, in my zip code - a thing which makes one think there may be
some turning of the tide.) Extended families are a rarity. Clans and tribes are found
only among the primitive. There are no guilds, there are no real churches, there are
no genuine, multigenerational neighborhood communal organizations. There are
plenty of sexual bonds, friendships, affinity groups, and employment relationships,
of course. But everything is casual.
Whereas fifty years ago, this city was an American Catholic city, full of Irish and
Italians. It had community in spades. So did the entire country. America was in fact
famous for her social cohesion. If you read Tocqueville's actual American journals, he
goes around America marvelling at the social fabric, marvelling at the strict
discipline in the prisons, and being amazed that both can coexist with democracy whose destructive side, being French, he knows well. It was a tough fabric, and took
more than another century to totally decay.
But now, of course, it has - as another famous pundit has pointed out. (The same
professor has, much against his will, even observed one of the causes.) American
society is atomized and structureless. All decisions are as procedural and collective as
can be made. The only exception is in the corporate, military and law-enforcement
worlds, each its own little bitter holdouts of rationalized reaction. These are
stubborn. But when they go, commerce and security go - and here is the true slide
over the great falls.
Oh, and Shakespeare and Johnson? They were reactionaries too, of course. Johnson,
of course, was a notorious Jacobite. But Shakespeare? Alas. Aside from notorious
passages such as Ulysses' speech on degree (which you are now fully equipped to
understand), not to mention notorious plays, such as Coriolanus - let me simply note
that if Shakespeare was a democrat, you'd of heard it.
If you must look further: Brownist. Note that Brownism begat Congregationalism
and Congregationalism begat Universalism - so we are all Brownists now. By
memetic genealogy, at least. Remember that next time NPR chews your ear off about
the Bard.
And again, don't let this be your only introduction to Carlyle. To repeat the course:
Chartism, then the Latter-Day Pamphlets, then Shooting Niagara, then the
Occasional Discourse. If this doesn't stretch your skull, nothing will.
Carlyle in the 20th century: fascism and socialism
I promise that UR will not turn into the Carlyle Channel - all Carlyle, all the time.
However, we have yet to seriously examine Carlyle's track record as a prophet. The
true force of the mad sage emerges only when we compare his future to our past and our present. If Carlyle's predictions are significantly more accurate than those of
his more conventional peers, his reputation as a true prophet and general Sith Lord
is confirmed. If not, he is just another crazy homeless person in the library.
What we'd really like is Carlyle's own history of the 20th century. Perhaps Rick Darby
can help out with his ouija board. Until this channel opens, however, we are stuck
with Google Books. (Question: does anyone at the Googleplex know they're serving
the Occasional Discourse? Does anyone at the SPLC read UR? If so, wouldn't suing
Google generate fantastic press? And say - how's it coming with that diversity effort?)
Fortunately, it is not too hard to retrospectively construct a Carlylean interpretation
of the 20th century. And for those who disagree, there is UR. (I would not be
surprised if I'm the only human being who read Frederick The Great this year.) Just
tilt your head and slip the mollusc in your ear.
Carlyle can be quickly identified as a predictor of unusual accuracy by two major
correct predictions about the 20th century. One: the 20th would be a century of
democracy, in which the political center moved consistently to the left. Two: it would
be a century of murder, misery, tyranny and anarchy, "enormous Megatherions, ugly
as were ever born of mud."
The first prediction was pretty standard. The second was quite unusual. Their
combination is distinctively Carlylean and, more broadly, Victorian and British. You
will certainly have a hard time finding anyone outside these categories, except a
grumpy old Mugwump or two, who believes in both these predictions. They are
clearly correct, and they were on paper by 1850.
But why paraphrase? Why not go direct? For I am to Carlyle, as Saruman to
Morgoth. Enter the true palace of darkness! Join in my iron oath to the Master!
Or perhaps Democracy, which we announce as now come, will itself manage it?
Democracy, once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such like,
will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, and make
a new blessed world of us by and by? — To the great mass of men, I am aware, the
matter presents itself quite on this hopeful side. Democracy they consider to be a
kind of "Government." The old model, formed long since, and brought to perfection
in England now two hundred years ago, has proclaimed itself to all Nations as the
new healing for every woe: "Set up a Parliament," the Nations everywhere say, when
the old King is detected to be a Sham-King, and hunted out or not; "set up a
Parliament; let us have suffrages, universal suffrages; and all either at once or by due
degrees will be right, and a real Millennium come!" Such is their way of construing
the matter.
Such, alas, is by no means my way of construing the matter; if it were, I should have
had the happiness of remaining silent, and been without call to speak here. It is
because the contrary of all this is deeply manifest to me, and appears to be forgotten
by multitudes of my contemporaries, that I have had to undertake addressing a word
to them.
The contrary of all this; — and the farther I look into the roots of all this, the more
hateful, ruinous and dismal does the state of mind all this could have originated in
appear to me. To examine this recipe of a Parliament, how fit it is for governing
Nations, nay how fit it may now be, in these new times, for governing England itself
where we are used to it so long: this, too, is an alarming inquiry, to which all thinking
men, and good citizens of their country, who have an ear for the small still voices and
eternal intimations, across the temporary clamors and loud blaring proclamations,
are now solemnly invited. Invited by the rigorous fact itself; which will one day, and
that perhaps soon, demand practical decision or redecision of it from us, — with
enormous penalty if we decide it wrong! I think we shall all have to consider this
question, one day; better perhaps now than later, when the leisure may be less.
If a Parliament, with suffrages and universal or any conceivable kind of suffrages, is
the method, then certainly let us set about discovering the kind of suffrages, and rest
no moment till we have got them. But it is possible a Parliament may not be the
method! Possible the inveterate notions of the English People may have settled it as
the method, and the Everlasting Laws of Nature may have settled it as not the
method! Not the whole method; nor the method at all, if taken as the whole? If a
Parliament with never such suffrages is not the method settled by this latter
authority, then it will urgently behoove us to become aware of that fact, and to quit
such method; — we may depend upon it, however unanimous we be, every step taken
in that direction will, by the Eternal Law of things, be a step from improvement, not
towards it.
Not towards it, I say, if so! Unanimity of voting, — that will do nothing for us if so.
Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may
vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely
constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions
already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers,
who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting,
ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the
Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable
Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic
"admonition;" you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished
into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will
never get round Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship; — yes indeed, the ship's
crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the time being, will be very
comfortable to the ship's crew, and to their Phantasm Captain if they have one: but if
the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it
will not profit them much! — Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and
they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities
— since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws — could be brought to
show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of
Nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous votings: this is considered to be all the
law and all the prophets, at present.
If a man could shake out of his mind the universal noise of political doctors in this
generation and in the last generation or two, and consider the matter face to face,
with his own sincere intelligence looking at it, I venture to say he would find this a
very extraordinary method of navigating, whether in the Straits of Magellan or the
undiscovered Sea of Time. To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and
improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the
man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to
him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. These will lead
him to victory; whoever it may be that sets him in the way of these, — were it Russian
Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of
Canterbury, M'Croudy the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political
Economy, — sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this Universe, and is his
friend of friends. And again, whoever does the contrary is, for a like reason, his
enemy of enemies. This may be taken as fixed.
And now by what method ascertain the monition of the gods in regard to our affairs?
How decipher, with best fidelity, the eternal regulation of the Universe; and read,
from amid such confused embroilments of human clamor and folly, what the real
Divine Message to us is? A divine message, or eternal regulation of the Universe,
there verily is, in regard to every conceivable procedure and affair of man: faithfully
following this, said procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole Universe to
second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions, towards a victorious
goal; not following this, mistaking this, disregarding this, destruction and wreck are
certain for every affair. How find it?
All the world answers me, "Count heads; ask Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes,
and that will tell." Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well, — I
perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed. Within the last halfcentury or so, either the Universe or else the heads of men must have altered very
much. Half a century ago, and down from Father Adam's time till then, the Universe,
wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat abstruse nature; by no
means carrying its secret written on its face, legible to every passer-by; on the
contrary, obstinately hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere
persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose
number was not the majority in my time!
Latter-Day Pamphlets, The Present Time, page 18.
Of course, this pair of predictions is just an example. Hindsight can easily identify
correct predictions in the corpus of any essayist. We cannot consider Carlyle's actual
accuracy in retrospect without counting all his correct and incorrect predictions, then
comparing them to those of a contemporary peer. Perhaps this could be a useful
exercise for some anomic beaver with a spreadsheet.
We can produce a more interesting effect on the modern mind, however, by
presenting ways in which Carlyle understands the 20th century better, in the 1850s,
than almost anyone in 2009. Specifically, we can employ Carlyle to teach you about
the 20th century - and if not you, your uninitiated friends.
Only one simple demonstration is required. You see, for Carlyle the pair of
prophecies described earlier - the rise of democracy in the 20th century, and the
extraordinary level of political murder in the 20th century - are not independent
predictions. They are causally connected. The rise of democracy is the cause of the
Holocaust, etc.
While this proposition seems self-evident to Carlyle, pretty much no one believes it
today. Will historians eventually conclude that he was right? If so, Carlyle beats them
by 150 years - and counting. Counting for a while yet, I suspect.
To the democrat, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather,
democracy appears as the cure for the 20th-century's political ills. A cure born in
serendipitous synchrony to its disease, like the Monitor for the Merrimack. It reaches
the scene of the crime just in time to try to save the victims. Succeeding for most,
sadly failing for some. So you may see some blood on its hands or clothing.
If this alibi were not interesting enough, any exculpation of democracy leaves the
tragedies of the 20th century uncaused. If the narrators of democratic history were
more confident that these events were indeed causeless, random and without
pattern, they might be less addicted to the passive voice. Instead you see it every day
in the papers: "three people were killed today in..." Or even better, the false active:
"today, violence killed three people in..." Indeed. Thus in the 20th century, which was
also the century of democracy, violence killed hundreds of millions of people.
Of course, neither Carlyle nor I can deny that North America and Europe in 2009
enjoy local peace, at least in the conventional military sense. Recent political violence
in these areas has been minimal. But any hegemonic conqueror can and typically
does suppress political violence: democracy, or Genghis Khan. This does not help us
assess the net total of political violence in a counterfactual universe in which
democracy, or Genghis Khan, had decided to mind their own business.
Surely the easiest argument against Carlyle's hypothesis is that most of the atrocities
of the 20th century were committed not by democracy, but by its enemies totalitarian states of both the right and left. Again, democracy is at the scene of the
crime only in its capacity as an officer of the peace. It is not just the blood of the
victims which appears on its hands and clothing, but also that of the real killers.
Again, perfectly true. It is possible to construct a definition of an orthodox
democracy, and possible to show that orthodox democracies have by far the cleanest
hands in the 20th century's military mass murders - under 21st-century principles of
"human rights" , for instance, we see only a million or so civilians incinerated by
urban firebombing. A peccadillo for the age. Sure.
But clean hands do not exclude causality. The fascist and socialist totalitarian states
of the 20th century - Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, basically - existed as exceptions,
throwbacks, in the age of rising democracy. Hitler, Mao and Stalin committed the
crimes of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, making them the proximate causes of these events.
We still may ask: what caused Hitler, Mao, and Stalin? What was the origin and
nature of these regimes? If we find the fingerprints of democracy behind them, we
may continue to suspect it as the ultimate cause.
The argument that democracy caused Hitler, etc, may seem an unusual and abstruse
one. In the democratic narrative of the 20th century, indeed, it makes very little
sense. In the Carlylean narrative it is almost so obvious as to be unworthy of
mention, as we'll see.
The Carlylean explanation of Hitler, Stalin and Mao is that fascism and Communism
are both, each in a very different way, democratic phenomena. They existed in the
century of democracy because they could not have existed without it.
We will make this argument at length, later. It is a subtle point to explain, however. It
is easily suspected of sophistry, or (as Carlyle would put it) Jesuitism. An
introduction to Carlyle's 20th century can only start with a much less subtle blow to
the head.
To demonstrate how easy it is to retell history without changing any of the facts, let
us supply a Carlylean reinterpretation of the events by which democracy gained its
hegemony - the wars of 1939-45. The result will attribute ultimate causality for the
Holocaust to the democratic movement in general, and the Roosevelt administration
in specific.
First we must remove the existing cloak of hagiography. Beating the Nazis (a feat in
which my own grandfather participated, quite enthusiastically) is perhaps the main
moral claim to fame of our present democratic overlords. The moral logic is simple.
Hitler committed the Holocaust, the Holocaust was evil, FDR fought Hitler and beat
him, so FDR must be good.
A saint may fight against a knave. Alternatively, two knaves may fight. A dragon may
be slain by St. George, or by another dragon. In the former case you are left with St.
George, who deserves a reward for slaying his dragon. In the latter case you are faced
with a dragon, which did only what dragons do. He was probably the bigger of the
two, and now he is even bigger than that.
Unfortunately, there is no moral system on earth which assigns any points for either
(a) the unintended consequences of one's actions, especially when (b) these
consequences do not actually happen. So if (a) America's war had been undertaken,
either by its leaders or its masses, with the intention of saving the Jews from Hitler,
and (b) any significant number of Jews had been actually saved by this policy, credit
on this count would most certainly be due. And we would see what we want to see St. George slaying the dragon.
But I am not aware of any historical school which espouses either of these
propositions, neither of which has any relationship to reality. In reality, the American
authorities were only slightly less eager than their German counterparts to conceal
the Holocaust. As any bail bondsman can tell you, this is called being an "accessory."
Not good. As for saving Jews, all contemporary claims that America was fighting a
war for the Jews emanate from Berlin, not Washington. Goebbels was known to tell
the truth on occasion, but not this occasion.
Moreover, the Roosevelt administration at its highest level knowingly concealed the
crimes of its own Russian proxies at Katyn, an atrocity no less horrific in quality if
not quantity. America in this war is just as responsible for Russian war crimes as
Germany for the work of its Lithuanian special police. Total responsibility for the
offenses of one's dependents, clients and proxies is a clear case of natural law, both at
the individual and sovereign levels.
One layer of camouflage is seldom sufficient. Lurking beneath the mythical war to
save the Jews is the equally mythical Axis plan to conquer the world. Unlike the
Holocaust, this is a genuine work of living propaganda - a device of British Security
Coordination, which forged the infamous map in which South America is divided
into Nazi Gaue. Quite simply, no such plan existed.
Hitler most certainly had a plan to conquer Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is not
the planet, and nor was it in any sense liberated by the war. Mein Kampf's grand
strategy was that Germany must expand to the East and remain at peace with the
West - especially the British Empire. Hitler's geopolitical fantasy, and the perennial
core of his perennial peace plans, was a world in which Germany dominated the
Continent with land power, serving as an equal but not a rival to British maritime
imperialism. Curiously, the Third Reich and the British Empire are now equally
defunct - another coincidence.
Of course, having conquered the East, Hitler or his successors might have developed
new appetites, revised said plans, and decided to conquer the West as well. Those
requiring the 20th century to constitute the end of history are yet another class of
automatic apologist. Of course, after the Anglo-Soviet split, the West in any case
faced a ruthless, militaristic Eastern totalitarian state with clear ambitions to world
domination. (And actual domination of Eastern Europe.)
We thus begin to see the outline of the foreign policy that Carlyle would propose for
America and Britain in the 1930s. A Carlylean judges the quality of a government's
actions by comparing them to what that government should have done, and he is not
shy about using hindsight to construct this alternative.
Or, of course, the prophecies of the master himself. The Carlylean alternative being
simple:
When the Continental Nations have once got to the bottom of their Augean Stable,
and begun to have real enterprises based on the eternal facts again, our Foreign
Office may again have extensive concerns with them. And at all times, and even now,
there will remain the question to be sincerely put and wisely answered, What
essential concern has the British Nation with them and their enterprises? Any
concern at all, except that of handsomely keeping apart from them? If so, what are
the methods of best managing it? — At present, as was said, while Red Republic but
clashes with foul Bureaucracy; and Nations, sunk in blind ignavia, demand a
universal-suffrage Parliament to heal their wretchedness; and wild Anarchy and
Phallus-Worship struggle with Sham-Kingship and extinct or galvanized
Catholicism; and in the Cave of the Winds all manner of rotten waifs and wrecks are
hurled against each other, — our English interest in the controversy, however huge
said controversy grow, is quite trifling; we have only in a handsome manner to say to
it: "Tumble and rage along, ye rotten waifs and wrecks; clash and collide as seems
fittest to you; and smite each other into annihilation at your own good pleasure. In
that huge conflict, dismal but unavoidable, we, thanks to our heroic ancestors, having
got so far ahead of you, have now no interest at all. Our decided notion is, the dead
ought to bury their dead in such a case: and so we have the honor to be, with
distinguished consideration, your entirely devoted, FLIMNAP, SEC. FOREIGN
DEPARTMENT." — I really think Flimnap, till truer times come, ought to treat much
of his work in this way: cautious to give offence to his neighbors; resolute not to
concern himself in any of their self-annihilating operations whatsoever.
Thus the Carlylean foreign policy for USG and Britain in the 1930s is the same as the
Carlylean foreign policy for USG today: abandon, disown and release all foreign
protectorates, dependents, "allies," client states, puppet states, and other "little
friends." Rather, each sovereign nation should just mind its own business for a while
and see how that works out.
After a Carlylean reaction, there is no world policeman, no world judge, world
parliament, or world anything. Even the traditional practice of exchanging
permanent diplomats is obsolete. Governments often have things to say to each
other, but they can get used to saying it by email.
And if Bolivia and Paraguay wish to wage war, that war is the business of Bolivia and
Paraguay. Washington has no particular interest in which side may be in the wrong.
It is certainly either Bolivia, Paraguay, or both. Moreover, if Spain herself does pick a
side, intervenes in favor of it, and eventually uses this as a pretext for reacquiring
both Bolivia and Paraguay, the Flimnaps of Foggy Bottom shall gaze serenely down
on the entire affair - requesting, at most, that all sides avoid weapons which might
cause global atmospheric or marine contamination.
Thus, if we imagine this principle applied to Europe in 1933, a Carlylean regime in
1933 disavows all involvement in Continental politics, including the League of
Nations and the protection of the various invented states of the Little Entente. All of
which were, in 1933, much better-armed than Germany.
If Germany wishes to have a war with Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc, that is the
business of these nations. If Czechoslovakia and Poland wish to defend themselves
from Germany, they should arm sufficiently and band themselves together for the
purpose. If not, they must accept German suzerainty. In the actual event, they
behaved as if they were armed, but the arms on which they counted were not their
own - but those of Britain and France, which in retrospect were obviously insufficient
to defend them.
Meanwhile, of course, if these wars expel valuable refugees - especially a high-value
population such as the Ashkenazi Jews - Britain and America will stand ready to
snap them up, just as Frederick the Great was happy to snap up French Huguenots
expelled by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Thus under this strategy, Nazi Germany (assuming the most aggressive intentions)
either enlarges itself to the East, or fails to do so. If populations are displaced, for
crazy Nazi reasons or otherwise, they are relocated to the Western Hemisphere.
(Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, for one, wanted as many Jews as he could get.)
It is possible to construct a global military disaster, genocide, etc, emerging from this
counterfactual scenario. But it does not seem likely, whereas with the road taken we
know it is certain. Hindsight is a bitch.
And more damningly, the Carlylean answer answers a question we didn't know we
had. Remember: we have eliminated the two most frequently presumed rationales
for the Allied side of the war. Roosevelt was not fighting to save the Jews, for he gives
no appearance of giving a crap about the Jews. And he is not fighting to thwart the
Nazi project of invading Mexico, for he knows there is no such project. What, then, is
he fighting for? What is the nature of the Allied cause?
There is a three-word answer: "the United Nations." Basically, the Anglo-American
coalition (which in fact called itself by that name during the war) is fighting for a
vision, which vision might well be described even better by the name it now carries:
"the international community." Skeptics will note that this phrase can always be
replaced with the term "State Department," with negligble change to the meaning of
the sentence.
More concretely, the fundamental question of the war was: if Germany and Poland
disagree, whose business is it? Germany's answer was: it is the business of Germany
and Poland. This answer is roughly coincident with classical international law, in
which each nation is the only final judge of its interests. The Anglo-American answer
was: it is the business of the international community. And so, in modern
international law, it is. The Allies having defeated Germany, just as Germany
defeated Poland. Might and right always converge in the end.
From the perspective of classical international law, Britain, which has been acting as
the sole global hyperpower since 1815, and her new partner in crime America, are
essentially asserting suzerainty over the Continent. They, and their stable of
satellites, are to make the rules of international affairs henceforth. And indeed there
is only one way for Germany to dispute this claim of suzerainty, which like all
sovereign claims grows stronger the longer it is not disputed, and establish its status
as an independent and equal country: make war, needless to say without permission,
on the Anglo-American client states that after the last war were created out of its
territory.
Thus, Anglo-American democracy causes the war, and its resulting terrors and
destructions, because the nascent system of global suzerainty it set up in 1919 forces
Germany to either accept a position which is permanently subordinate to the Anglo-
American system or "international community," effectively sacrificing her
independence as a nation, or demonstrate its disobedience by violently attacking that
community. The dog has been backed into a corner; it must either cringe and submit,
or bite. It probably should have cringed.
But military causality is always a dark and difficult point to argue. This would be
Carlyle's explanation of these events, I think, but it is not his most powerful
argument. Not only were Stalin, Hitler and Mao the products of bad democratic
foreign policy, but their own movements could not have existed without democracy.
Rather, fascism and socialism (including the various Communisms) are inherently
democratic phenomena. It is thus obvious that they came to exist in the century of
democracy. This argument, too, may strike you as implausible - but wait and see.
Because first, this nasty pair suggests a cheaper, uglier, more banal explanation for
Carlyle's seeming success as a prophet. As Wikipedia correctly notes:
[Carlyle's] ideas were influential on the development of Socialism, but - like the
opinions of many deep thinkers of the time - are also considered to have influenced
the rise of Fascism.
If Carlyle predicts that your house will burn down, and your house burns down,
Carlyle is a prophet. But if he was seen on your porch with a can of kerosene, he's an
arsonist. The plot thickens.
To understand the 20th century, we have to understand what socialism is and
fascism was. To understand it from a Carlylean perspective, we need to understand
the relationship of democracy to each - and to Carlyle himself. To Carlyle, democracy
is the ultimate cause of the Holocaust; to democracy (or at least to Wikipedia),
Carlyle is that ultimate cause. He is both prosecutor and defendant in the case.
The essential step in understanding socialism and fascism is understanding the
difference between these Megatherions. They are both Megatherions all right, and
both born in mud. Moreover, both muds contain a significant concentration of
Carlyle. But they are two very different muds - and mud should not be confused with
Carlyle.
While there are no qualitative distinctions in history, the difference between
socialism and fascism is about as close as it comes - it's up there with virus versus
bacterium. Or perhaps, for a closer medical analogy, liver cancer and lung cancer.
Lung cancer can spread to your liver and/or vice versa, but the tumor is always
descended from either lung or liver. Similarly, while the structure, apparatus and
practices of socialism and fascism may in advanced cases converge, the origin of the
malignancy is always precise and distinct.
Orthodox libertarians and, increasingly, conservatives have a particularly easy wrong
answer available to them on this point. The wrong answer is that socialism and
fascism are two forms, with negligible or cosmetic distinction, of one pathology of
government - statism. Statism being the condition of having an enormous
government which does all kinds of stupid, useless, and/or counterproductive things
it doesn't do.
This clicks naturally with the theory of Carlyle as villain. Carlyle is most certainly a
statist in the abstract libertarian sense of the word. Libertarianism is in fact a revival
of the Manchester liberalism of Carlyle's time - whom the reader may meet as
"M'Croudy, the Seraphic Doctor of Political Economy."
From Carlyle's end, Manchester liberalism is one of the principal symptoms of 19thcentury democracy - the other being the philanthropism of Exeter Hall. Note that
21th-century democracy has boosted Exeter Hall to the nth degree, but retains some
fragments of Manchester liberalism only grudgingly and with contempt. This too
must be explained.
But here is Carlyle on M'Croudy - directly following the first passage on Democracy:
Or perhaps the chief end of man being now, in these improved epochs, to make
money and spend it, his interests in the Universe have become amazingly simplified
of late; capable of being voted on with effect by almost anybody? "To buy in the
cheapest market, and sell in the dearest:" truly if that is the summary of his social
duties, and the final divine message he has to follow, we may trust him extensively to
vote upon that. But if it is not, and never was, or can be? If the Universe will not carry
on its divine bosom any commonwealth of mortals that have no higher aim, — being
still "a Temple and Hall of Doom," not a mere Weaving-shop and Cattle-pen? If the
unfathomable Universe has decided to reject Human Beavers pretending to be Men;
and will abolish, pretty rapidly perhaps, in hideous mud-deluges, their "markets" and
them, unless they think of it? In that case it were better to think of it: and the
Democracies and Universal Suffrages, I can observe, will require to modify
themselves a good deal!
Observant readers will note that Carlyle, the prophet, errs here. He asserts that
Manchester liberalism is so simple and obvious that it can be explained to voters,
who can (he seems to vaguely imply) be trusted to vote for it. This may have been
true in the 1850s. If so, voters have changed - alas.
But let's examine this Carlylean critique of libertarianism. Carlyle says:
libertarianism is an epiphenomenon of democracy, because it is or purports to be a
formula which dictates the actions of a sovereign - ie, the government must do this
and must not do that. In democratic parlance - a position, platform or ideology.
Platforms are essential to the conduct of democratic government, because the only
legitimate way to rule in a democracy is to construct a party which agrees on a
platform. Thus, the simpler and more appealing the formula, the better. Thus the
existence of libertarianism, from this skeptical and delegitimating standpoint, is
explained. Thus Manchester liberalism got somewhere in mid-19th-century Britain,
although libertarians with more or less the same platform got nowhere in late-20thcentury America. Simpler and more appealing formulas, such as "hope" and
"change," having since been invented.
Thus, Carlyle helps us explains why libertarianism was a democratic trope in the
1850s, and also why the democracy of 2009 is fundamentally un-libertarian. Antidemocratic libertarians can begin and finish their thesis here. The idea of
libertarianism as a fundamental form of government, and non-libertarianism (or
"statism") as an equally fundamental form, is most plausibly explained by the
political needs of democracy, not any actual natural phenomenon.
That said, we will accept this category, "statist," a little longer. Before we look at
socialism and fascism independently, we need to observe the shared Carlylean roots
around which both are built. In the Carlylean narrative, socialism and fascism are
both corruptions of the Carlylean ideal. They combine Carlylean truths with unCarlylean shams.
Carlyle is a "statist" in that he considers the State to have absolute responsibility for
the well-being of the nation it governs, and absolute authority to take any act it
considers necessary to optimize that well-being. Quite simply, the Carlylean likes a
strong hand at the tiller. And a strong tiller, too. This taste he shares with the
socialist and the fascist - his fellow enthusiasts of government power.
Here all three part ways with the tradition of classical liberalism, under which so
many American and British institutions were founded and re-founded in the 17th,
18th and 19th centuries, and whose central motif is the belief in limited and/or
divided government. One cannot be either socialist, fascist, or Carlylean, without
either abandoning this belief or warping it beyond recognition. (Carlyleans and
fascists abandon it. Socialists warp it.)
But at the next stop, the Carlylean parts ways with his 20th-century buddies. It is he
who stays on the bus, and they who get off. Socialism and fascism produce a mix of
substandard and disastrous results, for a simple reason: both originate in democracy,
a precancerous growth always pregnant with some malignancy.
In almost every historical case of democracy, factions have arisen which can be
arranged along a right-left axis. In the Athenian era, for example, hundreds of citystates developed a factional pattern in which a nominally demotic party competed
against an nominally oligarchic party. This pattern must be a consequence of human
nature, for it appears in all eras and populations without any apparent structure of
transmission.
The socialist one-party state arises through the total victory of a faction, party, or
movement of the Left. The fascist one-party state arises through the total victory of a
faction, party, or movement of the Right. (Note that victory is victory, by means legal
or illegal.)
The stable two-party democracy remains pregnant with both. And its stability is
illusory: the same nominal parties remain, but their actual positions shift inexorably
toward the Left. Thus we see chronic rather than acute socialism, which has the same
endpoint - sclerotic emphysema of Brezhnev - but slower, and with a lot less drama.
Unless it breaks down, of course.
(Note that under this definition, it is impossible to argue that "Hitler was a socialist."
On the Weimar political spectrum, which was no different from ours, the NSDAP was
a party of the Right. Thus its total victory can only constitute the condition of
fascism. Of course you may use any definition of "socialist" or "fascist" you like, but
the above will be found to closely match your intuitive sense of the matter.)
It is these democratic roots which fatally poison both socialism and fascism. Since
the origin of the socialist or fascist regime is always a democratic party, achieving
power at least partially through democratic tactics, the regime cannot escape
democracy as a source of both external legitimacy and internal structure. The mark
of Cain is always on it.
Your captain is a strong hand on a strong ship. But he is no Baptist. Will he round the
Horn? Famously, if sober. Otherwise, in the belly of a fish. As an ingredient in
government, even just a mixer, democracy is a deliriant - like Jimson weed. Cocaine
sends you up, whisky brings you down, acid swings you around. But you never know
what a man will do on Jimson weed. You might want to find another captain for the
Southern Ocean.
This origin in democracy should not be confused with genuine popular sovereignty,
or actual sailing of the ship by ballot-box. Such a thing is almost unheard of. It is not
that socialist or fascist states actually extend significant decision-making power to
the people at large. This is almost never the case, not even in working democracies
with genuine contested elections.
If you look at any government of the 20th century and ask, who helms the ship
around the Horn? Who tells the sailors when and how to reef the anchor, swab the
mast or jibe the poop deck? Your answer will not be: the people who vote in
"American Idol." Your answer will be: the pros. Public servants. The people who
always do it. Which is not to say they do it right.
However, a socialist or fascist state, being by definition the descendant of a
democratic movement, (a) cannot cease to adore some mythic construction of
popular sovereignty, and (b) cannot afford to lose the actual adoration of its subjects.
Both are central to its legitimacy.
And both, as we will see, are central to its insanity - in two very different ways.
Because both socialism and fascism must maintain the sham of popular government,
they have the seed of mendacity always inside them. That seed always finds fertile
soil, and indeed life in a socialist or fascist state always becomes life in a jungle of
lies. Which is typically the least of your problems.
Thus in socialism and fascism, we see the worst of both worlds. The state is (or at
least may be) strong. But it is also mad. Thus, sometimes, often or always, its
strength is wielded in the service of Chaos and not Cosmos. In short, the 800-pound
gorilla is on acid. No wonder the night-watchman state seems like such a tempting
idea.
The Carlylean insists: the forces of sovereignty must be mastered. There is no
alternative. To limit the State to what it should do, prohibiting it from doing what it
should not do, is to commit an act of tautology. Suppose you make it promise? What
use are the gorilla's promises? Either you have mastered him, or not. If not, he will
do as he likes. If so, you have taken his place.
Observe the fascist or socialist State again, through the eyes of the orthodox
libertarian or classical liberal. We see an 800-pound gorilla on acid, whooping it up
at the wheel of a running bulldozer. Your libertarian says: stop that bulldozer! Your
Carlylean says: stop that gorilla!
A bulldozer, well-made, well-maintained and well-operated, is a positive force in the
world. But only if it is controlled by a man and not a gorilla. If you saw a bulldozer
driven by a qualified bulldozer operator, dear libertarian, would you cry: stop that
bulldozer! I think not. You might be amazed at all the good works a qualified
bulldozer operator can work with a bulldozer.
Of course, the world at present contains no such thing as a qualified bulldozer
operator. Which is hardly the Carlylean's fault. And it still contains men, who are not
gorillas, and can learn. They can also be drug-tested.
But this analogy, though picturesque, is as far as we can go with the two together.
Socialism and fascism are different things. We must examine them apart, each
through the Carlylean lens.
Let's do fascism first, because fascism is easy. Fascism is Carlyle, implemented by
swine. Thus, you can go through Carlyle, finding Carlylean heroes, and replacing
them with swine. The result will be fascism.
This exercise is exceptionally simple for those with a progressive education. Not only
do you already know everything about the crimes of fascism, how to recognize it, how
to fight it, etc, you cannot conceive of a Carlylean hero who is in fact a hero, and not a
swine at all. Your mind rebels against the very thought.
Fortunately, history - which for you is the story of the 20th century, because
progressives hate the past - demonstrates that in all cases, swine appear in the
position at question. Therefore, the dispute is settled. With this assumption, proven
by experience, let's see how Carlyle is a fascist. We might, for instance, choose this
passage from Shooting Niagara:
I always fancy there might much be done in the way of military drill withal. Beyond
all other schooling, and as supplement or even as succedaneum for all other, one
often wishes the entire Population could be thoroughly drilled; into co-operative
movement, into individual behaviour, correct, precise, and at once habitual and
orderly as mathematics, in all or in very many points, — and ultimately in the point
of actual Military Service, should such be required of it!
[...]
Soldier-Drill, for fighting purposes, as I have said, would be the last or finishing
touch of all these sorts of Drilling processes; and certainly the acknowledged king
would reckon it not the least important to him, but even perhaps the most so, in
these peculiar times. Anarchic Parliaments and Penny Newspapers might perhaps
grow jealous of him; in any case, would he have to be cautious, punctilious, severely
correct, and obey to the letter whatever laws and regulations they emitted on the
subject. But that done, how could the most anarchic Parliament, or Penny Editor,
think of forbidding any fellow-citizen such a manifest improvement on all the human
creatures round him? Our wise Hero Aristocrat, or acknowledged king in his own
territory, would by no means think of employing his superlative private Fieldregiment in levy of war against the most anarchic Parliament: on the contrary, might
and would loyally but help said Parliament in warring down much anarchy worse
than its own, and so gain steadily new favour from it. From it, and from all men and
gods! And would have silently the consciousness, too, that with every new
Disciplined Man, he was widening the arena of Anti-Anarchy, of God-appointed
Order in this world and Nation, — and was looking forward to a day, very distant
probably, but certain as Fate.
For I suppose it would in no moment be doubtful to him That, between Anarchy and
Anti-ditto, it would have to come to sheer fight at last; and that nothing short of duel
to the death could ever void that great quarrel. And he would have his hopes, his
assurances, as to how the victory would lie. For everywhere in this universe, and in
every nation that is not divorced from it and in the act of perishing forever, AntiAnarchy is silently on the increase, at all moments: Anarchy, not, but contrariwise;
having the whole universe for ever set against it; pushing it slowly at all moments
towards suicide and annihilation. To Anarchy, however million-headed, there is no
victory possible. Patience, silence, diligence, ye chosen of the world! Slowly or fast in
the course of time you will grow to a minority that can actually step forth (sword not
yet drawn, but sword ready to be drawn), and say “here are we, Sirs; we also are
minded to vote, — to all lengths, as you may perceive. A company of poor men (as
friend Oliver termed us) who will spend all our blood, if needful!” What are Beales
and his 50,000 roughs against such; what are the noisiest anarchic Parliaments, in
majority of a million to one, against such? Stubble against fire. Fear not, my friend;
the issue is very certain when it comes so far as this!
Fortified by your progressive education, which is at this moment flashing the red
alert, see instantly that this program, implemented by swine, is fascism. And
implemented by non-swine? It has no name - for history has yet to see its like.
And where do the swine come from? In the 20th century? Gosh, in the age of
democracy, why would one find a sudden effusion of swine in government? A famous
Hitler campaign poster showed him with Hindenburg, "the Field Marshal and the
Corporal." Traditionally, of course, any such fraternization would be a military
offence.
Again, fascism is fascism because it arises out of democracy. Against the Left of
intellectual consensus, universalist philosophy, bureaucratic disinterest, and
bohemian disorder, it pits the forces of popular consensus, parochial tradition,
vested or corrupt interests, and military order.
Each of the above has its place - both the Athenian perspective of the Left, and the
Spartan judgment of the Right. A healthy society can see itself through any of these
glasses, or all. But none in recent memory has combined the Athenian and Spartan
virtues - it is a difficult merger. Carlylean order does not preclude the bohemian, but
the combination is delicate at the least.
But to create this Spartan force in a democracy is to create, essentially, the Nazi
Party. Or the Republican Party. If your party is just a theatrical production and has
no actual intent of seizing power, it is the latter; if its plan, hopefully not a secret
plan, is "one man, one vote, one time," it is the former. Neither is a benefit to
humanity, at least as described.
When the NSDAP seized absolute power, what seized absolute power was an
organization which was more or less a government in exile, whose leader was a
palpable nut, and whose supporters consisted largely of the lower-middle classes relatively ignorant and ill-informed. This was not a military coup. It was the electoral
victory of a democratic political party.
Had Weimar been terminated by a military coup, perhaps under Captain Ehrhardt or
the like, the order that replaced it might have been a military order - a complete
renunciation of democracy, a return to the Prussian traditions of Frederick the Great.
Instead, as a democratic movement, the militarism of the Nazis had a notably
paramilitary quality. For instance, calling the SA the SA was rather as if Youth for
Western Civilization were to name its paintball brigade the "Special Forces." It's
definitely not the way to get the actual Special Forces on your side.
It is this difference - the line between military honor and tradition, and paramilitary
brawling and thuggery - that separates men from swine, and Carlyle from fascism.
The trouble is that if you try to modify the Nazi path to power to remove the swine, it
is not clear that you have a path to power. There were plenty of non-swinish German
nationalists competing with the Nazis. Only the Nazis, however, could build an entire
party of swine. And even in Germany, enough swine and friends of swine could be
found - which is hardly surprising, when you see that the choice was not the Nazis or
nothing, but the Nazis or Weimar.
So once the Nazis seize power: power is held by a party of swine. With Hitler at the
top. Many have joined the Party because they want to help restore Germany; many
have joined it because they want to get ahead; some have joined it because they want
to get revenge on the Jews. It is this organization, nominally under Hitler's absolute
rule but in practice more dangerous to him than he is to it, that now rules Germany.
And at the bottom, below the Party, is the Deutsche Volk - whose opinions are
coordinated by the propaganda techniques familiar to all, and coordinated quite
successfully too. This too is a relic of democracy: popular sovereignty.
This is the outline of a Mafia state. This pyramid can impose order outside itself, but
internally it is not and can never be ordered. Germany is a sea of warring acronymic
agencies, increasingly corrupt. The Nazi system is still often dynamic and successful
because it is so new and so young. Had it lived longer, however, the structure of
bureaucracy and venality would have ossified, producing a transition not unlike that
between the regimes of Louis XIV and Louis XVI. Hitler was certainly no Frederick
the Great, and even Frederick's system did not fare well under his dissolute heir.
Thus what we see in fascism is the last gasp of the European ancien regime, heavily
contaminated by vices implicit in the attempt to restore order by democratic means.
Fortunately, the whole question of fascism is of only academic interest in the 21st
century, because no such attempt could now succeed. Only the very unusual
conditions of postwar Germany and Italy made it possible to construct a successful
fascist party, even one constructed with generous helpings of swine. Now and for the
foreseeable future, there is no practical democratic politics of the Right - moderate or
extreme.
On to socialism.
It is just as easy to find the link from Carlyle to socialism. Walt Whitman will find it
for us:
Then the simplicity and amid ostensible frailty the towering strength of this man -- a
hardy oak knot, you could never wear out — an old farmer dressed in brown clothes,
and not handsome — his very foibles fascinating. Who cares that he wrote about Dr.
Francia, and "Shooting Niagara" — and "the Nigger Question," — and didn't at all
admire our United States? (I doubt if he ever thought or said half as bad words about
us as we deserve.) How he splashes like leviathan in the seas of modern literature
and politics! Doubtless, respecting the latter, one needs first to realize, from actual
observation, the squalor, vice and doggedness ingrained in the bulk-population of the
British Islands, with the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkeyism everywhere, to
understand the last meaning in his pages.
Accordingly, though he was no chartist or radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most
indignant comment or protest about the fruits of feudalism today in Great Britain —
the increasing poverty and degradation of the homeless, landless twenty millions,
while a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, possess the entire soil, the money,
and the fat berths. Trade and shipping, and clubs and culture, and prestige, and
guns, and a fine select class of gentry and aristocracy, with every modern
improvement, cannot begin to salve or defend such stupendous hoggishness.
Whitman is not making any of this up. You will indeed see Carlyle, especially in his
early works - before he has entirely rid himself from his old group of Radical friends,
to be exact - take just this tack. Much of it is still found in Chartism (1840).
Carlyle will: criticize economic inequality; mock laissez-faire economics; deplore the
growing dehumanization of the new British proletariat; denounce industrial
pollution; call for massive national literacy campaigns; propose that government
organize unemployed workers; etc, etc, etc. All these ambitions of the muscular State
are distinctively socialist.
Of course, they are not exclusively socialist aims, since we see them also under
Hitler. Aims alone do not enable us to distinguish socialist and fascist regimes, which
are distinguished by origin rather than result. Over the long run, the two can develop
a remarkably similar structure and apparatus - I suspect the Third Reich, had it
survived, would have looked rather Brezhnevian by the 1980s. But this is parallel
evolution: analogy, not homology.
For a deeper connection between socialism and Carlyle, we need to understand the
shared inspiration of the two. Since Carlyle was considerably under the influence of
Scottish Calvinism, and the roots of socialism run through (Calvinist) Puritanism, the
religious connection does not require a great leap of faith. The Carlylean imperative
of the State is to discover the laws of God and implement them on earth. This is a
dream easily recognized in the progressive of a century ago, a Herbert Croly or
Edward Bellamy or Benjamin Franklin Trueblood, none of whom would have had
any qualms in describing his utopia as a New Jerusalem.
Finally, we need to recognize perhaps the most distinctive and subtle quality of
socialism, which is that socialism (again in origin, though this quality disappears in
the nasty end stages) is a fundamentally aristocratic movement. Moreover, it is
aristocratic in the Carlylean sense: the actual meaning of the word, rule of the best.
Socialism, always in origin and perpetually in the true democratic state which still
contains a competing Right, is the alliance of the smartest, the wealthiest, the most
powerful, and the most beautiful.
The Left is the faction of the professors, the scientists and the scholars, the cognitive
elite. It is the faction of the true ultra-rich, the old money, the Rockefellers and
Vanderbilts and Fords, and their trustafarian hipster junkie grandchildren. It is the
faction of the journalists and the bureaucrats, the activists and astroturfers - the
wielders of power. And, of course, it is the faction of movie stars and other
celebrities, who for all their flaws have climbed a long greasy pole. The closer you get
to the top in a democratic society, the more pervasive socialism becomes.
So Carlyle said to his readers: England is going to the dogs. A new aristocracy is
needed to replace the old, stultified, dying hereditary caste of land and title. This
must be an aristocracy of merit and service - a true nobility. It must cast aside the
dogmas of laissez-faire and be unafraid to govern, to garden, to intervene and
improve.
And indeed, the Christian Socialism of the Fabians and Progressives, rooted not only
in Carlyle but in Ruskin and Morris and Dickens, developed precisely along these
lines. Its goal was to improve society, both physically and morally, through the
energy and nobility of the State. And indeed it outcompeted all major competitors.
There is no school of Carlyleans today, but every school that isn't a madrassa in Qom
is a school of progressivism.
And the trouble was: it was all wrong. The results were exactly opposite the original
intent. The poor were not morally uplifted and converted into gentlemen; they were
degraded and converted into savages. A new underclass of unprecedented human
degeneration appeared below the proletariat. The New Jerusalem did not arrive.
New Babylons, new Haitis, new Armageddons beyond words, enormous
Megatherions all, slithered up on their great bellies.
Alas, socialism can be explained in one sentence. Socialism is the last stage of
democracy. The process may be fast and bloody, as in the French and Russian
Revolutions, or slow and mostly peaceful, as in Britain. But it is not generally
reversible by any conventional means.
By pouring their talents into the democratic movement, the new aristocracy of
progressivism ensured the following results:
First, that bad ideas would blossom and good ones wither and disappear.
Progressivism has become a veritable religion of quack goverment. Its policies are
always counterintuitive: it preaches leniency as the cure for crime, timidity as
military genius, profligacy as the acme of economics, "special education" as the heart
of pedagogy, indulgence as oversight, appeasement as diplomacy. As it goes from one
disaster to the next, progressivism never considers the possibility that the obvious,
rather than its opposite, could be the case. Occam's Butterknife is the only tool in its
kitchen.
So everywhere that socialism or communism triumphs, we see the same phenomena:
hypertrophy of the bureaucracy, destruction and/or assimilation of organizations
outside the State, expansion and widespread delinquency of the underclass,
decimation of the working class, decay and disappearance of manufacturing
industries, persecution of upper classes and successful minorities, destruction of old
cities and production of hideous totalitarian architecture, ubiquitous depression both
economic and psychiatric. These effects are not pleasant to anyone, progressive or
otherwise. But their production does not slacken.
Except for the occasional psychopath, a man to be found in all walks of life, this is
never the intent of the socialist. My own grandfather was a CPUSA member, and this
was certainly not his intent. Nonetheless, they all happened. (And the CPUSA is
again best friends with the White House - just as if it were 1934. Or South Africa.)
But why? What causes this pattern of repeated failure? Why, with its intellectual
firepower, can progressivism not self-correct? After all, its public-policy experts are
supposed to be scientists. They publish papers - with numbers. Surely this makes
them scientists, and science is self-correcting, ie, always right.
Alas. Not everyone who writes papers with numbers is a scientist. The most you can
say is that your subject is either a scientist, or a pseudoscientist. Also, while it is
correct to note that science can be self-correcting, it is incorrect to assume that it
must be, ie, is incorruptible. Nothing whatsoever is incorruptible - certainly not
science.
The Platonic guardians of the socialist state - scientists, planners, bureaucrats, or
whatever you call them - persistently prefer bad ideas because of the organizational
structure of the socialist state. Again, democracy is the fundamental and
irrecoverable flaw.
Because socialism is democratic, it distrusts, opposes and tends to destroy
organizational structures which are built on (a) hierarchical command, (b) personal
responsibility, and/or (c) financial interests. Your socialist state will never produce a
structure in which a single planner is responsible for, say, North Carolina; can fire
whomever he likes in the administration of North Carolina; and gets fired himself, if
North Carolina does not blossom into a subtropical Eden. This is an organizational
structure that one might find in, say, the British Raj. It is not democratic in nature,
nor socialist.
Instead, the socialist state divides power and spreads it as widely as possible - within
itself, of course. Its decisions are not personal, but procedural. A procedure is a
better procedure if it cuts more stakeholders into the loop - if it is a more open
process. Here we see clearly what the State is doing: it is building a support base
from its own employee roster, and it is purchasing support by exchanging it for
power. The feeling of being in the decision loop produces a remarkable effect of
emotional loyalty, no matter how trivial the actual authority may be.
There is just a slight downside to this: when socialism fails, no one is responsible. No
system of ideas, even, can be responsible - for a system of ideas would be an ideology,
and public policy is not determined by ideology. Thus many will tell you that
economics failed in the crisis of 2008, but no one can possibly do anything about it.
Certainly, no producer of economic wisdom in the universities, nor consumer in
Washington, need feel even slightly threatened. Tenure is tenure, and civil-service
protection is civil-service protection. Our masters serve for life.
Moreover, in an environment where failure confers no punishment, we would expect
bad policies to outcompete good ones. Much as islands without predators are
dominated by flightless birds. Freed from the need to actually succeed, the bad
policies can offer everything to everyone - permanently. But alas, no dodo is forever.
Thus the power of socialism to take a perfectly good aristocracy, and corrupt it to the
service of lies, incompetence and the Devil. The trouble is that for everyone to get a
tiny slice of power's pie, no one can actually do the job of ruling - a concept which
conflicts with the entire idea of public policy. A government based on the principle of
hierarchical rule simply does not have enough work for all the aristocrats who need
to feel important. It is too damned efficient. Thus it is abhorred, and shunned, by all.
Second - and worse, to the Carlylean eye - because it embraces democracy only to
contradict it completely, socialism has a permanent core of mendacity, which breeds
new lies the way a clogged birdbath breeds mosquitoes. This sham aspect is at the
root of all its failures. To the Carlylean, no structure built on lies can be expected to
last.
For the progressive does not actually believe in the philosopher's stone of democracy,
the instinctive and growing wisdom of the masses, Walt Whitman's wet-dream. He in
fact despises (often, though not always, rightly) all ideas that flow from the masses
up: these are "ideologies," and their electoral manifestations "politics." Nothing is so
important as keeping government apolitical and non-ideological.
Or to be more precise, nothing is so important as keeping government in the hands
of its Platonic guardians - the aforementioned progressive aristocracy. Who alone
can round Cape Horn. For everything that the socialist state does - in Moscow then,
in Washington now - there is an entire caste of scientists, exquisitely trained and
rigorously selected, from whom all apolitical and non-ideological public policies flow.
Not since the heyday of the Board of Rites or the Logothete of the Course has such
intellectual firepower been trained on the problem of government.
The power flow of democracy is simply reversed. Rather than the sovereign People
leading and directing their "public servants," it is the servants who lead and the
People who follow. The function of elections and elected officials in a progressive
democracy is to educate the electorate, to speak from the "bully pulpit," to help it
become the progressive and enlightened People that it deserves to be. In classic
astroturf style.
Thus, elections become simply another propaganda mechanism. If this mechanism
fails every now and then, the progressive establishment has more than enough
institutional inertia to wait out and defeat any temporary attack of the primitives. No
permanent imprint on Washington can be or ever has been left by the postprogressive Right, from McCarthy through Bush. Indeed, in Europe, there is nothing
at all like the Republicans, and daily life in Europe seems more or less the same for it.
So there is a sham here. To be fair, this sham is hardly a socialist invention: it is a
staple of democracy in all eras. Robert Michels described it well as the Iron Law of
Oligarchy, almost a century ago. It seems easy to excuse progressives for merely
finding this natural tactical feature of politics, and taking advantage of it.
And in fact it is. But it is also interesting to examine the result. Lies are always
interesting, and those who defend them still more so.
Those with a taste for historical scholarship of less august vintage than we usually
prefer, here at UR, may enjoy Edmund S. Morgan's Inventing the People (1988). In
this multi-century survey, winner of the Bancroft Prize, the author - professor
emeritus at Yale - repeatedly and deliberately describes the legal and constitutional
doctrines of the democratic faction in Anglo-American history as "fictions." The body
of the book is quite well-composed and quite thoroughly damning, to my ear at least.
Professor Morgan, however, wants to make sure we do not take this as any kind of a
criticism. Rather, he is a cold-eyed believer in what, here at UR, we call
"psychological security." In his introduction, he writes:
Government requires make-believe. Make believe that the king is divine, make
believe that he can do no wrong or make believe that the voice of the people is the
voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the
representatives of the people are the people. Make believe that governors are the
servants of the people. Make believe that all men are equal or make believe that they
are not.
The political world of make-believe mingles with the real world in strange ways, for
the make-believe world may often mold the real one. In order to be viable, in order to
serve its purpose, whatever that purpose may be, a fiction must bear some
resemblance to fact. If it strays too far from fact, the willing suspension of disbelief
collapses. And conversely it may collapse if facts stray too far from the fiction that we
want them to resemble. Because fictions are necessary, because we cannot live
without them, we often take pains to prevent their collapse by moving the facts to fit
the fiction, by making the world conform more closely to what we want it to be. We
sometimes call it, quite appropriately, reform or reformation, when the fiction takes
command and reshapes reality.
Although fictions enable the few to govern the many, it is not only the many who are
constrained by them. In the strange commingling of political make-believe and
reality the governing few no less than the governing many may find themselves
limited — we may even say reformed — by the fictions on which their authority
depends. Not only authority but liberty too may depend on fictions. Indeed liberty
may depend, however deviously, on the very fictions that support authority. That, at
least, has been the case in the Anglo-American world, and modern liberty, for better
or for worse, was born, or perhaps we should say invented, in that world and
continues to be nourished there.
Because it is a little uncomfortable to acknowledge that we rely so heavily on fictions,
we generally call them by some more exalted name. We may proclaim them as selfevident truths, and that designation is not inappropriate, for it implies our
commitment to them and at the same time protects them from challenge. Among the
fictions we accept today as self-evident are those that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in
the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and that they owe
obedience to government only if it is their own agent, deriving its authority from
their consent. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate these
propositions by factual evidence. It might be somewhat easier, by the kind of
evidence we usually require for the proof of any debatable proposition, to
demonstrate that men are not created equal and that they have not delegated
authority to any government. But self-evident propositions are not debatable, and to
challenge these would rend the fabric of our society.
It is not the purpose of this book to challenge them, and my use of the word fiction
has no such intention. I have been troubled by the pejorative connotations attached
to the word, but I have been unable to find a better one to describe the different
phenomena to which I have applied it. I can only hope that the readers who
persevere to the end of the book will recognize that the fictional qualities of popular
sovereignty sustain rather than threaten the human values associated with it.
To which Carlyle has an answer, and a terrible one. I leave you with his words:
What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is
everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for
us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is
the meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the
right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling,
still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only
the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible! — The whole social
wisdom of the Present Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to
make clear to itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice
and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European Populations,
which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue permanent, may be.
Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity
finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of
all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating,
celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that
now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come.
Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph
of civil and religious liberty — O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to
an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and
psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all
reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavyladen, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same.
The front wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no
purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street,
the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency
of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor
rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way: — but is it cheering, in such
circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of
light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that
now they have got a house to their mind? My dear household, cease singing and
psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your work-implements, if you have any;
for I can say with confidence the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails,
worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry, are not the best
basis for a household! — In the lanes of Irish cities, I have heard say, the wretched
people are sometimes found living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such
swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends; but I did not hear that
they sang very much in celebration of such lodging. No, they slid gently about, sat
near the back wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for most part! —
High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of speech and writing,
rise from far and near over this last avatar of Democracy in 1848: and yet, to wise
minds, the first aspect it presents seems rather to be one of boundless misery and
sorrow. What can be more miserable than this universal hunting out of the high
dignitaries, solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and reverend signiors of the
world; this stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against
those who pretended to be speaking for them and guiding them? These guides, then,
were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they
had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously
drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings,
play-acting as at Drury Lane; — and what were the people withal that took them for
real?
It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one
time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and
long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true
thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly
devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real
position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn
shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices, — a falsity of falsities, which at
last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of
mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,
— a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A
universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture
everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its
word into an act any farther: — fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these
false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present! A more scandalous
phenomenon, wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy
everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in all high places:
odious to look upon, as the carnage of a battle-field on the morrow morning; — a
massacre not of the innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a
universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impostures into the street!
Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes,
but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow, — like the vision of
immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would
not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt?
By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery
to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then, — known it must and shall be,
— is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and
swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to
return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim
this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very
indispensable one.
Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its
being here, — for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at
all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue?
No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease. Good Heavens, to
what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to
many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting
his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange
exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has
been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes,
solemnities grown ceremonial, — what you in your iconoclast humor call shams, all
his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting
on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries
come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings
reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached,
and honorable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and
no sham there, did not scrip continue salable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper
with a metallic basis? "The greatest sham, I have always thought, is he that would
destroy shams."
Even so. To such depth have I, the poor knowing person of this epoch, got; — almost
below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and
oxhood! For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy
quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man
believe generally in his heart that lies were the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate
long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at
length other than hindrance and destruction for him. O Heavyside, my solid friend,
this is the sorrow of sorrows: what on earth can become of us till this accursed
enchantment, the general summary and consecration of delusions, be cast forth from
the heart and life of one and all!
Cast forth it will be; it must, or we are tending, at all moments, whitherward I do not
like to name. Alas, and the casting of it out, to what heights and what depths will it
lead us, in the sad universe mostly of lies and shams and hollow phantasms (grown
very ghastly now), in which, as in a safe home, we have lived this century or two! To
heights and depths of social and individual divorce from delusions, — of "reform" in
right sacred earnest, of indispensable amendment, and stern sorrowful abrogation
and order to depart, — such as cannot well be spoken at present; as dare scarcely be
thought at present; which nevertheless are very inevitable, and perhaps rather
imminent several of them! Truly we have a heavy task of work before us; and there is
a pressing call that we should seriously begin upon it, before it tumble into an
inextricable mass, in which there will be no working, but only suffering and
hopelessly perishing!