The Canberra rape libel action grinds on. 

The lawyers for the defeated plaintiff were no-win, no-fee – which tells you about the advice they gave the loser.  The winner  will be millions of dollars out of pocket.  You or I could be bankrupt.

We need to think about this.  Is it right that people can ‘maintain’ a law suit?  I am not talking about classes of people suing other people behind a corporation.   ‘Class actions’ involve their own well identified policy issues – about which I know nothing.

It is not easy to find statements of the modern law of maintenance.  In The Queen’s Peace , 1953, Sir Carlon Allen said that  ‘maintenance is the officious intermeddling in other people’s legal disputes by ‘maintaining’ a cause in which one has no legitimate interest or charitable motive, and champerty is the baser form of it which aims at a share of the spoils’. 

Coke, in character, referred to ‘vexatious relators, informers and promoters’ – and ‘viperous vermin.’

Allen said:

It is however still the law that anybody, who, without any of the various excuses which are now well recognised, maintains another in his suit, whether as a mere busybody, or for financial gain, is liable to criminal penalties ; and …it does not matter whether the suit….is successful or unsuccessful.

Should such maintenance be unlawful unless the promoter is liable for the costs of the other side – and is good for them?

The court was scathing about the case of the plaintiff. That leaves questions.  Why did it cost tens of millions of dollars and a judgement of more than 300 pages to get that answer?

The system has run amok.  

Gibbon on ancient religion

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

The superstition of the people was not imbittered by any mixture of theological rancour; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative system. The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth. ….. A republic of gods of such opposite tempers and interests required, in every system, the moderating hand of a supreme magistrate, who, by the progress of knowledge and flattery, was gradually invested with the sublime perfections of an Eternal Parent, and an Omnipotent Monarch.  Such was the mild spirit of antiquity, that the nations were less attentive to the difference, than to the resemblance, of their religious worship. The Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities.  The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism of the ancient world.

The philosophers of Greece deduced their morals from the nature of man, rather than from that of God.

Prefigures Robespierre, Salin, Hitler and Franco

An anxious regard to his personal safety was the ruling principle of the administration of Valens. In the condition of a subject, he had kissed, with trembling awe, the hand of the oppressor; and when he ascended the throne, he reasonably expected, that the same fears, which had subdued his own mind, would secure the patient submission of his people. The favourites of Valens obtained, by the privilege of rapine and confiscation, the wealth which his economy would have refused.  They urged, with persuasive eloquence, that, in all cases of treason, suspicion is equivalent to proof; that the power supposes the intention, of mischief; that the intention is not less criminal than the act; and that a subject no longer deserves to live, if his life may threaten the safety, or disturb the repose, of his sovereign. The judgment of Valentinian was sometimes deceived, and his confidence abused; but he would have silenced the informers with a contemptuous smile, had they presumed to alarm his fortitude by the sound of danger. They praised his inflexible love of justice; and, in the pursuit of justice, the emperor was easily tempted to consider clemency as a weakness, and passion as a virtue. As long as he wrestled with his equals, in the bold competition of an active and ambitious life, Valentinian was seldom injured, and never insulted, with impunity: if his prudence was arraigned, his spirit was applauded; and the proudest and most powerful generals were apprehensive of provoking the resentment of a fearless soldier. After he became master of the world, he unfortunately forgot, that where no resistance can be made, no courage can be exerted; and instead of consulting the dictates of reason and magnanimity, he indulged the furious emotions of his temper, at a time when they were disgraceful to himself, and fatal to the defenceless objects of his displeasure. In the government of his household, or of his empire, slight, or even imaginary, offences—a hasty word, a casual omission, an involuntary delay—were chastised by a sentence of immediate death. 

In his book The Lyric Age, the historian A R Burn, whom I studied at school, said:

Homer and his age also gave Greece a pattern of conduct: the conception of the Hero.  In a sense, it is the discovery, often in part lost and made again, of the dignity of the individual.

For reasons set out in the extract from a book below, I do not agree.  Burn himself says that the Greeks were in a ‘spiritual vacuum’ like that of the pagan Northmen. They got no consolation from their religion – the spiritual vacuum.

Homer himself….is deeply pessimistic.  Life and its glory are fleeting; and the ghost-life to which he looks on in the House of Hades is that of a gloomy limbo, whose only pleasure is the remembrance of earth; a life, to disbelieve in which was, to later Epicureans, a liberation….It is to the credit of Homer and his patrons that they do not take such gods as these very seriously.  The gods are stage machinery in the traditional stories but when the scene is set on Olympus itself, more often than not the object is comic relief of a crude kind….The fact is that the gods of the bronze age, conceived in the likeness of earthly rulers, became less worshipful the more they became the heroes of stories….

There you have not just aspiritual vacuum, but a moral void.  And it is nowhere near the principle of humanity of Judeo-Christianity or the Enlightenment. 

It sounds just like the world of King Lear – and the Ring Cycle.  In the former, we mortals are like flies to wanton boys.  We have not got anywhere near the notion of ‘the dignity of the individual’.  It is something you notice in Shakespeare – in plays where humans appeal to ‘the gods’, we feel like we are in the spiritual vacuum of a primitive religion.  In the Ring, the gods are so hopeless – they are doomed – that we get  regular serves of sit-com.

And what should we expect of the ‘hero’?   The word can denote someone of great courage or the lead part in a story or play.   In a myth, the hero has superhuman qualities and undergoes great trials to save part of mankind. Slaying a dragon who guards the gold is a textbook hallmark of such a hero.   He often has a magic weapon – like Notung (with  which Siegfried breaks the spear of Wotan  that so captivated James Joyce) or Excalibur.

For the reasons set out below, Achilles may be a champion warrior, but he is otherwise alarmingly human and mortal, and anything but a hero in any sense. 

Shakespeare completed the annihilation of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida.  He put a big bomb under chivalry, romance, knighthood, heroes – the whole shebang – at about the time Cervantes was doing the same with Don Quixote. This play may be the most serious hatchet job of the lot.  Auden said ‘the play doesn’t conform to heroic convention’ and that Achilles ‘takes the extremely unheroic line of butchering the unarmed Hector.’  The American poet Mark Van Doren called Achilles ‘the chief of all curs’ and said ‘the heroes have accomplished their own degradation’.

We get similar failings in Siegfried, and in the degradation of the gods in Gotterdammerung.   Siegfried  is a stupid young man who has never grown up.  Even Wagner thought he was stupid.  The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad.   And he takes so long to get killed.

It looks to me that we have to wait for Beowulf to get our hero.  As it happens, by then God is on the stage. But so are the dragons.

Book Extract

Homer

The Iliad is a war story.  When a Trojan prince, Paris, takes off with a Greek princess, Helen, the Greeks make war on Troy.  It is King Agamemnon and his hero, Achilles, against King Priam and his hero, Hector.  But the Greeks quarrel and Achilles sulks.  He comes back after Hector kills his friend.  Achilles kills Hector but is reconciled by Priam to allow a decent burial.

The gods of The Iliad may be immortal, but they are many, and they are divided against each other.  Each ‘smells of mortality’ or, as was said of a candidate for execution, each is ‘desperately mortal’.  The God of Paradise Lost and the Old Testament is very different.  He is the only One.  He is omnipotent and omniscient.  But he is not impersonal.  He is about as personal as any God could get.  He has intimations not of mortality, but of humanity.  He did, after all, say that he made Adam in his own image.  In truth, that God is downright jealous.

The God of the Book has another human attribute.  He plays favourites.  He plays favourites with peoples, lands and cities.  So do the Greek gods.  In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Chorus refers to the god of war as ‘the moneychanger of dead bodies’, and you could find plenty in the Middle East who would say the same of Jehovah or Allah.

But the adherents of God have one very big advantage over the followers of the Greek gods.  God may be jealous; he may play favourites; he may smile or frown; but in judging us mortals, he is not, as the Greek gods are, arbitrary, capricious, or whimsical, or any of those other epithets that make lawyers jumpy when they talk of judges.  God does not play dice.  He has no Fate to succumb to.  He is not to us as flies are to ‘wanton boys’. 

The idea of the hero was to excel as a man and as a fighter and so win honour and glory.  If he wins enough, he might live on in name and to that extent be immortal.  There was a Greek word, agenor, that may be rendered ‘excessive manhood’.  We now call it testosterone.  Their testosterone can send these heroes out of control.  We talk of sporting heroes being ‘on fire’.  As Achilles rearms after the death of Patroclus, the poet sings ‘so now from Achilles’ headthe blaze shot up the sky’.  Achilles was on fire.

How do the heroes seek to achieve honour?  The answer is simple.  They kill or are killed.  They are the precursors of the Mafia dons.

Achilles is without pity.  He is a natural-born killer, as Hollywood might now say.  He redefines our idea of selfishness.  Achilles is not at Troy – he does not fight – for his king, his clan, or his nation.  He is there purely for himself and, later, his dead friend.  For Achilles there is no question of a conflict of interest between honour and loyalty.  The needs of his men are nothing beside the injury to his wounded pride. 

Achilles is the worst kind of aggressor – he is super-sensitive to insult or affront.  T.S. Eliot, apparently in his capacity as Chairman of the Virgil Society, called Achilles a ‘spoiled teenager’.  (How would Eliot have known?)  The capacity of Achilles to sulk is limitless.  This is a characteristic of a high-born, spoiled brat.  Achilles was a lethal prima donna; like a professional footballer with attitude – O.J. Simpson, for example.  One goddess knew just how to appeal to him – the ‘most terrifying man alive’. 

There is one thing we can say in defence of Achilles.  The insult offered to this god-born hero was mortal.  In the course of the argument with his king, which escalates, Achilles pre-figures Mohammed Ali when he says that ‘the Trojans never did me damage’.  Agamemnon responds with raw hate and drives the insult home in terms that are unforgivable:

But I, I will be there in person at your tent
To take Briseis in all her beauty, your own prize –
So you can learn just how much greater I am than you. 
Achilles goes to draw against this ‘staggering drunk’, the ‘most grasping man alive’.  The gods talk him out of drawing on his king.  Achilles settles for a curse and a prayer.  His prayer is that the gods will curse the Greeks – his own side, if he ever had one – and ‘mow them down’. 

What, after nine years, was the object of the Greeks?  Genocide – or at least that degree of annihilation that Joshua wrought on the villages that lay in his way at Canaan, or that Henry V threatened the French with before the gates of Harfleur.  When Menelaus looks like he might weaken and show mercy to a Trojan prisoner, his brother snarls:

Ah would to God not one of them could escape
His sudden plunging death beneath our hands!
No baby boy still in his mother’s belly,
Not even he escapes – all Ilium blotted out,
No tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!
Just how awful was the final solution reserved for the Asians of Troy only becomes apparent in The Trojan Women by Euripides.

Achilles finally snaps out of his sulk when Patroclus dies.  The death of a male friend enables him to put aside his sulking at the loss of a female prize – but at the cost of his going berserk and becoming ‘barbaric’.  He slaughters everything he can get his hands on before he corners Hector.

When Hector runs in fear, Achilles loses control of himself.  (He actually fights a river.)  Hector proposes that the winner of their inevitable duel will respect the body of the loser.  He gets an eye-balled response that Adolf Hitler would have applauded:

There are no binding oaths between men and lions –
Wolves and lambs can enjoy no meeting of the minds –
They are all bent on hating each other to the death.

Achilles is now the apostle of hate.  He is Satanic.  He tells Hector that he wishes his fury could drive him to hack away his flesh and ‘eat you, raw’ 

What do his faithful men do?  They wonder at the ‘lithe beauty of Hector’ and all those who come forward stab the body of Hector while laughing with their comrades.  This may be the low point of humanity for the whole of this poem.  When these celebrated soldiers, the mighty Myrmidons – the elite killing machine of the Greeks – are released from their dreadful fear of the great Hector, they revert to their primal Stone Age forbears and behave like animals out of the Balkans.  They are as much part of humanity as was the Waffen Death’s Head SS.  One lesson of The Iliad is that even the best of us – the heroes – live in a state of suspense between the gods and wild beasts.

Now, the descent of the Greeks into barbarism – their fall, if you prefer – shows how nasty and hollow is the conception of ‘hero’ and ‘honour’ that some wish to celebrate in Homer, but also how marvellous is the reconciliation that Priam makes with Achilles.  The end of the plea of Priam is high theatre indeed.  It comes when Priam utters these lines:

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before –
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

What a step for man was this. Not a god or God in sight (except that Achilles was the son of a god).  Just an old man doing his best for one he loves, a son who is already dead.  And in doing that, the old father dared to break the invincible bonds and the ineluctable logic of the vendetta.  As a result, men were able to stop being wound-up, man-killers, and put behind them those codes that impel men to kill others.  They could try to think of what it was like before their fall.  Achilles may have ‘felt like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.’

In truth, the old king Priam was repudiating the whole code of honour and glory.  Priam did not offer up his son for us.  He offered up himself for his son.  This is a high testament to humanity in a very inhumane age.  It is as if we are going two thousand years ahead to ask with Hamlet whether vengeance is all there is.

And so the issue of the poem is resolved – the whole poem is dominated by the wrath of Achilles – the very first word of the poem – and that wrath comes to an end when an old man has the courage to put his lips to the hands of a frantic killer.  In the Cowper version, Priam refers to a ‘humiliation not yet seen’.  Humiliation is the polar opposite of the sought-for condition of the hero.  The first of those blessed by the son of man in the Sermon on the Mount were ‘the poor in spirit’.  That is the last thing you could say of a hero of The Iliad. 

There is, however, another side.  The big-heads, the prime cases of selfishness, are the gods, and the Greek heroes, and Helen and Paris.  They all put themselves first.  The rest are just there to make up the numbers.  The heroes are the great takers of the world.  They are living denials of the first beatitude.  Aristotle got it just right when he said that a man living outside a group is either ‘a bad man or above humanity [a god] …. the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war.’

When you look at the behaviour of the Greeks against the Trojans, Asia looks more civilised than Europe.  But who amongst us takes the side of the Trojans?  Why, then, do we take the side of the supreme man-killers?  Why do we still sing the praises of those ratbags who caused or declared the war, or even those ‘heroes’ who had the misfortune to fight and die in it?  Who is there among us who will sing the praises of those who devised or directed the awful carnage at Gallipoli or on the Western Front? 

We should also see the ‘honour’ of the Greeks at Troy in its place.  They went to war over a high-level defection, what our police would now call a domestic.  Thousands would die for a slight to the honour of a husband, king, and people.  In order to get his ships moving, Agamemnon sacrificed the life of his daughter, Iphigenie.  For that, as we have seen, his wife murdered him when he came home.  For this her son murdered her when he came home.  No wonder that Freud did not fear these Greeks bearing gifts – he had to look no further than these heroes to find the best example of how we twist our minds.

The Odyssey of Homer, on which James Joyce modelled his Ulysses, is a book of nostalgia, of the yearning of Ulysses (Odysseus) for home, and of his adventures in getting there.  These travel adventure stories may have had more appeal for the ancients than us.  This one influenced Shakespeare in his Pericles.  I have referred to The Iliad at length to show why Homer was treated by the Greeks as their Bible, and why we mention Homer in the same breath with Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.  It also speaks of a streak of hostility and violence in the people who lived by that book.

Random thoughts after 7 October

In commenting on religion, I am not forgetting the comfort it has brought to mankind.  It is the chronic need for that comfort, the mystical source of the power, the mix with politics, philosophy, and tribalism, and the consequent reliance and dependency, and capacity for abuse of power that troubles me.  Someone who holds the keys to Paradise or Hades is the most powerful person in the world.  And we all know what  power can do to people.   

As someone once said: ‘Freedom of speech, I am with you all the way – it’s just the Press I can’t stand.’   The problem I see is not with God – it is with us.

(I may add that religion has left all of us with one great and undeniable gift – the abolition of slavery.  That movement, as I recall it, was led by the Anglicans and Quakers when no one else seemed interested.  This was a great achievement for humanity.  At that time, America and Russia had yet to emancipate their own slaves.  If you take the view that a state that allows slavery is not civilised, then a gaggle of Anglican and Quaker activists gave the world its first civilised nation. )

The major moral failure in the Middle East, and elsewhere, in my view is that we do not treat each person as having worth or dignity just because he or she is human.  We want to put people in boxes or categories – or label  them by their faith or tribe or colour.

I have and need no religion to reach that conclusion.                                                                                    

Religion turns on faith.  It is beyond logic or proof.  Most of it seems at best silly to most of us.  But most of us allow one exception – our own faith. 

I do not allow any exception.  I hold no belief that could be called religious. 

Most people inherit their faith – it is not chosen after careful thought .  It is an accident of history. But once they adopt their faith, generally in childhood, it does not matter to them that most of the world think that they are deluded. But it remains the brute  statistical fact that all the world regards most of the rest of the world as misled, to put it softly, on religion.  They are content to live in hope that they have drawn the winning ticket in the lottery.   

I hold nothing against people practising religion, but I have a full understanding of the wrongs done in its name.  It is enough to mention the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the religious wars after Luther.  The schism in Islam is a blot on the world.

I cannot think of one major faith that has not been disfigured by hate.

I can think of plenty that look to be driven by fraud or who were so exotic that they stretched credulity and charity.  But that is not enough to disqualify their faith.  I had to decide such a case.  It is tricky.  And many Australians were revolted to find that the High Court put their decent faith in the same basket as Scientology  – which they look upon in horror. 

I can also think of plenty that have in my view far too much political influence or power.

I resent having people seek to rule me or affect my life – or death – by reference to dogmas that derive from faith alone.  Kant said that a church tends to pass itself off as the only universal one – ‘even though it is based  on faith in a particular revelation which, since it is historical, can never be demanded of everyone.’  That is crucial.

There is too much hate speech in scripture.  Including the Bible and Koran.  A lot of scripture revolts me.

One of the problems with the faiths coming out of the desert is that they are exclusive and absolute.  Greece and Rome were far more tolerant.  David Hume said: ‘The intolerance of almost all religions which have maintained the unity of God is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists…And if among Christians, the English and Dutch have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued effort of priests and bigots.’

Then there is the problem of God and power. The Church was behind the conquest of South America, and fully acquiesced in  the imperial rape of all Africa.  The peaceful Dutch may have been the worst.  And the Church did deals with Napoleon and Hitler, and the Orthodox Church, which has so badly failed Greece and Russia, treats with Putin.

For that matter, the role of religion here is at best spotty.  (The settlers here proceeded against those who were there before them  with the rifle, the bottle, and the Bible.  They derived their warrant not from Almighty God, but His Majesty King George III.)

In the result, religious bodies have at best limited plausibility.  There are so many of them.  They are mutually exclusive.  And they have a gruesome history of competition and conflict and starting wars.  Fear of the unknown has always driven mankind to religion.  It is the price of knowledge, and not a cross to be borne by the apes.  But is mankind nett better off because of God?   If so, which?

Partly as a result of the absolutism of current faiths , and partly as a result of tribal bonding and history, restraint and tolerance go straight out the window.  Brick wall meets brick wall, and each side is anxiously monolithic – but always so very righteous, so damnably righteous.  Neither finds fault in itself,  or virtue in its adversary.

But a decent community depends on restraint and tolerance.

And clever combatants should recall that Australians do not like intellectuals.  (In the old days, Prots held this against the Jesuits.) 

And judges do not like clever arguments.

The first proposition above I take from Kant.  He and Spinoza are very instructive on religion. 

Religious hate is the worst. 

Apart from schism, and charges of heresy, two factors make it worse.  A conflict may go beyond life and death, and reach the afterlife.  Or it may relate to land.  In the Holy Land, three faiths have fought for dominance in a very limited area.  We got a similar flow on from conflict in the Balkans in the fifties.

The conflict about Gaza looks to me to occur in some kind of legal vacuum.  By what rule book does one nation state take an army outside its borders into land not of any nation state and say that it will stay at war with those in the area it has invaded until it has eliminated all those who command those who attacked it?  It looks to me to be a kind of no-man’s land, which is fraught in any zone of conflict.  Whatever else it is, it is not a war between nations.

Both sides in this conflict claim some kind of victimhood.  One problem is that there is no agreement on how far back you should go to assess what may lie in the balance.  (Our First Nations might think that it is hilarious that people in the Middle East only go back a few thousand years for this purpose.)

Another problem is holding people responsible for what their ancestors did.  This violates the proposition I set out first.

But it is a political fact of life that a nation will be damned for crimes committed in its name.  Hannah Arendt is very good on this at the end of her book on Eichman.  ‘Many people today would agree there is no such thing as collective guilt, or, for that matter, collective innocence…This, of course, is not to deny that there is such a thing as political responsibility….It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.’

But extending that damnation to external supporters of the nation accused of wrongdoing is in my view wrong for the reasons given.

It follows I think that it may not be a good idea for members of a religious or tribal group to say that because of events in their history, they should be treated differently.  That is just the kind of bad thinking that lies at the heart of these conflicts.

I find it hard to think of any decent exceptionalism – the English used to get away with it, but the Americans no longer can.

Few who think they are different think that others are superior to them.

You hope that those who harbour feelings of their own superiority have the grace and courtesy to keep it to themselves.

It follows that neither side has exclusive claims to victimhood, that neither can accuse the other of being the only unreasonable party,  and that each will be in luck if it gets a sensible response from the other side.

The worst problem with vendettas is that they have no ending.

The attack on 7 October was an outrage and a crime against humanity that could never be justified by any felt grievance on the part of those making the attack.

For reasons that were obvious, the target nation felt the attack as a grievous affront to its national psyche, and a gruesome intimation of its own mortality.

The issue then  is whether its response is consistent with a general obligation to treat each person as having worth or dignity just because he or she is human.

And as lawyers are wont to say when they are being honest, or merely tired, that is a matter on which reasonable minds may differ.  But you will find plenty on either side who say that the other side are beyond the pale.  That is what happens when God is built into a nation or tribe.  The result is at best fraught.

Perhaps I may refer to another skeleton of religion which has no bearing on Gaza but shows why religion generally is under a cloud for many.  The ancient gods look theologically vacuous and intellectually savage, but they showed the supreme grace of tolerance.  Then we get the link between Christianity and philosophy.  That led to sectarianism, factionalism, and persecution.  David Hume said: ‘Hence naturally arose keenness in dispute, when the Christian religion came to be split into new divisions and heresies.  And this keenness assisted the priests in their policy of begetting a mutual hatred among their deluded followers.’  The logical corollary of exclusive belief  is heresy – which justifies persecution.  Doubt or dissent is criminalised.  The comparison with totalitarian governments last century is shocking. 

And religious fanaticism leads to wars, rebellions, pogroms, and inquisitions. It at least in part underlay the invasion from Gaza and is at large in the settlements.   It endorses confrontation and coercion.  And it so often stands in the way of freedom under the law.

Today is th 300^th birthday of Immanuel Kant.  After sixty years study, including a stint at Oxford, much of what he said goes clean over my head, but his ‘principle of humanity’ is basal to me.  The note beneath hangs here at home.  It is followed by a very learned note from the FT.

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Human dignity

Kant

There is therefore only a single categorical imperative, and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law….The practical imperative will therefore be the following: So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person, or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means….This principle of humanity, and in general of every rational nature, as an end in itself (which is the supreme limiting condition of the freedom of action of every human being) is not borrowed from experience….Morality consists then in the reference of all action to the lawgiving by which alone a kingdom of ends is possible….The practical necessity of acting in accordance with this principle, that is, duty, does not rest at all on feelings, impulses and inclinations, but merely on the relations of rational beings to another….In the kingdom of ends, everything has a price or a dignity.  What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity….Skill and diligence in work have a market price; wit, lively imagination and humour have a fancy price; on the other hand, fidelity in promises and benevolence from basic principles (not from instinct) have an inner worth… Hence morality, and humanity, insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity.

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Why the World Still Needs KantKant

•  

Susan Neiman

The philosopher Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.

When I arrived in Berlin in 1982, I was writing a dissertation on Kant’s conception of reason. It was thrilling to learn that the apartment I’d sublet turned out to be located near Kantstrasse, though at the time I wondered in frustration: Why was there no James Street — Henry or William — in the Cambridge, Mass., I’d left behind; no streets honoring Emerson or Eliot? Were Americans as indifferent to culture as snooty Europeans supposed? It didn’t take long before I, too, could walk down Kantstrasse and turn right on Leibniz without a thought.

It’s harder to ignore the way Germany, like other European nations, sets aside entire years to honor its cultural heroes. This century has already seen an Einstein Year, a Beethoven Year, a Luther Year and a Marx Year, each commemorating some round-numbered anniversary of the hero in question. Federal and local governments provide considerable sums for events that celebrate the thinkers in question and debate their contemporary relevance.

Years before Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday on April 22, 2024, the Academy of Science in Berlin, to which he once belonged, organized a conference to begin preparations for his tercentennial. A second conference published a report of the proceedings, but when I urged colleagues to use the occasion to create programs for a wider audience, I was met with puzzled silence. Reaching a wider audience is not a talent philosophy professors normally cultivate, but conversations with other cultural institutions showed this case to be especially thorny.

It wasn’t just uneasiness about celebrating “another dead white man,” as one museum director put it. The problems became deeper as the zeitgeist changed. “Immanuel Kant: A European Thinker” was a good title for that conference report in 2019, when Brexit seemed to threaten the ideal of European unification Germans supported. Just a few years later, “European” has become a slur. At a time when the Enlightenment is regularly derided as a Eurocentric movement designed to support colonialism, who feels comfortable throwing a yearlong birthday party for its greatest thinker?

Nonetheless, this year’s ceremonies will officially commence on April 22 with a speech by Chancellor Scholz and a memorial lunch that has taken place on the philosopher’s birthday every year since 1805. Two days earlier, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany will open an exhibit at the presidential palace devoted to Kant’s writing on peace.

The start of the year saw special Kant editions of four prominent German magazines. A Kant movie made for television premiered on March 1, and another is in production. Four exhibits on Kant and the Enlightenment will open in Bonn, Lüneburg, Potsdam and Berlin. The conferences will be numerous, including one organized by the Divan, Berlin’s house for Arab culture.

But why celebrate the Kant year at all?

The philosopher’s occasional autobiographical remarks provide a clue to the answer. As the son of a saddle maker, Kant would have led a workman’s life himself, had a pastor not suggested the bright lad deserved some higher education. He came to love his studies and to “despise the common people who knew nothing,” until “Rousseau set me right,” he wrote. Kant rejected his earlier elitism and declared his philosophy would restore the rights of humanity — otherwise they would be more useless than the work of a common laborer.

Chutzpah indeed. The claim becomes even more astonishing if you read a random page of his texts. How on earth, you may ask, are human rights connected with proving our need to think in categories like “cause” or “substance?” The question is seldom raised, and the autobiographical remarks usually ignored, for traditional readings of Kant focus on his epistemology, or theory of knowledge.

Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists, who were concerned about the sources of knowledge. Does it come from our senses, or our reason? Can we ever know if anything is real? By showing that knowledge requires sensory experience as well as reason, we’re told, Kant refuted the

sceptics’ worry that we never know if anything exists at all.

All this is true, but it hardly explains why the poet Heinrich Heine found Kant more ruthlessly revolutionary than Robespierre. Nor does it explain why Kant himself said only pedants care about that kind of scepticism.  Ordinary people do not fret over the reality of tables or chairs or billiard balls. They do, however, wonder if ideas like freedom and justice are merely fantasies. Kant’s main goal was to show they are not.

The point is often missed, because Kant was as bad a writer as he was a great philosopher. By the time he finishes proving the existence of the objects of ordinary experience and is ready to show how they differ from ideas of reason, the semester is nearly over. Long-windedness is not, however, the only reason his work is often misinterpreted. Consider the effects of a bad review.

Had Kant died before his 57th birthday, he’d be remembered by a few scholars for some short, early texts. He withdrew from writing them in 1770 to conceive and compose his great “Critique of Pure Reason.” After what scholars call his “silent decade,” Kant pulled the text together in six months and finally published in 1781. For a year and a half, Kant waited for responses. When one finally appeared, it was a hatchet job accusing him of being a Berkeleyan solipsist: someone who denies the existence of ordinary objects.

Any author can imagine Kant’s dismay, and most likely his rage. In haste to refute the distortion of his life’s work, Kant wrote a second edition of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and more fatefully, the “Prolegomena.” Since the latter is much shorter than the main book, it’s read far more often, and this has skewed the interpretation of Kant’s work as a whole. If the major problem of philosophy were proving the world’s existence, then Kant surely solved it. (Richard Rorty argued that he did, and that philosophy has little more to offer.)

In fact Kant was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?

A stunning thought experiment answers that question in his next book, the “Critique of Practical Reason.” Kant asks us to imagine a man who says temptation overwhelms him whenever he passes “a certain house.” (The 18th century was discreet.) But if a gallows were constructed to insure the fellow would be hanged upon exiting the brothel, he’d discover he can resist temptation very well. All mortal temptations fade in the face of threats to life itself.

Yet the same man would hesitate if asked to condemn an innocent man to death, even if a tyrant threatened to execute him instead. Kant always emphasized the limits of our knowledge, and none of us know if we would crumble when faced with death or torture. Most of us probably would. But all of us know what we should do in such a case, and we know that we could.

This experiment shows we are radically free. Not pleasure but justice can move human beings to deeds that overcome the deepest of animal desires, the love of life. We want to determine the world, not only to be determined by it. We are born and we die as part of nature, but we feel most alive when we go beyond it: To be human is to refuse to accept the world we are given.

At the heart of Kant’s metaphysics stands the difference between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be. His thought experiment is an answer to those who argue that we are helpless in the face of pleasure and can be satisfied with bread and circuses — or artisanal chocolate and the latest iPhone. If that were true, benevolent despotism would be the best form of government.

But if we long, in our best moments, for the dignity of freedom and justice, Kant’s example has political consequences. It’s no surprise he thought the French Revolution confirmed our hopes for moral progress — unlike the followers of his predecessor David Hume, who thought it was dangerous to stray from tradition and habit.

This provides an answer to contemporary critics whose reading of Kant’s work focuses on the ways in which it violates our understanding of racism and sexism. Some of his remarks are undeniably offensive to 21st-century ears. But it’s fatal to forget that his work gave us the tools to fight racism and sexism, by providing the metaphysical basis of every claim to human rights.

Kant argued that each human being must be treated as an end and not as a means — which is why he called colonialism “evil” and congratulated the Chinese and Japanese for denying entry to European invaders. Contemporary dismissals of Enlightenment thinkers forget that those thinkers invented the concept of Eurocentrism, and urged their readers to consider the world from non-European perspectives. Montesquieu put his criticisms of French society in the mouths of fictitious Persians; Lahontan attacked European politics through dialogues with a Native American.

At a time when the advice to “be realistic” is best translated as the advice to decrease your expectations, Kant’s work asks deep questions about what reality is. He insisted that when we think morally, we should abstract from the cultural differences that divide us and recognize the potential human dignity in every human being. This requires the use of our reason. Contrary to trendy views that see reason as an instrument of domination, Kant saw reason’s potential as a tool for liberation.

He also argued that political and social relations must aim toward justice rather than power, however often those may be confused in practice. We’ve come to better understand how racism and sexism can preclude genuine universalism. Should we discard Kant’s commitment to universalism because he did not fully realize it himself — or rather celebrate the fact that we can make moral progress, an idea which Kant would wholeheartedly applaud?

In Germany, it’s now common to hear that the Enlightenment was at very best ambivalent. While it may have been an age of reason, it was also an age of slavery and colonialism: This argument ignores the fact that, like progressive intellectuals everywhere, Enlightenment thinkers did not win all their battles. It also neglects the fact that they fought for them anyway, despite the risks of censorship, exile and even death.

Significantly, many contemporary intellectuals from formerly colonized countries reject those arguments. Thinkers like the Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu, the Nigerian Olufemi Taiwo, the Chilean Carlos Peña, the Brazilian Francisco Bosco or the Indian Benjamin Zachariah are hardly inclined to renounce Enlightenment ideas as Eurocentric.

The problem with ideas like universal human rights is not that they come from Europe, but that they were not realized outside of it. Perhaps we should take a lesson from the Enlightenment and listen to non-Western standpoints?

Coriolanus is a tragedy in the Roman plays of Shakespeare.  It is about an actual Roman figure described by Plutarch from the early days of the Republic. 

Rome is engaged in wars with neighbouring tribes.  It is sharply divided between patricians and plebs.  The former have the Senate.  The latter have the Tribunes.  They resemble our ACTU leaders.  The governors on watch are the Consuls.  To become one, you had to be a great soldier.  But you also had to be a politician. 

The tragedy is that the hero was a great soldier, but a lousy politician.  He held workers in contempt and he could not hide it.  He also did not want to play the games politicians play – networking the voters, surviving garden parties, or showing off his war wounds.  Negotiation was not in his vocabulary.

The dramatic interest is how much his mother made him this way, or can now change or direct him, and how he can avoid being brought low by the tribunes.

A 2017 RSC production at Stratford on Opus Arte has all the loud balletic bells and whistles of Broadway extravaganzas we expect now for the locals and tourists.   (‘Is this a play I see before me?’)  They are in modern costumes – dress uniforms and dinner suits – except for fight scenes, when they become blood crazed Tarzans in working gear using ancient Roman swords. 

All the players are white – except one.  The hero is black and with an accent to match. 

This is impossible.  We await with interest the arrival of the mother and wife.  White – Rinso white.  Like a pair out of Noel Coward in the West End circa 1948.  I pass over in silence the colour of the child.  By now, those of my upbringing feel like we are at a MAGA rally – you check your brains in at the door.

This playwright feared the mob.  The tribunes here ruthlessly manipulate the masses – with all the skill and devotion shown centuries later by Mark Antony.  They are played by women (one of whom looks just like Helen Garner).  Their drab apparatchik attire, black and gray, might shorten guessing games about their sexuality.

Well, all that is impossible too.  The Keystone Cops and Marx Bros reach their peak when the hero shows his wounds.  He gets sent out in a white dressing gown like those worn by boxers.  (And he wipes his hand on that gown after shaking the hand of one of the unwashed.)  Fortunately, the death sentence is not executed – it involved being thrown off the Tarpeian Rock as a celebration of Roman civilisation.  You would look a bit of a dill doing a header in a dinner suit and black tie.

In the name of Heaven – I am left lamenting the times I heard Richard Burton oozing contempt for the rabble.  Or the wonderful BBC production in full chiaroscuro where the tribunes are as threatening as they are pervasive, and look like they have come straight from the Inquisition to 1984, and Alan Howard erupts with loathing and amazement when a tribune drops the imperative ‘shall’.  As I said elsewhere:

If you want the Full Monty of haughty arrogance and distilled hate, there is Richard Burton on audiotape.  But the performance of Alan Howard for the BBC is just electrifying– as gripping as any performance for this author on the small screen.  He is manic, and most manic – and most frightening– when he smiles – which is not often.  He is both magisterial and brittle.  Some scenes stay with you. When canvassing the common people, he looks like an Eton and Oxford surgeon peddling incision photos at a flea market, or a nine-year-old behind the shelter shed – ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’  He erupts astoundingly when a tribune says ‘shall’ – a plebeian being imperative to a noble! (3.1.87)  And of course Aufidius knows what the word ‘boy’ will do.  (Imagine the current US President [Obama] being so addressed.)  Howard has ample back-up.  All the political scenes are very powerful.  The mood is not Vermeer or even Rembrandt, but Caravaggio.  The tribunes are like union organizers – Jesuitical and communist, depending on your phobia or fancy.  The film reeks of 1789.  ‘What is the city but the people?’  ‘The people are the city.’ (3.1.198-9).  Pure Robespierre.  As ever, Menenius is a crushing bore.

As it happens, the experienced actor playing Menenius here is one who can play his part – I would not say that of the lead.  He is not up to it.  (And spare a thought for the guy playing Cominius – God has so arranged it that the poor fellow bears a real resemblance to a son of Donald Trump.)

As I recall, some time ago some people had concerns about white men playing Othello.  It is perverse to go from a perceived insult to an actual inanity.  Spike Milligan would have been upstaged.  What we get in this show is a black man treating two white women with contempt – because they are lower caste.  In a play set in Rome two and a half millennia ago.

Why stop there?  Why not have a Chinese girl as King Lear, an Irish nun as Macbeth, and a blind, gay dwarf as Hamlet? 

Do these people think that we pay to go to the theatre to confront their mission to save the world – rather than revel in the miraculous genius of the greatest playwright the world has known? 

If I may borrow a phrase of Shelley, they are like gnats straining at a camel.

OK, this is the lamentation of a spent old Oz fogey, who lives in fear of the Tik Tok crowd, who can change their sex and sexuality at the drop of a hat – but I am not alone in feeling like I have been slapped in the face by some uppity ideologues driven by some misbegotten political dogma, who are bereft of both judgment and taste, and who have abused a trust that extends beyond their locale and our time. 

And even the team at Tik Tok may draw the line at changing the bloody colour of their skins.

A movie called Civil War will reflect on the U S today.  Here are some comments on civil war.

*

In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.

In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals.

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.

In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.

The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

Thus every form of iniquity took root in [these regons] by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defence than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.

Meanwhile [one city] gave the first example of most of the crimes alluded to; of the reprisals exacted by the governed who had never experienced equitable treatment or indeed aught but insolence from their rulers—when their hour came; of the iniquitous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed poverty, and ardently coveted their neighbours’ goods; and lastly, of the savage and pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the struggle, not in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their ungovernable passions. In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority; since revenge would not have been set above religion, and gain above justice, had it not been for the fatal power of envy. Indeed men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.

*

That was written 2400 years ago about a war in Greece by a man called Thucydides.  How much may apply to the U S now is of interest.

If someone said they would take you to see a film that was both tempestuous and ethereal, you would be curious.  One is stormy – very stormy; in dictionary terms, ‘characterised by violent agitation’.  The other is light and airy, like a clear sky – perhaps even spirit-like, not of this world, celestial even.

The Tempest is widely seen as the author’s farewell to the theatre.  It is very condensed and it makes strong calls on the imagination.  It involves magic and it comes from another time. 

Much the same may be said for the painting La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Each may be said to be one of the title deeds of western civilisation. Each may also be said to be at least in part either tempestuous or ethereal.  And each has had rivers of ink spilled on it to explain the apparent contradiction. 

For the purpose of this note, I shall take each as ‘read’ – if I may be granted that latitude in speaking of a masterpiece.

Although the play starts with a tempest, it has a dream like quality throughout that is summed up in its most famous lines.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

It would require some hardihood to try to get inside that poetry.  (And it looks so apt for the painting, too.)  You may was well seek to explain the allure of Catherine Deneuve or the flipper of Shane Warne.  You do not have to have mastered Wittgenstein to say that of some things we cannot speak, and we must therefore remain silent.

But some cannot help themselves – even among the best and brightest.  Let us see what two writers say.  The American writer, Mark Van Doren:

The Tempest is a composition about which it is better not to be too knowing….it will not yield its secret easily; or it has no secret to yield…Its meaning is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.  But what the world is cannot be said in a sentence.  Or even in a poem as beautiful and complete as The Tempest.

That sounds like rude good sense to me. 

W H Auden was a great poet, but in discussing Shakespeare, he calls to mind a remark about Milton – he was so intelligent, it was a wonder he wrote any poetry at all.  But Auden does throw light on the play by comparing it to others, except oddly the Dream, and he closes with a quote from Rilke:

Now he terrifies me,

This man who’s once more duke.  The way he draws

The wire into his head and hangs himself

Beside the other puppets, and henceforth

Asks mercy of the play.

Auden saw parallels with The Magic Flute, which too ignites bonfires of learned debate.  Midsummer Night’s Dream is closer to home in mixing the real with the surreal and requiring a suspension of analytic functions.  Mendelsohn’s Overture is both famous and gorgeous, but no one asks what it means.  In truth, if you asked the creator of the Pieta or Moonlight Sonata what they mean, your most polite response might be that you were impertinent.  

But I take some comfort from those writers in listening to this great play yet again. 

I had less luck with Giorgione.  I have a most handsome big book from the KHM Museum in Vienna.  It has two essays by German experts on the puzzle of La Tempesta.  One expert says:

Positing the presence of two levels of reality in the single phenomenal actuality of the painting has the methodological advantage of being able to observe the Subject and Not-Subject variants a work simultaneously.

I do not wish to be rude about German aesthetics, but may I give the response of Bluebottle in The Goons? ‘I don’t like this game.’

The other German scholar has a very different response.  After fastidious enquiry of ancient sources, he concludes that the warrior in the painting is Paris of Troy, and that the nude is someone called Oenone.  He even has a role for the shattered pillars.  May I say two things?  First, we know almost nothing of the artist, but it is hard to imagine an Italian Renaissance painter carrying on like Conan Doyle with a classics degree indulging in a cross between Charades and a cryptic crossword.  Secondly, I find no reference to the tempest in the analysis.

It is not surprising that we attach some mystique to what we now know to be the final works of great artists and minds – like Beethoven’s Ninth or Mozart’s Jupiter symphonies.  It is as if they finally rebel at the walls around them, and decide to take a peek over them before they go. 

This looks to me to be the kind of response of Newton and his entrancement with alchemy – that so scandalised the world of science.  Keynes, who may be said to have had an eye for genius, said:

Newton was not the first of the age of reason.  He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago…. For in vulgar modern terms, Newton was profoundly neurotic, of a not unfamiliar type, but – I should say from the records – a most extreme example.  His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic – with profound shrinking from the world, a paralysing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs his discoveries in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world …. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty……

Many serious people felt the need to go quietly on all this – as they did with Newton’s denial of the Trinity.

It is inevitable now with the play, The Tempest, that the focus will be on Caliban.  He stands for the curse of the United States – slavery, and the brutalised savage that leads to caste.  Prospero says he ‘profits’ from Caliban and he has the gruesome line:

……this thing of darkness I

Acknowledge mine.  (5.1.275)

And it may be worse for us down here in Oz.  How did the drop-ins seduce the one they called ‘Monster’?  With the bottle.  They got him cruelly and revoltingly drunk.  ‘They were red-hot with drinking’ (4.1.171) and giving their preview of the Rum Rebellion.

What kind of people were they that ruined the savage in this play?  The scum of the earth – Trinculo and Stefano – two drunks – that we laugh out loud at. 

In 1625, Tony Tanner tells us, Francis Bacon wrote an essay On Plantations.

It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant : and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation; for they will ever live like rogues…but be lazy and do mischief….(My emphasis.)

Yep – that is us at Botany Bay in 1788, a misbegotten colony where the only currencies would be the lash and the bottle.  So sadly for our First Nations, the warning of Bacon got lost in the great American Rebellion of 1776, and in the spellbinding hypocrisy of the colonials there vowing that all men are created equal.  Some of them could have taken lessons in deceit from the Duke of Milan and the King of Naples.

All three of them are desperate.  Their great guilt,

Like poison given to work a great time after,

Now ‘gins to bite the spirits.  (3.3.104-106)

Now, in our land of the Dreamtime, you won’t hear three cheers for this brave new world of the unworldly Miranda. 

According to the U N, as at the end of January this year, after nearly two years of war against Russia, the Ukraine had suffered about 29,000 civilian casualties, including about 10,000 killed.  Those numbers are not precise, but they are far more reliable than casualty figures in the armed forces.  I am not sure if someone has a breakdown of the women and children killed.

The figures for Gaza are disputed.  Time quotes experts in The Lancet as saying that at least 30,000 have died in Gaza in the six months of that war, including more than 10,000 children.

It is difficult to explain the difference in casualty rates, especially given that Russia is expressly intent on annihilating the nation it is making war against.  As against that, a lot of the damage in Gaza comes from the air, and the people of Gaza have no air force.  Because they have no status as a nation.

But whichever way you look at it, life is cheaper in the Middle East – a least in the eyes of some – than in Europe in a war between peoples of the same ethnic group and faith.

For the most part, the Western world has condemned Russia for its war on the Ukraine.  Its leaders are widely seen as war criminals.

The reaction to the war in Gaza has been very different. 

International concern at the casualties in Gaza has been growing.  An agency funded by the U S says more than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza in this war.  But it was not until recently that such concern has led to foreign heads of state demanding hard answers from those responsible.  That has happened after seven were killed who were citizens of the U S, Canada, Australia, Poland or Britain. 

That manifest infusion of European blood in the casualty lists has apparently served to concentrate minds in the West.  These people were killed in circumstances that make any defence of accident implausible and by experienced troops in armed forces that are not notorious for negligent errors.  It does not help that some blame AI, and the Prime Minister of Israel has his own version of the old defence of ‘inevitable accident.’

It is inevitable, I suppose, but so sad that we never live up to the aspiration of the Enlightenment that we should treat all people as having their own worth or dignity.

And in the eyes of at least some, that failure here is driven by forces of disunity inherent in what we call religion – which was just what the Enlightenment sought to deliver us from.

And we here in Australia are entitled to be outraged by the killing of one of ours – even when we look away from the fact that ten thousand Palestinian children have so far been killed.

Villains – and evil

There is no such thing as evil.  It is not something that you can sprinkle on or detect in your fish and chips.  Rather, it is a label that we attach to some forms of conduct.  And what we usually have in mind are people who are ready, willing and able to hurt or kill other people for the sake of it – or, as the saying goes, for the hell of it.  There may be no other apparent motive.  The pickpocket, the drug dealer, the rapist, the blackmailer, the vengeful husband, the neo-Nazi – they all have a motive.  But the villain?

At the beginning of his lecture on Richard III, W H Auden said there is a difference between a criminal and what we call a villain.  ‘The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously and for its own sake.’  The leading examples in Shakespeare, apart from Richard III, are Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and Iago in Othello.

In ordinary language, an evil person is one who wants to do wrong by others.  Such a person gets called a villain.  That word has apparently come down to us from villein, the equivalent of the serf at the bottom of the medieval social ladder.  Brewer (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) says that the notion of ‘rascality, wickedness and worthlessness now associated with villainis a result of aristocratic condescension and sense of superiority’.  That is very English.  (The editor cites a passage from the opening scene of As You Like It, where both meanings are in play in the one sentence.)

There is, at least in our literature, another type of villain, if I may be permitted that term.  Some characters are so made that they cannot stand goodness.  When in Paradise Lost, Satan comes across Aadam and Eve, he ‘felt how awful goodness is’.  (And if Satan is not entitled to have a view on evil, no one is.)  Iago saw in Cassio a kind of ‘daily beauty’ that unsettled him.  The most gross example is John Claggart in Billy Budd – especially in the libretto of the opera.  Claggart is unmanned by the simple goodness of Billy. 

O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness!  
Would that I never encountered you!  
Would that I lived in my own world always,  
in that depravity to which I was born.  
There I found peace of a sort, there I established  
an order such as reigns in Hell…….
Having seen you, what choice remains to me?  
None, none! I’m doomed to annihilate you,  
I’m vowed to your destruction. ….
No, you cannot escape!  
With hate and envy, I’m stronger than love….

There is more.

But when we come to look at Richard III, we will see that some bad actors are driven by pure envy in looking at what others get in life that is certainly denied to them.  Iago drove Othello to be jealous of what he thought Cassio was up to with his wife, but Iago envied Cassio for his good fortune and success in life.  In the grizzly argot of our time, Iago, a man of ‘other ranks’ bitterly resented the elites.

In papers called Richard and Adolf and The Seduction of Seduction, I have looked at some of these issues, but here I wish to focus on what the play Richard III may tell us now about the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

But, first, I want to say something about the best-known character of Shakespeare – Sir John Falstaff.  Not in any order, Falstaff is a coward, a liar, a fraud, a womaniser, a drunk, and a rotten fat skunk.  And he is this playwright’s most popular and enduring character.  One reason is that he said things and did things to offend and upset the Establishment in ways that we would like to be able to do.  He put the boot into knighthood and chivalry as surely as Cervantes did with Don Quixote.  He was the champion of those who had missed out. 

Well, if you go to a MAGA rally, you will not find too many people successful in a profession, government, academe, or business.  (Nor will you find any at the bottom of the scale, sleeping rough.)

And we might here telegraph a warning about the significance of Falstaff.  Dr Johnson said the character was loaded with faults, ‘and with those faults that naturally produce contempt.’  But he concluded his remarks:

The moral to be drawn from this representation is that no man is more dangerous that he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.  (My emphasis.)

I see the seduction as the other way round, but the point remains.  What is it that attracts us to some complete ratbags?  How do we get sucked in – conned?

In discussing Richard III, Dr Johnson said that Shakespeare was careful to suggest that the wickedness of Richard proceeded from his deformity – and from the ‘envy that rose at the comparison of his own person with others, and which incited him to disturb the pleasures that he could not enjoy’.  There is a lot of that in the Austrian corporal who was rejected by both Vienna and the German High Command.  But at the beginning of Richard III, in his opening speech, Richard says that with all his obvious defects, he is ‘determined to prove a villain.’  The author had paved the way in the prior play (Henry VI, Part III, 3.2 and 5.6), when Richard told us that he can smile and murder while he smiles – which he later does while stabbing a king to death, while saying that he has ‘neither, pity, love, nor fear….I am myself alone.’  By the end of the preceding play, Richard had happily compared himself to Judas – and you can’t go lower than that.

Here then is the triumph of the ego in the ultimate smiling assassin.  Now, that is a title that we would award to Vladimir Putin rather than Donald Trump, but that does not mean that we may not get some guidance on how to deal with the latter, from the insights into our humanity of the greatest playwright the world has known.

Here are some points of resemblance and distinction.

Each comes from a background that is on any view ‘privileged’ – and each knows little about the rest of the world, and each cares even less.  Neither really cares for anybody else.  The self is all in all.

Each is in his own way childlike.  Each has a view of the world that is at best superficial.  Neither could imagine a world without himself.  Nothing in the world is relevant unless it relates to him.  Somehow. the ordinary rules do not apply to him.

Each disdains anything remotely resembling book learning.

Richard, like Trump, did not care for others, but he could seduce them.  In this they both resemble Don Giovanni.  The seducer is amoral and it’s as if their victims had some sort of death wish.  If these seducers have any conscience, and it is a real issue for both, it just does not work.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!  (Richard III, 5.3.310-312)

That is the credo of the fascist.

People rarely get close or remain close to either of them.  They are mostly front.  Their egos do not allow much time out for others.  If someone breaks through, it is just a matter of time before they are ejected – with extreme prejudice.  Buckingham was Richard’s most loyal supporter in winning the crown.  When he feels the rift, he is ‘off while my fearful head is on’ (4.2.121).  With Trump, the rift comes when the lackey gets caught, and Trump drops him cold – and in the slammer.

You could not reason with either.  They create their own reality.  Both resemble spoiled children who never learned better, or grown up.

They enjoy the game of plotting to get power.  They are born gamblers.  Why not?  They take huge risks because they don’t mind if others get hurt.  But they are very bad on the job when they get it.  They were not made for responsibility in government – or anything else.  In this and other respects, they are like spoiled children who have not known what it is to be accountable.

Revenge for them is very personal.  This is because the loyalty they expect is very personal.  People owe loyalty not to the office or the nation, but to the leader personally.  This was the great error of the German High Command in dealing with Adolf Hitler, and it is the beginning of the shredding of anything like the rule of law.  What you get is personal power of someone above the law.  The old term was ‘tyrant’.

There was a beautiful example with the singer, Taylor Swift.  She was a threat because she might prove more popular than Trump.  And she had backed the other side.  Trump said there was ‘no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden’ and would never be ‘disloyal to the man who made her so much money’.  Congress had passed an act giving financial aid to singers, but to Trump, it never gets above the personal.  In Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, the last chapter is headed ‘The Grammatical Fiction.’  There is no such thing as ‘I’.  In the world of Donald Trump – and Richard III – it is the other way round.  There is ego – and that is that.  The Oxford English Dictionary happily defines egomania as ‘the insanity of self-exaltation’. 

The personal nature of the rule, and the grubby means by which these people  come to power, feeds on and promotes division and conflict, and simple hate.  They are a form of cancer on the community.  Indeed, that is the underlying thread of these plays leading to and from the Wars of the Roses.  Trump just went one further by denying that he had ever lost power.

These people appeal to those who feel they have missed out in the race of life.  This is more Trump’s schtick than that of Richard.  The scenes where Richard says that he has to be enlisted for the benefit of the common weal are frankly comical – but, in truth, no more incredible than what Trump’s ‘base’ salutes him for.  His followers think that they have been treated unfairly, and that this gives them a moral right to seek retribution.  And they are quick to identify those who they think should answer for their ill treatment – although they do not use the word ‘scapegoats.’  Their leaders go along with this.  It brings the loudest cheers at the rallies.  This is more like Jack Cade than Richard.  The oppressed believe that their leader is the one to look after them, and preserve what they have managed to retain from the wreckage wrought by their opponents.

They both play rough.  They know no other way.  They just ride roughshod over any doubter or opponent who gets in their way.  Bluff is built into their persona.  And if you are going to lie, lie big.  It is as if there is nothing left solid in the relative ether, and people have always preferred fiction to history.  This braggadocio is just another part of the intimidation, and it is always the scheme of the dictator to involve as many as possible in the dirty work, so that they get locked in by their own complicity.  There is the sleight of hand of those we used to call mountebanks.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

That description brings us from the post-medieval morality plays and commedia dell’arte to Richard III – and it is also very apt for a MAGA rally.

Now for some differences. 

Richard was a worthy soldier in battle, and prepared to do his own murders.  But Richard does not delude himself as Trump appears to do.  On the contrary, he takes great pride in his machinations and the pure malice that drives them.  When he seduces Anne, a process that is revolting, he challenges the audience to come with him.  He is celebrating a win for the misfits.  ‘And yet to win her, all the world to nothing’ (1.2.237) . Auden said (in 1946) of the opening monologue of Richard that it was ‘not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939 in its utter lack of self-deception.’  That is a remarkable analogy.  Some were more than troubled by the apocalyptic and brazen tripe of Trump in his (first) inaugural.  Was this the same nation that gave the world Abraham Lincoln? 

Auden also said that Richard was not ambitious in the ordinary sense of that term.  ‘He’s not interested in becoming king for the position of power, but because becoming king is so difficult.’  Well, others might put differently that description of the pursuit of the prize. 

But we come now to the bad news.  Dr Johnson, as we saw, warned against the dangers in succumbing to the whiles of Falstaff.  Sir Anthony Quayle played Falstaff and fairly described him as ‘frankly vicious.’  Why do we fall for him?

The problem is that Richard takes the audience with him and at least in part seduces the audience.  I referred above to the old morality plays.  They appeared in England in the 15^th and 16^th centuries – to set up the triumph of virtue over vice.  Vice was a central character – generally named after a particular vice, like pride or greed, who wore a cap with asses’ ears (so prefiguring Bottom). 

Richard expressly makes a reference to Vice.  ‘Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralise two meanings in one word’ (3.1.82-83).  I need to set out what Tony Tanner says here in full.

The Vice was the self-avowed mischief-maker, if not chaos-bringer, and we should remember that one of his Satanic privileges was to inveigle the audience into laughing at evil.  The figure of the Vice was clearly invaluable to Shakespeare when it came to depicting inexplicable evil, evil which seems gratuitous, unmotivated, simply for its own sake.  From any point of view, Richard’s behaviour is profoundly irrational, and is finally both horrifying and incomprehensible even to his closest accomplices (in fact, no one is close to him at all; simply some accompany him further into his evils than others.)  Richard is, as he has told us, an expert Machiavel; he is also a Senecan tyrant and a Marlovian villain (closest to Barabas in The Jew of Malta).  But he is primarily a Vice.  However – and this is crucial – he is a Vice who acquires (no matter how foully) the legitimate robes of a king.

Those insights round off this discussion.  ‘Chaos-bringer’ is so apt.  And remember just how vicious, how horrifying, Richard is.  The murderer of the children is unmanned by this ‘most arch deed of piteous massacre’ (4.3.2).  The king can hardly wait until after supper to hear ‘the process of their death.’

It is then that we recall that the playwright has subjected us to hours of flirtation with our taste for violence and deceit.  It is followed by a set piece of our theatre – the judgment of the Furies, the mother and two wronged queens, one of whom is a world authority on cursing.  We need to remember that Richard got to the crown not by guile or rebellion, but by murder in cold blood.  It makes The Godfather look pale – but we get a kick out of that, too.

So, as we watch in trepidation the possible revival of Donald Trump, despite all his offences against humanity, we should ask again – just why do we fall for some kinds of ratbag? 

And while doing so, we might recall that it does not require anything like the incandescent genius of Shakespeare, or the craftiness of Satan, to induce our undoing.  And despite his trysts with the ghosts, Richard goes down swinging, like Don Giovanni, but sans cheval.  And there were some in the cinema who cheered him on even there.

May I finally say something about the condition of the United States now?  In discussing Julius Caesar, Auden said that Rome was not doomed by the passions of selfish individuals, but ‘by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of dealing with its situation’   Angela Merkel said that ‘Sometimes my greatest fear is that we have somehow lost the inner strength to stand up for our way of life’.  The phrase ‘inner strength’ catches the eye.  A German man called Stephen Haffner lived through the twenties and thirties and the rise of Hitler.  He described the failure of Germany in very simple terms as a kind of ‘nervous breakdown’ that flowed from the want of a ‘solid inner kernel.’

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…

That is just how major battles and sporting events are won and lost.  Sadly, it does not help either us or the U S that we have seen it all before.

Trashing the Establishment

Well, if you write thirty-eight plays, even your most ardent fan will be disappointed in a few of them.  We are familiar with the problems modern audiences have with the early comedies uncut, and with Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice (and Portia is just the kind of smartie pants in a power suit that really winds the boys up.  Judi Dench can’t stand the play either).  Cymbeline is plain silly in parts, and Cloten is a frightening preview of  the whole Trump menagerie.  The prospect of having Volumnia for a mother-in-law casts a pall over Coriolanus, but the big one I can’t stand is Othello. 

The problem came on about twenty-five years ago, when I listened to all the plays on a few occasions walking between Darling St, South Yarra, and 101 Collins Street – about half an hour each way.  You could do all the plays in about four months.  Cyril Cusack played Iago, and it got to the stage where if I heard that sibilant whining insinuation once more, the cassette player was going into the Yarra.  Then there was the ghastly inevitability of it all.  And those bloody strawberries did as much for me as they did for Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.  And just how did the daughter expect dad and the town to react when she turned up with a black man on her married arm?  Then Hollywood did the unspeakable – they cast Irene Jacob as Desdemona and made her look awful.  I had formed the considered view after Trois Couleurs Rouge, my favourite modern film, that that was impossible.

But there are two plays of Shakespeare that I can barely bring myself to read or listen to (and I have seen both on the stage – one in both London and Melbourne – and on film).  They are Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. 

These plays are both fiction pieces set in the ancient world.  Timon is the kind of man who thinks money can buy anything, and is predictably let down when he goes broke by what the cast list refers to as ‘flattering lords and false friends.’  The other play is a love story gone wrong when the main players from the Iliad run a very close race to see who can behave the most vilely during the Trojan War. 

Curiously, the Everyman edition lists Troilus in Tragedies, as you would expect.  The sparkling and gorgeous new Folio edition puts it in the Comedies.  It would be interesting to know their view of the funniest part.  The play concludes with Alcibiades, who has a shocking press in the history texts, meditating on the epitaph of the dead hero who sounded mad when he died:

Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft.
 Seek not my name. A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!
 Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate.
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.

Our playwright is no less frank in Troilus.  The Prologue ends:

Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are;

Now good or bad, ‘tis but the chance of war.

It ends when the utterly loathsome Pandarus says:

Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

Don’t say you weren’t warned, or that the author did not know what he was doing.

When we speak of ‘the Establishment’, we speak of those people in the community who have power or influence in matters of policy or opinion.  They are usually thought to be opposed to change.  It is not easy in Australia now to locate what the technical cognoscenti – the Swifties – call ‘influencers’.  (People used to point to the Melbourne Club, but those days are long past.)

In the Bronze Age, the royals and warriors controlled the scene.  In the time of Alcibiades, at least in this play, we speak of ‘lords’ and men of capital who trade in negotiable paper.  That is more like the governance of England in the eighteenth century.

Each such version of the Establishment is trashed in these plays.  The so-called heroes of the Trojan War are seen as slippery politicians, and their biggest hitter, Achilles, is a boastful, stupid, coward and killer. 

This is not the first time this playwright has put a bomb under the notion of chivalry, and in my view, the targets deserve all they get.  This goes especially for the ‘heroes’ – whose ‘glory’, after the Napoleonic model, is built over the bones of the innocent and wasted dead.  The whole idea of the ‘hero’ in the ancient world is the reverse of what might decently be called ‘civilisation’.  It is as bogus as their religion.  It was an ugly myth fostered at Oxbridge by people who were not brought up to know any better, and by Kenneth Clark mooning over the David of Michelangelo, with its thrusting, piercing, and brutalising arrogance.

In truth, Troilus is a drive-by shooting of the of Homer’s heroes.  Agamemnon is petty and past it; Ulysses is a crashing bore and know-all; Ajax is crackers; and Achilles is a fake.

The Establishment in Timon is easier for us to see.  We saw it in the writings of Tom Wolfe, especially Bonfire of the Vanities.  You can see it now in who gets the best seats at the Australian Open – what we might, and perhaps should, call ‘the usual suspects.’  It is I suppose a matter of taste, but some do remind me of what Mark Twain had Huck Finn do to his black runaway companion: dress him up with a sign: ‘Sick Arab.  Harmless unless provoked.’  Timon is a preview of Gordon Gecko – ‘Greed is good’ – and Elon Musk – if you are rich enough, you can afford to be mad.  W H Auden said Timon showed a maniac in two phases: first he gives money; then he gives curses.

And as well as trashing chivalry, Troilus may be the most savage indictment of war ever put on the stage.  The war began with the abduction of a young woman, and the play ends with the forced transfer of another young woman in the other direction.  The whole war was about ego and face – and nothing else.

The chivalry of the Middle Ages was also associated with what was said to be an ideal of romantic love.  ‘Romance’ is the term.  Both Troilus and Cressida shred the notion, and leave us with moonshine made to cover the appalling treatment of women by the medieval church.  In writing of this elsewhere, I said:

What of women?  As we saw, the scholastic mind could see women as the gate of hell, while Mary was the queen of heaven.  Medieval views on women came from the Church (celibate men, but ultimately from St Paul rather than from Christ) and the aristocracy.  The first saw women as a source of evil; the second could be gracious about seeing women as having some ornamental value, something to be celebrated in chivalry.  Both concurred in holding women down.  The women were expected to be obedient like good working dogs.  This subjection is precisely set out by Katharina at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, and at the heart of our marriage vows until recently. 

Now, Shakespeare and Cervantes had ripped into the mystique of chivalry with the two most famous characters in our letters – Sir John Falstaff and Don Quixote.  But those two characters are also the most popular. 

It is very hard to find anyone who is half way decent in either of the plays here discussed.  And the only role of some characters – like Apemantus, Pandarus, or Thersites – looks to be to drive us to the exit or the ‘Off ‘button.  And the problem with listening to them on Arkangel is that they have a policy of serving up the whole text.  It might run for three hours.  A director who did not cut heavily for the stage would not do a good job.

A gloomy air of unseemliness, dirt, and hopelessness pervades each play.  Is anything untainted?  One braggard Greek speaks of a man ‘having’ Helen and not ‘making any scruple of her soilure’ – being soiled (Troilus,4.1.56).  What does the audience take home apart from despair?  Is it like reading something like The Outsider by Albert Camus?  You wash your mouth out, and wonder why you bothered.  Tony Tanner thought one play Shakespeare’s ‘bitterest’ and the other ‘sour and abrasive’ and ‘disturbing and disconsolating’.  He could have said either of both.

It is very odd.  As Judi Dench says, the playwright is the man who pays the rent.  Were either of these plays good for business?  Compare, say, Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra for love stories or gripping dramas about rifts in the community.  They come from another world.  If a playwright now did to Cressida what Shakespeare did – take her in twenty-four hours from that pretty girl next door to a wanton slut fondled by a procession of lecherous old Greeks whose ideas of personal hygiene were not ours – the best PR company in town would have trouble keeping him afloat.

This does suggest to me that we have a very blurred view of the market – the tastes of what we might call Shakespeare’s target audience.  It takes some courage to put on Titus Andronicus now, but my understanding is that it was very popular during the author’s lifetime.  Do we know what the record has been with the two plays discussed in this note?

We should not be surprised that the target market, as we now call it, was different in Elizabethan or Jacobean London.  Alternative entertainments for the people included bear-baiting, public whipping or mutilation – nose or ears – or hanging, drawing and quartering.  The world was far from being set for the Swifties.