Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Passing Bull 245 – Responsibility

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Kushner said: ‘In the Democratic convention, I’m hearing a lot of lecturing moralists … in this administration, we have a lot of doers, we have businessmen, we have people who are held accountable.’  Accountable?  Facing a burgeoning pandemic back in March, Trump had this to say, ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’  One of the testimonials on the Build The Wall site is from Don Trump Jr, who said: ‘This is private enterprise at its finest.’  Now Trump is distancing himself. After the news of the arrests broke he said: ‘I disagreed with doing this tiny section of wall in a tricky area by a private group which raised money by ads’.

The words ‘responsible’ and ‘accountable’ frequently have the same meaning, and equally frequently, it is hard to see what that assertion may entail.  If we say that John is ‘responsible’ for a failure to control people who may be carrying an infectious disease, what does that mean?  What if John says ‘I am sorry for that’?  Is that the end of it?  If there is no relevant mechanism to confirm that there was in fact a failure to control people and that because of the role of John in that failure he is subject to a decision involving consequences that are adverse to him?

If a Minister of the Crown makes an error, he is accountable to the Parliament for that error.  That is part of what we call ‘responsible government’.  But the time has long since passed where a Minister of the Crown would accept responsibility for an error made by a civil servant.  Nowadays you might an expression of regret, or even an apology, but that’s all.  You will have to wait for the next election when you can express your discontent at the ballot box.

If you get hit by a van delivering for a pizza company, the law may impose liability on the company, and in doing so, it will not be making a finding against the company.  Its liability is based on a policy of the law to make employers liable for the faults of its employees. This liability does not depend on a finding of fault against the employer.

During the current epidemic, people engaged – to use a neutral term – in dealing with people who may be carrying a virus made errors of judgment.  The premiers say they are sorry, and that for them is an end to the matter.  They may suffer a loss of votes at the next election, but in what respects are they otherwise said to be ‘responsible’ or ‘accountable’ for the errors made by people engaged by the government?

Bloopers

Our media, dominated by publicly funded progressives, is part of the problem….Our media/political class has eviscerated a self-reliant, robust anti-authority, and egalitarian country.  Our politicians have done far more damage than the coronavirus…..Outside war, we have never suffered so much government.  But there is little leadership.  We are bordering on delusion.

The Weekend Australian, 22 August, 2020. Chris Kenny

Some get fixated on the apocalypse.

MY SECOND TOP SHELF – 13 – Euripides

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[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

EURIPIDES

PLAYS (circa 410 BC)

The Franklin Library, 1976.  Nine plays, variously translated.  All green leather, gold embossing, humped spine, god leaf, navy moiré and ribbon, etchings by Quentin Fiore.

They died from a disease they caught from their father.  (Medea)

The Australian artist Tim Storrier, two of whose (numbered) works I have at home likes painting fire and water, and the stars and pyramids.  He has, therefore, a taste and feel for the elemental.  So it was with the drama of the ancient Greeks.  It is as black and white as ‘High Noon’, a little like ‘Neighbours’, but up very close, and very in your face and very, very terminal.  The Greeks liked keeping their murders in house.  Euripides is probably the most accessible on the page or on the stage for modern audiences.

I saw Medea in London played by Diana Rigg – no ordinary avenger.  It was first produced in about 431 BC (during the Peloponnesian War).  It can sound strikingly modern.  Here is how the hero states her condition.

Of all things which are living and can form a judgment

We women are the most unfortunate creatures.

Firstly, with an excess of wealth it is required

For us to buy a husband and take for our bodies

A master.  For not to take one is even worse.

……..

A man, when he’s tired of the company in his home,

Goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom

And turns to a friend or companion of his own age.

But we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone

What they say of it is that we have a peaceful time

Living at home, while they do the fighting in war.

How wrong they are!

Truly does the Bible say that there is nothing new under the sun.  When her husband rats on her, Sir Paul Harvey in the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (which it is handy to have around when reading or seeing these plays) says: ‘The desertion and ingratitude of the man she loves rouses the savage in Medea, and her rage is outspoken.’  The savage in us all is what Greek drama is largely about.  Since she kills her successor and her father, her children will die:

No!  By Hell’s avenging furies it shall not be –

This shall never be, that I should suffer my children

To be the prey of my enemies’ insolence.

In case you are asking, we hear from the children offstage before they go, and their mother then unloads the mordant pearler that stands at the head of this note.  What we not give to know how audiences reacted to all this all that time ago?

In some ways, The Trojan Women is even tougher.  The women and children are given up to the victors after the fall of Troy.  Their names have been burnt into our consciousness through The Iliad and these plays and opera.  A child is sacrificed over the grave of Achilles.  Cassandra is given to Agamemnon ‘to be joined with him in the dark bed of love.’  Hecuba is to be ‘slave to Odysseus.’

To be given as slave to serve that vile, that slippery man,

Right’s enemy, brute, murderous beast,

That mouth of lies and treachery, that makes void,

Faith in things promised

And that which was beloved turns to hate.  Oh, mourn,

Daughters of Ilium, weep as one for me.

This is like the Old Testament.  Andromache drops these great lines:

Death, I am sure, is like never being born, but death

Is better thus by far than to live a life of pain,

Since the dead with no perception of evil feel no grief…

But the widow Hector comes crashing back to earth as she reflects that she has been given to the son of his killer.  Will she defile Hector’s memory?

Yet they say one night of love suffices to dissolve

A woman’s aversion to share the bed of any man.

The Orestes here is not in the same league as that of Aeschylus.  It is very long, although the dialogue can be crisp, as in this exchange between Menelaus and Orestes.

I am a murderer.  I murdered my mother.

So I have heard.  Kindly spare me your horrors [!]

I spare you – although no god spared me.

What is your sickness?

I call it conscience: The certain knowledge of wrong, the conviction of crime.

You speak somewhat obscurely.  What do you mean?

I mean remorse.  I am sick with remorse.

We will return to ‘conscience’, but the play is about the dilemna at the dawn of our law.

Where, I want to know, can this chain

Of murder end?  Can it never end, in fact,

Since the last to kill is doomed to stand

Under permanent sentence of death by revenge.

No, our ancestors handled these matters well

……………….they purged their guilt

By banishment, not death.  And by so doing,

They stopped that endless vicious cycle

Of murder and revenge.

If art reflects on the human condition, these old Greek plays are in at the beginning.  This is their looking at us, tiptoeing around the rim of a volcano, and hoping that we do not fall in.  Have we changed at all?

 

Here and there – Twilight of Democracy

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Twilight of Democracy

The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Anne Applebaum

This book is beautifully written.  It is also very sad.  It could be given to apprentice barristers because its author understands that for an advocate, candour is a weapon.  And that it is a weapon is not realised by those people that Anne Applebaum describes.  She looks at the recent political shifts in Poland, Hungary, Spain and England – or, I should say, Great Britain – and asks who are the kinds of people that are attracted by the lure of authoritarian rule?  Her answer is ‘people who cannot tolerate complexity.’  You may want to be careful how you put that.  You could get into serious trouble if you referred to those people as ‘simpletons’ or even ‘simple minded.’  (You get sent straight to the stocks if you say that they are ‘deplorable.’)

….the ‘authoritarian predisposition’….is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness.  It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.  They dislike divisiveness.  They prefer unity.  A sudden onslaught of diversity – diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences – therefore makes them angry.  They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

This is the kind of failing that Keats had in mind when he spoke of the ‘negative capability’ of Shakespeare – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’  A professional person must pursue this course; its absence is fatal in a judge; and it should be a paramount objective of what might be called a liberal education.  Educated people – and you also need to be careful about where you use that term – are brought up to distrust anyone claiming to have the answer.  But that is what those who surrender to the seduction crave.  It puts an end to anxiety and gives them peace.  Life is easier when you march to the beat of a drum.

And, of course, if you have the answer, then those against you are worse than perverse.  They are diagnosably wrong.  What you get is something like all-out war.  What we then miss is what Sir Lewis Namier referred to as ‘restraint coupled with the tolerance that it implies.’  The term is ‘polarised’ – what one participant told the author was ‘winner takes all.’  In Australia at the moment, a mild disagreement about handling a virus leads to shrieking about the death of democracy.

And you will see immediately how Twitter and the like feed those cancers and deliver up the credulous to their puppeteers.  What you get is a ‘frame of mind, not a set of ideas.’  And in the company of those of like mind, you get identity, the marks of which you bear with pride.

And the answers are plain.  ‘The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity.’  For the followers of Hitler, the Jews were the enemy; for the followers of Obán, it is Mr George Soros.  It doesn’t matter much whom you choose for scapegoats – say Jews, Muslims, migrants or gay people – as long as they are indentifiable and vulnerable.  What you have is ‘resentment, revenge, and envy.’  What you are released from is responsibility for your own history.  And you distrust experts.  You don’t want to concede their power or let them take your time.  You may even burble some nonsense about sovereignty.

As I said elsewhere:

Lord Clark said … that ‘as rational argument declines, vivid assertion takes its place.’…. You see a similar problem with people who ignore evidence that is contrary to the view they have formed provisionally.  It looks good enough to get a problem off their desk to someone else’s – why give yourself more trouble by re‑examining the point?  The problem is, in large part, one of laziness, the quest for the easy life, and for an end  to uncertainty and anxiety. …..The real problem is that most of us are not ready to acknowledge the prior opinion, nor the extent of its hold on us.  As Aldous Huxley observed, ‘Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored’; or, as Warren Buffett said: ‘What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.’  ….There is a related problem about our reluctance to be left in doubt or uncertainty.  It is sometimes hard to resist the suggestion that doing something is better than doing nothing.  That position is commonly dead wrong.  The French philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably said that, ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

At least three things sadden me about what this book tells us.  The first is that people like Farage, Trump and Boris Johnson are not people you would like to invite into your home.

Quite a lot of people have since remarked on Johnson’s outsized narcissism, which is indeed all consuming, as well as his equally remarkable laziness.  His penchant for fabrication is a matter of record.

They are the attributes of Farage and Trump.  They are like spoiled children.  They are not used to being denied, or even checked.  If they do meet obstruction, they sulk about the structures in their way.  They even claim to be persecuted.  The contempt of Farage for displaced Muslim persons in 2016 was manifest.  Just about every day, people like Trump or Johnson do something that would get them fired from the position of CEO of a public company.  But it appears that the bargaining power of those who put them in power does not allow them to call their leader to account.

The second point of sadness is that the followers of these liars rejoice in their lies.  This is part of the myth that the establishment is being stormed.  ‘Dominic Cummings’ Vote Leave campaign proved it was possible to lie, repeatedly, and to get away with it.’  It is quite remarkable how much time is spent by members of the elite complaining about the conduct of the elite; some even claim to be persecuted by the elite.

That brings us to God in America.  It has been a problem since the Puritans arrived and found themselves in the majority – they were fast running out of favour in England.  The pact between Trump and the evangelical Christians is something like: ‘You give us judges that will ban abortion and we will forget the Sermon on the Mount for federal politics.’  (Could you believe it?  The meek shall inherit the earth?)  That is sickening enough – but Rome did deals with Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco.  And according to the author, some in America believe that ‘Russia is a godly Christian nation seeking to protect its ethnic identity.’  Others have odd views about Jerusalem.

If you see Laura Ingraham of Fox News on TV, you may feel the chill of her Aryan froideur even if you are not Jewish.  She is a Catholic who once went on a date with Trump and who gives lectures on Christian values and virtues – ‘honor, courage, selflessness, sacrifice, hard work, personal responsibility, respect for elders, respect for the vulnerable.’ Trump is none of those things.  When Ms Ingraham interviewed Trump on the anniversary of D-day, she said ‘By the way, congratulations on your polling numbers.’  How can any faith survive that kind of betrayal?  And the worst of it is that some of these people call themselves ‘conservatives’.  Do any of them have any sense of shame left at all?

Then there is Falstaff – ‘Jack to my friends and Sir John to all Europe’.  (I refer to the Falstaff of the history plays, and not the sit-com of The Merry Wives of Windsor so gorgeously realised by Verdi in his carnival opera version).  Falstaff is, not necessarily in order, a coward, a drunk, a thief, a liar, a cheat, a crawler, a snob and a womaniser.  He is also the most popular character that Shakespeare ever created – so popular, some say, that the Queen commanded and got a whole play by way of encore.  For all his faults – his vices – we relate to Falstaff.  But looked at objectively, he is what Sir Anthony Quayle – and he should know – described as ‘frankly vicious.’

Is there something in our psyche – perhaps the complete reverse of the superego – that leads us to enjoy someone who openly mocks our whole establishment and its tiresome virtues?  You often hear people say that they like Trump because he can say things that they would never get away with – about, say, the first black president.  That is probably also the main source of appeal of those frightful parasites called shock jocks.  This is what Tony Tanner (in his Prefaces to Shakespeare) said:

In carnival, social hierarchy was inverted, authority mocked, conventional values profaned, official ceremonies and rituals grotesquely parodied, the normal power structures dissolved  – in a word, Misrule, Riot, the world upside down.

That is a fair summary of some of the more unattractive aspects of Falstaff and of those living in the world of the current White House.  And when you look at it, there is about Falstaff, as there is about Trump and Johnson, the aura of a spoiled child who never grew up.

Anne Applebaum says that ancient philosophers had their doubts about democracy – as did the movers of the revolutions of 1688, 1776, 1789, and 1917.  Plato feared the ‘false and braggart words’ of the demagogue, and wondered if democracy was anything more than a staging point on the way to tyranny.  This fine book shows a clear light on our current descent.

MY SECOND TOP SHELF – 12 – Einstein

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[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

IDEAS AND OPINIONS

Albert Einstein

Folio Society, 2010.  Bound in figured boards, with photographs and slip case.

The word Einstein now stands genius, just as Hoover means vacuum cleaner, but it was Einstein who once and for all put science beyond all but the select.  Before Einstein, people with a good general education could come to grips with the laws of science on which the world revolved.  But they could not do so after Einstein rewrote the whole book.  Now for most of us science is, at bottom, like God or Mozart, something that we must take, if at all, simply on trust.  It would be fair to hazard the assertion that the mind of Einstein has had more effect on the world than any other mind.

Einstein was born of Jewish parents in Ulm, a small city on the Danube in the south of Germany.  He at first attended a Catholic elementary school, and then attended the local Gymnasium.  He was introduced to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the age of about ten – which is like saying that Mozart started composing at the age of five.  He took his tertiary education in Switzerland and got employment as an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office.

The work of Einstein led him to conduct thought experiments about the nature of light and the relation of time and space.  He was crossing the borders of existing knowledge.  In 1905, he published four revolutionary papers, one on special relativity.  He then developed his general theory which was later verified.  He was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, and a professor at Humboldt University from 1914 to 1932.  He won a Nobel Prize in 1921.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein was in America.  He stayed there – back home they burnt his books and put a bounty on his head.  He then warned the U S that Hitler might be first to get the Atom bomb.  This led Roosevelt to implement the Manhattan Project.  Einstein later wrote a manifesto with Bertrand Russell on the dangers of nuclear weapons.  His total scientific output was staggering.  It does not bear to think what might have happened had Einstein returned to Germany in 1933 and provided the means for Hitler to be the first to get, and most certainly use, the bomb.

Einstein had a mature view of religion.  Towards the end of his life he said ‘I very rarely think in words at all’.  He thought in pictures, in his thought experiments, and mathematically.  Whereas some people see what they believe to be miracles as evidence of God’s existence, for Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence, and revealed a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists’.  This is very much like what Kant thought.  When Einstein adhered to this dictum and said that God does not play dice, the rejoinder of Nils Bohr was: ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do!’

Einstein had the problem that Darwin had with people trying to get him to express views on religion.  People were out to get him.  A New York rabbi sent him a telegram: ‘Do you believe in God?  Stop.  Answer paid.  Fifty words.’  The reply was: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind’.  Einstein never felt the need to put down others who believed in a different kind of God: ‘What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos’.

In a paper headed The World as I See It, published in 1931, Einstein said:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.  Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.  It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.  A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge, and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.  I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.  Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.  I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvellous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

You can see why Einstein poses a challenge to religion as it is usually practised.  It is not just the rejection of a personal God and life after death – he finds a source of wonder and mystery from contemplating the world as he finds it.  In a paper published in Germany in 1930, Einstein had affirmed that man could get by ethically without God.

A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible….Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust.  A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.  Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Elsewhere he made a strong allegation: ‘The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods.’

He knew how to take a stand.  Here is his advice on a 1953 inquisition.

What ought the minority of intellectuals do against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of non-co-operation in the sense of Ghandi’s.  Every intellectual who is called before one of the committee’s ought to refuse to testify, i. e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country.

However, this refusal to testify must not be based on the well-known subterfuge of invoking the Fifth Amendment against possible self-incrimination, but on the assertion that it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition and that this kind of inquisition violates the spirit of the Constitution.

If enough people are ready to take this grave step, they will be successful.  If not, then the individuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.

That was written by someone proscribed by Nazi Germany.  He could prescribe very high standards.  Here he is on human rights in 1954.

The existence and validity of human rights was not written in the stars…There is however one other human right which is infrequently mentioned, but which seems to be destined to become very important: this is the right or the duty of the individual to abstain from cooperating in activities which he considers wrong or pernicious.  The first place in this respect must be given to the refusal of military service.  I have known instances where individuals of unusual moral strength and integrity have, for that reason, come into conflict with the organs of the state.  The Nuremberg trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law and the state.

The last clause is potent.  Finally, this is what he had to say to Mahatma Ghandi in 1944:

A leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority: a politician whose success rests not upon the craft nor the mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality; a victorious fighter who has always scorned the use of force; a man of wisdom and humility, armed with resolve and inflexible consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the uplifting of his people and the betterment of their lot; a man who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being, and thus at all times risen superior.

Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.

Those words were spoken by the man who referred to Jesus of Nazareth as ‘the luminous Nazarene.’  This book is a big clean window into one of the most powerful minds the world has known.

 

Passing Bull 243 – More on freedom

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The virus was obviously sent to test us.  And some of us are doing better than others.  The threat to public health and safety leads to government being called on to interfere in our lives much more than we would ordinarily want.  People say that they are less free than they were before.  As we know, that is just about an inevitable consequence of any law.  The requirements of masking have led to complaints about a loss of freedom.  But it follows as night the day that in a time of emergency – genuine emergency on this occasion – we will be less free to act in certain ways than before.

Someone – it may have been G B Shaw – said ‘Freedom means responsibility – that’s why most men fear it.’  That sounds about right – if how you act is completely a matter for you, then the decision is yours and yours alone.  You will have to accept responsibility for your decision – you will not have the prop of superior orders to rely on.

In responding to the virus, each one of us will be affected by the conduct of everyone else.  The law cannot control every contingency.  To some extent at least, each one of us is responsible to the rest of us for doing what is reasonably required to see us through this emergency.  People who complain that the government is curtailing their freedom often forget that with that freedom comes a responsibility to act in a way that does not increase the risk of harm to others.  In other words, freedom comes with a price.

Bloopers

Trump is often unseemly, but in focusing on law and order, he may be saying things that Americans will increasingly want to hear.

The Australian, 4 June, 2020, Greg Sheridan

Then he sent in the army.

Whether it [dealing with COVID-19] was the necessary price of success or born of hysterical overreaction, history can judge.

The Australian, 4 June, 2020, Adam Creighton

Passing Bull 243 – Silliness about rights

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You have the right walk down the street outside my house.  But you may be denied that right if you want to cross the road at a light controlled intersection and you are facing a red light.  We use traffic lights to reduce the risk of accidents between people using the same roads. But then we took a further step.  We made it compulsory for the driver of a motor car to wear seat belts.  This law was not made to reduce the risks of others being hurt.  It was made to reduce the risk of damage if the driver was involved in a collision.  Some people were offended.  They complained that this law invaded their rights by impairing their freedom.  One answer is that all laws affect the freedom of people since they will not be free – they will have to face consequences – if they break the law.  If you want to introduce economics into this discussion about compulsory wearing of seat-belts, it is that people injuring themselves badly because they are not wearing seat-belts may be injured badly enough to require hospitalisation – at our expense.

That is the argument for the compulsory wearing of face masks during a time of epidemic.  You do not hear that argument so much outside the U S, but to many of us, Americans have a fixation about ‘rights’ and ‘liberty.’  That fixation reached the level of madness when a state governor sued a city mayor for seeking to make the wearing of face masks compulsory.  It adds nothing to say that a law affects ‘freedom’ since all laws do just that.

Bloopers

We’ve been having a lively debate lately about what the sudden social-justice ascendancy in American institutions represents, and whether the new iconoclastic progressivism is just an organic development in liberalism or a post –liberal successor.

New York Times, 7 July, 2020

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Michael Kidd said later ‘the Commonwealth accepts the need for this action in response to containing spread of the virus’.

But, Kidd said, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee — the federal-state health advisory body so often invoked by Morrison — ‘was not involved in that decision.

‘The AHPPC does not provide advice on border closures’, Kidd added.

ABC, 7 July, 2020

Here and there – Black Knight plays White Queen

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The events known as the Dismissal of 1975 have come back to the front page of our press with the release of correspondence between the Palace in London (on behalf of the Queen) and the Governor-General (Sir John Kerr) in Australia.  Those who had the custody of those documents had resisted disclosing them.  The resistance was fierce and prolonged.  It is hard to think of a good reason why the people of Australia should have been prevented from getting access to documents that may throw light on one of the most contentious political episodes in our history.

At the heart of that dispute was the question of what is the proper role of the executive of the Commonwealth – the Queen and the Governor-General – in resolving a deadlock between the two houses of Parliament.

The dispute had arisen because one party had used its numbers in the Senate to block supply to the government with a view to forcing an early election and, as I recall, state governments had filled Senate vacancies with people they thought would be amenable to their views.  The government had been acting badly, but there were good grounds to suggest that the opposition parties had breached long standing political conventions in the way in which they were blocking supply.  The atmosphere was worse than tense.  It was venomous.

The answer about the proper role of the Queen and the Governor-General in our political affairs was not given by the Queen.  The answer was driven from London from advisers in the Palace and from the Governor-General and his staff in Canberra.  The Queen, we are told, had no part in the decision.  According to the correspondence now released, the decision reached by her advisers in the Palace and the Governor-General in Australia was that the Queen should have nothing to do with this crisis in Australia, and it should all be left to the Governor General – albeit with the benefit of advice to him from the staff of the Queen at the Palace.  The decision that the Queen should play no part extended to a decision that she should not be told in advance what action the Governor-General might take.

All that raises the question – if the Queen has no part to play in resolving an issue like this, what is the point of keeping the Queen as part of the government of the Commonwealth of Australia?

The Constitution in section 61 provides:

The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth.

In considering this provision, we should remember that the Constitution was contained in a schedule to an act of the British Parliament that was passed at the time when Great Britain was at the pinnacle of its power ruling over one of the greatest empires in the history of the world – if ‘great’ is an appropriate epithet for any empire.  When the mother country granted former colonies their independence, as it had done with Canada and as it would do with many other nations in Africa and Asia, it did so by setting up the constitutions of those nations so that they would follow what the British were reasonably entitled to believe was their greatest contribution to the world – the rule of law under the common law and the Westminster version of parliamentary democracy.  You can, if you wish, test the validity or worth of that faith by looking at the subsequent histories of, say, the former colonies of Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, or Italy.

The terms ‘power’ and ‘vesting’ that appear in s. 61 may at times be legally charged, as may be the notion of delegation implicit in the stipulation that the Governor-General may exercise those powers of the Queen, but the intention and effect of this law is plain enough.  The mother country is bequeathing its system of government to the fledging nation that it is giving birth to.  If you look at s. 61, you see that the powers that are exercisable by the Governor-General are the powers of the Queen.  The law says that the Governor-General acts as ‘the Queen’s representative.’  It is like the relation between principal and agent developed by the common law.

In the business of running the government, the Governor-General has the powers of the Queen.  And part of our overall constitutional framework is that the Governor-General, like the Queen, can only exercise those powers on advice from the Ministers of the Crown who are members of parliament and who have the confidence of a majority of that parliament.

There is therefore no need to ask what might happen if there was a dispute between the Queen and the Governor-General as to how those powers should be exercised – each of them can only act on the advice of the government of the day.  It follows of course that it would not be open to the Governor-General to act in a manner that is denied to the Queen – by, for example, acting not just without the consent of the government, but by acting against the express wishes of that government.  To put it more broadly, it is difficult under our law to envisage an agent having more power than the principal.  Perhaps we might consider the analogy of chess – the queen is much more powerful than a knight, but the knight moves in a way that the queen cannot; a player who sacrifices a queen for a knight is mad; and the king is untouchable.

The debate, if that is what it was, about the ‘reserve powers’ of the Governor-General calls to mind the issue of the ‘royal prerogative’ in the seventeenth century.  The Stuart kings could not shed the illusion that their powers – the prerogative of the Crown – came from God – and could only be taken from them by God.  That issue was resolved against the Crown in the events known as the Glorious Revolution of 1788-1789.  James II, the last of the Stuarts, decamped ingloriously, heaving the royal seals into the Thames as he went, possibly reflecting, as one mordant historian remarked, about that part of the neck that was severed when the English cut off his father’s head; Dutch troops patrolled the streets of London; and the parliament and the Queen, who was the daughter of James II, and William of Orange signed the Hanoverians up to supply a line of house trained kings from Germany to run things in England.  This is where we get the supremacy, or, if you prefer, the sovereignty of parliament.  Virtually all powers of the Crown were subject to the will of the people in parliament.  Looking back on it now, this does look like a pan European solution to a very English problem.  The efforts of the French to follow suit a century later met a much harder fate.

Lord Denning, am English jurist of last century, did not pussy-foot about the English solution.

Concede, if you wish, that, as an ideology, communism has much to be said for it: nevertheless, the danger in a totalitarian system is that those in control of the State will, sooner or later, come to identify their own interests, or the interests of their own party, with those of the State: and when that happens the freedom of the individual has to give way to the interests of the persons in power.  We have had all that out time and again in our long history: and we know the answer.  It is that the executive government must never be allowed more power than is absolutely necessary.  They must always be made subject to the law; and there must be judges in the land who are ‘no respecters of persons and stand between the subject and any encroachment on his liberty by the executive.’  We taught the kings that from Runnymede to the scaffold at Whitehall [the execution of Charles I]: and we have not had any serious trouble about it since.

It therefore came as quite a surprise to learn from the correspondence now released that the staff of the Queen at the Palace and the Governor-General in Australia went out of their way to ensure that the Queen had no notice at all of what would be the most significant step ever taken purportedly on behalf of the Queen in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia.  Of course in the day to day business of government, the Queen is never consulted.  But on what basis did those who advised Sir John Kerr about his powers decide that the Queen should be not be informed or in any way involved in the way that her powers should be exercised in a manner that had never been done before?

And although the Queen could only act on the advice of the government of the day, the Governor-General was acting in this case in a manner expressly contrary to that advice.  It has always seemed to many to be odd to say that the person entrusted with the powers of the Queen could exercise those powers in a manner expressly denied to the Queen – that in some ways his powers were more plenary than when exercised by Her Majesty.  What the Palace correspondence shows is a Governor-General acting in a manner that was contrary to an essential pillar of our inherited Westminster system of government.

The reason offered for that course is that if the Governor-General had warned the Prime Minister of his intention, the Prime Minister could have asked the Queen to remove the Governor-General and she would then have been obliged to do so.  Is that not a matter of the Governor-General acting peremptorily in order to preclude the possibility of the Queen acting appropriately?  And does that just leave us with Alice in Wonderland?

If after the Governor-General had acted as he did and he had informed the Queen, what may have been the case if the Queen had been of the opinion that she would have acted differently?  And how could Her Majesty have said otherwise when she was obliged to act, and only to act, on the advice of her Australian ministers?

It is not therefore surprising to read that a former member of the Palace bureaucracy says now:

I suspect that the advice that would have been given to him [Sir John Kerr] was that it would have been prudent to hold off a bit longer.  But obviously he felt the pressure of these two contingencies about the election and the financial situation were too pressing to ignore.  I think it was very proper of him not to ask and in ways which are now very evident, very sensible and satisfactory that he didn’t.  There was considerable discussion of a hypothetical nature about the existence of, and appropriateness of, applying to those reserve powers, but at no stage did the Governor-General ever ask the Queen to suggest that he should act in any particular way, and nor did she offer that advice through her private secretary…

The press reports that this gentleman and the author of the Palace letters thought that Australia was embroiled in a ‘political’ and not ‘constitutional’ crisis and concluded that the Governor- General had intervened ‘too precipitously’ to resolve the deadlock over supply.

All of us in London thought that if Kerr had been able to hold his nerve for just a day or two more, there probably would have been a political solution to the problem, which would have avoided a lot fuss.

And ‘a lot of fuss’ there was – that might have been avoided if the various officials in London and Canberra had not sought and managed to keep the Queen out of this dispute.

And one day someone in Whitehall may illuminate us about the distinction between a ‘political’ crisis and a ‘constitutional’ crisis.  It looks to be the kind of question that could have tantalised Aristotle or Plato or Augustine or Aquinas in different ways.  Some may be reminded that the medieval Schoolmen agonised over the question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.  This is not the kind of speculation that we need to see in the government of our nation.

Well, what are we now to make of all this?  Does it not just look like an episode of Yes, Minister that has gone horribly wrong?

Many Australians, including me, were infuriated by what happened in 1975.  Now many of those Australians, again including me, just feel personally insulted that the fate of their government in 1975 had been determined by the actions of Palace officials in London and a Governor-General here who thought that it was appropriate for him to act in the way that he did without notice either to the Queen of Australia or to the Prime Minister of Australia.

When you come to think about it, there was truly chutzpah to behold in civil servants in the onetime seat of a mighty empire involving themselves in the affairs of onetime colonies and helping to bring about a change of government – without any notice to its head of state or prime minister. The term coup d’état may be too strong, but I know how some people feel.  If there is one thing worse than a monarch wanting to intervene in our affairs, it may be a monarch who wants nothing to do with us, even though our constitution makes her the primary repository of the executive powers of the Commonwealth.

Now, forty-five years later, we may wonder if the reaction to the election of Gough Whitlam in Australia might now be seen in the reaction to the election of Barak Obama in the United States – ‘this aberration is not the way that we the better people are used to doing business,  and we may therefore just have to bend the rules a little in order to restore the status quo; democracy is at its best when it is duly guided, and sometimes the people just forget what’s best for them.’

It brings to mind an immortal cartoon of Ron Tandberg.  Just before he retired, Sir John put on a routine of another but much better known Sir John – Falstaff.  Sir John presented the Melbourne Cup when it was obvious to tout le monde that he was as full as a state school.  Tandberg showed him blotto with crosses for eyes under a silly, tilted top hat.  The caption was: ‘I love making presentations in November.  Like when I gave the nation back to its true owners.’

Gough Whitlam said Sir John was the last of the Bourbons.  He might as well have said Stuarts – they were very helpfully incorrigible.  But it is notorious that those in the diaspora cling to relics long after their time has passed.  Sir Lewis Namier said that the US is ‘in certain ways, a refrigerator in which British ideas and institutions are preferred long after they have been forgotten in this country’.

Well, two things are clear enough – indeed, two things are transcendentally clear.  First, very few people in Australia want to give any power to any government officials in London to settle their political disputes.  Secondly, no one in London wants to be involved in any such Australian disputes.  The time of this institution in Australia has passed from us long ago.  That being so, the presence of the monarchy in our body politic is as useful as the appendix in my body and it is time for us to achieve independence from Great Britain and proceed under our own head of state.

 

Passing Bull 242 – The ode of Trump

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal once commanded respect.  It put out an editorial about the speech of Donald Trump for Independence Day.  The convention is that this is not a time for party politics or division.  The editorial called the speech a ‘familiar Fourth of July ode to liberty…..Contrary to the media reporting, the America Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity…’  He described ‘a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance.’  The fault lies with ‘progressives.’

The speech contained the following.

Let us also send our deepest thanks to our wonderful veterans, law enforcement, first responders and the doctors, nurses and scientists working tirelessly to kill the virus…..

I am here as your President to proclaim, before the country and before the world, this monument will never be desecrated…..

Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children…..

Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities…..

Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this, but some know exactly what they are doing…..

This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly…..

We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life…..

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far left fascism that demands absolute allegiance…..

This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution…..

The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets and cities that are run by liberal Democrats in every case is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions……

All of that is rubbish.  But it is also vicious.  The WSJ shows how far the U S has fallen.  Not only have better people not stood up to Trump – they positively encourage him.  And Donald Trump would not know an ode from an owl.

Quite by chance, I was reading Nicholas Nickleby again and came across this passage:

There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world.  Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather—for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man—that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour.  Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men’s lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this—not to question how it is, so it is.

Bloopers

Ember quotes the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the theorist of intersectionality, marveling at the change: ‘You basically have a moment where every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness, and that stuff is even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying.’

New York Times, 24 June, 2020

What says your theory of intersectionality?

MY SECOND TOP SHELF – 11

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880

Folio Society, 1964; bound in illustrated boards with slipcase; drawings by Nigel Lambourne

Wagner and Dostoevsky had a lot in common.  Neither was ever at risk of underestimating his own genius, and the behaviour of neither improved as result.  Both were prone to go over the top.  You can find forests of exclamation marks in the writings of both.  And both could and did bang on for far too long for some of us.  They both badly needed an editor. But if you persist with either of these men of genius, you will come across art of a kind that you will not find elsewhere.  The Brothers Karamazov, is a case in point. In my view, it could be improved by being halved – but you would be at risk of abandoning diamonds.

The most famous part of the novel comes with a sustained conversation between two brothers, Alyosha, who is of a saintly and God-fearing disposition, and Ivan, who is of a questing and God-doubting outlook.  The conversation comes in Part 2, Book 5, chapters 4 and 5, Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor.

Ivan gets under way with ‘I must make a confession to you.  I never could understand how one can love one’s neighbours.’  The author probably knew that Tolstoy had written a book that asserted that the failure of civilisation derived from our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.   We are familiar with Ivan’s biggest problem.

And, indeed, people sometimes speak of man’s ‘bestial’ cruelty, but this is very unfair and insulting to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so ingeniously, so artistically cruel.  A tiger merely gnaws and tears to pieces, that’s all he knows.  It would never occur to him to nail men’s ears to a fence and leave them like that overnight, even if he were able to do it ….The most direct and spontaneous pastime we have is the infliction of pain by beating.

Well, that attitude is not completely dead in Russia.  Ivan is objecting to the unfairness, and the random nature, of cruelty, and he comes up with a phrase that so moved Manning Clark.

Surely the reason for my suffering was not that I as well as my evil deeds and sufferings may serve as manure for some future harmony for someone else.  I want to see with my own eyes the lion lay down with the lamb and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer.  I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it has all been for.  All religions on earth are based on this desire, and I am a believer…I don’t want any more suffering.  And if the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price….Too high a price has been placed on harmony.  We cannot afford to pay so much for admission.  And therefore I hasten to return my ticket….It’s not God that I do not accept, Alyosha.  I merely most respectfully return him the ticket.

That is very strong stuff.  There may be answers, but Alyosha doesn’t have them.

‘This is rebellion,’ Alyosha said softly, dropping his eyes.

‘Rebellion?  I’m sorry to hear you say that, said Ivan with feeling.  One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live.  Tell me straight out, I call on you –imagine me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?  Tell me the truth.’

‘No I wouldn’t said Alyosha softly.

Nor would any other sane person.  So much for rebellion – now for the Grand Inquisitor.  Ivan said he wrote a long poem about this functionary.  He had set it in Spain during the Inquisition.

The Cardinal is very old, but in fine fettle.  He has just supervised the public execution by fire of nearly one hundred heretics.  But his peace is disturbed by the arrival of a holy man.  ‘In his infinite mercy he once more walked among men in the semblance of man as he had walked among men for thirty-three years fifteen centuries ago.’  The crowd loves him.  A mourning mother says ‘If it is you, raise my child from the dead.’  The only words he utters are in Aramaic, ‘Talitha cumi’ – ‘and the damsel arose’.  And she does, and looks round with ‘her smiling wide-open eyes.’  The crowd looks on in wonder, but the eyes of the Cardinal ‘flash with ominous fire.’

He knits his grey, beetling brows….and stretches forth his finger and commands the guards to seize HIM.  And so great is his power and so accustomed are the people to obey him, so humble and submissive are they to his will, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and amid the death-like hush that descends upon the square, they lay hands upon HIM, and lead him away.

That sounds like the Saint Matthew Passion – doubtless, deliberately so.  The Cardinal visits the prisoner in the cells.  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

Do not answer, be silent.  And, indeed, what can you say?  I know too well what you would say.  Besides, you have no right to add anything to what you have already said in the days of old.  Why then did you come to meddle with us?  For you have come to meddle with us and you know it……Tomorrow, I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the vilest of heretics, and the same people who today kissed your feet will at the first sign from me rush to take up the coals at your stake tomorrow.

Ivan, brought up in Orthodoxy, explains that that in his view the fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism is that ‘Everything has been handed over by you to the Pope, and therefore everything now is in the Pope’s hands, and there’s no need for you to come at all now – at any rate, do not interfere for the time being’.  Ivan thinks this is the Jesuit view.  The Cardinal went on.

It is only now – during the Inquisition – that it has become possible for the first time to think of the happiness of men.  Man is born a rebel, and can rebels be happy?  You were warned.  There has been no lack of warnings, but you did not heed them.  You rejected the only way by which men might be made happy, but fortunately in departing, you handed on the work to us.

Then comes the bell-ringer.

You want to go into the world and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which men in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend – for nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and to human society than freedom!….Man, so long as he remains free has no more constant and agonising anxiety than to find as quickly as possible someone to worship.  But man seeks to worship only what is incontestable, so incontestable indeed, that all men at once agree to worship it all together….It is this need for universal worship that is the chief torment of every man individually and of mankind as a whole from the beginning of time…

Ivan comes again to the problem of freedom which is discussed in conjunction with the three temptations of Christ.  It’s as if the Church has succumbed to the third temptation and assumed all power over the world.

There is nothing more alluring to man than this freedom of conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either.  And instead of firm foundations for appeasing man’s conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was exceptional, enigmatic, and vague, you chose everything that was beyond the strength of men, acting consequently, as though you did not love them at all…You wanted man’s free love so that he would follow you freely, fascinated and captivated by you…..But did it never occur to you that he would at last reject and call in question even your image and your truth, if he were weighed down by so fearful a burden as freedom of choice?….You did not know that as soon as man rejected miracles, he would at once reject God as well, for what man seeks is not so much God as miracles.  And since man is unable to carry on without a miracle, he will create new miracles for himself, miracles of his own, and will worship the miracle of the witch-doctor and the sorcery of the wise woman, rebel, heretic, and infidel though he is a hundred times over…

How will it end?

But the flock will be gathered together again and will submit once more, and this time it will be for good.  Then we shall give them quiet humble happiness, the happiness of weak creatures, such as they were created.  We shall at last persuade them not to be proud….We shall prove to them that they are weak, that they are mere pitiable children, but that the happiness of a child is the sweetest of all ….The most tormenting secrets of their conscience – everything, everything they shall bring to us, and we shall give them our decision, because it will relieve them of their great anxiety and of their present terrible torments of coming to a free decision themselves.  And they will all be happy, all the millions of creatures, except the hundred thousand who rule over them.  For we alone, we who guard the mystery, we alone shall be unhappy.

The Grand Inquisitor does not believe in God.

A swipe at one church by an adherent of another?  A reprise of the fascism latent in Plato’s Republic?  A bitter denunciation of the Russian hunger for dominance by a strong man like Putin?  A frightful preview of 1984?  It could be some of all of those things, but it is writing of shocking power that gives slashing insights into the human condition.  It is for just that reason that we go to the great writers.  They may not have the answer, but they ask the big questions.

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Here and there – Dignity in Kant and Shakespeare

In any community, two questions always arise.  How should I treat my neighbour?  (Or, and this question may evoke the same answer, how would I like my neighbour to treat me?) And, are my neighbour and I equal in our rights?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote a great deal and most of it is beyond the understanding of most of the rest of us.  He did however have something to say about dignity or worth or value that we can follow.  For some people – including me – what he says can be taken as offering an axiom on which we might base our view of the moral world.

Here is part of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

….all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves….In the kingdom of ends, everything has a price or 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.

What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price; that which, even without presupposing a need, conforms with a certain taste, that is with a delight in the mere purposeless play of our mental powers, has a fancy price; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not really a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is dignity.

Now morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself, since only through this is it possible to be a lawgiving member in the kingdom of ends.  Hence, morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of humanity, is that alone which has dignity.  Skill and diligence in work have a market place; wit, lively imagination and humour have a fancy price; on the other hand, fidelity of promises and benevolence from basic principles (not from instinct) have an inner worth.

In another paper (On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory), Kant said this about equality:

Whoever is subject to laws is subject within a state and is thus subjected to coercive right equally with all other members of the commonwealth…in terms of right…they are nevertheless equal to one another as subjects; for no one of them can coerce any other except through public law….From this idea of the equality of human beings as subjects within a commonwealth there also issues the following formula: Every member of a commonwealth  must be allowed  to attain any level of rank.to which his talent, industry or luck can take him….

(This was written after the fall of the Bastille, but before the Terror became known to the world.)

In another text (Critique of Judgment, par.60), Kant said that humanity signifies the universal feeling of sympathy – although we might feel a little more at home with a reference to a capacity for a kind of sympathy that may or may not be found in gorillas.

Shakespeare touched on the issue of dignity in one of his plays that I find very heavy going, Troilus and Cressida.  Paris the Trojan has eloped with Helen the Greek wife of a Greek king.  This affront to Greek honour leads them to declare war against Troy.  Not surprisingly, at least some Trojans ask whether this insult, if that is what it was, warrants men being killed in their thousands. 

Helen and Paris have not had a good press.  (You may fairly ask who of this motley warrants one?)  A Greek soldier says of Helen:

For every false drop in her bawdy veins

A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple

Of her contaminated carrion weight

A Trojan hath been slain.  (4.1.69-72)

Hector may be the only decent person on the stage – the rest are a parade of human frailty or nastiness – and Paris and Troilus are among the worst.  Hector lines Paris up with a shirt-front:

… ..or is your blood

So madly hot that no discourse of reason

Nor fear of bad success in a bad cause

Can qualify the same? (2.2.115 – 118)

(Fear of ‘bad success in a bad cause’ might be said of us in every war since 1945.) 

Ulysses is even more damning about Cressida.

…….Her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive of her body….

For sluttish spoils of opportunity

And daughters of the game.  (4.5.56-63)

(The last line has its modern reading.)

But the passage we are interested in is as follows.

HECTOR

Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost
The holding.

TROILUS

What is aught, but as ’tis valued?

HECTOR

But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein ’tis precious of itself
As in the prizer.   (2.2.51ff)

So, Troilus has the view that value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder – ‘the prizer’ (the person making the appraisal).  Value is whatever the market will bear.  But Hector says that the dignity of a person ‘is precious of itself.’  Some might say that Troilus is on the side of relativism, the moral cancer of our time – there are no intrinsic values, only those that are attributed by others.  But for Hector human dignity is inherent in a human being – it comes with humanity.  This was the view of Kant.

Hector says that some truths are beyond matters of opinion.

There is a law in each well-order’d nation
To curb those raging appetites that are
Most disobedient and refractory.
If Helen then be wife to Sparta’s king,
As it is known she is, these moral laws
Of nature and of nations speak aloud
To have her back return’d: thus to persist
In doing wrong extenuates not wrong,
But makes it much more heavy. Hector’s opinion
Is this in way of truth….(2.2.180-186)

But then Hector flips and says that he will just go with the flow – and that is part of the reason this play is so hard to grapple with.

The notion of dignity inherent in humanity underlies the self-evident truths of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and the first article of the Rights of Man: ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’.  If you look at a random cross-section of world slayers like Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Calvin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin, or Donald Trump, you see immediately how important are the views of Kant and Hector.  These people have no regard at all for the dignity of other people.  For them, other people exist only as means to an end, and in acting that way they reject out of hand the rationale of Kant for his primary rule.  And of course their celebration of their own egos leaves any conception of equality as illusory as a thing writ on water.  For any of them, you would be talking into air to offer them the plea that a Danish prince offered on behalf of travelling players – to ‘use them after your own honor and dignity’ (Hamlet, 2.2.54—542) – that is not what they were built for.

For others, this assertion of human dignity from two of our most famous minds is a real comforter in a time of need – especially at a time of epidemic when some people, who appear to me to be close to being morally insane, think that it might be a good idea to put a dollar value on my human life.