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A rotten state

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The desolate prince was right when he described the state of Denmark as ‘rotten’.  The Compact OED gives us ‘rotting or decaying…. morally or politically corrupt.’  And there was a lot more to that decay and corruption than an ‘o’er hasty marriage’ and binge boozing behind the battlements. 

We can see signs of this rotting in governments generally in what we call the western world, but none more so than in the United States.

In her most enlightening book, Autocracy Inc, Anne Applebaum traces the similarities between the current regime in the U S, and those autocratic regimes like China or Russia, or ‘illiberal democracies’ like Turkey, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, or Hungary.

They share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth.  Unlike the communist and fascist leaders of the past…the leaders of Autocracy Inc often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures.  Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals, but deals – deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich…. Autocracy Inc offers its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible: impunity.

Does that not describe the Trump malaise in the U S?

After referring to ‘the fascist belief in the liberating power of violence’ and describing the feeling of success and calm after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Anne Applebaum says:

Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideals would spread to the autocratic states.  Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.

Later, the author refers to the remarks of a U S senator who said that ‘the same techniques of concealment used to facilitate offshore thugs and criminal activities also facilitate the political activities of domestic special interests.’

The book prompts discussion of the following – the relationship between political and financial dishonesty; the fundamental fallacy that underlies every aspect of the Trump administration; the limitations of the notion of kleptocracy; and the liability of the profiteers to account for their obtaining profits from their offices.

Trust and probity

People who hold office in government are in a position of trust owed to those who put them there.  They were not appointed or elected to look after themselves, but to serve the interests of others.  If they choose to break the rules about the limitations on their political powers, then they may just as easily break the rules about how they help themselves financially.  If they are dishonest politically, why not be dishonest financially?  If you are rotten about the rights of others, why not be rotten about their money?

There is nothing new in the notion that those in charge of the most austere political regimes are also likely to be the most corrupt financially.  Here from my schooldays is J B Bury, the bible on ancient Greece, on Sparta.

…..  the ‘communism’ which we observed in the life of the citizens was only superficial.  But it was specially provided by law that no Spartan should possess wealth in the form of gold or silver.  This law was at first eluded by the device of depositing money in foreign temples, and it ultimately became a dead letter; Spartans even gained throughout Greece an evil reputation for avarice.  By the fourth century, they had greatly degenerated, and those who wrote studies of the [Spartan] constitution contrasted Sparta as it should be and used to be with Sparta as it was.

The Spartans were not alone in having an evil reputation for avarice.  Greed was good generally – just look at Timon of Athens.  Bury remarks that Solon of Athens introduced reforms that ‘hit the rich hard,’ but that he was ‘too discreet to attempt to interfere seriously with the money market by artificial restrictions’. 

But it does seem that otherwise austere regimes cause its members to resort to graft as a way of life.  Does anyone believe that the rulers of Burma or Iran or Venezuela have clean hands?

Yet for centuries, Oxbridge clung to the myth that ancient Athens and Rome were civilized.  The wealth of each was built on slavery and the protection racket called empire.  Both slavery and empire disqualify the ancients from being called civilized. 

It was not until England shed its empire that it saw the ancient world for what it was.  Neither Athens nor Rome had ever dreamed that each of us is born with a dignity or worth merely because we are human – the sine qua non of civilization after the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth or Immanuel Kant.

For many, including me, The Republic of Plato is a blueprint for fascism.  But if we go to authentic fascists like those of Nazi Germany, we find real graft and corruption on a huge scale.  Put aside the dog-like loyalty of people like Hess and Rohm – Hitler, Goring and Himmler wallowed in mansions and riches, much of it the product of what the Romans called rapine.  Indeed, the conquering Roman armies lived off rapine – vae victis – in a manner that would only be surpassed by Attila the Hun, and Napoleon the Corsican.

It is not surprising that people cannot silo their dishonesty or greed.  That is why I take the view that we should be wary of dismissing as irrelevant the failures of those in public life that may be characterized as ‘private’.  If a person in a position of public trust cannot be trusted by those close to them, where does that leave the rest of us? 

That view may sound old fashioned.  That is not of itself a problem for most of us – if, for example, you also believe in having a trained independent civil service, or two political parties both capable of serving equally in government and opposition.  Each of those has gone clean out the window here in the last two generations.

So, that is the first point.  People in power who break the rules of government may be just as likely to break the rules about crime generally, and enrich themselves at your and my expense.

The present Trump regime stands for every part of that proposition.  Its own contribution is to be more brazen – shameless – than any of those who came before it – starting in the garden of Eden.

Government and business – and profit

The second point is the fallacy that underlies the whole Trump administration.  About forty years ago, some business people in Melbourne thought it would be simple to save struggling football clubs.  Just run them like their business.  They were dead wrong, and they sadly failed in their mission. 

Trump makes the same error.  He thinks he can run the U S like a business.  He is wrong. 

A trading corporation is formed and managed to return a profit on its business for its shareholders. 

That is not what the United States was formed for.  Its founders may have been grandiose, and hypocritical, but their stated object was not to make money.  Putting to one side the dreams of the Puritans, the aim of the founders was to deliver and ennoble the new Promised Land:

We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, and general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity ….

The congeries of slave owners who had their own self-evident truths were not after profit, but justice, tranquility, and general welfare. 

Those aspirations are pure moonshine for the New York property developer and his rough mates.  He is in it for profit and fame, and that contradiction undermines every part of his administration.  To adopt the phrase of Anne Applebaum, he puts deals way above ideals. 

Although he did not write one word of the book, Trump is obsessed with ‘the art of the deal,’ and his coming out the winner.  This is a different universe to that of Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Truman, whose one aspiration was to serve the people of the United States – ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’  Trump does not believe in God, but if he did, he would surely know that God did not create him to serve the people.

It follows that this presidency stands on an obviously false premise.  But it gets worse.  The first object of government is to keep the peace – to ensure domestic tranquility and general welfare.  The laws of the union about guns make the first impossible, and the opposition to the Welfare State, that is pursued everywhere else in the West, make the second impossible.  The United States has not achieved its stated objectives.

Trump must be taken to have admitted that the United States has not ensured tranquility for Americans.  He says he should send the federal army into cities that have let crime run amok.  That would be unthinkable in Western Europe – or, say, Australia or Canada.

Because Trump is so egocentric, his political responses are often so personal.  During the Dark Age, the justice of the state was created to replace the vendetta.  Trump now uses – or abuses – the organs of the state to pursue his own personal and political vendettas, and to give succor to those whom he persuaded to try to overthrow the Constitution.  We therefore have a fearful combination of Alice in Wonderland and Nineteen Eighty Four.

There is something more about Trump’s infatuation with ‘deals’ – as when he told President Zelensky that he, Zelensky, did not hold the right cards.  To which the obvious response was – this is not a card game. 

But deals are games for Trump, and he is a very bad loser.  (Witness the Nobel Prize, a loss he suffered in full war-like mode.)  

People do not come back for repeat business with Trump.  Good business people know that the best ‘deals’ are contained in documents that are put on file and left there.  Ongoing arrangements turn on trust – and Trump’s whole career in business suggests he cannot be trusted. 

You can, if you wish, start with two admitted facts – he avoided national service, and he avoided paying tax.  In any other western nation, his history on those grounds alone would disqualify him from being elected to any significant public office.

So, there is something unsettling, is there not, about the following proposition?  ‘Jack and Jill went into politics – and then Jack and Jill got filthy rich.’

Kleptocracy

That leaves the kleptocracies discussed at length in Autocracy Inc.  Trump puts Mammon before God every time.  (His ego has no room for God.)  And he is making millions for himself and his family from the public offices he holds.  (I could be typing this under a framed cartoon of Trump as Superman.  He sold the cartoons.  The proceeds did not go to charity.  The very idea would be absurd.) 

Words like kleptomania come from the Greek kleptos meaning ‘theft.’  Wikipedia says:

Kleptocracy is different from plutocracy (rule by the richest) and oligarchy (rule by a small elite). In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favours from lobbyists and corporations, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates.

That is not Trump.  His schtick is not theft.  That is a crime.  But Trump’s profiteering certainly looks unlawful and dishonest.

Under our Westminster system, ministers of the Crown, the members of the executive government, hold positions of trust.  As the great English legal historian, Maitland, said in another context, ‘for every exercise of the royal power, some minister is answerable’.  Civil servants are servants of the Crown and the people, and being in the same position as employees, they owe obligations under the general law of loyalty and good faith to those whose interests they serve.

It is not the Westminster model, but the rule of law that regulates the way that our governments ministers discharge their obligations under the law, at least to the same extent that we regulate the way that directors of public companies are obliged to act – in the interests of shareholders, and not themselves. 

That is very much the way of the common law in the view we take of the proper role of all those in government.  It is not to the constitution that we ordinarily look in order to control those who direct government, in much the same way that we seek to control those who direct business.  Parliament looks after its own, but otherwise these are matters for our general law – the common law and the statutes of our parliaments.  The rationale is the same.  These people are where they are for us, and not for themselves.

Unjust enrichment or unconscionable profit?

The ministers are, therefore, subject to legal duties owed to those who put their trust in them.  As such, the Ministers must put the interests of the public before their own; they must act toward the public with the utmost good faith (uberrima fidei); they must avoid any external obligation that conflicts with their duties to the public; and they must account to the public for any financial benefit they derive from breaching any such obligations.

There is a kicker for grifters in that last remedial proposition.  We are not constrained to talk about cases where the fault of the agent has led to loss of the principal.  If the principal happens to score a win, the agent may get the windfall.  The liability to account under our laws does not turn on dishonesty. 

The duties I refer to are customarily called ‘fiduciary’.  That is a very slippery word.  It is not understood by most lawyers, let alone those who are appointed as Ministers of the Crown.  It is a standing invitation to circular reasoning – he has to account, because he is a fiduciary; because he is a fiduciary, he has to account. 

But the obligations owed by public officers (or public servants) to the Crown (the Commonwealth) are described as ‘fiduciary’.  And the law is clear that the ordinary relationship of a contract of employment entails that the employee is subject to fiduciary duties to the employer.  It follows that those serving the Commonwealth, including Ministers of the Crown, owe these duties to the people of Australia.  They are accountable to the people of the Commonwealth for any failure to observe those duties and are liable to account to those people for any profit they derive from doing so.

Now, there may I suppose be nuanced arguments about the extent of these duties for public officers, but it would be difficult for ministers to say that they did not have to act in good faith, or that they could make and keep a profit arising from their position without seeking some form of authority – or without disclosing it.  Such a denial would of itself lead to loss of office.

This part of the law, generally called equity, turns on conscience, rather than fault, and it provides a remedy for conduct it regards as unconscionable.  And it does so in terms that would shock those shysters who are wont to clip the ticket, and with much greater thrust than our regulators can summon up.

Here are extracts from two texts of undoubted authority on equity.  The first is the standard text of Maitland.

….wherever a person clothed with fiduciary character gains some personal advantage by availing himself of his situation as a trustee, he becomes a trustee of the advantage so gained…the rule includes persons who are not trustees properly so called, but all those who stand in what is called a fiduciary position …it is a general principle of equity that if an agent acquire any pecuniary advantage to himself from third parties by means of his fiduciary character, he is accountable to his employer as a trustee for the profit he has made.  

The second is the great American text of Story.

But by far the most comprehensive class of cases of undue concealment arises from some peculiar relation, or fiduciary character, between the parties …the relation of client and attorney and principal and agent.  In these and the like cases, the law, in order to prevent undue advantage from the unlimited confidence, affection, or sense of duty, which the relation naturally creates, requires the utmost degree of good faith (uberrima fides) in all transactions between the parties.  If there is any misrepresentation, or any concealment of a material fact, or any justsuspicion of artifice or undue influence, courts of equity will interpose and pronounce the transaction void ….

In short, it may be laid down as a general rule, that a trustee is bound not to do anything which can place him in a position inconsistent with the interests of the trust, or which has a tendency to interfere with his duty in discharging it.  And this doctrine applies, not only to trustees strictly so called, but to other persons standing in like situation.  … Besides, agents are not only responsible for a due account of all the property of their principals, but also for all profits which they have clandestinely obtained by any improper use of that property.

Story originated in the U S.  These citations come from an English edition.  But I am not qualified to say what may be the American law relevant to the millions upon millions Trump and his family are milking from the people as a result of his use, or abuse, of public office. 

Nor do I know whether abuse of, or misfeasance in, public office gives rise to a cause of action there, or whether our law of unjust enrichment may apply.  (That law derives from the decision of Lord Mansfield given before the United States was born, in Moses vMacferlan, and which was founded simply on the ‘ties of natural justice’ and ‘the equity of the plaintiff’s case’.)

It may help to mention two English cases where people have had to account for profit they made out of a relationship where they had to act in good faith.  Only one case involved dishonesty. 

In Reading v Attorney- General, an English sergeant during the war made a large amount of money by using his position and uniform to assist smugglers.  The court held that the assets of which the sergeant had control, or the facilities which he enjoyed, or the position which he occupied, were the real cause of his obtaining the money, and he was therefore accountable for it to his employer – at common law.  It mattered not that the employer had not lost any profit, nor suffered any damage.  (Sadly, our texts on equity are reluctant to discuss this decision at common law – given at the highest level.)

Previously, the same court (the House of Lords) in Regal Hastings Ltd v Gulliver had ruled that where the directors of a public company had, as if by accident, derived a profit from a corporate restructure, they were liable to account to the company for that profit.  It arose while they were discharging a fiduciary obligation, and that liability did not depend on any finding of fraud or bad faith.  ‘The profiteer, however honest and well intentioned, cannot escape the risk of being called to account.’ That is not comfortable reading for company directors.  Or servants of government.

So, our law makes not only the greedy pause before feathering their nest.  For present purposes, we need not stay to see what particular legal rubric – what we call common law or equity – that the court applied, since all have moved on since.

Under our laws therefore, Trump and his family would be liable to be sued for millions.  I do not know what is the position in the U S. 

It is easy to hear the response of Trump.  ‘I have not even been furtive; I am the most brazen hero of the Golden Age since Achilles.  In any event, I can do what I like since I am the President of the United Sates.’  Neither could be a defence, and either should inflame the remedy.

The assertion that the President is above the law represents an argument that was lost in England in 1215.  The President would strike at the very basis of the rule of law in the United Sates if he asserted that he could derive profit from breaching the trust imposed on him by virtue of his office, and that the law denied any remedy to the people.  Such a proposition may or may not hold in China, Iran or Russia, but not in the United States.

There is a medieval background beside Magna Carta.  The Statute of Westminster 1275 provided that ‘No Sheriff nor other’s King officer shall take any reward to do his office, but shall be paid out of that which they take of the King.’  Later, Lord Mansfield said that a ‘public officer’ held ‘an office of trust and confidence concerning the public.’  The general law – common law or equity – had for long provided that someone misusing an official position for personal gain was liable to the relevant authority under a writ of account.  This was not a matter of what we call ‘constitutional law.’  It is the law that applies to the boy selling pies at the footy.

The old writ of account at common law, which was later effectively taken over by courts of equity, goes back to at least the twelfth century.  It involved two phases.  First, the issue was whether the defendant was accountable.  Secondly, a judgment for the return of capital and any profits from its use.  As was common with the development of substantive law from procedure, the writ came first, and the doctrine followed later – reluctantly.  Still, a leading text book is entitled ‘The Duty to Account’.

There is nothing therefore extraordinary, at least for Australian lawyers, about public officers at the highest level being subject to the general law of the land.  To adapt the language of A V Dicey, no one is above the law, but all of us, whatever our rank or condition, are subject to the ordinary law of the land, and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.  ‘The principles of private law have with us been by the action of the courts and parliament so extended as to determine the position of the Crown and its servants; thus, the constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land.’

The second proposition does not apply in the United States.  The first did not apply in France.  I would be surprised if that were so in the United States.  (A footnote in Dicey, published in 1885, refers to the ‘servitude of the French.’)

The Prime Minister of Australia and the janitor at Parliament House are subject to the same laws about how they go about serving the people of Australia.  If the barons got it right at Runnymede in 1215, this issue is not one of governance, much less the constitution, but one of domestic housekeeping.  The law in Australia is clear that employees are liable to account to their employers and this applies to employees of government.  It would be odd if the Prime Minister had less exposure to the law than the janitor.  Is the state of the revenue less important than the state of the loo?

Put differently, the question is not whether Ministers of the Crown are accountable to the Commonwealth and the people for any profit obtained in the carrying out of their trust, but on what legal ground could it be submitted that they are not?  A standard work of authority is blunt: ‘Wherever A owes a duty to B, B is entitled to recover from A every benefit obtained by A by virtue of his fiduciary position, without B’s knowledge and consent.’

If the legal position is not the same in the United States, it might be time they came clean about it.

Now, the proper plaintiff in any action against the President would, I suppose, be the nation – the United States.  Trump could prevent that – but only while he is in office. 

There are ways around this where a company refuses to sue its directors – one is a ‘derivative shareholder action’ – but I do not know what the position may be in the United States.  Eventually, however, Trump and his family could be held to account.

Which brings me back to the disconsolate prince of Denmark.  He fell to ground like the providential sparrow.  He felt cursed that it was left to him to put things right in Denmark.  The problem for America is that no one is putting their hand up to do so there.

And it would be a shame if they were seen to go back nine hundred years on the bequest of the nation from which they seceded.

Notes

Maitland on ministers of the Crown: The Constitutional History of England, C U P, 1963, 203.

Equity: Maitland, Lectures in Equity, Cambridge, 1910, 82-83.

Equity: Story, Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence, First English Edition, Stevens and Haynes, 1884, pars 218, 232, and 462.

Moses vMacferlan (1760) 2 Bur 1005.

Reading v Attorney- General [1951] AC 507.

Regal Hastings Ltd V Gulliver [1967] 2 AC 134n, 144.

Statute of Westminster, 1275, 3 Edward I, Ch 26: Paul Finn, Fiduciary Obligations, 2016, 358, fn 15. (Wikipedia offers a different version.)

Lord Mansfield: R v Bembridge (1783) 22 State Trials I, 155-156.

The writ of account: J A Watson, The Duty to Account, Federation Press, 2006, pars 2, 61, and 169.  The writ said the defendant must ‘duly and without delay render to the plaintiff an account’ for the time during which he held the plaintiff’s money: Pollock andMaitland, The History of English Law, 2nd Ed, Vol II, 221.  The authors there say that in the thirteenth century, statutes ‘sanctioned a procedure against accountants which was in that age a procedure of exceptional rigour.’

Dicey, The Law and the Constitution, Macmillan & Co, 1885, 177 (and footnote), 216.

The end of the Liberal Party?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In an article in The Age published on 17 October this year, Waleed Aly described the present condition of the Liberal Party.  I will set out parts at length.

But in the broader sense, 2025 was decades in the making. If the Liberal Party’s problems are now existential, it is because the very conditions that made it viable, indeed dominant, for so long have evaporated. Some of this is a function of the Liberal Party’s contradictions. But some of it is a result of its successes, too.

Menzies created the party by uniting 18 anti-Labor organisations. Politics in those days was organised largely around the Labor Party: either Labor formed government, or a coalition of ‘non-Labor’ parties did. That coalition might be free-traders or protectionists or nationalists, or some combination of these, but there was no nationally co-ordinated conservative party. Menzies remedied this by building a party on the foundations of liberalism, in which the individual reigns supreme, but even this was complicated. The Coalition as we know it expresses an unorthodox marriage of the Liberal Party’s individualism, and the Nationals’ agrarian socialism, which backed state support for primary industries.

This basic structure of Australian politics changed dramatically with the Hawke and Keating governments. Their signature economic reforms had a distinctly liberal flavour: floating the dollar, dismantling tariffs, deregulating the financial system, privatising Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. Hawke and Keating were not Reagan or Thatcher, and did things such as introducing Medicare, but they funded such projects with a more liberal economics, which changed Labor politics forever. And that, by definition, changed the nature of non-Labor politics, too.

Politics became a contest between shades of a broadly agreed liberalism. Fights occurred at the edges, over issues such as means-testing, safety nets and levels of government spending. Only when someone seriously overstepped, such as John Howard with WorkChoices, did sparks truly fly. The days of socialism being (to crib Menzies) ‘the growing threat to all that is good in our beloved country’ were over.

The big difference was on culture. As Labor liberalised economically, it also did so socially. The White Australia party dreaming of a working man’s paradise ended up spruiking being part of Asia, celebrating multiculturalism and pursuing reconciliation. From John Howard on, the Liberal Party struck a very different pose. Howard emphasised our British ties, dismissed reconciliation proposals and began interrogating migrant communities on their acceptance of Australian values.

But Howard’s lengthy success obscured the contradictions the Coalition now embodied. Put simply, its free-market economics pulled in the opposite direction of its social conservatism. It demanded high immigration – especially from Asia – but bemoaned the cultural change that brought. It wanted to deregulate labour, making working hours more irregular and unpredictable, then bemoaned the hollowing out of family life. It wanted globalisation and nationalism all at once.

This was a winning combination, but also an unstable one.

England had, and still has, both a Liberal Party and a Conservative Party.  It has always been hard to say what the Liberal Party in Australia stands for.  But is easy to say what they stood against.

The Labor Party had a history and base in the trade union movement that was its strength and its weakness.  The middle class of my generation did not want to associate with a body that had a proclaimed alliance with and reliance upon government.  There was hypocrisy in this since we as a nation have been so much more reliant on government than the Americans, but people do not have to logical in their politics. 

The Liberal Party got by not for what it stood for but what it opposed.  The bogey-man was ‘socialism’.  My schoolmates were horrified by the thought.  They were climbing the greasy pole of respectability and they did not want to be seen with that blue-collar crowd in the Collingwood outer.

The Labor Party up to 1972 was unelectable.  It was run by ‘faceless men’, and marooned by ideologues and shysters – people who thought more of themselves, and refused to acknowledge that they could only achieve their proclaimed political purpose by achieving power.

All that changed in the 80’s and the apparently calm phase under Howard is not looked back on with favour.  It has a kind of sterilized and gutless mediocrity.  Why did I before 1982 have to wait for a Labor government to lift the inane and cruel burden of income tax and to introduce the now untouchable Medicare? 

And then there were the wars joined under false pretenses, and the pussyfooting about the First Nations and the Crown.  And in the meantime, the edifice of agrarian socialism was dismantled.

So, now the infighting in a failed party that stands for nothing is vicious.  It is now the Liberal Party that is run by ‘faceless men’, and marooned by ideologues and shysters.  And they look unelectable.  Who would want to join or stand for such an ugly motley?

Their trouble makers do not recall two fundamentals about politics down under.  The man from Snowy River is a myth.  We are druggedly dependent on government.  And we could not give a bugger about ideology, class wars or the like. 

Just get on with the bloody job and make as little noise as possible.  There are not many thrilling footy umpires, but we don’t mind those that are seen but not heard.  Most of us want to have as little to do with government as possible, but we all know we have to look after those not doing so well – because one day something may go wrong for us.

My sense is that now people are less likely to be tribally attached to either major party and more able to change – to ‘swing’, if you prefer.  If you have debarred yourself from voting for one side, you have in a way disenfranchised yourself.  Going into the booth to administer a kick in the bum can be very cathartic.  And then there is the allure of those who have had real jobs and are not scarred by a political machine or albatross.

Our system of democracy turns on two parties.  At both the state level here in Victoria, and federally, one party is incapable of doing its job in that system.  That is very dangerous, and I have no idea what the answer may be, except that those called ‘independents’ will continue to fill the gaps. 

I do not see any future for the Liberal Party.  Its white ants look unstoppable and entirely unrepentant.  That again takes us back to the dark days of the 60’s, and it is of no comfort to see both the U S and U K struggling with apparently inherent weaknesses in their major parties.

If the party system collapses, what follows?

Falstaff at Covent Garden – a kind of alacrity in sinking

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment


This is how Sir John Falstaff reflects on the ignominy of being dumped in the Thames with filthy washing.

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow
of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?
Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my
brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a
dog for a New Year’s gift.  S’blood, the rogues
slighted me into the river with as little remorse as
they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies,
fifteen i’ th’ litter! And you may know by my size
that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom
were as deep as hell, I should drown. I had
been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and
shallow—a death that I abhor, for the water swells
a man, and what a thing should I have been when
I had been swelled! By the Lord, I should have
been a mountain of mummy.

This may remind you of the philosophical reflection of a sometime Spanish knight after a similar humiliation.  After being trampled on by a herd of bulls, Don Quixote laments:

Here I am with my name in the history books, a famous man of arms, courteous in my conduct, respected by princes, sought after by damsels, and just when I was expecting palms, triumphs, and crowns, I find myself this morning, as a climax to it all, trodden under foot, battered and kicked by a herd of filthy animals.

These are probably the two most famous characters in our literature.  They were created at about the same time.  In saluting what we may call the modern era, or the end of the Middle Ages, they stand for the end of all that moonshine about chivalry.  In the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we seethe arrival of the middle class as the centre of attention on our stage, a kind of Elizabethan prelude to Coronation Street, Neighbours, and Friends – although we had to wait centuries before Jennifer Anniston became the most photographed person on the planet, and bowed out in front of 52 million television viewers.

Well, that is one factor behind the snobbery that this play of Shakespeare attracts.  It may be his only play for which he supplied most of the plot, but the lead, Sir John Falstaff, had exploded on the stage in two history plays, before being killed off in another. 

But, as fans of Shakespeare are wont to remind fans of Verdi, the Falstaff of the comedy is much softer than the Falstaff of the history plays.  The brash insolence, fraud, drunkenness, cowardice, and womanizing are constant.  But in the comedy, and the Verdi opera Falstaff, we are spared watching Falstaff the recruiter accepting bribes to allow some poor blighters to be be despatched for cannon fodder.  If he cannot be said to rat on his mates, it’s because he does not have any.  It was this kind of nastiness, which gives a guilty edge to our glee, that led Sir Anthony Quayle call Falstaff ‘frankly vicious.’

The play and the opera are both put on to make us laugh and give us a good time – and reconcile ourselves to our condition.  Well, God only knows how much we need that release and therapy now.  Someone in the trade got up Verdi’s nose by saying he could not write an opera for comedy like Rossini.  Falstaff was Verdi’s answer.

At the beginning of the play, Page is discussing the form of his greyhound, which had just been outrun.  He tells Falstaff they have a hot venison pasty for dinner, and says ‘Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.’  At the end of the play, his wife says ‘let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire….’  That is precisely the tone of the whole show – and it is precisely the tone of the whole Verdi score.  It may be the most remarkable marriage of script and score that I know.

Still, some snobbery attaches to the play – but not I think to the opera.  W H Auden just refused to lecture on the play.  Well, at least he had the courtesy to refer his audience to the opera.  My own view is that if you are not uplifted by any decent performance of the play, you need help.  As for the opera – Shakespeare is the best playwright that we know, and there are only two challengers to Verdi for that position as composer of opera.  In the result, Falstaff is not just my favourite Verdi opera, but my favourite across the board.  (I may say that I have never taken to the opera Macbeth, and that the play Othello gives me the willies.   Strawberries out of order have the same effect on me as they did on Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.)

And for those who have been cruelled by Wagner, Falstaff has one unassailable charm.  It is not too long.  It takes less time than the final act of Wagner’s comedy.

Well, those who turned out to Covent Garden in October, 1999 to see a new production of Falstaff sure got their money’s worth.  The house, especially behind the famous curtain, had just had a major rebuild.  The lead was played by a popular local, Bryn Terfel.  The band was conducted by the urbane and unflappable Bernard Haitink.  The costumes and sets were alarmingly attention-grabbing.  The full crowd was expectant and knowing – and they got all that they wanted.  This is, after all, a show in which the English may claim some rights.  And I was at home, with Opus Arte, red at hand, cheering them all on.

At first, I thought the sets and costumes were overdone, and distracting.   But I acclimatised, especially after hearing the director say later that this is after all an Italian opera, and that the story had Italian roots.  (In the extras, Haitink said this is the one opera of Verdi where not one note, not one, is out of place.  Terfel in interview was entirely at ease and bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Burton in so many ways.  The commentary on the massive work backstage is riveting.) 

This is an opera where the music is integral to the whole show to an extent rarely seen outside of Mozart and Wagner.  As it goes, it gets ethereal, but we always come back to what it is there for – to give us a great night out and send us home more at peace with our neighbours and the world.  And that’s God’s work.

The highlight of this show was the peak of dramatic irony where Falstaff is telling Ford disguised as Brook how he will get Ford’s wife into bed.  The incoming bourgeoisie, the future rulers of television and the world, are terrified of being cuckolded.  You may as well be castrated.  The English language has no female counterpart to ‘unmanned.’  The sequence is as paralyzingly funny as the mirror sequence with Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, and is a warrant for the value of filming this kind of theatre, so that we can see close-up the facial contortions of the splendid Italian actor.  For some reason, his pain and anguish at the cruelty of fate reminded me so strongly of that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners.  There are times when we get almost viscerally grabbed by the universality of theatre going right back to commedia dell’ arte and the Greeks.  And all this at what used to be a convent, then a red-light area, and now one of the more singular tourist traps on this earth.

And with it all there is a sense of elegy – unless that is just my coming to grips with coming gutsers as I get older.  Falstaff is not what he was.  They know it, and so does he.  An autumnal wistfulness pervades Henry IV Part II until it is shattered by an act of brutal betrayal.  We are spared this in the comedy and opera based on it, but not in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight also entitled Falstaff.  (I do think it was a bit rich to give Jeanne Moreau second billing, when the tart Doll Tearsheet gets about three lines.)

In his play, Parolles gets his come-uppance too, but his decline and fall is total, and the pathos is scarcely funny.  As Tony Tanner remarked in discussing All’s Well, Falstaff in the comedy ‘dusts himself off fairly breezily…his attitude is more resigned – you win some, you lose some, and as you get older you lose more.’ 

I know just what he means, and perhaps that is why this play and opera just keeps getting better for me as I age.  It calls to mind a desolate Friday lunch in an Adelaide pub after court about forty years ago with a fading silk.  ‘You know, Mate, we are just like cats.  For every fight you have, you have one less to give.’

The Australian Opera put on a show of Falstaff in Melbourne about twenty years ago that mesmerised me and converted me to being a life-long a fan of both the play and the opera.  Well, this show at Covent Garden, now on film, is up there with the best – perhaps the locals can claim a home ground advantage, even if we now miss the subtle charms of the Crush Bar.  If anyone wants to challenge the West End as the beating heart of world theatre, they will have to get up bloody early.

Wuthering Heights – and Shakespeare

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A few years back now, I bought the Franklin Edition of this novel.  Now I have just finished what was at least my fifth reading of the novel.  This edition is bound in leather, and the American drawings are almost photographic compared to the bleak wood cuts in the Folio Edition. 

After I had first read this version, I placed it at number 1 in the series of great books called A Curated Library.  It is elemental and unique, like the book that had been number 1 – Carlyle, The French Revolution.  And reading it again, I was reminded of the advice of a tutor at Cambridge.  ‘Don’t read it as history.  Treat it like opera or an epic poem.’

In the Foreword to the Folio, another Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley is recorded as saying:

On the moors one could escape from all the conventional restraint and battle fiercely with earth and sky… It is this untamed moorland and its untamed characters, who admit no restraint in their fierce passions, which give Wuthering Heights its incomparable air of dark, wild, stormy freedom.

That would accord with my sentiment that we are all like Hottentots tip toeing around the crater of a live volcano, when there is no known rule about who might fall in. 

I set out my impressions about fifteen years ago in the extract below, and I will just add a few observations about a novel about our inclination to lock out the outsider.

There is quite a bit of Antony and Cleopatra in Cathy and Heathcliff – a blazing untameable, but unworldly passion, except this time the gypsy is the male.  And there is a lot of Romeo and Juliet, except this time the lovers bring their dooms on their own heads.  And there are issues not just of class, but of caste.  There are aspects of this tragedy, for that is what it is, that call to mind Othello, theultimate outsider (depending on your view of The Merchant of Venice).

And this is a revenge story, as searing as the revenge in Titus Andronicus.  Then, in the end, two battered misfits survive the rubble to unite the two houses of the star-crossed lovers, and go out in quest of what Churchill called those broad sunlit uplands, in a way that calls to mind the magical finale of the Julie Taymor movie, or the ethereal peace found at the end of Die Walküre. 

You can, as they say, treat the novel as an opera, just as Wilhelm Furtwangler did for the symphony.  But, putting all labels to one side, this is one of the most searing and explosive moments in our literature.

Well, in addition to Shakespeare, Emily was brought up on the adamantine strictures of the Old Testament, the closet subtlety of Virgil, and the fiery imagination of Milton.  Perhaps no one else wrote like Emily because so few were brought up like that.

It is not just the location that makes this novel different – it is the times.  Class was all pervasive.  Servants were different – and less entitled to respect.  (That puts it softly.)  ‘Equality’ was a myth blown up by the French.  When Heathcliff returns, should he take food in the parlour, or stay in the kitchen with the servants?  Good grief, might they have had to set two tables?  Children were treated coldly, if not cruelly.  And sickness of any kind carried the threat of death.  Sick people had to be nursed over long periods.  Sanitation was not understood, and medicine was not far removed from the barber shop. 

The author died at the age of thirty.  When you compare her age and that of her sister, or Jane Austen, with that of Charles Dickens, you can gauge what we missed.

God only knows what may have happened if Mozart had lived as long as Shakespeare.

*

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Emily Brontë (1847)

Franklin Library, 1971.  Fully leather bound, with gold edges and figured endpapers.  Illustrated by Alan Reingold.  Preface by Charlotte Bronte.

… and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same….

Wuthering Heights has passages like this that some English ladies – and I do mean ladies – that you might meet at Oxford University know by heart.  It has become part of the English psyche.  It was the first and only novel of a young woman from Yorkshire who had probably scarcely been kissed by a man, and it fairly raises the question: just what did they put on the porridge of those young girls up there back then? 

Emily Brontë was brought up in Yorkshire with a Celtic ancestry of an Irish father and a Cornish mother.  Her father was an Anglican minister and the parsonage was the centre of the life of the family which included a sister, Charlotte.  The girls went to a harsh Curates’ Daughters’ School, but they had the run of their father’s library, so that their education in literature was so much better than what modern children get – the Old Testament, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest. 

The children’s mother died young, as was common in that time, and their aunt had a fiercely Calvinist view of the world.  The children began creating their own tales and legends and creating their own worlds for those legends.  They spent some time in Europe, but they were unhappy away from the parsonage.  The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte came out two months before Wuthering Heights.  They are very, very different books.

When you think of Wuthering Heights, think not of a novel.  Think of Shakespeare – the passionate young Hamlet jumping into the grave in defiance of convention to embrace the dead body of a woman who went mad and then killed herself when Hamlet so coldly and cruelly rejected her; think of King Lear, plunged into madness by his sustained rage at being rejected by the one woman he loved; think of Othello, tipped over the brink of madness by the thought that the young, white woman he loved was not true to him; think of Macbeth, who allows the woman he loves to push him so that his ambition sends him and her to their respective hells; think of Malvolio, who is cruelly tricked into believing that his lady loves him and then is even more cruelly accused of being mad; and think of Prospero, who uses his powers of magic to bring together those who had wronged him and then brings them undone – and then buries his magic. 

Think of opera.  Think of The Flying Dutchman, and the thumping romantic drive of the music of the sea by Wagner, and the story of a rejected loner doomed to roam alone until he finds redemption.  Think of painting.  Think above all of La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Against a nocturnal European landscape, with sawn-off pillars and odd buildings, and lightning in the sky, a young man in contemporary costume stands calmly watching over a nude woman suckling a child.  Have you ever seen anything so enigmatic?  What on earth can it mean?  Or are we simply impertinent to seek to put into words what this great artist put on canvas?  Well, then, why not just enjoy it? 

Wuthering Heights is the story of a man despised and rejected of men, who is then rejected by the woman he loves, and who sets out to and does get revenge upon the whole pack of them, but who then, in the emptiness of his achievement, is reconciled to the memory of the woman he loved. 

The scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff on his return are the most blazing.  ‘I meditated this plan just to have one glimpse of your face – and a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself.’

The score settling would have to be terminal.  This is as elemental as Greek tragedy.

In their final argument Heathcliff looks to Nelly like a mad dog foaming at the mouth.  There is a level of sustained hysteria rarely seen outside of Dostoyevsky.  Heathcliff and Cathy flay and lacerate each other like mad monks.  It is like crossing Medea and Now, Voyager.

Has any other English writer unleashed emotional power – passion – like this?  The fury that Heathcliff unloads on those who should have been close to him – for example his wife and his son – must unsettle any reader.  Heathcliff twice refers to Cathy as a ‘slut’.  Nelly got it right when she said they were ‘living among clowns and misanthropes’.  But the more revenge and power that Heathcliff gets, the emptier becomes the shell of his life, and then we see that the second Cathy is looking to change things by being civilized.

For Heathcliff, God and Satan are one, and equally irrelevant, but somehow, he manages to induce his own death, so that he can be at one in the ground with his Cathy. 

The novel ends in this way: ‘I sought, and soon discovered, that the three headstones on the slope next the moor …I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and the harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.  It is so English, and yet so wild.  And the ending is as rich as that of The Dead by Joyce.

This novel comes up at us out of the earth like a novel of Christina Stead –a rough uncut diamond.  It is all rawness, and it is found in Yorkshire, of all places.  Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet come at us from the mists of the past and foreign places.  (Charlotte found her male lead in Rochester in Jane Eyre – those Brontë girls sure liked their men strong and tough.)  

Our novel is altogether more modern.  Heathcliff is the original angry young man who comes undone because his girl is not ready for him – Cathy prefers the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie, with a little bit of bovver on the side. 

Well, who could blame her?  Heathcliff was a gypsy, and he had all the makings of a real bastard.  And yet we know that neither was ever going to find peace above the ground.  How come, then, that Geoffrey Boycott was so boring? 

*

And if I can bring this note to an end by swapping from cricket to footy, when you get into this book, you are playing with the big boys.  What a shame for us that we never got a reading of this book with Heathcliff read by Richard Burton.

Quo vadis, Conservatism?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The most abused word in our language may be ‘conservative’.  When applied to the political attitudes of a person or party, what does it mean?  Is it of any use here in Australia now?  Do we have a conservative political party?

The Shorter OED has: opposed to change and holding traditional values… (in politics) favouring free enterprise and private ownership.  The Macquarie has: disposed to preserve existing conditions…cautious or moderate…traditional in style or manner….

These categories are very wide, and obviously open to questions of degree.  They practically invite the application of bromides like ‘broad church’ – until the body is so wide that it is no longer a church. 

Most labels are suspect – this one is even more so.  Some people are optimistic about the work of government.  Others are pessimistic.  Some crave change.  Others fear it.  There may be deep emotional values underlying differing world views.  The place of ‘science’ in all this is wobbly.  The temptation of deception is strong.  And the poseur might have a field day.  Especially one who craves the ear of the ‘people’.

We can see the room for slippage in the notion of ‘conservative’ from the definition in The Oxford Definition of Philosophy.

Conservatism.  Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions.  In this ‘organic’ form, it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and a properly subservient underclass.  By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally.  The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

Those remarks are English and dated now.  No sane person here would refer to ‘a properly subservient underclass’.  But no political party in the Welfare State can reject ‘benevolent paternalism’.  That would be political suicide. 

We inherited the Welfare State from the English.  The constant political issue is that we demand to retain the benefits, but we turn against those who want us to pay for them.  The result is that our government is broke, because its members are too scared of us to do what is required.  They just pass the buck to the next lot. 

They deny that, but we do not believe them.  Nor do we do anything to fix the problem.  This failing looks to be inevitable in our model of democracy.  I have no idea what the end will be.

Another thing we inherited from the English was a rejection of theory or ideology.  We distrust both.  ‘Ideology’ comes from the study of ideas.  We act on the lessons of experience rather than the demands of logic.  You see very different attitudes across the Channel or the Atlantic.

Another thing we inherited from England, after America had not, is that the English had accepted the responsibility of government for looking after the poor from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603).  In the sixteenth century, before white people had even seen America, the English people had assumed obligations for their poor that would have been abhorrent to their Puritans back then, and which still look at best alien to most Americans today.  By 1563, the English had made a law for the compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged and needy persons’.  The Oxford History of England records that the English accepted that the poor were ‘a charge on public benevolence’ and that ‘responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law upon everyone.’ 

The English did not do this for ideology or out of charity, but for the prosaic object of keeping the peace against vagabonds.  They faced reality, not God.  Common sense trumps theory.  The distance from this very old English position to that in America now is as deep as the Atlantic.

When you add to that the fact that the Welfare State was introduced to England by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in the People’s Budget, you get a better idea of the difference between us and the U S. 

Before Churchill, Disraeli had been the pin-up boy of English Conservatives.  That did not stop him taking the plunge and introducing something like universal male suffrage.  The great Prussian, Count Otto von Bismarck, had done the same for Germany before he introduced the Welfare State there.  Disraeli and Bismarck were archetype conservatives – and I admire both.

‘Conservatives,’ then, could be alarmingly ‘progressive, to use another very plastic label.  Even when ‘conservatism’ was in full flower it allowed policies we now call liberal or progressive and which would be pure heresy to those who claim to be ‘conservatives’ in the U S today.  Burke, Bismarck and Disraeli did things that would lead to apoplexy on Sky After Dark.

England had both a conservative party and a liberal party.  (Churchill flitted between both, but he was one off.)  England still has a party with ‘Liberal’ in its name beside the party of the Tories.

Australia has a party called the Liberal Party.  It also claims to be conservative, although its lore is that the title ‘Liberal’ was deliberately chosen.  It now looks neither liberal nor conservative.

For about a generation it was wedded to a party of very determined agrarian socialists.  That party now looks to be in the hands not of farmers, but mining companies and urban ideologues in think tanks.  The coalition further dilutes any recognisable platform.

What are the results in Australia? 

 First, neither of the two main parties can come close to forming a majority in parliament.  Each is on the nose to the public at large.  One is accused of forgetting its roots or past.  The other is accused – and fairly accused – of not fulfilling its obligations in opposition and of turning its province into a one-party state. 

Secondly, on vote-driving issues, the only differences between the two parties are those of degree.  With the possible exception of preserving the environment, neither major party offers policies that derive from its platform, and are different in substance to those of the other side.  Each is engaged in a listless and useless game of charades that turns people right off politics as a whole.

Thirdly, whereas two generations ago it was the Labour Party that was unelectable because of division, ideology, cranks, and crooks, now it is the turn of the Liberal Party.  They look useless and bent on sustained irrelevance under the sedative of the ideology of their media drivers. 

It is best to pass over the National Party and One Nation in silence.

The conclusion is, I think, that the word ‘conservative’ has no place in Australian politics.  It is at best useless, and at worst misleading.  Like ‘socialist’, it is a darling dodo of our time.

And no populist can claim to be ‘conservative.’  They stand, they say, for ordinary people against the ruling Establishment, whose members they brand with the term ‘elites’.  I long for the day when an Australian says ‘I don’t want the best cricketer in my Australian XI – I want a dinky die Aussie battler or bludger.’  Or someone walking into a hospital saying ‘I need surgery to deal with a life-threatening condition, but I don’t want a Top Gun surgeon – a GP from the sticks suits my schtick.  I distrust all elites.  I am but a child of the people. Who was it who said of the people, by the people, for the people?’

The most hilarious claimant for the label ‘conservative’ is Donald Trump.  His mission is to obliterate the whole status quo by deceit, and if necessary by violence and force.  And a frightening number of Americans are happy to go along for the ride on a violent road.  And the last thing Trump wants to ‘conserve’ is the planet.

His major trumpet, Fox News, has nothing to do with politics.  It exists simply to enrich and aggrandize its owners.  In this respect, it resembles Trump.  By contrast, the function of the Murdoch press in Australia is simple.  It appeals only to a portion of the voters who can only vote for one party, and while doing so makes that party unelectable.

The American ideology is home grown – the family, God, and the flag.  They look still to have a hankering after royalty, as do the French, but at its worst in the U S, you get the spewing hate of Stephen Miller, who is besotted by the very idea of ideology.

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.  It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.  It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.  Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul.

You would not want to be left alone in a room with a man who talks like that.  Goebbels would have blanched.  This is wild uncharted Scapegoat Territory.

So, the future looks bleak for democracy all round. 

Conservatism is a natural and decent instinct, but it has been claimed by people who are anything but decent, either because they are stupid, or greedy, or both.

Oddly enough, Australia may be well placed to deal with the Fall.  This is because we are not interested in ideology – or, for that matter, politics at large.  Life offers so much more.  Most sane Australians would much prefer to talk about footy or cricket than the so called ‘culture wars’.  And that is very healthy.  Australians correctly suspect those who have the time and inclination to indulge in what are called the ‘politics of grievance’.  What more do these people want?  What drives them to keep stirring the possum?  Did they not have enough toys in their childhood?

I was reminded of a very cold morning in the middle of winter on a crowded platform on a railway station an hour from Melbourne some years ago.  Then came the dreaded announcement.  The train was delayed.  Yet again.  That led to the following conversation.

I am going to punish these bastards for this at the next state election.

So am I, Mate.

Can you just remind me, Cobber – which set of bludgers claims to be running this bloody joint at the moment?

Passing Bull 412 – The spellbinding hypocrisy of Americans and guns

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.

The author of that evil banality was the late Charlie Kirk.  The President said he was a martyr.  He is – to Trump and the rest of the gun lobby.  Just another unfortunate gun death – under God and an Amendment.

The Mob – and Some of our Vices

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Shortly before white men began occupying this country, London was consumed by riots against Catholics.  These were the Gordon Riots of 1780.  Night after night, many substantial buildings, including the home of Lord Mansfield and his library beyond price, were burnt down, and hundreds were killed when the military established law and order. 

Charles Dickens told the story of those riots in his novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841).  It is an epic tale full of sound and fury, but an idiot is the hero, and this story is full of significance.  In the words of his mother, Barnaby, with the soul of innocence, ‘has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect.’  It must have taken real courage to write a novel so constructed, and having now read it for the third time, I regard it as the most powerful novel that this author has left to us.

It was not in my view an accident that led Dickens to write about the actions of the London mob with an idiot in the central role.  In words that will ring true for those who experienced the march against migrants that was patronized by neo Nazis in Melbourne in the beginning of Spring 2025, Dickens spoke of ‘this vast throng, sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London.’ 

One thing the novel is clear on.  People in a mob can be divided in two groups – the puppeteers, those who do the manipulating, and the base, those who are content to be manipulated.  It is an unholy marriage.  In the novel, one of the mob calls a puppeteer ‘so awful sly.’

Reading the novel again has prompted reflections on aspects of the Melbourne disturbances compared to the riots in London.

Selfishness

Even hermits may feel the need to call a plumber, night carter, or doctor.  If you wish to live with, or at least have access to, other people, you will not be able to act as if you were one person standing alone.  You would have to contradict Richard III expressly when he said ‘I am myself alone.’  (And he is the archetype villain.)  If you want to be able to take, you must be able to give.  In the vernacular, you must pull your weight.

This is too much for too many.  We saw it during the Covid emergency.  In an emergency, the need for cooperation and cohesion is increased.  Yet many selfish people asserted a right to opt out.  They sprouted ideological claptrap about ‘liberty’, or doubts about vaccines.  They were more concerned about their alleged rights than the vulnerability of others.  They were selfish. 

Some even claimed to be ‘sovereign citizens’.  Sovereignty is a tricky notion at best, but this looks like a contradiction in terms that makes as much sense as ‘powerless monarch’.  There is a term for such people.  ‘Bush lawyers’ are serial pests.

Then, after two police officers were murdered, and all available police were involved in a search for a dangerous killer, some decided to go ahead with a public event that they knew would take up police time and cause serious trouble.  They generated division and loathing, and some confronted and attacked police at the worst possible time. 

They seemed to be equally opposed to recent migrants and those who had been here for many thousands of years before any white people arrived in their boats.  (A lecturer of colour at Cambridge said the British Empire was spread by ‘water-borne parasites’.  It was a great line about ‘boat people’.)  The flag they purported to celebrate features a foreign flag – the one that was run up by those white migrants who first arrived here in 1788.  These marchers were in large part as nasty as they were selfish.

Prejudice

Truth matters.  Or it used to matter. 

We arrive at it, or try to arrive at it, by thinking.  There are many ways that process can be corrupted.  The most common is prejudice.  We tend to prejudge issues based on insufficient evidence and to arrive at an opinion that suits our world view.  Antagonism between people of different race, religion, sex, or sexuality typically starts this way.  It is harmless in sporting competitions, but poisonous elsewhere.

That is one way we fail to arrive at truth and risk being lost in Fantasyland.  But truth as a whole has been undermined by what is called ‘social media’, so that the man who was called the leader of the free world looks to have lost all connection with truth.  There is in play a catatonic movement in how people at large think – or, rather, don’t think.

Laziness

Too many people are too loose in their language.  We all have our prejudices – about religion and sport for example – but we are insulted if someone says we are prejudiced against people on the grounds of race, sex, or sexuality. 

The relevant terms of abuse include ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘misogynist’, and ‘homophobic’.  They have all been used so loosely that none has scarcely any useful content left.  If John the footballer is said to be ‘homophobic’, the relevant emotion is not fear.  Rather, the charge is that John dislikes gay people; that his dislike is irrational; and that he regards all gay people as being in some way inferior.  John is in truth endorsing a form of branding – something we normally reserve for cattle.

You do not compliment John by describing him in that way.  On the contrary, you are attacking him by denigrating his humanity.

There are then these problems.  This charge is far too often made with no adequate foundation.  And in circumstances of strife where prejudice and malice too often are manifest.  And the person making the charge is indulging in a form of branding, and so engaging in something like the vice he or she is attacking.

Stupidity

This ‘branding’ commonly involves its own kind of stupidity.  Do I have the right to call John a loud bigot just because he barracks for Arsenal or Collingwood?  Or can I call Ivan uncivilized just because he is Russian?  Or can I say that no Irish man can be trusted to pay tax because of the attitude of Irish government to tax? 

In each case the available premises do not support the conclusion.  The Latin phrase is non sequitur.  And in each case, there is an insult to the humanity of the target. 

Insult weighed very heavily in the Roman law of civil wrongs.  And you can find authority for a very large proposition of Roman law that any affront to the dignity of the individual was actionable for the wrong of inuria.  The common law knew nothing of the kind.

Victimhood

You know you are in Lala Land when Donald Trump claims that he and Vladimir Putin, and, for that matter Benjamin Netanyahu, are victims of some undue process.  (He is happy to pass over the fact that he is so far at least the only member of the trilogy to have been convicted of a serious crime.)  Nigel Farage claims the right to stand up for victims.  He says that ordinary English people are victims of excessive migration.  That claim was being aired in the marches against migrants here in Australia.

This is I suppose an example of what some people in the press call ‘identity politics’.  The problem is that to claim each member of a group should be regarded as different to the rest of the community, and therefore dealt with differently, can lead to the most pernicious consequences in the history of mankind.

Naivety

If you watch programs like American Greed, you will wonder at the stupidity of victims of con men.  You may wonder if you could be so vulnerable.  ‘There is one born every minute’ is a truth that comes from the fact that the promise of wealth distorts, or blows, people’s minds.  They forget one maxim of investment: the greater the return, the higher the risk.  At best, the victims look naïve, and when the scam is uncovered, they feel shame that they allowed themselves to be taken for a ride.  (I speak from experience of having been scammed.)

Recently, people marched in Melbourne protesting, they said, against migration.  Very few would acknowledge that all white people in Australia – the nation of the infamous White Australia Policy – are migrants, or descendants of migrants going back to 1788, but we can put that to one side.  We are assured that many of these people were decent people exercising their democratic right of protest in an event that was taken over by neo Nazis. 

That takeover was foreseeable, if not inevitable, and those decent people must be naïve to a level that makes them dangerous.  They were after all participating in the inevitable replay of an historical process.  Children fight hard to gain control of the tree house, and then fight like hell to lock out other upstarts threatening to dilute their power or wealth.  Try for example The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Jealousy

If you look at western democracies that embody the welfare state – and the U S is not one of them – you face the same problems.  People want to receive the same benefits from government, but they don’t want to pay for it.  Those at the top get cross at the increasing demands made on them, and those at the bottom are incensed at the lack of fairness in the distribution of income and wealth.  And they resent newcomers who look to them to be here to get their heads in the trough.  They fear that their own standing is being debased.

You know you have a problem when both ends are whingeing, but it is hard to persuade a bank teller that the system is fair and reasonable when her boss gets paid one hundred times what she gets, and when some professional people are charging north of thirty thousand dollars a day.

Righteousness

This term is not often used favourably now.  It is downright obnoxious when claimed for one’s self by the speaker – usually by implication.  It is implicit in the bearing of the victims.  The self-righteousness of some victims – actual or alleged – can be revolting, especially with those who look like anything but victims, when they seek to benefit from the suffering of others.  (A droll observer, might offer, from a safe distance, Collingwood supporters as a good example.  People of wealth and standing posing as victims.) 

Not many of these standard-bearers of the downcast are surgeons or silks.  But we see it now from those at the very top to those at the very bottom when they seek to assert some moral right in what is otherwise a sterile argument about wealth and power – underwritten by the green-eyed monster called jealousy. 

These claims on righteousness lead people into melodrama, and claiming a significance that life has otherwise denied them.  For a change, they mean something, and they have a cause.

And white Australians baiting migrants and people of colour, when all white Australians are white migrants or their descendants, are about as nasty as you can get.  Among other things, apart from our migrant past, you would have to shut down every hospital in Australia if you were to exclude migrants, especially those from Asia and Africa.

Insecurity

Insecurity is no more a vice than anxiety, but it plays a fundamental role in much of our communal unrest.  You do not see many professional people or leaders of business at MAGA or Nazi rallies, and you rarely hear complaints or fears about migrants from those whose position or status is secure.  The trouble often comes from those who are insecure, and therefore feel anxiety, a form of fear.  This then disfigures thought.  The great Dutch philosopher Spinoza said:

‘Men would never be superstitious if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune …. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident and vain.  Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.’

Some cannot tolerate doubt, and along with superstition, they go after any conspiracy theory that they think might justify their world view.

It is, I suppose, a fact of life, if not language, that the weak are prey to predators.  And stupidity and insecurity lead inevitably to gullibility, as Spinoza observed. 

People become suckers for those who have the answer.  They are vulnerable, and when the aggrieved unite behind a leader, their communal belief and self-righteousness warps their minds, and strife and violence become more incidental than accidental.  On a bad day you get the Proud Boys.  Here it is the so-called neo Nazis – forget the neo, they are Nazis properly so called. 

Macaulay said:

‘We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves…. virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is within his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind.’

Ambition

This does not sound like the people we are looking at.  ‘Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.’  Big hitters like Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler all had ambition and were brought down by it, leaving millions of dead behind them, but it does not seem the appropriate epithet for our protesting marchers.  They do not want to join the ‘elites’ – they loathe them.

Intolerance

Attaching headings to these traits should not give these labels any more force than traits to look for in trying to work out how we go off the rails.  They are all out there to combine to undo us.  But we may have left the worst to last.  Intolerance.  Sir Lewis Namier knew as much about history as anyone I have read.  He said what we miss is ‘tolerance with the restraint it implies.’  If you look at the flare-ups currently being encountered in the U S, the U K, or Australia, they arise from or are driven by intolerance and a lack of restraint.

Venom

The result of these vices can be a loathing that cannot be dismissed as irrational, and a form of vitriol that is anything but rational.  Such as Nazis or police killers who call themselves ‘sovereign citizens.’  These people are cancers on the common weal, and in looking at dealing with them, we should bear steadily in mind the forces for evil that were unleashed in Paris in 1789, in St Petersburg in 1918, and Berlin in 1933.  Those explosions led to catastrophic losses of life and human dignity.  It is curious that two are still celebrated in some parts.  But what we do know is that when revolution comes, the scum rises to the surface – and we can already see the scum before our eyes.

Dickens had at least two things in common with Shakespeare – the ability to depict precisely those at the bottom of the barrel, and an unholy fear of the mob.  In this Dickens novel, the hero was sentenced to death for his part in the riots.  He got a full pardon in the end, presumably on the ground of some kind of diminished responsibility.  Medicine may need to refine its views on insanity, and the law may need to do so on criminal liability, but it would be as well to remember the insistence of Hannah Arendt that:

‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’

Passing Bull 411 – Hume on dodgy moralists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

DISPUTES with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind.  The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood.  And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

David Hume began his Enquiry regarding the Principles of Morals this way in about 1750 – centuries before Fox News or Sky After Dark.  Andrew Bolt would have been his Eureka moment – the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood.  

Passing Bull 410 – The Enemy Within

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

In discussing a quintessential cad of the upper class in Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens permitted himself what his friend Thomas Carlyle may have called ‘a philosophical reflection.’  (You can find the phrase in the first sentence of The French Revolution.’

The despisers of mankind – apart from the mere fools and mimics of that creed – are of two sorts.  They who believe their merit neglected and unappreciated, make up one class; they who receive adulation and flattery, knowing their own worthlessness, compose the other.  Be sure that the coldest misanthropes are ever of this last order.

At the risk of being uncharitable, this might bring to mind Canberra, Washington and Westminster – and a fair slice of the press.

Who was it who said that we go to great writers for the truth?

More on Minorities

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Lectures on Foreign History by J M Thompson is one of my favourite books.  I keep going back to it.  As a tutor at Cambridge remarked, the Reverend historian wrote at a time when good writing was a prized attribute of the historian – one which we hardly see now.

Here is part of the author’s lecture on the reaction of the Church to the Reformation.

First came the Jesuits – then called ‘the Company of Jesus’.  The Company was, he says, a military body living under military discipline.  All religious orders had a vow of obedience, but that of the Jesuits was ‘specially strict’.  The members were to be directed and ruled ‘as though they were a dead body.’ 

As for liberty of thought, there is no more room for patriotic agnosticism in West Point than for Jesuit agnosticism in a Jesuit College.

Well, all that has a very different ambience here and now.

Then came the Inquisition.

After this auspicious beginning, the Spanish Inquisition never looked back.  It became a weapon of the State as well as the Church.  It punished political liberalism as it punished unorthodoxy in religion – they were regraded as two sides of the same coin.  It was turned less against Protestants than against Jews, Moors, and renegade Jewish Christians.  It chose its victims from the classes best worth plundering.  If they could not be burnt, at least their goods might be confiscated, or they might be frightened into purchasing their freedom cash down.

The Reverend was a man of the cloth – and surely also a man of the world. 

Elsewhere, we read of the Duke of Orleans in what was called ‘the barbarous age’.  ‘His Godhead was the Trinity of wealth, of women, and of wine’. 

But it was said that at birth the fairies had given him every gift, but the last fairy said: ‘He will possess all the talents, except the talent for making use of them.’

I know just what the fairies meant – the risk manager’s nightmare.