‘Sovereignty’ is a loaded term.  Sovereigns are big hitters.  The sovereign is supreme.  There is no one superior.  So when England was subject in some ways to the Church of Rome, its king was to that extent not supreme in his own nation.  Indeed, in scrapping with the barons over Magna Carta, King John became a vassal to Rome.  So when King Henry VIII was prevented by the Church of Rome from attending to an important matter of state – securing succession to the throne – the question for him was – who was preeminent in England – the king or the pope?  He settled the matter in his favour by persuading the parliament to break all ties with Rome by passing a series of statutes for that purpose.  One was naturally called the Act of Supremacy.  It iced the cake with the assertion that England was always known as an ‘empire’.  Now, Facebook is nasty and Mr Zuckerberg is nauseatingly unctuous, but Facebook is not challenging the place of the Commonwealth of Australia in the governance of this nation.  Rather, it is seeking to bring pressure on the government about a law it proposes to make – much as a union might do to an employer seeking to alter terms of employment.  Claims by government ministers that there is an issue about sovereignty resemble claims by employers that a trade union by industrial action is seeking to take over management of the company.  It is just a bit of local colour.  Facebook is well capable of shooting itself in its posterior.  And if it showed that to us on the way out, I would stand and cheer.

Extracts from a book of fifty important books or people.  The second of four such volumes.

A REMARKABLE POLITICIAN

Stefan Zweig

Viking Press New York, 1930.  Quarter bound in burgundy leather with title in gold on black label and navy cloth boards.

Some politicians get by with luck and grit, and not a lot more.  Perhaps that is all that it takes for most of them – as it tends to be for the rest of us.  One such politician was Joseph Fouché who was active during the French Revolution and who, as the Duke of Otranto, was Minister of Police for the Emperor Napoleon.  Fouché was the ultimate survivor.  The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was an immensely popular novelist in the 1930’s, called Fouché ‘the most perfect Machiavel of modern times’ – ‘a leader of every party in turn and unique in surviving the destruction of them all.’.  Here was a ‘man of the same skin and hair who was in 1790 a priestly schoolmaster, and by 1792 already a plunderer of the Church; was in 1793 a communist, five years later a multimillionaire and ten years after that the Duke of Otranto.’  Fouché therefore was not just a survivor – he was a winner.

In introducing his book about ‘this thoroughly amoral personality’, Joseph Fouché, The Portrait of a Politician, Stefan Zweig said this:

Alike in 1914 and 1918 [the book was written in 1929] we learned to our cost that the issues of the war and the peace, issues of far-reaching historical significance, were not the outcome of a high sense of intelligence and exceptional responsibility, but were determined by obscure individuals of questionable character and endowed with little understanding.  Again and again since then it has become apparent that in the equivocal and often rascally game of politics, to which with touching faith the nations continue to entrust their children and their future, the winners are not men of wide moral grasp and firm conviction, but those professional gamesters whom we style diplomatists – glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.

Those observations have the timelessness of truth. 

Joseph Fouché was born in the seaport town of Nantes to a seafaring mercantile family.  The great places were reserved for the nobility, so Joseph went into the Church.  He went to the Oratorians who were in charge of Catholic education after the expulsion of the Jesuits.  He becomes a tonsured teacher, not a priest.  ‘Not even to God, let alone to men, will Joseph Fouché give a pledge of lifelong fidelity.’  Three of the most powerful French political thinkers then – Talleyrand, Sièyes, and Fouché – come from an institution that the Revolution will be bent on destroying, the Church. 

Joseph became friendly with a young lawyer named Robespierre.  There was even talk that he might marry Robespierre’s sister, and when the young Maximilien was elected to the Estates General at Versailles, it was Joseph who lent him the money for a new suit of clothes. 

When Joseph moves that the Oratorians to express their support for the Third Estate, he is sent back to Nantes.  He then becomes political, discards his cassock, and, after marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, ‘an ugly girl but handsomely dowered’, he is elected to the revolutionary National Convention in 1792 as the Chairman of the Friends of the Constitution at Nantes. 

Fouché is always cool and under control.  He has no vices and he is a loyal husband, but he will be an ‘inexorable puritan’ and invincibly cold blooded, at his best working in the shadows as an unseen second to the limelighters.  He prefers the reality of power to its insignia, but with ‘his resolute freedom from convictions’, he is quite capable of repudiating a leader who has gone too far.  ‘He knows that a revolution never bestows its fruits on those who begin it, but only on those who bring it to an end and are therefore in a position to seize the booty.’

Fouché starts up the ladder.  He had aligned with the moderates known as the Gironde on the issue of death for the king, but sensing the shift in the breeze, he stabbed them in the back with the words la mort when it came his turnto cast his vote.  He acquires huge power as Representative on Mission, a kind of Roman proconsul.  He has what we would call a communist social program, especially toward the Church.  He issues an utterly chilling instruction: ‘Everything is permissible to those who are working for the revolution; the only danger for the republican is to lag behind the laws of the Republic: one who outstrips them, gets ahead of them; one who seemingly overshoots the aim, has often not yet reached the goal.  While there is still anyone unhappy with the world, there are still some steps to take in the racecourse of liberty.’ 

The çi devant Oratorian declares war on the Church ‘to substitute the worship of the Republic and of morality for that of ancient superstitions.’  He abolishes celibacy and orders priests to marry or adopt a child within one month.  In Moulins, he rides through the town at the head of a procession hammer in hand smashing crosses, crucifixes and other images, the ‘shameful’ tokens of fanaticism.  This is the phase of dechristianization, far, far more brutal than the Reformation in England.

But we also speak of the Terror, when an anxious France was guillotining its enemies within, and Robespierre would implement the Law of Suspects.  It is the black night of the revolution and it leads Stefan Zweig to this most remarkable judgment which still speaks so clearly to us at a time of a collapse in public life.

By the inexorable law of gravity, each execution dragged others in its train.  Those who had begun the game with no more than ferocious mouthings, now tried to surpass one another in bloody deeds.  Not from frenzied passion and still less from stern resolution were so many victims sacrificed.  Irresolution, rather, was at work; the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob.  In the last analysis, cowardice was to blame.  For, alas, history is not only (as we are so often told) the history of human courage, but also the history of human faintheartedness; and politics is not (as politicians would fain have us believe) the guidance of public opinion, but a servile bowing of the knee by the so-called leaders before the demons they have themselves created.

With those words, Stefan Zweig justified not only this whole book, but his whole life.  The words ‘the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob’ should be put up in neon lights in every parliamentary and government office, and in the booth of every shock jock, poll taker, and sound-bite grabber, and that of any other predatory bludger, urger, or racecourse tout.

And the Terror was in turn at its worst for those parts of France that had sought to rebel in bloc, like the great city of Lyon, the second of France.  The revolt in the west in the Vendée was seen to be Catholic and Royalist; in Lyon, it was a revolt by class and money.  The reprisals for each had a manic cruelty and intensity unmatched until the times of Stalin and Hitler.  In the Vendée, a man named Carrier was responsible for the infamy of the noyades, when batches of priests were manacled, and placed on barges that were towed in the Loire and then sunk.  Fouché executed revolutionary justice at Lyon where the guillotine was thought to be too cumbersome.  The depravity is described by Zweig in these terms:

Early that morning sixty young fellows are taken out of prison and fettered together in couples.  Since, as Fouché puts it, the guillotine works ‘too slowly’, they are taken to the plain of Brotteaux, on the other side of the Rhone.  Two parallel trenches, hastily dug to receive their corpses, show the victims what is to be their fate, and the cannon ranged ten paces away indicate the manner of their execution.  The defenceless creatures are huddled and bound together into a screaming, trembling, raging, and vainly resisting mass of human despair.  A word of command and the guns loaded with slugs are ‘fired into the brown’.  The range is murderously close and yet the first volley does not finish them off.  Some have only had an arm or leg blown away; others have had their bellies torn open but are still alive; a few, as luck would have it, are uninjured.  But while blood is making runnels of itself down into the trenches, at a second order, cavalrymen armed with sabres and pistols fling themselves on those who are yet alive, slashing into and firing into this helpless heard, of groaning, twitching and yelling fellow mortals until the last raucous voice is hushed.  As a reward for their ghastly work, the butchers are then allowed to strip clothing and shoes from the sixty warm bodies before these are cast naked into the fosses which await them.

All this was done in front of a crowd of appreciative onlookers.  The next batch was enlarged to two hundred ‘head of cattle marched to the slaughter’ and this time the avengers of the nation dispensed with the graves.  The corpses were thrown into the Rhone as a lesson to the folks downstream.  When the guillotine is again put to work, ‘a couple of women who have pleaded too ardently for the release of their husbands from the bloody assize are by his [Fouché’s] orders bound and placed close to the guillotine.’  Fouché declares: ‘We do not hesitate to declare that we are shedding much unclean blood, but we do so for humane reasons, and because it is our duty.’ Zweig concludes: ‘Sixteen hundred executions within a few weeks show that, for once, Joseph Fouché is speaking the truth.’  That may be so, but the invocation of humanity for this butchery defies all language.

I am relying on a translation (by Eden and Cedar Paul in the 1930 Viking Edition), but Zweig attributes to Fouché what he calls ‘a flamboyant proclamation’;

The representatives of the people will remain inexorable in the fulfilment of the mission that has been entrusted to them.  The people has put into their hands the thunderbolts of vengeance, and they will not lay them down until all its enemies have been shattered.  They will have courage enough and be energetic enough to make their way through holocausts of conspirators and to march over ruins to ensure the happiness of the nation and effect the regeneration of the world.

There, surely, you have a preview of all the madness and cant that will underlie the evil that befalls mankind in the next century.

Fouché and his accomplice get news that the wind may have changed in Paris and the other is sent back to cover their backs.  Fouché now has to deal with Robespierre, ‘that tiger of a man, balancing adroitly as usual between savagery and clemency, swinging like a pendulum now to the Right and now to the Left’, who was unhappy with Fouché for having displaced his own henchman (the crippled lawyer Couthon who had no stomach for the task).  Robespierre is the cold lawyer from Arras that we associate with the height of the Terror – and with its end.  Zweig says that Robespierre was ‘wrapped in his virtue as if it were a toga’.  That about sums it up, but Zweig has a most remarkable passage that includes:

Robespierre’s tenacity of purpose was his finest quality, but it was also his greatest weakness.  For, intoxicated by the sense of his own incorruptibility and clad as he was in an armour of stubborn dogmatism, he considered that divergences of opinion were treasonable, and with the cold cruelty of a grand inquisitor, he was ready to regard as heretics all who differed from him and send them to a heretic’s doom…..The lack of communicable warmth, of contagious humanity, deprived his actions of procreative energy.  His strength lay exclusively in his stubbornness; his power, in his unyielding severity.  His dictatorship had become for him the entire substance and the all-engrossing form of his life.  Unless he could stamp his own ego on the revolution, that ego would be shattered.

That judgment may be too severe for Robespierre, but it looks dead right for Lenin – especially the last, about the insatiable need to stamp his own ego on the revolution.  There is the key to the agony of all the Russias.

There followed a duel between Fouché and Robespierre.  Fouché ‘had never asked Robespierre’s advice; had never bowed the knee before the sometime friend.’  Robespierre turned on Fouché in the Convention: ‘Tell us, then, who commissioned you to announce to the people that God does not exist, you, who are so devoted to that doctrine?’    Fouché is just one target in a speech that ends in a hurricane of applause.  Fouché goes quiet, he goes underground, he performs the then equivalent of working the phones – and then he surfaces – as the next elected President of the Jacobins Club!  This is the rank and file of the ‘party’. 

The response had to be nasty, and the next time Robespierre is brutal, with the by then standard allegation of conspiracy.  ‘I was at one time in fairly close touch with him because I believed him to be a patriot.  If I denounced him here, it was not so much because of his past crimes because he had gone into hiding to commit others, and because I believed him to be the ringleader of the conspiracy which we have to thwart.’  This was vintage Robespierre paranoia and the stakes were terminal.  Fouché is expelled from the Jacobins.  ‘Now Joseph Fouché is marked for the guillotine as a tree is marked for the axe…..Fifty or sixty deputies who, like Fouché, no longer dare to sleep in their own quarters, bite their lips when Robespierre walks past them; and many are furtively clenching their fists at the very time when they are hailing his speeches with acclamations.’ 

Robespierre is circling in his sky-blue suit and white silk stockings, and the very air is thick with fear.  He gives a three hour harangue, but then declines to give names.  ‘Et Fouché?’ gets no answer.  Fouché furiously works the numbers: ‘I hear there is a list, and your name is on it.’  ‘Cowardice shrinks and dwindles, and is replaced by desperate courage.’  God rolls the dice, the bunnies become wolves, and Robespierre and his lieutenants are submitted to the blade that they had brought down on so many others.

Here Zweig permits himself a general political observation.  He condemns those who overthrew Robespierre for their ‘cowardly and lying attitude’ who ‘to gain their own ends have betrayed the proletarian revolution.’  That is an assessment made in 1929 that many French historians would embrace, and Fouché had tried to get on a populist horse.  This time he picked badly, and the new regime had different views about the Terror – and Lyon.  Fouché ‘like many animals shams dead that he may not be killed.’  He goes underground for three years living on the breadline.  No one mentions his name.  As to the proletariat – what a dire and debasing word! – there is not much use crying over spilt milk.  Those who are crying wanted the French terrorists to do what Lenin had tried to do, and transfer all power from the king to all those at the bottom inside one generation.  It cannot be done.  It took the English, who are geniuses at this, seven centuries.

Fouché lies low and poor.  The carpet-baggers of the new shop-soiled regime, the Directory then the Consulate, need someone who can work in darkness, a cold-blooded spy, a collector of information on others, a man to hold chits IOU’s and grudges, and someone who can oil the wheels of power and money.  Who else?  ‘Joseph Fouché has become the ideal man for these sordid negotiations.  Poverty has made a clean sweep of his republican convictions, he has hung up his contempt for money to dry in the chimney, and he is so hungry that he can be bought cheaply.’  Is it not remarkable how deathless are all these political insights? 

The dark and dangerous mitrailleur of Lyons is back in town – as minister of State, the Minister of Police to the mighty and all-conquering Republic of France!  Well, our man ‘has no use for sentimentality, and can whenever he likes, forget his past with formidable speed’.  The Jacobins are a shadow of themselves, but they are also beside themselves at this heartless enforcer of tranquillity – who calmly says that there must be an end to inflammatory speeches!  In France?  In Paris?  In 1799?

They have learned little during these years.  They threaten the Directory, the Ministers of State, and the constitution with quotations from Plutarch.  They behave as rabidly as if Danton and Marat were still alive; as if still, in those brave days of the revolution, they could with the sound of the tocsin summon hundreds of thousands from the faubourgs.

But our man has got his sense of scent back.  He knows the public mood.  The former president just closes down the Jacobins Club – the next day.  People are sick of strife.  They want their peace and their money.

Then some people higher up start to fear the information that he gets – on everyone.  Knowledge means power, and Fouché has more knowledge than anyone – more even than Napoleon.  And people start to notice that his eyes look upwards as well as downwards.  Talleyrand, who also stands up to Napoleon and lives to talk about it, and who is another consummate and totally conscienceless puppeteer, says: ‘The Minister of Police is a man who minds his own business – and goes on to mind other people’s.’

But when Napoleon becomes Consul for Life, his family, the biggest weakness of the loyal Corsican, urge him to fire Fouché.  Napoleon shifts him sideways, but ‘seldom in the course of history has a minister been dismissed with more honourable and more lucrative tokens of respect than Joseph Fouché.’  It was ever thus. 

Fouché goes into retirement again, the polite and thrifty squire with his wife and children who gives a homely entertainment now and then.  The neighbours see a good husband and a kind father.  But the old campaigner feels the itch.  ‘Power is like the Medusa’s head.  Whoever has looked on her countenance can no longer turn his face away, but remains for always under her spell.  Whoever has once enjoyed the intoxication of holding sway over his fellows can never thenceforward renounce it altogether.  Flutter the pages of history in search for examples of the voluntary renouncement of power….Sulla and Charles V are the most famous among the exceptions.’ 

Napoleon senses the itchiness of Fouché but he does not want to take him back; ‘the argus-eyed unsleeping calculator’ is too dangerous.  But then Napoleon errs – he has the Duke of Enghien kidnapped over the border and returned to France to be shot – he passes his grave on the way to his ‘trial.’  This leads Fouché (some say Talleyrand) to make the famous remark: ‘It was worse than a crime it was a blunder.’  Napoleon needs someone to hold the stirrup again, and on his ascension to the purple – he allows the pope to watch him crown himself – Son Excellence Monsieur le Senateur Fouché is appointed Minister by Sa Majeste l’Empereur Napoleon.  He will become the Duke of Otranto and while the rest degenerate into ‘flatterers and lickspittles’, the Minister of Police stiffens his back, and minds his own business and that of everyone else. 

Fouché is a millionaire many times over, but he lives a frugal almost Spartan life.  His image is part of his terrifying power.  He and the Emperor are at arms’ length.  ‘Filled with secret antipathy, each of them makes use of the other, and they are bound together solely by the attraction between hostile poles.’

The stakes have gone up now.  At Marengo in 1800, Napoleon won with thirty thousand men; five years later, he has three hundred thousand behind him; five years later, he is raising a levy of a million soldiers.  He will leave five million in their graves.  And now Fouché must deal with the political genius of Talleyrand, another of the world’s very greatest survivors.  ‘Both of them are of a perfectly amoral type, and this accounts for their likeness in character.’  For a long time tout Parisgazes in a kind of trance at the duel between Fouché and Talleyrand, and, as it happens, both survive Napoleon. 

Fouché was either working for Napoleon or plotting against him, or both, even during the Hundred Days leading to Waterloo.  In fact, Fouché served as Minister of Police to Talleyrand as Prime Minister after 1815 for Louis XVIII.  Since he had voted for the death of that king’s brother, Louis XVI, this might be seen as the masterpiece of his slipperiness or negotiability.  He then proceeded to orchestrate a new terror, the White Terror, against the enemies of the Bourbons.  This revolted even Talleyrand, and Fouché was shifted again, this time for the last time.  He died in his bed in Trieste in 1820.

It is hard to imagine our story, for that in part is what it is, being told better than Stefan Zweig tells it in this wonderful book.  The author moves so easily from one graceful insight to the next, and like a true champion he makes it all look so easy and so natural.  And as our author leaves his subject, he leaves us with the question that Shakespeare leaves to us with various bastards, in the proper sense of that word, and Richard III and Falstaff – why are we so taken with the life and character of such an absolute villain?  And he also leaves us with the same old problem – glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.

MY SECOND TOP SHELF 19 – ARTHUR MILLER

Extracts from a book of fifty important books or people. The second of four such volumes.

COLLECTED PLAYS

Arthur Miller

Franklin Library, 1981.  Fully bound in embossed leather, with ridged spine; gold finish to pages and moiré endpapers with satin ribbon.  Introduction by the author.  Illustrated by Alan Mardon.  Limited edition.

Death of a Salesman is not an easy night out at the theatre.  Au contraire.  This play is wrenching, as wrenching for some as the tragedy of King Lear.  It is pervaded with a sense of doom – not just in the sense of that term in Lord of the Rings, as an end foretold, but in the darker sense of inevitable destruction or annihilation.  The battered, deluded Willy Loman is, like the crazy old king, bound upon a wheel of fire, and the fate of his whole family unfolds before eyes that you may wish to avert.  It is therefore as challenging as a Greek tragedy or one of Shakespeare, because it is a searing inquiry into the American Dream.  That is not something that many Americans have been all that happy to undertake.  (Indeed, the character of the White House as we speak shows a frightening capacity for delusion.)  But by the end of the play, you may be left with the impression that a champion of American business is less secure than a medieval serf.

This is Willy according to his wife:

I don’t say he’s a great man.  Willy Loman never made a lot of money.  His name was never in the paper.  He’s not the finest character that ever lived.  But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.  So attention must be paid.  He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.  Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

When Willy’s boss wants to get rid of him, he responds: ‘You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.’  He is, as his wife remarked, a human being.  But his delusion passes to his sons.  When reality catches up with his son Biff, he says: ‘I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We’ve been talking in a dream for fifteen years.’  In the Introduction, the author says:

The play was always heroic to me, and in later years the academy’s charge that Willy lacked the ‘stature’ for the tragic hero seemed incredible to me.  I had not understood that these matters are measured by Greco-Elizabethan paragraphs which hold no mention of insurance payments, front porches, refrigerator fan belts, steering knuckles, Chevrolets, and visions seen not through the portals of Delphi, but in the blue flame of the hot-water theatre…..I set out not to ‘write a tragedy’ in this play, but to show the truth as I saw it.

The academy was dead wrong.  E pur si muove.

All My Sons is hardly any easier.  The American Dream here is punctured not by failure but by betrayal, and a crime of the worst kind.  A businessman in a time of war betrays his nation by selling defective parts to the army.  This crime leads to the deaths of American servicemen including, it would appear, one of his own sons.  And the man says that he did it for his family.  But, as in Greek tragedy, his crime comes back on the whole family and ultimately it will only be answered by his death.  In The Wild Duck, Ibsenwrote a drama where one businessman was forced to accept moral and legal responsibility for the crime of his partner.  This affront to the American Dream would be one of the factors leading to Miller being confronted by the Houses Un-American Committee.

This is how the playwright introduces Joe Keller, the hero. 

Keller is nearing sixty.  A heavy man of stolid mind and build, a business man these many years, but with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still upon him.  When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgment must be dredged out of experience and a peasantlike common sense.  A man among men.

There is no doubting that this is like a Greek tragedy.  The mother tells the son that the brother who was a pilot and has been missing for years is still alive.

Your brother’s alive darling, because if he’s dead your father killed him.  Do you understand me now?  As long as you live, that boy is alive.  God does not let a son be killed by his father.

This drama, like that of Ibsen, is both hair-raising and fundamental, and the end of this play is quite as shocking as the end of Hedda Gabler.

The Crucible grabs and distresses us for different reasons.  It is a fraught descant on the lynch mob, and it had and continues to have so much impact because it covers ground from the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century to the McCarthy pogroms of the twentieth century.  In the course of both, we get to see ourselves at our most fragile and lethal worst.  And this is ‘us’ – this is not an American problem any more than fascism was a German problem.

The children at Salem in 1692 suffered from hysteria in the medical sense.  The reaction of the community was hysterical in the popular sense.  If you believe in witchcraft, it works.  (Witness the effect of pointing the bone in our indigenous community.)  A ‘victim’ showing hysterical symptoms is a victim of a fear of witchcraft rather than of witchcraft itself, although the distinction may not matter.  John Hale showed a remarkable insight when he observed at Salem that the suspects showed fear not because they are guilty, but because they were suspected.  In 1841 a Boston legal commentator said that no one was safe and that the only way to avoid being accused was to become an accuser.  That script was re-written word for word during the Terror in France.

From 1950 to 1954 the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, used The Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations as his version of The House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) to pursue people who had had any association with the Communist Party.  HUAC had previously been a dodgy little affair specialising in anti-Semitism, but when the Red scare came to prominence under the boozy mania of McCarthy, real people got badly hurt without anything resembling a trial, much less due process. The Americans had in truth unleashed a latterday pogrom, and it only ceased when McCarthy over-reached and went after the Army.

One of the writers forced to appear before the HUAC was Arthur Miller.  He correctly believed that he only got his subpoena because of the identity of his fiancée.  (In an amazing commentary on the difference between the power of sex appeal and the sex appeal of power, the Chairman offered to cancel the session if he could be photographed with Marilyn Monroe.) 

Miller adopted the position that had been taken before the committee by Lillian Hellman.  She said that she was willing to talk about her own political past but that she refused to testify against others.  She said:

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

Hellman did not have the advantage of a beautiful lover.  Not only was he not gorgeous, but he was avowedly left wing and he was jailed for refusing to rat.  Partly for this reason, Hellman is not as fondly remembered in some quarters as Miller.

Hellman described her experiences in the book Scoundrel Time, published in 1976.  Miller described similar experiences in a play published in 1953.  That play was The Crucible.  It was based on the events in Salem in 1692, and is a searing testimony to the ghastly power of a mob that has lost its senses.  When Miller was called before the HUAC in 1956, it reminded him of The Crucible, as life followed art. 

And if you have invented Satan, you have to give him some work to do.  The failure of due process before the HUAC takes your breath away, but it got worse before the courts.  When people were charged with contempt for refusing to answer, the trials did not take long.  The prosecution called expert evidence. They called an ‘expert on Communism’ to testify that the accused had been under ‘communist discipline’.  When Miller’s counsel announced he was going to call his expert to say that Miller had not been under discipline of the Communist Party, Miller noticed ‘that from then on a negative electricity began flowing toward me from the bench and the government table.’  Miller thought his expert was good, ‘but obviously the tracks were laid and the train was going to its appointed station no matter what.’  The nation that would have been entitled to see itself as having the most advanced constitutional protection of civil rights on earth had been scared out of its senses by a big bad bear that existed mostly in the minds of the tormented.

In the Introduction, Arthur Miller wrote:

It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance.  The wonder of it all struck me that so picayune a cause, carried forward by such manifestly ridiculous men, should be capable of paralyzing thought itself, and worse, causing to billow up such persuasive clouds of ‘mysterious’ feelings within people.  It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one could have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten.

The relevance of all this to the mess that we see across the West today is obvious.  Indeed, if you read those words again you may be frightened by the references to ‘paralyzing thought’ and ‘elemental decencies.’  The lynch mob or pogrom is simply the ‘people’ at its worst.  We are now confronted everyday by affronts committed in the name of ‘populism’ as if being popular affords some evidence or warranty of worth.  (Was there ever a politician who was more popular than Adolf Hitler was in 1936?)  What we now see is our dark under-belly being flaunted before our eyes by people stunted by envy. 

Arthur Miller went on to comment on what may be described as our ‘darker purpose’ in terms that Hanna Arendt would have recognised.  He referred to ‘the tranquility of the bad man’ just as Arendt referred to the ‘banality of evil’, and to ‘the failure of the present age to find a universal moral sanction.’

I believe now, as I did not conceive then, that there are people dedicated to evil in the world; that without their perverse example, we should not know good…I believe merely that, from whatever cause, a dedication to evil, not mistaking it for good, but knowing it as evil, is possible in human beings who appear agreeable and normal.  I think now that one of the hidden weaknesses of our whole approach to our dramatic psychology is our inability to face this fact – to conceive, in effect, of Iago.

Those propositions are hugely important.

A View from the Bridge might for some bear more of a resemblance to an Italian opera – say, Cavalleria Rusticana – than  a Greek tragedy, with a heavy sauce supplied by Doctor Freud, but for the sake of Sicilian honour, the hero continues the bad run of  this author’s heroes.  The same sense of inevitability – doom – is there again.  By contrast, the author says that A Memory of Two Mondays is a ‘pathetic comedy….a kind of letter to that subculture where the sinews of the economy are rooted, that darkest Africa of our society from whose interior only the sketchiest messages ever reach our literature or the stage.’  Each of these plays is pitched well below the middle class – and territory not covered by Ibsen or Chekhov.

In commenting on King Lear, an English scholar said that we go to great writers for the truth.  The last word may make us wobble a little at the moment, but we look to great writers – and Arthur Miller was certainly a great writer – to hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves for what we are.  Arthur Miller says in the Introduction:

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man.  Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

We might then flinch at what is presented to us in the theatre, but Arthur Miller did not.  His memoire Timebends is a testament to his enduring moral and intellectual fibre – as of course are the five plays in this fine book.This Franklin edition is lusciously presented and reminds us that if we want to try to understand the human condition, the place to go to is the theatre.  And whatever else may be said of Arthur Miller, he knew what it was to be dramatic.

The book is dedicated to Marilyn.

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.

[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.

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.