History

Two Dictators

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Each views the existing dispensation with contempt, and looks back on a mainly imaginary past, and a wholly imaginary future.

Each counts himself and his nation as a victim.

Each has suffered a crushing loss either personally or by the nation.  ‘Never again.’  Each reacts by denying the loss or inventing reasons for which it must be avenged.  In one sense, each wants to replay events leading to the downfall to produce a different result. 

Both can look at their lives as a struggle against the forces of darkness.  Each is therefore the archetype of a hero.  If either knew who Tolkien was, he would have asked that myth maker to write his story.

Each claims the power to diagnose the cause of his suffering and that of his nation. 

Each claims to have the answer.

Neither has any time for middle ground.

Those they accuse are enemies of the nation.

Each brings a self-righteousness that is nauseating to others.

A savage and vengeful bully lies close to the front of each that sometimes drops.  His whole life is a charade.

Neither has any sense of shame.  Each is shameless.

Each bully has no trouble in finding a weak minority to beat up as scapegoat.

Each claims that by taking revenge on the enemy, he can restore the nation to its greatness.   But both are addicted to and feed off conflict in a way that reminds others of Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle.  They look like Ponzi schemes of conquest.

Each exploits the envy felt by those who have not done so well for those who have.  Envy, as Othello learned, is a killer. 

And God help any minority whose members are seen to do better than the locals, and who threaten to challenge the established order.  Some are left with only their bare civic standing to barter with, and to lose that is to lose all.

The revenge of each is very personal.

Each is capable of cruelty for its own sake.

The character of each is fixed early, and his upbringing left no capacity for honest inquiry of himself.

Although hungry for power and acceptance, each fears inferiority and resorts to fantasy – a denial of reality.

Each is a showman – is there anything else? – but the Internet carries more clout than a torch-lit parade.

Each has an unerring feel for the parochial and the nativist – the gutter.

Each brings to his followers the ultimate gift of deliverance from the insecurity of doubt.

Each therefore raises a serious question about the upbringing or education of his followers – although it is very unwise for others to raise this issue.

Neither has any friends.  Their ego leaves no room in their psyche for friends.  When the end comes, they may stand alone.

God is obviously quite out of the question.

For similar reasons, neither marries well.  Love is not in the vocabulary.

Because neither cares for other people, each gambles recklessly with the lives of others.  If he goes down, he will take as many with him as possible.  (His Grace the Duke of Wellington correctly identified Napoleon as being guilty of this failing.)

But although each gambles with the lives of others, each is terrified of failing – and refuses to acknowledge it when it happens.

Each has had brushes with the law that he seeks to paint in his favour.  The prevailing faith in the community was premised on the life and teaching of a man subjected to the most gruesome form of capital punishment.  He was a humble man who crossed the old regime. 

Neither could ever be accused of humility.  Each subscribes to his own cult.

Each has devoted cult like followers, but the rest of the nation has trouble taking most of it seriously.  They regard the message and the messenger as fantasy – and banal fantasy at that.

Each is surrounded by toadies who from fear or ambition or both are too scared to contradict their leader.  They betray their obligation to the nation, and they feed the already enlarged ego of the man appointed by destiny.

The press of course is brought to heel, and the judges are too.  They get stacked or sacked in any event.

Each understands that the dictator must make all those around him complicit in what the regime is doing. 

Their loyalty is personal to him – not to the nation.  This is fundamental, and commonly fatal to the nation – and to those who pledge their civic faith.

Each sees the world as he wants to see it.  Each shows all the signs of having been spoiled and pampered as a child,  And that is another ground for saying the claim of victimhood is moonshine.

Each knows that if you are going to lie, and you most certainly are, you lie greatly.

Each relishes chaos – he remains the center of attention.  If he happens to drop from view, he behaves like a baby throwing toys out of the cot. 

Neither can accept being left in a room alone.

Each loves the sound of his own voice.

Each has many fronts, but is capable of an arrogant humility.

The result is that those who oppose the dictators do not understand them and are reviled by them.  The new man is treated with disbelief and scorn, but that only fires up him and his supporters.  (And what, in any event, is ‘reality’?  What did reality ever do for you?)

Each claims to be a patriot, but each also ruthlessly attacks the nation insofar as it was or is outside his power.  L’état c’est moi.  This is just one of those spellbinding contradictions in terms in which he revels. 

Neither has had the time or inclination to acquire any real learning – or taste.  Each is utterly tasteless, and civilized people would be uncomfortable having them in their home.

Each has low intelligence and no conscience.  Each is a moral cripple.

But that want of general intelligence does not prevent either from sensing the taste of the gutter, or an instinct for the weak spots of their enemy.  Someone said of that instinct that it was a handy gift for a politician, but ‘had less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.’

Only one is a coward.

In the end, the old regime starts to fall apart, and the center cannot hold.  As Yeats further said, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Chaos takes the place of fantasy, and each dictator trades on chaos.

What is essential is that neither lives in this world.  There is more to this than egomania.  Each lives in a world of his own.  As someone remarked of one of them: ‘He does not really exist – he is only the noise he makes.’

But his raison d’être is simple.  He is the hero who will save the nation and raise it to its rightful triumph.

Above all, each is heartless.  I am myself alone.  Et praeteria nihil.  (And in addition, nothing.)

Well, then, both the fantasy and the chaos in their worlds seem to us so banal.  We might look at what that observation entails.

The word ‘banal’ comes from France – curiously, a banalité was one of those feudal obligations that led the peasants to burn down chateaux during the French Revolution.  The dictionary says that ‘banal’ means ‘trite, trivial, or commonplace’, but there is often a suggestion of emptiness or hollowness behind feigned or usurped importance that is pejorative.  This may have been behind the observation in Fowler’sModern English Usage that ‘we should confine banal and banality, since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.’

Hannah Arendt had as penetrating an intellect as I know of in the realm of political philosophy.  She wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations derive from intellectual integrity, and they are of great moment.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ 

Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.  Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin or Franco or Mussolini.

We might here note the matter of fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said of Eichmann, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

It is in the French Revolution more than under twentieth century dictators that we see people with little or no prior experience of government trying both to govern and to lay down a system of government, each of which tasks was beyond most if not all of them. 

These tasks require more than a lifetime of experience – they require generations of history and experience, centuries even.  It is here in France during the revolution that we see ordinary people placed in a whole new world doing their best in good faith to stare down chaos and the void, and just getting slowly more out of their depth until they run out air. 

We see this all the time.  If you have any experience with what we now call risk management, you will know that your biggest worry is the functionary who is getting out of their depth and either does not see that, or is incapable of admitting it.

In any revolution, you can normally back three horses.  First, jealousy fairly shrieks its venom.  Secondly, the scum rises to the surface, as if by an iron law of motion.  (The world’s losers are the most vengeful.)  Thirdly, self-interest usually prevails.  And those at the bottom live in terror of the heavyweights leaving them to hang out and dry when the carousel comes to a stop – as it must.  Their ultimate fear is replacement. 

These are simple, obvious facts of life, but historians tend to forget that most humans are just that – ordinary human beings – when they consider how some of them reacted when the volcano that was France erupted.  When looking back on how events unfolded, with the curse of ignorance and the false hope of hindsight, we may not be surprised to see that some ordinary people did some things that they would do very differently if they had their time again.  There was no procedure or manual telling Robespierre how he might react: the script had not been written because no one had seen anything remotely like it before.  And we might also remember that if the French could at least look back on the experiences of both England and America in their revolutions, the Russians had the benefit of the lot, and made a worse mess than anyone.

There is another term that is useful in dealing with people who are sleight of hand.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

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

There is a big gap in time between Commedia dell’arte and Mussolini, but they have so much in common.  And it is all there in MAGA.

Well, in my lifetime, the Germans and the world learned lessons from Hell.  We have no idea what may unfold as the United States falls apart before our eyes.  Who can say?  Who in the name of God could have predicted that in my lifetime, thousands of Jewish people would choose to live in Germany rather than Israel?

Two Dictators

Each views the existing dispensation with contempt, and looks back on a mainly imaginary past, and a wholly imaginary future.

Each counts himself and his nation as a victim.

Each has suffered a crushing loss either personally or by the nation.  ‘Never again.’  Each reacts by denying the loss or inventing reasons for which it must be avenged.  In one sense, each wants to replay events leading to the downfall to produce a different result. 

Both can look at their lives as a struggle against the forces of darkness.  Each is therefore the archetype of a hero.  If either knew who Tolkien was, he would have asked that myth maker to write his story.

Each claims the power to diagnose the cause of his suffering and that of his nation. 

Each claims to have the answer.

Neither has any time for middle ground.

Those they accuse are enemies of the nation.

Each brings a self-righteousness that is nauseating to others.

A savage and vengeful bully lies close to the front of each that sometimes drops.  His whole life is a charade.

Neither has any sense of shame.  Each is shameless.

Each bully has no trouble in finding a weak minority to beat up as scapegoat.

Each claims that by taking revenge on the enemy, he can restore the nation to its greatness.   But both are addicted to and feed off conflict in a way that reminds others of Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle.  They look like Ponzi schemes of conquest.

Each exploits the envy felt by those who have not done so well for those who have.  Envy, as Othello learned, is a killer. 

And God help any minority whose members are seen to do better than the locals, and who threaten to challenge the established order.  Some are left with only their bare civic standing to barter with, and to lose that is to lose all.

The revenge of each is very personal.

Each is capable of cruelty for its own sake.

The character of each is fixed early, and his upbringing left no capacity for honest inquiry of himself.

Although hungry for power and acceptance, each fears inferiority and resorts to fantasy – a denial of reality.

Each is a showman – is there anything else? – but the Internet carries more clout than a torch-lit parade.

Each has an unerring feel for the parochial and the nativist – the gutter.

Each brings to his followers the ultimate gift of deliverance from the insecurity of doubt.

Each therefore raises a serious question about the upbringing or education of his followers – although it is very unwise for others to raise this issue.

Neither has any friends.  Their ego leaves no room in their psyche for friends.  When the end comes, they may stand alone.

God is obviously quite out of the question.

For similar reasons, neither marries well.  Love is not in the vocabulary.

Because neither cares for other people, each gambles recklessly with the lives of others.  If he goes down, he will take as many with him as possible.  (His Grace the Duke of Wellington correctly identified Napoleon as being guilty of this failing.)

But although each gambles with the lives of others, each is terrified of failing – and refuses to acknowledge it when it happens.

Each has had brushes with the law that he seeks to paint in his favour.  The prevailing faith in the community was premised on the life and teaching of a man subjected to the most gruesome form of capital punishment.  He was a humble man who crossed the old regime. 

Neither could ever be accused of humility.  Each subscribes to his own cult.

Each has devoted cult like followers, but the rest of the nation has trouble taking most of it seriously.  They regard the message and the messenger as fantasy – and banal fantasy at that.

Each is surrounded by toadies who from fear or ambition or both are too scared to contradict their leader.  They betray their obligation to the nation, and they feed the already enlarged ego of the man appointed by destiny.

The press of course is brought to heel, and the judges are too.  They get stacked or sacked in any event.

Each understands that the dictator must make all those around him complicit in what the regime is doing. 

Their loyalty is personal to him – not to the nation.  This is fundamental, and commonly fatal to the nation – and to those who pledge their civic faith.

Each sees the world as he wants to see it.  Each shows all the signs of having been spoiled and pampered as a child,  And that is another ground for saying the claim of victimhood is moonshine.

Each knows that if you are going to lie, and you most certainly are, you lie greatly.

Each relishes chaos – he remains the center of attention.  If he happens to drop from view, he behaves like a baby throwing toys out of the cot. 

Neither can accept being left in a room alone.

Each loves the sound of his own voice.

Each has many fronts, but is capable of an arrogant humility.

The result is that those who oppose the dictators do not understand them and are reviled by them.  The new man is treated with disbelief and scorn, but that only fires up him and his supporters.  (And what, in any event, is ‘reality’?  What did reality ever do for you?)

Each claims to be a patriot, but each also ruthlessly attacks the nation insofar as it was or is outside his power.  L’état c’est moi.  This is just one of those spellbinding contradictions in terms in which he revels. 

Neither has had the time or inclination to acquire any real learning – or taste.  Each is utterly tasteless, and civilized people would be uncomfortable having them in their home.

Each has low intelligence and no conscience.  Each is a moral cripple.

But that want of general intelligence does not prevent either from sensing the taste of the gutter, or an instinct for the weak spots of their enemy.  Someone said of that instinct that it was a handy gift for a politician, but ‘had less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.’

Only one is a coward.

In the end, the old regime starts to fall apart, and the center cannot hold.  As Yeats further said, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Chaos takes the place of fantasy, and each dictator trades on chaos.

What is essential is that neither lives in this world.  There is more to this than egomania.  Each lives in a world of his own.  As someone remarked of one of them: ‘He does not really exist – he is only the noise he makes.’

But his raison d’être is simple.  He is the hero who will save the nation and raise it to its rightful triumph.

Above all, each is heartless.  I am myself alone.  Et praeteria nihil.  (And in addition, nothing.)

Well, then, both the fantasy and the chaos in their worlds seem to us so banal.  We might look at what that observation entails.

The word ‘banal’ comes from France – curiously, a banalité was one of those feudal obligations that led the peasants to burn down chateaux during the French Revolution.  The dictionary says that ‘banal’ means ‘trite, trivial, or commonplace’, but there is often a suggestion of emptiness or hollowness behind feigned or usurped importance that is pejorative.  This may have been behind the observation in Fowler’sModern English Usage that ‘we should confine banal and banality, since we cannot get rid of them, to occasions when we want to express a contempt deeper than any of the English words can convey.’

Hannah Arendt had as penetrating an intellect as I know of in the realm of political philosophy.  She wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil.  She explained the sub-title as follows:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’.  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing……He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.  And if this is ‘banal’, and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

These observations derive from intellectual integrity, and they are of great moment.  Arendt had previously said to the same effect: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ 

Eichmann was no devil or demon; he was just human, and the trouble for us is that he was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’.  Those who do not accept that Eichmann was just human, and that there is a little of Eichmann in all of us, are seeking to impose some kind of grid or cattle pen over humanity and are at risk of falling into the error that fed the derangement of people like Stalin or Franco or Mussolini.

We might here note the matter of fact assessment of the American historian R R Palmer on Carrier, the man who drowned priests by the boat load in the Vendée during the Revolution, and after being at first applauded, was later guillotined for what we would now describe as war crimes.

Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.

As Arendt said of Eichmann, ‘it was sheer thoughtlessness…that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.’

It is in the French Revolution more than under twentieth century dictators that we see people with little or no prior experience of government trying both to govern and to lay down a system of government, each of which tasks was beyond most if not all of them. 

These tasks require more than a lifetime of experience – they require generations of history and experience, centuries even.  It is here in France during the revolution that we see ordinary people placed in a whole new world doing their best in good faith to stare down chaos and the void, and just getting slowly more out of their depth until they run out air. 

We see this all the time.  If you have any experience with what we now call risk management, you will know that your biggest worry is the functionary who is getting out of their depth and either does not see that, or is incapable of admitting it.

In any revolution, you can normally back three horses.  First, jealousy fairly shrieks its venom.  Secondly, the scum rises to the surface, as if by an iron law of motion.  (The world’s losers are the most vengeful.)  Thirdly, self-interest usually prevails.  And those at the bottom live in terror of the heavyweights leaving them to hang out and dry when the carousel comes to a stop – as it must.  Their ultimate fear is replacement. 

These are simple, obvious facts of life, but historians tend to forget that most humans are just that – ordinary human beings – when they consider how some of them reacted when the volcano that was France erupted.  When looking back on how events unfolded, with the curse of ignorance and the false hope of hindsight, we may not be surprised to see that some ordinary people did some things that they would do very differently if they had their time again.  There was no procedure or manual telling Robespierre how he might react: the script had not been written because no one had seen anything remotely like it before.  And we might also remember that if the French could at least look back on the experiences of both England and America in their revolutions, the Russians had the benefit of the lot, and made a worse mess than anyone.

There is another term that is useful in dealing with people who are sleight of hand.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

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

There is a big gap in time between Commedia dell’arte and Mussolini, but they have so much in common.  And it is all there in MAGA.

Well, in my lifetime, the Germans and the world learned lessons from Hell.  We have no idea what may unfold as the United States falls apart before our eyes.  Who can say?  Who in the name of God could have predicted that in my lifetime, thousands of Jewish people would choose to live in Germany rather than Israel?

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Haffner on Hitler

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Hitler embodied evil.  It is therefore as well to note some symptoms.  The following observations come from The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner that is the subject of the note below.

There is no development, no maturing of Hitler’s character and personality.  His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be ‘arrested’ – and remains astonishingly consistent; nothing was added to it.  It was not an attractive character.  All soft lovable reconciling traits are missing…. His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty…. a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.  Hitler was all his life exceedingly full of himself and from his earliest to his last days tended to self-conceit……

He did not wish to be the first servant of the state but …. an absolute master.  And he perceived correctly that absolute rule was not possible in an intact state mech anism but only amidst controlled chaos….and he knew how to control it…. A close study of him reveals a trait in him that one might describe as a horror of committing himself, or… anything final.  It seems as though something within him caused him to recoil not only by way of a state system, but also his will by way of a firm set of goals…. As a star performer Hitler probably ranks higher than Napoleon.  But one thing he never was – a statesman….

Of course he was no democrat but he was a populist, a man who based his power on the masses, not on the elite, and in a sense a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  His principal means of rule was demagogy, and his instrument of government was not a structured hierarchy but a chaotic bundle of uncoordinated mass organisations merely held together by his own person.  All these are ‘leftist’ rather than ‘rightest’ features…

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a fascist.  Fascism is upper class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm, but never in order to buttress an upper class.  He was a class politician, and his National Socialism was anything but fascism….

…. There is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world; he saw the world as he wanted to see it.  The world is imperfect, full of conflict, hardship and suffering …. he does not state these things with the sad courageous earnestness with which Luther calmly faced what he called original sin, or Bismarck what he called earthly imperfection, but with that frenzied voice with which Nietzsche, for instance, so often hailed what was deplorable.  To Hitler, the emergency was the norm, the state was there in order to wage war.

Three things.  Haffner may have added the frenzy of Wagner, Hitler’s pin-up boy.  The poet said, or meant to say, that comparisons are odious, but the whole fabric of our law turns on learning from the past. 

Finally, fans of the poet, and Coriolanus, will love the reference to a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  In the hands of a genius, you don’t know who is more dangerous – the hero, or the jealous tribunes claiming to stand for that fiction called the people.

THE MEANING OF HITLER

Sebastian Haffner

Folio Society, 2011.  Translated by Ewald Osers and introduced by Mark Roseman. Illustrated.

The author was born in Berlin in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel.  He therefore came of age under the Nazis.  He qualified as a lawyer, but he left Germany in 1938 because of his relationship with a Jewish woman.  Before leaving, he wrote a manuscript of a book that would be published posthumously only in 1992 under the title Defying Hitler.  He was in a law library when the brown shirts came in to round up the Jews.  He joined the staff of the Observer in 1942 and began writing for publication. 

The present book was first published in 1978.  Haffner chose the name ‘Sebastian,’ because it was Bach’s middle name, and ‘Haffner’ after a Mozart sonata.  His writing style is pithy and laconic, and the book was written before the works of Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans were published.

Defying Hitler caused a sensation when it came out.  Here was direct eye witness evidence of the Terror before the Holocaust began – and by someone so well qualified to comment.  It caused me to see a lot of things differently.  In it, Haffner said:

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown….  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law. 

We might pause to note what a biographer of Mussolini had to say as it applies to Hitler word for word.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

In the present work, Haffner says of Hitler (in the second page):

His life lacked – before and after – everything that normally lends warmth, weight and dignity to a human life: education, occupation, love and friendship, marriage, parenthood.  Apart from politics and political passion, his was an empty life and hence one which was certainly not happy, was strangely lightweight, and lightly discarded.  A continuous readiness for suicide accompanied Hitler throughout his political career.  And, at its end, almost as a matter of course, stood real suicide….Hitler had no friends.  He enjoyed sitting for hours on end with subordinate staff  – drivers, bodyguards, secretaries – but he alone did all the talking….His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be arrested – and remains astonishingly consistent…His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty.  Added to these, moreover, from the very start was a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.

Here, then, is a writer who gets to the heart of the matter.  Hitler relied on charisma and terror, hope and fear, the populist trademark.

That ability for mass hypnotism was Hitler’s first, and for a long time his only, political capital……On the whole, the management and dosage of terror during the first years must be described as a masterly psychological achievement by Hitler.

Or again:

Hitlerism has at least one thing in common with Marxism – the claim to be able to explain the whole of world history from a single point of view….For there is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world: he saw the world as he wanted to see it….To Hitler, the emergency was the norm; the state was there in order to wage war.  And that is where he was wrong.

As a cartographer of evil, Haffner is in my view up there with Hannah Arendt.  This book ends this way.

For German history does not end with Hitler.  Anyone believing that it does, and possibly even rejoicing at it, does not realise just how much he is thereby fulfilling Hitler’s last will and testament.

Villains – and evil

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

[This was posted before the recent U S election.  It is set out again because every word bears on how our worst fears have been realised since Trump took office.  In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman said the question is whether Trump is the dupe of Putin or a Mafia don running a protection racket.]

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

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

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

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

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

There is more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some points of resemblance and distinction.

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

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

Each disdains anything remotely resembling book learning.

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

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

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

That is the credo of the fascist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for some differences. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Richard II has been one of my favourite plays for more than fifty years – when I first heard Gielgud in the lead.  The reasons are set out in the note below, which I wrote more than ten years ago for a book on Shakespeare. 

After listening to the play for the nth time, I ordered a book The Reign of Richard II.  It is a collection of papers given at the University of York on subjects like A Personal Portrait, The Chivalry, His Sense of English History, and His Reputation.

Two things struck me about the papers.  First, many commentators, who are historians, felt happy about looking at the psychological or psychoanalytic aspects of this medieval king and evaluating the evidence and conclusions. 

Secondly, and much more remarkably, no one saw fit to mention how Shakespeare saw this character.  This unmatched genius could see inside us and our history, but no one at this conference thought Shakespeare was worth mentioning. 

What about Divine Right?  How do you square that with the barons putting their king under contract in 1215?  Were the references to Pilate and Judas justified?  What other aspects of the passion play do we have here?  Opinions may differ on whether Shakespeare painted Bolingbroke as shifty – I think he did – but is clear that Shakespeare saw this usurpation as an infection that would culminate in the Wars of the Roses.  Did Shakespeare get it right or was he just wrong?

This silence is at the university very odd.  But there is an upside.  Here is an extract of the psychoanalysis.

The most plausible way of reconciling the opposites in the king’s character is to see Richard’s character as essentially narcissistic – a condition in which only the person himself – his own body, his own needs and feelings – are experienced as fully real.   Generally, a narcissistic person achieves a sense of security in his own subjective conviction of his perfection.  This is a condition characteristic of rulers with a high sense of mission, and having an obsessive interest in the trappings of power.  Its sufferers have ‘an appetite for self-worship.’  It finally detaches its victims from reality so that they become cocooned from the outside world by groups of yes-men and by physical isolation, which was Richard’s eventual fate.  By the final years of his reign, there can be little doubt that Richard’s grasp on reality was becoming weaker.

The author of the paper from which that quote is taken went on to say that Richard was ‘vengeful’ and ‘reacted very badly and very aggressively, to any criticism made of him’.  ‘The general attitude [of low confidence] is…. domineering, attacking, hostile, blaming, mistrustful, status-seeking, and punitive.’

Well, we now have the AI model of that narcissist in Donald Trump.  One difference is that he would never abdicate.  Rather, he would not accept being deposed – even when done with due process of law.

Otherwise, as the book says, there is nothing new under the sun.  Which make the omission of reference to Shakespeare even more remarkable.

The play is called ‘The Tragedy of Richard II.’  It is certainly a tragedy, and it is in my view the most operatic play ever written.  Of course, Churchill reveled in it.  It is a rolling twenty-one-gun salute to the majesty of the English language and history.

(Set out below is my earlier note of more than ten years ago.  Since then, Opus Arte has released its version at the Globe, which is not as mangled as many are there now, and the RSC has released the version with David Tennant directed by Greg Doran.  Sadly, they sent Tennant out as a rampant hairy queen desperate to be debagged, and in so doing trashed the whole play.)

RICHARD II
AN EFFEMINATE ROYAL IN A PASSION PLAY

In this man’s reign began this fatal strife

The bloody argument whereof we treat
That dearly costs so many a prince’s life

And spoil’d the weak and ev’n consumed the great

(Daniel, Civil Wars)

Jussi Bjoerling is frequently said to have been the most popular tenor of the last century.  He had a clear, high, lyric tone that still sounds as pure as silver. (Caruso was more golden and chiaroscuro.)  Some have the same sensation listening to Richard II, of a clear, high lyric tone that sounds as pure as silver.

This play evokes our sense of opera in another way.  Most composers like to load up their operas with big arias for their big singers.  Puccini did it so that his guns could really unleash themselves in a way that highbrows think is shameless, but that the rest of us enjoy shamelessly.  A few people know Vissi d’Arte; many have heard Un Bel Di; but everyone knows Nessun Dorma.  

Shakespeare loaded this play up with set pieces for the big guns of the stage, so that listening to the recording featuring John Gielgud as Richard and Leo McKern as John of Gaunt has for some about the same impact as coming to terms with an ’86 Grange.

Richard was the last of the Plantagenets.  He took by succession and Divine Right.  His misrule and weakness led to his being deposed, and so to generations of civil strife.
A medieval king was the fountain of justice.  At the beginning of this play, this King breaches his obligations in that position fundamentally– twice.

The King failed to follow the established legal process to rule on a dispute between two of his barons.  They were entitled to and did seek under the common law of England trial by battle of the issue between them.  One of the parties, Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, says:

Look what I speak, my life shall prove it true. (1.1.87)
He has another charge:
… and I will in battle prove. (1.1.92)

The second charge related to the murder of a duke. This was a sensitive charge since the King, the judge if you like, had given orders for the murder.  Well, for whatever reason, Richard intervened after a massive display of chivalry, and stopped the combat, a form of judicial duel.  He banished both of the litigants, but Bolingbroke and his family for a lesser time.  The King had therefore made enemies of two families by interfering with the due process of the law.  Bolingbroke laments his exile:

How long a time lies in one little word.
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word – such is the breath of kings. (1.3.212-214)

As the second scene of the play shows, the supporters of the King include those who are under a duty to avenge the death of the murdered duke.  How do you fight a judicial duel with the substitute of God?  How can the King try a case that involves one of his political assassinations?

The second mistake of Richard was to confiscate the property that had belonged to the father of Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt, after his death.  This was illegal.  (Richard needed funds for a foreign war – this has long been an incentive to illegality.)  In doing this, Richard was breaking the laws of inheritance– but these laws are the source of his own title.  York says just this:

Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from time
His charters and his customary rights,
Let not tomorrow then ensue today;
Be not thyself. For how art thou not a King
But by fair sequence and succession. (2.1.195-199)

As a result of these two great fallings off by the King, Bolingbroke returns to England.  He says he does so just to claim his own private rights and not to claim the crown, but Bolingbroke– who does not show us his mind by a soliloquy– is as evasive about his intention as a modern politician is when thinking of challenging for the leadership of the party. After he had become King, he was to say:

Though then, God knows, I had no such intent

But that necessity so bowed the state,
That I and greatness were compelled to kiss. (2 Henry IV, 3.1.72-74)
From the time when Richard returns to Ireland, it is all downhill. As Tony Tanner remarked:
Perhaps … he can already see the writing on the wall; but to a certain, quite distinct extent, he himself is doing the writing.

Here is some of the high poetry of this failed king.
… I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand;
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs. (3.2.4-7)

So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revelled in the night
Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To shift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel; then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right. (3.2.47-62)

 No matter where– of comfort no man speaks.
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow in the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can be bequeath
Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s;
And nothing can we call our own, but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed
All murdered – for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keep Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh that walls about our life
Were brass impregnable;, and, humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell King! (3.2.144-170)

He is very up and down. He rallies and then he falls.  Here is a rally:
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot
That lift your vassal hands against my head,
And threat the glory of my precious Crown.
Tell Bolingbroke– for yon methinks he stands –
That every stride he takes upon my land
Is dangerous treason.  He has come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war … (3.3.84-93)

But he gives in. Here is a real down.
What must the King do now? Must he submit?
The King shall do it. Must he be deposed?
The King shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of King? A God’s name, let it go.
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown;
My figured goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints;
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave … (3.3.142-153)

Has the theatre – the theatre– ever known language of such silver grace?  When in Act 4, Richard formally surrenders the Crown, his disillusion takes him to a different tone.

Now, mark me how I will undo myself.
I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With my own hands I give away my crown,
With my own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear … (4.1.202-210)

He calls for a mirror:
… Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face,
[Throws glass down]
For there it is, cracked in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.283-290)

Richard, the actor, starts to comment on his own performance:
… Say that again.
‘The shadow of my sorrow’? Ha, let’s see.
‘Tis very true, my grief lies all within … (4.1.292-294)

Richard is now the very picture of self-centred self-pity, but his subsequent murder haunts Henry IV and the nation as a whole for the rest of this series of plays.

It is not surprising that Elizabeth did not like this play being performed.  Dethroning a king is a not a good precedent. (Verdi had to convert the murdered king of The Masked Ball to a Governor of Boston to get it performed.)  Medieval kings were the Lord’s Anointed, and it was almost inevitable that Richard would see himself as some Christ-like figure betrayed by Judas and arraigned by Pilate.  Indeed, some see in this play Richard enduring the Stations of the Cross.

He loses it completely, as we now say, at times, as shown by his shift in pronouns in:
I had forgot myself: am I not King?
Awake, thou coward majesty! Thou sleepest.
Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm my name!  A puny subject strikes
At thy great glory.  Look not to the ground,
Ye favourites of a king, are we not high?
High be our thoughts. (3.2.83-9)

Bolingbroke has shown his intention to take control by executing his opponents before he was crowned. He said that ‘to wash your blood / From off my hands’ (3.1.5-7) he will say why they die. Richard refers to:

… some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands. (4.1.238)

And right at the end, Bolingbroke, now the King, says:
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood from off my guilty hand. (5.6.49-50)

Going on a Crusade was a way of doing penance and getting remission from sins for those who subscribed to the medieval church, which was everyone in the Middle Ages.  This was all still real to Elizabethan audiences.  For us, Richard is a shallow man not up to his job – 10 for noblesse; 0 for oblige.  Richard had a weak, effeminate, showman side.  Coleridge said Shakespeare did not mean to represent Richard as ‘a vulgar debauchee, but merely as a wantonness in feminine shew, feminine friendism, intensely woman-like love of those immediately about him, mistaking the delight of being loved by him for love for him.’

Coleridge also said that Richard endeavoured to ‘shelter himself from that which is around him by a cloud of his own thoughts’ and went on:

Throughout his whole career may be noticed the most rapid transitions – from the highest insolence to the lowest humility – from hope to despair, from the extravagance of love to the agonies of resentment, and from pretended resignation to the bitterest reproaches.  The whole is joined with the utmost richness and copiousness of thought, and were there an actor capable of representing Richard, the part would delight us more than any other of Shakespeare’s masterpieces – with perhaps, the single exception of King Lear.

We may agree with Coleridge, especially since we found the actor capable of representing Richard.  For people who love language and care for history, Richard II is the play. The best way to take this play is with the Gielgud recording.  Derek Jacobi did not under-camp the role in the BBC production.

We should not leave this play without referring to some of its most famous lines:
This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, the seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happy lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teaming womb of royal kings … (2.1.40 – 51)

It is by such things that nations are formed and history is made. The author has as good a title as any to be called the greatest historian of his own nation.

Racism at home and abroad

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In discussing the Voice, I said:

, , , ,

‘Racism’ or ‘racist’ are not terms that I use.  They are too broad in their reach, and they are too often applied as unfair and unwarranted labels of abuse.

But as I understand it, ‘racism’, at least in its pejorative sense,  involves more than a recognition that people can be in some way classified according to race.  It entails a belief that people of some racial backgrounds are in some way inferior to others, or may be discriminated against, on the ground of their race.  And history is replete with stories of the misery that this vice has led to.

Such beliefs are irrational on the part of those holding them  – such people are described as ‘prejudiced’ – and hurtful to the objects of such beliefs.  Those holding such beliefs are open to the accusation that they are not seeing the dignity of other  people that arises merely because they are human.

‘Prejudice’ is almost irrational by definition.  It is irrational to hold that all people of the same tribe or colour have the same character.

But it is equally irrational to hold that reasoned criticism of some in a group evidences a prejudice against members of that group generally.  Those expressing such a view are often trying make themselves out as victims and get sympathy or support that way.

And where two groups are in conflict, people on both sides will tend to be irrational  – prejudiced – in assessing the conduct of either  side.  Their side cannot do wrong.  The other side cannot do anything right.

You can see all this in the history of Ireland.

The English regarded the natives of Ireland with a contempt greater than that with which they greeted the natives of Australia five centuries later.  The Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 put most of the natives ‘beyond the pale’.  It was apartheid that resembled the Spartan treatment of helots – to the discomfort of Oxbridge. 

You could still find this racist contempt in polite circles much later.  The sometime historian J H Round in 1899 in The Commune of London said:

We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats; we are there now because if we left, they would all be breaking one another’ s heads….The leaders of the Irish people have not so greatly changed since the days when ‘King’ McDonnchadh blinded ‘King’ Dermot’s son, and when Dermot, in return, relieved his feelings by gnawing the nose of his butchered foe.  Claiming  to govern a people when they cannot even govern themselves, they clamor like the baboo of Bengal against that pax Britannica, by the presence of which alone they are preserved from mutual destruction.  No doubt… .they would rather be governed badly by themselves than well by anyone else.  But England also has a voice in the matter; and she cannot  allow the creation of a Pandemonium at her doors.

The white man’s burden – you could not beat that even by crossing Hitler with Kipling.

So, the Irish arrived in Australia with centuries of history of being victims of racism.  To which was now added discrimination against Catholics.  Those two factors led to raw prejudice on their part.  And that led to bitter division in Australia – right through to the end of my childhood.

Ned Kelly was taught ‘Death to any Judas Iscariot who betrays an Irishman to an English  policeman.’  Kelly was a cold-blooded murderer, but many in the Irish diaspora – including otherwise sane lawyers in my lifetime  – treated him as a champion of the dispossessed against the Protestant dominated Philistine society of Melbourne.  It went beyond the Irish.  Manning Clark said: ‘Yet Ned lived on as a hero, as a man through whom Australians were helped to discover our national identity.’   It was another sad instance of our saluting losers.

Daniel Mannix came from Ireland to be Archbishop of Melbourne.  Just as the conscription issue got going here in the First World War, he launched an appeal for victims of the Easter Rising.  He was righteously vehement in his  opposition to the government and conscription.  To whom did he and Irish Catholics owe allegiance – Ireland, Rome, or Australia?   Part of this quandary had plagued England since Becket ran into Henry II.  Australia was dangerously, and venomously, split by Mannix and his followers.  Manning Clark said:

He was the mystic who saw in the face of the Irish peasant the image of Christ.  He was the Irish patriot nursing a grudge against those guilty of that ancient wrong against the Irish people…. For him, any reflection on his people and their reputation was like the sin against the Holy Ghost – something which could never be forgiven.  In Catholic countries, legend had it that when a person committed mortal sin fell across the face of the Virgin.  For Daniel Mannix, any slur on his faith by or on his own people by the eternal enemies of the Irish caused a shadow to pass over his face.

All that proved a fierce cocktail of imported division in the brand-new Commonwealth.  You can see that the fear and loathing felt by Mannix for the English and Protestant establishments, more than matched that felt by the English against the Irish five or so centuries before.   And then you get to the phase where the ultimate insult is for the conduct of your team to be compared with that of the other.  The inarticulate premise is of course that the members of the other team are inferior.  Which takes us back to where we started.

Then, after the next war, Catholics were, fairly or otherwise, seen to be the drivers of the ‘Split’ – the breakdown of the Labor Party that effectively left Australian as a one-party state for a generation. 

It is a notorious fact of history that religious conflicts are the worst of the lot.  And that conflicts within one faith – say Sunni and Shiite, or Protestant and Catholic – are the worst of those.  The stakes are so high.  Which is worse – treason, or heresy?

Well, all this comes to you from a lapsed Prot who now looks askance at most religion (and who could not give a hoot about the schism in Christianity) .  I have no doubt those brought up as Catholics, whether Irish or not, may well see things very differently – and possibly say so; possibly, vehemently. 

It is both natural and inevitable that people will associate with others of the same tribe and faith.  It is equally natural and inevitable that such associations will affect the way we think, frequently with results that bespeak raw prejudice.    It is not a good idea in Melbourne to engage your cab driver in discussion about the governance of Kosovo, Lebanon, or India.

But the few instances mentioned here, which reflect wrongs wrought on people over centuries,  and which fed bad tensions here over generations, show that we must be wary of those whose interest in foreign conflicts leads them to seek to interfere with our own domestic politics here in Australia.  Such people are dangerous.

Racism – Logic – Diasporas – Ireland – Gaza – Kosovo – Balkans – India.

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Lessons from the massacre at Glencoe

About six or so years ago, I put out two notes about the consequences of the massacre at Glencoe, one of the most revolting episodes in the history of Britain.  I leave it to others to say whether any of the discussion may bear on lethal conflicts in the world today.

One post

The Clan McDonald (or Macdonald) of Glencoe was a band of robbers.  Most Highlanders were.  The Campbells of Argyle hated them and they had ruthlessly preyed on a man named Breadalbane.  The British Crown offered money to all Highlanders to take an oath of allegiance by 31 December 1691.  Anyone who did not do so in time would be treated a traitor and outside the law.  Breadalbane was in charge of handling the money. The Highland chiefs dragged their feet but they came in.  The McDonald chief left it to the last day – but no one there could take his oath.  He finally got sworn six days later.  That the McDonald chief was outside the law was good news for the Campbells, Breadalbane and for the Scots Prime Minister, Sir John Dalrymple, known as the Master of Stair.  Dalrymple had hoped to strike at a number of clans. In a letter written in this expectation, he said ‘I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.’  Then he found out that McDonald had sworn his oath after the cut-off.  He resolved to strike at that clan.  Without saying that McDonald had taken the oath late, Dalrymple put an order before King William that said:

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe [the McDonald chief] and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves.

You can get an argument about what ‘extirpate’ might mean there – clean the glen out of these bandits by rooting them out (as the Scots  king swore to ‘root out’ heresies), or wipe  them out in the sense of killing all, including women and children?  A soldier killing a bandit might seek to rely on that order as a defence – but killing a woman or child?

The design of the Master of Stair was ‘to butcher the whole race of thieves, the whole damnable race.’  But the troops would not just march in and execute the condemned outlaws.  Dalrymple was afraid that most of them would escape. ‘Better not meddle with them than meddle to no purpose.  When the thing is resolved, let it be secret and sudden.’ Macbeth himself might have said that. 

The troops accepted the hospitality of the clan at Glencoe for twelve days.  Then at five o’clock in the morning, the troops started to kill men, women and children.  But they used firearms, and three quarters of the clan escaped the fate of their chief.

Macaulay could understand the hatred of Argyle and Breadalbane for the McDonalds, but Dalrymple – ‘one of the first men of his time, a jurist, a statesman, a fine scholar, an eloquent orator’?

To what cause are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy.  The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the State.  This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit.  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.  A temptation addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm.  But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church on a commonwealth, on mankind.  He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his intentions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good.  By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe that Dominic would, for the best archbishopric in Christendom, have incited ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and industrious population, that Everard Digby would, for a dukedom, have blown a large assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy.

This analysis is vital.  There we have a description of our greatest enemy – the zealot who has God or the people on his side; the quintessential Catholic terrorist, Guy Fawkes; Robespierre and the people of la patrie; Osama bin Laden and the religion of Islam – all responsible for some of ‘the blackest crimes recorded in history’, and all convinced of the blackest falsity mankind has been guilty of – that the ends justify the means.

Dostoevsky put it this way.

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.

So the great Russian writer, in The Brothers Karamazov, foretold the misery that would flow over all of the Russias from the righteousness of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

In the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky explained how we are corrupted by power.

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being….automatically loses power over his own sensations.  Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease.  The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast.  Blood and power intoxicate…The man and the citizen die with the tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Those words are deathless because they are so true, but they have frightening ramifications for Donald Trump.

Shortly before citing those words, Paul Johnson referred to some equally relevant remarks of Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes in 1911:

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front.  A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first.  Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.  Such are the chiefs and the leaders.  You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues.  The scrupulous and the just, the noble humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a revolution, but it passes away from them.  Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.

All that is so true of the French and Russian revolutions.  A Marxist historian applied this kind of learning to the Communist Party under Stalin: ‘The whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors.  No one was innocent and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society.  Thus the party acquired a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which there was no turning back.’  George Orwell saw all this.

The violence, the randomness, and the cruelty all come to be taken as part of life, and people become what we now call ‘desensitised’.  Commenting on the butchery that followed the fall of the Bastille, the French historian Taine reflected mordantly that some mockery is found in every triumph, and ‘beneath the butcher, the buffoon becomes apparent.’ 

The result is that the people become less civilised.  They are degraded.  You can get an argument over whether terror or ‘the Terror’ commenced on 14 July 1789, but there is no denying that bloody violence and lawless butchery erupted on that day and continued off and on until at least the time when Napoleon put a former break on hostilities with a whiff of grapeshot.  The nation itself was destabilised for the best part of a century.

To go back to Glencoe, who was to be answerable?  It was all hushed up for a while, but word got out, and there had to be a public inquiry.  It was full and fair, and its findings went to the Scots parliament, the Estates.  The commissioners of inquiry concluded that the slaughter at Glencoe was murder, and that the cause of that crime lay in the letters of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair.  They resolved with no dissenting voice that the order signed by King William did not authorise the slaughter at Glencoe.  But the Estates let Dalrymple off with a censure, while they designated the officers in charge as murderers.

Macaulay says they were wrong on both counts.

Whoever can bring himself to look at the conduct of these men with judicial impartiality will probably be of opinion that they could not, without great detriment to the commonwealth, have been treated as assassins.  They had slain no one whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer to slay.  That subordination without which an army would be the worst of all rabbles would be at an end, if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger. The Case of Glencoe was doubtless an extreme case: but it cannot easily be distinguished in principle from cases which, in war, are of ordinary occurrence.  Very terrible military executions are sometimes indispensable.  Humanity itself may require them….It is remarkable that no member of the Scottish Parliament proposed that any of the private men of Argyle’s regiment should be prosecuted for murder.  Absolute impunity was granted to everybody below the rank of serjeant.  Yet on what principle?  Surely, if military obedience was not a valid plea, every man who shot a McDonald on that horrible night was a murderer?

Should officers have resigned rather than carry out their orders?

In this case, disobedience was assuredly a moral duty: but it does not follow that obedience was a legal crime.

That sounds to me like common sense. What about the Scots Prime Minister, the Master of Stair?

Every argument which can be urged against punishing the soldier who executes the unjust and inhuman orders of his superior is an argument for punishing with the utmost rigour of the law the superior with whom the unjust and inhuman orders originate.  Where there can be no responsibility below, there should be double responsibility above. What the parliament of Scotland ought with one voice to have demanded was, not that a poor illiterate serjeant…should be hanged in the Grassmarket, but that the real murderer, the most politic, the most eloquent, the most powerful of Scottish statesmen, should be brought to a public trial and should, if found guilty, die the death of a felon….Unhappily the Estates, by extenuating the guilt of the chief offender, and, at the same time demanding that his humble agents should be treated with a severity beyond the law, made the stain which the massacre had left on the honour of the nation broader and deeper than before.

That analysis seems fair – even if it is distorted by the author’s need to be gentle with King William, one of his heroes, and the failure to mention in this context the hatred of the Campbells for their targets, the McDonalds.  You wonder how many of these killers were reluctant, and how many were actuated by what lawyers call ‘malice’. And it must take some acquired coldness to kill in cold blood members of a family you have lived, eaten, and slept with for so long, and some of whom were morally and legally incapable of committing any crime.

But people who say that the soldiers should have rebelled rather than comply with orders are postulating a very high moral standard, one that calls for immense courage, which may not be appreciated by the dependants of the soldier so called upon.

Very few people have the still strength or firm insight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany after Hitler became the Chancellor.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.  Are we still of any use?  What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.  Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

It took a hero even to ask the question.  Moral giants like Lincoln, Bonhoeffer and Mandela come along once or twice a century.  The rest of us just hope that we don’t get called on to seek to emulate them.  If we do, and if we fail, as is most likely, then the judgment will belong not to us or the law, but to God.

This sordid affair was all Scottish.  The avengers took the view that the ends justified the means.  In doing so, they sank below the level of those whom they attacked.  It’s a lesson on how not now to respond to terrorism.  Lawyers have a saying that hard cases make bad law.  If you stretch or bend the law for a tricky or hard case, you make the law worse.  You debauch it.  That, too, is a lesson of the massacre at Glencoe.

Another post

The other day I was driving my Mini in the Grampians listening to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall when it got to one of my favourite parts – the luscious put-down of the Emperor Gallienus.  I was laughing out loud, and then my mood changed when I heard a passage which I have read and heard before, but which I could not recall.  Gibbon referred to ‘a most savage mandate’ Gallienus issued after he had put down a revolt by a man called Ingenuus, who had assumed the purple (claimed the title of Emperor) in the provinces.  The mandate was indeed savage, but it had a revoltingly modern air to it.

It is not enough that you exterminate such as have appeared in arms: the chance of battle might have served me as effectually.  The male sex of every age must be extirpated; provided that in the execution of the children and old men, you can contrive means to save our reputation.  Let everyone die who has dropped an expression, who has entertained a thought against me, against me, the son of Valerian, the father and brother of so many princes.  Remember that Ingenuus was made emperor: tear, kill, hew in pieces.  I write to you with my own hand, and would inspire you with my own feelings.

All that is revolting, but the modern part is that in bold.  And the word ‘extirpate’ immediately brought to mind the mandate that led to the infamous massacre at Glencoe.  It occurred about thirteen hundred years after the extirpation of the followers of Ingenuus, and is so movingly described by the other great English composer of history, T B Macaulay.

The tribal conflicts left the Highlands in a savage state.  The clan MacDonald had an awful reputation for outlawry.  Their blood enemies were the Campbells.  (Still now in Australia you might hesitate to ask a MacDonald to break bread with a Campbell.)  The new king, King William III, asked the clans to take an oath of loyalty.  The Macdonald chief was a day late in turning up and his enemies saw their chance to get even.

The Scot responsible for managing the clans was the Master of Stair.  ‘He justly thought it was monstrous that a third part of Scotland should be in a state scarcely less savage than New Guinea…..In his view the clans, as they existed, were the plagues of the kingdom; and of all the clans the worst was that which inhabited Glencoe….In his private correspondence, he applied to them the short and terrible form of words in which the implacable Roman pronounced the doom of Carthage.  His project was no less than this, that the whole hill country from sea to sea, and the neighbouring islands, should be wasted with fire and sword, that the Camerons, the Macleans, and all the branches of the race of Macdonald should be rooted out.’  (The word ‘race’ is there used for ‘clan’.  The word ‘extirpation’ is built on the Latin word stirps, meaning the stem or block of a tree, and the OED quotes Macaulay in support of its definition ‘to root out, exterminate; to render extinct.’)

The Master of Stair was dire in his directive.

Your troops will destroy the country of Lochaber, Lochiel’s lands, Glengarry’s and Glencoe’s.  Your power shall be large enough.  I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.

Troops of the Campbells accepted the hospitality of the Macdonalds over twelve days and then, like Macbeth, murdered their hosts.  Many escaped, but about thirty-eight were murdered – that is the word – and perhaps many more died of the cold or starvation.  The massacre proceeded under an order signed by King William that included these words.

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper, for the vindication of public justice, to exterminate that set of thieves.

That was not a lawful order for a king to give in a nation that subscribed to the rule of law –which says that people are ruled by laws not people, and that they are only to be punished for a breach of those laws, and not at the arbitrary whim of the monarch.

Well, it was unlikely that anyone down the line would take that point, even had they wanted to.  And it is plain enough that extirpation in this context means extermination.  And that apparently is how the Campbells saw their authority and duty – to commit mass murder.  It is not to be supposed that they could have reported to the Master of Stair, or their king: ‘We shot and killed a dozen, but the others promised to behave in the future, so we stopped the killing.’  Among other things, they would be leaving witnesses to an act of infamy that no decent person could want to see the light of day; and the vendettas would have made Sicilian fishermen look decidedly docile.

But this was a problem for our author.  He was a bigger fan of William of Orange than all the people of Belfast put together.  Had his hero given a warrant for ethnic cleansing, if not genocide?  (Remember that the historian used the word ‘race.’)  Macaulay said that people as high as kings – he might have added me and my tax returns – rarely read a lot of what they sign.  That is true enough – but we all have to live with the consequences of so acting.

But Macaulay gets into trouble saying that ‘extirpate’ has more than one meaning – in this context.

It is one of the first duties of every government to extirpate gangs of thieves.  This does not mean that every thief ought to be treacherously assassinated in his sleep, or even that every thief ought to be put to death after a fair trial, but that every gang as a gang, ought to be completely broken up, and that whatever severity is indispensably necessary for that end ought to be used.

That’s like kids playing marbles behind the shelter shed and making up the rules as they go.  You don’t authorise or order a killing in ambiguous terms.  Nor do you make the killing subject to a value judgment – that this killing is ‘indispensably necessary’ to effect ‘extirpation’ – what if the family of a deceased and a prosecutor appointed by a government of a different colour come to a different result, and the executioner finds himself on a murder charge for doing what he reasonably believed to be his lawful duty.  (And the history of revolutions is full of instances where the executioners are among the first to die when their government falls.)

(Macaulay comes across this difficulty again when, much later, he discusses the government findings on the massacre.  The finding was that the massacre was murder and was not authorised by the King’s warrant.  But the report merely censured the real author of the crime, the Master of Stair, and recommended that some officers down to the rank of sergeant be charged with murder.  Macaulay says this was dead wrong.  (If it matters, I agree.)  ‘They had slain nobody whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer not to slay.  That subordination without which an army is the worst of all rabbles would be at an end if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger….Who then is to decide whether there be an emergency such as makes severity the truest mercy? Who is to determine whether it be or not be necessary to lay a thriving town in ashes, to decimate a large body of mutineers, to shoot a whole gang of banditti?…..And if the general rule be that the responsibility is with the commanding officer, and not with those who obey him, is it possible to find any reason for pronouncing the case of Glencoe an exception to that rule?’  All that seems very right to me, and the government response looks like another case of the Establishment looking after itself.)

Macaulay then makes his case worse by referring to Hastings’ dealings with the Pindarees, and Bentinck and the Thugs.  Any reference to different kinds of savagery is only likely to inflame the issue, and the Scots.

Finally, he says that another example of the soft use of ‘extirpate’ is in the coronation oath in Scotland when the king swears ‘to root out heresies.’  Heretics were commonly burnt then, but a heresy is not a person and cannot be put to death.  Macaulay says that King William asked what this meant and the Earl of Argyle (the Campbell chief, as it happens) was authorised by the Estates at Edinburgh to say that ‘the words did not imply persecution.’  The politest thing that you can say about that is that it is plain silly.

A simpler explanation for the liability of the English for the massacre at Glencoe was that this was just a manifestation of the evil that had already plagued England for two centuries in its dealings with Ireland, and which had descended to a new low point under that religious fanatic named Cromwell – their contempt for people they regarded as being of an inferior race.

Well, a painter of history as gorgeous as Macaulay is entitled to the odd blemish.  And the people of Glencoe have moved on.  Or at least their publican has.  I have visited the site on three occasions, and if you visit my second loo, you will find a framed collage of scenes of Glencoe, in the middle of which is a photo of a brass sign on the front door of the pub: ‘NO HAWKERS OR CAMPBELLS.’

Finally, because I regard Macaulay’s account of the massacre as one of the glories of our letters, I just read it again.  People like Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle don’t write history –they compose it, or paint it, or write an opera about it.  For the first time, I think, I read the long footnote in which Macaulay mentioned his only two sources.  One was the government Report of 1695.  The other was a contemporary pamphlet that helped blow up the cover-up.  It was called Gallienus Redivivus.  It was published well before Gibbon, but its author was aware of the mandate of Gallienus that I have set out above, and part of which Macaulay quotes.  ‘Gallienus ordered the whole province to be laid waste, and wrote to one of his lieutenants in language to which that of the Master of Stair bore but too much resemblance.’  The man who said that there is nothing new under the sun was dead right on this point.

Glencoe – massacres – extirpation – ethnic cleansing., , , , ,