Digressions&Impressions

Orwell, Pynchon, Spinoza, and the stability of texts and records (Pt III)

[46] We lack, not only all these things, but also and especially, a phraseology of this language. For time, the devourer, has obliterated from the memory of men almost all the idioms and manners of speaking peculiar to the Hebrew nation. Therefore, we will not always be able, as we desire, to find out, with respect to each utterance, all the meanings it can admit according to linguistic usage. Many utterances will occur whose meaning will be very obscure, indeed, completely incomprehensible, even though they are expressed in well- known terms.
[47] In addition to the fact that we cannot have a complete history of the Hebrew language, there is the very nature and constitution of this language. So many ambiguities arise from this that it is impossible to devise a method which will teach you how to find out with certainty the true meaning of all the utterances of Scripture. For besides the causes of ambiguity common to all languages there are certain others in this language from which a great many ambiguities are born....

[65] These are all the difficulties I had undertaken to recount arising from this method of interpreting Scripture according to the history available to us. I consider them so great that I don’t hesitate to say this: in a great many places either we don’t know what Scripture really means or we’re just guessing about its meaning without any certainty.-- Spinoza, Theological Political, Treatise Chapter VII, translated by E. Curley.

This is the third and final post in a series on Orwell's 1984 inspired by Thomas Pynchon's (2003) "Introduction" to it (here is pt 1; pt 2). After this week's controversy (recall), it might seem cheeky that this piece is mediated via Spinoza. But careful readers of the second in the series will not be surprised (I hope). Okay, with that in place, let me turn to Orwell.

After Winston has been tortured, he comes arrives at three slogans, the third of which is: "GOD IS POWER." Now, on the face of it, this is an odd slogan in the context of 1984. For, first it seems religion and theology are altogether outlawed in Oceania, and this in fact only the second mention of 'God' in the book. What mysticism exists is itself (recall) funneled through the creation of Newspeak. Much earlier, God had been mentioned in the context of the Party's rewriting the poems of Kipling, in which 'God' could not be eliminated as a rhyme (with 'rod'--the subject matter is serious, but the scene is hilarious). Shortly after, writing "GOD IS POWER," Winston insists he is no believer.

The slogan itself echoes one of the claims of his torturer, who says, 'We are the priests of power... God is power.' And, in fact, he goes on to claim in one of the more philosophical passages in the book.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

And in fact, Winston echoes this argument in the context of writing down the "GOD IS POWER" slogan. 

Now, that God is power is a feature of Spinoza's a priori demonstration of God's existence (see, especially, E1P11S). And there is, in fact, more than a kind of superficial similarity between the de-individualized Party and Spinoza's conception of eternality. I don't mean to press the analogy too far because Spinoza's idealism (yes, I know very controversial) is not of the subjective kind.  And while Spinoza's philosophy certainly risks turning the state into a new idol, he would reject many of the Party's techniques and positions. 

This may all be a bit anachronistic, but it is worth recalling that Orwell certainly thought Swift the first great critic of totalitarianism (see his essay Orwell (1946) "Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels.") And in a World-War II BBC program, Orwell treats Hobbes "and other 17th century writers" as original predictors of totalitarianisms. So, the connection is not entirely far-fetched.

In particular, in the Appendix to 1984, we are told by a narrator of the distant future that in Oceania, "What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. And, in contrast to Pynchon, I claimed that key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. But this is also a problem.

For, from the first, famous sentence of 1984, we are also reminded that we have entered a universal with a certain kind of instability at its core. That the clocks strike "thirteen" is distinctly odd.* Odder still is that when Winston starts his diary, he quickly writes, ‘To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945, but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two." The theme is repeated throughout the novel.** This uncertainty about the date is especially odd because in his work, at the Ministry of Truth, which involves fabricating and retouching news-stories in the Times, he encounters the official date on the newspaper every day.

But, of course, that calendric reform coincides with a major political revolution is no surprise. It's happened before. So, the Party could have changed dates for convenience sake. And the fact that Winston is part of the process of permanent falsification (in the ordinary not Popperian sense) means he knows nothing he reads can be trusted. The "terrible" book by the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein ("The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") turns out to be circulated and written by the Party so Winston's torturer claims. Can he be trusted, who knows?

In fact, and I hate to go meta-textual, but textual instability is even part of the title of Orwell's book, which is often spelled just '1984'; 'nineteen eighty-four' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' And as Pynchon notes, the American edition was almost published without its appendix.

Now, first, Orwell's important political insight, anticipating (recall) Arendt, is that in true totalitarianism the center and near-center is often not just paranoid, but also has no better access to the truth of its own affairs than ordinary citizens or foreigners. In a system like that it cannot develop a true shadow book-keeping. And, as Orwell notes, this also makes collective planning so difficult and self-defeating.

Second, (recall) as Walter Lippmann (building on, as Nick Cowen reminded me, J.S. Mill) emphasized, reliable record-keeping by the state (of birth, death, property deeds, etc.) is one of the bedrocks of many species of modern liberty. Yes, anarchists everywhere and some Foucaultians will see in such legibility an immanent, would-be panopticon. (Pynchon's own writings are worth re-reading for reflection on this.) Even so, reliable record-keeping is the foundation of removing many forms of uncertainty and generating reliable expectations. And when there is little reason for doubt and suspicion about these records, the politics tends to be more temperate. Blessed are the times in which such record keeping can be taken for granted, and is available to all! 

Third, I put the passages of Spinoza at the top of the post because in many ways we readers of 1984 are in the position that Spinoza attributes to the would-be-interpreter of Scriptures. In a way, the Appendix reinforces this point. For, it provides us with an interpretation of the rules of Newspeak that, while compelling, is clearly also post facto and may, in fact, serve it's own political ends. As I noted last week, Pynchon is surprisingly optimist in reading the Appendix as a sign of a restoration of sorts, whereas my two previous posts argue that this need not be so. And because Orwell deliberately does not inform us of the author of the Appendix and his/her intentions, we are pretty much in the same position as Spinoza implies about Scriptures, "we are completely ignorant of the authors (or, if you prefer, Writers) of many of the books, or else we have doubts about them." (TTP VII [58]).

Let me close. I do not mean to suggest that the severe textual and referential instability of and in 1984 reduces it to a kind of meaningless white noise. Spinoza address an objection like this in Chapter X, too:

[42] But perhaps someone will say that in this way I overthrow Scripture completely—for in this way everyone can suspect that it is faulty everywhere. But that would be wrong. 

Something like this seems true of one's reading of 1984. But once one starts pressing on the details, one has to allow major insecurity about one's own judgments of it. Paradoxically, inducing such an experience into the attentive reader may well be one of its aims. 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

On subaltern horrors, Borges, and the Natural History of an Idea

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism .... I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.--Borges (1939) The Total Library.

I have quoted the concluding paragraph of "The Total Library," which is the forgotten sibling of Borges' more celebrated (and slightly younger) "The Library of Babel" although it shares some underlying insights. The Total Library is an articulating of the thesis that "the fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues." That we recognize the name of the story in the sentence describing the utopia of the total library alerts us that use and mention, and even baptistic designation intermingle on macro and micro level, which is a feature of the story, not a bug. 

The main narrative, such as it is, of The Total Library, is a history of ideas in Lovejoy's specific sense: an idea is treated as an isolated cultural unit with a clear natural history ("Between Democritus of Abdera and Fechner of Leipzig flow-heavily laden-almost twenty-four centuries of European history"). The most familiar token, Dennett calls it proverbial, of the "typographical image" whose natural history is recounted is Huxley's claim that "half dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum."

Inscribed in this narrative in the history of ideas, is a report on the "polemic" between the system of chance or necessity and the system of divinely organized order. This polemic is decided in favor of Democritus (the proponent of the system of chance). 

As an aside, Borges treats Cicero (not his character) as refuted. But Cicero had been introduced not as a proponent of the system of divine order, but as an ironic skeptic. In other words, Borges treats the rise of Darwinism (who is represented by Huxley) and Logic (Carroll) not, altogether without wisdom, as a refutation of the system of divine order, but rather as a defeat of ironic skepticism. This is, of course, not just an aside because one can understand Borges' story as the revenge, or eternal return, of ironic skepticism (which competes with a more successful skepticism familiar from the extension of the holographic principle to a holographic universe.)

The version told by one of Cicero's characters, and now I quote Borges, goes like this:

 I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade him-self that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.

Because of the familiarity of Huxley's token of this image in recurring debates over Darwinism, we might overlook that in Cicero the image is used to undermine an epicurean cosmogony (recall yesterday's post on Newton)--the existence of species is a mere subset of this. This cosmogony held that the structure we encounter is the product of the collision of atoms, which have an innate gravity, subject, as we learn from Lucretius and Cicero, to random swerves.

I don't mean to suggest that Cicero or Huxley are idiosyncratic to connect cosmogony to the origin of species. As I noted a few weeks ago, in the revised preface to his Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell trots out Cicero's sibling argument -- which I have dubbed 'Posidonian,' which is just before the passage recounted by Borges' narration  -- in response to Darwin's Origin (as I learned from David Haig). And while Whewell treats the nebular hypothesis as plausible, he does not think it is sufficiently explanatory about the origin of the order it exhibits.

But rather than returning to that material, my eye stops at Borges' two-fold claim that Swift's "Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul," (i) is a "museum of commonplaces," and (ii) itself a token of this idea. Part of the joke here is that the correct title of Swift's essay is "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind."  "Tritical" being (now archaic) "trite" or "hackneyed." And in the joke Borges' discerns that a single typographic mistake can be memetically or fitness enhancing.

And when we turn to Swift we find indeed a museum of commonplaces, which presents us not so much with a natural history of the typographic idea, but with a philosophical history, which as the title already suggests, itself a polemic against (ahh) then recent philosophy (and the commitments of an Enlightenment age: democracy, science, etc.).

And lurking in the essay is not so much the observation that democracy is vulnerable to demagoguery, which is indeed trite, but rather the more philanthropic point that would have been evident to Borges' initial readers -- that democratic theorists fail to grasp the true nature of the best kind of democratic public speech. This nature is not truth-telling (as democrats deceives themselves) nor flattery (as the the critics of democracy claim), but rather the art of hiding its artfulness ("in oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art.")

There is no better way to hide artfulness if the surface is random characters which "chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence." And this would be the case "for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings."

It is tempting to domesticate the thought by saying 'it's fiction' or 'science fiction'. But in the refutation of Cicero  the ground from which to deny we inhabit the subaltern horror became unstable, even a trapdoor.

 

 

On Duty in Times of Crisis, and Redistribution; on Swift, Hutcheson, and Lisa Herzog,

As God hath contrived all the works of nature to be useful, and in some manner a support to each other, by which the whole frame of the world, under his providence, is preserved and kept up; so among mankind our particular stations are appointed to each of us by God Almighty, wherein we are obliged to act, as far as our power reacheth, toward the good of the whole community. And he who doth not perform that part assigned him toward advancing the benefit of the whole, in proportion to his opportunities and abilities, is not only a useless, but a very mischievous member of the publick: because he takes his share of the profit, and yet leaves his share of the burden to be born by others, which is the true principal cause of most miseries and misfortunes in life. For a wise man, who does not assist with his counsels; a great man, with his protection; a rich man, with his bounty and charity; and a poor man, with his labour; are perfect nuisances in a commonwealth. Neither is any condition of life more honourable in the sight of God than another; otherwise he would be a respecter of persons, which he assures us he is not: for he hath proposed the same salvation to all men, and hath only placed them in different ways or stations to work it out. Princes are born with no more advantages of strength or wisdom, than other men; and, by an unhappy education, are usually more defective in both, than thousands of their subjects. They depend for every necessary of life upon the meanest of their people: besides, obedience and subjection were never enjoined by God to humour the passions, lusts, and vanities of those who demand them from us; but we are commanded to obey our governours, because disobedience would breed seditions in the state.--Jonathan Swift 28 February 1718, Sermon on Mutual Subjection, printed in 1744. [Bold added]

The passage in bold is discussed quoted up until "the publick"in Isaac Kramnick's excellent (1968) Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, pp. 214-215. The book is interesting to this because it contains a majestic treatment of the origin of the conservative ease with populism and nationalism. When Kramnick introduces the passage, it is meant to illustrate that Swift is "an apologist for the aristocracy and gentry...[he] could not conceive society without degree and place, without authority and submission. Beneath the humanist prince, at the apex of authority, stood the virtuous and public-spirited nobility and gentry, and below them farmers, merchants, traders, artisans, workers, and servants." (p. 214) Indeed, there is no doubt that the passage is a kind of defense of social hierarchy. But Kramnick recognizes that this does not exhaust the passage because after quoting it he adds,  "God sees no station as more honorable than another. Submission and authority, Swift wrote, were not necessary to flatter the vanity of the governor, but to prevent sedition through disobedience. Servants obey masters, children their fathers, wives their husbands; otherwise, there would be only great confusion." (215)

I was so surprised by Kramnick's reading that I decided to look up the whole sermon.  The reason I was surprised is that the quoted passage in bold reminded me of one of my favorite passages (see here) -- which I have dubbed heroes without dazzlement -- from the second treatise (and third section of) Hutcheson's (1725) An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises,+ In the margin of this passage,+ Hutcheson himself prints its moral: "Heroism, in all stations." I have discussed Hutcheson's passage back in the day at NewAPPS, and won't do so again. I suspect Hutcheson was not back in Ireland when Swift preached the sermon, so I am not suggesting mutual influence.

Hutcheson's passage is an important, foundational text in the history of mathematical and classical utilitarianism [see Julia Driver]. And, anybody who has read (1729) A Modest Proposal realizes that Swift would not endorse Hutcheson's position without qualification. But where they agree (while tacitly relying on a principle akin to ought implies can) is that there is a (high enough) vantage point from which our duty to contribute to our community is equalized in light of the constraints and opportunities of action we face (qua individuals). And this duty fits in both into a larger consequentialist scheme. In Swift the consequentialist analysis is manifestly part of a providential story, maybe even a theodicy.

Kramnick also misses that for Swift the argument is not merely a defense of social hierarchy and obedience. It is clearly also an attack on free-riding by any member of the community. ("And he who doth not perform that part assigned him toward advancing the benefit of the whole, in proportion to his opportunities and abilities, is not only a useless, but a very mischievous member of the publick.") And because the rich, smart, and powerful have more opportunities to contribute to the social good, their (attempts at) free-riding is objectively worse. [Swift also claims explicitly the rich and powerful of his day tend to be objectively badly prepared for their obligations. So, it's de facto quite critical of the status quo.]

So, in so far it is a defense of hierarchy and obedience it is also more than an exhortation to noblesse oblige. It is clearly also a criticism of those who squander their privilege in non-socially beneficial activities and, thereby hurt not just others but generates social disorders. That's especially clear in the sentence after the end of the part quoted by Kramnick: "because he takes his share of the profit, and yet leaves his share of the burden to be born by others, which is the true principal cause of most miseries and misfortunes in life."

More generally, Swift's position is a complex mixture of political-economic and gender hierarchy combined with a strong moral equality. The defense of obedience is entirely in consequentialist terms; a fear of revolution. The underlying argument is really a choice between two evils: obedience to superiors and political revolution.* And in the social and economic division of labor we all depend on each other, and (while I don't want to claim Swift adheres to relational equality) from this fact those who happen to be at the top of the hierarchy can claim no moral superiority. 

Be that as it may, I think Swift and Hutcheson has something to teach to us about the underlying reality and nature of moral economy. Beneath any social division of labor and its financial and status rewards, there is another and in a sense truer system of duties and recognition. (I use 'recognition' because they presuppose an impartial/divine spectator.) This is the system of duties that asks us to contribute to our communities to the best of our abilities given our capabilities and opportunities. 

We (sorry, some of us) tend to have little eye for this system of duties and recognition. But during emergencies and crisis situations the spot-light reveals it clearly. This is clearly exhibited each time when fire-brigades, nurses, the police, and physicians risks their lives for the rest of us. But it is even more revealed in the present pandemic: when supermarket cashiers and delivery people are at work while the rich and powerful (and middle classes) stay at home.

I could stop here, but I want to close with a remark on the significance of this. What I have called "the system of duties and recognition," which takes any existing inequality for granted, sits uneasily with rewarding people in light of a market logic or their contribution to marginal productivity as well as those who claim that we should reward financially in terms of the "contribution to society" or "positive externalities" as Lisa Herzog has recently argued in New Statesman. Let me say something about the latter.

Herzog also notes that in the crisis we see people acting from duty and the desire for social recognition. "Many individuals want to make a meaningful contribution to society through their work – and work should be organised so that they can do that." One may think, thus, that what Herzog is proposing is to bring rewards in the market place more in line with the contribution to society (so much is right) -- to recouple "contributions to society, income and status" -- and, thereby, to bring these rewards in line with the system of duties and recognition. 

There are four subtle issues here. Herzog treats the measure of meaningful contribution in subjective terms. (This is presumably so because she respects people's autonomy.) But the system of duties and recognition is meant to be objective (relative to particular circumstances--so objective in the way Aristotle's moral theory is objective). Second, she thinks that we can democratically agree on the nature of these positive externalities. (I  think this is very optimistic.) But, by contrast, for better or worse the "system of duties and recognition" is grounded in skilled (perhaps omniscient) perception of an impartial spectator.

These two point to the more important third issue: The system of duties and recognition is always a moving target because it is meant to reflects real underlying political and economic facts of the matter. So, if society were to adopt and agree on Herzog's proposals to re-organize financial rewards for occupations in light of need this would shift what would be expected from each of us, and so on, in light of the system of duties and recognition.  

My point is not that there is an infinite regress lurking here. Nor that we should avoid altogether rewarding richly those who risk their lives on behalf of the rest of us. Herzog has every right to argue for redistribution given the status quo. But rather that the contested discussion of redistribution should not prevent us from recognizing that something like the system of duties and recognition marks correctly the pull each of us feels, or ought to feel, to act from duty to the best of our abilities and opportunities when others in society really depend on us.** 

 

On Being Inside Leibniz's Mill (on Remainder, Smith and Kramnick)

Remainder’s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism-it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall. It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very specific six-story building he has yet no memory of ever living in or seeing. In this building many people lived doing many things-cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back to him, though it was never there in the first place. And now Remainder really begins, in the mission to rebuild this building, to place reenactors in it reenacting those actions he wants them to enact (cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike), doing them over and over till it feels real, while he, in his apartment, fluidly closes and reopens a fridge door, just like De Niro....To facilitate his reenactment, the Reenactor hires Nazrul Ram Vyas, an Indian “from a high-caste family” who works as a facilitator for a company dedicated to personal inauthenticity: Time Control UK. It takes people’s lives and manages them for them. Nazrul is no more a character (in realism’s sense of the word) than I am a chair, but he is the most exquisite facilitator, and it is through him that every detail of the reenactment is processed. He thinks of everything. In place of the pleasure of the rich adjective we have an imagined world in which logistical details and logical consequences are pursued with care and precision: if you were to rebuild an entire house and fill it with people reenacting actions you have chosen for them, this is exactly how it would play out. Every detail is attended to except the one we’ve come to think of as the only one that matters in a novel: how it feels. The Reenactor in Remainder only ever has one feeling-the tingling-which occurs whenever his reenactments are going particularly well. The feeling is addictive; the enactments escalate, in a fascinating direction.--Zadie Smith in "Two Directions for the Novel," in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, pp. 86 (First published in 2008 in NYRB as "Two Paths for the Novel"). 

After (recall) I wrote about Tom McCarthy's Satin Island the distinguished literature scholar, Jonathan Kramnick, mentioned to me he thought McCarthy's Remainder one of the most important novels of this our comparatively new century (having almost passed a fifth of its projected years, it's still fresh). Chapter six of Kramnick's collection of essays, Paper Minds, taught me that he, in turn, was echoing the judgment of "Zadie Smith, in an influential essay in the New York Review of Books, [touted Remainder] as both the most significant novel of its decade and the direction Anglophone fiction should follow into the new millennium." (130) As it happens, I was familiar with Smith's essay, but somehow had remembered mainly the devastating criticism of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which has discouraged me from reading the book (life is short!), and the subtle use of a poem by Szymborska.

In re-reading Smith's essay I was reminded of her comic description of the International Necronautical Society (INS). In its manifesto, the INS assumes, with the logicians of old, the necessity of death and commits itself to reinventing death in rigorous ways. In the new logic, if we can make it (recall this post on Regina Rini), death will be a violent possibility.

But somehow, I had completely forgotten that Smith treated the seven year path (and presumably many rejections of) Remainder to publication as exemplary of "our ailing literary culture." (71) This culture represents unhealty times. In healthy days literature has multiple, possible futures. This (in 2008) is now denied. The opposition between Netherland and Remainder is a form of prophecy in order to re-open paths (and also recall the American metafiction -- "Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, David Foster Wallace" [I would add Fran Ross's Oreo]-- now languishing in a safe corner of literary history (73)). Since that very literature culture has rewarded Smith greatly, one cannot help avoid sensing some ambivalence (she uses "violence") in these remarks.

As Smith's description reveals, Remainder presents a character, a reenactor, who is very much a part inside Leibniz's Mill argument:

[W]e must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size, and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. 

But the novel suggests that Leibniz is inviting us to look in the wrong place. Perception is co-constituted by the body moving in space, the body's interaction with its umwelt, and repetition with (to echo Deleuze) occasional variation. Kramnick expertly connects Remainder to recent developments in enactive philosophy of mind (although understates the significance of repetition). Strikingly, the only feeling that occurs inside the reenactor, occurs when a pattern is recognized as, and thereby projected, as having occurred before. This constitutes a reenaction as going well.

The reenactor is a person who suffered an accident. His experience of recovering motor-control, which the able bodied ordinarily take for granted, reveals that the only person with truly fluid movement is a fake (De Niro's screen character). There is no what it's like of that. Once our behavior is (now quoting Kramnick) "slowed down and made unfamiliar, the experience in each does not layer on top of the [body-]motion. It is, rather, identical to it." (135) This claim is made visible (I almost wrote felt) by a kind of stripping away, that is, abstraction.

Both Smith and Kramnick note that Remainder's aesthetic is fully (ahh, I almost wrote self-conscious) present in the art. I quote Kramnick's description before I close with a comment: 

“In school, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art,” the reenactor begins one chapter; “I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus” (90). What follows is a revealing meditation on the making of art as its own type of perceptual activity. “For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel, and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable—a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us—right in the block that we were chiseling away at” (91). The art object is already there, only requiring a certain kind of physical motion—the lifting of one’s arm and hammering—for it to come into its own. The action is a deliberately plain shucking away of what is not art; thus, the reenactor can “not be any good at it” while also standing as the form-giving example in McCarthy’s ordinary sentence. “‘Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,’ he said; ‘it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.’ ” The reenactor takes this as a lesson on how to create his building (“chiseling away at surplus matter” will “scare my building out” [96]), and we are in turn supposed to take both as an account of how to see form as a kind of matter, the novel as a thing in the world rather than the world’s representation. Creative engagement merely strips away the surplus matter of what is neither experience nor art. (137)

One part of the (serious) joke here is that the teacher echoes (with a non-trivial difference) Vasari's definition of the nature of sculpture:* "Sculpture is an art which by removing all that is superfluous from the material and reduces it to that form designed in the artist's mind." Of course, the joke is that the traditional artist and his design has been removed from the (perhaps mis-remembered) teaching; there is now -- as Leibniz feared -- only motion and rough pattern recognition.

That would have been the best end to this long digression. But the other or same part of the joke is, of course, that one encounters the reenactor and his teacher through the words of McCarthy and (ahh) one's imaginary participation with these...and just then one recognizes the looming regress.

And so I close with gratitude to Kramnick with Swift:

• But art no longer can prevail,
• When the materials all are gone;
• The best mechanic hand must fail,
• Where nothing's left to work upon.
• Matter, as wise logicians say,
• Cannot without a form subsist;
• And form, say I, as well as they,
• Must fail if matter brings no grist.

Jonathan Swift and Pessimistic Meta-Induction

[Aristotle’s ghost] freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the same fate to attraction, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined.--From Jonathan Swift's (1726) Gulliver's Travels. Part Three, Chapter 8. 

Swift let's Gulliver recount through Aristotle's Ghost what we may call a pessimistic meta-induction (see here in the Stanford Encyclopedia). Swift is not the first to produce such a meta-induction I am familiar with several version of it to be found in Montaigne's Apology of Raimond Sebond -- involving induction over multiple sciences  --, and I would not be surprised if it has an ancient Skeptical pedigree. Montaigne wrote in the aftermath of the Copernican revolution so it is no surprise he is sensitive to this opportunity to argue for his version of skepticism. 

We are inclined to read Swift's version as, perhaps, displaying his scientific experience. How could one claim that Newton is mere 'fashion' and founded upon 'conjecture?' In his edition of Swift, Sir Walter Scott, suggest that this passage shows "the Dean understood little natural philosophy."* Scott may correct about this. While one can wonder why another novelist fails to recognize that a writer need not agree with his character, I leave that aside. But Scott underestimates Swift's remarks.

First, note that Swift correctly grasps that Newton had made Descartes's vortex theory obsolete. It's little noticed fact that Newton offered the first quantitative vortex theory and showed that it was incompatible with the empirical evidence (for explanation see this paper--the argument is Smeenk's.) This was by no means the consensus everywhere. (And, in fact, Newton's argument rested in part on a subtle mistake in his treatment of torque recognized by Bernoulli.) But Newton had clearly shifted the burden of evidence; Descartes version was doomed.

Second, it is worth noting that 1726 was also the year of publication of the third edition of the Principia. (So, Gulliver was written in the shadow of the second edition.) Even so, the most controversial empirical results of the Principia (shape of the Earth, universal gravity, the lunar orbit etc.) were still very much contested. These were not settled until more than a decade later in groundbreaking work of Maupertuis, Clairaut, and Euler. While there were many sympathetic defenses of Newton in circulation, that even in the British Isles, Berkeley and Toland had demonstrated that there was space for works that were not uncritical of Newton (along many dimensions).

Now, one may still think Swift should not have said (or let Aristotle's  Ghost say via Gulliver) that the Principia was grounded in conjecture. But that was not an uncommon view (see here for evidence) among the learned who had good evidence to think that the empirical world did not favor Newton's theory and that he violated standards of intelligibility. 

Moreover, the idea that the use of mathematical is a matter of fashion and context specific is one that is key to a series of important arguments by Mandeville developed in his (anti-mathematicist) treatment (see here) of using the incentive structure of medicine to support epistemic claims in his A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (recall my old posts here and here.) I believe Mandeville's arguments were inserted in the second (1730) edition. If so, then Swift may well have encouraged Mandeville's development of the point. Mandeville's argument is so much more thoroughly developed than Swift's remark that I hesitate to call it an influence. 

Anticipating Kuhn (and Adam Smith), Aristotle's Ghost treats the commitment to a particular scientific paradigm as akin to a religion. And while he does not claim that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is entirely due to social context, social context is a key factor. And, in fact, it would be useful to read this passage alongside the critical treatment of the royal society in his description of his visit to Laputa and the floating island, but that's for another voyage, I mean digression.

 

On Bullying, Conformism, Self-Censorship, and Clinical Depression: The Religiosity of Fahrenheit 451, revisited

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, and mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!  Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.....
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?--From Ray Bradbury (1953) Fahrenheit 451, pp. 75-6

Judging by the results of a Google search, which shows me links to many essay writing companies, the passage quoted is extremely popular among high school and college students. So, for all I know what follows has been worked out countless times before (and, if not, will -- because it's free -- perhaps become a staple of such essays). The narrator here is Beatty, the fire captain and boss of the main protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag -- his name (man Monday) an allusion to Crusoe's man Friday* -- is part of a book burning brigade (firemen). The speech occurs just as Montag's growing doubts about his work and society are crystallizing.

As it turns out, Beatty's own stance toward his own work and society is also ambivalent, but this is shown more indirectly. Be that as it may, he understands legal censorship as originating in self-censorship which arises out of three elements: a do-no-harm principle, mass democracy, and a heterogeneous population. The embrace of a do no harm principle is not a deeply felt normative stance, but rather dictated by prudence--minorities can organize and create unwanted controversy and hurt sales. In a heterogeneous population it will be difficult to avoid giving offense except by embracing a certain blandness and conformity. The idea being that in a homogeneous society free speech is more natural.

One may read in Beatty's speech a prescient prediction about the origin of what is now known as political correctness (something Bradbury encouraged late in life). But his speech is more subtle. His list of possible would-be-aggrieved minorities omits mention of African Americans and Jews. When the book was published, the great civil rights victories were still in the future, and the persecution of Jews (and the burning of their books) too fresh in living memory.  So, the underlying (neo-Humean) idea is that only when one's resentment can be felt by the majority, will the majority embrace bland conformism toward that minority. 

The previous paragraph may be thought speculative. But Beatty himself goes on to call attention to the two key elements, first not everybody is born equal and, second, he exposes the conformist violence at the core of his consumerist, mass-media society when he describes the school bullying of the boy** that stands out. In an age of McCarthyism, Bradbury need not have done it, but the political significance of bullying is made explicit (with a nod to the Constitution)-- bullying makes us equal. That is, rather than being a bug of a democratic polity, conformist violence is a feature of it.+ While African Americans are effaced, the burning of witches at Salem haunts the whole narrative. It is no surprise, then, that such a society, which disguises its own structural violence by, paradoxically presenting it as spectacle, expresses it abroad with a violent foreign policy. 

To what degree Beatty's origin story fits the facts is an open question. (This is a society in which the printer Benjamin Franklin has become the patron saints of book burners. There is a Swiftian fondness for reversals.) Beatty's diagnosis of the conformism and self-censorship of modern mass culture echoes the meritocratic critique of democracy first developed by Mill (recall here and here). Beatty is an interesting character because he clearly is the nerd in disguise (he is well read despite the prohibition) who  goes on to serve a soul-less and cruel regime.++ The regime is grounded in elections, but no less cruel for it. Its bad laws rooted in public opinion.

This last point deserves more emphasis. The underlying horror of the society depicted is that human life in it is trivialized. Something that Guy Montag becomes increasingly sensitive to. This lack of soul is what creates an undercurrent of clinical despair and dangerous thrill-seeking; where fun is everything. It's a bit surprising that Bradbury is not thought of as the prophet of the clinical depression epidemic of a society addicted to communication by (ahh) screens; this is a society in which all feeling is at the surface and in which our desires for goods are made to outstrip our means, but no connection intimate. For such intimacy is only possible -- the point is made explicit right at the start of the novel [Clarisse does not want anything from him]-- if it is not instrumentalized. 

For, while Bradbury himself facilitated the idea that this was a book about the perils of censorship, the truer theme of the book is the pernicious effects of spiritual deprivation on individual and society. At the start of the book, when talking to Clarisse, Montag understands himself (cf. Plato's Cave), by chance, as somebody watching a puppet show. Clarisse is likened to an angel more than once. She is the prophetic light that points the way out of the cave.*** It's no surprise then in the aftermath of rational-man-made cataclysm -- mutually assured destruction is the fruit of the tree of knowledge --, the novel closes with a quote from Revelation (22:2), which not only prophecies such a destruction, but also the promise of a light that follows. Those that have read the novel will understand my conclusion: there is only redemption if you can hold on to a text.

 

On the Civilized vs Savages, reconsidered.

Is it possible, without shuddering with horror, to read in history of the barbarous and useless torments that were coolly invented and executed by men who were called sages? Who does not tremble at the thoughts of thousands of wretches, whom their misery, either caused or tolerated by the laws which favoured the few and outraged the many, had forced in despair to return to a state of nature; or accused of impossible crimes, the fabric of ignorance and superstition; or guilty only of having been faithful to their own principles; who, I say, can, without horror, think of their being torn to pieces with slow and studied barbarity, by men endowed with the same passions and the same feelings? A delightful spectacle to a fanatic multitude!...

The punishment of death is pernicious to soci­ety, from the example of barbarity it affords. If the passions, or necessity of war, have taught men to shed the blood of their follow creatures, the laws which are intended to moderate the ferocity of mankind, should not increase it by examples if barbarity, the more horrible, as this punish­ment is usually attended with formal pngeantry. Is it not absurd, that the laws, which detect and punish homicide, should, in order to prevent mur­der, publicly commit murder themselves? Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria [1764] An Essay on Crimes and Punishment (96-97 & 104-105).

I had seen the name Beccaria mentioned in the context of predecessors to Bentham's utilitarianism and legal reform. And I recalled (with the help of Google) that in Discipline and Punishment, Foucault mentioned him as an exemplar of the advocate of a new political economy of punishment (more efficient, but also more unbounded, etc.); in fact, Foucault uses the very same passage I quote above to treat Beccaria as an advocate of the 'principle of moderation.' I had never read his Essay. But because I am preparing (with Sandrine Berges) an edition of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy, which offers a program of legal and penal reform, I decided to read Beccaria. His writing is forceful, with a vigorous sense of outrage and drama; rather than focusing on legal minutiae, he writes in the vernacular of an eighteenth century philosophe, who is clearly familiar with Hobbes, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Diderot, and if not Hume then Condillac or Adam Smith.  So, one is constantly hearing echoes of works already familiar, but applied and given vivacity, if I may, to urgent and existential matters of life and death.

The passages above are parts of his attacks on torture and the death penalty. (Amongst other things, he is also against anonymous accusations, and he favors a clear separation between judge and state prosecutor.) He is uncompromising against torture. And the only exception he grudgingly grants is one during the state of emergency: "it can only be necessary when a nation is on the verge of recovering or losing its liberty; or in times of absolute anarchy, when the disorders themselves hold the place of laws." (It's grudging because he relentlessly focuses on likely abuses of any law.)

As an aside, and to forestall misunderstanding, Beccaria's point is not to promote quiet, capital punishment without spectacle. For such punishment would defeat the purpose of punishment which is almost entirely meant to deter other people's future crimes. And so any punishment needs to be visible to the rest of society. This leads him, in fact, to justify a form of imprisonment that he (quite rightly) calls slavery--the prisoner needs to be seen to work. (His moral psychology justifying this is clearly indebted to Hume or a Humean.) 

Now, as regular readers know I am rather ambivalent (see here), and often opposed to the savage/barbarous vs civilized distinction. Historically, it helps justify colonial projects (from Ireland to the rest of the world) in terms of a paternalistic and violent extension of civilization.The distinction is not merely of historical interest: to this day it is re-activated by moralists to help justify belligerent acts against (let's stipulate for the sake of argument, hostile) 'non-western' forces.* 

For Beccaria, there are two kinds of savage/barbarous conditions. One is the state of nature, which he sometimes calls 'anarchy' or 'state of independence.' For him we escape the state of nature by being under authority of tolerable law or by way of contract. The conditions of this social contract deviate interestingly from Hobbes's account (which clearly inspired it)--about which some other time more. But, and this is the second kind of barbarism, a lot of existing or past states are de facto wholly barbarous or partially barbarous/savage. So, for example, while there are clear, non-trivial republican strains in his thought, he writes about the "Romans" (while praising them for their abhorrence of torturing citizens), that they were "in many respects barbarous, and whose savage virtue has been too much admired." (59)

That is to say, in Beccaria's hands the opposition between barbarism vs (law-governed) civilization is brought home and applied to Europe. And Europe comes out looking very barbarous which incentivizes criminals to become more violent and criminal and, thereby, (note the first passage above) returns to the state of nature. (So, for Beccaria, the state of nature is, as Spinoza suggests, possible within advanced society.) This, in turn, only benefits rulers who can justify further repression and savagery (etc.)

In fact, incentives are crucial to his general approach. I'll offer two examples of this: first, in his treatment of credibility of evidence, he writes: "the credibility of his evidence will be in proportion as he is interested in declar­ing or concealing the truth. Hence it appears,  how frivolous is the reasoning of those, who reject the testimony of women on account of their weakness; how puerile it is, not to admit the evidence of those who are under sentence of death, because they are dead in law; and how irrational, to exclude persons branded with infamy: for in all these cases they ought to be credited, when they have no interest in giving false testimony." (48) Witnesses are crucial to his general penal reform because he attacks oaths, torture, and duels as means toward establishing the truth in law-courts. The inclusion of women as credible witnesses is especially notable, because in general Beccaria is a defender of a modernized patriarchy. By this I mean, that he uses republican and social contract reasoning to attack the paternal tyranny over the household in order to create masculine equality (which excludes women).**

Second, there is a passage, that echoes an extremely familiar Machiavellian trope adopted by a whole variety of eighteenth century writers from Hume to Madison (recall Hirschman [who misses, I think, the significance of Beccaria]), "by opposing one passion to another, and opinion to opinion, a wise legislator puts an end to the admiration of the populace." (84)

Let me wrap up. Beccaria holds up a mirror to his European readers, who think of themselves as progressive, embracing mathematical sciences, and enlightened. What he shows is savage barbarism. But unlike say, Swift or Sade, he does so not to undermine the self-conception of the project of enlightened humanity (in different ways), but to encourage his readers to adopt reforms that may help the mirrored reality live up to its professed ideals.  

 

Pateman On the Shaky Foundations of Liberal Contractualism

Exploitation is possible precisely because...contracts about property in the person place right of command in the hands of one party to the contract....The genius of contract theorists has been to present both the original contract and actual contracts as exemplifying and securing individual freedom. On the contrary, in contract theory universal freedom is always an hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the form of relations of domination and subordination....Carole Pateman (1988) The Sexual Contract, 8

In re-reading, because teaching, Pateman's Sexual Contract, I was struck by the claim that contract always generates 'political right in the form of relations of domination and subordination.' As I was contemplating her 'always,' I suddenly realized that I had not quite grasped the depth of her challenge to liberal contractualism. For, I had always (falsely) assumed that she was making the non-trivial, albeit limited, point that given empirical conditions of social hierarchy and unfairness, existing contracts re-inscribe forms of domination and subordination. That insight is indeed what explains the idea behind the first sentence quoted above: contracts produce inequality of power (income, status, etc.) because, regardless of the nature of formal (abstract) equality that is presupposed in the making  of any contract, in the real world contracts always tend to reflect the relative bargaining positions of the parties to the contract. Or they tacitly create out-groups not party to, and subordinated by, the contract. This is why even commercial contracts can, and generally do, reinforce economic and political/social hierarchies, even if over time they may shift them in unexpected and unintended ways. Pateman is right to call attention to sexual and commercial exploitation grounded in contracts.

But while the limited point reveals that historically contractualism is compromised by the many injustices it legitimates, the point is itself not fatal to a liberal contractualism worth having. All it requires, in response, is more stringent conditions on the material and social/economic (etc.) pre-conditions of a legitimate contract. While this may be a step too far for many folk who are attracted to (say a Lockean) contractualism, so much the worse for them. (That's to say if you want to be an apologist for hierarchy, good for you.) 

I now recognize that Pateman's point is more thoroughgoing. To grasp the more fundamental insight, it is worth being reminded of the conceptual difference between your average contract and your standard promise. The key distinction is that a promise has no enforcement mechanism outside the promising parties. A contract worth its name, by contrast, doesn't merely bring parties to it together, but also introduces a credible, enforcement mechanism (a binding arbiter, judicial review, etc.). This enforcement mechanism has to be a stronger (in the relevant sense) power such that enforcement is credible.

Thus, conceptually every genuine contract -- even when we only think of it as a source of justification --  presupposes subordination to some higher authority. (The absence of such higher authority – as in some international treaties – make some contacts more akin to promises than to contracts.) While sometimes one of the parties to the contract may well be able to supply the power and thus credibility of enforcement (alliances with a hegemonic power are like this), this does not undermine Pateman’s insight. While it's not the main point of most contracts, all contacts legitimize the contracting parties' subordination to a higher party.+ In most contracts this higher power is the judiciary, but in the founding contract this is the state/sovereign (etc.).

Now, for Hobbes – and unlike most critics (and friends) of Hobbes, Pateman understands the strengths of his approach -- (civil) subordination to the state is a feature not a bug. The whole point of the contract is the generation and simultaneous subordination to a higher power, a mortal god, in his fine words. Of course, Hobbes does not advocate subordination for its own sake; they are supposed to make possible the 'fruits' of peace. And if one has sympathy for consequentialist justifications that may be well good enough. (Obviously it ought not be good enough once one has confronted, say, Pateman’s or Mills’s reminders of the many ways in which both hypothetical and actual contracts have inscribed gendered and racial (etc.) patterns of exclusion and domination.)

Hobbes is no liberal so for him subordination to another is a price worth paying. But it is peculiar that subsequent liberals would sign up for a way of conceptualization the political order that at its core presupposes subordination to a stronger party. Whether one thinks liberalism as, at heart, a program that is in the business of preventing harm, or promoting freedom, or the preservation of human dignity (etc.), it has, in practice, an instinctive abhorrence of systems of hierarchy. This is, at heart, liberalism’s argument against feudalism and slavery. (They are not primarily opposed for their bad consequences.) Even the defense of commerce is, at heart, not utilitarian or focused on economic growth (or on the virtues it promotes)—it is rather grounded on the desirability of mutual exchange, which presupposes, if not always mutual recognition and the legitimacy of each side’s desires and longings, at least acknowledged indifference to these.

As a non-trivial aside, it is, of course, perfectly possible – I believe Jacob Levy taught me this -- that as a historical fact, liberalism arose as a mitigating project against an existing strong state (say, Tudor absolutism, French despotism, etc.).* That is, it’s the reality of a certain species of existing subordination that generates the liberal project. So, it may well be the case that practices of certain kind of subordination are the historical-social preconditions for the very desirability of liberalism.** So, liberalism may well be the bastard-child of state power, and aims to diminish it or re-direct it to less dangerous ends.

Be that as it may, Pateman’s conceptual point should give contractarian liberals pause: it may – let’s stipulate -- be legitimate to choose one’s self-subordination. But it is peculiar to inscribe one’s subordination (to a higher power, etc.) in the very ground and justification of the political order. That's, in fact, what nationalists do (recall). And it is especially peculiar if such self-subordination is inevitable given that one understands the order as a contract. (This is no less peculiar than the obsession of some contemporary liberals in finding justification for the use of state power against others.)*** That is to say, if liberalism is de facto a normative enterprise that presupposes the state and seeks to ameliorate it by promoting fair and just (and harm-reducing) institutions, we should avoid conceptualizations that commit us to hierarchy from the start--that's just asking for trouble.

 

When is a book not a Classic?; On Huxley's Crome Yellow.

If one is capable of intellectual detachment, one can perceive merit in a writer whom one deeply disagrees with, but enjoyment is a different matter. Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself- not independently of the observer, indeed, but independently of the mood of the observer. In one sense, therefore, it cannot be true that a poem is good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. But if one judges the poem by the appreciation it arouses, then it can certainly be true, because appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be commanded. For a great deal of his waking life, even the most cultivated person has no aesthetic feelings whatever, and the power to have aesthetic feelings is very easily destroyed. When you are frightened, or hungry, or are suffering from toothache or sea-sickness, King Lear is no better from your point of view than Peter Pan. You may know in an intellectual sense that it is better, but that is simply a fact which you remember: you will not feel the merit of King Lear until you are normal again. And aesthetic judgement can be upset just as disastrously — more disastrously, because the cause is less readily recognized — by political or moral disagreement. If a book angers, wounds or alarms you, then you will not enjoy it, whatever its merits may be. If it seems to you a really pernicious book, likely to influence other people in some undesirable way, then you will probably construct an aesthetic theory to show that it has no merits. Current literary criticism consists quite largely of this kind of dodging to and fro between two sets of standards. And yet the opposite process can also happen: enjoyment can overwhelm disapproval, even though one clearly recognizes that one is enjoying something inimical. Swift, whose world-view is so peculiarly unacceptable, but who is nevertheless an extremely popular writer, is a good instance of this. Why is it that we don't mind being called Yahoos, although firmly convinced that we are not Yahoos?...

Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of Gulliver's Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.--Orwell (1946) "Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels."

I read novels primarily for entertainment. As Orwell once argued you get a lot of value for money. But, and this probably marks me as unsophisticated, I also read them for their instruction in the art of living, that is, in wisdom. By the 'art of living,' I do not mean to suggest that novels are sophisticated self-help books (although Alain de Botton is not wrong to insist they are sometimes this, too), but rather that I see them as sources of insight about (ahh) anything. I do so because professional philosophy largely and steadfastly lost interest wisdom. So, for me novels are a means to help perfect my imperfect philosophy. Some of my these Impressions are a partial diary of my engagement with this project.

The previous, paragraph is a kind of apologia for what follows which is an attempt at explaining why, despite its historical significance, I find Aldous Huxley's (1921) Crome Yellow un-instructive. I read the book in a Vintage Classics edition that includes a preface by Malcolm Bradbury, who with the publisher also insists that is "one of the modern classics."  (I have quite a bit to say under the influence of Coetzee on the nature of a classic, but ignore that here.) Unlike some, who treat the book simply as satire, Bradbury is more careful and claims that it is a "comic novel of ideas" (and can "go on being read with complete delight and pleasure.") Bradbury does not deny that the book contains "satirical tales cunningly planted in the story," -- including the brilliant Swiftian, "narrative of  Sir Hercules Occam, the perfectly-formed [and perfectly named!--ES] dwarf who builds his perfect dwarf estate until all is destroyed by a full-sized heir" -- but he is right not to treat the book as satire. For, the book lacks, despite its invocation of Swift at the start of the novel, say, the "disgust, rancour and pessimism" (and anger) that (as Orwell correctly notes) animates Gulliver's Travels.

The main character is Denis Stone a published poet, who visits a great house one Summer shortly after World War I (so 1919 or 1920).* The house is the estate of the Lapiths (a Homeric name, this is a Swiftian gesture),** and that Summer there are three available young women. (He is interested in Anne.) When we meet him he suffers a writer's block while working on a novel and, perhaps this is connected, he admits to a kind of nihilist lack of faith in anything (including his own art). For faith keeps dullness at bay and transforms each event into something meaningful. Early on the reader (and Denis) learns that the would-be-plot of his projected novel -- which is loosely based on his own misguided understanding of himself -- is completely predictable. While he may lack self-knowledge, Denis has enough sense of shame to blush. Shortly thereafter his lack of originality is revealed (which a scene later he takes to be central to art), when he acknowledges that "things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about then." He blames his "education" for this. He goes on to suggest (in a much quoted passage):

One entered the world [...] having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

Even if one were to grant the truth of these thoughts (and ignore the false, even fatal opposition between life and ideas), there is no sign that he is willing to struggle free from education's effects. I could go on and on pointing out the contradictions and cliches in this timid poet's outlook. None of these, of course, prevent him from being a potentially sympathetic character. But while his shy, longings are familiar enough sources of sympathetic identification, he is revealed as an empty shell, a self-described lover of "words" (and not "things and ideas and people') in two revealing episodes.

First, Denis's inability to act, even when offered a proper exemplar, is revealed in an extended set-piece in chapter XIX. The estate's pater familias, Henry Wimbush, has been working on a history of the family from which he reads to the gathered guests and family in the evenings. One night he tells the story of his not-so-aristocratic grandfather who won the hand of one of the aristocratic, lovely Lapiths, with a mixture of curiosity and not entirely moral, spirit. Denis is incapable of taking a hint.

Second, and in many ways this is the climax of the novel (chapter XXIV), Denis discovers he is not "his own severest critic" when he reads Jenny's red notebook full of drawings. (He never wonders why he is able to find it.) Jenny  is deaf, and he has shown little interest in her throughout the novel. It turns out he recognizes his own ridiculousness and foolishness in Jenny's caricatures of him. While his hurt is understandable, he draws entirely the wrong lesson:

There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes besides himself....One is apt...to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one's own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents itself to other people as well as to oneself."

None of this is false. But he shows no curiosity about Jenny (not even after his discovery), who is revealed as the most interesting person among the babbling other guests. In fact, it's clear that his lack of curiosity (a leading theme throughout the slim novel) condemns him not to get anything he wants. This is made abundantly clear to the reader.

It may seem perverse that I grant that the book is a comic novel of ideas -- in the way, say Zadie Smith's White Teeth is -- and yet fail to engage with neither the comedy nor the ideas. There is, in fact, quite a bit of comedy, and not a few moments that are the jumping-off places for further reflection (about which some other time). But by not challenging, even flattering the reader's felt superiority to its main character, the novel stimulates our pride and, most fatally, our complacency and so is unworthy of our engagement.***