Dope
Auguste Dupin once traced the course of his companion�s thoughts by a series of inductions that attached to the dumbshow of his companion�s expressions - the microworld of steps, frowns, glances, and furrows that, in the nineteenth century, was being explored with absurd confidence by German physiognomists -- until, interrupting that silent monologue, he made some magically relevant comment. The nineteenth century motif: detective as magician, consciousness as a rather easily demystified magic trick � we love it, we love it. LI (and the century we escaped from) has only a broken faith in the coherence and topical unity of the consciousness, even our own; still, we find it worth while (infinitely narcissistic as we are) to navigate the branches of our thought on the bateau ivre until we come to the source of our sudden interest in Macaulay.

Because in the last post we lied. Our readers haven�t been clamoring for explication de texte; they�ve been clamoring for naked pictures of Britney Spears.

But patience, one day, perhaps....
In the meantime -- our more faithful readers will remember that lately, we have been fascinated with Burke. At least, we have been quoting him a lot. And we have been reading Burke�s most ardent current defender, Conor Cruise O�Brien. O�Brien�s spirited attack on Burke�s critics prompted us to pick up Jeremy Bernstein�s biography of Warren Hastings, the East Indian company�s governor in Calcutta after Clive, and the victim of an impeachment process in the 1780s that never succeeded completely in impugning his character, but did succeed in giving Burke a reputation for madness. Even in the 18th century, when there was a patience for extended, hypoglycemic oratory that can only be compared to the curious stoner enthusiasm of the of the sixties and the seventies for 15 minute guitar solos of extreme monotony, Burke�s rants got on the nerve of the governing classes. They liked to see an orator collapse in tears and sweat, but they were less thrilled when these effects were more generally present in the audience, and the audience had gambling to do.

Bernstein convinced me that Hastings was a much better man than Burke and O�Brien painted him; there's an essay about the nostalgic imperialism of the new conservative crowd in the New Statesman that bears quoting on this point. It is by Maria Misra, and it conflates, without ironic intention, I think, the programs of Hastings and Burke:

"It would be anachronistic to identify these tolerant 18th-century attitudes to race and culture with those of modern liberal opinion. Hastings and his colleagues were certainly not bien-pensant radicals. Colour prejudice was common, not just among the British. Many Indians, then as now, favoured the "wheaten" complexion (the Indian word for caste is varna, meaning "colour").


But what made Hastings and his peers different from the pith-helmeted empire-builders of the Raj lay in their adherence to a kind of Burkean conservatism, which, with its concern for tradition, its respect for the authority of custom and practice, and hostility to the new, nurtured a kind of 18th-century cultural relativism. As Hastings himself observed: "Bengal is already a great nation and has no need of the supposedly superior wisdom of the English." It may dismay modern liberals, but this tolerant era was to be swept aside by their early Victorian avatars, the utilitarians.


For utilitarians, relativism of any kind was anathema. Good government, to them, consisted in the application of universal principles of law. From this universalising liberalism emerged the more extreme examples of Victorian imperial arrogance; 19th-century liberalism may have been liberating at home, but abroad it was a weapon in the armoury of the cultural imperialist. Without the iron-clad confidence of the ideological zealot, the utilitarian James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill), a man who had never set foot in India, could not have written a multi-volume history of the subcontinent, denouncing manners, culture and practices of which he was almost wholly ignorant. Likewise, it was the liberal polemicist and historian Thomas Macaulay who confidently claimed that a single shelf of books in a good European library was worth more than the entire written corpus of India and Arabia put together."

Misra's Macaulay is the common type, the one I have some passing acquaintance with. However, there�s a passage that intrigued me in Bernstein. Macaulay, Bernstein said, has a style like champagne, so that one sometimes forgets how bogus his points are in one�s appreciation of how he is making them.

These disjunct fragments can't be shored against Macaulay's ruin. They simply have to be sorted through.
Since Macaulay lived in Calcutta, and must have had some gossipy knowledge of Hastings himself, I wonder if Bernstein is being wholly fair. O�Brien is a fierce twit about Burke�s detractors, yet the politics of Burke�s objection to Hastings seems sound to LI. However, do we really want to turn in the gyre of the
Hastings story? No. We got more interested in the long essay on Bacon, for the reasons we gave
in the last post.

Meaning � sorry, but the next post will be about Macaulay and Bacon. Those looking for the usual trenchant missiles we hike at the NYT, or Sharonophiles, or Enron apologists, will just have to come back here in a couple of days, when we have found our mind. Right now, we simply want to lose it.