Dope

LI was on the horn with our friend, MB. MB mentions an article she's writing for a book on Philosophy and Race, which gets us onto the topic of philosophy and race. So LI mentioned that if the editor expanded his mandate, he ought to include the Eyre Incident. MB hadn't heard of the Eyre incident, and --- putting our cards on the table -- LI has gone many moons in complete Eyre ignorance too. We came across a reference to it in a biography of Mary Kingsley. So we explained what we knew -- that Governor Eyre, in Jamaica, brutally put down a revolt of agricultural workers there, mostly black, in the 1860s. And that he was put on trial for murder. And that the case became a sensation in England, where two different committees were formed, one pro-Eyre, one anti. The pro-Eyre committee was openly contemptuous of the idea that a white man should be prosecuted for murdering black men. Alas, Charles Dickens was on the pro-Eyre committee, as well as the ever racist Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. On the side of the angels, though, was James Stuart Mills. As well as Charles Darwin.

Well, after we got off the horn, we decided to look up Governor Eyre, in order to expand our knowledge from the rather potted account we'd given MB. We were in luck. Two free market economists, David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, have written a marvelous, long article that centers around the affair. For Levy and Peart, the themes are clear: critics of classical economics, the prototypical descendents of Adam Smith (who are, presumably, statists and other unspeakable things) are, from the beginning, advancing a racist agenda. Racist in the modern sense of refusing to grant, to blacks, or to disfavored ethnic groups (the Irish, mainly) a status of judicial equality, and backgrounding that refusal with a theory of racial or ethnic inferiority.

Now, LI doesn't buy Levy and Peart's entire argument. For one thing, the two make the mistake of taking ideological positions of circumstance to the be equivalent of ideological positions that unfold from logical necessity. Let me explain the difference with a more modern example. Religious conservatives in this country have been in the forefront of the attack on the whole language movement. The whole language movement seeks to teach reading by memorization, and using contextual clues -- whatever that means. Religious conservatives favor phonics.

Now, does is phonics somehow logically inferred from core conservative positions? I think not. LI thinks the whole language movement is, mostly, a crock, and that writing should be learned musically -- by way of phonics. We think this partly because it has been the more successful way to teach reading. We think it provides a more reliable interface between the text as a material object and the body. We think this for any number of reasons. But none of those reasons lead us to other conservative Christian positions. We think that, given other circumstances, the conservative position could as easily be whole language learning, and the liberal position phonics.

In the same way, we think that the racist positions taken by Ruskin and Dickens -- which, in spite of Levy and Peart's efforts, seem marginal to the work of both of those writers -- aren't to be deduced from their criticism of classical economics. With Carlyle, however, it is a wholly other matter.
We'll defend this thesis, and modify it, later on.

However, Levy and Peart are right to use the Eyre dispute as a sort of litmus test to tell us a lot about the intellectual playing field in Victorian England.

Here is the pair's simple, forceful abridgement of the affair:

The Eyre Controversy

"The controversy was triggered by a seemingly trivial event in the British colony of Jamaica. A contemporary witness wrote:

On Saturday the 7th October, 1865, a court of petty sessions was held at Morant Bay. A man made a noise in the court, and was ordered to be brought before justices. He was captured by the police outside, but immediately rescued by one Paul Bogle and several other persons, who had large bludgeons in their hands, and taken into the market-square, where some one hundred and fifty more persons joined them also with sticks: the police were severely beaten. ... On Monday, the 9th, warrants were issued against Paul Bogle and twenty seven others for riot and assault on the Saturday.1 Paul Bogle lives in the lyrics to Bob Marley's"So Much Things To Say."

On Wednesday the police came to enforce the warrants. Stones were thrown at the police. Then the shooting began. The island's Governor, Edward James Eyre, took command. Eyre imposed martial law and called in the army to restore order. By the time the army was done, over 400 Jamaicans were dead, and thousands homeless. Britons were horrified by the methods of state terror, including flogging with wire whips and the use of military courts to deny civilians their rights."

To understand how history, especially if it involves English or American injustice, can be covered up, compare this account to the account in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in the entry under Eyre:

"1846 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, where he served under Sir George Grey. After successively governing St Vincent and Antigua, he was in 1862 appointed acting-governor of Jamaica and in 1864 governor. In Octobef~ ~865 a negro insurrection broke out and was repressed with laudable vigour, but the unquestionable severity and alleged illegality of Eyre�s subsequent proceedings raised a storm at home which induced the government to suspend him and to despatch a special commission of investigation, the effect of whose inquiries, declared by his successor, Sir John Peter Grant, to have been �admirably conducted,� was that he should not be reinstated in his office. The government, nevertheless, saw nothing in Eyre�s conduct to justify legal proceedings; indictments preferred by amateur prosecutors at home against him and military officers who had acted under his direction, resulted in failure, and he retired upon the pension of a colonial governor."

Laudable vigour -- unpack that phrase and what do you find? Flogging with wire whips and 400 deaths. Something to keep in mind as Bush uses America's "laudable vigour" as he sees fit.

The "amateur prosecutors" -- can't you hear the Tory sneer in that phrase? -- were stimulated by John Stuart Mill, in one of his greatest moments. To understand Levy and Peart's article, you have to understand the divide between Mill and Carlyle, and what it represented in England.
To be continued...