Dope

LI took a bumpy flight to Atlanta last Monday. I went to spend Christmas with my family. My friend S. was patiently along for the ride, and displayed an admirable calm, as well as a blue cowboy hat perched at a jaunty angle on her head, while we dipped into various troughs and got our memento mori moment .

S. was a singleton child -- no other siblings in sight when she was growing up. Merely the one on one with those gradually diminishing household giants, the parents, with their gothic voraciousness, their sudden, irrational ukases, their illogic, their dense weave of habit -- the afterwork tasks, the sitting before the tv, the petrified idioms of their conversation, what they found funny or disgusting or respectable -- and their own consciousness of a forward motion in time that is invisible to the singleton, for whom the parent comes as a complete and finished unit. This is a bit more visible to those who start out either before or after some other human bodies at the table. The weight, the height, the grades and the birthdays make growth and aging a matter of population rather than an (for a long time) incomparable process. The singleton is a maroon. I grew up with two brothers and two sisters, which makes for considerable differences in tactics and strategies. For children in large families, the POV becomes, necessarily, an amalgam; the one on one with the parents is, if sometimes sharp, always subject to sudden switches of focus. For a singleton, the family is a novel. For the children in a large family, it is a newspaper. Furthermore, my family has a tendency to competition and gregariousness that makes us seem, sometimes, very like a tree full of starlings. However, S. enjoyed us; and when she didn't, she sat back and let us gabble on and thought, herself, of other things.

Since Mom died, the family has changed a lot. My father, for instance, found another wife -- or so I suppose, not having been invited to the wedding, or even knowing if there was one -- not knowing, too, what 'finding' means, exactly, here, since finding implies looking, and was my Dad looking? or was the woman looking? -- and has, my Dad, astonishingly enough, spent most of the last four or five years having nothing to do with us. Aggressively. That's a painful desertion, but it has been muted by the fact that we are all of us middle aged. We are, frankly, not going to mope over Dad when we have such other, rich themes to mope over: lack of romantic partners, unsatisfactory romantic partners, money, news, whether God exists, etc. My sister J. lives in Shreveport; she wasn't present for this Christmas. Deidre's two kids were, for me, the highlight of Christmas. Molly is eighteen, Emerson is, what, eleven? (I am, of course, using false names -- ever the discrete one, LI is). I can never remember if Emerson is eleven, twelve or thirteen. In any case, Christmas is about giving gifts to kids. Adults of course like gifts, but they like gifts that derive from less communal holidays, like birthdays, or Valentines day. Gifts, in other words, that are aureoled with a certain intimacy of gift giver to gift getter. Christmas, however, is less about the refinements of love and more about the basic roux. Like Christmas dinner -- which is all hearty, blatant flavors, aiming for the the bovine warmth of the full stomach rather than some epicurian mid-state -- the perfect Christmas gift should acknowledge the child's concupiscence for stuff rather than signal the givers own taste in the choice of it.

The gifts were just right, as Goldilocks says of the little bear's porridge. And, to acknowledge LI's own lust for stuff, we are typing this post on one of them -- a laptop computer.

Dope

What would Pilate do?

Well, LI learned, the other day, that we were not the first to spot the significance of Pilate in the controversy between Mill and Stephen -- a writer for the Economist, Ann Wroe, in her book on the figure of Pilate, alludes both to the controversy and to the colonial background:


"With this contemporary problem [of empire] in their minds, the Victorians turned again with some interest to the trial of Jesus. Had Pilate been justified in crucifying Christ, or not? On one side stood John Stuart Mill, the great liberal thinker, who naturally took the view that the trial itself was a travesty and Pilate's sentence an outrage against freedom of speech and freedom of religion. On the other side stood James FitzJames Stephen, the uncle of Virginia Woolf, who argued that Pilate's moral absolutes would have been different. If a ruler, he argued, was charged to keep the peace, that naturally became his first priority. He was not required to be tolerant of free speech or religion if that meant he would have a riot on his hands. Pilate's first concern was the glory of Rome; his second, the preserving of his own skin, and both depended absolutely on keeping the peace in Jerusalem."

Our notion is that there is much more to be squeezed out of the Pilate example, in this case, than Wroe gives us here; in a sense, the Trial of Jesus encompasses the whole paradox of Christian imperial governance in the age of democracy. However, we must (grudgingly) acknowledge Wroe's precedence (big of us, huh?).

Voltaire refers to Pilate in two crucial places: in his essay on Tolerance, and in his Philosophical Dictionary. The latter reference is in the entry on Truth. Pilate appears in the light of Voltaire's irony as a figure with whom the philosophea were all too familiar: the sympathizers within the state, the hangers-on of the enlightenment. The nobles, officials, churchmen who expressed, as is the way of the circles of the powerful under political tyranny, sympathy for dissent -- an enlightened view of official superstitions -- a discomfort with old institutions - and who, when the time came, would unhesitatingly betray their enlightened friends. Pilate, who, following an old convention, Voltaire obviously sees as a disenchanted old officer, is willing to surrender to establishment pressure rather than stand up against it. He knows the better thing, and does the worse. Truth, then, gets mixed up, from the very beginning, with resistance against the structure of falsehood. It is, in other words, politicized.


Voltaire's reading of Pilate comes from the famous passage in John 18:

Pilate said to him, "you are the king?"
Jesus responded, "you say that I am the king; it is for this that I was born and have come into the world -- to witness the truth; let every man who is of the truth listen to my voice." Pilate said to him, "what is the truth?" and having said this, he parted.

Voltaire's gloss on this passage is in the highest vein of his style -- sparse, dry, doublesided:

"Il est triste pour le genre humain que Pilate sort�t sans attendre la r�ponse; nous saurions ce que c�est que la v�rit�. Pilate �tait bien peu curieux."

It is as if Pilate and Jesus were actors in one of Perrault's folktales. But Voltaire soon drives home his liberal point. Conceding that the truth is to say that which is; and conceding that that which was, or will be, can only be said in terms of its probability, and never in terms of its certitude; then to kill a human being for speaking his mind is to kill him on what was, or on a probability; furthermore, it is to kill him without, oneself, knowing the truth, insofar as present certitude is surrounded by a gulf of doubt, is to commit an act of lese majeste with regard to the truth. Voltaire, of course, expresses these things with his usual astringent humor:

" Mais comme vous n�aurez jamais de certitude enti�re, vous ne pourrez vous flatter de conna�tre parfaitement la v�rit�.

Par cons�quent vous devez toujours pencher vers la cl�mence plus que vers la rigueur. S�il ne s�agit que de faits dont il n�ait r�sult� ni mort d�homme ni mutilation, il est �vident que vous ne devez faire mourir ni mutiler l�accus�. S�il n�est question que de paroles, il est encore plus �vident que vous ne devez point faire pendre un de vos semblables pour la mani�re dont il a remu� la langue; car toutes les paroles du monde n��tant que de l�air battu, � moins que ces paroles n�aient excit� au meurtre, il est ridicule de condamner un homme � mourir pour avoir battu l�air. Mettez dans une balance toutes les paroles oiseuses qu�on ait jamais dites, et dans l�autre balance le sang d�un homme, ce sang l�emportera. Or celui qu�on a traduit devant vous n��tant accus� que de quelques paroles que ses ennemis ont prises en un certain sens, tout ce que vous pourriez faire serait aussi de lui dire des paroles qu�il prendra dans le sens qu�il voudra; mais livrer un innocent au plus cruel et au plus ignominieux supplice pour des mots que ses ennemis ne comprennent pas, cela est trop barbare. Vous ne faites pas plus de cas de la vie d�un homme que de celle d�un l�zard, et trop de juges vous ressemblent."

("Since you will never possess the entire certainty of any state of affairs, you cannot flatter yourself to know, perfectly, the truth.

Consequently, you ought always to lean towards clemency, instead of rigor. If if it is only a question of facts which have not resulted in homicide or injury, it is evident that you should not, yourself, either kill or mutilate. If it is only a question of words, it is still more evident that you ought not to hang one of your kind for the manner in which he moved his tongue. For all the words in the world are only thrashings of the air, at least if they have not excited to murder, and it is ridiculous to condemn a man to death for thrashing the air. So, let's put into one side of the balance all the idle words one has ever spoken, and into the other side the blood of a man, and you will see that blood carries the point. Thus he who they have brought before you, being only accused of some words that his enemies have taken in a certain sense, all that you can do would be to have him say the words in the sense that he himself would have them taken; but to deliver an innocent to the most cruel and ignominious torture for words that his enemies doen't understand, that is too barbarous. Doing this, you are making no more of a case for the life of a man than the life of a lizard -- and too many judges are just like you."

Voltaire prefigures Mill's argument for liberty of opinion from the fallibility of all opinions. However, he's simply funnier than Mill.

Remora

Venezuala.


LI averted our eyes from the news during the past week in this space -- at least officially. Like a robotically connected citizen, outside of this space we did keep a beady-eyed watch over the march of history in the newspapers. One story that hasn't stirred us is the general strike in Venezuala.

Why haven't we been stirred? After all, what word, to a romantic leftist, conjures up more vivid images of liberty, equality and fraternity than the general strike? The favored tool of the working class -- and yes, Virginia, there is a working class -- usually engages our sympathies. This one, however, has engaged our ambiguities.

On the one hand, the picture is this: Hugo Chavez has all the appearances of that scourge of Latin American history, the military populist, of whom Peron is the great, dark exemplar. They arouse the contempt and fury of the propertied class, but one shouldn't infer, from that, that these military energumen are leftists. More often, they offer a corporatist answer to the civil and economic problems of the nation. It is a short range solution that, at the price of stifling liberty, pledges the nation to dependence on an elevated spoils system, usually centering around some exported raw material, or agricultural product. In the meantime, the despotic distribution of power creates a grass-roots motive for social violence. In Venezuala, where everything floats on oil and Chavez is enamored of his own charisma, all these elements are in place.

On the other hand, there's a certain rancid odor wafting above some of the groups opposing Chavez. An odor of the coup, the death-squad, and the sour snobbery of the elite. This snobbery is not a matter of who joins the club -- it is a matter of taking violent coercion as the chosen instrument of governance. It is a matter of freezing class divisions. It is a matter of under-educating, under-investing in, and actively repressing, the lower classes. We've seen this machinery in motion before.

The LA Times has been particularly hip to the turmoil in Venezuala, with a better archive of Venezuala news stories than are on offer at the NYT. The ambiguities of opposition are explored in yesterday's story, entitled Marxists, Management Unite to Oppose Chavez, with the explainatory graf:

"For more than two weeks of a national strike, the opposition has presented a solid front against Chavez, whom it accuses of conspiring to turn the United States' third-largest oil supplier into a communist redoubt like Cuba."


Today, they publish a profile of Raul Baduel, who "commands a fifth of Venezual's 45,000 troops." Baduel is Chavez' friend, and a mystic dabbler:





"The commander of Venezuela's most powerful military force sits behind a large dark wood desk surrounded by Virgin Mary statues and Buddhist prayer strips. The smell of patchouli fills the air. Gregorian chant music floats ethereally."



Gregorian chants, eh? Latin American military men do seem fatally inclined to mystagogic eccentricities. The Autumn of the Patriarch is the strict truth about this type of man.

The opposition, to judge by the rhetoric of one of its websites, seems, in part, mired in the ultra reactionary views that encouraged the death squads in El Salvador and the torture units in Argentina. Here's a graf from Vcrisis:

"Brazil's president Lula Da Silva, after giving the ministry of Economy and Finance to a pro capitalist-US educated businessman, has sent his top foreign policy adviser -- Marco Aurelio Garcia -- to Caracas to offer Brazil's help in solving the political crisis in Venezuela. However, Garcia said he will not meet with any opposition leaders because they are demanding that President Hugo Chavez resign. Da Silva is a co-founder with Cuban leader Fidel Castro of the Sao Paulo Forum, a hemispheric umbrella group for Latin American Marxist and socialist parties, former guerrilla organizations and active rebel groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Peru's Shining Path. Chavez has been a member of the Sao Paulo Forum since the mid-1990s."

The Houston Chronicle published an uncharacteristically thoughtful commentary on the Chavez situation Thursday.  Although the writer, Michael Marx McCarthy [a name that reeks of cognitive dissonance] counts Chavez out a little pre-maturely, his analysis of the post-Chavez landscape seems about right:




"Indeed, while the Chavez-led "Bolivarian revolution" might soon be dead, the president's impact on Venezuela has transcended the visceral association many lower-class supporters feel because of his mestizo skin color and anti-establishment rhetoric. It's important to recognize that the proverbial genie is out the bottle, and Venezuela's poor majority will demand that fundamental social issues be addressed.

During the two-day April coup, which was tacitly supported by the United States, the interim administration of business leader Pedro Carmona looked and acted like a 1950s Latin American civil-military junta, dissolving the National Assembly, throwing out the Supreme Court and unabashedly representing the elite. The opposition still wants the whole system revamped, from the name of the country -- "Bolivarian State of Venezuela" -- to the assembly and constitution. If the opposition again sacks the president, Chavez's supporters -- at least a third of the population, which in April took to the streets and brought their leader back to office -- will not hesitate to bear arms for the first president to offer them a legitimate stake in national politics."


Finally, for a left tilt to the news, Counter-Punch publishes Greg Wilpert's pro-Chavez journalism. However, do we detect a note of hesitancy in his writing? Instead of the usual cocktail of tabloid invective and lefty support, he seems to hesitate about characterizing Chavez' opposition as wholly reactionary. He does view the strike as ultimately a ploy of the management, but who is the managment of a state owned firm?

Dope

What would Pilate do?

We've been losing readers by the handfuls as we've pursued the argument in James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity this week. Or rather, as we have gnawed around the edges of it, like a man on a diet with a salt cracker. Our friend L.S. in NYC has recommended less lentamento -- our slow-motion conceptual strip-tease, he tells us, is gradually putting the patrons to sleep, who have come for some hot action and a little ideational pudenda.

Hey, what can we say? We are using this space to put together a possible essay. And so you will have to excuse, reader-patron, a certain air of sawdust, and fragments, and sketches.

To continue, then -- we are, we promise, going to get to the central paradox in Stephen's conservative imperialism -- that, in the name of the Christendom, Stephen is forced to advocate the government of a bunch of Pilates. And we see this same paradox in Stephen's conservative American heirs, transposed into the American idiom: for the proconsular dreams of such as Paul Wolfowitz, in which the American imperium irresistably spreads democracy, demands, as well, methods that are anything but democratic, and alliances that are anything but libertarian.

Well, that is getting peremptorily to the heart of the matter.
LI doesn't do that.

Rather, this post will be devoted to a brief note on a philosophical-literary genre.

Don't groan. Let's start with the relevance of this note to our Stephen problem. The figure of Pilate occurs, in Stephen's book, in response to John Stuart Mill's example of free thinking being put down -- viz, the condemnation of Christ. But what is an example in a philosophical argument? That is what we are concerned with tonight, comrades. This will be painless. Refreshments will be served at the end.

Okay. The philosophic situation is our name for a story that is adapted to a theory. Descarte's evil demon is one example. Socrates' death is another example, even though it is based on a real event. Like the stories in the Bible, philosophic situations have a peculiar persuasive status. In the Bible, according to Christian theology, every story instances some aspect of the divine presence -- and leads us to the more abstract question of the nature and purposes of the divine will. The philosophic situation, similarly, crystallizes the abstract conceptual issues posited by theory, but the movement in the philosophical situation is torn between the allegorical and the juridical impulse -- between the simple, concentrated display of conceptual forces, and the testing of hypotheses. This tension in the philosophical situation distinguishes it from its cousin, the counterfactual, which is solely defined by the exigencies of argument. The philosophical situation was still half under the rules of art, and could serve as satire, or even, ultimately, as pure fiction. The Enlightenment was the great age of the philosophic situation, from Molyneux's problem to Montesquieu's Persion Letters.

So, enough lit-crit maundering. Let's get to Pilate.

Notes

What would Pilate do?

LI was happy to receive a little email from our friend Alan this morning. He is resurrecting his own blog, Gadfly's Buzz. He also liked, actually liked, our continuing series of posts about James Fitzjames Stephen -- which seem, otherwise, to have decreased our readership significantly, at least according to that little inaccurate site meter thing we keep on this site.

Odd. We find Fitzjames Stephen to be a more and more fascinating figure. After reading his entry in the National Biography (a series started and edited by his brother, Leslie Stephen, who was -- as our readers already know -- Virginia Woolf's Dad, as well as the model for the polymathic dynamo in George Meredith's The Egoist), we realized that, by accident, we are ending the year by tying together many of the themes we've pursued on this site. We've written about Lord Macaulay (5/4/02) and Lord Bacon, wandering into Macaulay's essay about the Trial of Warren Hastings; we've written about Mike Davis' scarifying and much ignored book about the "Victorian holocaust" -- a book that gains its power by simply describing the famines of 1876 and 1877 in India. The description indicts the Raj, by the common consent of today's historians a beneficent entity, for its gross inhumanity(2/16/02) -- and to put a parenthesis in a parenthesis, as is our usual, maddening way of going about things, Davis' work reminds us, again, in this time of imperialist nostalgia, that the British empire is judged on a moral standard that makes heavy use of such omissions as would, transposed to 20th century Russia, clear Stalin of wrongdoing. Take the popular history of the Raj recently published by Lawrence James (Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India). Not only is there no entry in the index for famine (although it does sport a couple of photos of famine victims), but James devotes more space to Lord Curzon's management of state pageantry than to the famines that might have killed as many as two million people in the 1870s. Here is almost the entire substance of James' report on the latter, troubling affair:

"In 1876 and 1877 there had been two successive seasons of inadequate rainfall which had affected a swathe of country stretching from Mysore to Punjab, in which 58 million people faced chronic food shortages [editor's note -- this is euphemism as high art]. The government's efforts to cope with this disaster had failed, partly because of underfunding, partly because of the current laissez faire dogma which forbade interference with market mechanisms, and partly because there was not enough railroads to convey foodstuffs..." This is what is known as understated prose. The reader of James' 670 page tome might be forgiven for never exactly gathering that famine killed a couple of million Indians during the heyday of the British Raj. And, if the reader pauses during James brief, awkward walk through the years of rain shortfalls, he will be reassured that, after all, the faulty response can be laid to a doctrine, laissez faire -- an impalpable thing, to be found in economics dictionaries -- rather than in the human, all too inhuman, policies of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, that were firmly supported by the Conservative government in England -- although not by the liberals under Gladstone, it should be said. James himself provides an image for the kind of history he is creating -- and the kind that is still created about this period. In the early1800s, James claims, colored prints of the Indian countryside started to appear in England, and became popular. But, as he notes, the prints customarily "omitted" the Indian multitudes that thronged in those landscapes. Well, so it was, and so it has been ever since. If, of course, James had emphasized such chronic food shortages -- the fault, of course, entirely of nature, and not at all of a pernicious and rapacious tax system, combined with a systemic neglect of the agricultural structure of the countryside that had been built up over two centuries, and that, by some miracle of nature James doesn't contemplate, had prevented chronic food shortages in the eighteenth century -- if James had emphasized famine, it might be harder to 'adjust the balance,"as James puts it, against the "Marxists" and left wingers who have slandered the Raj.
End of parenthesis...
We've also written about Governor Eyre of Jamaica and his brutal suppression of a black and mulatto uprising (9/09/020. The uprising has become the centerpiece of a revisionist history of the socialist impulse in 19th century England, undertaken by an economics professor at George Mason University, David Levy, in collaboration with Sandra Peart. All of these themes converge in the figure of James Fitzjames Stephen, strange as that might seem. When Stephen went to India in order to reform the law of evidence in the colony, he built on the regulatory structure created by Macaulay. Stephen was a particular friend of Lord Lytton, who went home in some disgrace -- a disgrace compounded of his response to the famine and his failures on the frontier. And, finally, Stephen was officially a part of the prosecutor's entourage in the Eyre affair.
We'll have more to say about the latter in the next post. And then, we promise, we will get to the much delayed Pilate problem.

Dope

Pilate (continued)


Niall Ferguson, the conservative historian, pens an article in the NYT Magazine this Sunday that nicely sums up the conventions of the moment among the trans-Atlantic belligerants. He goes back and forth with the parallel between the British Empire and the U.S -- too much of a historian to find analogies unembarrassing, but too much of a belligerant to fresist it:

"Let's look again at that parallel between the U.S. and the British Empire. Terrorism is a global phenomenon and so, necessarily, is the war against it. One consequence of 9/11 was to shatter forever the illusion that Americans could retreat to enjoy the fruits of their productivity behind a missile defense shield. For terrorism breeds in precisely the rogue states and strife-torn war zones that some Republicans before 9/11 thought we could walk away from. Intervention to impose the rule of law on such seedbeds of terror is far from an unrealistic project. That was precisely what the Victorians excelled at."

The rule of law (which was not, of course, any kind of motive for the expansion of the British Empire -- it is the kind of phrase much favored by those who have put a suitable generation or two between themselves and the pirates who seized the properties they now complacently fold into the law of contracts) was the kind of thing Fitzjames Stephen brooded on, no doubt in a Mr. Rochester way. Law, of course, gives you a rather grimmer idea of human action than economics or logic does -- the latter two being more Mill's specialties. The tone of Stephen's dissent from Mill in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity is shot through with a sense that human beings are essentially difficult. Especially if you meet them out there, doing the rounds in some godforsaken part of Southern India, rather than confine your encounters to the pleasanter purlieus of Chelsea.

Being a religious man -- or, rather, a man attached to the guarding of the Christian religion, and the preservation of all its old ferocities, regardless of his personal appraisal of the plausibility of Christian evidences -- Stephen attacks Mill's libertarianism on two fronts: one is that, frankly, Mill undervalues the role of coercion in human society, and hence would impose limits on the State's coercive power that would countermine the State's great role -- that of disciplining the mass. The other is that Mill's libertarianism is, ultimately, a hedonism contrary in all its parts to Christian doctrine. Even if one feels, reading Stephen's tract, that Stephen, post Cambridge, was that Victorian thing, an agnostic with Calvinist leanings, one also feels that Stephen believes -- as did Nietzsche, at times -- that the disbelief of the rulers in the established creed is no reason not to enforce belief in that creed, by all means necessary. This belief also shows up in one of the great nineteenth century texts -- the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov. Stephen's intro graf certainly intones Dostoevskian themes:

"The object of this work is to examine the doctrines which are rather hinted at than expressed by the phrase "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." This phrase has been the motto of more than one Republic. It is indeed something more than a motto. It is the creed of a religion, less definite than any one of the forms of Christianity, which are in part its rivals, in part its antagonists, and in part its associates, but not on that account the less powerful. It is, on the contrary, one of the most penetrating influences of the day. It shows itself now and then in definite forms, of which Positivism is the one best known to our generation, but its special manifestations give no adequate measure of its depth or width. It penetrates other creeds. It has often transformed Christianity into a system of optimism, which has in some cases retained and in others rejected Christian phraseology."

You can feel the black leather gloves being put on with that phrase, "transformed Christianity into a system of optimism..." As if a creed with a tortured man/god spilling his blood at the center of it promised us a lifetime of teacups and edifiying lectures! Stephen wasn't having any of that nonsense: religion is about the last things, and in that bleak and all consuming light, happiness shrivels up like a dead cockroach.

We mention the Grand Inquisitor with intent -- for part of Stephen's work does, indeed, touch on the same territory treated, much differently, by Dostoevsky. Remember the way Ivan Karamazov's "poem" starts. Jesus comes back to Earth. It is in the time of the great heresy hunts in Spain. Jesus has just raised a dead child when the Grand Inquisitor comes into sight:


"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church -- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks."'Is it Thou? Thou?' but receiving no answer, he adds at once. 'Don't answer."

Well, Stephen does not intend to reach these depths -- he would no doubt find them rather repulsive. Yet his book does contain a disquisition on Pilate that is certainly worthy of the Grand Inquisitor -- transposing some of the elements.

TBC

Dope

The Pilate problem

James Fitzjames Stephen was a Victorian bravo of the purest water. When Gertrude Himmelfarb gets all fluttery about Victorian masculinity, she is undoubtedly envisioning a man of Stephen's type. In his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, he is described as �massive, downright, indefatigable and sincere even to unnecessary frankness.� In other words, a sort of Mr. Rochester sprung from Jane Eyre�s tale.

Stephen was a member of the Apostles, the Cambridge group, in the 1840s � well before it became the conglomeration of aestheticism and the higher buggery under Keynes and Strachey � where he met Henry Maine, the legal historian; Stephen, having no taste for curateships, went into law himself; in his practical life, he eventually devoted himself to grafting principles of English common law into the workings of the British Raj in India.

The Mills, of course, father and son, were the redeeming intellectual ornaments of the East Indian Company, and Stephen must have been highly aware of them in his work. It is said � at least, in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica it is said � that on the boat back from India, Stephen, reading John Stuart Mill�s On Liberty, devised his rebuttal, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity


The book rather sank. Lately, however, it has become the subject of a little Tory cult.

Among the little band of Fitzjames Stephen's acolytes, none is fiercer than Roger Kimball of the New Criterion. Kimball, who has done his warrior bit in the Kulturkampf of the early nineties, rousting out tenured radicals and exposing them for the dubious souls that they are, has featured Stephen as a sort of Archangel Michael, putting the sword in the breast of that loathsome liberal toady of Satan, John Stuart Mill. Kimball�s loathing of Mill has breathed even in the pages of the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, where all conservative hobby-horses eventually find a home. But there's a problem. Mill is widely revered in Libertarian circles. Kimball represents one crucial side of the untidy conservative front. He is plainly unhappy with his libertarian allies.

In an essay in November, 1998, that served as the centerpiece for a later, book-length attack on�liberalism,� Kimball poured out the vials of his wrath on Mill, � and as is the way of New Criterion loathings and the mood of the time, he attacks him as a sexual being as well as a thinker. Kimball, like Ken Starr, is a great one for keeping up with the bedroom habits of his enemies. In Mill�s case, the great sin was one of omission, rather than commission. Kimball writes, of Mill's relationship to his wife Harriet, �it is noteworthy that this "lofty minded" relationship was apparently never consummated.� There are, it appears, no sexual depravities to which the liberal mind won�t sink � including chastity.

In this essay, Kimball referred to Stephen�s book, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The book has already been rescued by Richard Posner, and has found its way into the reading list of the Federalist Society. Here�s Kimball�s assessment of it:

�By far the most concentrated and damaging single attack on Mill's liberalism is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, first published serially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1872-1873, and then in book form in March 1873 in the last year of Mill's life. It was written by the lawyer, judge, and journalist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894): Leslie Stephen's older brother and hence--such is the irony of history--Virginia Woolf's uncle. Mill himself never responded to Stephen's book beyond observing, as Leslie Stephen reports in his excellent biography of his brother, that he thought the book "more likely to repel than attract." But several of Mill's disciples responded--the most famous of whom was the liberal politician and journalist John Morley (1838-1923). Stephen brought out a second edition of his book the following year, 1874, in which he reproduces and replies to many criticisms raised by Morley and others. Stephen described Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as "mainly controversial and negative." Pugnacious and devastating would be equally appropriate adjectives. As one commentator put it, Stephen made "mincemeat" of Mill.�

One notes that there is nothing worthy, sexually, of noting about Stephen. Thank God.

The Federalist Society of Wisconsin has, very kindly, made available half of Stephen�s famous polemic on-line.We�ve entertained ourselves, in these doggy days of flu and cloud, by reading the great man. It turns out that Kimball is right � at least, he is right to accord Stephen a great deal of recognition. The confused elements of American conservativism, circa 1998 � the longing for an established religion, the opposition to dissent, and the confused sense that the marketplace is no model for ideas � already form Stephen�s politics. In fact, this is no surprise � Mill might have been an eminent Victorian, but Victorian society, in its imperial flush, was much better represented by Stephen than by Mill. Stephen articulates a type that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Shaw, in Heartbreak House (his best play � the only play of Shaw�s that LI re-reads, as we re-read Shakespeare�s plays), was talking of the Mill/Stephen split when he describes the difference between Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. Heartbreak�s liberalism, of course, was falling down around Shaw�s ears as he wrote � World War I was an unmistakable counter-blast to the genteel Victorian and Edwardian virtues, and seemed, at the time, to put an end to the matter. Shaw�s description of Heartbreak culture in the preface seems, to LI�s mind, alarmingly like contemporary academia, with the substitution of other references for Wells, of course -- try Foucault, or whoever:

�With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
learn how to do such things or starve.�

Horseback Hall has, of course, few voices, because its texts are woven of such common-places of the governing classes as have, usually, no need for the exposure of literature, being content with the half-grunted affirmations of one's fellow club-men over a nice glass of port. However, Shaw creates a sort of ambassador from Horseback Hall in the play, Lady Utterword, whose husband, Hastings, has been a colonial governor over various tracts of the empire. At one point in the play, the house discovers a burglar, and there is a debate about sending for the police. If they do, of course, their names will be in the paper, which is the kind of publicity to which both Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall are constitutionally averse. Lady Utterword alludes briefly to her husband�s ways of dealing with crime:

�Think of what it is for us to be dragged through
the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs
in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you
a good beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in
England there is no real protection for any respectable person.�

Hastings Utterword, who never appears, in propria persona, on the stage, is embodied once and for all in that outburst. His type was invented by such as James Fitzjames Stephen.

Ah� we�ve reached the limit of the post-able, for one day. And we haven�t even gotten to Pilate! But never fear � tomorrow we will try to make a stab at Fitzjames Stephen�s Gedankenexperiment with the honorable Pontus Pilate, and connect it to the current baying for war against Iraq.