Vast views

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

-- John Adams, in a letter to Jefferson, quoted in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

Unreasonable expectations

All are not naturally conditioned so as to act according to the laws and rules of reason; nay, on the contrary, all men are born ignorant, and before they can learn the right way of life and acquire the habit of virtue, the greater part of their life, even if they have been well brought up, has passed away. Nevertheless, they are in the meanwhile bound to live and preserve themselves as far as they can by the unaided impulses of desire. Nature has given them no other guide, and has denied them the present power of living according to sound reason; so that they are no more bound to live by the dictates of an enlightened mind, than a cat is bound to live by the laws of the nature of a lion.

-- Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

... As he writes in the Tractatus Politicus, "men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so." A liberal polity that treats education as a secondary priority has doomed itself.

An understandable mistake

In 1919, during a session of Sovnarkom, Lenin wrote a note and passed it to Dzerzhinsky: "How many dangerous counter-revolutionaries do we have in prison?" Dzerzhinsky scribbled, "About 1,500" and returned the note. Lenin looked at it, placed the sign of a cross by the figure, and gave it back to the Cheka boss. That night, 1,500 Moscow prisoners were shot on Dzerzhinsky's orders. This turned out to be a dreadful mistake. Lenin had not ordered the execution at all: he always placed a cross by anything he had read to signify that he had done so and taken it into account.

-- Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.

But we can't say that.

Steinberg, the Left SR Commissar for Justice, was another early critic of the Terror, although all his efforts to subordinate the Chekas to the courts proved to be in vain. When, in February [1918], Steinberg first saw the Decree on "The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!", with its order to shoot "on the spot" all "profiteers, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries," he immediately went to Lenin and protested: "Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all? Let's call it frankly the 'Commissariat for Social Extermination' and be done with it!" Lenin's face lit up and he replied: "Well put, that's exactly what it should be; but we can't say that."

-- Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.


... Which reminds me of Edward Crankshaw's aside in his The Shadow of the Winter Palace: "Those who think Lenin was a splendid man will know just where to read all about him."

But what about seditious misunderstanding?

In March 1872 a heavy tome of political economy, written in German, landed on the desk of the tsarist censor. Its author was well known for his socialist theories and all his previous books had been banned. The publishers had no right to expect a different fate for this new work. It was an uncompromising critique of the modern factory system and, although the censorship laws had been liberalized in 1865, there was still a clear ban on any work expounding "the harmful doctrines of socialism or communism," or rousing "enmity between one class and another."

The new laws were strict enough to ban such dangerous books as Spinoza's Ethics, Hobbes's Leviathan, Voltaire's Philosophy of History and Lecky's History of European Morals. And yet this German magnum opus -- 674 pages of dense statistical analysis -- was deemed much too difficult and abstruse to be seditious.

"It is possible to state with certainty," concluded the first of the two censors, "that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it." Moreover, added the second, since the author attacked the British factory system, his critique was not applicable to Russia, where the "capitalist exploitation" of which he spoke had never been experienced. Neither censor thought it necessary to prevent the publication of this "strictly scientific work."

Thus Marx's Capital was launched in Russia.

-- Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. (Reparagraphed for internet standards, though somewhat spoiling the punch line.)

... Sadly, the second censor was a better reader of Marx than were Lenin and Trotsky.

Divine beings

You are mistaken, my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As far as St. Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up this society and their mocking have no significance whatsoever.

--The Empress Alexandra, in a letter to Queen Victoria, quoted in Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.

... Grandmama had written to sympathize with Alexandra's difficulties regarding her "first duty to win [the Russians'] love and respect." Figes also notes that Alexandra kept a portrait of Marie-Antoinette above her writing desk; God only knows what she thought of when she looked at it.

God's bad days

Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?

--Henry Clarendon IV, in Raymond Chandler, Playback.

1s 6d per board

[Kitchener] drove 160,000 of [the Boers'] wives and children into the fifty concentration camps established along lines pioneered by Roberts but not, apparently, in imitation of those created in Cuba by General "Butcher" Weyler. Here 28,000 inmates, mostly children, succumbed to disease and malnutrition caused by conditions almost as bad as in the separate camps set up for Africans, where the mortality rate was probably even higher.... [W]hen British officers wore out the dance floor at the Bloemfontain Residency they sold the old floorboards for 1s 6d each to incarcerated Boer women to make coffins for their children.

--Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

It would never happen in the Commons

[T]he Whig magnate Lord Hartington, whose vigour was all the more impressive since he had raised somnolence to a political art, yawning during his maiden speech and later dreaming that he was addressing his peers, only to wake up and find that it was true.

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

... This would seem to be Spencer Cavendish, who became the eighth Duke of Devonshire in 1891.

Decline and outsourcing

Britain had invested heavily in traditional industries while rivals inevitably made the most of new techniques and inventions. Germany's chemical industry pulled so far ahead, for example, that in 1914 the British Army discovered that all the khaki dye for its uniforms came from Stuttgart.

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

... Alas, mauve was not substituted.

Throwing kittens

The Governor-General [Warren Hastings] was particularly indulgent towards his acquisitive and much-loved second wife Marian, who dressed like "an Indian princess," braided her auburn ringlets with gems, and amused herself by throwing kittens into a bowl full of enormous pearls which slid under their paws when they tried to stand up.

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

"The big issue" ... ya think?

The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it.

-- Prof. George Church, on the possibility of mapping the Neanderthal genome and altering chimpanzee DNA to ultimately match the Neanderthal. A similar, though less potentially controversial, method is envisioned for using elephant DNA to recreate wooly mammoths.

Shackled to a not-quite-dead corpse

When one state is completely dependent on another, it is the weaker which can call the tune: it can threaten to collapse unless supported, and its protector has no answering threat in return.

-- A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918.

... Iraq being only the most recent example.

The pattern that Taylor describes is similar to that in the more famous Taylorism from The Origins of the Second World War: "The negotiations between Germany and the Allies became a competition in blackmail, sensational episodes in a gangster film. The Allies, or some of them, threatened to choke Germany to death; the Germans threatened to die."

Except the Italians

Though they carried on the mysteries of secret diplomacy, there were few real secrets in the diplomatic world, and all diplomatists were honest, according to their moral code.*

__________
* It becomes wearisome to add "except the Italians" to every generalization. Henceforth it may be assumed.

-- A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918.

Myth, or man, or god, it does not matter

Some weeks ago a Catholic reader of Tribune wrote to protest against a review by Mr Charles Hamblett. * * * It also appears from my correspondent's letter that even the most central doctrines of the Christian religion don't have to be accepted in a literal sense. It doesn't matter, for instance, whether Jesus Christ ever existed. "The figure of Christ (myth, or man, or god, it does not matter) so transcends all the rest that I only wish that everyone would look, before rejecting that version of life." Christ, therefore, may be a myth, or he may have been merely a human being, or the account given of him in the Creeds may be true. So we arrive at this position: Tribune must not poke fun at the Christian religion, but the existence of Christ, which innumerable people have been burnt for denying, is a matter of indifference.

-- Orwell, "As I Please" # 14.

... Not especially interesting on its own merits, but relevant today. Can America survive an objectively pro-Arian president?

Objectively pro-Coulter

Civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society together is not the policeman but the good will of common men, and yet that good will is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up. Any government which refused to use violence in its own defense would cease almost immediately to exist, because it could be overthrown by any body of men, or even any individual, that was less scrupulous. Objectively, whoever is not on the side of the policeman is on the side of the criminal and vice versa. In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis, and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the U.S.S.R. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.

-- Orwell, "No, Not One."

... For the time being at least, this must be my nominee for the worst thing Orwell ever wrote (which is why I feel obliged out of fairness to give the final sentence its context). I would like to think that he would recant, or at least qualify, his statement if he could peruse the Google listings. The best I can say is that 1941 was a rather tense time for an Englishman.

The ostensible object of his ire in that review essay, btw, was a dreary pacifist novel by Alex Comfort, whose future as the author of The Joy of Sex would not have surprised Orwell in the least.

Or a blog, for that matter

One way of feeling infallible is not to keep a diary.

-- Orwell, "As I Please" # 3.

... He goes on to note that he has been "not so wrong as the Military Experts," who (1943) have been wrong about most things, and goes on to ask:

Where now are the men who told us those things? Still on the job, drawing fat salaries. Instead of the unsinkable battleship we have the unsinkable Military Expert.

They are stil afloat today.

Anagnorisis, almost

The house seemed unnaturally still. Carrying his empty beer can, he went downstairs to see what Milly was doing, and he was halfway across the living room before he realized that he had four sons.

-- Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road.

Dirty jokes

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage.

-- Orwell, "The Art of Donald McGill."

A god(lessness)-intoxicated man?

I could wish your friend had not denominated me an infidel writer, on account of ten or twelve pages which seem to him to have that tendency: while I have wrote so many volumes on history, literature, politics, trade, morals, which, in that particular at least, are entirely inoffensive. Is a man to be called a drunkard, because he has been seen fuddled once in his lifetime?

-- Hume, in a letter (circa 1761); reprinted in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican.

... We may notice that the force of the argument is the same inadequacy of reasoning from a limited effect to a more general cause, which Hume typically deployed against religious dogma. The irony must have amused him.