Essays Toward an Anthropology of Evil

Stephen Kennamer TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. CHARACTER, MORALITY, AND EVIL

The search for evil The virtues The unpardonable sin Sociopathic evil Psychopathic evil Narcissism in high places Careerism in high places Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies Character, morality, and evil in "The Permanent Washington" Principled evil on the Supreme Court Adolf Hitler

II. CRITIQUE OF PURE VIRTUE

The universe according to William Bennett Joe DiMaggio and the simulacrum of character The advice of Polonius to Laertes Character versus morality The social virtue of duty: Robert E. Lee's character and morality The solipsism of character In praise of lying A meditation in praise of cowardice The social virtue of modesty The tragedy of discipline The unpardonable virtue Lutheran morality Calvinist morality Institutionalized obedience The psychology of obedience

III. THEOLOGICAL EVIL

The narcissism of religion Milton's dystopia, or Paradise well lost John Bunyan Superstar: self-flagellation as performance art Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief Transubstantiation The riddle of apostasy

I

CHARACTER, MORALITY, AND EVIL

The search for evil

On June 4, 1995, The New York Times Magazine bit off more than it customarily chewed: no less

than what theologians call The Problem of Evil. In a tabloid sense, of course, the topic of Evil! is

a perennial favorite. But this was an attempt to give the subject a breadth, and especially a depth,

of treatment that was altogether exceptional in American journalism before the September 11,

2001 attack.

From the beginning, author Ron Rosenbaum lets us know that he is dealing with the real

thing. No sociological excuse-making, no therapeutic New Age doo-dah. His topic is unadulterated evil – deep, ineradicable, inexplicable, his Satanic Majesty in human form.

The bad mother

And what has set the (male) writer of The New York Times to contemplating the horror at the heart of the human species? – it is 23-year-old Susan Smith's murder of her two infant boys. So incomprehensible, so monstrous. This deed has sent our author, brooding, to the edge of the very lake where she strapped her sons into their seat belts, released the brake and watched the car roll into the water and sink. Rosenbaum walked the shore trying, trying, trying to make sense of it

all. But not even The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the minds of . . . women!

And did Susan Smith not say, after her story of an abduction by a black bogeyman broke

down, and she had confessed, that her boys were now in a better place? Was that what the devil

whispered to her that night? In order to make her his very own and claim her soul for evil?

Please.

Susan Smith was an ordinary overwrought young woman who fell into a disastrous funk on a particular night and came apart like pick-up-sticks. She committed an evil act in an evil hour – who would deny it? But there is not a shred of evidence to indicate that it was the grand finale to a series of evil acts, or that it was a deed, to paraphrase Shakespearean critic A. C.

Bradley, "thoroughly characteristic of the doer." Her remorse began even with the confession, or really before it – since she had essentially beaten the rap and had only to stick to her story. Her line about "a better place" was a pathetic attempt to console herself.

The reason she killed her kids could not be simpler. A wealthy young man with whom she had been intimate, and on whom she had fixed her hopes, had broken off the relationship by letter, citing as one of the reasons his unwillingness to take on the responsibility of her children.

In a culture that bombards both sexes, but especially women, about one thousand times per day, with the message that the chief good and satisfaction in life is romantic love forever, is there anything to wonder at here? But if you prefer something more rococo, like "life imitating art," well, the plot can be found in a novel by Richard Adams, The Girl on a Swing.

But was this not, as the ghost of Hamlet's father says:

Murder most foul, as in the best it is, But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.

The search for evil - 6

Well, several hundred children are killed each year by adults – some by predatory abductors;

many more by parents who are known and respected in their communities. Twice within ten

days in the Washington metro area, an aggrieved husband murdered his two children to punish a

wife who wished to separate. Not far from my house, a man stabbed his wife to death in front of

their children. In the next town, a man punished his son by ordering him to do so many

calisthenics that the boy died. In the next county, a man was sentenced to life in prison for

having beaten, raped, starved, and finally murdered his step-daughter: for years he had been

locking her in a tool shed all night, after various forms of assault. In these rather commonplace

cases – unlikely to make the national news – the murder is usually the culminating event in a

pattern of bullying, beating, and psychological torture that has gone on for years. But suddenly

we turn pale – we have looked into the very face of evil, and it is Susan Smith's.

It is a caution to behold what spin can accomplish. Susan Smith is now a household

name, and no article on evil in the mainstream press fails to mention her. Less familiar is the

name of Tracy Thacker. He was a Marine Corps recruiter in Cleveland, Tennessee who had

beaten and stalked his wife until she filed for divorce. On the morning of December 12, 2000, he

pulled his nine-year-old daughter and five-year-old son out of their elementary school classes.

When administrators asked him to provide a reason for the withdrawal on a sign-out sheet, he wrote the words "to pay back mom." He took the children home, stabbed them to death, and set fire to the house. He was brought down by police gunfire later in the day. But the news-as- entertainment industry was right to neglect this story: it was not news; there was nothing new in it; and it certainly was not entertaining. The search for evil - 7

And our sentimentality about the smallest children is surely suspect. Shouldn't we think that a child gains in value as he or she ages? In Chicago alone, several upstanding honor students in middle schools and high schools are killed each year in senseless bursts of gunfire – children who have been dear to their parents, relatives, teachers, and friends not just for two or three years, like the children of Susan Smith, but for twelve, fourteen, and sixteen years. And how about adults? How many grown women have been, and are being today, not merely "abused" – a bland, euphemistic word – but stalked, terrorized, brutalized, tormented, and raped for years on end by husbands who sometimes call them every hour to check up on them, pretend to go out and circle back to spy on them, systematically isolate them from their families and friends, and finally kill them when they try to leave?

Out of fear of male violence, almost every female person of any age whatsoever who lives in an urban part of this country is, if not quite confined to quarters every night from sunset to sunrise, careful to venture out only in a group, or in a car with the assurance of a safe place to park at the other end of the drive. But the national symbol of corrosive evil was suddenly a 23- year-old woman without a rap sheet other than the one containing her single, heartsick, desperate act.

As Hamlet said after the revelation of the ghost, "Would heart of man once think it?"

Yes, Hamlet, would ever a man think it? In a century where militant military man has murdered over one hundred million people, often with the approval, if not downright enthusiastic support, of most of his countrymen – in this century, we have finally peered into the very heart of darkness, and found. . . a woman. . . who kills boys. The search for evil - 8

What's wrong with this picture?

The good father

Do you want evil? Do you want everything the public has read into the Susan Smith case, but this time, for real? How about a Pennsylvania man named Alan Gubernat, a pleasant-looking

34-year-old white man, a good worker, respected by all. He fathered a son but denied paternity;

so the mother began raising the child alone, and meanwhile – obviously – bestowed upon the boy

her own last name. But when Gubernat's paternity was proven by blood tests and he was ordered

to pay child support, he suddenly took an intense interest in his son: he sued for custody and – of

course! – demanded the right to give the boy his own last name. Father and mother came to

terms on most issues: Gubernat was granted joint legal custody and visitation rights; the mother

retained physical custody. But she also contested the matter of the last name and eventually

prevailed in a unanimous decision by the state supreme court. Whereupon Gubernat decided to

even the score a little bit. On Mother's Day, he shot his son in the head.

And his lawyer had the effrontery to say, after the murder and Gubernat's subsequent

suicide, that Gubernat's persistence in the case "had nothing to do with a father's right to assign a

name or an extension of the male ego." Gubernat had insisted on his own last name, the lawyer

said, only "in the best interests of the child, because of the relationship they had, the strong bond

they'd made."

Assuming we can take it as a general principle that shooting a child in the head is never in The search for evil - 9

his best interest, or the way to strengthen a bond, Gubernat stands exposed as having been motivated by nothing else except the extension of his male ego.

But why do I not say of him, as I say of Susan Smith, that he fell into an evil mood in an evil hour? The answer is that his act can only be understood as the culmination of similar, but lesser, acts. He cared nothing for the life of his child in utero, nothing for his son's life after the boy was born . . . until he was forced by the courts to acknowledge his paternity and pay child support. Then he decided to give as good as he got: the law had stung him; he would sting back using the same law. He used it to inject himself into the lives of mother and child, or, put another way, to interpose himself between the mother and child, to the maximum degree that the law would allow. Of course he disguised this as an interest in the child: evil always lies.

Susan Smith mistakenly came to believe that happiness, in just that form that society recommends to all young women, would be denied her, and denied her forever, because her children presented an insuperable obstacle to it. A tragic mistake, and one I suspect she recognized in the days before her confession. But she did have some excuse for believing that she had reasoned correctly: she had society's values; she had the letter from her abdicating lover.

(Please do not interrupt me here to tell me that society also urges young women to nurture their children. There is currently a great deal of hot air about "family values" in our ongoing, staggeringly trivial, political debate. But turn on your television set at any hour of any day, and down the left hand side of a sheet of paper, list all the images and messages extolling motherhood, and down the right hand side, list all the images and messages extolling sex, sexiness, passion, and romantic love. And while you are compiling your list, do not allow The search for evil - 10

yourself to be thrown off by the lip service paid, before and after the steamiest scenes, to the

importance of right action and good character – watch the images.

(It is certainly true that some serious thinkers all along the political spectrum are calling upon us to reject the values of popular culture and embrace genuinely spiritual values. But let us not delude ourselves that these voices have been heard. And let us also keep a weather eye out for opportunism and hypocrisy. Some of the loudest advocates of "traditional" values are also the most vociferous defenders of the free market economy and the first amendment to the

Constitution: they preach monogamy, responsibility, and family, but they will not lift a finger to stop the inundation of American culture with images of sex, violence, violent sex, and sexualized violence, and they will defend the right of the entertainment industry to wallow in filth and spatter us with it on the grounds of both the capitalist's right to sell any product the public wants and the libertarian's right to publish anything at all whether the public wants it or not.)

A digression

But, you may wish to rejoin, Susan Smith was more than a consumer of romantic illusions. She was utterly selfish, she put herself first.

May be – but if that defines evil, then evil is pandemic.

But she went further – she killed her own children.

That's bad. But I came of age in the 1960s. If, at that time, you were, like me, a young man in Roanoke County, Virginia – still a child, really – you were at risk. You were being The search for evil - 11

stalked. People were out to get you. These people were not soldiers in an enemy army, or local

thugs; they sat on draft boards appointed by the federal government. Yes, during that decade, a

large part of the country, acting through its elected representatives in Washington, turned upon its

male children en masse, and with machine-like thoroughness sought them out, gathered them up,

and put them in harm's way. More than 58,000 of the nation's children were struck down, and in

some cases those were the lucky ones; but you probably do not wish to visit the back wards of the

local veterans' hospital to be reminded of all this.

The Vietnam War suddenly became timely again 30 years later when one of its architects,

former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, wrote a book admitting that the administration

of which he was a part did not know what it was doing and did not try very hard to find out.

Basically, 58,000 American boys – the number of Vietnamese boys is incalculable but certainly in the millions – died for a theory. The theory was called the "Domino Theory," and it stated that if South Vietnam fell to communism, then the rest of the countries of Southeast Asia would also fall, toppling the way a line-up of dominoes topples in response to the fall of the first domino.

Had the theory been true, it would still have provided scant justification for the government's action. Southeast Asia is 8,000 miles away from Roanoke County. I was never menaced, and I was never in any danger of being menaced, by a Vietnamese soldier, or any Asian

Communist soldier – so long as I kept to my own neighborhood. But the theory also posited that the world was locked in a struggle to the death between two rival ideologies, and that the fall of

Southeast Asia would eventually contribute to the possibility that Russian soldiers would strut The search for evil - 12

their stuff on American soil.

The first disproof of the theory came in 1975, with the actual fall of the South Vietnamese

domino to communism. Laos and Cambodia succumbed at the same time, partly because our

incursions had widened the war to include their territories. No other domino fell.

The second disproof came 14 years later, when, almost overnight, communism itself all

but vanished from the face of the earth, destroyed from within by internal contradictions.

(Ironically, some of the most hawkish free-market Republicans had long predicted just such an

outcome, while at the same time irrationally supporting a military buildup that almost ruined

capitalist democratic America economically.)

"World Communism" turned out to have been a figment of the right wing imagination.

Monolithic communism was never a threat to the so-called Free World. There was no monolith.

The Soviet Union lacked the military clout to pacify Afghanistan, much less imperil Roanoke

County.

Now you might think that, before you send 58,000 young men to die for a theory, you will be pretty damn sure of that theory. But the government of the United States responded the way a cartoon character in Doonesbury, Uncle Duke, responds to a sound from his living room in the middle of the night. Weapon in hand, Duke reasons as follows: "I better shoot first, ask questions later." He guns down his own maintenance man. It is perhaps relevant to this discussion to note that Duke is a sociopath.

Are we not entitled to conclude that evil was abroad in the land? That with unseemly haste the adults sent their male children to kill people with whom they had no quarrel, and to be The search for evil - 13

killed in turn? For a cockamamie theory?

The geography of evil

Well, this type of evil, you may say, is "political" and "complex." It is difficult to think about.

Not so. A number of prominent people at the time thought very clearly about it and gave us good advice. We just did not choose to listen. But I will drop the subject for now, and return to the microcosm, with this comment: that the real inconvenience of the evil that afflicted this country in the 1960s is that most of us participated in it. We have been reassuring ourselves of late with the myth that an aroused citizenry protested against the war and eventually brought it to a halt. But the senators we elected throughout the 1960s voted overwhelmingly – sometimes 96 to 2 – to fund the war.

So, back to our man in Pennsylvania – a model father, by all accounts, just as Susan

Smith was considered a good mother. But whatever his reputation in the community and his outward appearance, he, unlike Susan Smith, can only be understood as having committed an act thoroughly characteristic of the doer, and one dipped in unspeakable malice toward the boy's mother.

Did he have grounds equal to those of Susan Smith to believe that happiness would never be his, and that he was being asked to sacrifice the chief good of life for the rest of his days because of his son's existence? His grounds were that his son would not be carrying his last name. The search for evil - 14

And this evil – the extension of the male ego in a name – is a subset of a huge,

ubiquitous, umbrella evil – an evil done by all of the people some of the time and some of the

people all of the time: the evil of regarding our children, both personal and national, if only for a

moment, as extensions of ourselves, as reflections of ourselves, as creatures whose primary duty

is to us, and who must be molded, forcibly if necessary, to specifications that we have set up in rigid conformity to what we are pleased to call our superior "values." And this is the primary reason why we see Alan Gubernat, but not Susan Smith, as confused and miserable. To see him as evil is to hold the mirror a little too close.

We prefer the idea that evil is far away, that it attains dominion but once or twice in a decade, in a young woman down south, and, many years ago, in a man named Adolf Hitler. We love the thought that it is foul, strange, and unnatural – in a word, exotic, which is to say, expressive of something utterly foreign and unimaginable to us. It is at least several states away, and you have to book a flight to see it. We stand at the edge of the lake and shake our heads:

Who can fathom it? Here . . . right here . . . the sine qua non of evil.

No. The evil is not in Satan, and it is not in South Carolina. It is commonplace, familiar, mundane, hardly worth remarking. It is all around us, it is in us, it is side by side with the good.

We rub shoulders with the evil spirit when we forget for a moment and turn the person nearest us into an object – a means to our own ends. It is just a whiff of bad air, so the world continues spinning on its axis – but the stuff that fills our lungs is the same substance that Hitler breathed, exact as to form. And we fail to see it only because it necessarily pays that tribute to goodness that vice always pays to virtue – it wraps itself in the words of the good. Evil always lies. The search for evil - 15

Lyndon Johnson told us that the war in Vietnam was necessary to guarantee the safety of the

country, and Alan Gubernat told us that the child needed to carry his last name as a way of

strengthening the bond he felt with his son. That these men may have believed their own lies is

nothing to the purpose. And we are blind to the everyday ubiquity of evil only because, for the

convenience of our souls, we choose to be so easily lied to.

The continuum of evil

Everyday evil manifests itself in a series of gradations. A child comes to me with a problem that he takes seriously. I laugh at him because the problem, viewed from my adult perspective, is trivial, or cute. Or I dismiss him because my adult concerns are so much more important than a child's. In other words, I forget to view him as a fully human being, as someone just like me. I treat him as a stuffed toy, or an inconvenience.

Or a child comes, and I cannot be bothered, and I reach out and slap him.

Or his continuing existence so interferes with my way of life that I kill him.

It is worse to slap a child than to dismiss him, and worse to kill him than to slap him; but it is a continuum.

Or my wife tells me something that is important to her, and I "listen." I "hear it," but it doesn't fit with what I "know," so I conclude, in about half-a-second, that it must be trivial and stupid; and I say to myself, "What makes the silly woman think she has a right to feel that way?"

Or I see clearly that she does not understand her duty to me, and I correct her and The search for evil - 16

discipline her.

Or I come to live for the pleasure of dominating her, for the special thrill that comes from

her submission. And when she has the effrontery to leave me, I kill her.

It is worse to torment her than to patronize her, and worse to kill her than to torment her;

but it is a continuum.

A difference in degree may amount to a difference in kind, but it is important to recognize

whether or not the difference in kind originates as a difference in degree, or whether the

difference amounts to, as it were, a vast gulf. In other words, it is important whether two acts do

lie, however far apart, along a continuum; or whether they lie on parallel lines that never can

meet.

If I am wrong about the continuum, then Susan Smith is a prodigy of nature and I have

nothing to worry about. I doubt if any of my friends or any of their friends will ever kill their

own children. Evil is far away – or even if it is as close as South Carolina, I will never meet it,

lying as it does on a parallel line. We pure ones can engage with a clear conscience in the

morbid, yet strangely titillating, avocation of contemplating evil's fearful visage across the gulf –

on this side, we happy, happy many; on the other side, the handful of approved monsters.

But if I am right about the continuum, then Susan Smith is my sister.

If she is my sister, she still has to pay. Her rehabilitation as a spiritual being cannot be

undertaken by excusing her. If she wishes to be rehabilitated, she probably even wants to be

punished. The punishment will have to fit the crime, and the crime is terrible. Very little in the judicial world changes as a result of my human connection to Susan Smith. But perhaps The search for evil - 17

something in the real world can change. Perhaps I can finally begin to attack evil at its very roots. I will not have to travel far. I can just pick up a spade and begin in my own back yard.

The "inexplicability" of evil

To be fair to the author of the article in The New York Times, he went on, after opening with

Susan Smith, to contemplate several other notable monsters, all of them men. The Menendez

Brothers, who gunned down their parents in order to go on a credit-card spending spree, got a mention; Jeffrey Dahmer played a starring role; Timothy McVeigh came in at the end. Overall, the treatment of the subject, complete with investigations into theodicy, was sober and respectable.

But as you can see, the article rounded up the usual suspects. All these examples are far, far away from us. They escalate from atrocity to atrocity: Lyle Menendez goes out, reloads, and comes back in the room to finish off his wounded mother; Jeffrey Dahmer cannibalizes his victims; and finally McVeigh detonates his bomb directly in front of a day care center. There is not much danger I will see my reflection while looking into this heart of darkness.

And finally the buzzword near the end, borrowed from every article I have ever read about the Holocaust, and this time applied specifically to the Murrah Federal Building bombing: inexplicable evil.

Sorry. Timothy McVeigh's motives were entirely explicable. He believed that a massively corrupt federal government was giving away the white man's portion. He believed that The search for evil - 18

taxation is an unconstitutional seizure of personal property. He believed that the centerpiece of

American freedom is the second amendment to the constitution, and that it was under attack. He

believed that civilization was imperiled by the propensity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to murder law-abiding citizens and get away with it. He believed that the last, best hope of mankind lay in white citizens' militias that would resist the tyranny of an imminent world government.

In the fanaticism with which he held these beliefs, and in his brave willingness to risk his life in order to strike a violent blow at the heart of the federal bureaucracy, he certainly differed from you and me. But the beliefs themselves are widespread among Americans today, and in a watered-down version make up the repetitive drumbeat not only of talk shows hosted by despicable racists like Bob Grant but of suave demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Timothy

McVeigh could have listened for years to Rush Limbaugh and never heard anything that substantively contradicted his world-view.

What McVeigh did with the table-talk of rich, respectable Republicans all over this land –

what Hitler did with Richard Wagner's table-talk – was to take it seriously, and even literally. He

went all the way with it. He does, as I have said, stand out, simply by virtue of his having done

this. But I do not believe it makes sense to call it inexplicable, unless we go a little further and

consider it inexplicable that, in 1993, at a time when the annual budget deficit was approaching

400 billion dollars, Rush Limbaugh was apoplectic over an increase in the taxes that would be

paid by people who make over $140,000 a year.

The search for evil - 19

The rectitude of evil

Ron Rosenbaum was honest enough to admit his perplexity over certain paradoxes attaching to his stance on evil. When he tried to retrieve the name of someone who lived up to the requirement that the greatest evil has to be conscious evil, all he could think of were fictional characters: Claggart in Billy Budd, Iago, and – yawn – Milton's Satan. "Evil, be thou my good."

He neglected to draw the moral that these are fictional characters, and could only be fictional characters. Furthermore, Satan, the only truly viable candidate, was the creation of a mind that had been infantilized by fundamentalism. Milton – the same Milton who could write a sonnet in praise of Cromwell after Cromwell ordered the killing of all the men who surrendered at

Drogheda – was besotted by a theodicy in which his famously petulant, tyrannical, unjust God was, in his mind, a paragon of perfect righteousness. He had, of course, unwittingly created God in his own image. Now if you are a righteous daddy like Milton, what is the worst thing you can imagine your own children doing? Disobeying you. Original sin is disobedience to the Father.

And on closer examination, Milton's Satan turns out to be just what we would expect – a heart- stung adolescent, piqued that he wasn't noticed more in Heaven, given to posturing and swaggering, but very sorry to be out of his Father's good graces, and full of second thoughts in the Garden of Eden. He is finally dedicated to evil in about the same spirit as a teenaged vandal

– as a way of cutting off his nose to spite his face.

The burden of paradox became excruciating for our author during a conversation with the renowned historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who told him that Hitler was "convinced of his own rectitude." In other words, Hitler died believing he had tried to do good; so, as bad as he was, he The search for evil - 20

did not engage in conscious evil. This appears to mean that the ten-year-old children in England

who murdered a baby and then tried to cover up the crime (thereby betraying their sense that they

had done wrong) were somehow more evil than the arch-fiend of the 20th Century.

But is not the way out of the conundrum obvious? No one ever does say, "I did evil for

its own sake" – except the fictional creation of a schoolmarmish Puritan bigot who projected his

own evil onto all his opponents and accidentally made God the most evil character in Paradise

Lost. Every evil act ever committed in the history of evil was viewed by its perpetrator as, in

some higher sense, good. Milton defended the execution of Charles I. Cromwell explained that

the slaughter at Drogheda would prevent future bloodshed. Hitler said quite candidly in Mein

Kampf that some of his measures would go hard with the misfits he had singled out, but that

these exterminations would only have to be enacted one time, and would confer a salutary benefit

upon posterity. (By contrast, Milton's God out-Hitlers Hitler: he punishes Adam and his posterity.)

Indeed, not only Hitler, but millions of his followers, believed in "the greater good" espoused by the Nazi Party. Not only Stalin, but millions of his followers, believed in the rectitude of the Soviet experiment. Not only General Sheridan – still today a revered hero of the

Civil War – but millions of white Americans believed that the only good Indian was a dead

Indian. And today, millions of white Americans, who are economically in the upper 20% of this

country's population, believe that the very fabric of the nation is threatened by injustice and that

they are the victims of it: in their world-view, an out-of-control government has brought about the unconscionable situation that poor people have too much money and rich people have too The search for evil - 21

little. Mr. Limbaugh has said that the solution to homelessness in this country is for homeless people to get a job.

(Let me be clear. Mr. Limbaugh is not a purveyor of evil because he proposes radically conservative solutions to the social and political problems that afflict this nation: some conservatives want to dismantle the welfare state out of a sincerely held belief that misguided liberal policies actually cause the poverty they claim to try to eradicate. Mr. Limbaugh is a purveyor of evil because he encourages the most fortunate and affluent citizens of this country to feel angry and resentful over their fatuous belief in their own victimization. And do not be sidetracked by Mr. Limbaugh's passionate belief in his own rectitude.)

Freud and Falwell on evil

The viewpoint I am espousing here bears a superficial resemblance to a doctrine that is familiar.

Ironically, those arch-enemies, the fundamentalist Christians and the Freudian psychoanalysts, agree that evil is present in every one of us – as original sin, or as the contents of the id. But I wish to categorically dissociate my own view from theirs. They believe that every one of us is capable of committing the actual and specific evil acts of our rogues' gallery – Freud and Jerry

Falwell believe that I have it in me to drown my children, eat my parents, and blow up every federal building in the country. Such is my natural human propensity according to the Freudian conception of the unconscious; and such is the state of my unsaved soul according to the

Christian conception of original sin – or of "total depravity," to adopt John Calvin's pretty notion The search for evil - 22

of my inborn spiritual condition.

Such views appear to be very tough-minded about evil, but finally they are sentimental and dangerous. For both the fundamentalists and the Freudians believe in salvation: psychoanalyzed man is saved from the beast within by a healthy ego and an active superego; and born-again man is saved by grace. But if salvation is possible, then the unsaved are the monsters.

And indeed we see that fundamentalist Christians typically feel no kinship at all with death row inmates and support capital punishment with a clear conscience.

My view is rather that the spectacular evil of the monsters, and, more to the point, the quotidian evil of my neighbors, is a recognizable extension of behaviors close to my own heart whether I am evangelized or not, psychoanalyzed or not. I would go further: the Christian doctrine has become part of the evil itself, for it reinstates the gulf I have so painstakingly explained away, and encourages its disciples to divide the world once again into the saved and the unredeemed. It was after he was saved that Calvin became capable of the greatest evil, as when he confidently ordered Michael Servetus to be burned at the stake over a theological disagreement.

History has shown that the self-appointed cadres of the saved have committed more crimes against the designated unredeemed than the criminal classes have ever committed against the upstanding law-abiding classes. Individual selfish people, acting on behalf of their own personal conceptions of their own greater good, may kill their children and even shoot up a post office. But secretaries of defense, acting on behalf of the much greater good, are capable of turning an entire subcontinent into a killing field. We have little to fear from our gallery of The search for evil - 23

approved monsters, and everything to fear from the respectable people into whose hands we

commend our very souls.

The evil that no one notices

And this brings us back to political evil. The New York Times Magazine did not run a cover

story on evil after the Diem assassination, or the Gulf of Tonkin "incident," or the massacre at

My Lai, or the secret bombing of Cambodia, or the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. It did not

create a rogues' gallery of war criminals and lead off with Richard Nixon's evil genius – the Cold

Warmongering, Realpolitiking, illegal wiretapping, amoral, self-infatuated Henry Kissinger.

Indeed not: this man is still an object of respect and an influential voice in foreign affairs.

Nor did The New York Times Magazine run a cover story on evil after the Persian Gulf

War – but let us review some of the facts. The war was fought for contemptibly self-serving reasons, but President Bush lied – a bad habit with him – and said that it was fought to make

Kuwait safe for democracy. The American people were not told that the "nation" of Kuwait owed its existence to nothing more principled than Great Britain's desire to place a geopolitical thorn in the side of Iraq: to effect this piece of imperialistic policy, part of the legitimate territory of Iraq was simply roped off and turned over to a single wealthy sheikh who knew how to show his gratitude for the favor. The American people were not told that we had secretly sided with

Iraq during the war between Iraq and Iran, and that as a result, Saddam Hussein believed we viewed his ambitions with some sympathy: he tried to annex Kuwait only after he had been assured by the United States Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, that we, his old ally, would not The search for evil - 24

intervene. The American people were not told that we were now hired mercenaries doing the bidding of Saudi Arabia, and that underlying our support for that regime – one in which women were not allowed to drive cars – was a complex policy aimed at shoring up those stable conservative Muslim regimes that had always cooperated with us against the former Soviet

Union. The war was not even fought over oil, really, because the oil was valuable to Saddam

Hussein only if was willing to sell it: the war was fought to sustain Saudi Arabia's oil-based hegemony in the Persian Gulf.

Bush ordered the attack on Iraq to begin as soon as the deadline for a negotiated settlement passed – a haste reminiscent of Hitler's hurry to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938, and similarly motivated: both men were afraid that their enemies would negotiate. (The outcome for

Hitler was bittersweet: his enemies got to the negotiating table just before the deadline and gave him everything he wanted. This allowed him the pleasure of achieving his goal without firing a shot, and in the process seeing his enemies groveling at his feet; but it thwarted his desire to unleash the German army. He made good his disappointment in Poland and France. Bush too had suffered his share of disappointments: Panama had turned out to be too insignificant, and too messy, to dispose of the Manhood Issue that had dogged him throughout his political career – a career of almost unparalleled moral cowardice, even by the standards of American politics.

When Saddam Hussein missed the deadline, Bush attacked the very next day, thereby making certain that he was not cheated out of his war.)

During the prosecution of the war, Bush glowed with animation, purpose, and good health: he and his closest military associates all had what the rest of us covet – a reason to get up The search for evil - 25

in the morning. (After the war, he sank into a lethargy so profound it played a significant part in costing him the next presidential election.) The American people were told that we had no quarrel with the people of Iraq, but only with the evil dictator, Saddam Hussein; yet we killed

160,000 of the people of Iraq – I will accept the Bush administration's own estimate here, which is undoubtedly on the low side – and then we called off the war rather than topple Saddam from power – which might have happened the very next day had we fought on. We spared him because the Saudis told us to – they preferred having him in power, with his teeth pulled, to having him out of power, with the possibility of a more liberal government. As usual, we did their bidding. We had other lofty considerations as well: since Saddam had always ruthlessly suppressed the Kurdish and Shi'ite populations of Iraq, our decision to spare him was reassuring to the Turks, who also suppress their Kurds, and to the "moderate" Arab governments, which also suppress their Shi'ites; and as part of our ongoing campaign of petty revenges for the 1979 hostage crisis, we wanted to further irritate Iran. Kuwait was returned to the billionaires who run the country as a personal fiefdom. The raping of Filipino housemaids by high-spirited Kuwaiti men resumed. When this sorry chapter in American history was over, Bush's popularity maxed out at 91%, and most major metropolitan areas of the country competed to have the biggest and best Desert Storm parade.

I repeat: there is not – or should not be – any difficulty in anatomizing this evil. Just because it is international in scale, or geopolitical, or "complex," does not – or should not – mean that we cannot sort it out. Our reluctance to come to grips with this brand of evil is owing, not to its unanalyzability, but to our enthusiastic support for it. The search for evil - 26

There are many excuses to be made. When I buy my coffee at the low retail price made possible by the unconscionable exploitation of coffee bean pickers the world over, I can hardly be expected to beat my breast with shame. It is part of my psychic economy to ignore those myriad tentacles of evil, many of them thousands of miles long, that enmesh me every waking moment of my life. If I were too sensitive, I would be merely a "bleeding heart liberal" – as noted for my utter ineffectuality as for my hyper-sensitivity. However, Tolstoy does have one small request to make of me, and it concludes my topic with a reminder, once again, of the essential issue:

I do not say that, if you are a landowner, you should at once give your land to the poor; if you are a capitalist, you should at once give your money and your factory to the laborers; if you are a king, a minister, an official, a judge, a general, you should at once resign from your advantageous position; if you are a soldier, you should, in spite of all the dangers of a refusal to obey, at once give up your position. If you do so, you will do the best thing possible; but it may happen – and this is most likely – that you will not have the strength to do so. You have connections, a family, inferiors, superiors; you may be under such a strong influence of temptations that you will not be able to do so – but you are always able to recognize the truth as a truth, and to stop lying.

The virtues

From listening to the conservatives complain about "the liberals," you would never guess that political liberalism in this country lasted only two years, from 1964 to 1966. But as art critic

Robert Hughes pointed out, cultural liberalism has been long dominant in the trendy arenas of the media, the arts, and the academic world. In recent years, even these last bastions of liberalism have caved in. The Republicans have made media heroes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill

O'Reilly, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge,

Michael Reagan, Bob Grant, Oliver North; they even had their own talk-show therapist in Dr.

Laura Schlessinger. And they had their very own moral philosopher, James Q. Wilson.

Duking it out with the relativists

Wilson's major contribution to this field is his book, The Moral Sense, published in 1993. But given Wilson's rhetorical prolixity, everything you need to know about his ethical posture can be found in his condensation of the book, which was published by Commentary in June 1993 and titled "What Is Moral, and How Do We Know It." The thesis of the article is that we the people are naturally moral, but our confidence has been shaken by prophets of relativism on the far left – why, some liberals don't believe in morality.

Like a lot of Wilson's contentions, this turns out not to be true. Reading Wilson requires The virtues - 28

a certain athleticism: you have to take him a phrase at a time and stay quick on your feet. Any place is as good a place as any to start with him. Let's take him from the top:

Almost every important tendency in modern thought has questioned the possibility of making moral judgments. Analytical philosophy asserts that moral statements are expressions of emotion lacking any rational or scientific basis. Marxism derides morality and religion as "phantoms formed in the human brain," "ideological reflexes" that are, at best, mere sublimates of material circumstances. Nietzsche writes dismissively that morality is but the herd instinct of the individual. Existentialists argue that man must choose his values without having any sure compass by which to guide those choices. Cultural anthropology as practiced by many of its most renowned scholars claims that amid the exotic diversity of human life there can be found no universal laws of right conduct. In 1906, the sociologist William Graham Sumner declared that "the mores can make anything right"; 30 years later, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized the phrase "cultural relativism." All of science seems the enemy of moral confidence, because its method requires that we separate factual statements, which can be verified, from "value" statements, which cannot.

. . .

I wish to argue for an older view of human nature, one that assumes that people are naturally endowed with certain moral sentiments.

. . .

To say that there exists a natural moral sense (or, more accurately, several moral senses) is to say that there are aspects of our moral life that are universal, a statement that serious thinkers from Aristotle to Adam Smith had no trouble in accepting.

. . .

I am reckless enough to think that many conducting this search have looked in the wrong places for the wrong things because they have sought for universal rules rather than universal dispositions.

The reader can already begin to savor the blandness of Wilson's language, the laxity of his thought, and the carelessness with which he uses ordinary logic. Notice, for instance, that he The virtues - 29

blames the cultural anthropologists for undermining moral confidence, because they tell us that universal laws of right conduct do not exist. But he goes on to acknowledge that it is a mistake to seek universal rules of morality – we should look for universal dispositions. Unless a universal rule differs in some esoteric way from a universal law, it is safe to say that Wilson agrees with the findings of the anthropologists.

Wilson proclaims himself the scourge of the ethical relativists; but right away he muddies the water by implying that an unwillingness to invoke moral absolutes is tantamount to saying that we cannot make moral judgments at all. Thus he sets up a straw man who is not merely a relativist but a complete skeptic and an ethical nihilist. This allows him to take a resolute stand against an argument that no one is making.

He portrays himself as a lonely battler against all the heavy hitters of the last century-and- a-half: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, the existentialists. He alone, he intimates, is willing to stand in the middle of the village square and proclaim defiantly,

"Values exist!" In truth, the only people who ever try to argue seriously that nothing is ever right or wrong are usually very young, quite drunk, and sure to be unfamiliar with any of the schools of philosophy cited by Wilson.

The historical figures that Wilson invokes are actually distinguished by their deep engagement with moral issues. Marx, far from banishing morality, clearly thought capitalism was immoral and communism moral. When he scoffed at "morality" he always meant conventional, or bourgeois, morality, which he considered a con-game designed to keep the laboring class docile. Nietzsche was a moralist through and through. He was contemptuous only of Christian European morality, which he believed was a betrayal of the higher Greek morality. The virtues - 30

His last great project carried the working title Revaluation of All Values – which shows that he believed that values exist and ought to exist. The existentialists, too, with their calls for authenticity, are clearly the modern philosophers who are most concerned about a moral existence. That such men – Marx, Nietzsche, Camus, all of whom yearned for a better and more morally coherent world – can be taken to be the enemies of morality goes to show how reactionary Wilson is.

Freud, it is true, denied the existence of either a social or a moral impulse. In Group

Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he made it clear that he believed human nature to be antisocial: he thought that the traditional virtues arise only under duress, as reaction formations.

He suggested that a child adopts fairness as a value only out of spite – if I can't have everything for myself, at least I can insist that no one else has more than I have. On this point, then, touching upon the origin of morality, Freud does part company with Wilson – and with almost everybody else. Nonetheless, even though he was a militant atheist who never recognized any moral agency other than the superego, Freud firmly believed that conventional morality was a good thing, and led an admirable sort of life judging by that yardstick. He favored inculcating all the traditional virtues by the time-honored Aristotelian method of childhood training. He was just as conservative as Wilson, and just as devoted to the moral status quo. He patriotically supported Austria in the Great War; he approved of the reactionary suppression of the left-wing parties in the early 1930s; he believed his own middle class morality (which he snobbishly distinguished from the lesser creeds of the plebeians) to be one of civilization's crowning achievements; he wore a suit every day, even when he lounged at home.

As for the analytical philosophers, or more precisely, the emotivists (sometimes The virtues - 31

lampooned as the "boo-hooray" school of moral philosophy, because they assert that moral statements are nothing more than ejaculations of approval or disapproval), it is true that they do not believe that moral propositions can be so framed as to command universal assent on purely logical grounds. But they too have been adamant in upholding the same conventional morality that Wilson espouses. Wilson misrepresents them as moral anarchists when they are actually well-bred Englishmen: they do not argue that nothing is right or wrong; they argue that statements embodying notions of right and wrong express sentiments rather than facts. In other words, they agree with Wilson and got there first. Wilson's whole argument is that, while moral rules that command universal assent are impossible to find, moral dispositions are universal.

Through a rose-colored glass cheerfully

What are the moral dispositions that are so encouraging to Wilson?

[T]he most fundamental of those dispositions [are] the affection a parent, especially a mother, bears for its child and the desire to please that the child brings to this encounter.

Well, good: Wilson is telling us that most people care quite a lot for their own children. Too bad this isn't really true. While the 20th Century's propensity for genocide was out in the open, its skeleton in the closet was the physical and emotional abuse of so many of the world's children.

In 1979, Sweden became the first country in the world to ban the beating of children – a form of assault and battery called "corporal punishment" in the United States, legal in all 50 states, and especially in vogue among fundamentalist Christians). If parental bullying counts as emotional The virtues - 32

abuse, perhaps a majority of the world's children are abused. If it were a crime to make of a child

a narcissistic extension of one's own ego, we would need to convert whole continents into

halfway houses for recovering adult abusers.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, among others, has told us that we must not confuse the concern most parents have for their children – the hand-wringing and over-involvement – with love. Many people are similarly obsessed with their property; and children are regarded by many parents as a type of property.

But Wilson is a cockeyed optimist from beginning to end. He goes through a complete inventory of human behaviors in a cheerful vein, finding evidence of our moral sense everywhere he looks.

Wilson comes out of the same comfortable stance as that of the British moral philosophers he fails to acknowledge. From David Hume to G. E. Moore, they tell us that our sentiments, or our intuitions, can be trusted, and even if there is no God, there will always be an

England. It is a stance that accords well with a comfortable life. It was Kant who laid out the uncomfortable truth: moral duty is all too often diametrically opposed to our inclinations, and doing the right thing may be a bitter pill to swallow. But we are required to do the right thing anyway, not because of our sentiments, but because we know what is right.

Wilson is blissfully unaware of the nature of the two-edged sword he is wielding. Mark

Twain agreed we have the moral sense; but he went on to identify it as precisely the source of all the evil in the world.

Wilson is of Twain's party without knowing it. So, for instance, he praises our social nature – our willingness to cooperate with one another and to affiliate with one another. Just The virtues - 33

look where our sociability takes us:

The affiliative drive is so powerful that it embraces people unrelated and even unknown to us. Patriotic nationalism and athletic-team loyalties are obvious examples, but the most important case . . . is ethnic identity.

In a world of soccer hooligans and Greater Serbia, anyone else would be complaining, but

Wilson is bragging. In "The Lowest Animal," Twain took a more jaundiced view of patriotism than Wilson:

For many centuries "the common brotherhood of man" has been urged – on Sundays – and "patriotism" on Sundays and weekdays both. Yet patriotism contemplates the opposite of a common brotherhood.

Wilson is aware that he has to solve the problem indicated by Twain:

Many cultures . . . rarely extend the moral sense, except in the most abstract or conditional way, to other peoples . . . .

Ay, there's the rub.

How can there be a moral sense if everywhere we find cruelty and combat, sometimes on a monstrous scale?

Good question.

One rather paradoxical answer is that man's attacks against his fellow man reveal his moral sense because they express his social nature . . . .

Ah! We can rest assured. While the Holocaust was a bit of a bad patch for the Jews, it revealed the Nazis' moral sense, because it expressed their social nature: it demonstrated their solidarity The virtues - 34

with each other. Indeed, the "good Nazi" was above average in his ability to affiliate with others

(who were also Nazis), and to care not merely about his own children but about other people's

(blond Aryan) children. The Nazis conspicuously possessed many of Wilson's favorite moral

qualities.

This is the macabre implication of Wilson's amazing moral complacency. Remember that

he took a look at child-rearing and found encouraging news there. Now he glances at man's

inhumanity to man, and . . . not to worry! "Man's attacks against his fellow man reveal his moral

sense."

Let's stop a moment over this logical faux pas. Wilson has taken a truism – that morality is

always social – and turned it around and said, in effect, that sociability is always moral. This

violates the elementary logic of his hero Aristotle: we might as well take the statement "All

humans are mammals" and assume it is valid to argue further that "All mammals are human."

"Man's attacks against his fellow man reveal his moral sense because they express his

social nature." It is "paradoxical," all right, and it is unvarnished Twain – the only difference

being that Twain scathingly reprehends the direct connection between our possession of the

moral sense and our perpetration of monstrous evil, whereas Wilson is delighted to claim

membership in a species that is capable of so much fellow-feeling. That is to say, Wilson, unlike

Twain, cannot seem to discern the difference between "paradox" and "nonsense":

The fact that there is so much immoral behavior is not evidence of the weakness of the moral senses.

This really is a wonderful sentence. What would count as evidence of the weakness of the moral The virtues - 35

senses, according to Wilson? – given that a preponderance of immoral behavior does not count.

Actually, I have so accustomed myself to Wilson's interesting way of viewing the moral

world that I can answer my question for him. Since social nature is, by definition, evidence of a

moral disposition, it follows that a weak moral sense would be indicated by the absence of social

impulses. So immorality is first of all to be found in loners and in people who lack team spirit.

Just think of the damage those people do.

But the really evil people are the philosophers who deny the existence of morality. We

know how much blood they have on their hands.

Just as all the philosophers slandered by Wilson were actually men of the highest moral

aspiration, so the type of selfish, antisocial loner hypothesized by Wilson also turns out hardly to

have any real existence in the world at all. Most people affiliate socially to some degree; and the

inconvenient truth is that the greatest evils have been perpetrated by people who evinced the

affiliative drive to the highest degree. The most military-minded totalitarian movements have all exploited the enthusiasm of the masses: the enduring image of Nazism is the Nuremberg rally.

The communists and the fascists have shared a passion for organizing individuals into activist communities.

Wilson is easily pleased. He urges us to joyfully inhabit this excellent world that exhibits, through and through, our moral sense – a world threatened, he says, not by ethnic cleansing, but by the philosophical doctrines of the logical positivists.

Indeed, sit up and pay attention: Wilson is about to rehabilitate ethnic cleansing. But he uses language so cavalierly that you have to read sentence-by-sentence to catch his frequent The virtues - 36

equivocations. Sentence 1:

We may bemoan what we sometimes think of as the "senseless" violence attendant on the conflicts that arise out of ethnic identity.

The quotation marks around the word "senseless" indicate that Wilson thinks ethnic cleansing has been getting an unfair press. Ethnic conflict makes sense to him. Sentence 2:

But imagine a world in which people attached no significance to any larger social entity than themselves and their immediate families.

Suddenly, a renunciation of ethnic identity and a refusal to make common cause with people who do violence in its name becomes equated in Wilson's mind with a rejection of all social entities other than family. Why? Why can't I attach significance to dozens of affiliations that are based on real bonds, and renounce only the fictitious tie I am presumed to have with those who share with me the superficial characteristic of ethnicity? Sentence 3:

Can we suppose that in such a world there would be any enlarged sense of duty, any willingness to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others, or even much willingness to cooperate on risky tasks for material gain?

So, without ethnic identity, I will just be selfish. It is a strange assertion, and it certainly requires proof, but proof is not forthcoming – Wilson thinks he is stating something obvious and irrefutable. But why wouldn't I elect to join guilds, mini-cultures, and societies consisting of like-minded people? Why wouldn't I bond with other musicians and other long-distance runners? How is it that Wilson can confront us with a stark choice between ethnic affiliation and narrow self-interest? The virtues - 37

What would the world be like if we banished ethnic identity? It would be bereft, Wilson thinks, of duty, sacrifice, and cooperation. Yet Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. explicitly disdained ethnic identity and still worked for an enlarged sense of duty to a common brotherhood. On the other hand, once again we find Wilson's vision perfectly exemplified by the

Nazi soldiers who fought so tenaciously at the Battle of the Bulge – who exhibited a stringent sense of duty, a heroic willingness to sacrifice, and a willingness to cooperate with each other on risky tasks, not for material gain, but for the honor and glory of the fighting unit and the Reich.

To answer Wilson's question with a question: May we not say that ethnic identity, in the overt form of ethnocentrism, nationalism, and sectarianism, or the more indirect form of political and ideological solidarity, caused well over a hundred million premature deaths during the 20th century alone? If social impulses are at the root of morality, then morality is at the root of a pathology that threatens to destroy most of the species that inhabit the planet.

Let us savor the full import of Wilson's position. He equates ethnic affiliation with our social nature. He equates our social nature with our moral sense. So ethnic identity reveals our moral sense.

A thing can be either good or bad depending upon its application – as even Aristotle knew. Rocket fuel can propel a satellite into space or a nuclear warhead into a city. Nowhere does Wilson give us any guidance on how to sort out the good, affiliative type of ethnic identification from the bad type that leads inexorably to ethnic cleansing.

I submit that he cannot give us this guidance because it cannot be given. Ethnic identification in any form is evil. The virtues - 38

Let me be clear. Ethnic identification is evil. Cultural celebration is benign. To celebrate, let us say, Irish culture – the shamrock, the shillelagh, the Celtic songs – because you grew up in it and it feels like home, is harmless so long as it functions as a bout of nostalgia. But to celebrate ethnic Irishness as a superior form of humanity is implicitly to denigrate anything- elseness.

If it is a good thing to be a Daughter of the American Revolution, it is implicitly a bad thing to be a Daughter of the British Loyalists. To celebrate the accident of my genetic endowment is automatically to denigrate the genetic endowments of others.

If Thomas Jefferson was a great man, it is open to any person in the world to celebrate his life and claim a spiritual kinship with him. If, as I believe, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American leader of the second half of the 20th Century, he belongs to me as my spiritual brother. As a white American, I am distressed that his holiday has turned into a "black" holiday, for I wish to claim him as my own.

The only affiliations that are benign are those that are freely elected based upon affinity.

They may turn out to be those of my childhood, but in that case they must be consciously, and conscientiously, re-chosen when I become an adult. To swear allegiance to my race, my gender, my ethnicity, my religion, my country, even my family, is to act immorally.

The problem of evil? No Problem!

But let us accept, for the sake of argument, Wilson's blithe conclusion to the contrary – that

"man's attacks against his fellow man reveal his moral sense because they express his social The virtues - 39

nature." Surely his next task, then, as a moral philosopher, will be to sort out those expressions of social nature that lead to evil from those that lead to good.

Wilson tries to provide a light to guide us, while continuing to emphasize the paradox:

The fact that there is so much immoral behavior is not evidence of the weakness of the moral senses. The problem of wrong action arises because of the conflict among the several moral senses that exists, because of the struggle between morality and self-interest, and because of the corrosive effect of those forces that blunt the moral senses. We must often choose between duty and sympathy or between fairness and loyalty. Should I fight for a cause that I do not endorse or stand foursquare with my buddy whatever the cause? Does my duty require me to obey an authoritative command or should my sympathy for persons hurt by that command make me pause? Does fairness require me to report a fellow student who is cheating on an exam, or does loyalty require me to protect my friend?

Remember to read closely. Sentence 1 assures us once again that the wickedness of the world should not undermine our confidence in "the moral senses." Sentence 2 suggests three reasons that wickedness prevails: my moral sense may be undermined by competing moral senses, or by self-interest, or by corrosive forces. Then Sentences 3, 4, and 5 suggest three dilemmas; but how do they relate to the three underminings of Sentence 2? Are they examples of "the conflict among the several moral senses," or of "the struggle between morality and self-interest," or of

"the corrosive effect of those forces that blunt the moral senses"? I am tempted to say that

Wilson hasn't the faintest idea. But a little farther along, he repeats his favorite paradox one more time, by reminding us that "the moral senses make partially competing claims upon us." I think, then, it is fair to say that he regards his dilemmas as conflicts between competing aspects of our moral disposition. This is confirmed by consulting the complete text of The Moral Sense, as well as his earlier book, On Character, and noting that fairness, sympathy, and duty are all treated as virtues. The virtues - 40

But his dilemmas turn out to be, on closer inspection, conflicts between morality and immorality. There is no moral conflict between loyalty and fairness. Loyalty is what they appeal to when they can't appeal to fairness.

"Does fairness require me to report a fellow student who is cheating on an exam, or does loyalty require me to protect my friend?" This is not a matter of conflicting moral senses. This is precisely the conflict Kant posited – between duty and inclination, between morality and expediency. Cheating is by definition unfair. But if I protect my friend, my friend will be grateful to me and will reward me in the same mode of exchange, by covering for me when I cheat. Morality will go a-begging.

"Should I fight for a cause that I do not endorse or stand foursquare with my buddy whatever the cause?" Behind the wording of the question lies a serious error: Wilson treats a number of so-called "virtues" as intrinsically moral, when in fact they are morally neutral. We can gauge the morality only after further questioning. We must ask, loyal to what cause? We must ask, patriotic under what conditions? As Twain said of the notorious slogan, "My country, right or wrong," a burglar could not put it any better. The slogan explicitly pits patriotism against morality: if there is any conflict between the two, patriotism is to be placed higher than morality. The only moral patriotism would be, "My country, when it is right."

Wilson assumes that "standing foursquare with my buddy whatever the cause" is, in and of itself, morally admirable. But unless I know what the cause is, I cannot be sure. If the cause is immoral, it will be immoral to support it for any reason. If, knowing the cause to be immoral, I stand foursquare with my buddy, I will do so, not out of a "competing sense" of morality, but out of expediency – I will be choosing the path of least resistance. I will do the wrong thing and my The virtues - 41

buddy will applaud me.

At this point, you are surely noticing that, according to Wilson, loyalty is a sterling example of the moral sense. I am so far from agreeing that I would like to digress a moment.

Not so long ago, the Pope threw a bone to the women of the Catholic Church: he agreed to allow girls to serve at the altar. This innovation was a matter of local option for each diocese.

The bishop in Northern Virginia was one of only two bishops nationwide to prohibit the use of altar girls.

This caused a great deal of comment and complaint in the diocese. Nick Penning, a columnist for the Arlington Courier, and himself a Catholic, expressed his disappointment in print. He was duly rebuked in a letter to the newspaper by Michael Flach, who wrote as follows on May 3, 1995:

The Catholic Church does not teach that popes, cardinals and bishops "don't makes mistakes". . . . The Second Vatican taught that the Church is infallible insofar as she preserves and propounds the deposit of revelation entrusted to her by Christ. The pope is infallible under three conditions: when he speaks of faith or morals, when he exercises his office as pastor and doctor of all Christians, and when he indicates that the doctrine must be held by the universal church.

It would have been more economical, and just as true, had Flach said that the pope is infallible whenever he says that he is. It might also have been interesting to some readers – especially

Catholics – to learn that "papal infallibility" originated in the 19th Century. In any case, the letter reaches a remarkable conclusion:

Jesus Christ gave the pope and bishops authority over the church. Loyalty to Jesus Christ is manifested by loyalty to the bishop. The virtues - 42

It is curious that Flach acknowledges that the bishop can make a mistake, but nonetheless equates loyalty to the bishop with loyalty to Jesus Christ.

Yes, the bishop may make a mistake: he may, for instance, recommend a course of action clean contrary to the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, it is a matter of plain historical fact that the church has repeatedly taught the very opposite of the Sermon on the Mount and does so today. Flach implies that the bishop will have to answer to Christ for disobeying the

Word of God; but you, a lay member of the church, will not have to answer for obeying the bishop in his error. Christ will overlook your failure to obey the Word of God because you followed a higher principle – that of loyalty to said bishop.

We thus have a hierarchy of moral values in which loyalty to someone who is mistaken about moral values is assigned a higher value than the moral values themselves. Obedience to your fellow human who happens to have gained a highly political appointment from the Vatican becomes the highest possible moral value. I will not belabor the point that obedience to the orders given by superiors was the standard defense employed by Nazi war criminals: it should be apparent on the face of it that loyalty, far from being a moral value of any kind, is a quality that opposes and undermines morality. Loyalty is not worthy of even the lowest place in the hierarchy of virtues; it is a principle of expediency and worldliness that makes you popular with the people to whom you are loyal and thus insures an easier ride through life. It is morally disintegrative – immoral almost by definition.

"Does my duty require me to obey an authoritative command or should my sympathy for persons The virtues - 43

hurt by that command make me pause?" I have left this to the last, because in Wilson's other examples, "duty" is what morality requires of us, just as Kant said, and "sympathy" is synonymous with inclination. But Wilson turns the tables in this example and makes sympathy the moral qualm, and duty the expedient, worldly, and self-serving action.

Let me accept his implicit definition of duty, which here is essentially the opposite of

Kant's definition of duty, and synonymous with Kant's definition of inclination. In the situation as Wilson has vaguely sketched it, the "authoritative command" should carry no presumption of morality whatsoever. It may be entirely moral, but not by virtue of its authoritativeness alone.

(To assert otherwise carries you down a very slippery slope whereby segregationists who dutifully obeyed Jim Crow laws, and policemen who enforced those laws with the perfectly legal use of attack dogs and fire hoses, acted morally, whereas peaceful protesters who sat down at segregated lunch counters, and disobeyed commands to disperse, acted immorally.)

We never have a moral duty to obey an authoritative command – only a duty in the same sense that we may have a duty to obey the dress code of the corporation where we are employed.

Wilson indicates a situation in which the command hurts people, and the only argument he gives in its favor is that the person issuing the command is in a position of authority over me. It is obvious that my moral duty is to disobey the command.

For the sake of completeness, let us assume that there is more to the situation than Wilson has told us. Let us assume that a few people will be hurt by the authoritative command, but many more will be helped. Then the conflict is not between sympathy and duty: the conflict is between sympathy for the few who are hurt and the many who are helped. But I am leaning over backwards to be fair to Wilson, for he is certainly suggesting that obeying a command is an The virtues - 44

action distinctively moral in itself, and that sympathy, emanating from another corner of our moral sense, may make a "competing claim."

Even though his own examples disprove his equation, Wilson goes on identifying our social nature with our moral sense:

It is the desire to earn or retain the respect and good will of their fellows that keeps soldiers fighting even against fearsome odds, leads men to accept even the more distorted or implausible judgments of their peers, and persuades many of us to devalue the beliefs and claims of outsiders.

Again, there is nothing intrinsically moral about the desire to be respected and liked. Respect and good will are valuable commodities in the social milieu: as such, they are assiduously cultivated by, for instance, members of the Mafia, who often exemplify these qualities – among each other – to an impressive degree. There is honor among thieves. But the desire to earn respect has no inherent moral dimension: in the military milieu, respect is gained by competently, and unquestioningly, carrying out orders – sometimes orders to bomb a village and slaughter its inhabitants.

Certainly the social impulse keeps the soldier in the field – that and the threat of execution if he deserts – but even Wilson has to admit that the soldier's quest for respect and good will may lead him "to devalue the beliefs and claims of outsiders" – that is, to abandon morality.

Every hypothetical situation that Wilson uses to illustrate the "competing aspects" of our moral sense turns out to be, on closer examination, one in which the social sense tempts us to do the wrong, but expedient, thing, and our moral sense stands opposed to our social sense.

This should not surprise us. Given that Wilson cannot distinguish sociability from The virtues - 45

morality, it follows that what he calls the moral senses are merely those qualities that produce a boon companion. They make someone a good teammate and a good fraternity brother. These purely social virtues have no ethical significance. But they do come in for an inordinate amount of admiration among the rest of us, because we are, as Wilson says, social creatures, and we do value those traits that glue us together.

Have you figured out yet that Wilson is a cultural conservative? The social virtues rate high with him. He values respect and obedience – especially to those in authority. He values duty – the conventional kind, not the Kantian kind. He values order and tradition over the turmoil of change. He values loyalty, standing foursquare with your buddy, even ethnic solidarity. Well, loyalty leads to Watergate. Duty leads to Auschwitz. Ethnic solidarity leads to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. Patriotism really is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Tribalism – a more descriptive term than "ethnic affiliation" – has turned the entire earth into a killing field and brought us to the brink of annihilation. What Wilson calls the "competing claims" of the moral sense are in fact the claims of genuine morality versus the insidious pull of the social virtues hallowed by tradition – "get along by going along"; "you scratch my back and

I'll scratch yours"; "for he's a jolly good fellow." I leave it to my readers to decide if tradition has given us a morality we can live with very much longer.

The virtue of character and the character of the virtues

Once the issue of character was broached in Wilson's article, I knew, with a sinking heart, that we would soon be arriving at a respectful treatment of Aristotle. Wilson's multiple "moral senses," The virtues - 46

upon closer examination, turn out to be almost synonymous with "the virtues" touted by the

Greek philosopher. Wilson thinks that this is a plus.

So we can no longer avoid the subject of the Nicomachean Ethics, which I take up more in boredom than in sorrow.

Besides a penchant for stating the obvious, Aristotle's system of morality possesses just one tiny defect: it is not what most of us mean by morality at all. It is essentially next of kin to

Poor Richard's Almanack – a guide to winning friends and influencing people. Live a magnificent life, says Aristotle – one that will turn heads. His ethic is entirely prudential, as is

Ben Franklin's when he says that honesty is the best policy. Not only is altruism nowhere endorsed, it is positively frowned upon. Many deeds we consider distinctively moral, such as, in past centuries, voluntarily freeing your slaves, would have struck Aristotle as neurotic, precisely because they go against the worldly interests of the doer. What Aristotle means by ethics, we would today signify by terms such as liberality and good citizenship – and even these traits are recommended because they will increase your happiness and your prestige, and make your neighbors positively green with envy.

Aristotle's concept of the good man can be defended in part by pointing out that he took the social and civic nature of human beings for granted. (His famous statement, "Man is a political animal," is altogether misleading to the casual student: he meant, not that man is the animal who loves to participate in the election process, but rather the animal who lives in a polis

– that is, a city-state.) Accordingly, a good life could never be merely a life of self- aggrandizement: an ethical life looks good to the other city-dwellers, and must concomitantly serve the interests of the community. Personal glory must entail civic munificence. The virtues - 47

But Aristotle could not conceive of a point of view that holds the polis itself up to the

scrutiny of a moral progressive. So he would have opposed freeing your slaves on the additional

ground that such a gesture would confer no benefit upon the state.

The French philosopher Émile Bréhier said that Aristotle's ethic was "the morality of a

middle-class lady in comfortable circumstances who is determined to make the best use of her

social advantages." Bertrand Russell, in A History of Western Philosophy, sums up aptly:

Those who neither fall below nor rise above the level of decent, well-behaved citizens will find in the Ethics a systematic account of the principles by which they hold that their conduct should be regulated. Those who demand anything more will be disappointed. The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seventeenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive.

Aristotle and Wilson elevate to preeminence the moral habits of those who obey the speed limit and pay their bills on time. J. Edgar Hoover attains American Sainthood by such criteria. Martin

Luther King, Jr., on the other hand, becomes just what J. Edgar Hoover thought he was – a disturber of the peace.

To point out that Aristotle's view has been superseded is not to refute it. But let us understand first of all what the anthropologists are really telling us. It is not any one tribe, or any single anthropologist reporting on a given tribe, who says that morals are relative – merely a matter of custom, merely what we want. Every tribe is, within itself, morally absolutist: every tribe says, there is only one moral way of life, and we live that way; any other way would be wrong. It is when you stand back and compare tribes that you are forced to admit that each differs from all The virtues - 48

the others in the code to which it absolutely adheres. This admission is not due to a left-wing bias built into anthropology and sociology: it is not William Graham Sumner's opinion that "the mores can make anything right"; it is a simple scientific finding, and he had a duty to report it. It is a fact recorded long ago in the writing of Herodotus.

Wilson has to slander the anthropologists because he has been impaled on the horns of their discovery. All societies differ as to mores; yet every society privileges its own mores, and makes them absolutely binding: this is what we mean by cultural relativism. Is it not extraordinary, then, that Wilson nonetheless still wishes to pick one society and treat its morality as normative? That it is not his own – that it is Aristotle's – may seem to do him credit, until we remind ourselves that Periclean Athens flourished for less than a century and then committed suicide by waging and finally losing one of the most unjust and senseless imperialistic wars in history. Aristotle lived in the decaying carcass of the Athenian Empire, but still celebrated its concept of ethical manhood.

Let us stay with this point about the historical and sociological context of the Nicomachean

Ethics. In contradistinction to the metaphysical status Wilson wishes to give them, the virtues are not Platonic Ideas, Mosaic commandments, or Christian injunctions. They do not manifest themselves independently of space and time. The Aristotelian virtues are specifically the virtues of Greater Athens. They are suited to a polis that believes in the absolute power of a husband and father over his wife, children, and slaves. They cannot be transferred intact to the 20th

Century unless we wish to try to replicate the Athenian city-state. Even Wilson has a clue about this, for in picking four of his own favorite virtues to write about in The Moral Sense, he The virtues - 49

conspicuously omits one of Aristotle's favorites – courage.

Why has courage always been touted as one of the greatest virtues? Because the societies

of the past all expected to engage in a type of warfare that was up-close and personal. Courage was functional. In a phalanx, the shield on the left arm of the man next to you protected your own right side. Cowardice on his part would not only get you killed, it could cause the entire line to collapse. Today, hand-to-hand combat is rare: success in war now relies very little on courage and a great deal on the intelligence to operate highly sophisticated weaponry. In any event, we must render warfare obsolete or warfare will render us obsolete.

But it is not merely the case that many of Aristotle's virtues are dysfunctional in terms of today's society. It is also the case that the virtues, taken as a package, and even revamped by

Wilson for modern consumption, cannot be assumed to have anything to do with what we mean by "morality."

We have, for many centuries now, identified morality with attempts to improve society and expand the concept of rights. But Aristotle's virtues would not have served the needs of a

Greek reformer: they were the habits that promoted happiness in the Athenian polis as it already existed. As such, they would not have been useful had he even so much as emigrated to Sparta.

The Spartan virtues were, as we all know, "spartan" by comparison.

Today, we conceive of morality, or "virtue" in the abstract, as the highest duty that exists

– an end in itself. But in Aristotle's system, virtue is emphatically not its own reward: rather, "the virtues" are the means that enable you to gain the end, which is personal happiness and the respect of the polis. The virtues are instrumentalities.

The virtues constitute a technology of ethics, or happiness. Therefore, Aristotle deploys The virtues - 50

them judiciously, as appropriate; nor does he exempt them from the law of the Golden Mean. It is possible, he thinks, to display too much courage. This is not because courage conflicts with a competing virtue – it is because courage is conceived, not as a moral sense at all, but as a kind of utilitarian accessory, meant to be displayed in certain situations, and useful only if applied in the right measure.

At first glance, Wilson, like Aristotle, seems to set forth the concept of "too much of a good thing." He admits that our socially affiliative drive may become too exclusive – that we may go overboard trying to ingratiate ourselves with our buddies, and so fail to recognize the rights of outsiders. But Aristotle's Greeks, like all other ancient peoples, disregarded the rights of outsiders as a matter of principle. Aristotle would not have understood the concept of universalizing morality throughout the inhabited globe. Or, more likely, he would have understood it and been amused at so hopeless an undertaking.

Aristotle's idea about a possible excess of virtue, then, is not at all Wilson's idea about an excess of affiliative drive. To Aristotle, too much courage is not immoral; it is self-defeating.

Wilson thus entangles himself in an impossible conflation of ancient virtues and modern morality. He thinks we become moral by cultivating the virtues. I will give Aristotle this much credit: if we had him here, and we could tell him what we mean today by "morality," he would reply that his virtues have nothing to do with it.

The character of morality

Modern morality is instead tied to the Kantian project of universalizing our maxims – of The virtues - 51

broadening the range of our ethical obligations so that previously excluded people fall within the

domain of our moral duty. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, knew that the signers of the

Declaration of Independence did not mean, by the words "All men are created equal," that all

men are created equal. But he purposely stretched the meaning of the phrase to make it inclusive

of black people. This is why we call him a moral reformer.

Wilson is aware of such attempts to universalize our moral maxims. Far from being

discouraged by how far we have to go – nothing can quell his optimism – he pays lavish tribute

to how far we have come. He does have sense enough to see that the universalizing of morality

can only happen in the teeth of our narrower social impulses; but instead of giving up his

identification of social affiliation with morality, he just scratches his head over what a bizarre

and unexpected accomplishment universalization is, and then goes back to his account of the

virtues.

Aristotle had this excuse, that in his day "pluralism" and "multiculturalism" were

unthinkable. So he did not indulge in comparative anthropology; he did not see any reason to

afford his student a way of going outside the context of life in a Greek city-state. This is why he blithely accepted the justice of slavery and the inferiority of women without even bothering to offer serious arguments for these institutions. They were givens of the Athenian moral order. (I do not call it serious to offer arguments that collapse when subjected to the most casual empirical testing by means of ordinary observation. To say that men control their passions by subordinating them to reason, but women and slaves do not, is actually to fall below the standard set by the Biblical argument that woman was created from the rib of Adam and the descendants of Ham are hated by God, because it is so much easier to disprove Aristotle's thesis without even The virtues - 52

leaving the house.)

The Nicomachean Ethics is one of the laziest books ever written. But what excuse does

Wilson have for exhibiting moral complacency to a degree that out-Aristotles Aristotle? To call him a "conservative" hardly goes far enough. All the thinkers that Wilson maligns as radicals were acutely aware of what he refuses to believe: that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. The greatest moral avatars have transcended the social impulse; stood against the times; shown us the narrowness of our traditional virtues, the partiality of our moral senses, and the provincialism of our social affiliations; and challenged us to universalize our maxims.

Kant got the basics of this right, and erred only in the application; therefore Wilson mentions Kant only to misrepresent him, and lionizes instead the apostles of sentiment, such as

Adam Smith. But we cannot rely upon our sentiments, precisely because they are socially rooted. It is our sentiment of ethnic solidarity that tells us to exclude the outsider; it can only be

Kant's categorical imperative that tells us this is wrong. Morality is knowledge, not feeling.

It is difficult to say whether, for Wilson, morality is primarily cognitive or emotional, because finally the virtues are just habits. If that sounds a little tepid, remember that Wilson aims considerably lower than the great moral reformers. He wants a renewed emphasis on character formation because he is afraid we will turn into Woodstock Nation. He thinks that, given our social nature, ethnic cleansing is just one of those things that happen; but a proper upbringing should at least be able to put a stop to dancing in the streets.

When Wilson tells us that habituation is the way the so-called virtues are acquired –

Aristotle again – he is neither contradicting Kant nor telling us anything we did not already know. Kant understood that inclination undermines morality, and no doubt approved of a The virtues - 53

training that teaches the individual how to manage his inclinations. But most of the wide-scale moral damage in the world has been done by puritans, not by profligates; by elder brothers, not by prodigal sons. The perils of self-indulgence are vastly overrated. I never stood in so much danger as when I was menaced, as a young man, not by bullies, vandals, and thieves, not by sellers of drugs and women of "easy virtue," but by my draft board. The virtuous Robert

McNamara put me in harm's way, with his overflowing sentiment and his urgent desire to do good – qualities still on display in the middle 1990s when he made the rounds offering heartfelt apologies for the war in Vietnam. Kant rightly disdained such effusions of well-intentioned feeling. It is only our moral intelligence that can overrule our sentiments (with their partialities) and stimulate us to challenge the obsolete social virtues (such as obeying our bishops or our draft boards). And it is only by means of such challenges that we can make any moral progress.

Let us spend a moment on this topic. I want to tread very carefully through this minefield of whether morality is cognitive or emotional.

Sometimes it seems as though we sense what is right, but intellectually rationalize it away; other times it seems we know what is right, but allow our feelings to overpower us. I have argued for Kant against Hume, but Kant's own argument that we should truthfully tell the murderer where his intended victim is hidden shows how a correct sentiment can be subverted by misapplied intellect.

Let me propose, at the outset, that humans have, not several competing moral senses, but a single moral sense. I can even applaud Wilson for using the word sense, for it seems to me that

this fundamental morality is rational and emotional. It originates, as philosopher Robert Nozick The virtues - 54

suggested, in a simple act of analogical reasoning: I see that you, with your two arms, two legs, and two eyes, are another human constructed along the same lines as I. I know how I would feel if given the smallest piece of pie, so I know how you will feel.

This original empathy belongs to all of us, perhaps not as a birthright, but as an early intuition that could hardly fail to arise. The New York Times of January 20, 1962 carried the following story:

Jackson, Miss., Jan. 19 (UPI) A University Hospital official said today it was difficult to prevent white and Negro children from playing together in the pediatrics ward. Dr. Robert Marston, Hospital director, said officials "discourage this practice" and would appreciate suggestions on how to stop it. He made the comments after a charge by State Representative Jim Mathis that white and Negro children were using the same facilities.

These children were probably four and five years old. A few years later, certainly by the time they were 14 or 18, they undoubtedly knew better – as the result of adult training, the purpose of which was to circumscribe their moral sense. We have to learn that it is not appropriate to waste our empathy on people who are undeserving of it – who are not of our own caste. We are indoctrinated in bigotry. That we have to be taught how to discriminate against others – how to decommission our empathy – argues powerfully for Wilson's notion that the moral sense is part of our natural equipment. Wilson is, as always, almost right. We do have a moral sense. Children do have a pronounced sense of fairness. It is important to practice the virtues, or you may not have them when you need them. How, then, does he go so wrong? I think Wilson misses all the steps in between our acquisition of empathy through an unforced intuition in childhood and the way we finally wind up as "functioning adults" in a particular society, with Aristotle's good-conduct medal pinned on our chests. He misses the way we talk ourselves into certain ideologies, which we embody in sets of rules governing our societies. These rules then condition our feelings. He fails to notice that our education in bigotry, snobbery, and chauvinism starts in the first grade at the latest. My frustration with him as a moral philosopher is owing to his lack of interest in the way our moral education is undone by our civic education. Certain intellectual assumptions about race, religion, class, gender, and nation, which have to be assiduously propagated, are made the basis of our sentiments – but these sentiments no longer have anything to do with the child's original empathic grasp of our common humanity. What child is naturally patriotic? His mental horizon is the edge of his neighborhood. He must be taught the concept of nation; he must be shown the boundaries on a map. Then, as Tolstoy says, he must be hypnotized into believing in its importance. (During the Vietnam War, had I The virtues - 55

drawn the boundary of my patriotism smaller, I would have tried to protect my fellow townsmen from the government of the United States, which was drafting them into the military and exposing them to harm; had I drawn it larger, I would have sided with the other inhabitants of the world who deplored the violence my government was perpetrating.) The naively empathic child, who can ask his parents with genuine curiosity why nations go to war, is propagandized and conditioned with the whole panoply of social reinforcements. He is encouraged in what Nietzsche called the mentality of the herd. At the end of this process, his moral sense is hanging by a thread. The white child who played with black children in the pediatrics ward winds up as an adult who burns a cross on the lawn of his black neighbor – all the while displaying, to his own kind, the social virtues Wilson admires. He grows up to be unfailingly civil, fair, loyal, and generous – to other whites. This tragedy, the Tragedy of Adulthood, happens because ideology undermines and reorients our childish empathy even as we simultaneously acquire Aristotle's virtuous habits. At the end of the process, we no longer possess this fundamental moral sense: we possess precisely Wilson's grab bag of moral senses – which are now at the service of one particular society or subculture, which is conditioned by a particular set of ideas. By its very nature, this society excludes people who swear allegiance to other societies built on competing concepts. At this point, when the disaster is complete, Wilson's analysis comes into its own, but drenched in the mordant irony he does not perceive. The social sense is synonymous with the moral sense – in a Klansman. After the fall, it is morality itself, as Twain said, that bears morality away. Wilson goes wrong in the same way that we go wrong as a culture. The ideological presuppositions of our quotidian morality are invisible to him and to us. If we have bought into those presuppositions, we cannot fall back upon our feelings. Our sentiments will tell us that our sentiments are wasted on "those people."

The character of boredom

You may object that I seem to be arguing and disputing every clause of Wilson's article. You may be getting the impression that I disagree with everything Wilson says. Strange to say, this is not at all the case; and I should beg Wilson's indulgence here, because I have been committing a critical sin. I have refused to review the article he wrote; instead, I have been savaging him for his failure to write the article he should have written. But pity me too. Because he begs the most interesting questions, Wilson is not so much wrong as utterly beside the point. Almost everything he says, far from being controversial, is a truism. We all know that most people, much of the time, are helpful, gregarious, loyal, patriotic, a veritable Boy-Scout-oath-full of approved social, and ostensibly moral, qualities. Wilson is like a man with a megaphone shouting on a street corner: "I don't care what anyone else says; the sun rises in the east." The only way to ward off sleep is to read between the lines and ferret out the smug assumptions that have made Wilson the poster boy of the Neo-Conservative movement in this country. Wilson is pained that some of his critics hurl such political accusations at him as if they render him unfit to address the issues. Wilson is not automatically wrong just because he is a Republican; but his conservatism does predispose him to look in all the wrong places for all the The virtues - 56

wrong things. I am quoting now from the introductory chapter to his book On Character:

I am surprised to learn that a concern for character is taken as the infallible sign of a conservative disposition. Anyone who explains high rates of drug abuse, criminality, or family dissolution by some defect in character (rather than as a consequence of social inequality, unemployment, or political oppression) is immediately taken to be a reactionary, probably in the grip of some extreme evangelical obsession. Now I confess to being conservative, at least by the standards of contemporary academia. But there is no necessary connection between a conservatively inclined politics and a character-oriented psychology.

Yes, there is. An insistence upon character, and a corresponding de-emphasis upon social and economic inequity and de facto political disenfranchisement, inevitably commits a thinker to disdaining the efforts of government to intervene in the cycles of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. If society's ills stem from private behaviors, which are in turn the result of biology and family upbringing, then why support government programs to change society?

Wilson might argue that we should try to cure poverty and unemployment anyway; but he does not think this is a task for government to undertake, and he accepts certain levels of poverty and unemployment as merely the price, well worth paying, of living under capitalism. So there isn't much left for government to do, and that makes Wilson a conservative in all the current senses of the word: he favors a smaller government; he favors a laissez-faire approach to business; he favors the good old days (pick any old days before the 1960s).

Wilson deplores the 1960s because of the rise of incivility. Well, at the beginning of the

1960s, black people were required – politely, of course – to sit in the back of the bus. At the end of the 1960s, young men were being drafted – in an orderly fashion, of course – and sent to die in the jungles of Vietnam. Wilson was at Harvard then, and he laments that it "was not a happy place to be." I wonder how the happiness of Khe Sanh would have struck him. The virtues - 57

"I did not think much of the way in which students and professors behaved." Wilson was, as usual, living in a parallel universe. To adapt the Buddha's famous parable: the house was on fire, and Wilson blocked the way of the firemen with their hoses and interrogated them at length in order to ascertain the quality of their table manners. Yes, the behavior of students and professors at Harvard fell below the highest standards of civility; but Southeast Asia was burning, and friends of the protesters were dying in the flames.

Perhaps Wilson does see immorality in such huge outbreaks of evil as the war in

Vietnam, but it is safe to say he is not very interested in the topic. In Wilson's universe, immorality is especially equated, not so much with the Holocaust or the white man's treatment of native Americans, but with "drug abuse, criminality, or family dissolution." Therefore, character formation is all-important to him, because then we produce citizens who are temperate, law- abiding, and devoted to family.

The problem is that these may also be the citizens who dutifully obey their governments, their corporate managers, and their clergymen. I apologize for resorting one last time to the

Nazis, but they are always useful in a discussion of this sort. Once again: among themselves, the

Nazis achieved the highest test scores for temperance, obedience to law, devotion to family, and civility. So did the men who ordered the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of

Hiroshima, the napalm bombing of Vietnam, and the smart-bombing of Baghdad. So did the men who sat in the courthouses of the segregated south for a century. So do the men and women who sit today in the meetings of the Christian Coalition. These last-named folks generally exhibit all the appurtenances of character, good habits, and good manners. They possess the virtues and the moral senses. They register high on the scale of Wilson's two touchstone The virtues - 58

qualities: empathy (as he defines it) and self-control. Unfortunately, there is a boundary to their empathy: women who seek abortions, homosexual men and women, and illegal immigrants fall outside the kingdom of God. If you read the writings of Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan closely, you begin to suspect that atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims are also beyond the pale; peruse more closely, and you will see that it looks bad for the Jews. Welfare mothers are on the other side of the border; also internationalists, secular humanists, and feminists; perhaps liberals who oppose the death penalty; maybe, in the final analysis, biologists and physicists who contradict the sacred account of creation in the book of Genesis and so drag down civil Christian society almost as much as a flag desecrator. Yes, the empathy of these Christians is a fixed quantity: they spend it entirely on each other; it has definite limits. When these people stand close to the place where they have drawn their line – near an abortion clinic, for instance – and scream "Murderer!" at the malefactors on the other side, their self-control sometimes turns out to have limits as well.

It is fashionable in certain circles – the Great Books circle and the Catholic Neo-Thomist circle – to say that Aristotle got it right and Aquinas brought it permanently up-to-date. Inculcate the virtues. But these virtues were designed to produce good citizen-soldiers of parochial communities. Aristotle took for granted a natural enmity between Athens and all the other city- states of Greece, not to mention the rest of the "barbarian" world; Aquinas assumed a natural enmity between Christian Europe and all the "infidels." Each man further assumed, within the community, a natural, even Godly hierarchy, which bottoms out in the existence of some beings so inferior they are of the community and yet without any civic rights in the community. Neither The virtues - 59

man was much disturbed by the existence of billionaires living in mind-boggling luxury next to beggars at the gates. Both men were comfortable executing the misfits, the heretics, and the sinners.

Well, these are the virtues, these the moral dispositions, that have served us so well up until now; and Wilson is the traditionalist who speaks up for them even today. Good for him: it is pleasant, really, after concluding the bloodiest century ever – the culmination of some 50 or 60 bloody centuries – to find out that God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world wherein we find such widespread evidence of the moral sense. Yet I am still mystified by how Wilson can imagine that his is such a lonely voice crying in the wilderness. It does strike me as inconceivably stupid, in light of the historical record, for a man, especially a moral philosopher, to defend "traditional morality"; but it does not strike me as brave, when after all he is merely repeating what every other self-satisfied and brainlessly optimistic thinker has said for the past

2400 years.

The unpardonable sin

Roger Shattuck is a professor of literature who believes that there should be a taboo on investigating certain topics. He set forth this thesis in his book Forbidden Knowledge, and the same thought permeates his piece in the January 1999 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, "When Evil is 'Cool,'" although his chief target here is ostensibly the postmodern cult of transgressiveness.

In beginning the magazine article with three fictional treatments of evil – by Diderot,

Hawthorne, and Baudelaire – Shattuck immediately betrays his preference for literature over life.

He implies that only certain courageous writers have faced up to the evil lurking within us – especially those writers who have given us highly colorful accounts of superman-criminals who are possessed of exaggerated will and intellect. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that

Shattuck deeply admires Paradise Lost. This taste prefigures the shallowness of his treatment of evil, and also points us to a subtext of orthodox Christianity that is nowhere made explicit.

(Shattuck's mental universe is not thereby imbued with the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth – after all, the founder of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus, displayed in his letters a marked disinterest in the teaching of Jesus. Orthodox Christianity in America is Augustinian, Lutheran, and Calvinistic.)

Since Shattuck, like any good university man of his era, is not going to wear his religion on his sleeve, we have to read between the lines for the clues; but the clues are there in plenty – as when he condemns Hawthorne's protagonist Ethan Brand for two Medieval Christian sins, "curiosity and pride," that would have counted as virtues to the Greeks. The unpardonable sin - 61

For all its faults, Shattuck's article is to be commended for attempting a taxonomy of evil. He arrives at the following fourfold classification. There is a suggestion of logical ordering here, of a ladder of evil:

Natural evil occurs in the form of elemental disasters and scourges, which may affect any of us and over which we have limited control. . . .

Moral evil refers to actions undertaken knowingly to harm or exploit others in contravention of accepted moral principles or statutes within a society. These actions are subject to judgment and punishment, mitigation and aggravation, repentance and remission. . . .

Radical evil applies to immoral behavior so pervasive in a person or a society that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned. The Marquis de Sade, the Soviet gulag, and the Nazi Holocaust belong to this form of evil, so extreme that it can no longer recognize its own atrocity. . . .

Metaphysical evil designates an attitude of assent and approval toward moral and radical evil, as evidence of superior human will and power. Thus forms of evil arising from human agency are given a status as inevitable – effectively a reversion to natural evil. And thus the cruelest of monsters and tyrants are normalized in the perspective of history and in their evolutionary survival of the fittest. Metaphysical evil nullifies all attempts to establish constraints through law and social compact. The twentieth century has conferred astonishingly widespread respect for metaphysical evil by honoring the thought of Nietzsche.

We begin, then, with the benign category of natural evil, graduate to human evil, move up the ladder to radical evil (a kind of ne plus ultra of moral evil), and finally, with metaphysical evil, arrive at a condition so degenerate that whole populations are conditioned to approve of evil.

(While the famous monsters of evil inhabit the third, not the fourth, rung, Shattuck suggests that only the fourth rung represents the triumph of evil: for as long as we find evil repugnant, we will take arms against it, even in its radical form; but if we succumb to its allure, there will be no one left to oppose it.) The unpardonable sin - 62

Let us begin by paying close attention to the paragraph about metaphysical evil. Reading carefully, in the hope of extracting the thought accurately, I find myself floundering in a bog of the muddy-profound. To begin with, who, exactly, has the "attitude of assent" toward radical evil? At the end of the paragraph, I am given "the twentieth century" and "Nietzsche"; later I will be offered the enfant terrible of American movie-making, Quentin Tarantino, and a famous defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow. (Total amount of blood shed by these gentlemen: zero. It is a bit odd, his wanting to damn writers and philosophers to a deeper hell than tyrants and mass murderers: to support such a strange idea, it helps to wrap it up in a word as imposing as

"metaphysical.") The scholarly passive voice further obfuscates the identities of the people who supposedly consider evil inevitable and tyranny normal. There seems to be a slap at "Social

Darwinism" in the appearance of the phrase "survival of the fittest," although it isn't clear why we should assume that the so-called metaphysicians of evil embrace this belief: Nietzsche certainly did not. Finally, in the next-to-last sentence, the human agents have disappeared altogether: now metaphysical evil itself becomes personified as the nullifier of the social compact. This is not merely a stylistic fault, although it is that: it can only be the abstraction of evil that nullifies the social compact, because no human beings will ever be found who do this.

There are lone sociopaths who suspend the social compact from time to time just long enough to violate it to their own advantage, but they aren't Shattuck's quarry: it is Nietzsche whom he wants to damn, for questioning traditional morality – as if Nietzsche did not propose that we replace it with something more worthy of our esteem. Even the famous anarchists of the 19th Century expected the blown-up world to be reconstituted on more moral grounds.

We have, in short, a thicket of non-sequiturs. It is my guess that, because Shattuck's The unpardonable sin - 63

religion-based axioms are nowhere made explicit, perhaps not even to himself by himself, there are gaping holes in his logic that, in his own mind, are filled with shibboleths like "free will."

Take, for instance, Shattuck's complaint that the exponents of metaphysical evil reduce the other forms of evil to a type of natural evil, and so surrender to it as "inevitable." Yet one sentence earlier, he grumbled that these same miscreants praise evil "as evidence of superior human will and power." Which is it that he alleges they allege? that evil is a spasm of our human nature, as an earthquake is a spasm of mundane nature? or that it is a vaunting of human will?

Shattuck himself wants, vaguely, to have it both ways: in keeping with orthodoxy, he wishes to hold us (and not God) solely responsible, as individuals, for the evil we do, and he abhors any argument that undermines our moral accountability; at the same time, he thinks we are just such flawed creatures as will be tempted by all types of transgression – so much so that certain types of knowledge must be forbidden to us for our own good. Here we arrive unmistakably at "original sin" – but these words too, so redolent of religious belief, are missing from the article.

Yet surely it is obvious that only the believers in some version of original sin are committed to the inevitability of evil. They and they alone reduce the moral and radical evil that humans do to a type of evil that, if not "natural," is no more to be prevented than the weather: for just as, owing to the geological facts about the earth, volcanoes erupt, so also we humans sin, as an inevitable fact about the type of creature we are. To attribute to us a built-in ineradicable propensity for evil, then, is effectively to throw in the towel, whereas anyone but a Christian is free to imagine a future, however difficult of achievement, when we finally bring our destructive impulses under control. This paradox dooms the earnest plea of Forbidden Knowledge: if we are The unpardonable sin - 64

bound to violate all taboos due to a flaw in our natures – namely, our irrepressible attraction to

evil – then the good advice in Shattuck's book, with its careful categorization of types of

forbidden knowledge, is destined to become merely the latest taboo that we break. Like Milton's

God in the middle books of Paradise Lost, Shattuck just wants to warn us so that, when we fail,

as fail we must, and as he foresees, he can say, "I told you so."

Thus Shattuck condemns the metaphysicians of evil for giving in to sin and even

admiring some of its more florid manifestations; but he is the theorist who argues that our

cravings are so depraved that certain types of knowledge must be kept from us. Therefore, I

suspect that the true crime of the metaphysicians of evil, in Shattuck's eyes, is their urging the

rest of us to reach for the fruit of the forbidden tree. They are the snakes in the modern garden

who flout Shattuck's commandment. Although Satan did not commit the sin – Adam committed

the sin – still Satan was the metaphysician of evil who egged Adam on. (How this makes Satan

worse than Adam has always been a mystery to me – and it is an even bigger mystery how the

arch-believers in personal responsibility can think so. In any event, the real culprit always gets away during this debate: God made Adam "free" to fall but too weak to stand. Milton's poem demonstrates that, however long you dance around the conundrum, you can't exculpate God as the origin of original sin. Adam's crime, given Adam's God-given nature, is inevitable; Satan

merely affects the timing.)

If Adam's nature is human nature, and human nature is a part of mundane nature, then

evil is inevitable, and natural, and the metaphysician who points this out is simply "telling it like

it is." The only question remaining is why Shattuck calls him a metaphysician and not a

biologist. The unpardonable sin - 65

Shattuck's paradigm case

When an author writes as poorly and illogically as Shattuck, leaving out the assumptions upon which his arguments are based, and jumping to conclusions that are the opposite of what his premises imply, it is presumptuous to say what he really means; but if we wish to grapple with his ideas, we have to try to supply the missing terms. When Shattuck asserts, then, that the metaphysicians of evil try to turn moral and radical evil into natural evil, he apparently means that they try to shift the blame away from the conscious sinner and on to "circumstances" or

"society." He means they try to find causes outside the individual human agent. His bogeyman, therefore, is Clarence Darrow, who defended the "thrill killers" Leopold and Loeb in the famous trial of the 1920s. These two rich college students murdered a 14-year-old boy just to see what it would feel like and whether they could get away with it. In defending them, Darrow, needless to say, did not express "an attitude of assent and approval toward moral and radical evil, as evidence of superior human will and power"; nor did he argue that his clients should be released into the community as part of a program to nullify "all attempts to establish constraints through law and social compact." Indeed, he had them plead guilty, to avoid a jury trial, and expended all his efforts solely on cheating the hangman. He argued before the judge that execution was too dire a punishment for two weak-minded teenagers who had conducted an experiment in what they had mis-conceived to be the Nietzschean philosophy of the superman.

Shattuck is still disappointed these many years later that Darrow got the two murderers off with sentences of only "life-plus-99-years." The prosecutor then had as little scruple as we find in the proponents of capital punishment now: to try to discredit Darrow with the jury, he The unpardonable sin - 66

unearthed Darrow's profession of 20 years earlier, made in a speech to prisoners in the Cook

County Jail in Chicago, that "I really do not believe the least in crime." But, Shattuck complains,

"This disturbing revelation close to the end of the trial did not halt Darrow's juggernaut against

capital punishment."

I hope Professor Shattuck, presumably a man to whom words are important, will open up his dictionary some day, and explain to me how a lone private attorney, speaking against the death penalty before a community outraged by a heinous crime, in a country that is positively in love with capital punishment, can constitute a "juggernaut." Apparently, like most American

conservatives today, he is beset by hallucinations that "the liberals are taking over everything."

Against such moral relativists, who are mostly a figment of his overactive imagination, Shattuck

brandishes the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt – a man who had the moral imagination of a

pigeon.

But here's the rub. Shattuck is outraged that Darrow minimized the responsibility of the

murderers: "Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university." Yet Shattuck's own taxonomy identifies Nietzsche as the avatar of metaphysical evil. Again, which is it? Did Nietzsche, that old serpent, influence the impressionable young men, and so earn his imposing spot at the very apex of Shattuck's pantheon of evil? If so, then Darrow was right, and some of the culpability ought to be removed from the shoulders of the disciples, and put on the shoulders of the teachers. If not – if every Adam must bear the brunt of his act, and no prior influence can mitigate the criminal's criminality – then why is Nietzsche brought into Shattuck's case? Why does the fourth category of evil, which seems to consist merely of provocative writers and their approving claques, exist at all? The unpardonable sin - 67

The answer, again, can only be found in Shattuck's invisible Christianity. Somebody

once said, "Judge not, lest ye be judged," but he was no Christian. Shattuck, in common with

organized Christianity throughout the ages, says "Judge!" He says that Leopold and Loeb are

guilty of moral, perhaps radical, evil, and should be punished accordingly by the secular arm of

the law; and Darrow and Nietzsche are guilty of metaphysical evil, and should be punished by the

contempt and loathing of all men of good will. Leopold, Loeb, Nietzsche, and Darrow are

carriers of the universal virus of original sin, and so cannot help but do evil; all four should be

held separately accountable as individuals for their inevitably occurring actions. We – although

no better than they, according to the scripture that Shattuck believes but neglects to invoke –

should find all of them guilty; and after hanging Leopold and Loeb, we should set forth an intellectual taboo against any ethicist who dares even to speculate that Darrow was right about

crime. To argue that these men might have been nudged toward evil by influences in their

environments is to embrace metaphysical evil, even though Shattuck apparently agrees with

Darrow that Nietzsche did give the thrill killers a push; instead, artists and philosophers must

everywhere affirm that each separate crime is individually caused by the diseased will of an

original sinner, even though this is tantamount to saying that crime is, sociologically speaking,

uncaused and unpreventable. If an offending ethicist does break the taboo, and, worse still,

appear to be right in positing a sociological cause of crime, we should still ban his findings,

because they are an instance of Shattuck's fifth category of forbidden knowledge, which consists

of information that can only confuse us by inviting us to empathize with monsters like Leopold

and Loeb.

The unpardonable sin - 68

Nietzsche

In our time, Shattuck does not have to invoke original sin explicitly, because we have updated

the conception and stripped it of its embarrassing Biblical appurtenances, while clinging to it

more vociferously than ever as the unifying concept underlying all our palaver about "character."

Most of us, like Shattuck, believe in it even if we fail to identify the belief as such.

For instance, Sigmund Freud, perhaps the single most influential theologian of the 20th

Century, contended that "all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition" in

our unconscious. This is original sin, and no mistake; and it happens that, in spite of Freud's

insistence that he was promulgating a new science, psychoanalytical original sin is just as meta- physical as the Catholic version, since the id does not appear in an x-ray and Freud could not locate the DNA that carries these predispositions. (Neither does the Freudian "death drive" show up as a chromosome, a hormone, or a retrovirus.)

According to Freud's so-called structural theory of the tripartite mind – another metaphysical concept – the id houses an unholy cauldron of evils ("I want to kill and burn") while the ego tries to invoke the reality principle ("I could get caught") and the superego parrots the rules of society ("Shame on you!"). Freud titled his most popular book Civilization and Its

Discontents, to make the point that this inner conflict is irreconcilable. (Some of his followers have gone astray by imagining that he condemned civilization for repressing our desires. On the contrary, he praised civilization for reining in mayhem and murder, and considered it the only edifice imposing enough to make a man feel that the sacrifice of his drives has been worth it.)

In Freud's account, the nagging superego is the best we can do by way of morality; and its The unpardonable sin - 69

overthrow by the superman would indeed lead straight to radical evil. But how do we explain a man like Henry David Thoreau? By "Higher Laws," he did not mean Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. He scorned the cultural superego of his time, not in order to appoint himself a superman and give his id free rein, but so he could erect in place of the cultural superego a far more stringent personal conscience.

Thoreau was Nietzschean before Nietzsche, setting himself a morality higher than that of the herd, and proceeding to live by it.

And he defended John Brown. Because he himself was no better than a murderer? No, because, with his moral imagination, he reckoned the daily cost of Southern slavery and wondered how it compared with the loss of life at Harper's Ferry. Indeed, the cost in human life of undoing chattel slavery proved, during the next six years, to be about 50,000 times greater than the cost at Harper's Ferry. Yet Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, suggested that God could in all justice have required a continuation of the war "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." Do we recoil from Lincoln because he made light of four years of casualties? Was he so full of metaphysical evil that he took a cool view of radical evil? Can it be that 600,000 premature deaths did not touch him?

Shattuck aligns himself instead, whether wittingly or not, with Robert E. Lee, who found abolitionism a much greater sin than slavery. So reason all the other conservatives of history.

No morally sane person truly excuses the crimes of the Terror of the French Revolution, the great collectivization in the Soviet Union, the Stalinist show trials, the Nazi Holocaust, the Chinese

Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian killing fields. But the horror expressed by many conservatives is suspicious. We never find a similar fervor in their denunciations of the ancien The unpardonable sin - 70

regime, feudal Russia, or Western colonialism and imperialism. Of course, the old established order rarely needed to use widespread violence, because it had at its disposal a massive state apparatus that emanated a constant threat of violence. Moral thinkers as diverse as Tolstoy,

Krishnamurti, and the liberal and reactionary Catholic popes of the 20th century have pointed out that the threat of violence is violence. But conservatives have little to say against it: so it be

"duly constituted," they are satisfied.

In Elizabethan times, executions were festive occasions in which the torture preceding the death was drawn out over the course of the entire afternoon, for the better entertainment of the crowd. Any just description of it is pornographic. Three centuries later, an overseer could shoot down a recalcitrant slave, without fear of punishment by the law or even much likelihood he would be relieved of his duties by the owner of the plantation. But following Shattuck's definitions, these are not examples of "radical evil," or even of "immoral behavior," inasmuch as they did not contravene "accepted moral principles or statutes within a society." But when a

Nietzsche comes along and says that our obedience to the morality of the Elizabethans, or the

Southerner slaveholders, or Bismarck – Christians all – is a "herd morality," and suggests that we examine the origin of this morality in our own psychology, and questions its usefulness to future generations, he is called the prince of darkness.

Moral evil

As absurd as it is, Shattuck's formulation of the category of metaphysical evil is perhaps his most original contribution to the analysis of evil – no one else that I know of, besides the Republican The unpardonable sin - 71

Party's philosophical mouthpiece James Q. Wilson, has assigned writers and philosophers to the

deepest circle of hell. Shattuck's other categories are more familiar, but no less confused.

"Moral evil," he tells us, "refers to actions undertaken knowingly to harm or exploit others in

contravention of accepted moral principles or statutes within a society."

The incompetence of this brief definition is breathtaking: Shattuck has mixed up evil with

crime and sin, failing to notice that most of the offenses that are dealt with so sternly in the

courtroom and the confessional are mere drops in the ocean of evil that we are drowning in; and

he has omitted to mention even the possibility that the criminal statutes and the religious

commandments may themselves be evil.

Most crimes are immoral, although many are trivial; but some staggeringly immoral

actions have been in accord with accepted moral principles and legal statutes. In 1840, slavery

was an accepted moral principle, and the abolitionist who ran the underground railroad was a

criminal; in 1950, Jim Crow was an accepted moral principle, and the black woman who sat in

the front of the bus was a criminal. Today it is an accepted moral principle that the Pentagon can

actively assist the sale of armaments by private corporations to poverty-stricken Third World

nations pursuing senselessly destructive local wars at the cost of widespread famine; and any

nonviolent protester against this policy who trespasses on federal land is arrested.

Many acts stigmatized as crimes harm no one at all, or at most the perpetrator himself,

whereas the potential for doing moral evil through the enforcement of unjust laws is almost

unlimited. During the 1960s, civil rights demonstrators, anti-war protesters, and millions of individuals who smoked marijuana broke the laws and were knowingly harmed by the prosecutors who pushed for their arrests and convictions. At the time I first wrote this, it was The unpardonable sin - 72

against the law for an official of the District of Columbia to spend the District's own tax dollars to tabulate the votes of a referendum on whether the penalties for marijuana use should be relaxed; and as I revise this now, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed that it is an accepted moral principle that a man dying of AIDS or cancer, whose demise is being hastened by his being unable to keep down any nourishing food, should be regarded as a criminal if he uses marijuana medicinally under a doctor's orders during his last days on earth – even though marijuana is currently the safest known substance that eases pain without killing appetite.

Under what category of evil are we to place the enforcement of immoral laws or the pursuit of an evil foreign policy? Shattuck has peacefully demonstrated against government policies, so he must have some idea of the existence of this problem, but his article is silent on the topic. Meanwhile, by including "statutes within a society" on an equal footing with "moral principles," and qualifying "moral principles" with the adjective "accepted," Shattuck, at the time he wrote, apparently agreed that all adult consenting homosexual acts were immoral as well as criminal. He thus refused to address at all this sticky and terrible problem of principles and laws that themselves embody evil; and while I suspect that he is a liberal about civil disobedience, sodomy laws, and drug-use penalties, he does not say so, and I note that elsewhere he strongly condemns precisely those thinkers, like Nietzsche and Darrow, who attacked conventional morality.

He has given himself an escape hatch with the words "knowingly to harm or exploit others." The user of medical marijuana, he might say, contravenes a statute, but not for the purpose of hurting or preying upon anyone else. But surely he is aware of the rhetoric of those who write the statutes, who claim that any contravention "tears at the fabric of society," and that The unpardonable sin - 73

great harm will befall the republic if scofflaws are not prosecuted. The opponents of clean

syringes for drug addicts argue that permissiveness would "send the wrong message." The

warriors against drugs write laws legislating morality because they are confident that real evil

does flow from these private consensual acts. Robert Bork spoke for many when he wrote that

"Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral."

Similarly, Shattuck might say that nonviolent demonstrators and consenting adults do not knowingly harm others in any marked way, and so do not fall within his definition of moral evil: but they do stir up controversy, irritate and sometimes inconvenience their neighbors, cast doubt upon the wisdom of our governors, and undermine our confidence that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Millions of upright citizens think that is bad enough.

I agree with Shattuck that we must not give ourselves carte blanche to defy the law, which embodies the values of the majority; and the violation of accepted moral principles is always a complex act, because it foments dissension and discord. Nonetheless, ethical progress has always depended upon the hardy souls who have dared the deed.

But let us confine ourselves to a comparison of cases where there is an intent to harm others: we still learn from Shattuck's definition that bilking a creditor is morally evil, but not the invasion of the sovereign nation of Panama and the abduction of its head of state, leaving behind hundreds of civilian casualties and a devastated capital city; we deduce that many lies, even if not strictly criminal, are morally evil, but not the manufacture and marketing of millions of handguns and billions of rounds of ammunition; we surmise that insider trading is morally evil, but not the accumulation by a single person of an amount of money that could pay off the national indebtedness of the entire Third World. The unpardonable sin - 74

Let me offer my own classification, using as many of Shattuck's words as possible: Crime refers to actions undertaken in contravention of accepted statutes within a society; sin refers to actions undertaken in contravention of accepted moral principles or religious commandments; moral evil refers to actions undertaken knowingly – or unknowingly – to harm or exploit others.

In defining moral evil, then, just leave out the civic realm altogether. As an ethical agent, what do I care about the laws and statutes of our time-serving legislators, or the commandments of our dark religions?

And omit the matter of intentions. Am I unhurt because my tormentors meant well?

Who doesn't mean well? Czar Nicholas I, on his deathbed, making his final confession, looking back on a career of heartless cruelty, brainless repression, military aggrandizement, and brutish opposition to every progressive idea, every social and political reform, every attempt to lighten the darkness of feudal Russia, said with unshakable conviction to the attending priest, "I believe I have never done evil knowingly." There you have it.

George Bush told Billy Graham, during the Gulf War that killed 160,000 people in Iraq,

"I know in my heart I've done right."

Why did Shattuck keep the pen scratching, until he had vitiated all the good of his definition? Why did he add the accepted principles, and the statutes, to his description? Does he automatically assign some measure of morality to every legislative whim? He of all people should be skeptical of that premise. His own definition of radical evil allows that entire societies sometime run amok. It has been often noted by historians that the Nazis in Germany had an obsession with legality. They wrote and passed laws for each incremental step in the The unpardonable sin - 75

disenfranchisement of the Jews. And Stalin's interrogators kept careful notes and proceeded in

accordance with "Soviet law." We can read them today. They did not cover up their deeds like

criminals because they weren't criminals.

Why, too, does Shattuck insist that evil must be undertaken "knowingly"? Here it is easier to ferret out his agenda. If evil is not conscious on the part of the doer, what happens to

Shattuck's hidden axioms? What becomes of free will and moral accountability if we don't know

we do evil? How stands God's punishment of us if we have good intentions?

Philosopher Nel Noddings, in her study of evil misleadingly titled Women and Evil,

begins her attempt at a definition with the question that Shattuck never considers: how does the

victim of evil define it? Picking up this end of the stick allows her to construct a phenomenology

of evil starting from the experience itself. She finds three components of evil: the physical pain

and death inflicted upon our bodies and the destruction of the personal property that might be

considered an extension of our bodies; our separation from the people who matter to us, and

again, to a lesser extent, from the objects in our environment that nourish and nurture us, such as

our homes and all that we put in our homes; and finally, the feeling of abject helplessness that

can come from a situation so dire that we have no options and can imagine no remedy in the

course of time.

[T]he real face of evil . . . reveals itself not in disobedience or alienation from an angry or possessive god or in sexual abandon or in love of earth over heaven or in a lack of intelligence or in laziness, but rather in the careless or willful infliction of pain, separation, or helplessness.

Willful – but not necessarily conscious of evil. Noddings points out the inconvenient fact that

most torture has been inflicted in the name of a higher good, and often in obedience to what was The unpardonable sin - 76

believed to be the will of God.

Obviously the Nazis knew they were harming people, but they thought they were acting in self-defense, to prevent a greater harm from befalling themselves. Doesn't this make them less like the Marquis de Sade and more like the United States government when it cracks down on users of medical marijuana? Does their belief that they were acting to stamp out a social plague prove that they had good intentions overall? What if they did not "knowingly" do evil? Would we say "Not guilty"? What did their intentions matter to the Jews?

By beginning with the victims of evil, Noddings exposes the fatuity of intentions, and renders irrelevant journalist Ron Rosenbaum's intense desire, in his book Explaining Hitler, to prove that Hitler was conscious of his own criminality. Whatever Hitler's intentions, the evil on the receiving end was exactly the same; and that is where we measure it.

Intentions are not merely beside the point; their intrusion into ethical debates is worse than irrelevant. They take us farther and farther away from the phenomenology of evil, and open up a Pandora's box of confusions. So conservatives damn liberals for explaining away the evil in criminal acts by making excuses for the perpetrators; at the same time, they constantly explain their own good intentions. In passing drug laws that discriminate massively against black users – for decades it required possession of only five grams of crack cocaine, the favorite street drug in black neighborhoods, to trigger the harshest penalties, as opposed to 500 grams of the ordinary cocaine favored by white users – white legislators have insisted that their motive is to save black neighborhoods from the scourge of crack; and they have turned a deaf ear to the near-unanimous plea of black community leaders that their neighborhoods be spared this particular form of assistance. Must we really allow ourselves to be imposed upon by the "good intentions" of these The unpardonable sin - 77

"unconscious" racists who "mean well"?

Shattuck is afraid to open the door to the possibility that intentions do not count, because his entire theology will collapse if he does. But whether the door be open or shut, he cannot escape the black hole at the center of his definition of moral evil: The most appalling evil has always been legal, always in accord with the accepted moral principles of the time, and rarely if ever the cause of a guilty conscience in the perpetrators. The Inquisition was legal and accepted in medieval Spain. Drawing and quartering was legal and accepted in Elizabethan England. The hanging of witches was legal and accepted in 17th Century Massachusetts. Slavery was legal and accepted in the antebellum South. Jews were legally barred from earning a living in Germany in the late 1930s. A form of Apartheid known as segregation of the races was legal and accepted in

America in the early 1960s. Immediate confiscation of the property of presumed drug offenders, without a trial and without an indictment, is legal and accepted in America today. And in 2002,

our government acted to legitimate the systematic torture of incarcerated individuals who were

denied the most elementary rights of due process.

Radical evil

These familiar examples of social and political evils lead to Shattuck's next rung of the ladder.

"Radical evil applies to immoral behavior so pervasive in a person or a society that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned. The Marquis de Sade, the Soviet gulag, and the Nazi

Holocaust belong to this form of evil, so extreme that it can no longer recognize its own atrocity." The unpardonable sin - 78

Again, Shattuck has managed to cram an abundance of moral confusion into a couple of short sentences. First of all, the conflation of "a person or a society" is absurd. No genuine example will ever be found of a society that has utterly abandoned scruples and constraints.

Every society, literally by definition, is bound together by its scruples and constraints – nothing else, in fact, can bind it. The Nazis and the Communists merely substituted new scruples for old

– scruples not at all to our liking, needless to say, but very much to theirs. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of totalitarian societies is that they vastly multiply the number of constraints. New moral rules proliferate, and the prisons begin to fill up with slackers, complainers, and selfish individualists. Extreme puritanism is the characteristic shared in common by totalitarian states of the political right and left. Prostitution was stamped out by the

Communists in China; music was banned by the Taliban in Afghanistan; the use of Esperanto was criminalized by both the Nazis and the Stalinists. No one would have been quicker to agree with Professor Shattuck that some types of knowledge ought to be "forbidden.")

Is the gulag evidence of a society without scruples? We have a gulag in this country, the largest in the world today. We lock up criminals; the Soviets locked up criminals. We differ in our definitions of criminality. The Soviets thought that anyone who would try to undermine the first state in history devoted to a just distribution of society's goods must be mad or bad. I do not seek to excuse the evil they did in the name of their definitions, but we will seriously cloud our understanding if we fail to see that they believed in their ideals and that most of their lower- ranking prosecutors acted sincerely. The Stalinists arrested malcontents, saboteurs, and malingerers and sentenced them to ten years; Shattuck doesn't like it. The state of Michigan arrested a nonviolent first-offense drug possessor and gave him a life sentence without parole. The unpardonable sin - 79

The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the sentence, and some of the justices joked at the expense of the attorney who had the thankless task of trying to convince them that this was a cruel and unusual punishment. Shattuck has no problem with such judicial abuses, at least in this article; he has a problem with Clarence Darrow's critique of our system of justice.

His mixing up of individuals with societies leads to pernicious confusion about the criteria of radical evil. The references to the Holocaust and the gulag, and the use of the word

"pervasive," suggest a statistical measure, based upon the number of victims or the number of willing perpetrators. But the inclusion of the Marquis de Sade leans us toward a definition based upon the abandonment of inhibitions.

Perhaps a few demented individuals, the Marquis de Sade among them, have personally shed all constraints in a voluptuous surrender to transgressive behavior. To the extent this happens, we are encountering an extreme, terribly narcissistic example of Shattuck's category of ordinary moral evil – of "actions undertaken knowingly to harm or exploit others in contravention of accepted moral principles or statutes within a society." Sade, in common with most other career criminals, knew these rules, preferred to break them, was prosecuted numerous times, and was incarcerated for much of his adult life. As a criminal, he was not really that original. He aspired to be placed in Shattuck's category of metaphysical evil, but his monomaniacal ravings hardly have the stature to support his inclusion there, however many academic lackwits write their journal articles defending his style and his ideas.

Shattuck's distinction between "moral evil" and "radical evil" turns on his argument that radical evil no longer recognizes its own atrocity. But his quote from Emerson dissolves this distinction: "that which we call sin in others is experiment for us." Such is the credo of every The unpardonable sin - 80

malefactor. Every criminal, from the smallest to the greatest, believes that what he did was in

some sense justifiable – either he was goaded in some way by the victim, or he truly needed what

he took, or society was persecuting him so roundly that he had no other recourse. Sade had the

same consciousness as forgers and serial killers, petty thieves and mass murderers: he knew that,

if he were caught, his conduct would be punished – in the language of American courts, "he

knew right from wrong" – yet at the same time, he thought he was not really a criminal.

(Nothing changes if you proudly assert that you are a criminal, but then redefine criminality as

the prerogative of the stout-hearted and the clear-seeing.)

The most odious aspect of Sade's "philosophy" was not his purely literary and rhetorical parade of unfettered will, but his complacent belief that, as an aristocrat, he was entitled to have, as a matter of nature's course, the unimpeded use of lower-born folk as instruments of his pleasure. He had morality: he would never have tortured a fellow nobleman. His beliefs about his privileges and perquisites stamp him as an arch-conservative – almost a typical nobleman of the ancien regime. He differed primarily in thinking that he should have the right to exploit the lower classes for his sexual pleasure as well as his financial profit. No, I take that back: the aristocracy certainly claimed, and feverishly exercised, that right as well, and thought nothing of impregnating their maids, turning them out of the house, and learning with satisfaction of the deaths of their offspring in "orphanages" with 90% mortality rates. Let me try again. I should say, Sade differed in claiming the right to use the lower classes for avowedly sadistic sexual pleasures – rather than the ordinary right to wear them out cooking and cleaning for him, dressing him, and emptying his chamber pot. French officialdom, upon learning that a man had inflicted a few bruises and burns on the body of an abducted woman, recoiled in horror, while otherwise The unpardonable sin - 81

believing that the woman herself had no more standing before the law than a child or a slave; meanwhile, the civilized world was affirming the rights of millions of men to own as chattel tens of millions of other men, women, and children. (Many of the lower classes of this system would have been happy enough to be spanked, or even raped and branded, by an aristocrat in return for a week's decent wages.)

That Sade wrote philosophical justifications of his conduct only made him seem the sicker to his contemporaries, and he was remanded at last to the famous mental hospital of

Charenton. That a bunch of late 20th Century academicians genuflected before his obsessive- repulsive writings and turned him into a cult hero is intellectually offensive but hardly threatens the moral commonwealth. It is true that every decade or so a serial killer is found to have the works of Sade on his shelf; but we can safely assume that Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and

Slobodan Milosevic were not influenced in the least by the divine marquis.

To lump Sade with Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, and to classify all these gentlemen together as master criminals, is a colossal failure of Shattuck's imagination. Sade was a decadent nobleman; Hitler and Stalin were idealistic revolutionaries. Sade's intellectual stance was pure posturing, but it did define him as a genuine criminal; Hitler and Stalin never had the least inkling that they were engaged in crimes. Let us set aside the unlikelihood that millions of followers would have signed on to programs of consciously transgressive radical evil – for surely most people, and certainly most good churchgoing Lutherans in Germany, are dully conservative in matters of morality, and like their French counterparts in the time of Sade, much readier to be shocked by anything outside conventional mores than to entertain new ideas. More to the point, any analysis depending upon the perpetrator's consciousness of evil is ludicrous from a The unpardonable sin - 82

psychological point of view. Not even a sociopath thinks he is truly wrong to live as he does: at

most he acknowledges that the sheep of society will think he is wrong. Here is the credo of a

budding sociopath, taken from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's work of history, The Gulag

Archipelago: "The only people who do not steal and deceive are those who are afraid to. As for me – I don't want to be afraid of anything!" Hitler, by way of contrast, was a man set upon reforming and purifying society. Shattuck's interpretation gives us a Hitler engaging in "immoral behavior so pervasive . . . that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned." But Hitler attacked the decadent Weimar Republic in exactly this language, accusing his enemies of

pervasive immorality, lack of discipline, weakness, pleasure-seeking, and aestheticism, and

portraying himself as bringing back the scruples and constraints of Wilhelmine Germany – and

sometimes of medieval Germany or even pagan Germany. Certainly he ordered many political

murders during the 1920s, but he justified them in the same language of expediency employed by

the Central Intelligence Agency to justify decades of American support for military thugs in

Central and South America. After he became Chancellor of Germany, Hitler summoned the

nation to a great moral awakening. Needless to say, this is why people responded to him with

such fervor; for there really is no record in all of history, that I know of, in which a leader called

for the overthrow of all scruples and constraints in order to unleash a reign of terror, and thereby

achieved a mass following.

If it is a mistake to assume that a perpetrator of ordinary evil is conscious of wrongdoing, it is an even greater mistake to attribute any such awareness to a perpetrator of radical evil. It is more likely that an inverse relationship holds: that the grubby careerist who cheats on his expense account has some capacity for shame, but the presiding genius of a genocide has none. The unpardonable sin - 83

Following Shattuck's sentence structure, we are asked to believe that Hitler began by behaving

just a little bit immorally; soon he was indulging himself lavishly; eventually he threw all

constraint to the four winds; finally he no longer recognized his own atrocities. Shattuck gets it

exactly backwards: the inability to recognize any atrocity comes at the beginning, not the end, of

the process. The reason Hitler could not recognize any atrocity in the extermination camp at

Treblinka is that he could not recognize any in the law that ousted Jews from the teaching

profession.

We will never grasp the Holocaust unless we understand that Hitler did indeed believe in

his own rectitude, and that the millions who followed him did so out of a sense of duty.

Shattuck's notion is that the career trajectory of a radical evil-doer resembles that of Macbeth, who knows from the very start, and all along, the wrongness of his deeds, but eventually wades in so deep that he reasons it would be as "tedious" to turn back as to go the rest of the way.

Shakespeare is a wonderful dramatist but no psychologist: real-life villains, unlike Edmund, Iago, and Macbeth, never acknowledge their villainy. The historical Macbeth would have convinced himself that he had saved the state from Duncan's feckless liberalism.

A modern-day Macbeth

Yes, exactly so. Augusto Pinochet is the closest analogue in modern times to the Thane of

Cawdor – like his prototype, Pinochet murdered his way to the throne and then tyrannized over his suffering country for almost two decades. But let us notice how life differs from literature.

In 1973, the general led a coup that toppled the legally elected government of Chile and The unpardonable sin - 84

installed a military dictatorship. The head of state, Salvador Allende, was found shot to death in the presidential palace – "a suicide."

What followed was a reign of terror similar to that found in Shakespeare's play: the former leaders flee into exile, the country sinks into fascism, and "enemies of the state" are seized, tortured, and murdered without trials.

Pamela Constable, who reported from Chile for the Boston Globe between 1983 and

1991, set forth a catalogue of Pinochet's crimes in The Washington Post on March 15, 1998:

Between 1973 and 1978, thousands of Chileans – from small-town mayors to labor organizers to student leaders – were seized. Prisoners were whipped, electrocuted, asphyxiated, forced to eat rats and listen to their children's screams. At least 3,000 were killed or vanished while in military custody.

She calls Pinochet "ruthless, messianic, and indifferent to the agony and humiliation he had inflicted on tens of thousands of people." She condemns him not only for his political repressions, but also "for the rigid application of free-market economic policies that devastated thousands of families and widened the gap between affluent and poor."

As thousands were thrown out of work and factories went bankrupt, he repeatedly refused to ease the pain of adjustment. Not until the mid-1980s, after several periods of economic depression, did he implement more moderate fiscal policies and create social programs for the poor. Even today, while Chile's new elite trades stocks and hits the ski slopes, one-third of its 12 million people still struggle in poverty.

You might think that Constable is writing a blistering indictment of the sweetheart retirement deal that allowed Pinochet, early in 1998, to relinquish his control of the armed forces and return to civilian life as a lifetime member of the Senate, with a guarantee from the Chilean government The unpardonable sin - 85

against any future prosecution. But you do not know the mind of Ms. Constable, nor the reigning

philosophy of The Washington Post, a strongly conservative paper that is hilariously slandered by

the Republicans as "liberal." The article I am quoting is a tribute to Pinochet – a plea in

extenuation of his crimes, and a paean to his old-fashioned character:

He was a soldier who believed in duty and discipline, honor and country. He was insecure and vengeful, but he was neither corrupt nor a coward. He believed he had been placed by Providence in a position of enormous responsibility, and he conducted himself according to the strong values and methodical tactics he had been taught.

. . . [H]is motives were not those of a corrupt strongman creating a fiefdom of perquisites and patronage, like Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza or Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner. Pinochet was convinced his mission was to raise Chile from the ashes of socialism by using his power – no matter what the cost – to build a modern, efficient society free from the volatility of partisan politics.

. . .

No matter how unpopular he became, Pinochet never wavered. In private, he lived a rigorous, Spartan life, working harder than much younger aides and approaching each problem of governance with a careful plan of attack.

. . .

To this day, however, he believes he did what was best for his country, and for that the retiring general deserves a measure of respect.

I would hope that these quotes speak for themselves in establishing the chasm that exists between

"character" and "morality." I will add only these comments. First, "the volatility of partisan politics" is the most interesting euphemism for "free democratic elections" that I have ever seen, well deserving of the George Orwell Prize for 1998; I further note that the phrase is Constable's, not General Pinochet's. I do understand why the general wished, patriotically of course, to spare The unpardonable sin - 86

his country, and himself, this inconvenience of elections, but I am less comprehending of

Constable's approval. Second, in regard to Pinochet's mission "to raise Chile from the ashes of

socialism," we might want to remind ourselves that President Allende won a fair election,

employed legal and constitutional means to his ends, and had been in power for less than three

years when he was overthrown and murdered. That is to say, he had barely had time to rub the

twigs of socialism together, much less to reduce the country to ashes. Finally, in keeping with my values, I must personally withhold the "measure of respect" that Constable thinks I owe the general; but I would certainly call upon her, in keeping with her values, to accord an equal

measure of respect to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, each of whom also believed that he "did what

was best for his country."

But let us round out our comparison with Macbeth, by saying that there is no comparison.

Macbeth never entertains for half-a-second the comforting lie that he acts for the greater good.

Like Richard III, he is out for himself and undeceived about it. This means that he is a character

in a play.

Pinochet, quite unlike Macbeth, and exactly like Adolf Hitler, was convinced at every

moment of his mission and his rectitude. He did not begin with moral evil and graduate to

radical evil; he did not start with small crimes and end with widespread atrocities that he no

longer recognized as such. He began in atrocity and stayed the course; and at no point in his

career, beginning, middle, or end, did he believe he had committed an atrocity, a crime, or even

an indiscretion. Only by such moral certitude could he have attracted thousands of followers to

his cause; only by such burning sincerity could he have gulled millions into standing by and

assenting tacitly. In the United States of America, hundreds of millions complacently supported The unpardonable sin - 87

the Nixon administration when it promoted the assassination the head of the Chilean armed forces, used the Central Intelligence Agency to undermine Allende's government, and finally sponsored Pinochet and guaranteed the success of his coup; these same hundreds of millions then turned a deaf ear to the sufferings our policy engendered. The manner in which we denied doing evil to Chile throughout the 1970s and 1980s did not differ in any detail from the manner in which Pinochet denied committing even a single crime: we meant well; our enemies were evil; strong measures were required; it was a case of fighting fire with fire. (It had been said in

Vietnam that sometimes it is necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.)

At the end of his career, Macbeth, although striking a note of self-pity, nonetheless well understands that he must not look to have "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," but only

Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

A literary ending. In real life, to judge by the career of that modern Macbeth, Augusto Pinochet, the ending is honor, riches, fame, a glorious retirement with the thanks of the nation, and a tribute in The Washington Post.

(If a few courageous members of the Spanish judiciary, acting against the will of their own government, managed, at the very last, to have the general temporarily and comfortably detained under house arrest in Great Britain while he was being charged with his manifest crimes against humanity, it was in defiance of the wishes of a majority of the Chilean people and in the teeth of Ms. Constable's praise. He experienced this inconvenience only because he was unlucky enough to live into his dotage. But his ordeal was lightened by a glowing tribute from Margaret

Thatcher, who roused herself out of retirement to make a thunderous speech to the Conservative The unpardonable sin - 88

Party deploring Britain's mistreatment of her old ally. He had, after all, provided useful

assistance to her during her famous victory over Argentina in the Falkland Islands War –

perhaps, acre for acre, the most fantastically expensive bloodletting in history, fought to

"liberate" a population of 1800 sheepherders, none of whom were in any danger, all of whom

lived 200 miles off the coast of South America but 8000 miles from Mother England. It is true

that the Argentine generals were thugs, but they differed from Thatcher's ally Pinochet only in

their preference for dropping the victims of their torture into the Atlantic rather than the Pacific

Ocean.)

Societal evil

There is a limited truth in Shattuck's underdeveloped image of a society that slips its moral moorings incrementally, beginning with immorality and ending with atrocity. The Nazis did begin with lesser crimes and move on to greater; and by the end they had indeed committed so many crimes that perhaps some of the lower-ranking party members could no longer tell evil from good. But the phenomenon we are describing is characterized, not so much by a numbing of sensibility, as by what has often been called the "insane logic" of ideology, and by abstraction run amok. Many ordinary Germans doubtless would have drawn a line somewhere between forcing Jews to emigrate and murdering families wholesale. Unfortunately, the reasoning that

"justified" the banning of Jews from certain professions in 1933 was essentially the same as that used to justify their annihilation in 1943. To inoculate themselves morally against the microbe of racism, the German people needed to view the very first Nuremberg Laws with something like The unpardonable sin - 89

the repugnance most of them felt when they understood the extent of the death camps. Shattuck's

analysis implies that these citizens must have known right from wrong at the start, and passed at

a later point into a condition of moral torpor and turpitude so great that they lost this basic ethical

faculty. Again, Shattuck has things backwards: the good German citizens who cleansed their

towns of Jews in the early 1930s felt no compunction about forcing them to emigrate; they

began, not in a spirit of petty crime and harassment, but in the warm glow of a quasi-religious rite

of community purification. Later, some of these perpetrators did wake up to the pandemic of evil

they had unleashed through those earlier actions. They started in moral ignorance and sloth, but

ended with the beginning of knowledge.

It is a fallacy, by the way, and one unworthy of any true scholar and reader of the

historical record, to view the 20th Century as a reversion to barbarian times, or the inventor of

new atrocities. Only the shallowest thinker gauges our conduct by the purely statistical horrors of

our wars and liquidations: these are an accidental byproduct of our global population explosion

and our invention of weapons of mass destruction. For most of human history, tribal

exterminations have been regarded as a pleasure and a duty, and people everywhere have been

dyed-in-the-wool racists. It is sometimes said that the Japanese were the first to indiscriminately bomb civilian populations, in Manchuria, in 1937. In the ancient world, whole populations of civilians were massacred as a matter of course, and the customary spoils of victory included the mass execution of the men of military age and the enslavement of the rest of the population. The

Pope's crusade against the Albigensians in the early 13th Century wiped out those heretics so thoroughly that we lack even their writings, and know of them only through the reports of their exterminators. During the English Civil War, the Puritan leader Cromwell still had time left over The unpardonable sin - 90

to devote to the perennial English blood sport of reducing Ireland to the status of a vassal-state: when the inhabitants of Drogheda tried to surrender to him and threw themselves on his mercy, he continued the slaughter, including women and children, "in accordance with contemporary practice," as the 11th edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica blandly puts it. Judging by the record of the past, perhaps the most remarkable occurrence in modern times is the widespread condemnation by other nations of Serbian ethnic cleansing within its own borders. Modern

Europeans differ from their ancestors not in having perpetrated genocides, but in having regretted them. Our growing consciousness that there is a "family of man" and that we must evolve a

"United Nations" to foster it is the newest idea in history.

But only if we believe in the special malignancy of the 20th Century can Shattuck persuade us to buy into his myth of those damnable 18th and 19th Century metaphysicians of evil. Only then will we believe that Hitler and Stalin represented a new form of radical evil, egged on by atheists like Nietzsche and Clarence Darrow and those earlier Enlightenment writers who dared to suggest that Milton's version of cosmic justice was superstitious, jejune, and, well, unjust.

So let us return to Shattuck's train of thought as he passes from the radical evil done by the murderers of tens of millions to the metaphysical evil done by writers and film directors. As previously noted, Shattuck does manage to identify a handful of his fellow humans as the minions of metaphysical evil: Darrow and Tarantino; his professorial colleagues who have made a cult figure of the Marquis de Sade; and Nietzsche, presumably for titling a book Beyond Good and Evil. I would have thought that, if we were listing the champions of evil on the fourth and final rung, we might want to round up, if not the usual suspects like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, The unpardonable sin - 91

perhaps men like Luther, Calvin, and John Knox, who whipped up the militant religious enthusiasms that culminated in the Thirty Years' War and the Salem witch trials. I might have thought we could range so far as to name Congressman Brooks of South Carolina, who broke his heavy cane over the head of Senator Sumner in a sneaking attack from behind, maiming him for life in order to defend the sacred honor of Southern slaveholders; by extension, we might have included all the Congressman's rabid defenders who sent him replacement canes as expressions of their gratitude. Instead, Shattuck attacks those who read and think seriously about the philosophy of Nietzsche.

Certainly there are passages in Nietzsche's writing where he blithely accepts the bloodshed of the past as part of humanity's learning curve; and he does sometimes write recklessly about the prerogatives of the individual man of genius. He attributes greatness to

Napoleon, for instance, and says that the French Revolution served its purpose by making

Napoleon possible. But even Shattuck's hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson, admitted that some men have been "splendidly wicked," and were capable of corrupting the world precisely because they were endowed with "the graces of gaiety" and "the dignity of courage." These latter qualities were much admired by C. S. Lewis, who tells us that Christian soldiers "have a right to . . . a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness."

C. S. Lewis

Since my subject is evil, let me dilate a moment upon the writings of Lewis, who has come so fortuitously to mind. If Shattuck has his favorite whipping boys, I have mine. The unpardonable sin - 92

It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

In a book devoted to finding the "highest common factor" shared by all the major warring sects of Christianity – in other words, to defining "Christian orthodoxy" in an unexceptionable way –

Lewis could hardly have said otherwise; but just as Pamela Constable went out of her way to agree with Augusto Pinochet's self-assessment as the savior of his nation, so Lewis makes it clear that he agrees with the modern church about the beneficence of capital punishment and just war.

Not for him the Christian pacifism of the first three centuries A.D.

Like that other metaphysician of evil in the garden of Eden, Lewis quotes scripture. Yet when the verses tell us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek to them, Lewis somehow dismisses them, saying that "Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality." Instead, he explicates the divine commandment this way, with a straight face:

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves – to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good.

A reader unfamiliar with Christian apologetics can be forgiven here for thinking that I made up this quote. In fact, the book in question, Mere Christianity, is not only a treasure-trove of such propositions, but has been mentioned to me more than once by intelligent Christians as a work that I should investigate as an antidote to the presentations of unthinking fundamentalists.

The moral insanity of Lewis's thought does not reside in the propositions per se: while I consider capital punishment an unmixed evil, I know honest and conventionally upright people who disagree; and the problem of war is complex. Lewis was writing in 1943. In the 1990s, it The unpardonable sin - 93

was the pacifist who should have been required to defend his reluctance to support military

intervention in the Balkans. How, exactly, would it have been more ethical to allow the

genocidal slaughter to continue, rather than end it almost overnight by means of NATO's attack

on the Serbians? No, the evil of Lewis's statements does not lie in their affirmation of war and

executions; it lies in his psychological naivete, which is especially puzzling in a man who

believes that all people on earth are afflicted by original sin and beset by actual invisible demons

who prey upon their manifold weaknesses. To such suggestible, sinful men, Lewis is willing to

hand over the power to loose and to bind; yes, to such will be cheerfully given the power of life

and death over others, without any fear it will be misused, because it will be exercised in a

Christian fashion. How could it be that all human history had not yet disabused Lewis of his notion? I can only conclude that he had a complacency peculiar to certain sturdy men of the empire, who got up every morning confident that God is, after all, the Head of the Church of

England, and that the English monarch is indeed the defender of the one true faith.

Let us compare Lewis's belief in the good we do to those we kill with the more robust

realism of the ancients. Homer's Iliad is a bloodbath that reflects a primitive conception, but when a man is hacked apart on the battlefield, this poet has enough ethical sensibility to call it an evil for the victim. When we come to the drama of Aeschylus, we encounter a more complex morality, still without sanctimony and false piety: the Oresteia tells us that the Trojans offended the gods when they harbored the stolen Helen, but that the Greeks offended still more in punishing the offenders. Most of the conquering heroes perish at sea; Agamemnon is preserved alive so he can be butchered in his bathtub by his wife; the best of men, Odysseus, is blown about the Mediterranean for ten years. It is a profound moral view, worthy of its vast subject, and it has The unpardonable sin - 94

relevance to the very times in which Lewis wrote: for England, too, beginning with justice entirely on its side, ended in the firebombing of Dresden.

The Greeks were honest where Lewis is not: they knew that, in the inevitable course of things, men, with God's own imprimatur in a just cause, will start by resisting atrocity but end in bettering the instruction. Nothing much has changed these many millennia; yet Lewis considers his "Christian" morality – which, since it is not to be found in the gospels or the early church, may be more aptly called the morality of the expiring British empire – to be a great advance over paganism.

Along comes Nietzsche in the 19th Century, and he questions this. He dares to put in writing what many men and women of ordinary intellect were already saying over their dinner tables – what Marx had said long before and what George Bernard Shaw says clearly ten years after Nietzsche – namely, that this hallowed morality is and always has been merely what we, or our rulers, want, or in the words of even a minor figure of the times like Ambrose Bierce, what we find expedient.

Let us take only the simplest example that Nietzsche was confronted with. The Jews were ethnocentric and racist, in the way of all ancient tribes; therefore the One God invented by them was tribal and racist. These qualities of God were later amended by Christians without being renounced. Nietzsche encounters the "Judaeo-Christian heritage" in its 19th century form, after many such amendments, and dares to suggest that we had done the amending, for our own purposes. Therefore it behooves us to see what portion of the population constitutes the "we"; to see in whose interest it is that we continue with the morality of that group; and that we examine the origin or, as Nietzsche says, the "genealogy" of our morals. Indeed, since "good" has always The unpardonable sin - 95

been, up to now, really just a name we call ourselves, and "evil" the name we call those who oppose us, perhaps we ought to go beyond good and evil – that is, beyond the self-interest that we dress in these tendentious terms – and try to discover, or build from the ground up, a genuine morality worthy of the allegiance of the best people. And in pursuing his investigations,

Nietzsche came to think that, contrary to the received wisdom, the Greeks had a higher ethical conception than the "monotheistic" Hebrews and Christians, and he judged that the passage from the thought of Homer, Aeschylus, and Socrates to that of Luther, Milton, and Cardinal Newman shows us a decline, not an advance.

He says all this in the spirit of a man with more questions than answers. And Shattuck recoils in horror. I suppose he is equally scandalized when Oscar Wilde says that the basis of morals is "the terror of society," or that morality is "simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." Well, Wilde did later come a cropper before the law, violating accepted moral principles and legal statutes, and undergoing, per Shattuck's definition of moral evil, "judgment and punishment, mitigation and aggravation, repentance and remission." I suppose those words can apply when a man is convicted of consensual sexual acts with other adults and his health is destroyed by a British prison.

When Nietzsche suggests that there is a natural history of morality, he earns Shattuck's opprobrium as someone who normalizes and perspectivizes evil. But it may be simply a fact that the path of human evolution has had to be, of necessity, along the road of militarism, patriarchy, and slavery. It may be that such creatures as we are could have done no other than we did. It may be that the "human agency" that Shattuck wants to cling to is just a fiction, accepted by all of us in the interest of condemning others of us, as we go about doing our evil to them. I don't say The unpardonable sin - 96

that I believe this, exactly, or that I agree with Nietzsche's ultimately sentimental ideas about the nobility of the Greeks and Romans; but I am loath to label him the chief architect of metaphysical evil because he dared to propound certain hypotheses.

I do think that the radical evil of ownership – of men owning land, slaves, wives, children; of tribes of men owning all the land of other tribes after taking it by main force – may have been the only method by which the humans of that time, with such consciousness as they

had evolved, could work out the problem of organizing new, very large groups that would no

longer be hunting and gathering but would now engage in agriculture and live in towns, city-

states, and nations. It may be that we had to pass through this miasma of ownership as the only

means of making the transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to the global economy. If this is the case, a normalizing view of all the tyranny and bloodshed that this transitional political economy produced is simply an acceptance of things as they had to be.

Let us not imagine, however, that Nietzsche was saying what Shattuck says he was saying. In most of his writing, Nietzsche, like Thoreau, demands that we voluntarily subscribe to a higher ethic than that of the herd. One has to put out the eyes of one's own reason (as Luther, in fact, recommended) in order to blind oneself to what Nietzsche really means by titling his book

Beyond Good and Evil – which is not at all what Ivan Karamazov means when he suggests that, without God, "Everything is permitted."

Dostoevsky and Chekhov

Yes, that's the origin of Shattuck's metaphysical evil: a character in a book, of course. In trying The unpardonable sin - 97

to mesh his utterly contradictory criteria, Shattuck must continually veer away from life and

toward literature – as he prefers. So he tells us that Dostoevsky is a light to guide us on the

subject of evil, and, incidentally, that Chekhov is not. (As I've already noted, Shattuck is an

almost perfect reverse-barometer: just turn his judgments right around to get them to make sense.

The evil in Dostoevsky is literary, exciting, romantic, and unbelievable; the evil in Chekhov is

dreary and depressing, senseless, painful, and real.)

"Why don't we turn to Chekhov, as we do to Dostoevsky, to inform ourselves about the compulsions and the evasions of evil?" Because, like Shattuck, we prefer to fantasize; because

Dostoevsky is entertaining whereas Chekhov is merely true; because the vast panoramas of a

Christian mystic are more fun to read that the accurately observed miniatures of a clear-sighted realist who thought "a writer should be as objective as a chemist."

Chekhov dealt with evil, but he pushed it constantly in the opposite direction from that of Dostoevsky, moving it through prolonged silences and inappropriate laughter toward natural evil, about which we can do very little. Dostoevsky, with prolonged intellectual discussions and growing horror, moved evil toward radical evil and its self-justification. As a result, Chekhov is consoling to read, Dostoevsky disturbing.

What I find mostly disturbing about all of Dostoevsky is what Vladimir Nabokov found disturbing about Crime and Punishment: that it is "long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written." And if I had been asked to pick a thousand, or ten thousand, adjectives to describe the work of Chekhov, I don't think I would ever have hit upon "consoling." Nor do I understand, exactly, why "we can do very little" about natural evil – the implication being that we can do something about moral, radical, and metaphysical evil. We have done a great deal to mitigate the effects of the natural disasters that once plagued humankind; on the other hand, the historical The unpardonable sin - 98

record indicates that so far we have come up short in our efforts against moral evil. No doubt

Shattuck, thinking inside the box, means that we can punish the perpetrators of moral evil, whereas it makes no more sense to punish a perpetrator of natural evil than to punish a hurricane.

This is true, and leads to the following conclusions: first, that after 5,000 years of failure, it is high time to abandon punishment as a putative solution; second, that we do have ways of minimizing natural evils without first "teaching them a lesson they will never forget." In the case of a wildfire, we move away from its path, and we quarantine it by establishing a perimeter within which it is forced to burn itself out. Our natural human response to naturally evil people would be the same: we would get them away from us. We would not, as Shattuck childishly fears, empty the prisons of them. But we would stop tormenting them with sadistic aforethought under the noxious pretense that we are subjecting them to "judgment and punishment, mitigation and aggravation, repentance and remission."

But it is clear, at least, why Shattuck judges Russian literature as he does: Dostoevsky practically invented Shattuck's incubus – the conscious, willful doer and justifier of radically evil deeds. I do not know which I find more lamentable: that Shattuck believes in this mythical figure; or that he thinks it takes unusual mettle to believe in him.

Thus we remain forever on the alert to recognize and de-fang the monsters of evil; meanwhile evil continues to flourish under our noses. How can this be? Surely Chekhov, and not Dostoevsky, shows us how. Evil is not a towering mountaintop of excess and atrocity, but a swamp in which we thrash about daily. It is the air we breathe. It is our very principles and statutes, our convictions and our loyalties. It is every day's failure of empathy and moral imagination. Therefore, it is inevitably "hard, but just." It is "regrettable, but necessary." It The unpardonable sin - 99

"hurts me more than it hurts you."

If only it were, as Shattuck and Dostoevsky think, a matter of "compulsions and

evasions." Then we would be as easily cured as Dmitri Karamazov, the prototypical

Dostoevskian man, so sinful and noble, sensual and open-hearted, compulsive and evasive, ripe

to be converted to millennial Christianity by a dream about suffering children; and our enemies

would indeed be the Ivans, the skeptics, the atheists, the sowers of doubt, the metaphysicians of

evil.

Rather, our daily evil proceeds not from doubt, but from duty and discipline. We lie

down, as Dmitri never does in his life, with a clear conscience. To evade the truth, we would

first have to recognize the truth. This is Shattuck's idea: that we do see, and then turn away – just

as Ivan turns away at the moment of truth in The Brothers Karamazov, with a twinge of guilt that

he ignores at his peril. This is how Shattuck can call for a taboo on forbidden knowledge: he

contends that we know our filthy natures, we know our demons, so we know what we shouldn't

read – we know what to ban. But it is so much worse than Shattuck, or Dostoevsky, thinks: we

don't know at all. We are no more Ivans than Dmitris. We never even arrive at evasion.

Hannah Arendt's phrase about "the banality of evil" has by now been so traduced and

trampled upon that I hesitate even to refer to it in print. But she was trying to capture the

Chekhovian truth about Adolf Eichmann that so startled her – that he did not at all resemble a

Nietzschean superman or a Dostoevskian villain, but rather a bureaucratic functionary without an

ounce of imagination. He was not a monster of the id; he was so dominated by his superego that there was nothing left in his character except service to the times. Once he was under detention, he distinguished himself by his obedience to his Israeli captors – because they outranked him. It The unpardonable sin - 100

does not readily appear that he was even among those types who, lacking the necessities to be

supermen themselves, give themselves over lock, stock, and barrel to those whom they believe to

be supermen: such was Goebbels, who could so little imagine life without Hitler that he killed his

six children before killing himself. But Eichmann fled to Argentina and blended in with the

scenery. Ideologically, he had no compelling interest in eliminating world Jewry; it was

compelling to his government, and he wanted to get along by going along. No one has ever made

a convincing case that he was other than what he represented himself to be: a man following

orders.

Without many millions of such men, of course, the Holocaust could not have happened.

Hitler himself was hardly unique; there are many Hitlers right now in America, babbling about

"mud people" and the Zionist Occupation Government and the imminent transfer of our national

sovereignty to the United Nations. What they lack is a following. So the colorless careerists

who take on assignments in genocide do matter in the anthropology of evil – just not in the way

Shattuck thinks they do.

By the way, it is Raskolnikov, a character created by Dostoevsky in a novel written over a decade before Nietzsche coined his term "the superman," who conducts the prototype of the experiment later tried by Leopold and Loeb. There is nothing in Nietzsche to indicate that his superman will be licensed to commit a thrill-killing and remain morally untainted by it, or that, if

God is dead, "everything is permitted." But let us dilate upon Dostoevsky's fateful phrase, especially since Shattuck is so enamored of it.

"Everything is permitted" The unpardonable sin - 101

I should begin by noting that I have indeed heard the argument that "everything is permitted"

made with some appearance of seriousness by real people – who were about 15 years of age, and

had been reading Henry Miller, not Dostoevsky or Nietzsche. Eventually some of them read

Sade with some degree of infatuation. None of them ever committed a serious breach of social

etiquette that I know of, much less a crime. Like Quentin Tarantino, they had an adolescent urge

to shock. Surely Tarantino is a recurring phenomenon throughout cultural history – the savvy

sensationalist out for fun and profit; an insect, not a prodigy, of evil. His fame bespeaks our

boredom, our intellectual sloth, our moral torpor, and our fantasy-romance with transgression, not our actual sinfulness. We've seen all this before, and long before Nietzsche: the Jacobean playwrights, in the generation after Shakespeare, turned English drama into such a cesspool that the Puritans succeeded in having the theaters closed in 1642. Which does Shattuck think is worse? the theater of John Webster? or the reign of Cromwell? Let me help him out: Webster never killed anybody at Drogheda.

I agree wholeheartedly with Shattuck that there is no sadder spectacle in contemporary life than the tendency of large numbers of postmodern academicians to take jejune transgressive gestures seriously as indices of spiritual freedom. Shattuck has wrung his hands over the Sade industry in modern scholarship, and I can't agree more that he is right about that. But neither have these professors managed to perform deeds of radical evil, either. We must make allowances for the arrest of psychological development that produces such attention-seeking behavior, and move on to more serious arenas of evil, such as, let us say, the cowardly ten-year-

long proxy war on the little country of Nicaragua that we waged by means of terrorism and The unpardonable sin - 102

economic embargo throughout the 1980s.

But always, for men like Shattuck and James Q. Wilson, as for a man like Robert E. Lee, evil resides not in the machinations of the powerful to concentrate ever more amounts of power and wealth in their own hands, but in the disturbers of the peace. Are they afraid that the underclass will hear, and believe, that "everything is permitted," and rise up in anarchistic, nihilistic frenzy? Sadly, that never happens, whereas everything is permitted right now, if done by rich powerful white males against the interests of nearly everybody else. Everything was permitted to the Pope when he ordered the extermination of the Albigensians; everything was permitted to Luther when he urged the authorities to shoot, hack apart, or beat to death every poor rebel among the suffering peasants of Germany, who had revolted only because they believed his rhetoric about their spiritual equality; everything was permitted to Calvin when he called any idea not his own an invention of the devil and signed the execution warrants of those who disagreed.

In spite of these contradictions – that no philosopher taken seriously by the population-at- large espouses the doctrine of the permissibility of everything, and that everything is already permissible if cloaked in the mantle of conventional morality – the Dostoevskian phrase has gained currency among conservatives as the contemporary locus of evil. The audience for

Camille Paglia, when she celebrates Sade, cannot be more than a few thousand similarly overeducated academics; the audiences for Rush Limbaugh and "Doctor Laura" Schlessinger have numbered in the tens of millions. There we learn that, without a belief in God, people can have no values, they will believe only in themselves, everything will be permitted. Where it is impolitic to mention God as the bulwark against chaos, the magical phrase "absolute values" is The unpardonable sin - 103

substituted. It was proclaimed by the Republicans who impeached President Clinton: We believe in absolute values and absolute truth; the other side favors "relativism," which means that

"nothing is ever really right or wrong" and that "the truth is whatever you think it is." And millions of grown men and women nodded in agreement.

And the joke in the joke is that the Constitution turned out to mean whatever the

Republicans wanted it to mean: everything was permitted to its interpreters. The words "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" lost their "absolute" meaning and were said to mean, actually, sex, lies about sex, and Linda Tripp's illegally obtained audio tapes. But they said that the Democrats were the evil relativists who don't believe in anything, not even the fixed meanings of words.

While this is going on, what is Shattuck doing? Nattering in The Atlantic Monthly about the radical evil of the Marquis de Sade and the metaphysical evil of his apologists in the academy. What the Republicans did won't even make his category of garden-variety "moral evil," because it did not directly and flagrantly contravene accepted moral principles or statutes within our society.

And what are we to make of Dostoevsky's opposing slogan? "Each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone." This is no more possible as a genuine psychological experience than the belief in the permissibility of everything. But we do recognize in these silly words yet another formula for original sin. And just as if Shattuck himself had written The Brothers

Karamazov, the cold intellectual Ivan is represented as more evil than the brawling, drunken

Dmitri: for Ivan spouts the gospel of metaphysical evil and so causes the murder of his father by The unpardonable sin - 104

Smerdyakov, who takes Ivan's careless philosophizing seriously; whereas Dmitri knows himself to be a weak and sinful man – spiritually a most favorable condition to be in, according to a sentimentalist like Dostoevsky. Alyosha is in the best position of all: he really believes he believes in "the guilt of each before all and for all," although this phrase cannot possibly mean anything useful to the all of us before whom and for whom he is guilty, but rather tells us only that he is destined to be another hand-wringing mouther of pieties.

Dostoevsky was not without talent: his four faces of evil, his four varieties of original sin, are distributed quite artistically among the four brothers. But neither before nor after reading

Shattuck is it clear to me why I should take this maudlin and incoherent view to be the deepest and the truest solution to the problem of evil. The book's enduring value will continue to be its unforgettably searing statement, in Ivan's monologue about the torture of children, of the problem of evil.

I must say finally that I have never understood why everything will be permitted if we abandon the hypothesis of God's existence. Neither Ivan Karamazov nor Dr. Laura have explained it. I don't understand why we might not simply agree among ourselves that murder and theft are bad, since they so obviously are. Again, the joke in the joke is that this is exactly what we did do. Dr.

Laura thinks that the idea of law was given to us by the God of the Jews, but everyone else knows that murder and theft were punishable under the code of Hammurabi. Only a child can believe that the God who created a universe that contains a hundred billion galaxies and is almost

14 billion years old handed Moses two stone tablets on the top of Mount Sinai. The only thing more unbelievable than this personal intervention in our affairs, in order to tell us exactly what The unpardonable sin - 105

we wanted to hear, would be His subsequent silence for the next several millennia, when we urgently need Him to settle the abortion question from the top of Pike's Peak.

But if we prefer to agree with Dr. Laura that God really gave us The Ten on Mount Sinai, and a good deal besides about His jealousy and His keen interest in the details of animal sacrifice, then it is interesting that His People continued to murder and steal, sometimes in His honor and sometimes under His direct orders: for the Israelites genocidally murdered the entire tribe of the Amalekites and destroyed everything they had. In the case of the Midianites, they spared the virgins and the booty and helped themselves to these spoils of war, per God's instructions. I have this on authority of the same scripture that gave us The Ten.

It might be salutary to toss out those famous commandments, and start over, among ourselves. Then we could tailor the commandments to our own current needs. I believe many of the Ten would reappear, because we really don't want everything to be permitted; and we might create some new ones, such as the abolition of child-beating, which not only never was condemned by Yahweh, but was enjoined as a positive duty.

Some readers may be impatient with my shooting these fundamentalist fish in the barrel of Biblical literalism. But these ideas have put out deep roots. Noddings reminds us that, in early historical times, men re-conceived God as a repository of just punishment and re-conceived sin as disobedience to God. (Prior to that, the gods were just winds that blew and the concept of sin may not even have existed – there was just good and bad luck.) The new belief that God

Himself blithely and willingly inflicts suffering upon us – in a word, does moral evil to us – for our own good, of course – has reaped a whirlwind down through the ages by encouraging us to apply His type of correction to each other. The modern monotheist, whether fundamentalist, The unpardonable sin - 106

evangelical, or "liberal," attributes the infliction of pain and suffering to the Creator and calls upon us to emulate His ways. It is no laughing matter.

Noddings and Shattuck

I accept Noddings as the best contemporary philosopher of evil, and it is noteworthy in this context to compare her explicitly with Shattuck.

In Forbidden Knowledge, the most interesting statement comes in the introduction: "This book has a personal origin." Shattuck mentions that, as one of the soldiers who would have been given the thankless task of invading mainland Japan, he cheered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, only to participate 16 years later in a peaceful demonstration against the manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons. But after this single evocative anecdote, he draws the veil:

I shall leave autobiography behind in order to pursue my subject in what I believe to be the best set of records we have about ourselves: stories of all kinds, true, embellished, invented.

Mostly invented, it turns out. But at least we now know the book that he should have written. In the article in The Atlantic Monthly, which says in six pages all that the book said, he refers to one of Baudelaire's tales of transgressive evil as "a reverse epiphany, a negative transcendence toward baseness and inhumanity," and tantalizes us again by verging upon self-revelation:

All of us can feel and have felt this tug toward what is vile, and have yielded to it in varying degrees.

The unpardonable sin - 107

I do not wish to imply that I am pure of heart, or a better man than he, but neither am I

comfortable having him speak for "all of us." Before I, for one, sign on, Shattuck must tell me

what he means by "vileness" with some degree of precision. In his own case, at least, he should

be able to be clear, if he will only be candid.

For I have heard too often from Freudian psychoanalysts and Christian fundamentalists

that I have it in me to be O. J. Simpson, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Saddam Hussein. My heart

supposedly contains all the specific crimes that have ever been done. This I emphatically deny,

and I further contend that such rhetorical excesses constitute a type of bragging and have the

effect of removing from our consciousness our complicity in real evil: for while we are posturing

that we are no better than murderers and cannibals – although somehow we cannot even jaywalk

without an attack of conscience – and confessing to the tug of Shattuck's putative vileness in our

transgressive hearts, we are the more easily lulled to sleep while our government, in our name,

kills 160,000 people in another country in only six weeks; and closer to home, we may also fail

to notice that we are treating our own children as narcissistic extensions of our egos.

Shattuck's sweeping yet imprecise statement of the universality of vileness makes a

striking contrast with the more judiciously phrased contentions of Noddings:

Are the people who commit horrors "normal" or "pathological"? . . . We might do better to ask: What is this pathology of normality? What is wrong with the vast majority of us? The answer I have been suggesting all along is that we do not understand or accept our own disposition toward evil and that we lack a morality of evil. . . . Evil is neither entirely out-there nor entirely in-here; it is an interactive phenomenon that requires acceptance, understanding, and steady control rather than great attempts to overcome it once and for all.

It may appear, on a hasty reading, that Shattuck and Noddings agree: both argue that, as she says, The unpardonable sin - 108

"we lack a morality of evil"; and Shattuck's article in The Atlantic Monthly attempts to address that lack. But Shattuck is enamored of literary, romantic, theological evils – the doings of

Raskolnikov and his experimental murder, of Ivan Karamazov and his theory that everything is permitted, of Ethan Brand and his quest for the unpardonable sin – whereas Noddings remains rooted in reality; and Shattuck mentions the Marquis de Sade, Leopold and Loeb, and Quentin

Tarantino in the same breath with Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, while Noddings has little recourse to tabloid evil. Nor does Noddings waste paper creating a whole new category of "metaphysical" evil wherein Nietzsche and Clarence Darrow turn out to be the scourges of humanity. On the other hand, the evil done by established churches and democratic states seems to escape

Shattuck's eye altogether, whereas Noddings examines in great depth the evil that seems to grow directly out of our Judaeo-Christian theology.

Both writers suggest that we are woefully susceptible to evil. But where Shattuck speaks vaguely about our "tug toward what is vile," without further elucidation of this titillating idea,

Noddings is specific about the definition of evil: it lies in our "careless or willful infliction of pain, separation, or helplessness" upon other sentient creatures. By his use of examples like the

Marquis de Sade and Leopold and Loeb, Shattuck suggests that, however much lip service he pays to the notion that we all feel the lure of transgression, radical evil is a rare and exotic flower; whereas Noddings identifies normality as pathology. Where Shattuck suggests that we know evil and are tempted and tantalized by it, Noddings suggests that we do not recognize our own disposition toward evil. Where Shattuck calls for a taboo on forbidden knowledge, she calls for greater self-understanding.

If, as Shattuck suggests, we know the kinds of knowledge that ought to be forbidden to us, The unpardonable sin - 109

we must know a great deal about our propensity for evil. But I agree with Noddings: we do not acknowledge that propensity; we deny the disposition; we see nothing wrong with "the vast majority of us"; in truth, we tend to believe firmly in the morality of any action that garners enough popular support. Our blindness is so great that we commonly view a great evil as a great good, as when we inflict tortures upon each other while thinking that to refrain from doing so would be disobedience to God; and our active pursuit of evil in the name of good occurs, typically, not at the end of a long slide into moral degeneracy, but at the very beginning of a great campaign to extirpate the evil in other people once and for all.

Narcissism

Shattuck's insistence upon the importance of "human agency," of actions undertaken "knowingly" to harm others in contravention of "accepted" moral principles and statutes, of "abandoned" scruples, of "a negative transcendence toward baseness and inhumanity," continually draws us back toward the notion that evil originates in malice, bad faith, despicable intentions, disgusting appetites, original sin. Narcissism, however, is distinguished by the narcissist's sincerity. Here we have a person constitutionally incapable of empathizing with others – not because of an evil disposition to regard others as means to his own ends, but because every attempt to get into the mind of the other person turns into an exploration of his own mind. Such persons are typically prevented from acts of great cruelty by subscribing to conventional, and even altruistic, codes of conduct. The conscious values of the narcissist are often of the highest. He may be a paragon of what is called "character." (An example of a narcissistic person who nonetheless possessed The unpardonable sin - 110

moral imagination and good values would be the pianist Glenn Gould. He was completely

incapable of reciprocal friendship and genuine intimacy; at the same time, one of the people who

knew him best described him as perhaps the most moral person he had ever known.)

It is interesting and instructive to compare the narcissist who descends into immorality with the ordinary selfish individual on the one hand, and the sociopath on the other. I once confronted a woman who read my private mail. She defended the action: "I knew you were keeping things from me; for the good of both of us I had to know what it was; it was necessary this one time for me to do this." Finally she said with complete sincerity, "You know I'm not the kind of person who reads other people's mail."

The ordinary selfish individual who gives in to such an impulse will laugh shamefacedly and say, "I don't know how I could have done that. I must have been beside myself." The sociopath will laugh brazenly and say, "I always read other people's mail. You can try to read mine, if you think you can get away with it. I know you'd like to." The narcissist will say, "It was the right thing to do, and it is evil of you to suggest otherwise."

It should be clear from even so brief an account that if the narcissist is handed absolute power, there will be almost no check, no bar – in Shattuck's language, no scruple or constraint – that will stand between his will and the last degree of persecution of his opponents; for he believes that the motives of those who oppose him cannot be other than malicious. But it should be equally clear that such an individual does not embark upon evil consciously and knowingly, and then at some later point pass beyond the pale; he always identifies his own motives with good and the motives of his opponents with evil, and does so with complete conviction. That his career in crime begins only at a certain point, and seems to run a course of radical evil, is owing The unpardonable sin - 111

to the happenstance that the power to effect such a course is handed to him only at a given moment; for he never in his life had the ability to question his own motives. Hitler fantasized evil long before he did any. He was as sure of himself when he was starving in Vienna as when he commanded the German war machine.

In my opinion, nothing is stupider – nothing is more immoral – than to hold the narcissist personally accountable for his failures of empathy, as if he chooses to turn off the engine of his compassion, and to treat him, against all the psychological evidence, as the embodiment of intentional evil. If, therefore, we begin to think that narcissism belongs in Shattuck's first category, that of "natural evil," we may not be thereby undermining all of Western Civilization, but merely getting our facts straight. Shattuck wants to damn us for thus renouncing human agency and responsibility in the ethical realm: he waxes long and indignant over Darrow's remark to the prisoners in the Cook County jail. But Darrow did not say that he believed the jail should be thrown open. If we were to make a factual finding that every crime ever committed in the history of the world has been the result of the purest social determinism – that no person is ever responsible for his actions – we would still incarcerate the trouble-makers, to prevent their inconveniencing us; and we will go on incarcerating them until we find a better method of preventing their mayhem, or until the end of time, whichever comes first. If only for this reason: that the threat of incarceration is one of the social determinants of socially determined actions. Is this so hard to understand? Not one writer ever suggested that Leopold and Loeb be released back into the community: "They are prophets; they are Nietzschean supermen; let them go about their business for the better instruction of mankind." Who said this? Who thought it? Darrow, as much as anyone else, wanted them behind bars so that he, too, would be safe from them. Yet The unpardonable sin - 112

Shattuck condemns me for incipient metaphysical evil solely because I am curious about a category of knowledge that he wants to forbid, namely, What made Leopold tick? The only lower form Shattuck's attack could take would be for him to say – as millions do say, as if it is the knockdown argument of all time – that I must not care about the victims if I am so concerned about the perpetrators.

Must we forever defer to the sensibilities of thinkers too shallow to realize that an explanation of a criminal's behavior is not tantamount to an exculpation? Must those of us who believe, with Darrow, that capital punishment is barbaric – that it brutalizes the executioners as well as their victims – continually have to answer the inane argument that we don't believe in criminal responsibility?

Unquestionably, human evil is a natural phenomenon; and we need to continue inquiring into the causes of it with a scientific eye. I believe narcissists are made and not born, so there is much to look at in their families of origin, and in the culture that often enough rewards narcissism; and those of us who are curious must not be deterred by the attack on our motives. If we are accused of wanting to undermine values, character, responsibility, duty, and traditional morality, let us plead guilty and get on with it. It is a great error to think that men of so-called character have stood against the great crimes of history. They have perpetrated them. Character, duty, and self-discipline have produced the world we live in, and I do not hesitate to say I am dissatisfied with it; "original sin" has had a long run in the history of human ideas, and has explained nothing at all. It is time to look in other places.

Conclusion The unpardonable sin - 113

"Natural evil" is important to Shattuck, because the linchpin of his indictment of the

metaphysicians is their reduction of radical evil to a type of natural evil. Both Shattuck and

Noddings, then, begin their investigation with a definition of "natural evil." But as we have seen,

only Noddings asks the critical question: What is it about a natural disaster that would cause us to

call it evil? We call it an evil hour when pain, separation, and helplessness are inflicted upon us,

from whatever source. For Noddings, then, human evil occurs when we inflict, unnecessarily,

any of these three types of suffering upon each other. (The paradigm case, combining all three,

would certainly be the institution of "death row," which draws out with ghoulish leisure the most

extreme forms of separation and hopelessness, contributing thereby to the maximum of

psychological pain; the torture is then ended by the infliction of a carefully scheduled death.

How can we watch ourselves do this?)

The definition provided by Noddings seems satisfactory to me; we need no fourfold

categorization. I would suggest, rather, that the fourfold classification is itself the beginning of

evil, because it muddies the clear waters of her simple definition and also because it arrives at a

taxonomy that implies that Nietzsche and Quentin Tarantino occupy a higher rung on the ladder

of evil than Hitler and Stalin, that the Marquis de Sade occupies a higher rung than the planners

of the firebombing of Dresden or even O. J. Simpson, and that those who defied the Fugitive

Slave Law, and so caused palpable harm to law-abiding property-owners, were guilty of everyday moral evil. If we stick to "stories," as Shattuck prefers – because for reasons that make sense to a professor of literature but not to anyone else, he thinks a fiction about evil is more revelatory than a fact – we have a categorization that makes Ethan Brand in Hawthorne's story the most evil The unpardonable sin - 114

person who ever existed, because he sought knowledge of the unpardonable sin. (It is only

Shattuck's mistaken surmise that the quest itself is sinful. This interpretation flows ineluctably out of his argument that taboos on knowledge are good and that violating them is heinous.

Hawthorne is clear that the sin consisted not in the search per se but in Brand's elevation of the importance of the search above the claims of compassion for other people. In his mania, he contracted his humanity.) Elsewhere, we get a strong notion that Shattuck may consider

Clarence Darrow to be the epitome of metaphysical evil, because he theorized that moral and radical evils may really be examples of natural evil.

Forbidden knowledge, metaphysical evil, the unpardonable sin – perhaps we can profitably combine the various items in Shattuck's inventory of evil. I will take the bull by the horns. The unpardonable sin exists, and can be specified; furthermore, I make so bold as to conflate it with original sin – they are one and the same. This fundamental, basic, instigating evil that underlies all other evils is the idea of original sin itself: it is the idea that human evil is not a form of natural evil. We being a part of nature, and our evolution being a natural phenomenon, evil must be a natural phenomenon. All evil is natural evil. Shattuck's classification system is errant nonsense, an embarrassing remnant of Aristotle's little handbook on how to be a professor – just classify everything endlessly, by subdividing the topic into subtopics. There aren't four types of evil; there is one type. No matter how Shattuck abuses the word, there is no such thing as "metaphysical evil. "Radical" evil is Shattuck's portentous way of saying that evil is sometimes widespread or, in the case of the Marquis de Sade, outrageously offensive to our sensibilities and backed up by silly prose expressing an antinomian philosophy. The unpardonable sin - 115

"Moral evil" is Shattuck's way of saying that he is not going to let us humans get away with calling our evil "natural evil." If I were to keep the category at all, I would say that there is only one distinctively moral evil – i.e., only one evil that is uniquely human and unknown among the animals – and that is the belief in moral evil. The identification of moral evil as a contaminant of our neighbors (and not ourselves) is our single foray as a species into creating a new category of pain, separation, and hopelessness – we alone inflict this triad of suffering with great unctuousness on our own kind as a presumptive therapy. Our intellectual urge, strongly endorsed by Shattuck, to dismiss evil as a subject fit for sociological research, and to substitute for scientific investigation our righteous administration of "judgment and punishment, mitigation and aggravation, repentance and remission," is the one evil that is peculiarly expressive of the narcissistic blindness that so disfigures us among all the creatures of the earth. All other animals, unless they are born defective or later fall victim to catastrophic accident, seem to become fully themselves; we alone assiduously train our humanity out of ourselves, in order to face the world with diminished capacity. Before us is the possibility of knowledge, and Shattuck says to turn away from it. He goes farther, and pronounces anathema upon those who, like Nietzsche and

Darrow, do not turn away. But I will stay true to my own tenet: even this one apparent example of moral evil should be reclassified as natural evil. When we succeed in understanding what has made Shattuck and all the other acolytes of original sin so afraid, and what has deprived them of the psychological mobility to deal with their fear in any other way than the expression of punitive urges toward miscreants, we will have placed their evil under the same umbrella of natural science as everyone else's evil, including, needless to say, my own.

In the meantime, the unpardonable sin remains the belief that our neighbors are harboring The unpardonable sin - 116

the unpardonable sin, and that they possess it, not as a natural consequence of many and varied antecedents, but as isolated acts of will for which they and they alone are entirely responsible.

Once we have this belief, there is little, or nothing, that we will not do to them: thumbscrews for

Jews and heretics in the 14th Century, burning at the stake for any and all dissenters in the 15th

Century, drawing and quartering for offenders of the monarch in the 16th Century, hanging for witches in the 17th Century, extra-judicial execution of defiant slaves in the 18th Century, dispossession and near-extermination of the native populations of North America and parts of

Africa in the 19th Century; ethnic "cleansing" of communities throughout the 20th Century; open-ended incarceration without due process in the American gulag for "terrorists" in the 21st century. Indeed, we have no recourse other than punishment and more punishment: if man is a fallen angel, a rebel by nature, unregenerate, each bad seed the sole individual carrier of a diseased will, then he cannot be improved by abolishing conditions of poverty, ending the abuse of children, and equitably sharing the resources of the earth. If, as Pope Pius XII instructed us, original sin is innate, "passed on to all by way of generation" – the gene has not been found – then we no more need to reform the body politic than we need to waste breath pardoning the death-row inmates once they have been judged by us. In the past, the rehabilitation of the witch, the slave, and the Jew was not even undertaken; today the terrorist is similarly said to be incorrigible. Like the witch, he is subjected to torture in order to bring him to a confession; failing of that, he is kept in perpetual durance. In 1998, the state of Texas executed Karla Faye

Tucker even though most observers believed that she was rehabilitated. We hated the sin, loved the sinner, kept her caged, and killed her with extreme unction.

The unpardonable sin is Shattuck's judgment on Darrow. Since his own academic corner The unpardonable sin - 117

of "the problem of evil" is his belief that, because our hearts are dark, we should be forbidden to gather knowledge of certain kinds, he finds Darrow's search for a particular type of answer to be the highest sin; but taking a page from his own chapter, in which bookish sins are the worst, I might label his scholarly taboo on the search to be the greatest evil. For if we are not allowed even to investigate how it is that moral and radical evil keep happening, and we are not allowed to hypothesize that it is a natural phenomenon that came into existence historically and so can come to an end in our own time – if we are required to go on thinking, as we have for 3,000 years now, that we already know the answer to this question, which is that all this evil is both inevitable and inexpungeable as a consequence of our fall from God's grace – then we are condemned to go on as we have gone on, even though we are the first generation in history to possess weapons of such destructiveness that we now know that we can't go on as we have gone on.

Sociopathic evil

Scott Peck's People of the Lie is infected with typically Christian errors – notably in its view that evil originates in a diseased will. Nonetheless, there is much of value in this audacious study, not least this striking paragraph, which no doubt astonished many of Peck's more orthodox readers:

I have spent a good deal of time working in prisons with designated criminals. Almost never have I experienced them as evil people. Obviously they are destructive, and usually repetitively so. But there is a kind of randomness to their destructiveness. Moreover, although to the authorities they generally deny responsibility for their evil deeds, there is still a quality of openness to their wickedness. They themselves are quick to point this out, claiming that they have been caught precisely because they are the "honest criminals." The truly evil, they will tell you, always reside outside of jail. Clearly these proclamations are self- justifying. They are also, I believe, generally accurate.

I do not wish to endorse this thesis wholeheartedly: it depends a great deal on Peck's Christian insistence upon locating evil more readily in an evil disposition than in actual deeds. And he can be naive even about disposition, relying too uncritically upon the common psychiatric notion that hardened criminals are afflicted by "poor impulse control." In truth, the violent displays of criminals are characterized by a great deal of malice aforethought in addition to volatility. We have to be careful about the temptation to push a paradox to the point of absurdity: it is correct as well as attention-grabbing to say that evil is found most often in respectable society; but it risks absurdity to argue that vicious criminals are not evil.

Peck has nonetheless pointed us in the right direction: the greatest and most widespread Sociopathic evil - 119

evils have been perpetrated by heads of state with the support of a majority of the most

upstanding members of society. It takes years for a serial killer to sow as much death and

destruction as a single commander ordering a single bombing mission. However, no study of

evil can be exhaustive unless it takes cognizance of the terrible suffering caused by the malicious

and often gratuitous acts of habitually violent felons.

To delineate these bad actors, I will use the familiar term "sociopath," but it is not really an

accurate term, because it does not specify which society is preyed upon by the human pathogen.

Similarly, when we label violent criminals antisocial, we should ask ourselves, "Which society

are they against?" Within the small society or subculture to which the perpetrator belongs and

where he wishes to be admired, violent acts are approved and even celebrated. In a military or

paramilitary subculture, for instance, especially if it is engaged in actual combat, the sociopath

may come into his own and function as just another "good buddy." He is a germ only in the

larger conventional society – society as a whole. Within the tiny society of his pals, he is a man,

perhaps even the man – respected and feared.

How many members of "American society" know me or care about me? or should care

about me? My actions are directed toward the members of various subcultures that are all-

important to me but comprise a minuscule fraction of the larger culture. I care about how

musicologists judge my theories of tonality and how well I ran the latest 10-kilometer road race.

Even though I am the author of this book I care little about most readers of books – I care only about the tiny percentage of readers who are interested in character, morality, and evil. Am I antisocial because I am indifferent to the opinions of 99% of the members of American society? Sociopathic evil - 120

Furthermore, while only a few like-minded people will agree wholeheartedly with what I write, I

may discomfit and offend many decent law-abiding citizens with my ideas about religion,

Freudianism, "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger, Mother Teresa, the war on drugs, "the virtues," the

Supreme Court, and the Republican Party. Am I a sociopath, then? a contaminant of respectable

society? At the least, I aspire to be a gadfly or a stinging nettle; and if I fail to upset a lot of

people, it won't be for lack of trying.

Like me, the violent offender attacks only his adversaries, while wishing to be a member

in good standing of the community that he cares about belonging to and impressing. He directs

his acts toward symbolizing the values that he shares with this select society. His violence is the

conscious expression of his world-view – of his morality, such as it is. This morality – do unto

others before they can do unto you; nobody messes with the man; hit 'em again, harder, harder –

is something he was taught, by violence, and it is something he now believes in. Furthermore –

this point cannot be over-emphasized – the components of this strength-based morality of

personal domination are found among the members of respectable society and are constantly on

display there. Consider this apt remark by novelist E. L. Doctorow in an interview:

People don't say, as they more or less do in Shakespeare, "I'm by nature bad." They say: "I had to do this; it was necessary. I didn't start it, but nobody's going to play me for a sucker."

Doctorow was explaining the code of conduct governing members of the criminal underworld,

which was the subject of his latest novel, but he accidentally verbalized the true morality of a

majority of men in our society, and not a few women. The secret religion of humankind is

"respect." We say it is self-respect, but then we define it as the respect of others: "I had too much Sociopathic evil - 121

self-respect to let him put one over on me." Violent criminals differ from law-abiding citizens primarily in being touchier about their self-respect and more extravagant in their revenges. But their code lies on a continuum with mainstream values: starting from "respect" as the supreme virtue, it is but a hop and a skip to "machismo," and an even shorter jump to "sociopathy." Each next step is just a further exaggeration of the last.

The failure to reckon with this simple, elemental fact – that criminals, like the rest of us, are socially constructed beings who engage in expressive acts that symbolize their moralities – has caused criminology to go down a blind alley for most of the last century. I will merely allude to, rather than excavate in detail, the prevailing theories, because every reader will recognize them as the stuff of newspaper articles, television commentaries, and magazine essays. These ideas are "what everyone knows." Violent criminals, according to these theories, give way suddenly to their animal instincts and have diminished responsibility for their acts; they are mentally ill, or psychologically damaged; they have been past victims of abuse and so cannot be expected to refrain from "acting out"; they are impulsive and can benefit from behavioral modification classes in anger management; their violence was bred by poverty and is a direct outgrowth of unjust economic and social arrangements; their violent deeds are unconsciously motivated, often poorly remembered, and done in a kind of trance; they are irrational beings, swayed by their emotions and attracted to instant gratification, as is proven by their frequent failures to cover their tracks; they are closet masochists who are often caught because they brag about their crimes; they don't know why they do such terrible things, they wish someone had stopped them – perhaps they feel that they are making their childhood tormentors pay in some crazy scheme of retribution; their deeds sometimes set up a conflict within themselves, causing Sociopathic evil - 122

them to suffer the way Raskolnikov suffers in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

The only thing to be said in favor of this view is that it was an improvement over the 19th century dogma that criminality was mostly inherited and could be diagnosed during a phrenological examination.

The truth is that most violent criminals have a well-thought-out philosophy of subverting other people and being the top dogs. They take great pleasure in dominating others through violence. The evil that they foment takes the form of conscious deeds that are thoroughly characteristic of the doers. In acting as they do, they symbolize that they are the right sort of people – "right" indicating, here, not "right-doing" according to high school principals and

Baptist deacons, but rather the possession of "the right stuff." They brag to their friends about raping and murdering for the same reason businessmen call the local newspaper to publicize their awards from the Chamber of Commerce: to impress their chosen communities with their accomplishments. The reason that the rate of recidivism is so high among violent offenders is that it is a tall order to change someone's philosophy of life. The reason that some few prison inmates do change is that, in spite of all the positive reinforcement tough guys get in the form of approval from other tough guys, the morality of sociopathy really is evil, and humans recoil from evil once they understand it. Goodness is a banquet, and evil is the compost pile. The nature of pride is such that most criminals will refuse to eat from the table and will make fun of those who do. But no one who has authentically tasted the banquet will return to the crumbs.

Instead of bothering to refute all the patently absurd theories that have dominated the recent past in penology, I will look at the work of two researchers who went against the tide.

Sociopathic evil - 123

Stanton Samenow

Stanton E. Samenow is a clinical psychologist who, by directly studying hardened criminals,

happened upon the importance of cognitive factors in their behavior. Unfotunately, he brought to

this work the same predispositions that so cripple the intellectual powers of "Dr. Laura"

Schlessinger, William Bennett, and Roger Shattuck: he is deeply committed to the concept of

character, and infected, apparently without even recognizing its origin, with the Christian

doctrine of the tainted will. Therefore, while he admirably describes the world-view of the career criminal, and notes plainly the resistance of the prison population to liberal nostrums, he fails to understand that antisocial behavior is an actual type of morality. Like Dr. Laura, he can only understand it as a willful desire to do the wrong but easy thing.

Samenow began his work on violent offenders in tandem with Dr. Samuel Yochelson.

Armed with the favorite psychoanalytical theory of the time – that criminals are mentally ill, the victims of past abuse who subconsciously want to be punished – the two first tried to rehabilitate their patients with standard psychotherapy. Eventually they recognized the futility of their efforts.

Samenow and Yochelson then switched to a more behavior-oriented approach, and eventually, after many years of working with 235 hardcore career criminals, published a three- volume study of the criminal personality. In 1977, shortly after the second volume came out,

Samenow reported at a press conference that his subjects had "rejected their parents, schools and society long before the institutions rejected them. They had made a series of choices early in life that had nothing to do with family, neighborhood, race or socioeconomic factors." Sociopathic evil - 124

"Lying," he went on to say, "is a way of life to make fools of other people." The inmates of the prison hospital were especially adept at lying to their psychiatrists. "They played the psychiatric game. They simply tricked their psychiatrist by telling the doctors what they expected to hear: stories about parental rejection, socioeconomic deprivation, guilt feelings and all the catchwords psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers have been trained to expect."

Samenow and Yochelson began to study the way their subjects thought. Among the 53 separate thinking patterns that characterize career criminals, they found extreme pride, sentimentality, anger, intolerance of fear, and procrastination.

In 1989 Samenow published a book, Before It's Too Late, directed toward the parents of antisocial children. This primer followed naturally from the findings of his study of adult criminals: he defined as "antisocial" those children who demonstrate, at an early age and to an extreme degree, the thinking patterns found in hardened adult criminals.

Samenow's book is often little more than a compendium of common sense. Seven chapters identify the characteristics of antisocial children: they are pervasively selfish; they are lacking in empathy; they crave immediate fulfillment of their exaggerated desires; they take the easy way out; they lie repeatedly for personal advantage; they continually scapegoat and refuse to take responsibility for their actions; and at bottom, they are loners, given to concealment. Woven throughout these chapters are predictable subthemes: the budding sociopath is a consummate user of other people, adept at turning blame around, willful, argumentative, bullying, and incorrigible. He is outraged by a firm hand and contemptuous of a weak hand. He sees life in terms of conquest, triumph, and power. In his world-view, strong opponents are enemies, weak opponents are chumps, and friends (mostly temporary) are useful tools. He responds to Sociopathic evil - 125

discipline with insubordination and to compassion by taking advantage of it.

Alerted by the negative response in liberal circles to his earlier work with adult criminals,

Samenow tries to anticipate the objections of his critics by several times reiterating his admonition that a child should be labeled antisocial only if he displays almost all of the characteristics to a marked degree over a lengthy period of time.

In the "how to" section, parents of such children are enjoined to be firm and consistent;

"before it's too late," the child must be put under a regime of discipline and punishment. But

Samenow is mainly concerned to try to undo what he sees as the damage done to parental confidence by liberal shibboleths: he emphatically denies that parents are to blame, that society is to blame, and that difficult children need lots of leeway and permission to "be themselves."

The book, based on the author's experience in his practice, is written in a chatty manner with very few footnotes. There is little empirical evidence offered, but little that needs to be offered – only a bleeding-heart liberal who is unable to learn from bad experience would argue against the existence within civil society of a class of genuine sociopaths.

Nonetheless, because of the narrowness of its perspective, the book sets itself up to be misunderstood. I will discuss its sins of omission in an effort to expand, rather than entirely contradict, what this author says.

Samenow is so concerned to take the onus off the parent and put it on the child – he says repeatedly that children make choices – that he neglects to establish any etiology at all for antisocial behavior, other than the child's decision to engage in it. I agree with him that we cannot say glibly that society and the parents are to blame; but if behavior is not environmentally Sociopathic evil - 126

shaped, what does produce it? Patterns of thought, says Samenow. But where do they come from? It is as though he is saying that this is not his department – he just wants us to know that if certain patterns occur, then antisocial behavior is sure to follow.

For a psychologist, he is strangely lethargic about pursuing the causes of the child's personality. He offers almost no theory of any kind that would account for the origin of antisocial thought patterns, even though he is so certain that the child alone is to blame. For instance, it is not clear what, exactly, he thinks a conscience is, or how one is acquired – yet he says confidently that the antisocial child does have a conscience and simply chooses to disregard it. Scott Peck, on the other hand, views the sociopathic criminal as a person without a conscience: he therefore acquits the sociopath of responsibility and instead begins his study of evil by defining it as a subcategory under the standard diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality

Disorder. Patients are diagnosed as narcissistically impaired when they are self-aggrandizing, shallow, materialistic, self-absorbed, and grandiose. As a rule, such people are not criminals, and they often seek therapeutic help because they are sincerely hurt when their relationships go awry.

Peck avers that narcissists who do engage in outright evil are a further subset of the narcissistic population – they are characterized by elaborate mechanisms of self-deception that differ from the careless alibis of criminals: such devious "people of the lie" often belong to respectable society and may even appear to be its greatest defenders.

Sociopaths, in contrast to such narcissists, rarely seek out therapists and never give a thought to the quality of their relationships: they use and abuse other people for their own pleasure and move on. Unlike Peck's people of the lie, they tend to be impulsive, bullying, and self-destructive – totally unsuited to playing the game of appearances and fooling their neighbors. Sociopathic evil - 127

And they may admit that they do not belong to respectable society – because they wouldn't want to. The antisocial child is frankly contemptuous of the goody-goodies.

Samenow's folksy presentation fails to differentiate these conditions, which may superficially resemble each other. Highly narcissistic people, for instance, like sociopaths, will lie to look good, fail to notice the injuries they do to others, and selfishly push for immediate gratification. But their craving for conventional respectability is at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the budding sociopath's criminal bent. The criminal is vain, but it is enough to think himself superior to all the chumps and to be admired within the criminal subculture; the narcissist is vain about recognition from the respectable public. Peck's evil narcissist takes this vanity much further, into a realm of sneakiness, destructiveness, and covert hatred.

(In accepting Samenow's description of what I am tempted to call "normal sociopathy," I am putting off, for the time being, my discussion of psychopathy, which I will treat as a statistically rare and genuinely abnormal condition lying at the extreme end of the criminal continuum and characterized by monstrous predilections and behaviors. I should say here that my distinction between the terms "sociopath" and "psychopath" is idiosyncratic and claims only the merit of internal consistency: most of the literature I have consulted either uses the terms interchangeably or adopts one of them to the exclusion of the other. In keeping with popular usage, I use "psychopathic" to designate the most frightening and incomprehensible manifestations of antisocial behavior, whereas I use "sociopathy" to designate the personality type of the incorrigible criminal. Whether psychopathy is simply the radical version of sociopathy is unimportant to me. I am concerned to place the sociopath on a continuum with other, more acceptable exemplars of the morality of toughness and machismo, while deferring Sociopathic evil - 128

until the next chapter a consideration of two extreme psychopathic types that have captivated

readers and directed our attention away from the generalities I have set down: a few individuals

seem to be chillingly cold-blooded and monstrously predatory – as one writer put it, they see

other people as "food"; a few others combine predation with a perplexing ability to take in people

with their charm and intelligence. The fictional creation Hannibal Lechter is a fanciful

combination of these two types, but such a fusion is rare. The most murderously criminal

psychopaths have tended to be furtive loners, and were able to elude the police and achieve

undeserved reputations for cleverness simply because our free and highly mobile society,

especially in districts of urban anonymity, enabled them to live out of sight with relative ease.

The ones with the charm, who can sometimes be found in the upper echelons of big corporations,

profit from the shallowness of our notions of charm. They never succeed in fooling all of the

people all of the time, but they know how to pick their associates and their victims. I have not

worried too much about whether this minuscule group of frightening psychopaths makes up a

truly distinct category of evil that defeats all other generalizations, because statistically such

abnormal people account for an infinitesimal fraction of the evil that plagues our planet.)

Samenow fails to ask how the patterns of thought he exposes are experienced by the

criminal. We may have a low opinion of the characteristics of extreme pride and intolerance of

fear, but the criminal probably calls these traits self-respect and courage. On the other hand, it is misleading of Samenow to say that the antisocial individual thinks of himself as a good person and leave it at that: as we have already noted, the budding criminal thinks of himself as a winner,

and he thinks of winning as a good thing; but he also knows very well that society pays lip

service to another type of "good" – characterized by self-sacrifice – that is not, and never will be, Sociopathic evil - 129

his own.

In other words, many criminals have a conscious philosophy of ethical egoism; and it is important to understand that this is a genuine moral stance, however repellent. Such people believe that every person is either "looking out for number one" or would be if he were not cowed by social intimidation. Sociopaths divide the world into the strong and the weak; and they sincerely believe that only a very weak man would consciously choose to place himself among the sheep of society.

According to such ethical egoists, traditional concepts of "good" and "evil" are part of the scam of conventional morality, which is set up precisely to reward the sheep. Criminals differentiate sharply between the goodness of the straight arrows, which they despise, and their own notion that they belong to the true aristocracy of stout-hearted fellows who take what they want. Furthermore, the ethical egoist believes that he is envied by the sheep, who would do as he does if they had the moxie, the intelligence, and the strength of will.

An ethical egoist quotes chapter, book, and verse from the society we live in and can plausibly make a defense of his conduct. He claims that his values are ours as well. He points to celebrities who literally get away with murder, to movie stars who flout convention, to athletes who do as they please, to rich men who fear no one. He notes that, as Elizabeth Taylor once said,

"There's no deodorant like success." He sees that people with money and power are respected, or at least noticed, no matter how they acquire it (think of Joseph P. Kennedy) and no matter how they act once they have it (consider Henry Ford, who was a raving anti-Semite, and any number of present-day vulgarians).

In the geopolitical arena, the violent criminal sees that his own country has no scruples Sociopathic evil - 130

about violence any time it chooses to cite a compelling national (that is, selfish) interest. He knows that George H. W. Bush beat up Manuel Noriega because he wanted to and he could, and that millions of Americans felt pride at the spectacle.

Nor is the sociopath's argument of recent vintage. The perfect statement of it is found at the beginning of Plato's Republic, articulated by the character Thrasymachus, who says that injustice is a winner and justice a loser. The argument is thoroughly modern and perfectly in tune with the temper of our own times: after all, says Thrasymachus, the unjust man cheats the just man in business; the unjust man evades his taxes and the just man pays; the unjust man (like

Silent Sam Pierce, Reagan's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) uses public office to enrich himself and his friends and gets away with it, while the just man (like Jimmy Carter) ends up as the butt of everyone's jokes. Thrasymachus also makes a point seconded by Scott Peck: that only the little thieves are caught and condemned. Those who steal one piece of jewelry at a time are called "burglars"; those who, with the connivance of zoning boards and purchased politicians, steal thousands of acres, are called "developers." The character Glaucon then concurs to the extent that he believes that the concept of justice is embraced primarily by weaklings who stand to lose more than they would gain from the survival of the fittest.

The upshot of these arguments is the contention that every man would do evil if he could be sure of evading punishment.

Glaucon too believes that this is everyone's true, if covert, opinion. And this belief that

"everyone does it" is a genuine tenet of the criminal's philosophy, and not merely a rationalization. The sociopath believes – with Freud among other thinkers – that everybody's unconscious mind is a cauldron of unholy desires, and goodness is just a defense mechanism Sociopathic evil - 131

called a reaction formation. When the criminal backs up his philosophy with examples from the

daily newspaper, he may be arguing like a lawyer – another respectable perpetrator – but that

does not mean that he has to manufacture the evidence.

The criminal is grasping and selfish, no doubt about it. But he also possesses a coherent view of the world and an actual code of ethics. He agrees with Thrasymachus that the straight arrows are simpletons and the unjust are wise. He agrees with Glaucon that "justice" is the

refuge of the weak. If you say to him that he may himself get the short end of the stick one day,

he will reply that he knows there are others who would victimize him if they could, but he is

willing to take that chance. He believes he is a superior being who is able to take care of himself

and to thrive in the world as it really is – the world described by Thrasymachus and Glaucon. To

be grasping and selfish is to be bold and unrepressed; to be meek and self-sacrificing is to be

emasculated and dehumanized. And some modern therapists concur to this extent, that

selflessness has been labeled "codependency" and treated as a disease.

My first point, then, is that Samenow has not gone deeply enough into the self-image and the

conscious philosophy of the antisocial individual. Had he done so, he would have found

important distinctions among sociopaths, narcissists, misfits, and career petty criminals, not to

mention the truly evil people who – by virtue of their sterling reputations and, in some cases,

high elective office – cannot be classed with any of the above.

When it comes time, then, to apply his advice on prevention, we will find ourselves

suspecting that his one size does not fit all. His guidelines may be effective in diverting a

juvenile delinquent from his destiny as an adult offender; but they will not serve at all to keep Sociopathic evil - 132

your son from turning out like the first President Bush.

My second point is that society is more implicated in the creation of the thought patterns of antisocial children than Samenow wants to admit, not only in the obvious but general sense I have already mentioned, that the patterns have to come from somewhere, but also in the more particular sense that the social scene inhabited by our budding sociopath may be stifling and hypocritical.

Antisocial children have recurring complaints about life that have at least a degree of validity to my ear. They pronounce themselves bored in school; they object to the regimentation; they say that the most interesting people break the rules and that only the dullest people behave well. Of course, such statements are self-serving; but Samenow is mistaken in assuming that they are insincere. Nor are they necessarily inaccurate.

Samenow tries to place himself above the battle in the culture war: he has chosen to limit himself to a description of behaviors that, taken together and exaggerated in a single individual, give us the profile of an antisocial person headed for criminal activity. But even his bare presentation of symptomatic behaviors betrays him into revealing his sympathies. He is clearly a cultural conservative who sees no reason to question the traditional verities of school and work.

He speaks up for discipline, effort, deferred gratification, playing by the rules, and telling the truth, as though the rewards for displays of character, in terms of socio-economic success as well as moral self-satisfaction, can be taken for granted.

Nietzsche scorned the crowd for its "herd mentality": Samenow gives no sign that he can even imagine the possibility that the herd is wrong. He implies that we all know that the tried- and-true path to maturity and responsibility is right and good. Therefore he blithely assumes that Sociopathic evil - 133

the antisocial child knows that his rebellion is wrong and bad. He assumes further that all arguments offered by a rebel are rationalizations: the child cries boredom when he is merely lazy.

Samenow's proof is that the other kids do the work without complaining. Over and over, he reminds us that the antisocial child stands out from the crowd that follows the rules.

This is his knockdown argument, and he employs it ad nauseam: the antisocial child cannot really be too restless to do the work, because the other children do the work. He cannot really be damaged by his parents' upbringing, because his siblings are not damaged. Society did not cause him to commit a crime, because society did not cause his neighbor to commit a crime.

If readers, especially parents, were not so eager for the absolution that Samenow is conferring upon them so promiscuously, they would have to see the absurdity of his reasoning.

In its basic form, the argument is circular: if most people do it, then it must be right; since it is right, then all people ought to do it. Put another way: majority behavior embodied in traditional institutions is automatically right; therefore a student's complaint about his school system is illegitimate, by definition.

(If this were true, moral progress could never occur, because every criticism of the established, majority-approved way of doing things would be preemptively denounced as an attack on morality and dismissed as a self-serving rationalization of the individual's failure to adjust. How a new, more progressive majority could ever form is a pretty question, since all attempts to bring it about would be considered by conservatives to be socially disruptive and therefore either criminal or immoral. Samenow might reply that reform is best achieved when a new majority peacefully comes to see that the old way is wrong. But any of them who said they saw this would be accused of "undermining traditional values.") Sociopathic evil - 134

The sociopath often sees clearly what Samenow refuses to see at all: that those who play

by the rules wear themselves out and have little to show for it, while those who cut corners

thrive. At least in the old days, we made a pretense of mourning this state of affairs; but as we

have more and more abandoned ourselves to consumerism, careerism, and the culture of

celebrityhood, we have begun to openly admire the cheaters. (The wealth of Bill Gates is founded

upon his brazen appropriation of the Apple computer's display, but no one bothers to indict him

for this theft of intellectual property.)

Samenow may deplore all this, but what has he done about it lately? The sociopath

divides the world into the honest, hard-working fools who are exploited, degraded, and left behind, and the shrewd movers and shakers who do the exploiting and get ahead. Unwisely,

Samenow tries to refute the sociopath's analysis on its own terms. He argues that hard work and good habits bring about real success. In other words, he thinks that society is rationally

constructed: the best people rise to the top, the worst sink; integrity, self-discipline, and effort are rewarded while liars and con men fail. In short, he is the voice of your high school principal.

Sadly, this is life as we wish it to be, not life as it is. And the sociopath prides himself above all on being a tough-minded realist: he believes that Samenow is all Sunday-school talk.

I believe the sociopath is wrong, but not on his own terms. And not even on Samenow's terms, which too closely resemble his own. The answer is that there is another set of terms altogether. If the sociopath could be personally transformed, and taste the difference between the evanescent pleasures of domination and acquisition and the lasting happiness of spiritual plenitude, he would acknowledge his mistake.

I am not sanguine about the possibility of inducing this conversion experience in the Sociopathic evil - 135

sociopath; but Samenow gives no indication of knowing that such a transformation is possible.

Meanwhile, he tries to persuade the sociopath that a man can dominate and acquire at a faster rate if he plays by the rules. This is mostly untrue and perhaps, in the largest scheme of things, morally corrupt. We need to change the rules. Until we do, too many of us are going to covertly admire the sociopath's disregard of them. Since the 1930s, the American moviegoing public has thrilled to the depiction of criminal geniuses; since the 1970s, the violent loner has come to represent almost the prototype of the perfect movie hero.

Samenow's blindness to the contributing role of parental and societal values in the formation of the antisocial personality is clearly on display in his analysis of "denial":

Denial is a psychological defense mechanism that protects us from being overwhelmed by fear or guilt or by a reality that seems too threatening to handle. It is a defense mechanism that can blind us to such an extent that we do not even recognize that a problem exists until it has become so severe that we can no longer escape its consequences. Parents may harbor strong doubts about how their child is developing but suppress them, believing that the wisest course is to endure and let the passage of time and maturation eradicate any potential problems. Many times I have encountered the following scenario. A mother and father consult me about an "adjustment problem" their preadolescent is having. The boy constantly gets into scrapes with other children. The teacher reports that he does not pay attention and disrupts the class. At home he is argumentative, disrespectful, and untruthful. The mother, recognizing the presence of a problem that can no longer be ignored, insists on seeking professional help. But the father has a radically different view. He resents being in my office and is certain that his wife is manufacturing a problem where none exists. He takes the position that "boys will be boys" and that his son is simply going through a stage. In fact, he may even consider it admirable that his child stands up for himself and refuses to let others push him around. He perceives the boy's argumentativeness as a favorable sign that his son wants to be his own person. Enumerating the many positive characteristics of the child, the father flatly contends that no professional attention is necessary.

Notice that the father is not at all "in denial." He holds a coherent world-view and ethical stance Sociopathic evil - 136

according to which his son is strong and admirable. We see immediately – as Samenow does not

– that both society and parents are implicated in the child's antisocial behavior: machismo is the covert ethos of large numbers of American males, and of this particular father; and in spite of, or perhaps even because of, his tough-guy philosophy, the father is an accepted member of the larger human community. His son is a chip off the old block.

At the same time that Samenow endorses society as he finds it and acquits it of any complicity in producing the criminal personality, he also avoids any examination of genetic, physiological, or constitutional factors, because these too might afford the miscreant an excuse. He sees no need to take a closer look at either nurture or nature.

It is obvious, for instance, that many children who fall under his microscope are physically insensitive to pain, have short attention spans, and require a high degree of crude stimulation to find their brains engaged. The criminal bent in these children's quest for excitement could be nothing more than the logical outcome of their need for extreme types of stimulation. Antisocial children, says Samenow, love to break taboos. He gives this behavior a moral tag; but the child may be attracted purely by the thrilling sensation, and understand little or nothing about the content of the taboo he is flouting. It may not be contempt for society, but reckless abandon, that motivates him. (Society tacitly recognizes the existence of such people and finds ways to offer them career opportunities in high-risk, daredevil professions. What sort of person wants to be an undercover narcotics agent? It may well be a person differing very little in personality from the person who wants to be a drug dealer.)

Sociopathic evil - 137

If patterns of thought are neither inherent in our genes nor imposed upon us by our upbringing, they must be simply what we like to think. They must express our diseased wills. We are right where Samenow wants us, with nobody and nothing to blame other than ourselves. The individual criminal has certain patterns of thinking; they originate in his own head. Even if we find some of the patterns in society, his brother Billy didn't adopt those patterns – only he did; even if we find genes that predispose him to hyperactivity and insensitivity to pain, not everyone with these genes becomes a criminal – only he did. He is responsible for what got into his head, whenever it did, be it ever so long ago; he is responsible for changing what is in his head.

It is a stark, crude, intellectually impoverished view of how we become what we are. Or rather, it dodges the interesting questions altogether. Are patterns of thinking socially constructed? Do our emotions tell our brains what to think, or do the thought patterns shape our emotions? Samenow doesn't know and doesn't care, because finally he is a moralist rather than a psychologist. It sounds psychological to analyze "patterns of thought," but when we add up the patterns and try to label their totality, we can't improve upon that old-fashioned word "character."

Samenow's true intellectual ancestor is Aristotle. According to The Philosopher, I am formed by the habits that I acquired very early in life – in spite of which I, and not the parents who instilled the patterns by every means of coercion available to them, am accountable for the actions that flow out of those habits. Or, Samenow adds, in some cases, mysteriously, I am not formed by my parents' teachings – only Billy was – and that too is my own fault.

Society is to Samenow what the free-market economy is to a capitalist: simply the way things are, the expression of natural law. Some people thrive under capitalism, so the rest of us who complain about it must be sore losers. Some kids do their homework every night and never Sociopathic evil - 138

disrupt the classroom, so those who rebel against school must be indolent and selfish.

As a result of this blindly conservative view of human institutions, Samenow, like

Aristotle, takes the most stringent possible view of personal accountability. People make choices

– end of story. The wrongdoer did the wrong. (Aristotle will make an exception and exonerate the wrong-doer if – the quality of thought here is peculiarly Aristotle's own – a strong wind picks him up and blows him bodily against the injured party.) As a further concomitant of such a view, society is given carte blanche to discipline the malefactors. We pass decisively from the liberal ethos of victim politics, good intentions, and the abuse of the "abuse excuse" – good riddance, I admit – to an ethos of Stalinist rigor, according to which the state is always right and there are no excuses at all, neither those invoking personal good intentions nor those that take the form of a critique of the state.

It is worth remarking here that Dr. Laura, the national scold, simply adores Samenow's book, and makes explicit its implicit theory of personality, character, and morality. She believes that everyone knows right from wrong, because God gave us the commandments; therefore all of our evil stems from conscious decisions to do wrong, because of the laziness and selfishness that she associates with our animal natures. (This is her most hilarious solecism, inasmuch as animals are never evil, hardly ever lazy, and have no selves to aggrandize. She is such a shallow thinker that she never sees that her theological concept of man as a fallen angel cannot coexist with her more secular up-to-date Darwinian concept of man as a risen animal.) Naturally, Dr.

Laura is a bitter and passionate foe of any argument that says that the self is socially constructed; yet she defines self-esteem as something that can be gained only by impressing others. In short, she elevates character above heredity, environment, genetic predisposition, socialization, and Sociopathic evil - 139

enculturation. The individual is thus totally responsible for his own behavior – he would

naturally have to be, since there is no one and nothing left to cause it. Her view is nonsensical,

but it does serve to keep the world turning as it ever has.

Lonnie Athens

The only feature missing from the sociology of Aristotle and Dr. Laura is human consciousness.

Why did the term "road rage" have to be coined in the 1990s? The answer is that it hardly

existed before then, although traffic congestion had been a major problem in the nation's cities

for the previous three decades, and we had possessed our "animal natures" for the last three

million years.

Conservatives properly lampooned liberals who treated it as a new social pathogen, requiring new forms of treatment. We can only imagine the liberal nostrums that might be proposed by our benevolent civic fathers: better highway signs, soothing music piped from

overpasses, trained counselors at every milepost. On the other hand, the phenomenon was not

conjured into existence by liberal fantasies: men and women really were dying of gunshot

wounds as a result of cutting each other off during the morning commute. So it was a matter of

some importance that the existence of road rage be recognized as a specifiable pathology and

publicized: citizens needed to be warned about a new threat of violence that was occurring in a

place that had previously been deemed safe.

If road rage is ordinary human violence, what accounted for its sudden efflorescence in a

new location? Sociopathic evil - 140

The answer to that question is that someone did it and others heard about it and thought,

"Good idea!"

Why were there no school shootings (to speak of) for 98 years of the 20th Century, and then a spate of them during the final 15 months? Because someone shot up a school, and all over the country there were individuals who learned of it and thought, "Yeah!"

Every act originates as a thought.

What is the content of most cognition? It is morality. It is the answer to the question,

"What do I wish to signify about myself?" All my behavior makes a statement: "This is the kind of person I am." As soon as life is lived away from the margin, with any sort of economic security, leisure, and disposable income, behavior becomes primarily symbolic and expressive.

Even where I have a clearly defined explicable motive for what I do – looking for a new job, shopping, eating – I do it in a way that tells onlookers, and especially the onlookers in my head, what kind of person I am. I bail out of interviews if asked to compromise my idea of myself; I abandon the groceries in the shopping cart and storm out of the checkout line when the clerk keeps me waiting too long; I eat the french fries with my fingers to show that I'm not such a mincing, pretentious, over-socialized dolt as to eat them with a knife and fork. If no one sees me do it, I tell someone about it, in order to authenticate the performance I have already given for the benefit of my internalized judges.

This renders the argument about animal drives absurd. What I share with the animals is an alarm system that is triggered when some other animal invades my space. What I do about that hormonal flood – fight, flee, or negotiate for however long and with however much intensity

– is determined by socialization. And what I think I am doing has no analogy to any animal Sociopathic evil - 141

behavior whatever: I think I am sending a message, whether anybody cares or not, about who I am.

In July of 1999, to the utter astonishment of an international television audience, professional golfer Jean Van De Velde threw away his chance to win the British Open, one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world, by refusing to "play safe" on the last hole. His three- shot lead was so huge that, even after he had gotten into trouble by foolishly using his driver off the tee, he could still have recovered and won easily by playing the next shot conservatively. But he chose to gamble a second time and "go for the green," and so suffered the most mortifying last-hole collapse in the history of the sport. He knew the chance he was taking, but he did not wish to be seen "playing safe." To the reporters afterward, he said, "Next time, I hit a wedge, okay? You'll say I'm a coward, whatever." His wife said proudly, "He went for it on every shot."

It was important to him that his play symbolize boldness, confidence, elán.

A raccoon would have just wanted to win the tournament.

Lonnie Athens is the subject of a book by Richard Rhodes titled, somewhat sensationally, Why

They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. Athens realized, after a decade of conducting interviews with the most violent offenders in several state penitentiaries, that the

"community-at-large" is not the only socializer, and that the "generalized other," or Freudian superego, is not the voice of conscience – if it were, we would all be peacefully alike. Athens coined the term "phantom community" to designate the much smaller, less conventional, group in my head that is comprised of the most important individuals who socialized me. I am symbolizing to them that I learned their lessons and that I am the right sort of person. Sociopathic evil - 142

Again, remember what is meant here by "right." Many violent criminals would be the

first to agree that they are not good men. But they would be bragging rather than complaining.

They do believe, to a narcissistically pathological degree, that they are good men.

The key to understanding the world-views of these men is found in a single sentence

setting forth the fundamental, shocking truth:

Those who hold violent self-images have an unmitigated violent phantom community providing them with pronounced and categorical moral support for acting violently toward other people. [Emphasis in the original]

Violence is an expression of morality.

To emphasize that this morality of violence is produced by socialization, Athens coined the unwieldy but accurate term "violentization." Criminals are educated into violence. Their

teachers utilize a pedagogy of violence and teach by example. (In everyday language: their

teachers, starting most often with their fathers, by turns beat them up and also show and tell them

how to beat up others.) The pupils are conditioned by punishments for passivity and rewards for

aggression. The red-letter date in the memories of many sons of vicious fathers is the day they

were big enough to turn the whipping on their long-time tormentors.

Regardless of how we address the red-herring issue of inborn capacity for violence, every violent criminal also displays a violent career with well-defined stages. Athens called these stages brutalization, belligerency, violent performances, and virulency. They are self- explanatory, as are his three components of brutalization: violent subjugation, personal horrification, and violent coaching. (Horrification occurs when we see others – most often our mothers or our siblings – subjected to violence.) Sociopathic evil - 143

In those rare instances where the violence of a criminal seems to come out of nowhere,

Athens suggests that we would do well to look more closely and examine the history of the

offender's thought-world. We are likely to find a rich fantasy life evincing all the stages of

violent education, and to discover that the perpetrator had long contemplated the possibility of

violence as an effective solution to his life's problems.

It may seem that Athens and Samenow are cut from the same cloth. Both skewer the

liberal shibboleths about hardened criminals, and both emphasize the thinking patterns that

characterize violent offenders. But Athens knows that the patterns of thought are themselves

given by society. One of his "few simple assumptions" is that "people are what they are as a

result of the social experiences that they have undergone in their lives." And he quotes from two

of the sociologists who mentored him:

So both the self and the mind are social in origin and in function. . . . Selves are not given. They are constructed. [This is a paraphrase of one of the tenets of Herbert Blumer, Athens's teacher.]

[Quoting sociologist Frank E. Hartung] A person identifies himself to himself as being . . . a particular kind of person. He then performs the role appropriate to the kind of person that he has identified himself as being. . . . One's statement to oneself of who and what one is determines the role that is played in a particular situation. [The last sentence was underlined by Lonnie Athens in his copy of Hartung's book.]

Leo Tolstoy understood all this acutely. In his first published work of fiction, by mercilessly satirizing his own attempt to assume the role proper to a university student by acquiring a pipe, he exposed our eternal self-consciousness about the symbolic import of our actions. At this time in his life he did not yet understand how personal evil is conditioned by political and social evils.

But in his last, little-read novel Resurrection, we have his fully matured reflections on this Sociopathic evil - 144

matter:

[Maslova] showed no sign of shame, except of being a convict – she was ashamed of that, but not of being a prostitute. On the contrary, she seemed rather pleased, almost proud of it. And yet, how could it be otherwise? Nobody can wholeheartedly do anything unless he believes that his activity is important and good. Therefore, whatever a man's position may be, he is bound to take that view of human life in general that will make his own activity seem important and good. People usually imagine that a thief, a murderer, a spy, a prostitute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be ashamed of it. But the very opposite is true. Men who have been placed by fate and their own sins or mistakes in a certain position, however irregular that position may be, adopt a view of life as a whole which makes their position appear to them good and respectable. In order to back up their view of life they instinctively mix only with those who accept their ideas of life and of their place in it. This surprises us when it is a case of thieves bragging of their skill, prostitutes flaunting their depravity or murderers boasting of their cruelty. But it surprises us only because their numbers are limited and – this is the point – we live in a different atmosphere. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e. of robbery; when commanders of armies pride themselves on their victories, i.e. on murder; and when those in high places vaunt their power – their brute force? We do not see that their ideas of life and of good and evil are corrupt and inspired by a necessity to justify their position, only because the circle of people with such corrupt ideas is a larger one and we belong to it ourselves. It was after this fashion that Maslova had formed her view of life and of her position in the world. She was a prostitute, condemned to penal servitude, yet she had formed a conception of life which allowed her to think well of herself and even take pride in her position. According to her philosophy the highest good for all men without exception – old and young, schoolboys and generals, educated and uneducated – consisted in sexual intercourse with attractive women, and therefore all men, though they pretended to be occupied with other things, in reality cared for nothing else. She, now, was an attractive woman who had it in her power to satisfy, or not to satisfy, their desires, and this made her an important and necessary person. All her past and present life confirmed the truth of this attitude. For the last ten years, wherever she had been, she had seen that men . . . needed her; she did not see and did not remark the men who had no need of her. Consequently, the whole world seemed to her to be made up of people possessed by lust, who watched her on all sides, trying by every means in their power – deception, violence, purchase, cunning – to get hold of her.

By now, Tolstoy understands the absurdity of arguments "from nature" that "women are weak." Sociopathic evil - 145

He knows that women become what patriarchal society wants them to become, whether timid

adoring wives or brazen erotic toys. But both early and late, he knew that our actions are always

performed on a stage before the audience of our phantom community.

What Tolstoy understood about the ruthlessness of vanity was everlastingly displayed in humorous fashion on the old Jack Benny show. For years, Benny played the part of a self- absorbed miser, and never once winked at the audience – as all the other comedians did – to reassure them that "in real life" he was a generous fellow (as in fact he was). One night I was listening to the show on the radio: Jack, out for a walk and feeling especially happy, is approached by a beggar who asks him for a dime. Now the most famous gag in the history of the show involved a robber who demanded of Jack, "Your money or your life," only to be met by a protracted silence while Jack ponders. But in this program, Jack, unable to find any small change, gives the beggar a half-dollar. Hearing this, I felt betrayed by the writers – how could they depart from the core premise of the show? But the writers were several steps ahead of me.

As Jack walks along and shares his thoughts with us, we hear him returning obsessively to the subject of his generous act. He tells everyone he meets about it. As he parts from a friend, he thinks to himself, "What a nice person he is." Then, after a pause, he says to himself, "But I'm a nice person too. I gave that beggar fifty cents." When he finally falls asleep, he dreams that he is the guest of honor at an international banquet – leaders from around the world have come to celebrate his generosity.

As Tolstoy is fond of noting, we act magnanimously, and in the next moment we are touched by the thought of our magnanimity.

In his very next thought, the violent criminal is impressed by his violence. This time he Sociopathic evil - 146

showed them; taught them a lesson; put them in their place. They didn't know they were messing

with the man; now they do.

Stanton Samenow treats these thoughts as weaknesses of character – he can't begin to

imagine where they come from. Tolstoy's observations about the hypocrisy of our public

institutions are lost on him. Instead, Samenow is struck by how society – in general, he thinks, a

rationally organized place of hard-working, honest, thrifty, achieving, god-fearing families – tries to inculcate all the right patterns of thoughts in its fortunate up-and-coming members; and yet some choose to reject all this good advice and to pursue a course of selfish, lazy self- aggrandizement, thereby breaking their parents' hearts.

Well, here is a monologue from an upstanding parent:

I'm a man, and I want to be treated like a man. Hell, I'm real easy to get along with just as long as people don't take me too light. I just don't play. When I tell somebody something, I mean it. I don't want to hear a whole lot of horseshit about who did what. I don't care who a person is or who they think they are, either; they better not play around with me. I'll show them who in the hell they're playing with. They'll find out fast that they aren't fucking with any boy when they fuck with me. I'll put my foot in their ass quick. Once I get started on them, I'll fix their ass up right. I've ruined more than one good man in my time, and Jack, I'll do it again too. That's the way I am, and that's the way I'll be until the day that I die. Everybody knows that's the way I am.

The speaker is "Pete the Greek," the father of Lonnie Athens, and he was upstanding – a respectable member of his working-class community, in spite of repeatedly beating his wife and children and constantly getting in brawls. He never spent a day in jail.

(Self-deception is endemic to these "straight shooters." While Pete was touchy and aggressive, and quick to take on all comers, he was also a bully; and I leave it to your interpretation whether he was a coward, for when Lonnie finally bested him in a fair fight, he Sociopathic evil - 147

went looking for a gun. His code required him always to win, by any means necessary, rather than lose to a better man, or to any man.)

Samenow and Athens agree only about the thoughts themselves:

Low self-esteem . . . is frequently evoked to explain criminal violence. Subjects certainly suffer from low self-esteem during the early stages of violentization, [Athens] concedes, but "should they later reach the final stage, virulency, they will suffer from exactly the reverse problem – unrealistically too high self-esteem to the point of arrogance."

(The liberal who argues that the high self-esteem masks low self-esteem is using words, like

Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, to mean whatever he wants them to mean. There is a real problem with equating the arrogance of a sociopath with the confidence of someone who is a respected member of polite society, but the problem cannot be solved by saying that aggression is a form of meekness and cockiness a type of timidity.)

So Samenow and Athens concur that criminals are arrogant, and likely to remain contemptuously so when treated with unconditional positive regard; and both men emphasize that the criminal is responsible for his actions. But there are two ways to understand what we mean by responsibility, and the difference is crucial to constructing a psychology of evil.

Because we are socially conditioned, and because the only way society can do the conditioning is by rewarding us when we respect its values and punishing us when we flout them, the concept of personal accountability is indispensable. The everlasting bogeyman of conservatives – a society in which nothing is ever right or wrong, everything is relative and no one is responsible – cannot and will not come about. We will always codify what is right and punish the offenders as if they were solely responsible for their wrongs. We cannot do otherwise, if only because all the social Sociopathic evil - 148

neophytes who are still learning the rules must themselves be conditioned by the way we

dispense our punishments and rewards. For a child to internalize the conditioning, he must know

that he will be "held responsible" for his acts. If humans are creatures of social conditioning, we

must socially condition them. Society must do so even if there is widespread agreement that the

actor is not really responsible. When a much-beaten child turns on his father and kills him, for

instance, he is nonetheless arrested and often charged with a crime. After a half-hearted prosecution, a jury acquits the defendant to the general satisfaction of all. But the principle of personal accountability has been upheld. We undertake this charade in all earnestness, because we have to send a message to all children everywhere that killing is against the law and killers will be held responsible for their actions.

This type of responsibility, which is likely to outlast every liberal therapeutic regime that can ever be devised, was called by the philosopher Hans Vaihinger a legal and moral fiction. He gave this word a technical sense: a fiction is a proposition known to be false, but accepted as true on practical grounds. We conduct our affairs as if every actor is solely responsible for his act.

The key is the practicality.

Am I saying, then, that we know in our hearts that the criminal isn't to blame but we blame him anyway? No. Criminal accountability is not merely a ruse. Aristotle, imaginatively stunted as he always is, gets it right in spite of himself: no one else did the deed; and the wind did not lift the criminal up bodily and blow him into his victim. Furthermore, Lonnie Athens shows us the disturbing truth as no other writer has ever done: the violent perpetrator enjoyed his crime.

He was putting in good minutes. At the time, he thought he was doing the right thing by his code; and he thinks today that he did it well. He boasted to his friends about it then, and even Sociopathic evil - 149

now cannot bring himself to convincingly fake the gestures of remorse when his parole board

demands them.

Not even Samenow faces up to this. Remember that Samenow thinks the criminal has a

conscience and ignores it. Well, Athens thinks the criminal has a conscience and follows it.

But who or what is responsible for that conscience? Where does it come from?

Samenow, as we have noted, won't ask and won't tell, but implies that it certainly cannot have

come from anywhere other than the criminal himself. Scott Peck first dodges the uncomfortable

truth that Athens proclaims by saying that sociopaths are somehow missing a conscience; but

when he finally creates his own taxonomy of evil, he agrees with Samenow in locating the bad

seed entirely within the perpetrator. And he gets specific: evil originates in the narcissistic will

gone bad. But he too is stumped as to how and why – until he avails himself of the hypothesis

that Satan is real. Then and there, his thesis falls apart – not solely because he has introduced

Christian metaphysics and supernatural agency into his argument, but mostly because he has

merely given a new name to the phenomenon in question without providing an explanation. He

does not seem to understand that he has only moved the goal posts: before, we needed to

understand why some people are susceptible to evil; now we need to understand why some

people are susceptible to Satan.

The problem of evil can never be solved until we accept the simplest truth of all: the evil

did come from somewhere else. It came from outside the individual, whom we have always been

so intent upon blaming and punishing; but it did not come from so far outside as the gates of Hell

– it came from this world. Once we accept these liberating facts, we are freed at last to look for evil in its actual strongholds. We can identify the moralities that embody it and the moralists Sociopathic evil - 150

who teach it, from our presidents and Supreme Court justices down to our immediate family members. We can treat it as a naturally occurring human phenomenon, first understanding it, then taking practical steps to quarantine it and eradicate it. If we cannot stop it overnight, we can at least, as Tolstoy admonishes us, begin to see it for what it is. Then we will give a different meaning to Samenow's words: "before it's too late" we will, rather than try to salvage "character" by a judicious, if tardy, show of force, instead inculcate a different morality altogether in our children.

Psychopathic evil

Exponents of the view of original sin feel they have a knockdown argument in our group behavior. Freud thought that the individual, when a member of a mob, is emboldened by the group dynamic to throw off the necessary repressions of civilization and to allow his id to emerge in all its nastiness. Certainly it is demonstrable that individuals will participate with others in crimes that they would never do alone, from gang bullying to participating in the unjust wars of their nations.

According to this theory, the group does nothing more than behave the way the individual members would like to behave, whereas each separate individual is afraid to unleash his id without the cover of the group sanction. The group, then, is the individual writ large: what the

American government does is an expression of what the American people want as individuals.

But in Arthur Koestler's language, the members of a group are holons and the group is a holarchy, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Society is an organism at a level that is higher than the level of the single person, with emergent properties that subsume the characteristics of the individual components. Notice that, relative to itself, society ruthlessly attempts to eliminate unruly expressions of the id, whether in the form of interpersonal viciousness that undermines social stability, or of rebellion against the state, or of an armed incursion by another state. Indeed, as groups become more highly organized, the behavior of individual members becomes increasingly pacific, and the penalties for disruptive behavior Psychopathic evil - 152

increasingly severe. A hundred years ago, most men settled most disputes by means of their fists; today they have to clean up after their dogs.

The group is, in fact, a new and higher organism, and the free individuals that we all imagine ourselves to be are its molecules and cells. A group forms its own objectives, and its constituent parts are no more free to impose their objectives on it than the cells of my body are free to go their own way. Or, to refine the analogy, sometimes my cells do act as individuals, and pursue aims that are at variance with those of my organism as a whole. I call this condition a cancer. I set about ruthlessly exterminating these cells, and my failure to do so thoroughly will be the death of me.

American society is distinguished by its willingness to put up with a multitude of harmless eccentricities among its citizens. Nonetheless, when an individual crosses a line and pursues a course of action detrimental to our free society, we use the apt word "antisocial" to describe the behavior, and the bad actor is referred posthaste to our criminal courts. We do this naturally enough in cases where the individual agent has done some unequivocal evil to others – killing, robbing, and vandalizing – but also when we decide, for example, that a woman who buys nine dollars worth of crack cocaine for her cousin to smoke should be imprisoned for a year.

Yet not so long ago our nation-organism scratched its head at the behavior of the old Soviet

Union's nation-organism, which found evil in acts of intellectual dissent. I can assure you that intellectual dissent was far more dangerous to the legitimacy of the Soviet government than cocaine use is dangerous to the legitimacy of the American government.

These societal behaviors cannot be understood as the individual writ large: the "jump- outs" who arrested that crack-brained woman were not normally given to wishing that they could Psychopathic evil - 153

unleash their ids at the expense of poor harmless addicted people; rather, the higher organism pronounced a holy war on drugs, and these good Christian soldiers joined the army. More recently, a number of young men and women who, prior to setting foot in the country of Iraq, had never entertained the first thought of torturing one of their fellow human beings, found themselves eagerly improvising an impressive variety of techniques designed to cause sleep- deprived Iraqi men in shackles and hoods to urinate on themselves. They had been told by their superior officers to break these prisoners down in the higher cause of extracting valuable information from them during interrogations.

Society, then, is not the individual writ large. The police officers who prosecute the unjust war on drugs and the interrogators in military prisons who torture their captives are not doing so to gratify pent-up desires to torment innocent fellow citizens and laugh about it, and the government is not catering to the obscene pleasure principle of its men in uniforms. The individual officials are the society in small, pursuing the goals of the holarchy like obedient holons.

But what about genuine sociopaths (of whom a few do manage to join our law enforcement agencies)? Are they not monsters of the id?

Strange as it may sound to say it, such individuals too can best be understood as microcosms of the larger society.

We are definitely evolved from the animals, and in our own behavior, as recently as a dozen or so millennia ago, we resembled animals much more than we resembled our present-day selves. Let us reiterate, then, that animals do not do evil at all. And I would suggest that human Psychopathic evil - 154

animals did very little evil throughout their long history as small bands of roaming hunter- gatherers. It is difficult to imagine how any particular criminal would have profited from his crime in the conditions faced by such groups.

The great turning point in the history of evil happened only 11,000 years ago, when previously nomadic humans settled down to till the soil, herd sheep, and live in communities. As long as these settlements remained small and widely separated, there still would have been little cause for conflict. But sometime a little over 5,000 years ago, the groups and communities grew to the size of ethnically identifiable tribes. My guess is that we can date the change pretty much by the invention of the first writing, because it is hard to imagine these larger groups staying glued together by means of oral communication alone. This epoch brought about the origin of certain social institutions that have persisted into contemporary times: government by a governing class (whether priestly or secular), militarism, patriarchy, slavery, public and private ownership of property. We see the conquest of one people's land by another people, and the effective ownership of some humans by other humans. We are still within that epoch, although some visionaries foresee the end of it. All these institutions of ownership have been agents of cruelty and destruction. We may balk at calling them evil, but only in the sense that the humans who invented these institutions were doing the best they could with what they had: they could not conceive of any other way of organizing themselves into these higher social units. The larger units themselves were, as philosopher Robert Pirsig says, a good thing. They freed up amazing amounts of human energy that were poured into science and art, which in turn promoted a dramatic evolution of the institutions themselves.

Once tribal nations came into existence, what was the effect upon human psychology? In Psychopathic evil - 155

the old days, there was almost no psychological freedom or individuality. Any close observer of animal pack behavior and primitive tribal behavior knows that the individual members of such groups evince only the most stereotypical behaviors. We like to vaunt our human freedom as if it is our oldest inheritance; but it is the higher level of organization typified by complex societies that actually begins to confer some of the freedom we take for granted, liberating us from the rigid tribal roles that cannot be questioned and allowing us to choose specializations within the society that most accord with our talents and inclinations.

But while we acquire the possibility of choosing our roles within these groups, we also evolve into just such cogs as efficiently serve these new machines. The "rugged individualists" who cannot fit in are ruthlessly eliminated, in keeping with well known principles of natural selection and by means of brutally efficient methods that have remained viable until the present moment. Today we are weeding out certain types that were heroic to us only a few generations ago. There aren't so many Daniel Boone knockoffs around any more: Bill Gates is the model of a modern frontiersman, because the new frontiers are technological. I like to vent my disgust with billionaire chic by joking that in a "state of nature," a nerd like Gates would not have lasted two seconds: the local bully would have killed and eaten him. But we can reverse this insight just as well: today the old-fashioned bully cannot compete in the global economy and is being devoured by the technocrats. To run our war in Afghanistan, we don't need a man of courage to rush recklessly at a machine-gunner's nest: we need a coolheaded woman with high test scores to plot the coordinates of a missile launch and make sure it does not land on the Chinese embassy by mistake.

I have already spoken of the paradox that the more we believe that we have free will, the Psychopathic evil - 156

less we actually have it, whereas the realization that we possess very little of it is the beginning of its acquisition. It is difficult to overstate how much the concept of free will deludes us about the roots of our behavior. When we examine the workings of an ant colony or a beehive, we are struck by the purely social identities of the members of the swarm; we see no individualism at all. We imagine that we are at the opposite pole, but we differ only a little from the social insects

– and some of us hardly at all. What confuses us is that we do not feel socially constructed. But probably the individual honey bee does not either. When the queen dies, he says to himself, "I don't know why, but I've just been depressed lately."

Certainly we retain some individuality, and I have already alluded in passing to a whole class of people who seem to retain a lot of it: the sociopaths. Relative to the group, these folks do go their own way. A pathogen is a germ, and a pathology is an illness, so the term

"sociopath" is apt as a description of an individual who is experienced by the organism of society as a disease.

The existence of such individuals seems to make a strong case for the existence of innate evil. But on closer glance, the sociopath does little more than act individually the way my nation acts globally. While my government rarely lives up to the standards of its best citizens, the sociopath lives down to the example of our foreign policy. I won't go all the way and say the sociopath gets his ideas from the State Department; but I will aver that the sociopath's behavior cannot be legitimately said to be strange or prodigious. There is ample precedent for his selfishness in his nation's imperialism; and his belief that "might makes right" finds an example in the conduct of his own country on the international stage.

I am here speaking of those individuals whom I have referred to as "ordinary sociopaths" Psychopathic evil - 157

– those "ethical egoists" who live by a code that is only a step or two removed from the code of

machismo and extreme masculinity. Some of the principles of that code are as follows: I'm

nobody's fool; do unto others before they can do unto you; I'm not my brother's keeper. This

philosophy is certainly known in the Pentagon under a variety of names and acronyms.

There is one final category of evil individual, and it produces the hardest test case for the theory

of social construction and the absence of innate evil. Accordingly, 99% of the writing about evil

is about these extremely rare individuals, partly because such extreme cases have an undoubted morbid fascination, but mostly because this allows us to ignore most of the real evil in the world, which is done by all the other "normal" categories of individuals. I am referring to those predatory criminals who are called "psychopathic killers," who are distinguished by the malicious joy they take in carefully stalking their fellow humans. Claggart in Melville's Billy Budd is such

a person.

The existence of a Claggart here and there does very little to disturb the points that I have

been at pains to make – that most evil is done by ordinary people in the service of respectable

ideas, and that most of the evil left over is done by ordinary people who have taken the

respectable ideas a little too far. I can live with the existence of a tiny residue of evil that appears

to be done by a few widely scattered and highly aberrant individuals whose crimes cannot readily

be explained as originating out of their prior education and treatment. But I will nonetheless

suggest that even in a case that Melville calls a "mystery of iniquity," by which he means a man

whose evil seems to be inexplicable – that is, to come from nowhere, or from "natural depravity"

– we should be careful about embracing a theory of original sin or an inherited predisposition to Psychopathic evil - 158

wickedness.

When we say that the psychopath lacks the capacity for empathy, for instance, we have only attributed to him a characteristic that may be far more widespread than we want to believe;

and we have still not explained why he preys upon people instead of simply ignoring or

disdaining them. After all, he goes much further than feeling coldness toward others: he delights

in causing pain and witnessing the pain he has caused. If we set aside our horror at this quality,

and look upon it clinically, we have to start by admitting that it cannot be found in any other

species, and that there is no clear evidence of its existence in prehistory. It is another emergent

property, and it most likely emerged very recently in our development – almost certainly in

conjunction with our creation of modern large-scale societies and our acquisition of consciousness. Disconcertingly, then, rather than evincing a purely individualistic stance, psychopathy is a quality that can arise only out of a distinctly social orientation. After all, an

intellectual pleasure in destroying another person is the attribute of a highly aware person who,

far from displaying inhuman indifference to other people, is exquisitely attuned to them and

determined to forge very personal, if terribly malignant, bonds with them. Claggart knows better

than anyone else on the ship what sort of person Billy Budd is, and how and why Billy's qualities

make him revered by his shipmates. Precisely this knowledge spurs Claggart to torment Billy

and attempt to kill him. Claggart's campaign is a conscious undertaking based upon a

sophisticated and refined understanding of the play of personalities in the social arena. Such a

crime is very distinct from the evils perpetrated on the basis of abstractions. I am fairly certain

that Timothy McVeigh could not have killed even one of his 168 victims by hand; he certainly Psychopathic evil - 159

could not have killed all of them. He operated the way Stalin operated when he pointed to a map and told the secret police to wipe out a nest of traitors. But psychopaths operate "up close and personal": they enjoy interacting with their victims. They are careerists in the interpersonal arena. More than lasting renown in civic affairs or money and power in the socio-economic realm, they crave total domination in one-on-one relationships.

A few psychopaths stalk and kill strangers, but the prototypical predation involves a psychopath's canny manipulation of an unsuspecting dupe who thinks of him as some sort of partner or friend. Indeed, part of what fascinates us about psychopaths is their keen understanding of how to exploit the weaknesses of their victims. Let us contrast the psychopathic individual with the autistic. This proves to be a highly illuminating exercise, because autistics have zero capacity for empathy; but they also cannot read social cues at all, whereas psychopaths often exhibit mastery at reading clues to the behavior of other people. As one result, we see that autistics are almost completely incapable of telling lies, and rarely have any concept at all of aggrandizing their personalities, whereas psychopaths lie continually, sometimes brilliantly, and have no concept other than the aggrandizement of their personalities.

Autistics are our most law-abiding citizens. This is, or should be, a disturbing fact: apparently, psychopathic crime does not automatically proceed out of a lack of empathy for other people and alienation from the social sphere; instead, it appears to proceed out of something more accurately described as an hypersensitive awareness of society's "rules of the game" and a heightened urgency about winning by any means at all. Put this way, the urges of the psychopath are clearly placed on the continuum of the human normal, and only their expression is beyond the pale.

Suppose I were to say that society really is, whatever else it may profess to be, an arena Psychopathic evil - 160

wherein personality expresses itself, and that the meaning of life is the aggrandizement of personality. Put this way, I do seem to be talking about a society that is recognizably our own and about some people that we all know. It is unusual indeed that, unlike most of the rest of us, the psychopath does not need the approbation of others and is willing to perform for an audience of one – or two, if we count his victim. But his answer to "what's it all about" may not be so different from the answer of his fellow humans. Does it boil down simply to "pleasure in winning"? If so, we may be entitled to say that although we would never choose his particular blood sport to letter in, we do not deny that we recognize that he plays on another part of the same field that we also have to play on, whether we do so reluctantly or enthusiastically.

All careerism is nested in a competitive endeavor pitting the individual against his colleagues; and the duties of the career are likely to promote the subordination of some groups of people to other groups. Fewer and fewer wars are fought for purposes of economic aggrandizement: they have indeed become "politics by other means." In the international arena, we see that events like the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States are entirely about a clash of values and not about narrow economic self-interest and utilitarian goals. And domestic politics is more and more about the war on my next-door neighbor, not to seize his property, but to bring him into conformity with the national Zeitgeist, and about his resistance, through the invocation of his legal "rights," to this attempt to impose the collective will on him. Confining our view to the political scene, we see that the two Bush presidents first clawed their way to the top job in their chosen profession by savaging their fellow Republican candidates; then they attempted to force the values of corporate oligarchy and Christian fundamentalism down the throats of their fellow countrymen. Because they operated through a mass organization, the Psychopathic evil - 161

Republican Party, in a field of endeavor called electoral politics, which is thought to take as one of its proper spheres of activity the realignment of national values, we do not call them psychopaths. But those we do call psychopaths merely dispense with "the middleman" – with the organization and its professed objectives. The psychopathic loner does not first compete for the top spot in the hierarchical pecking order of an institution, then direct that institution's policies against certain of his neighbors with a view to compelling them to submit to the dominant ethos: instead, he strikes directly at one particular neighbor, without justifying the act in terms of anything other than the pleasure of domination. He takes his pleasure straight, without any pious palaver about saving the neighbor from himself or saving society from the neighbor.

I want to stay with this point: the psychopath is on the continuum with the rest of us, and his qualities are recognizable exaggerations of, or even dead ringers for, our own. Let us go down the "psychopathy checklist" developed by psychologist Robert D. Hare, which offers a dozen symptoms: the psychopath is said to be glib and superficial, egocentric and grandiose, deceitful and manipulative, and impulsive; he demonstrates a pronounced need for excitement, a lack of responsibility, a lack of empathy, and an inability to feel remorse or guilt; he exhibits shallow emotions, poor behavior controls, early behavior problems, and adult antisocial behaviors.

Unfortunately, just as many social virtues can be conducive to evil, so many of the symptoms of psychopathy can be reframed as virtues. Precisely such a "deconstruction" of

Hare's checklist was undertaken by an ex-con who had been diagnosed as a psychopath earlier in his life. In his response, he reframed glibness as "articulation skills" and grandiosity as the effort to attain a goal by reaching high. He noted shrewdly that we are all manipulative to some degree, Psychopathic evil - 162

and that "positive manipulation" – a carrot instead of a stick to motivate our children to do well

in school, for instance – is common. He associated impulsivity with spontaneity and creativity,

and the need for excitement with "living on the edge" and "living life to the fullest." He labeled

empathy toward an enemy a sign of weakness – and I would add that empathy is stigmatized by

many of our most renowned moralists as "misplaced compassion" and that the mandatory

sentencing strictures of our criminal code are designed to prevent a judge from exercising it.

Lack of responsibility, our critic observed, is such a common weakness that it can hardly be said

to distinguish a psychopath. Similarly, "shallow emotion" is so broad a symptom that someone

might be labeled psychopathic because of an outburst of anger. The con man's explication of

"poor behavior controls" was especially interesting, both as a rationalization and an implicit criticism of much social psychology: he argued that "violent and aggressive outbursts may be a defensive mechanism, a false front, a tool for survival in a jungle." Finally, juvenile and adult offenders, according to our expert, may be nonconformists rather than bad people.

It is easy to see that this gentleman's analysis is self-serving, and no doubt Hare wants us to savor the spectacle of a psychopath engaged in the very act of trying to pull the wool over our eyes; but I would not want to debate this sophist in front of a panel of logicians who had not already made up their minds in keeping with conventional moralism. "Interestingly," Hare comments, "he had nothing to say about lack of remorse or guilt." But if the refutation of the other eleven criteria is conceded to be effective, then the misdiagnosed psychopath has done nothing to feel remorseful or guilty about.

The artful reframing of these putatively negative qualities reminds us that the behaviors of psychopaths, especially when viewed in isolation rather than all together, are part of the Psychopathic evil - 163

spectrum of normal human behavior and in some cases close to the center of the bell curve. It is also a sobering exercise to further reframe these traits and place them in a different context.

Suppose we say of someone that he is a total nonconformist and has a quick tongue; that he is cocky, goes for the gusto, seizes the brass ring, follows his star; is careless about money, works when he feels like it, is easily riled, looks out for number one, lives life to the hilt. Suppose that someone is a famous athlete or a celebrity.

Almost the only thing Freud got right is the motivation of the artist: "honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women." The artist and, of course, everyone else. I subsume all five of Freud's motivations under the rubric of careerism. Most people are unimaginative: their careers are strictly mercantile. People like William Rehnquist, on the other hand, go for what I call a moral career – they want honor and power even more than money and fame. All careers are in the social domain, but some people operate in a much narrower sphere. They want power that is intensely personal, in a one-on-one relationship. Casanova specialized in women; but the channel can be narrower still. There are individuals who live to dominate only a single other person: husbands who terrorize their wives; parents who suck the life out of, not even all their children, but one particular child. The psychopath too has his career: and its satisfactions, while more violent and extreme, may not be so very different in kind from the satisfactions of a boxer who knocks out his opponent, or a hockey player who "beats" the goalie and scores, or an actor who will do anything to get the part, or a compulsive womanizer who leaves a string of gullible victims seduced and abandoned but at least alive, all the while putting notches on his bedpost.

My point is not that hockey players and actors are psychopaths, although some may well be: my point is only that we should not con ourselves into thinking that the qualities that make up Psychopathic evil - 164

a psychopath must have been acquired on another planet. Toned down just a little, they

characterize the successful salesman, entrepreneur, corporate high roller, and middle linebacker.

And lest I be misunderstood as stigmatizing certain professions, these traits are certainly not

unknown to veterans of academic tenure battles, scientific peer review scandals, and cultural

controversies. Recently, a respected performing ensemble in Washington gave what it thought

was a world premiere of a substantive work by a composer who came in person and basked in the

glory of the well-received performance. It turned out that the piece in its entirety, from first note to last, was the published work of another composer, little known and long-deceased. The

plagiarizer refused to admit any dereliction at all and offered a series of explanations that could

make the psychopathic hall of fame.

I may seem to have wandered far afield. In the most egregious type of case, involving, let us say,

the abduction, rape, murder, and dismemberment of a child, it certainly does not resolve the

matter to say that the perpetrator is a careerist in the interpersonal arena and then compare him to

a plagiarist. When the act in question is both statistically rare and repugnant to the feelings of

almost all humans including war criminals and organized crime bosses, the attempt to place the

actor on a continuum of the human normal may appear to be ludicrous on its face. Many humans

are coldly competitive, bereft of compassion and fellow-feeling, and even given to fantasies of

torture and domination; nonetheless, few of them cross the line into predation and murder.

Similarly, while thousands of self-styled militiamen applauded Timothy McVeigh for blowing up

the Murrah Building, he alone did it, and in so doing made himself one man in 300 million. Why

did he do it? Every predisposing factor that we can think of will be refuted by the common-sense Psychopathic evil - 165

observation that the same factor appears to be present in dozens, hundreds, and thousands of

other people.

It does not follow from this that a single "X-factor" remains to be isolated in the laboratory of human biology or morality; and it is even less likely that conservative moralists have already identified it as "freely willed evil in accordance with original sin" or "demonic possession." As I have already noted, such an answer is semantically empty: this is apparent if we rephrase the question and ask why some people, but not others, succumb to the original sin that is present in all of us, and freely choose to give in to it in the specific form of mass murder.

I believe that the X-factor must exist, by definition: it is the last card played; it is the triggering mechanism, the catalyst for the slipping of the leash, the straw of personal impulse that breaks the camel's back of social inhibition. Theoretically we should be able to find it – it will be whatever is left over after we compare McVeigh to everyone else in the world, concentrating especially on all those other pretend-paramilitaries who liked to run around in camouflage and lived in a fantasy world populated by the evil agents of the Zionist Occupation Government, who nonetheless stopped short of doing what he did. But aside from the practical difficulty of making the study and certifying the result, there are two points that suggest the irrelevancy of the undertaking. First, it is a logical fallacy to assume that the X-factor is generic, rather than unique to each actor. In Timothy McVeigh's case, it was idiosyncratic to McVeigh and it is never going to be repeated in all human history. The final trigger was a convergence (to use Thomas Hardy's suggestive word): a lifetime's conditioning by his particular family and his particular socialization combining with the fatuous political ideas that he fortuitously acquired, all of it kindled to the flash point by his passionate ruminations on the "meaning" of the incidents at Psychopathic evil - 166

Waco and Ruby Ridge. We would like the X-factor to be a twisted chromosome or, preferably, an identifiable moment of giving in to the dark force while recognizing that it is the dark force; and we would like a confession from McVeigh to that effect. But the X-factor in the Oklahoma

City bombing is just as likely to have been Attorney General Janet Reno's decision two years earlier to authorize an assault on the compound in Waco. Whatever the inborn darkness of

McVeigh's heart, it is unlikely that it would have impelled him to this act without the stimulus of certain acts of the government to which he thought he was responding. And to this he did confess.

I know that there will be many readers who will think that I would not dare to make such a remark unless I disapproved of Reno's handling of Waco, and a few who will think that I am captious and even reprehensible for seeming to place some portion of the blame for the

Oklahoma City bombing, however minuscule, on her shoulders. Not at all. The force of the illustration lies precisely in its absurdity, to use that word in the sense made famous by the

French existential philosophers. I want to disabuse the rationalists of their strange belief that we ought to be able to predict the actions of a psychopath. Their belief that the X-factor will turn out to be a mutant gene or an anomaly in a part of the brain, or that it has already been identified as

Everyman's tainted will or Freudian id, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

There is no common denominator. Each individual's X-factor belongs to him alone.

What we need to examine are the letters A thorough W, which are common to the perpetrators of atrocities, and known to us. Among these are the cognitive impairment that I have called narcissism, which limits empathy and can coexist with a penchant for thinking in grand abstractions; the moral illness of careerism, which may express itself in a rabid Psychopathic evil - 167

commitment to a cause, complete with ideological blinders; a personal history of childhood mistreatment, which comprises not merely physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that would be recognized in a court of law but also the myriad indignities that can be piled upon a child who is treated as a means to parental ends and not as an end in himself; and finally, the acquisition of unchecked power, whether Hitler's over an entire nation, a father's over an entire family, or

McVeigh's over the Murrah Building at 9:00 in the morning. Not even all of these together are guaranteed to produce a violent act in any given person or situation. The X-factor that will tip the scales will differ for every individual in the psychopathic gallery – it will turn out to be the pressure of a particular thought keyed to a specific situation. What triggers a psychopath to follow through on his fantasies and actually harm someone may be an innocuous and even kindly gesture by that person. Claggart would never have gone so far as to try to kill any man had not

Billy Budd been assigned to his ship; and Claggart's escalation from covert petty harassment to attempted murder of one particular man occurs after Billy accidentally spills some soup near

Claggart's shoes. I certainly agree that it makes no sense to blame the precipitation of the tragedy on Billy himself. After all, he could have been assigned to any other ship in the Queen's Navy, spilled soup in front of any other personage, and lived. But it makes no more sense to blame it solely on Claggart's "natural depravity" – this inmost propensity would never have ripened to murder had not Billy come aboard. Melville's mystery of iniquity does not lie in original sin and the heart of darkness; neither does it lie in Billy's unlucky assignment to Claggart's ship: it lies in

"the convergence of the twain."

The X-factor is the joker in the deck – and the joker, remember, is outside the orderly hierarchy of the regular cards and does not actualize any of its multiple potentialities until it is Psychopathic evil - 168

played. A card sharp can carry the other 52 in his memory and tell us which ones have already

turned up in the course of the game and which have not; but the greatest skill in the world cannot

enable him to say ahead of time what value will be assigned to the joker when it finally appears.

Because the X-factor is personal and idiosyncratic – the spilling of a bowl of soup – we cannot

predict it: we can only do a post-mortem. This frustrates us: we feel a rage to pin down the final

causes of things. But if we were to turn our whole attention to the realm of the possible, we

would find that we are in an excellent position to begin the wholesale eradication of evil. We

know a great deal about the other 52 cards in the deck, and the joker is only the last card played.

If we were to neutralize all the predisposing factors that we can do something about, then we

would not need to do anything about the final triggering factor. The X-factor, whatever its nature

– and even if it were generic instead of varying from person to person – would remain forever latent.

In the language of the theory of causation, those earlier letters of the alphabet, or the other

52 cards in the deck, are necessary and contributory causes of violence, but none of them alone and not even all of them together are sufficient to cause the deed. Critical mass is reached only with the addition of the X-factor. But the X-factor is also not sufficient by itself – it takes all the other necessary causes plus the X-factor coming in at the end. Unless we have a clear grasp of this, we go down the road Ron Rosenbaum traveled in hopes of explaining Hitler. We dismiss such contributory factors as the brutal beatings Hitler endured from his father, because they are not sufficient to explain the Holocaust – after all, many beaten children grow up to be pacifists.

Then, in attempting to isolate the one factor that tipped the scales, we overlook both the likelihood that it proved to be sufficient only by virtue of its being combined with all the merely Psychopathic evil - 169

necessary conditions, and that it was finally nothing more, or nothing less, than the action of all

the necessary and contributory causes concatenating at an exact historical moment in a particular

person. The X-factor of the Final Solution is found in Hitler alone, in the uniqueness of Hitler's

never-to-be-repeated personality converging with the never-to-be-repeated historical moment.

Even if we could "solve" the riddle of the uniqueness of Hitler's X-factor, this would do nothing

to illuminate the X-factor of the Cambodian killing fields.

Obviously, there are commonalities between Hitler and Pol Pot; but because they are

mundane – narcissism, careerism, ideological mania, absolute power – we ignore them at our

peril, while trying to find the chemical imbalance in the brain or the "psychopathic moment."

This, then, is the reason that I begin by assimilating the psychopath to the continuum of

normality and noting that the psychopathy checklist gives us qualities that are depressingly

familiar to us in everyday life. As a practical matter, we can do something about these values

that are already corrupt, that start to shade toward the psychopathic in maladapted individuals. It

is also just a matter of seeing the empirical truth: psychopaths are not literally monsters; they are

not demons whose shoes cleverly hide their cloven hooves; they are not creatures of another

species or another planet. There is a link between our "normal" ethos of competition and

careerism, our customary stance of social cohesion for "us" and violent retribution against

"them," our ongoing enculturation of boys to be hard and contemptuous of "feelings," and the

psychopath's abnormal propensity for violent predation and domination. Whatever the unique

factors that made him the only person to perpetrate a uniquely horrific act, Timothy McVeigh

was first conditioned by our shared values, and had even been decorated by the military for his

participation in a great violent undertaking that used explosives against an opponent who had Psychopathic evil - 170

been confidently identified as the enemy of freedom and placed outside the pale of humanity. It

will be indignantly replied that McVeigh murdered only "innocent victims" (a solecism too

established and too emotionally satisfying to ever go away). Does anyone imagine that the

bombs we dropped on Baghdad were so "smart" that they blew up only the guilty? In fact,

George H. W. Bush pointedly spared the life of the guilty party after killing 160,000 of the

innocents. So while the last pathogen, the mysterious X-factor that tipped the scales and made

McVeigh the only possible executant of his evil act, may remain unknown, it is irrelevant to an analysis of the evil he did, because only after all the other factors were in place did his idiosyncratic quirk come into play. By treating the causes that we do know about, we will innoculate humanity against the final few that we don't know about and won't ever have the ability to predict. Take away the inane but vicious fantasy-world that McVeigh shared with thousands of other members of anti-government militias; take away the knee-jerk jingoism and proto-fascism that he shared with millions of fellow "patriots"; take away, at the highest level of respectability, the everyday tirades about toughness and manliness that are the stock in trade of right-wing radio hosts – McVeigh could have listened to them for a decade and, while receiving no encouragement to do the despicable thing that he did, rarely have heard a discouraging word spoken against his paranoid fantasy of a small band of doughty white Christian patriots beset by hordes of liberal scum in a decaying America – take away all that and the mysterious X-factor at the heart of McVeigh's personal darkness would never have been activated.

Where the evil has such a clear political dimension, it is especially blinkered, and dangerous, to regard it as emanating purely from the X-factor of personal, idiosyncratic evil, because then we neglect to address any of the contributory causes on principle: we say, for Psychopathic evil - 171

instance, that we must not give in to terrorism, no matter how unjust our previous course of action has been, and how rational the opposition to it. Having suffered the calamity of

September 11, 2001, we wanted to round up all the swarthy men on earth and check them out for the X-factor; and in our desire to label the attack on us an example of pure malevolence and evil, we told ourselves that our prior actions in the Middle East could not have played any part in it.

But we are sadly deluded if we think that a personal wild card of nihilistic destructiveness is the explanation for Osama Bin Laden's decision to attack the World Trade Center, while his stated political and theological reasons are not. Even if he only used the ideals he espoused as a smokescreen for his pathological hatred, the attack on the World Trade Center depended upon recruiting many others to the plot and having them all keep faith with it. The members of al

Qaeda would not have carried out bin Laden's plan unless his stated reasons were plausible to them; so those reasons should be addressed even if they were pretexts on his part.

And where the evil act is shorn of all such political rationalizations and stands naked before us in its pure destructiveness and coldness, we would still do well to remember its connection to our quotidian values. At the very time that I was concluding this chapter, a series of sniper attacks began to terrorize the nation's capital and its suburbs, claiming 13 randomly chosen victims within a three-week period, each picked off with a single highly accurate shot.

Whoever was behind these crimes was shooting for sport and gloating over the frustration of law enforcement officials. It seemed as though the purely literary psychopath of hundreds of best- sellers had stepped off the pages; and perhaps the horror was doubled when it turned out that two men, a middle-aged adult and a juvenile, were responsible. But I could not refrain from noting Psychopathic evil - 172

that, in every particular except one, the perpetrators operated exactly like military snipers: the challenge that they faced, both to execute the shot and then escape, with the stakes being life and death both for the victim and potentially for themselves, was exactly the same in both situations.

The one differing particular was, of course, that they engaged in this practice against their fellow citizens during peacetime. I do not mean to minimize this difference, but sometimes we make the elementary mistake of thinking that what matters to us must have mattered to them. I have myself, elsewhere in this work, questioned our sentimentality about civilians and our corresponding callousness toward the uniformed young men who die in combat. The families of

Vietnamese soldiers who were killed at long range by a single shot from a sniper's rifle no doubt mourned their losses as deeply as the families of the victims of these domestic sharpshooters.

We cannot train military hit men, and glorify their exploits, without risking the possibility that some of the people who know about them and read about them will blur the moral distinction between taking out Vietnamese soldiers who are completely unknown to them and gunning down suburban shoppers who are completely unknown to them; and indeed, the adult was an Army veteran who had served during the Gulf War and was obsessed with conducting his life, and running the life of his teenaged associate, in accordance with his crackpot ideas about "military discipline." Judging this shooting spree from one template, we can say that it was among the most cowardly and cold-blooded campaigns in the history of serial killing, and that the snipers must accordingly be among the greatest monsters in the annals of psychopathy. We are easily impelled in this direction by gauging the extent of our own terror and wishing to find an

"objective correlative" for its devastating effect upon us. Judging from another template, however, we may have to admit that many of the shooters' motivations and satisfactions were Psychopathic evil - 173

depressingly mundane, and differed little from those of deer hunters. Again, I do not wish to be misunderstood: by turning their high-powered rifle against their fellow citizens, rather than against grazing animals or enemy soldiers, these men separated themselves from all other sportsmen and all other military marksmen in the country. The mastermind of the duo, like

McVeigh, is one out of 300 million, so statistically rare that we are entirely justified, for once, in paying such extravagant attention to his saga. But I will say it for the last time: the mysterious factor that propelled him over the line was the joker in his deck and the last card played. All the earlier cards were consistent with an unremarkable life that had attracted little notice and left even his closest relatives and neighbors unable to imagine that he was the killer. We have to begin to question how a man who has 52 predisposing factors to psychopathic murder can live among his fellow citizens and seem so normal to them.

Scott Peck writes memorably about the clammy feeling he had in the presence of evil. This raises the question of whether there isn't really something like a "force of evil" in the universe, which, taking possession of a human agent, is therefore the X-factor. Such is clearly the thesis of journalist Lance Morrow's Evil: An Investigation, although he hesitates to say so outright.

The palpable sense we have of a dark force operating is, I believe, owing to power alone.

If we encounter the narcissistic certainty, the crazed ideology, the violent fantasies, the grandiose abstractions, in a homeless panhandler or a house painter, we do not feel the dark force. If a shirtless man at the laundromat begins babbling about the mud people and the Zionist

Occupation Government, we just think, "What a moron." If we stop to think about it, we may say that he is evil, or spouts evil, but we do not feel a wave of fear upon encountering him. Psychopathic evil - 174

Roaming the airwaves listening to call-in radio shows, I have certainly encountered genuine evil,

but it seemed tawdry and stupid to me, not prodigious and frightening, because it was expressed

in the same abstractions that characterized Hitler's speeches during all the pre-war years when he

was treated internationally as a clown rather than a menace. Many years ago, I heard a gentleman

attempt to cut through the abortion debate by proposing the criminalization of all abortions and

the execution of all doctors and patients who violated the ban. In the aftermath of our victory

over the Taliban in Afghanistan, I heard a caller lamenting about our weakness and lack of

resolve, even though we had struck violently and efficiently and routed the opposing forces:

when asked how he would wage the war on terrorism, he responded that any country thought to

have sponsored terrorism should be annihilated. He was quite clear that he meant that the entire

country should be bombed into extinction with thermonuclear weapons, killing hundreds of

millions of people. I knew that these were genuinely evil ideas and that their purveyors believed

in them, but I did not experience queasiness. Nor do I experience uneasiness listening to Michael

Savage, the most narcissistically impaired of all talk-show hosts, even knowing that he speaks not only for himself but for his millions of listeners, because I also know that he and they are powerless to effect his violent solutions to global problems.

There is another reason I shrug off the purveyors of these violent fantasies: in the aptly named realm of "talk radio," these ranters are mainly engaged in exhibitions of bluster and chest- thumping intended to symbolize the manly virtues of moral clarity and toughness. Mark Levin spouts a toxic stream of apocalyptic right-wing drivel on his program, but he also wrote a best- selling memoir of his dog; and I do not doubt that most of the rest of the truculent windbags are not only kind to animals but even make decent neighbors. Psychopathic evil - 175

The closest I have come to having a metabolic reaction to the presence of evil occurred when I was driving through Michigan one day and a local talk-show featured former major- league baseball player Billy Bean, who had written a book about his struggle to hide his homosexuality during his playing days. It may be interesting to examine why I felt queasy.

Bean's comments, about the discomfort of denying his gayness to himself while participating in the macho world of sports, and the liberation he had experienced when he came out publicly as a gay man and was able to live openly and authentically, were mild and unmemorable. The host himself was unhelpful: although he was officially broad-minded and tolerant, it seemed to be very important to him to try to determine if gay men who start out straight, even going so far as to get married, are "deluded" – that is, as yet unaware that they are gay – or "living a lie." Perhaps the judgmentalism implied in this silly, if not noxious, distinction set the tone for the audience participation. One caller said that no one really cares if Bean is gay, so why is he screaming for acceptance? A second told Bean that he is selfish and destructive, and too immature to face up to the consequences of his behavior. A third caller, hoping to shine a light on the role of free will in the sin of homosexuality, posed the rhetorical question, "Are murderers born murderers?" These callers had not been merely annoyed by listening to Bean – they had gone to the trouble of calling the station and waiting patiently through the commercials to tell him personally how nauseating they found him. It was this that gave me the sickened feeling that Peck talks about: like the prototypical psychopath, each of the three callers wanted to enter into a personal relationship with Bean for the purpose of hurting him – they wanted to tell him one-on-one, they wanted him to hear directly from them, that he was pathetic, disgusting, and sinful. And they did have a modicum of real power: he was their captive audience. If they Psychopathic evil - 176

failed to wound him by their remarks, it was not for want of trying.

These people did not contemplate evil on the scale of the caller who proposed to execute thousands of women who resort to illegal abortions or the caller who wanted to kill millions of inhabitants of foreign countries. But while most blowhards who pontificate about public issues have no power to do anything other than fulminate impotently, and tend to do so in cloudy generalities, the callers to Billy Bean were actuated by malice toward a particular person and were given the opportunity to try to direct it toward him. It was their momentary possession of this real power, however slight, and their eagerness to use it for hateful purposes, that made me feel a breath of the bad wind that feels like the dark force.

One of my friends, whose parents would fit very neatly into Scott Peck's book about evil, believes in that dark force, based upon her profound personal experience; but these parents were never able to impress anyone other than their children with their malevolent powers. If their behavior inside the home had been known to others outside it, they would have been regarded as noxious vermin – but not, I think, as dangers to the republic. But at one time their power was as absolute as Hitler's over Germany. It was when their children were small. That power, allied to moral illness, is the dark force; and the first place to begin trying to eradicate it is the family.

Narcissism in high places

Ronald Reagan makes a strange and special case in the anthropology of evil. He publicly and unabashedly espoused, with dogged consistency, the worn-out values of the ruling classes of the

19th Century – the Protestant work ethic, unfettered capitalism, unbridled imperialism, and

American exceptionalism – and he personally possessed a strong component of tunnel vision and "Irish" obstinacy; but all this was masked by his cheerfulness, affability, and optimism, and palliated by his intellectual laziness and self-satisfied hedonism.

Reagan died during George W. Bush's reelection campaign in 2004, and a comparison of the 40th president with the 43rd is instructive. Reagan, like the younger Bush, was simplistic in his reasoning, uninformed about details, aggressive, militaristic, and dedicated to redistributing the wealth from the poor to the rich. But Bush, like his father, was also slick, manipulative, intolerant of opposition, obsessed with loyalty, and willing to sink to any depth of political depravity to win an election. Reagan, by marked contrast, was honest, guileless, and – most remarkable of all in politics – free of resentment of any kind. It is impossible to imagine him keeping an "enemies list" or even bothering to remember who had voted against him. He had such confidence in himself that he never felt the need to "play politics." He probably did not even think of himself as the "Great Communicator," as he was dubbed by the media: he did not attribute rhetorical wizardry to himself, but fondly imagined that it was the goodness and common sense of his ideas and the force of his logic that won over voters. As a close student of Narcissism in high places - 178

narcissism, I am especially impressed with Reagan's lack of animus against his political foes.

Most highly narcissistic people can explain opposition to themselves and their ideas only as

expressions of malice. But Reagan did not go down that path and was rewarded by a highly

compliant opposition party. After his retirement, the Republicans abandoned his genial

tendencies and took "the politics of personal destruction" to its modern nadir. At the time of his

death, Reagan's qualities of magnanimity, which were attractive even to his staunchest opponents

at the time of his presidency; seemed almost unimaginable: the White House had already cranked

up a campaign of relentless smears against John Kerry.

If historians analyze Reagan's administration soberly, I think they will give him very little

credit for the implosion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War; and they

will regard his gutting of the progressive income tax as a great step backward in the quest for a

just society. But they will have to admit that he was perhaps the greatest political master ever to

occupy the Oval Office. The majority of Americans loved having him as their president; and his

fellow politicians fell all over themselves giving him what he wanted. The torpor of his last two

years in office was owing, not so much to his lame duck status, or to the Iran Contra scandal, but

to his having achieved, by 1986, everything he had set out to do. Even with the Democrats

controlling the House of Representatives throughout both of his terms in office, he had wiped his

own slate clean.

In attempting to render a sensible assessment of his presidency, we encounter, to the

fullest degree, the problem posed by our failure to recognize narcissism in our public figures.

We have the epithet readily to hand as a put-down for movie stars and athletes who display extraordinary self-absorption – indeed, we often misuse the term to label extravagant braggarts Narcissism in high places - 179

and other celebrities who are "just too much" – but we often do not recognize the more mundane

quality I have been at pains to describe in earlier chapters, which is characterized by

psychological brittleness and the inability to see other points of view. The renewal of the arms

race between the United States and the Soviet Union, ten years after that staunch anti-Communist

Richard Nixon took steps to end it, was owing entirely to one man's certainty that the Soviets were not just evil, but willfully evil. A trillion dollars was sucked into the black hole of an unnecessary military buildup because that man was convinced that his own conduct was impeccable while that of his opponents was explicable only on the premise that they were consciously malevolent.

Since we are unable or unwilling to make the diagnosis of narcissism based upon such public performances, what most often brings it to our attention is an intimate episode involving the "narcissistic wound": a narcissist will often be terribly hurt by something trivial that I said or did to him that, it turns out, he misperceived; or, spookily, he will be hurt by my being hurt by something he did that was not trivial and was correctly perceived.

Now when our subject is an actor who has reinvented himself as a public speaker and personality, we are not going to get many glimpses of his private emotions. And in any case, we should be able to infer Ronald Reagan's narcissism from the complete record of the simplistic ideas that embodied his world-view, which revealed his unshakeable confidence in statements that were inordinately silly.

Nonetheless, at the very beginning of his political career, before he had perfected his glibly reassuring persona, he did slip in front of an audience, and the incident affords great interest psychologically because it is a perfect microcosm of the narcissistic wound. In March of Narcissism in high places - 180

1966, while seeking the Republican nomination for the governorship of California, Reagan went

before the National Negro Republican Assembly to try to drum up black support. Just two years

earlier, he had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that had integrated public accommodations.

Naturally, this audience wanted him to explain his record of opposition to civil rights legislation;

and the other candidate at the meeting seized the opportunity to say that he would have voted for the public accommodations act. But nobody drew blood; Reagan was about to emerge unscathed. Lou Cannon's admiring biography gives the sequel:

The questioning would have ended there except that Reagan rose to his feet and said he wanted to make a point of personal privilege. "I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature," Reagan yelled at the surprised delegates. "Don't anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that – in this or any other group." He then stalked out of the meeting. Some reports of his departure said Reagan had tears in his eyes.

Before examining what this reveals about Reagan personally, it might be worth while digressing a moment here into the larger arena of politics, because the Republican Party is now in its fourth decade of pushing programs that hurt easily identifiable groups of people while claiming to be completely free of any animus toward these groups. Where once Democrats sought to portray

Republicans as racists, figuring to reap an electoral bonanza if they could make the charge stick,

Republicans now eagerly accuse the Democrats of having called them racists. And where it used to damn a candidate if it could be shown that he had opposed school desegregation or the civil rights movement, now all it takes to certify that he is not a racist is his own statement that he is not, plus our inability to find in his record any overtly race-baiting remarks or crude name-calling on minorities. So, for instance, when members of Congress pass a drug law that punishes a person for the possession of five grams of one form of cocaine, whereas the same penalty is not Narcissism in high places - 181

triggered unless he possesses five hundred grams of another form of cocaine, and it turns out that the first form is favored by black users and the second form by white users, the press and the public no longer see the discriminatory outcome as evidence of racism, because the law does not mention blacks and whites and the legislators said nothing about race. Or when Republican senators deny a judicial appointment to a black candidate nominated by President Clinton because, as a member of a lower court, he supported capital punishment only 71% of the time, they cry out indignantly that they are not racists, and sure enough the record shows that not one

Republican senator made a speech opposing the candidate "because he is black."

Ronald Reagan took the politics of professed sincerity to the last degree of brazenness and effectiveness. No one ever heard him make an unequivocally bigoted statement: he simply pursued policies that hurt blacks, poor people, women, and children and favored rich white adult males. When challenged, he deflected all questions about the effects of his policies by blandly asserting that he was trying to help blacks, poor people, women, and children, and that he was succeeding. Whereupon most members of the media went back to sleep.

Now we might make a tentative diagnosis of narcissism simply based on Reagan's confidence that this ploy would play successfully before a black audience. But let us look closely at the incident. Reagan is wounded – there are tears in his eyes. My god, what have they done to him? First of all, nothing: at a political gathering, they asked him a question about his position on a political issue. Second, not what he perceives: nobody has impugned his integrity or accused him of bigotry.

He has voluntarily gone before the assembly as a candidate for high office, hoping to reap political advantage from his appearance, and he has faced a question his audience would Narcissism in high places - 182

naturally have asked and would have been derelict not to have asked.

Indeed, they had every right to ask, "What have you done to us?" Plenty, it turns out. In

1966, there were very few people outside the old Confederacy who wanted to be known for their

principled opposition to the law that finally allowed blacks to drink from the same water

fountains as whites.

So we have the configuration of the narcissistic wound: Nobody in the assembly had

acted against Reagan; he, on the other hand, had acted aggressively against the paramount

interests of all the members of the assembly. (He would go on doing so for the next 22 years, in

matters large and small: ending the enforcement of fair housing laws; trying to get tax-exempt status for avowedly racist institutions; supporting apartheid in South Africa; scoffing at the holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. His public record could not be clearer that he never felt the least amount of discomfort over segregation, but instead bridled over every government attempt to end it. During the 1980 campaign, his wife Nancy, speaking to her husband from a Chicago fund-raiser on an amplified telephone hookup, said "Oh, Ronnie, I wish you could be here to see all these beautiful white people.")

But. Reagan knows in his heart that he is a good man. He's told everyone that he is. And there are some who seem to doubt it, which hurts him to the quick.

It was all there on display on March 6, 1966: both his one-trick political pony of sincere professions, and his narcissistic rage if anyone tried to unhorse him; both his comfortable willingness to support policies that do grave and palpable damage to entire segments of the population, and his amazement at learning that anyone in or out of those segments could be unhappy with him. But from that day forward Reagan was, as Patricia Schroeder complained so Narcissism in high places - 183

aptly, covered with Teflon. Nothing stuck to him.

Reagan's narcissism is patent. But since narcissism is almost an admission card to the game of politics, what makes Reagan interesting, and curious, is the way his narcissism interacted with his other qualities, which are rarely to be found in a man who rises so high in life.

To begin our analysis, let us remind ourselves of the difference between stupidity and ignorance. We are told as children that stupidity is a lack of innate capacity, whereas ignorance is a lack of information: therefore, if we have the wherewithal to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, "ignorance is no excuse." I have given my own twist to the concept of stupidity by emphasizing that many people will themselves to be ignorant – they consciously refuse to learn anything new.

Reagan was both stupid and ignorant, to a degree that is positively incredible in a man who was twice elected governor of the most populous state of the union and twice more elected president of the United States. To complete an unholy trinity of personality traits, he was extraordinarily arrogant – by definition, we might say, since "arrogant" would be the best word to describe a person who is stupidly resolute about his ignorance. But Reagan's arrogance, like his narcissism, was hidden from view in plain sight by his joviality, public ease, polish, and mastery of the vocabulary of "character." He was a man who was trained as an actor; but more to the point, he was someone who performed on cue whenever he was publicly exhibited. He knew how to ape the gestures of candor, courage, conviction, steadfastness, and good cheer proper to the leader of a noble band of brothers about to take the field against the forces of evil. He was at his very best when he had to eulogize fallen astronauts. He could make his voice "catch" with emotion on any word his speechwriters underlined. I used to tear my hair out when people would Narcissism in high places - 184

tell me that he "sounded great." Of course he did.

In fact, no American president, with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, ever

fixated to such a degree on a handful of ideas and held to them in the face of all the contrary facts

and all the justified criticism. He knew what he knew; he could not be swayed; his ears were

stopped against all the outcry. Near the end of his second term, when he delivered his State of

the Union address, he decried the huge budget deficits that he alone had created, showing no

consciousness whatsoever that he had created them; when Democrats applauded sarcastically, he

looked up in bewilderment.

Perhaps I should say here that, had he achieved all three of the key elements of the

program he announced in 1980 – a massive tax cut, a military buildup, and a balanced budget –

we would probably have to put him on Mount Rushmore. But every middle-school kid with a calculator could have told him that the first two elements made the third an impossibility; on the other hand, forgoing the third made the first two easy. The Democrats, who had been lambasted since 1932 for their tax-and-spend recklessness, looked on with astonishment as the Republicans shifted to borrow-and-spend recklessness and quadrupled the annual deficits – and in the twelve years of Reagan and Bush together, quadrupled the total national debt as well. Almost immediately, the rate of unemployment rose to the highest level since the Great Depression. (To

Republicans, this meant that millions of people had suddenly become lazy.) When the economy came back out of its tailspin in time for the next election, and began to hum along for the rest of the 1980s, Reagan was given credit. It was the kind of credit that would properly belong to a man with a crushing mortgage and a bunch of unpaid credit cards who nonetheless borrows an

additional $100,000: when we see him next, driving down the street in his new Mercedes, should Narcissism in high places - 185

we really say to ourselves that he's looking good and doing well? But due to a peculiar blind spot

that afflicts even the most sober, well-meaning Americans, Democratic spending on social

programs is always called "government spending" and the permanent jobs created in the

management of these programs are said to be an "artificial" means of "stimulating the economy,"

whereas Republican spending on the military is for some reason not considered to be government

spending, and temporary positions in the military-industrial complex filling Pentagon orders are

viewed as "real" jobs. The health of the American economy during the Reagan years was

propped up by massive increases in government spending; meanwhile the public had more of its

own money to spend due to tax cuts and tax "reform," both of which overwhelmingly favored the

rich. The problem of spending more while making less was solved by borrowing the difference.

Anyone could have juiced the economy by these means; it had never been tried before because it

was so obviously shortsighted and immoral.

At the same time, Reagan was also given credit for the decline and fall of the Soviet

empire. He "won the cold war." By this logic, the rooster must be given credit for causing the

sun to rise. The analogy is exact, down to the role assigned to crowing.

But since a respected writer, Derek Leebaert, seems to support the popular conclusion in

his history of the cold war titled The Fifty-Year-Wound, perhaps more than a cursory examination of the canard is warranted. Leebaert is certainly correct to say that Reagan, almost alone among prominent Western politicians, refused to accept the Soviet Union's legitimacy and revived the idea, dormant in the highest circles for a generation, of opposing communism with the kind of moral fervor and national energy that had been mobilized against fascism. Reagan never wavered in viewing totalitarianism as evil and the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union Narcissism in high places - 186

as deranged: we may credit him, then, with keeping his moral compass when smarter and more

worldly men were losing theirs. I have said that he had only two or three fixed ideas, and I am

not mortified if one of them turned out to be right. Time has not been kind to the liberals who

kept trying desperately, for the sake of what they took to be the century's longest-running

experiment in socialism, to find some good in the century's longest-running tyranny; and, as

Leebaert points out, Reagan also made a monkey out of the conservatives who concluded too hastily that we should be realistic about accepting Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. That

Reagan set out from the very beginning to apply pressure on the Soviet Union is manifest; and the Soviets themselves, writing their memoirs, have agreed that they spent themselves into bankruptcy trying to counter that pressure.

It all worked out in the end; but it is still fair to ask whether Reagan was wise to pursue the matter quite in the manner he did, and whether the demise of the Soviet Union would not have happened without his lifting a hand. Here, Leebaert seems inconsistent: he acknowledges that the Soviet system was too burdened and corrupted by militarism, tyranny, inefficiency, and economic stagnation to survive; at the same time, he wants to give Reagan credit for applying the coup de grace. This contradiction shows in the book's treatment of Poland in the early 1980s.

Did the Soviets refrain from sending Russian troops against Solidarity, the Polish union, because

Reagan's pugnacious rhetoric made them fear an American military response, as Leebaert insinuates? Or did they hold back out of a desire to continue reaping the fruits of detente? – in which case, more credit needs to go to Nixon and Kissinger for offering those fruits and making it worth the while of the Soviets to temper their barbarism. I know of no credible information indicating that Reagan would have intervened had the Soviet army occupied Poland, and nothing Narcissism in high places - 187

to indicate that the Soviets thought he would: it seems more likely that Poland was spared due to

factors independent of Reagan's hard line. Having the Polish government declare martial law

was more in keeping with the lazy ways that had developed in the Politburo since the invasion of

Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union of the 1980s, although still a totalitarian state, was a far cry

from the Stalinist nightmare of the 1930s, which was characterized by millions of summary

arrests and executions and such ideologically-driven craziness as the attempt to establish a

Marxist biology.

In terms of the portrait I am painting of Reagan, it suffices to say that he never inspired any confidence that he could tell the difference: he had a monolithic view of communism. Since the USSR of the 1980s was bad enough, and we won, many want to applaud him for his "moral clarity" – a term which, then as now, is a euphemism for incuriosity and intransigence. But the question is whether he proceeded too recklessly, and it can be reframed this way: given that the

Soviets, due to the very contradictions that the Reaganites had identified in the communist system, were going the way of certain extinction, but still possessed enough thermonuclear weapons to ignite the planet if they tried too hard to save themselves or simply made a colossal error of judgment, how much pressure should have been applied to hurry up this inevitable process? Leebaert says that by 1982, Yuri Andropov had come to believe sincerely that the

United States was preparing, under cover of NATO exercises, to launch a nuclear strike against the USSR. Accordingly, the USSR, in June of 1982, ran its own exercise simulating "a seven hours' nuclear war started by the Soviet armed forces." What this would have meant was hundreds of hydrogen bombs exploding over Western Europe and America, each thousands of times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb, a single one capable of killing more people in four Narcissism in high places - 188

minutes than the Holocaust killed in four years. (The Soviets knew there would be a response in kind, and the plan included their own steps designed to limit their losses to 20 million people.)

In this charged atmosphere, in June of 1983, a Soviet satellite registered missiles pouring out of

American silos. The Politburo was not informed only because the duty officer had the savvy to recognize some telltale signs of malfunction. That was a close call. But Leebaert believes that the closest the Soviets came to launching their seven hours' war was November of 1983, after the

United States deployed its Pershing missiles in West Germany and NATO was performing precisely those exercises that the Soviets were primed to misinterpret as the camouflage for a nuclear strike against them. He believes the danger then was much greater than during the Cuban missile crisis:

It was barely noticed . . . that the Soviet Union was on the brink of initiating nuclear war. . . . The entire system was in a frenzy: gas masks and air raid drills, civil defense preparations, classified Communist Party briefings in what one former foreign ministry official calls an atmosphere of "pre-war". . . . In November 1983, Moscow marched just about as far as possible to the point of no return as second thought permitted.

. . .

Around the same time that a NATO exercise was practicing the command, control, and communications procedures that would authorize the release of nuclear weapons in combat, the Politburo came to surmise that U.S. forces might have begun the countdown to nuclear war. The Soviets may have come very close to launching an all-out preemptive strike.

Reagan was not the man to unleash a nuclear war. Unlike some of his predecessors, he did not get an ego-charge out of having his finger on the nuclear trigger, and was sickened at the thought; Leebaert says that he did not even bother to learn the mechanical details of the famous button until he had been in office for 17 months. The problem is that, with his cheerful Narcissism in high places - 189

narcissism and lack of insight into others, he appears to have been unduly reassured by knowing this about himself, and to have had no idea how he was regarded in the Kremlin. He made his customary mistake of believing that his own actions, so clear and so admirable to himself, were an open book to all other persons; and with textbook narcissism he further believed that the actions of those others were an open book to him. He underestimated the paranoia of his Russian opposites, whose fears were precipitously heightened by his aggressive rhetoric and actions: it is chilling to read that Adropov judged the Reagan administration to be in the grip of an

"outrageous military psychosis." (I thought something similar myself at the time.) And even the admiring Leebaert says that the administration "ended up walking closer to the edge than it realized." The edge of what? Well, of an abyss containing a half-billion human bodies incinerated on a single day by a fire as hot as the sun's. With hindsight, we can always say that the sure-footed Reagan skirted the edge of that abyss but did not fall in. But given the nature of the abyss, we might question the sanity of someone who gets close enough to the edge to even see what it looks like. On August 11, 1984, Reagan was preparing to give a radio address.

Thinking that the microphone was not yet live, he "joked" as follows: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." The Russians responded to his apology soberly and insightfully, by saying that they understood that he was not serious in that moment but that, in the best Freudian tradition, his "slip" had betrayed the contents of his heart. They were right. He did not want a nuclear war; but he certainly did want to abolish the Soviet Union. His narcissistic impairment was so great that he sometimes seemed to have trouble understanding why the Soviets themselves did not want to join him in the endeavor. Did they not know themselves to be little Narcissism in high places - 190

better than a cabal of criminals? Were they not ashamed of themselves?

As he went about this business, he converted our entire government into a "national security state," reducing civilian oversight over the military and intelligence communities, reclassifying documents in order to restrict citizen access to the workings of the government, and showing a marked proclivity for conducting secret operations that were accountable to no one.

He deeply resented the scrutiny of a free press and attempted to weaken almost every clause of the Bill of Rights – strange tendencies in a man who wanted to "get the government off our backs." But the paradox is easily explained, once again, by reference to his pronounced narcissism – he knew what the nation needed, and he didn't like to be distracted by opinions to the contrary.

In the 1990s, the bubble of false prosperity burst at just the right time to ensure the election of Bill Clinton. The country was then treated to the prospect of a fiscally responsible

Democrat, who, by raising taxes, keeping an eye on spending, and watching the economy grow its way out of trouble with the help of the global revolution in information technology, balanced the budget in only six years. We are still left with the malignant legacy of the overall debt itself, which eats up a large part of the yearly budget in interest payments. In short, we will never be able to honestly assess the damage done to the country by "Reaganomics," because to do so we would have to mentally set aside the trillion or so dollars wasted on defense, and the additional hundreds of billions diverted into interest payments on the debt, and imagine this money spent on urban renewal, education, and infrastructure; and we would need to factor in the less tangible effects of the culture of greed that was fostered and promoted during those years – a culture so virulent that even today the tax code remains shamefully regressive and the citizenry sees nothing Narcissism in high places - 191

amiss in a single man's accumulation of a savings account that is equal in size to the combined savings of the bottom half of the entire population – over 150 million people. (It is also frequently pointed out that this individual – Bill Gates of Microsoft – is wealthier than most of the nations of Africa put together.)

Such was Reagan the politician and statesman, and he still has his apologists and champions, especially among those who were catapulted into unmerited wealth by his policies, and those who believe in his simple-minded vision of geopolitical morality. If we attribute his evils to his ignorance, while grudgingly acknowledging that he thought all was for the best, we must nonetheless remind ourselves that he willed his ignorance with a determination so impressive it was sometimes mistaken for strength of character. The evidence of the consequences of his actions was always right before his eyes, but he fastened his own blindfold.

His one-time trusted lieutenant, the true believer David Stockman, recoiled at the sight of the havoc that the administration was wreaking and wrote a book about the intellectual fraudulence of Reaganomics that anyone could understand – but Reagan was not much of a reader. Then, too, it should be noted that the mainstream media – in their own way as besotted by Reagan as ever the journalists of Germany were intoxicated with Hitler – treated Stockman, who really did know something about economics, as a Benedict Arnold and paid no attention to him.

Why Reagan succeeded with the media to the extent that he did, and how he managed to achieve his entire program when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives throughout his presidency, is a subject for historians to ponder deeply. (The independent maverick journalist

Walter Karp provided a chronology of the Democratic Party's total capitulation even as it was happening.) At the time, it seemed that Reagan was surrounded by an aura of magic. Those who Narcissism in high places - 192

did not believe in it could nonetheless see that others did. A sober reassessment will show that

what was once credited to his charisma owed a great deal – naturally – to lucky timing. Seasoned

campaigner though he was, Reagan could not manage to wrest the Republican nomination away

from such used-up politicians as Richard Nixon in 1968 and Gerald Ford in 1976. But in 1980 –

the last year he could possibly have been a viable candidate in light of his advanced age – the gift

of the unrescued hostages in Iran was laid in his lap. He also benefitted from a confluence of

other fortuitous events: the national Democratic Party's conversion of itself into little more than a

central phone bank coordinating the election campaigns of cynical incumbents; Jimmy Carter's

failure to fit in with the grubby political culture of Washington; and the people's irritability with

inflation, recession, and the lingering effects of the oil embargo. Then, after his election, came

Reagan's luckiest, and freakiest, break: the failed assassination attempt two months into his first

term. By his manly pluck and gritty survival, he transformed himself from the grinch who was

trying to steal the working class's Christmas stocking into the nation's grandfather. The budget of

the Reagan Revolution, which had been languishing in a skeptical Congress, soon became the

law of the land.

Some members of the electorate were more than irritable. It had always been assumed

that rich people, if they are generally allowed to profit from an atmosphere of unfettered

capitalism, will not begrudge the public maintenance of a modest social net designed to catch

less fortunate folk before they hit rock-bottom. But 1980 produced the first-ever American revolt of the haves against the have-nots. Rich people were saying that the poor have too much money.

Reagan promised, in coded language, and delivered, with the active help of the Democrats, a

massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. Over the next decade, the top 20% of Narcissism in high places - 193

the population experienced a robust increase in prosperity, while the middle 60% stagnated and the bottom 20% lost ground. Our values became so debased that this widening gap between the rich and poor, which would have been viewed with alarm in most other Western democracies and treated as a problem to be addressed, was celebrated by the pundits as "economic growth" and accepted without resistance by the poor themselves as "the way things are." The millions of losers were so drugged by the propaganda of capitalism that they blamed only themselves for their failures and applied themselves assiduously to the voyeuristic celebration of the lifestyles of the rich and famous and to the purchase of lottery tickets.

When we go on calling the captain of this great economic realignment a good man, I am appalled, but I am not quite at a loss to see how. No doubt, a handful of true and thoughtful conservatives honestly believed, not without reason, that liberal programs were sapping the thrift and industry of the poor – that the welfare state was itself the cause of poverty. Others, who admitted that there were some faults to be found in this administration, but who stood ever ready to salvage Reagan's niceness, assigned the blame to his retinue of evil retainers, who were indeed marked, almost without exception, by heavy mediocrity, but who otherwise appeared in a variety of hues – some ideologically driven, like Caspar Weinberger, Jean Kirkpatrick, and the demented

Richard Perle; some nakedly avaricious, like Michael Deaver and Lyn Nofziger; and some just stupidly and selfishly devoted to their own interests and the interests of other similar rich white people, like Donald Regan and Ed Meese.

It is harder to find any moral excuse for the proxy war our nation waged against the very small and very poor country of Nicaragua – a vicious, unrelenting war that was one of the mainstays of Reagan policy, that lasted the entire eight years of his presidency, that was carried Narcissism in high places - 194

on illegally and unconstitutionally during the years that Congress ordered it stopped, and that even ran afoul of international law. We had, it is true, propped up many a military regime in the past, and turned a deaf ear to the sufferings of many an indigenous people who were being tortured and murdered by military thugs; and when, against all the odds, a few countries in our hemisphere had, despite our warnings, strayed toward socialism, we had habitually struck at them with the meanness of a junkyard dog. But our persecution of Nicaragua may have set a new standard. The CIA mined the harbor of Managua, and when the World Court of Justice condemned this sleazy act of terrorism, we blithely said that we didn't care. We financed a series of armed attacks by fascist forces lurking in Honduras; and we enforced an economic embargo so severe that we blackmailed the Canadian government into blocking its own importation of

Nicaraguan coffee. When the Nicaraguan people could no longer hold out against this state of siege, and voted out the socialists, conservative columnists called it a victory for capitalism and democracy.

Reagan stood at the helm of all this dishonor. The Iran-Contra scandal was, at the level of personal morality or "the virtues," simply a low, skulking, despicable thing to do, akin to

Nancy Reagan's promise in 1982 to stop "borrowing" designer clothes (in order to avoid either buying them or registering them as gifts and paying taxes on them) and her quiet decision a year or so later to resume the practice on the sly. In terms of its political significance, Iran-Contra represented the greatest assault on our Constitution in the 20th Century and should have led immediately to Reagan's impeachment. If Congress can pass a law and the President, after signing it, can disobey it and cover up the disobedience, it is obvious that we no longer live under a government of laws. Yet so great was Reagan's popularity that the public took almost no Narcissism in high places - 195

interest in the revelations of the investigation; instead, Republicans celebrated Oliver North, the

point man in the deception, as "an American hero," and ten years later, with the phrase "the rule

of law" constantly on their lips, attempted to impeach a Democratic president for committing

adultery and lying about it.

Afflicted with encroaching senility, but also still able to act a little from time to time and

thereby ape the gestures of honest confusion, Reagan appeared completely befuddled at press

conferences and in official interviews and so dodged the bullet of Iran-Contra. It has never been

established whether he lied about it persistently and knowingly or, like a ventriloquist's dummy,

simply parroted the words of the prepared statements that were placed in front of him. (His aides

would send him to Cabinet meetings with complete scripts, including hello and goodbye.) Most

citizens decided he was still an honorable man – just out to lunch – and their own continuing

belief in his "character" reassured them. But the window on his soul constantly opened in

unattended moments. When some high school students visited him in the Oval Office late in

1983 – this was the sort of duty he enjoyed most during the three or four hours of his working

day – he told them that the death-squad tortures and murders of El Salvadoran leftists were

probably the work of the leftists themselves, who were hoping to thereby discredit the American- supported right-wing government. Aides immediately hastened to acknowledge that most of the killings were undoubtedly done by right-wing military and paramilitary goons, many of them trained in the United States. Such clarifications were issued on an almost daily basis. In this case, as per usual, the aides spoke for themselves, and for "the administration": Reagan said nothing to indicate that he agreed with them. Instead, he went on to call the Nicaraguan Contras

"freedom fighters." His ideas were absolutely fact-proof. The press, meanwhile, which had Narcissism in high places - 196

hounded George Romney out of the presidential primaries of 1968 for saying that he had been

"brainwashed" by American officials during his tour of South Vietnam, treated all such Reagan remarks as amusing slips and harmless errors.

The intensity with which he believed his puerile ideas makes Reagan an especially interesting subject in the psychology of lying. In this, as in all things, he stands diametrically opposed to George H. W. Bush, who lied knowingly, easily, and congenitally. Reagan, possessed of the sincerity of the true narcissist, didn't think he needed to lie – after all, he was right. But he was masterful at lying when he had to be – as when he justified the invasion of

Grenada by citing the danger to the handful of American medical students who resided on that tiny island. To the hawks in his administration, this presumptive danger was a blatant but expedient lie – the excuse they needed, and just good enough to pass muster with a public that had already proven it would accept almost anything this president did. What was it to Reagan? I would surmise that it began as a pretext but converted itself to a fact, and that he spoke with a clear conscience.

No person that I am aware of has ever come forward to say that Reagan looked him in the eye and told an obvious lie and evinced the telltale signs of a man who is lying and knows it. So completely did Reagan seem to believe his own most palpable falsehoods that the word

"misstatement" came to be a staple of American journalism during his presidency. The explainers are up against it trying to rationalize such whoppers as Reagan's claim that he was present at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, but even there I'm with them in acquitting him of a conscious lie. This statement, like many others, was so grossly false and so easily disproved that a man would have to have taken leave of his senses to try to get away with Narcissism in high places - 197

it. (Saying that Reagan never arrived at his senses in the first place is a good joke, but only partly true.) Reagan lived in a world of his own making – or rather, it was made for him by movies and scripts and homilies and the lessons taught him about business and government by a few rich reactionary California Republicans in the 1950s. He probably saw some vivid film footage of the concentration camps and later inserted himself in it.

The cadre of true believers in Reagan – their numbers dwindle – may think me a mere partisan attacker, but what I have said here about his willed ignorance, his obliviousness, and his befuddlement is a matter of public record. Anyone can verify the factual part of my account, and find numerous examples of staggering ineptitude, inanity, and obstinacy that I have passed over in silence, by consulting the compendium of newspaper clippings assembled from mainstream journalistic sources in Paul Slansky's anthology, The Clothes Have No Emperor. For those who prefer to think that Reagan was cunning like a fox, Ronnie Dugger's 1983 political biography, On

Reagan, will have the requisite gravity. Dugger was almost the only journalist of the time to go over the complete record of Reagan's public pronouncements. He took Reagan very seriously indeed as a man who was committed to a "primitive ideology" and as a political force who was consistently underestimated by his detractors. He insisted, as did Lou Cannon, that Reagan was intelligent. But both biographers show only that Reagan was a talented public speaker and the most effective of all possible demagogues – one who believes his own platitudes. He never entertained a single notion that challenged the world-view of his smug white male constituency; but so genuine was his identification with these voters that he was free of the suspicion of having consciously pandered to them.

What is hard to grasp in retrospect is, perhaps, how he managed in the end to do so little Narcissism in high places - 198

damage. Given his constellation of extremely serious negative traits, we might be justified in

thinking ourselves lucky we escaped in one piece. After all, his finger was on the nuclear trigger;

he demonized our most dangerous nuclear opponent; and he believed in the apocalypse that is

described in the last book of the Bible. To this I would respond, first, that in terms of the damage

he did succeed in doing, he may eventually be judged the worst president to that date in our

history. Second, he was lucky. But in this connection, it is time to assess some of the other

peculiarities of his personality.

To a remarkable extent, Reagan really was "disengaged" – to use the word that began to

be applied to him even during his first term. Soon it became a media code word to describe but

also to subsume and cover up some of his greatest psychological deficits. He was ambitious, to a

degree that has been belatedly recognized in some of the recent sketches of his personal and

political history; but he was free of the compulsions of the world reformer or utopian idealist. A

restoration of the good old days, of "a way we never were," was the extent of his ambition. He

had his two or three pet projects: help those who don't need help; stand up to world communism;

appoint conservative judges. Beyond ordering his lieutenants to brook no compromise in these

few areas – a task that, to be fair to him, did not require him to work more than a few hours a day

– he was happy to delegate almost all authority and let the engine of state hum, or sputter, along.

One side-effect of this unusual disengagement was that, even though Reagan himself was personally incorruptible and conventionally decent, his administration was the most scandal-

ridden in American history. Officials charged with enforcing environmental protections gave

businesses a green light to pollute the environment. Government housing projects became

massive kickback schemes. Operators inside and outside the Pentagon skimmed off billions of Narcissism in high places - 199

dollars in procurement scams. The Attorney General of the United States became the object of

multiple ethics investigations. We cannot accurately say that all this happened "on Reagan's

watch," because he watched, and saw, nothing. But let us be thankful for small blessings. A

Reagan with real energy and an arsenal of hydrogen bombs would have been dangerous indeed.

During his second term, a myth about Reagan began forming. It was fostered largely by those

who had profited by him and so continued to lionize him; but it was also embraced by most of

the reporters who had covered him, partly as a way of clouding over their own lazy complicity in

his success. This myth has since insinuated itself into the national psyche, and it especially

animates the controversial biography by Edmund Morris published a decade after Reagan left

office. According to the myth, Reagan was an intensely private man. No one really knew him.

Above all else, he was deep. You couldn't know him. And at the unseen heart of his enigma,

wrapped in the very riddle of his personality, was his greatness.

Morris, anointed by Reagan as his official biographer, found himself baffled by the glassy

surface of this pond, and like so many others, persuaded himself of the unfathomable depths of

the still waters. Even though given unprecedented access to the president during his second term

in office, Morris was completely at a loss to write intelligibly about him, and floundered for most

of the 1990s, unable to produce the book. His solution was to turn it into a book about himself, populating it with fictional characters who keep bumping into Reagan and thinking about him.

This novel in the form of a biography – Morris's mixing of fact and fiction was mentioned neither

in the introduction to the book nor on the dust jacket – elicited almost universal derision from

serious historians. Yet many reviewers, themselves in the grip of the myth, sympathized with

Morris's predicament: Reagan was unfathomable; you couldn't write him. Narcissism in high places - 200

The intellectual confusion that is betrayed by Morris's clumsy literary device is symptomatic of a more serious failure of insight. On the one hand, Morris is able to entertain the possibility that Reagan was "an airhead." The biographer notes with chagrin that Reagan was overmatched by even the simplest question, sometimes idiotically repeating the points written on his ever-present index cards or cue cards, sometimes handing off the answer to an aide, and sometimes embarking on a rambling, irrelevant narrative. We are given examples of "the relentless banality, not to say incoherence, of the president's replies in interviews." But after the book was published, Morris had this to say:

I have gradually, over the course of many years, come to the conclusion that he was a great president. More interesting to me than greatness, however, is that he was throughout his life such a strange combination of innocence and wisdom, charm and hard force, gregariousness and aloofness, egocentricity without conceit, aggression without cruelty, imaginativeness and cultural ignorance, sentimentality and emotional coolness. I could go on for a quarter of an hour and not exhaust his contrary opposites. He is also – to finish with a simple statement – the bravest and most incorrupt figure I've ever studied.

What occurred to me the moment I read this paragraph, and to those to whom I read it, is that the qualities that Morris thinks are antipodal are not opposites. That he thinks they are, means that he is totally inadequate to the task of understanding Reagan – or anybody else.

I will comment briefly on the false pairings.

The greatest egocentricity is often without obvious conceit, for a man's complete narcissistic confidence in his own judgment will place him beyond the doubts and insecurities that engender most ordinary bluster.

Charm and hard force have coexisted in most of the charismatic dictators of the 20th

Century, and are the two most arresting qualities of many psychopaths. Narcissism in high places - 201

"Aggression without cruelty." Wonderful. The victims of Reagan's kindly aggression –

those that lived – will no doubt feel much better about their persecutor, knowing that he took no

sadistic pleasure in it.

Sentimentality and emotional coolness are twins, not opposites, because both are false,

staged, and conventional: the actor portrays sentimentality toward good people, children, and

dogs, coolness toward villains and flag-burners. Sentimentality is the public display of emotional

kitsch. The feelings are pre-packaged. Sentimentality is the opposite of empathy. Reagan was a master of sentimentality because he was emotionally stunted.

Mark Twain tells us that the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Morris attributes "aloofness" to Reagan

– a quality that, had he possessed it, would have indeed contradicted his gregariousness. But

Morris certainly means detachment, indifference, and the aforementioned emotional coolness.

By the use of a more innocent-sounding word, Morris points to, and yet protects Reagan from, the imputation of a terrible inability to relate to people. Reagan was incapacitated for intimacy.

He did not understand the emotional lives of others and he was not interested. Nancy Reagan – a venal, vindictive, unimaginative person who was ferociously loyal to him – was his ideal of a life partner.

A moment's digression about his marriage. After he became too debilitated by

Alzheimer's Disease to protest, Nancy published a book of his most personal love letters to her.

They can be read only with the acutest embarrassment by anyone who conceives of marriage as something loftier than the lyrics of popular songs written by teenagers. It is a tribute to Nancy's vanity and shallowness that she shared these letters with a hundred million people rather than Narcissism in high places - 202

burn them. They reveal what most White House correspondents had reason to suspect all along

about the Reagan marriage: that it was utterly infantilized and that Ronnie adored "Mommy," as

he called her, with a combination of perpetual puppy love and abject emotional dependency. It

would be a relief to believe that he did not mean a word of it – to believe that these treacly notes

and little missives were strategic in nature, designed to satisfy the voracious craving for adoration

that he shrewdly discerned in his partner. He was a master of the public display of kitsch:

perhaps he was no less adept in private. The genre of the love letter encourages a permissible

degree of exaggeration that can cover over a great deal of insincerity. Would he really have died,

as he says with apparent conviction, if anything had ever happened to her? On the other hand,

the nature of narcissism makes an answer hard to come by. A pose – in this case, the pose of the

faithful cavalier – can be sincere; and Nancy's adulation of him was presumably a powerful

aphrodisiac. I find no evidence of guile in the letters. But even if taken at face value, they still

do nothing to contradict my contention that he was incapacitated for genuine intimacy: they are

such sweets as would reliably please the literary palate of any woman as childish, vain, and

small-minded as Nancy Reagan. They prove only that two highly narcissistic individuals may be

able to join together in a perfectly narcissistic marriage.

That Ronald Reagan, in spite of his emotional isolation and his inability to relate to others, nonetheless liked to talk, and tell jokes, and entertain large groups of people, is not in the least surprising. Many stand-up comedians share with him this disconcerting but rather predictable combination of traits.

Again failing to check his dictionary, Morris uses "imaginativeness" where he most likely means Reagan's marked propensity for living in the world of his own limited, and mostly Narcissism in high places - 203

fictional, ideas, and his often-remarked susceptibility to mistaking the events in movies for things

that really happened. If imagination is the mental flexibility to see new possibilities and expand

our consciousness, Reagan had very little: his interior world was marked instead by an

extraordinary contraction and narrowness. Some of his most ardent apologists would say as

much, and seek to turn the accusation to his credit and to celebrate his single-minded devotion to a few sacred principles. I would even agree with them that, because of his focused pursuit of two or three objectives, he accidentally embodied some of the qualities that make for effective leadership. His fault lay rather in where he wanted to lead us. When he was challenged about the practicality of his vision, he was unwilling, and no doubt psychologically unable, to entertain any new thought or consider any new data. Indeed, he exhibited an almost terrifying lack of any psychological mobility whatsoever. Reagan's "cultural ignorance," then, far from contradicting his "imaginativeness," was the necessary precondition for it. What Morris really means by this putative imaginativeness – namely, Reagan's desire to stick with a few fixed and handy fictions, and to live "as if" his comic-book fantasies tracked reality – was the symptom, and also the guarantor, of his conspicuous lack of imagination.

It is hard to know what Morris even means by treating wisdom and innocence as opposites. He was probably thinking about Reagan's ignorance, or naivete, but once more reflexively produced the nicer-sounding word. As for wisdom: if Reagan deserves the accolades of his admirers, it is not because he mastered even the simplest elements of political or economic theory, but because he adhered stubbornly, even heroically, to his two or three tenets, which had been the stuff of Robert Taft's presidential campaigns when Reagan was young. Again, many have admitted as much and have tried to convert the debit of his utter intransigence into the Narcissism in high places - 204

credit deserved by a man who is right and knows he is right. Such people believe that we don't

need to understand much – we just need to stick to the tried-and-true verities of our grandparents.

This simple nostrum is one of the commonest consolations of imaginatively constricted people, and the reigning orthodoxy of the entire religious right, whose voters abandoned in droves a man of genuine faith in Jimmy Carter and turned instead to a fellow who rarely darkened the doorstep of any place of worship.

Finally, Reagan's bravery and incorruptibility. I don't doubt it. But let us note that highly narcissistic people are often brave and incorruptible. Scott Fitzgerald explained his love for

Zelda, which persisted even though his friends unanimously warned him away from her, as being based upon her courage, her sincerity, and her self-respect. These three qualities are not merely compatible with narcissism, they may be emblematic of it – especially if exaggerated to such a degree that they leap out as the first three qualities that strike an onlooker.

Let me also freely acknowledge here that Reagan was truly principled. This is often yet another facet of narcissistic charm – narcissists are, in general, more principled than the rest of us, because their psychological makeup is favorable to inflexibility and they use principles to organize their relationships where healthier people use empathy and understanding. But Reagan was also politically principled, and this is so rare a quality that it galvanizes voters on those infrequent occasions when they encounter it. Everyone sensed during those eight years that

Reagan meant what he said. It was most unusual.

Neither do I doubt that he was considerate to his staff, free of pettiness, and fundamentally a straight shooter; perhaps too he did have, as Lou Cannon believed, determination, grit, and the rest of the cowboy frontier virtues. But if so, this only serves to Narcissism in high places - 205

underline the point that character has nothing to do with morality. Where these virtues are bound

up with, and in fact indistinguishable from, narcissistic certainty, they convert to liabilities.

Reagan was no quitter, Cannon says with great admiration. Is it asking too much for us to judge

the moral difference between perseverance in a good cause and perseverance in a bad? Both

Lincoln and Reagan refused to compromise their core principles. As a candidate, Lincoln would

not entertain any suggestion that slavery be allowed to expand further into the territories; and as

president, he rejected every peace proposal that entailed the breakup of the union. Reagan

stubbornly stayed the course with a massive tax cut for the very rich and a tremendous

acceleration of the arms race. Doesn't it matter what a strong-willed leader is strong-willed about?

My comments in response to Morris's alleged paradoxes can serve as an abstract of my own psychological profile of Ronald Reagan. This man was not in the least self-contradictory – there

has never been a more cripplingly unified personality in the White House – but he did possess an

aggregation of traits not often found in a person who ascends to the most powerful position of

leadership in the world. The narcissism, the incapacity for intimacy and empathy, the

sentimentality, the aggressiveness, the lack of imagination, the psychological immobility, the

mental inflexibility, the gregariousness, the love of the limelight, the cultural ignorance, the

egocentricity – these are typical traits in men with an appetite for power. What was unusual

about Reagan was his lack of intellectual ambition, his tremendous self-satisfaction and comfort with himself, his pervasive cheerfulness, and his capacity for taking hedonistic pleasure in the perquisites of his high office. The besetting sin of his immediate predecessors, Johnson, Nixon, Narcissism in high places - 206

and even Carter, had been their tendency to "micro-manage." They wanted their fingers in all the

pies. Most men who get to where Reagan got are driven to begin with; then the responsibilities

that go with the office have a further malignant effect on their personalities. They develop dark

shadows under their eyes. Not Reagan. His insouciance was literally bullet-proof. He went out looking as young and fit as he went in. No man ever enjoyed himself more in high office; and one of the few times the American people glimpsed a private, personal desire behind his public banalities was when he argued against the constitutional amendment that was limiting him to two presidential terms. The downside of his complacency was that rich, greedy, corrupt, and evil men easily made him their tool, and the government of the United States sank to their level rather than his.

If there is anything deep and strange about Reagan, recalcitrant to easy explanation, I would say, as a close student of narcissism, that it is to be found in his lack of animus against his political enemies. Most highly narcissistic people can explain opposition to themselves and their ideas only as expressions of malice. But Reagan did not seem to go down that path; and even with the Soviets, in spite of viewing them as a cabal of master criminals at the head of an evil empire, he confidently and genially accepted Gorbachev as a man he could work with.

To summarize: Reagan was deep the way outer space is deep – he was characterized by a vast emptiness. True enough, few could see all the way to the bottom of him, for they were peering into an almost limitless vacancy. It is not quite accurate to say that "there was no there there." Instead, there was a handful of old maxims, "traditional values," trite convictions, and abysmal prejudices; and these were backed up by a prodigious obstinacy and breathtaking self- confidence. There was never any mystery about it: he was described early and often by clear- Narcissism in high places - 207

eyed observers as an "amiable dunce." A man's personality could hardly be sketched with greater

accuracy in only two words, allowing for the epithet's omission of his terrible certainty.

It is said that we were enamored of his genuineness, his candor, his old-fashioned virtues

– that he overcame our doubts when, in New Hampshire, he grabbed the microphone and, in a

display of undoubtedly real character, insisted that all the other candidates be allowed to speak;

or that he won us over when he said, with easy poise and geniality, "There you go again" in the

debate with Carter. (Does it matter to us that it later came out that his preparation for that debate

was greatly helped by his staff's underhanded acquisition of Carter's briefing book?) Or it is said

that Carter lost that debate by mentioning his 12-year-old daughter Amy and her feeling that the most important election issue was the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But such analyses always founder on the rock of obvious counter-examples. If that statement makes a man too much of a laughingstock for him to be elected, what about Reagan's 1979 statement that ''80% of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes but from plants and trees''? (I also wish to add that history will vindicate Amy Carter, and some day rank Reagan as one of our worst presidents if only on the grounds of his nuclear arms policy. This was a man who tried to revive the concept of a winnable nuclear war.)

If we, and our votes, can be explained by these means, we need to declare a day of national atonement. But some explanation is required. The man we twice elected president was publicly vacuous, simple-minded, and, increasingly during his second term, senile; and he was clearly the compliant toy of the rich and greedy. However, if enough of us are lazy and greedy, then we will prop this scarecrow up in front of the presidential seal and even vaunt his uncanny ability to lead us, thereby assenting to a myth as fatuous as Carter's supposed inability. It is easy Narcissism in high places - 208

to lead people to lower taxes and brainless patriotism; Carter's mistake was to try to lead us to

greater effort and a more comprehensive morality. A majority of American voters mistook

Reagan's intellectual, psychological, emotional, and imaginative impoverishment for wisdom,

firmness, and depth because they wanted to believe that, without anyone having to actually do

anything to bring it about, it was now "morning in America." In this man who gave almost

nothing to charity, who rarely set foot in a church, who was divorced from his first wife and

estranged from his children, whose second wife was pregnant when he married her, who was

shallow, uninformed, and stubborn, many claimed to see the "traditional Judaeo-Christian

values" that they craved as a substitute for hard thinking and moral imagination. He had another

side to him too, which came out in October 1965 when he talked about bombing North Vietnam:

"We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."

No one mistook this type of oratory for Sunday School talk. Perhaps it was the real secret of his electoral success, and our susceptibility to it is our own dirty little secret. Carter learned the hard

way that a real man doesn't talk about world peace or little girls – he talks about kicking some

serious international butt.

When a nation sells its soul, the question to ask about its voters is not, "How did that

devil make them do it?" A magnetic leader cannot attract people who have no iron in them. The

question is always, "How could we have sunk so low as to embrace the pinched, contemptible,

macho, self-congratulatory values that this holy fool embodied?" The fault, dear Brutus, is not in

our movie stars, but in ourselves.

Careerism in high places

Early in his administration, President George Herbert Walker Bush engineered the luring of a

drug dealer to Lafayette Park so that he could produce a bag of cocaine during a press conference

and say with a straight face that it had been purchased within sight of the Oval Office. (The

dealer, when told that the rendezvous point was across the street from the White House, had

asked, "Where the hell is that?" The undercover agent had obligingly given him a set of

directions.)

To a man without principles, many things will be possible that are forbidden to others.

Bush felt no compunction about resorting to such a gimmick; Ronald Reagan, in spite of his sure

sense of political theater, might have blanched at it. Reagan was a master of good stage

technique, but he did not think he needed it to put across his ideas. Because he was a competent

actor who was permanently at home in the role of president, he could not help being effective in the presentation of his ideas; but he nonetheless devoutly believed in these ideas. His natural sincerity strengthened his performances, whether or not he had any interesting accessories at hand. He was always serenely himself, even when he played parts in movies and on television.

He did not think he needed to resort to fakery. He was a rarity – an ideologue loved by the people. In a sense he was above politics. Bush was all politics. As a result, popularity dogged

Reagan, while Bush dogged popularity. Reagan did not need to prove anything; Bush needed to prove everything. Careerism in high places - 210

The comparison between Reagan and Bush is inescapable – fortunately it is also instructive. Reagan was completely narcissistic, which means that he was incapable of empathy and did not even know how to simulate it; but he was principled, honest, and genuine, and not notably selfish or opportunistic. Bush was in every way his opposite: he was utterly selfish and grasping, purely opportunistic, dishonest whenever it served his interests to be, and completely lacking in convictions. The antithesis may seem to break down when I label Reagan unempathic, since no one with half-a-brain ever called Bush compassionate: his slogan about a "kinder, gentler nation" in 1988, like his son's cynical invocation of "compassionate conservatism" during the election of 2000, was just a piece of pure political calculation, devised for him by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan. But I believe Bush's lack of empathy was willed rather than constitutional. Reagan could not see another point of view: he could not understand opposition except as a sign of stupidity, malevolence or craziness; he could not even pretend otherwise. I cannot imagine that anyone was ever unwise enough to consult Reagan about a moral or psychological crisis. He was incapable of giving a nuanced view: indeed, all of his children suffered at one time or another from the drastic impairment of his ability to relate to others. But I do not doubt that people sometimes went to Bush for candid and dispassionate assessments.

Bush did have the capacity to understand other points of view. He just knew that to use it would deleteriously affect his standing in the Republican Party. He preferred to get on with his career, and by the end of it he had put his moral imagination in cold storage.

Both men displayed breath-taking arrogance – the contrast with Bill Clinton here is marked. But again, Reagan's arrogance was based upon his conviction that he was right about his ideas. That belief in his rightness made him stubborn and uncompromising, but also Careerism in high places - 211

potentially fragile. Recalling his extraordinary public outburst in his first election campaign when questioned by black Republicans, we see that Reagan was susceptible to the narcissistic wound. We cannot imagine a similar vulnerability in Bush – his whiny petulance over setbacks does not qualify. It is true that the penchant among all the Bushes for choosing advisers based solely upon their allegiance to the family is highly indicative of some degree of narcissism, for we have elsewhere seen that narcissists value loyalty above all other qualities; but even here the comparison with Reagan is interesting. In spite of his narcissism, Reagan was so truly confident that he magnanimously forgave David Stockman for betraying administration secrets to a liberal magazine. Bush, on the other hand, was so insecure that he needed the constant reassurance of loyal retainers.

Reagan also possessed political courage, which again flowed out of his confidence in his own judgment. Against the advice of his hidebound and morally corrupted retinue, he made up his own mind that Mikhail Gorbachev was a good man, and dealt with him accordingly.

What Bush possessed in the place of Reagan's belief in his own rightness was a belief in his own rectitude. The words are related but point to different spheres. Reagan thought he was right about the world – about socialism, the Soviet Union, the economy, and the proper role of government in people's lives. Bush had no definite beliefs about any of these issues. Instead, he just thought that he was the right sort of person. So powerful was this belief in himself that he thought that principles, convictions, and ideas ought to be subordinated to his person – they ought to serve his interests, rather than he theirs. An idea became right when he adopted it:

Planned Parenthood yesterday, criminalization of abortion today; fiscal responsibility today, supply-side tax cuts tomorrow. We might say, then, that this made him the purest exponent of Careerism in high places - 212

Alasdair MacIntyre's theory that virtue is morality: believing as he did that he embodied all the

virtues in his own person, he therefore believed that his own person exuded morality.

Consequently, he did not want to risk having some little imp of principle turn out later to obstruct

the thriving of his perfected person. So naked was this dedication to himself that he could not

even fake principles. As a savvy politician, he knew that the great thing is to appear to have

principles, and to make one's changes of principle appear principled; but he was never any good

at the exercise, because it bored him to have to play to a crowd of people whom he considered

beneath him. (Again we bump up against the irony that Reagan was an actor who always played himself, and was therefore effective in the role, whereas Bush was always playing a part, and therefore performed badly.)

It is not that Bush was utterly bereft of ideas. Like any man of average intelligence who

lives long enough in the world, he had come to a few conclusions. He was always, for instance,

somewhat of an internationalist in foreign policy, and therefore unpopular with the isolationists

in his own party. But since he did not consistently follow any principle higher than his own

careerist thriving, this idea was up for sale. When the Soviet Union broke apart and was

transformed overnight into a friendly but precarious democracy, Bush remained aloof and did not

lift a finger to prevent the Russians from spiraling into economic chaos and political instability.

Given the long-standing prejudices of the American people, any effort to help would have

required leadership and incurred some degree of political risk, whereas inaction was easy,

convenient, and popular. His international outlook had no chance against the temptation to take

the politically expedient course. So one way we might gauge his character is to note that – again

in contrast to Reagan – he was averse to any display of political courage. Indeed, he did his level Careerism in high places - 213

best to make sure he was never put in a position where the need for courage could even arise.

But when, on rare occasions, an opportunity to stand up and be counted came around in spite of all he did to avoid it, he always sat down.

So he possessed neither character nor convictions. But he did have that one meta- principle – himself. Furthermore, his belief in his own rectitude caused him to believe – and this belief was sincere – that what served his interests served the interests of all upright people. This allows us to answer the most baffling question about Bush, which is not, "How can a man sell out?" but, "How can a man sell out without noticing it?" The answer is that he never sold out his one true principle. Indeed, in the pursuit of his own aggrandizement, he evinced one of the cardinal virtues – perseverance. He got back up after each knockdown, he refused to be deterred by rejection or even mortification. He wanted what he wanted so badly that he stayed in the political ring until he was the last one left on his feet.

Such a man never notices that his sale of parts of himself is shameful, because what he sells each time seems trivial, compared to the importance of what is gained in return. Indeed, in his mental world, it is trivial. Bush, like Lincoln, had a hierarchy of values. As I have already mentioned, Lincoln would compromise about the details – going so far, for instance, as to suspend the right of habeas corpus – as long as he did not sell out his core principles. Bush too would compromise about the details – the Constitution, the Supreme Court, civil rights, China,

Russia – while holding true to the overriding principle of himself and his rise through the political ranks to the highest office in the land.

To further delineate the condition of a man who lacks morality and character, let us compare Bush to Robert E. Lee, who lacked only morality. Lee failed to see which course of Careerism in high places - 214

action would be ultimately judged by humanity to be right and good. This was a serious error of

judgment, and many a young man paid for it with his life. But Lee was rigorously and

reflexively honest, and his own careerist interests were completely subordinated to his

conception of duty. He was offered the command of the entire United States Army, but he turned

it down to accept a modest commission from his renegade state government. He was genuinely

religious rather than faux Episcopalian. He thought slavery an evil that ought to be ended

eventually, in spite of his defense of its homeland. He looked upon the battlefield at

Fredericksburg and said, famously, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond

of it." Bush, on the other hand, who in the Gulf War caused more enemy casualties in six weeks

than Lee caused in four years, was elated by the bloodletting he had engineered because it

boosted his manhood quotient and his popularity rating to all-time highs.

And after he had wrought all the carnage, nothing so perfectly summed up his character

and his morality than his allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power. He had not quailed at

the abduction of a peaceful sovereign nation's head-of-state in Panama, but now he allowed the

mass-murdering dictator of a marauding aggressor-nation to stay at the helm as a concession to the Saudis and the Turks, who had reasons of their own for preferring that the people of Iraq remain under Saddam's tyranny. The Gulf War slaughter, undertaken at the behest of a theocratic monarchy in Riyadh, reinstated a contemptible oligarchy in Kuwait without unseating the brutal autocracy in Baghdad. It must not ever have occurred to Bush that the war had a moral purpose, even one incidental to its geopolitical expediency.

These judgments may seem harsh, but they are hardly debatable. There really can be no question, Careerism in high places - 215

for instance, whether Bush sold out: since he began as a moderate Republican who voted for the

open housing civil rights act of 1968 – which stirred up many of his constituents – but he ended

as himself, the only question is when and how. And the public record is equally clear that lying

came as easy to Bush as falling off a log. In 1988, he wrested the Republican nomination for the

presidency away from Bob Dole by vowing never to raise taxes, then used that same promise

effectively in the general election before breaking it halfway through his term. At one time a

pillar of Planned Parenthood, he embraced the anti-abortion movement in order to curry favor with Republicans on the religious right, claiming his about-face was due to a moral reassessment.

He denied repeatedly having anything to do with the illegal support of the Contras, in the face of overwhelming evidence that he personally ran much of the operation out of his own office. He acquiesced in the slaughter in Tiananmen Square, but pretended otherwise: after announcing to the outraged American public that he was suspending high-level diplomatic contacts, he secretly sent a contingent to China to reassure the butchers of Beijing that his announcement had been a sham intended for public consumption only. But perhaps his most brazen lie was his simple statement that he had nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court because he was the

"best man for the job on the merits."

It is worth while examining the context for this last-cited remark, both for what it says about the nature of politics today as well as the light it shines on the personality of George H. W.

Bush. Since the Supreme Court seat that was vacant had belonged to Thurgood Marshall, it was deemed appropriate in all political circles that the replacement candidate should be black; nor did anyone begrudge Bush his right to nominate a black conservative, if any could be found.

Moreover, it was understood and accepted by everybody that Bush would publicly extol his Careerism in high places - 216

nominee as a man of undoubted ability and integrity regardless of his race – it would have been plain bad manners to do less, and Bush was a graduate of the some of the best finishing schools in America. Commentators are not in the habit of picking on the lingua franca of everyday political expediency and holding it to the highest standards of accuracy and truth.

Nonetheless, in light of Thomas's manifest inexperience, Bush's speechwriters thought it expedient not to draw too much attention to his specifically legal qualifications; and had they written that race was not a factor in Thomas's nomination, they would have exposed the President to ridicule, for any such statement would be obviously disingenuous – and unnecessary besides, because everyone at both ends of the political spectrum understood that race had been, and ought to have been, considered. Therefore, choosing their words with great care, the speechwriters labeled Thomas the best man for the job, and they tactfully and sensibly omitted any statement either asserting or denying that race had played a part in the nomination. But Bush, under the pressure of his public appearances, often gave way to a kind of mania, which could be relied upon to produce garbled grammar and general incoherence, but could also tempt him toward pomposity and grandiosity. He departed from the prepared text of his speech and enthused that

Thomas was the "best qualified" candidate available; and he went on to say, gratuitously (since no one had asked) and quite untruthfully (in light of what was known about the White House deliberations), that "the fact that he is black and a minority had nothing to do with this." This awkward and, as I say, unnecessary lie embarrassed Thomas's supporters almost as much as it annoyed his opponents.

I have dilated upon the subject of Bush's lying because it raises the psychological question in the most profound way. How did George Bush explain his lying to himself? Surely it Careerism in high places - 217

is patent that his personal code of conduct prohibited lying; yet it is just as obvious that he felt no

compunction and no shame. As usual, our vocabulary is inadequate to limn the realities of moral

illness. The psychiatric profession, still fooled by Freud, makes too much over the

psychologically interesting, but almost nonexistent, category of unconscious lies. But Bush did

not in the least resemble that rare individual who can no longer can tell truth from falsehood or

remember which of his statements are lies. On the contrary: Bush's lying was congenital rather

than pathological. He lied readily and reflexively; but unlike the sociopath, with a conscience – a

conscience perfectly satisfied with itself, and convinced that the lies were fitting, acceptable, and

necessary.

He certainly knew at the time of uttering them which of his statements were lies; and at

the same time, he clearly thought of himself as a truthful and upright man. How? The answer

can only be that he regarded himself as so truthful and decent, so much the right sort of person,

that the lies that served him served also the cause of truthfulness and decency. Therefore he

believed that his statements were imbued with a rightness that transcended the niggling question

of their empirical truth or falsity. They were assigned to a special zone of expediency where the

ordinary rules are suspended. But remember that, in Bush's mind, the expediency was a genuine

national expediency. Sure, the statements served his personal interests; but these, he assumed, were also the interests of all decent people. Therefore, he thought that these statements, while not quite factually accurate, were nonetheless ethically and rightly sworn. I have several times cited his remark to Billy Graham about the decision to wage war on Iraq: "I know in my heart I've

done right." As a result of this belief in his own rectitude, he lied with confidence, if not aplomb;

and as his famous live interview with Dan Rather demonstrated, when he deflected a question Careerism in high places - 218

about Iran-Contra by alluding to an embarrassing moment from Rather's own career, he even considered any questioning of his veracity to be an impertinence.

Bush's lies about Iran-Contra were so outlandish – he said he hadn't known anything about it because he had been "out of the loop" – and his lofty disdain for those who dared to challenge him was so politically chancy, that we have to conclude that he really did have a clear conscience about it. He reasoned, I think, as follows: "I did what was necessary to protect and defend my country. I acted honorably in an honorable cause. No one can legitimately reproach me for any action I took at that time. But here is this little weasel of a reporter trying to score some sort of cheap shot. If I tell the truth, a bunch of spineless liberals will jump up and down.

Vermin, who wouldn't have cared if all of Central America had gone communist. These are the contemptible curs who want to call my honor into question. I flew combat in World War II, and these pampered draft-dodging sissies want to embarrass me. I owe them nothing! What I'm about to say is good enough for them, and all that anyone needs to know."

By the time Rather interviewed him, Bush had taken this reasoning to the next level: he was no longer going to bother to lie; he was going to refuse to answer at all. So the nation was treated to the spectacle of a candidate for the presidency responding to a serious and relevant question by attacking the reporter's professionalism in a completely unrelated matter. When the dust had settled, the question remained unanswered. That he did not suffer any serious political fallout from this reckless course of action shows the depths to which the public debate had sunk.

The same reasoning undoubtedly was at work when Bush lied about the secret high-level diplomatic meetings with China that he had authorized after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

He thought of himself as an old China hand – someone who understood how Deng's mind Careerism in high places - 219

worked. He was confident that he knew what he was doing, and loath to allow the sentimentality and ignorance of the American people to stand in his way.

Other of his lies resembled lying in the rest of us. When he said he had changed his position on abortion out of a genuine moral reassessment rather than political expediency, he may have partly believed himself. When he had to endure the fallout from his betrayal of his pledge never to raise taxes, he probably persuaded himself that the pledge had been made in earnest, but that "events" had conspired against him. When he tried to get away with saying that he had never called Reagan's fiscal program "voodoo economics" (he backed down only when confronted with the videotape), he may have told himself that he hadn't meant much by the original remark anyway. And this would have been true – Bush never meant much by any remark.

When he denied the importance of race as a consideration in the nomination of Clarence

Thomas to the Supreme Court, Bush simply embodied without embarrassment the almost limitless cynicism that attaches to a life in politics. He had lived in this water most of his adult life, and it was not uncongenial to him. There are statements that one makes simply as part of living the life – just as one poses in front of American flags, recites the pledge of allegiance, and appears before the American Legion to say that America will always be number one militarily.

Nearly all politicians go through these motions, but you can see that some of them are uncomfortable and even a little ashamed. Not Bush. He was the type of man who could not be humiliated by having to jump through the hoops of careerism. The only question he ever asked was "How high?" He wasn't embarrassed to lie about Clarence Thomas, and he didn't even think of it as lying. His stock of canards was limitless. Campaigning on September 7th, 1988, Careerism in high places - 220

pandering to an audience of American Legionnaires, he got carried away by his own rhetoric and convinced himself that he was addressing them on December 7th – Pearl Harbor Day. He began to extol their heroic sacrifices on that day of infamy, and only their baffled headshakes brought him back to reality. He had been, to use George Orwell's unforgettable metaphor about political speech, quacking like a duck; it went with the territory, and he was up to the task. Had it been required of him to bray like an ass, he would have willingly done that too; and sometimes he did it unwittingly.

He did not always lie for advantage: sometimes he knew better than to try. During the 1992 election campaign, he was asked by a television "news" reporter if he had ever strayed from his marriage vows. Because he was aware that the media had proof of his affair, and that the arcane rules of presidential "character" had been rewritten in the light of Gary Hart's adventures (it was now all right to have an affair but not to lie about it), Bush could not afford to prevaricate.

Therefore, he opted once again for the tactic that best suited his patrician sensibility anyway – he evinced a lofty disdain for the question and refused to answer it. Everyone with a brain stem knew that this was tantamount to a "yes" – that he would have trumpeted his marital fidelity had it existed – but with his customary recklessness he portrayed his refusal as the courageous act of a well-bred man who would not sully the presidency by responding to such trash while sitting in the Oval Office. He was accidentally right about this: the question was improper, and he had every right to scorn it. But I say "accidentally," because he had never, prior to this moment, had a fixed principle on this matter, any more than on any other. His sudden advocacy of the right of privacy and of the need for decorum was, like his advocacy of anything else, motivated by the Careerism in high places - 221

purest opportunism.

It will not do to call such ad hoc posturing a type of hypocrisy. A hypocrite pretends to believe the opposite of what he really does believe. Implicit in the definition is that there is a belief. Bush never believed in anything other than his own noblesse oblige.

On the issue of abortion, for instance, he was unable to disguise the fact that he had never

settled on any position long enough to betray it. It would make sense to accuse him of selling out

his pro-choice beliefs for political gain only if he had ever held them in the first place, or in any

place thereafter, with anything like an intellectual commitment. All that we are entitled to say for

sure about his changes of mind over the abortion question is that none of them cost him any

intellectual labor or moral uneasiness. It should be remembered, by the way, that he had

contempt for fundamentalist Christians, and they for him, and he and they both knew it; but it

was a marriage made in political heaven and moral hell. After he had abased himself before

them and received their votes in 1988 as his reward, he blithely ignored their interests and

incurred their considerable wrath during the campaign of 1992. He even backtracked on abortion

yet again while answering a hypothetical question about how he would respond if one of his

granddaughters wanted to get an abortion: he said that he would try to talk her out of it but would

support any decision she made. The interviewer, Stone Phillips of NBC, then asked him, "So in

the end the decision would be hers?" and Bush, whose own party platform called for the decision

to be made by the government and backed up by criminal penalties, replied, "Well, who else's –

who else's could it be?" He thus tacitly admitted that he did not after all regard abortion as

morally equivalent to murder. The anti-abortionists had always suspected as much, and their disgust with him was one of the factors that cost him the election. Careerism in high places - 222

As with abortion, so with the American flag. A friend who was in high school during the

Bush-Dukakis campaign remembers thinking to himself that no intelligent person could possibly believe that the rote repetition of the pledge of allegiance would promote patriotism. So did that

mean that Bush was completely cynical about politics? I have said that he embodied the endless

cynicism of Washington, D.C.; but I also believe that he adopted his positions "as if" they were

valid. That is to say, when he found out that Dukakis was vulnerable on the pledge – while

governor, Dukakis had vetoed a bill to make the pledge mandatory in Massachusetts public

schools – Bush was eager to take advantage of it; but he probably did not like his aides coming

up to him and saying "We're killing Dukakis with this bogus issue." I am guessing that he said to

himself that, damnit, people shouldn't be ashamed of the flag. After the issue had served his

purposes, his interest in it went away, of course. His quiet retirement has verified that he never

cared strongly about any issue at all, except possibly the repeal of the capital gains tax.

It is impossible to determine the real beliefs of a person whose guiding principle is the

question "What's in it for me?" And it is difficult to judge the public morality of a person who is

convinced that his "me" is composed of the best qualities of the best people, so that he honestly

believes at every moment of his life that the answer to that question is also the answer to the

question "What would be best for everyone?" We need a new diagnostic term to describe such a

person, who lies knowingly and brazenly for his own aggrandizement – yet believes in his heart

that his self-serving lies are the right thing to do and also serve the good of the nation. The term

"narcissistic" does not fully capture him, because many narcissists, however psychologically

blind, are, unlike Bush, honest about the facts and interested in ideas.

Therefore I will tag this category of extreme moral illness with the label of Bush's Careerism in high places - 223

Syndrome. Briefly, the presence of this pathology is confirmed when a subject abandons both the exercise of his moral imagination and any commitment at all to fixed principles, while remaining convinced that he is a light to guide his neighbors. We recognize it in the shameless careerism of a person whose every act, however accidentally or coincidentally moral, is imbued with self-aggrandizement and self-approbation.

Given this constellation of traits, it is fatuous to describe the condition in terms of weakness of character and ordinary selfishness: bereft as he is of stable principles, yet certain of his own virtue, where would the subject find in himself any impulse that is not self- aggrandizing? Yet how is he to know this about himself?

Ordinary careerism starts with, and presupposes, moral complacency, which is the adoption of the dominant respectable morality, not out of genuine reverence, but out of expediency. The morally complacent individual wants a successful career, and careerism always entails an acceptance of "things as they are," for a career can thrive nowhere else than in the world as it is.

We can climb the social ladder only of the society we live in. So "traditional values," however they are defined by whatever the dominant culture is, are always good enough for the morally complacent.

This is no small matter. If society itself is diseased, social success puts us near the center of the pathology. Edmund Burke said memorably that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. The example of Nazi Germany is never far from our minds. In our own culture, we have seen that the morality of character is the unofficial morality of most people; that machismo is only a slight exaggeration of the morality of character; and that Careerism in high places - 224

sociopathy is only a slight exaggeration of machismo. Those who go along to get along may end up complicit in a string of atrocities. Bush stood by while the Butcher of Beijing conducted his massacre in Tiananmen Square; we stood by while Bush, with an army at his disposal, veered toward the sociopathic in his demonstration of character and manhood in Panama.

Why not label Bush a sociopath, then, and have done with it? The answer is that we must not sacrifice scientific precision on the altar of instant gratification. For one thing, the sociopath, unlike Bush, often possesses a moral philosophy that he truly believes in, and it is one that is opposed to the dominant social morality and requires a certain amount of courage to profess publicly. For another thing, while it is true that the sociopath conducts himself like "a nation with one member in it," and therefore, in the interpersonal arena, may wreak the kind of havoc that the United States under Bush wreaked in the international arena, he does not, like Bush, delude himself that his own interests are also the interests of everyone else.

In other words, while both Bush and the sociopath are totally selfish, Bush does not know this about himself, while the sociopath does. The sociopath accordingly construes his selfishness as a principle, projects this principle onto all other people, and proceeds to live boldly by the tenets of that bona fide moral code that I have identified as "ethical egoism." He pretends to believe in the majority code when it suits him and he can profit from it, but he knows he is pretending. Bush, unconscious of his motives, professes, and believes that he believes in, a socially acceptable code of duty and service to others that the sociopath would gag on.

But much of the difference – and it is a real difference, however flippant it sounds to say it – is simply that Bush was rich and respectable and most criminal sociopaths are not. The lawless loner has to set himself against the society of which Bush is a member in good standing Careerism in high places - 225

and try to vandalize it: he is neither well-enough born nor imaginative enough to get inside that society and do things Bush's way. His selfishness stands out over and against the selfishness of

the law-abiding, whereas Bush knew how to align his own interests with that of respectable

others. As a consequence, Bush's greed, aggressiveness and opportunism were regarded by those

others as civic-minded ambition and patriotism.

(A budding sociopath with a kit of burglar's tools in his hands would eat his heart out

over the way Bush's youngest son Neil signed off on million-dollar sweetheart deals as one of the

directors of a savings-and-loan outfit that failed during the Reagan years. Refined white-collar criminality is easier on the knees and far more profitable, but you do have to be refined. Better still to be the oldest son, George W. Bush, and have wealthy friends who simply will not let your oil business go under. Later they will buy the presidency for you.)

The senior Bush, in spite of his cloak of respectability, could not finally get away with being unprincipled in the conduct of his very public career, because high character expressed through firm convictions really is the unofficial morality of our society. Our moral crime is not that we pay only a shamming lip service to character, but that we substitute the morality of character for genuine morality – for goodness, kindness, empathy, imagination, and love. Thus it did not hurt Bush in the polls to commit the mortal sin of devastating the country of Panama to plump up his reputation for manliness – our conception of manliness is not that far from his – but it did hurt him to commit the venial sin of lying about taxes, because "honesty" is a linchpin of character. And it hurt him worse to lie about taxes than for Clinton to lie about an extramarital affair, because most people understood that Clinton lied defensively about a private matter largely out of shame and embarrassment and at least partly to spare his wife and daughter, Careerism in high places - 226

thereby demonstrating a sense of right and wrong even in his breach of moral etiquette, whereas

Bush lied brazenly and unapologetically about a public policy solely to gain an advantage over his rivals by foul means when fair means were unavailing. He thereby demonstrated that the moral waiver he had granted himself was limitless.

So Bush had to pay the piper because our belief in character is not hypocritical. The judgment of the voters that was rendered in the 1992 presidential election about Bush's lack of character was correct. Even though he brought to that contest all the advantages of incumbency plus the recent memory of his spectacularly popular Gulf War victory, he was beaten decisively by Clinton, who carried quite a bit of baggage in the character department even at that early date.

But smoking pot, avoiding the draft, and straying from marital vows were perceived by the voters – again, correctly – as less indicative of low character than lying for political gain and adopting principles and positions out of political expediency.

To resume our description of Bush's Syndrome, then: we start with moral complacency, which means that the subject adopts the majority code out of opportunism, intellectual laziness, or moral torpor. But by itself, this allegiance will not take anyone very far in his career, and it may also come to function as a genuine moral commitment: many complacent people, having accepted the majority code as the path of least resistance, proceed to obey that code in all earnestness. They may be "no better than they have to be," but they are no worse. They are satisfied with their pedestrian careers and relieved that, in their modest niches, they are rarely tempted to go outside their Sunday School precepts. To graduate to the next level of moral illness, the subject must continually suborn that code to his own ends – as we have said, he does not serve principles; principles serve him. This adds a poisonous element to the mix: whereas a Careerism in high places - 227

merely complacent person's lasting adoption of the majority morality conduces to great evil only when that majority acts to wrong a minority, the opportunist's temporary adoption of the majority morality will set him at odds with other members of the majority when they block his path to success. And we do indeed see that Bush reached the nadir of his character in the tactics he used, not to rout "the liberals," but to undo the candidacy of fellow conservative Bob Dole. (After the

New Hampshire primary, Dole, when asked by a reporter what message he might want to send to the victorious Bush, said grimly, "Stop lying about my record." This was immediately analyzed by the pundits as further evidence of the "dark side" of Dole. They forgot to analyze whether

Dole's charge was well founded. It was. Twelve years later, Bush's son overcame John McCain in the South Carolina primary by the use of similarly slimy tactics.)

Psychologically, what made this public display of low character possible was, paradoxically, his belief in his own high character. He believed that his self was the best self – it was the apotheosis of the morality of character. "In me is found the highest character; what serves me serves morality and humanity." This confidence in his own rectitude is the third and defining element of Bush's Syndrome. The sociopath, for all his enjoyment of his own cunning, and his belief that he is superior to all the sheep, does know that he is not respectable. And many everyday careerists have twinges of conscience about their machinations and expect to be judged harshly if they are caught and exposed. They do still think of themselves as fundamentally decent people, who did only what most others would have done in the same situation; but they have some awareness that their conduct has not squared with the civilized norms, and they know it will be best for them to hide certain of their deeds from public scrutiny. Sufferers from Bush's

Syndrome, however, when called on the moral carpet, feel irritation rather than mortification. Careerism in high places - 228

They have clear consciences and they expect to go on being respected.

We have already asked how Bush could lie in his own cause and still maintain this belief

in his own irreproachable character. The question suggests that, in the etiology of Bush's

Syndrome, a malignant role may well be played by unmerited wealth and inherited respectability.

There is only a tenuous philosophical basis for condemning wealth per se: but surely unearned

affluence can serve to reinforce an individual's sense that, Nature smiling upon him as She does,

his own impulses must all be exemplary. The truest thing ever said about Bush was Jim

Hightower's much-quoted barb that "he was born on third base but thinks he hit a triple." To

deserve the epithet – with all that it says about his self-delusion – Bush did have to be born on third base.

We have in our definition of Bush's Syndrome, then, the lack of moral imagination associated with garden-variety careerists combined with the lack of scruples associated with career criminals. Add to this a patrician sense of his own inestimable self-worth, and we have a condition that, when we place an army at his disposal, plays out as "sociopathy with country-club

éclat."

When I asked one of my readers who was more evil, Reagan or Bush, he answered without a moment's hesitation: Bush by a country mile. I expected this answer and would have been surprised if he had said otherwise. Reagan was honest, principled, and courageous while Bush was dishonest, unprincipled, and cowardly. The contrast between the sincerity of narcissism and the opportunism of careerism is just that stark.

It is inevitable that we loathe the fawning, lying, manipulative social climber more than Careerism in high places - 229

the genuinely deluded narcissist. But we are probably hasty in our conclusion that the careerist

"could have been" a better person and "chose" not to be. This conclusion is evidence of our

belief in the universal template of character, which is itself a sign of our own lack of moral

imagination. How quickly we say, "I would not have done that," claiming moral credit and

forgetting that the "I" who is doing the talking would not have experienced the situation in the

same way as the "he" who is the unlucky object of the comparison. This simple insight is

captured eloquently by a character in Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner:

But you see, there you're judging another human being. . . . That's the thing that doesn't make sense to me. Because you're saying, in effect – you're saying, in effect, that Tom behaved the way he should have behaved, but Martin didn't. Martin ought to have behaved differently from the way he did behave. . . . But you see, that's where I become incredibly confused. Because I mean, if you were Martin, or if someone were Martin, and they'd had Martin's life, and Martin's experiences, then why wouldn't they perceive the whole situation around them in exactly the way that Martin did, and act accordingly? And in that case, what's the point of condemning Martin? Because he couldn't help being what he was – and since he was what he was, he saw things the way he saw them, and he did what he did. . . . I mean, rather than condemning Martin or whomever, wouldn't it be more valuable to try to understand various things? – for example, to understand what circumstances in the world or in a person's life might lead them to behave the way Martin behaved?

All this is, or should be, obvious and fundamental, yet it is overlooked repeatedly by even the

most morally alert and liberally tolerant among us – which is another way of saying that empathy

is not automatic, but, in the teeth of the constant allure of the rhetoric of character, must be

activated again and again.

If the universal template of psychology is used as a yardstick, Reagan and Bush are presumed to have been alike in their perceptions of right and wrong: therefore their disparities in

morality are purely disparities in character. Allowing for differences between the two men in the Careerism in high places - 230

amount of information and the suppleness of intellect each possessed – differences that are erroneously thought to be morally negligible – both are assumed to have seen identical ethical configurations. Bush may have known the names of more world capitals than Reagan, but both men, and all people with good eyesight, can see moral truth. We all know right from wrong; because we are all tainted by original sin, we are all tempted to do wrong; but those of us who embody the virtues will do our moral duty rather than follow our inclinations. Following this schema, Reagan evinced strength of character and Bush weakness; Reagan was admirable and

Bush was culpable. We want to hold Bush in contempt for having succumbed to temptation, while continuing to esteem Reagan as someone who was incorruptible. But in order to maintain our belief in Reagan's virtue, we have to attribute his cruel policies to a well-intentioned misunderstanding. So then we say that people do differ intellectually: Bush saw the world clearly and Reagan was deluded, which excuses Reagan and damns Bush doubly. But Bush could no more help his belief in his own superiority of character than Reagan could help his belief in the rightness of his ideas.

We arrive once again at the debate between those who, analyzing the Nazi era, locate the greatest evil in the blind ideologues who sincerely believed that Jews were human parasites that had to be exterminated for the common good, and those who locate the greatest evil in "the middle managers of the Holocaust," who participated solely for reasons of career advancement.

This is clearly another version of the Reagan-Bush antithesis. Again, most of us think that someone who operates solely to aggrandize his own wealth and status would be more reprehensible than a mistaken ideologue who at least "had the courage of his convictions." But the shadow of Hitler falls over the argument and tends to skew the comparison, because we want Careerism in high places - 231

to start with his incontestable status as the incarnation of evil, and we are immediately faced with

the uncomfortable fact that he seems more like the sincerely deluded ideologue.

Unhappily for our own most cherished pieties, the true believer like Hitler often

resembles the ideal man of character. He evinces the qualities that we associate with the virtues:

the integrity, the sincerity, the self-discipline, and the dedication of his life to the service of a

higher cause. Above all, he has firm principles, and he holds to them with tenacity and

consistency. How we worship consistency! – as if it did not rather indicate an absence of

psychological mobility that ought to alarm us the moment we recognize it. By comparison to the

blind idealists, the time-servers like Bush, who will sign on to any set of principles only for as

long as it takes them to climb the next rung of the ladder of success, seem not only low in

character, but also clearly aware of their lowness – for do they not have to consciously calculate

the social and political moves that advance their careers? But as the quote from Wallace Shawn

has already suggested, we may be jumping to a conclusion. While the careerist may be more

aware than the narcissist that others will consider his actions to be evil, he may not be conscious

that he is therefore a bad person: he may suspect that those others, faced with his dilemmas,

would do as he does. When we reach the degree of moral illness represented by Bush's

Syndrome, we see a careerist who sincerely believes that others will not condemn him – who

believes that others will in fact fall in with his own belief that, because he is such an exemplary

human being, his self-aggrandizing lies are not lies, but the right thing to do. After all, he must be, in pursuing his own good, pursuing the good of all other similarly exemplary human beings.

The way we have dealt with Hitler and his idealism, incidentally, is as the exception that confirms the rule. We think that his behavior, when analyzed closely, puts him in the careerist Careerism in high places - 232

camp. This proves how enthralled we are by the morality of character: for in keeping with our foregone conclusion that careerism is more evil than idealism, we have jimmied the propositions and played with the facts to try to prove that Hitler was a cunning opportunist, a cynical politician, and a conscious hypocrite. Ron Rosenbaum's book about Hitler is a single protracted jimmy: the author moves heaven and earth to prove that Hitler was aware of his own criminality.

Only if Hitler was a liar and a coward would we be right to withhold the accolades of character from him; only if he said one ostensibly good thing – "I wish to create a New Order in Europe" – but secretly longed to do another, malevolent thing that he knew to be malevolent – "I wish to exterminate this unoffending people to gratify my hate-filled heart" – would we feel confident in assigning him the status of arch-fiend. We think that the greatest evil has to be conscious evil; we think that only the self-aggrandizers meet that criterion; we cannot bear to put Hitler in that other category of those who couldn't help it. But Rosenbaum is not only wrong about Hitler, he is wrong about everyone and everything. Hitler the idealist could not help his blindness;

Eichmann the careerist could not help his ambition. The dichotomy between careerists and idealists is false, and the attribution of weakness of character to the careerist and strength of character to the principled idealist is doubly false.

As we have seen, the comparison of Bush to Reagan works to the disadvantage of Bush, even though history will record, I think, that Reagan, not Bush, was much the worst president of the

20th Century. Therefore, to conclude, I will put Bush in one corner of the ring, wearing the colors for complacency and self-aggrandizement, and in the opposite corner the champion of principle, William Rehnquist. Careerism in high places - 233

The Chief Justice was many things, but "corruptible," at least in the vulgar sense, was not

one of them. He had his musty, ugly principles and he invoked them with a consistency that

would shame a machine. On the few occasions where he wavered in his judicial principles –

finding a first amendment right in unlimited campaign contributions and a fourteenth amendment

imperative to protect Bush voters from Gore voters – he was already Chief Justice with no

further career advancement possible and he had nothing to gain except the contempt of

historians. He "modified" his overt principles on those occasions not for personal profit, but on

behalf of his covert higher principles that oligarchy is a better form of government than

democracy and rich white people should have greater access to political power than poor white

people and all black people. He truly believed that he had done the right thing when he violated

his oath of office and subverted the Constitution on behalf of the Republican Party. But when we

compare, let us say, the depth of his commitment to capital punishment with Bush's commitment

to a woman's right to choose an abortion, we need not doubt that Rehnquist really was in love

with the death penalty and could not be bought off.

Bush, on the other hand, would abandon his position on capital punishment if we made it worth his while. In his desire to gain the highest prize for himself and to enjoy holding it for its own sake, he resembles in some degree the rest of us. He is connected to us by cords that can

sometimes resonate to our advantage. As part of the very nature of his self-aggrandizing project,

he wants to please us, or at least a large enough portion of us to guarantee his electoral success.

So, for instance, he was never able to bring himself to endorse the hate-filled rhetoric of the pro- life movement, and when he was asked that hypothetical question about a granddaughter's possible abortion, he reverted to the common humanity he shared with the majority of Careerism in high places - 234

Americans. We may have contempt for the way he had earlier prostituted himself before the pro- lifers, but we cannot deny that we know why he did it.

But when Rehnquist voted in favor of the execution of one Texas prisoner whose attorney slept through the trial, and of another who was almost certainly innocent, we don't know how a man can reach the point of wanting to do such a thing. We cannot figure out which world he hopes to gain at the cost of losing his soul. We can only see clearly that he would gladly have driven his cold principles over our warm bodies without blinking an eye.

Careerism looks more tawdry to us when we view it through the lens of character, but narcissism wedded to absolute power does far and away the most damage over the long haul.

Careerists want to enjoy themselves, and they can best do that when they have aligned themselves with the body politic and gotten in the sty with the rest of us. They will do us no harm if we will acquiesce in their pleasures. Principled ideologues, on the other hand, have plans for us, and cannot be bought off – which is a bad thing rather than a good.

However, the correct answer to the question as posed is "mu" – Zen for "Un-ask it." Evil is defined by the suffering of its victims, and the intentions of the perpetrators do not matter. We need to stop rating evil, judging it, and punishing it, and instead begin to study it and understand it. As repugnant as their behavior was, neither George H. W. Bush nor William Rehnquist were, in a psychological sense, able to act otherwise. The categories of blame are no more appropriate here than elsewhere. If we placed such men in solitary confinement and fed them bread and water, we would be endorsing their concepts of character and vengeance. It is madness to imagine that they can ever be rehabilitated by punishment, any more than by exposure to other points of view or other ways of life. Indeed, Bush did travel widely and he learned little or Careerism in high places - 235

nothing from it. In lieu of taking punitive measures against such men, let us simply refuse to place them in positions of power over us. Let them be politically quarantined and so kept from doing any further damage. Thus protected from them, we must next try to educate ourselves about them and about our susceptibility to them, and to figure out ways to prevent ourselves from rewarding them in the public arena.

Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies

Timothy McVeigh was mentally ill, but since his condition was not taxonomically described in

the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it was

impossible for his defense attorneys to save his life from the federal hangman with an insanity

defense. This is because the term "mental illness" does not mean what it says. It is currently

used to designate either physical illness or, in rare cases, unseemly behavior. Most people in

psychiatric hospitals – those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, the most severe

cases of "clinical" depression, or plain old-fashioned dementia – have damaged or chemically

chaotic brains; a few of them – for example, sociopaths, child pornographers, and pedophiles

who have run afoul of the law, but whose families have money – have seemingly normal brains

but tendencies to engage in actions deemed outrageous by civilized society.

I leave to one side the contentious issue of whether the drug-based therapies that are currently recommended for "Axis I" mental disorders represent a scientific breakthrough or an admission of failure. Certainly the manner in which these disorders sometimes respond to drugs

– plus the way "Axis II" personality disorders typically fail to respond – verifies that brain chemistry is a salient feature of the so-called mental illnesses. That is to say, the person's thinking is off-kilter due to organic brain damage or dysfunction, in the same way that a baseball pitcher's curve ball is off the plate due to a broken arm. On the other hand, clinical depression is, as of this writing, alarmingly over-diagnosed, and people who quite reasonably cannot bear their Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 237

unbearable lives are being treated according to the "disease model." A few passing observations are pertinent to this issue: first, we do not understand the exact nature of the brain dysfunction; second, we have only a rudimentary idea why the drugs seem to palliate it and no expertise yet in developing pills that do not have disastrous side effects; third, we are at this moment in full denial of the evidence that social stresses are important causes of such damage to the brain. The confident assertion of researchers today that the etiology of so-called mental illnesses is entirely a matter of brain chemistry, which itself is mostly a matter of hereditary, should be understood as a massive outbreak of pseudoscience – and driven by politics. In conservative circles, political correctness requires the view that no government program can ever palliate a social injustice. It is convenient to have scientists arguing that all human ills are genetically based.

Be that as it may, the term "mental illness" is now unavailable to designate the purely sick thinking that occurs in individuals who are suffering from no identifiable Axis I illness. We need a term that identifies sick mentation – illnesses, not of the brain, but of the mind.

The main sign of Timothy McVeigh's particular illness was his tendency to live in a fictional world. He fantasized a nation of gullible citizens who were yielding their freedoms to a totalitarian government – a government that had (somewhat unaccountably) targeted white

Christian males for virtual extinction, even though white Christian males constituted an overwhelming majority of its officials. In the mythology that McVeigh embraced, the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco were preludes to an all-out assault on nonconforming true Americans, and it was left to a handful of freedom fighters who still swore by the Constitution and the

Declaration of Independence to take up arms against oppression. Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 238

Such "militia men" choose to live by this myth because its fictions are more interesting, and answer more of life's questions, and imbue its followers with a greater sense of purpose, than the facts of the real world.

As an inevitable consequence of his illness, McVeigh thought in terms of broad abstractions. He was not angry with any of the 168 victims of his attack. Yet he placed his bomb in Oklahoma City next to the office building's day care center and detonated it after the start of the working day. None of the people he killed had any connection to the debacle at Waco. But they were all part of the abstraction that he vilified as "the federal government." Here we see the familiar pattern of "us" versus "them": the children who died at Waco were close to his heart; the children of Oklahoma City meant nothing to him. He loved his own and hated the "others."

But where did he learn these interesting patterns of thought? He had been a good soldier who had been decorated for his exploits in the Gulf War, in which we inflicted upon the nation of Iraq the equivalent of 1,000 Oklahoma City bombings. (Given the size of the population of that country relative to our own, we should perhaps say 10,000 such bombings.) We did so with a clear conscience, to avenge the invasion of an abstraction called Kuwait by an abstraction called

Iraq. The abstraction called Kuwait was created by the British Foreign Office out of Iraqi territory in 1923, precisely in order to be a perpetual thorn in the side of its larger neighbor; it is perhaps more accurate to regard it, not as a country in the usual sense of the word, but as a very large estate owned by the al-Sabah family. Iraq, although historically more like a real country than Kuwait, at the time of the war followed a policy that was really just the expression of the will of a single human being named Saddam Hussein. In a moment of accidental truth, President Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 239

Bush said that our quarrel was with that one person, the evil dictator, rather than with the people of Iraq. But while the statement was true, Bush's professing it was a lie, for he proceeded to kill

160,000 of the people while taking inordinate pains to spare Saddam himself.

We cannot argue that Bush and his cohorts were mentally ill according to the DSM. The architects of "Desert Storm" were not delusional. They knew which of their statements were lies.

They did not really invade Iraq for any of the reasons they gave, such as protection of the world's oil supply or the restoration of Kuwaiti "democracy." They followed a geopolitical agenda that included such elements as the propping up of Saudi Arabia and the tormenting of Iran – ends more easily achievable with Saddam Hussein still in power at the end of the war. These men knew what they were doing.

But they certainly did not tell Timothy McVeigh what they were doing – troop morale in the Middle East could not have withstood a recital of their real motivations. So McVeigh thought that he understood all too well the use of force to bring down an evil government. His entire profession was glorified, and he himself singled out for praise. How much more compelling was his cause when the evil government was his own. Could he have been expected to look himself in the mirror while his native country slipped under the rule of a dictatorship harsher than that of Saddam's? – he who knew how to detonate a bomb in the midst of a civilian population, and had seen the thing done, and done well, in a foreign country, to the heartfelt gratitude of his fellow Americans. McVeigh preferred liberty to death; he preferred saving the

United States from itself to saving Kuwait from Iraq. Where is the flaw in the principle of his argument from principle?

There isn't any – not in the form of his argument. If American democracy had been truly Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 240

imperiled by Ruby Ridge and Waco, as he thought it was, perhaps he would today be celebrated as one of those sons of the American Revolution who understood that the tree of liberty must be refreshed by the blood of patriots from time to time. It might not even count so much against him that he performed a so-called terrorist action against a civilian population: the reputations of

John Brown, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Menachem Begin are by no means entirely tarred by similar deeds in their résumés.

The flaw turned out to lie in McVeigh's facts. There was no such peril. Those he struck down were no such enemies of freedom. He was deluded. He was living in a fictional world.

His thinking was askew.

But while McVeigh was mentally ill and Bush was not, Bush was morally ill in a way that

McVeigh was not. For Bush hoped to ride the tiger: he hoped his lie would not bear fruit, so that people like McVeigh would sign on to the administration's fraudulent account of the war without themselves concocting their own romances. But there is more in the human imagination than is dreamt of in George Bush's philosophy. McVeigh told himself a story worth two of Bush's, and assigned himself a part of infinitely greater heroism than anything he was offered in Iraq. To save Kuwait – that was something. But to save the United States of America – that was worth everything.

It will be worth while to pause over the distinction I am making between mental illness and moral illness.

Thinking, for all that it may seem to permeate every second of our lives, is just a technology that has evolved rapidly and dramatically in a single earthly species during the last Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 241

couple of ticks of universal time. Its purpose is to make us more biologically effective. Mind, consciousness, language, logic – we have developed all these in an effort to better our condition.

Among the unique properties of consciousness is the ability it gives us to critique our own programming. Mental health is defined by our ability to use our minds effectively: when gathering information, to select relevant data; when judging among alternatives, to make the best choice; when employing logic, to reason correctly without falling into fallacies.

Stupidity is defined by a continued adherence to a program that does not work any more.

Since most programs work most of the time, having been tested for efficacy down through the centuries and recommended to us as "common sense," we cannot define stupidity as unthinking conformity to a program and intelligence as openness: functioning on automatic pilot is tremendously efficient, and questioning every verity is hugely wasteful of the mind's resources.

The mental economy demands that we convert "the blooming, buzzing confusion" of raw experience into tried-and-true habits of action and thought as quickly as possible. Intelligence, then, is not perpetual openness but the option of openness: it is the mental flexibility to reexamine a program any time there is evidence that a better is available. It is the executive ability to spot incongruencies between our interpretations and the facts.

What I am calling mental illness is a continued commitment to a program that isn't any good – that now produces avoidable evil – out of an inability to connect with reality. The mentally ill person is blocked from acquiring the new information that can correct his mistakes and is unable to judge information rightly. I think it is fair to assume that Timothy McVeigh wanted to see the world as it is, tried to see it as it is, and thought that he did see it as it is. And not one person who called for his execution knew how to correct his vision. Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 242

My description of mental illness as a continued commitment to a program that does not work certainly fits the Axis I diseases of paranoia and schizophrenia, with the added proviso that often the only victim is the person suffering from the disease. But because these diseases can be ameliorated by drug therapies, I wish to insist upon a distinction between such victims of chemical imbalances in the brain and people like McVeigh, who can neither be helped by drugs nor persuaded to see the world differently. We can say that McVeigh too must have been diseased – that his emotions blocked him from seeing the truth – but we do not know, at this time, which drugs to use and where in the brain to intervene to make such people relinquish their fictions and see only facts. McVeigh's mind, not his brain, was sick.

Such a cognitive impairment is a good bet to lead the afflicted person into evil. But it is an important point, psychologically if not in a court of law, that he may have had principles that resemble ours: he went wrong only because he exercised poor judgment and leapt to bad conclusions when he analyzed the limited number of "facts" that he had selected on the basis of their emotional appeal.

Moral health, in parallel with mental health, is the flexibility to undertake a reevaluation of our moral program when it too no longer produces goodness: it is the openness that allows us to monitor our own propensity for evil; it is the mental elasticity that allows us to use empathy as a constant check upon our natural commitment to our own point of view, and so prevent ourselves from inflicting avoidable suffering on others.

As I have argued throughout this treatise, there are two conditions that militate against this exercise of moral imagination: narcissism and careerism. A narcissist is empathically impaired. He is prevented by this disability from gathering better information by means of an Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 243

imaginative connection to others. Worse still, he cannot know that he suffers from this affliction:

he tries to see other points of view and assumes that he succeeds. A careerist, by

contradistinction, may not have the excuse of narcissism but may nonetheless make a conscious

decision to forgo empathy, as a result of inclinations that have been considered, time out of

memory, to be base: such a person consciously lies in order to aggrandize his honor, riches,

power, and fame. He ignores better information and may take aggressive steps to block attempts

to gather it; he maligns the motives of those who point to this better information or continue to

search for it. In doing this, he can still salvage his self-esteem by a number of familiar rationalizations: that the program he has adopted for careerist purposes may, after all, turn out to be right, or at least better than those that would be implemented by his opponents; that he is fitter than any of his enemies to be in his office; that everyone is susceptible to careerism and that he, while no exception to this universal rule, is much less tainted by it than others.

From this discussion, it should be obvious why I consider George Herbert Walker Bush to be the epitome of moral illness. If he seems too bland a figure to qualify for such a diagnosis, it is only because he was so thoroughly blind to his own motives and also possessed such a veneer of good breeding. He embodied all the rationalizations, plus an exaggerated sense of noblesse oblige – he was confident that he was the right sort of person and that his critics were so far beneath him in the aristocratic virtues that any lie that served his interest and thwarted theirs was a good thing not only for himself but for the country. Bush knew what the facts were; McVeigh did not, and lacked the organ of reflection that would have allowed him to recognize them.

McVeigh wanted, or believed he wanted, justice for victims of government persecution in a revivified America populated by hardworking patriots. His thinking was askew, in that he mis- Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 244

identified both the victims and the oppressors, and miscalculated the means to the end of rectifying the situation. Every premise, every conclusion, was unempirical. But he wanted something that makes sense to most of us. He was in fact an idealist, as most such terrorists are.

Bush, on the other hand, knew the truth and had the ability to reason. It was what he wanted that was morally indefensible: and because it was, he had to lie in order to get it.

Next, let us turn our attention to Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber" who sent lethal letter- bombs to individuals who had some connection, however remote, with the world of technology.

The Unabomber had cast himself in a role that makes McVeigh's look like a bit part. Kaczynski set out to rescue, not just the United States, but the entire world, from a global catastrophe. He sought to save the shriveled souls of the billions of victims of a scientific/technocratic cabal. He fought with the pen as well as the sword. He had a comprehensive political, social, and psychological view of this many-tentacled monster that, he believed, does far more harm than totalitarian political states – for this monster devours the "power process," which is the battle with nature that gives joyful meaning to every individual human existence, and so robs us all of the juice of life itself. He hoped that he was striking the first, revolutionary blow against a conspiracy of mad scientists, and that the eventual outcome would be the worldwide abolition of such technological evils as electricity.

Such a tendency toward grand abstraction, with no feeling of empathy for the millions who must be moved about or murdered in order to impose the new world order, is the salient quality of those other idealists, Hitler and Stalin. The paranoia that is found in most of these idealizing abstractionists is, I believe, secondary – a byproduct of the extreme identification of Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 245

the self with the ideal. Hitler's ideal was a purified Germany. The deaths of six million

individuals – or forty million, including all the European casualties of the war – so that the

Germany of his imagination might live: that was a price Hitler was willing to pay (or see others

pay). But he was not purely selfish and self-aggrandizing. Even Walter Langer, the wartime biographer who had stupefied himself with Freudianism before composing his psychological profile of Hitler, set aside the inanities of "the primal scene" long enough to correctly predict, without psychoanalytical flourishes, that Hitler would commit suicide at the end of the war because he was messianically identified with Germany itself, and the death of one would be the death of the other. Not for him a comfortable retirement in Argentina.

Unless we pay attention to the real commitment of such men to their ideas, and, most especially, to the way those ideas are, all too often, our own, we will miss everything that matters. For the next Hitler will not, any more than the last one, appear to be paranoid or otherwise mentally ill to his millions of followers. He will appear to articulate inspiring transcendental truths that call upon us to join some dangerous but glorious communal undertaking to create heaven on earth. What we will have to notice is not that the person issuing the call to arms is sick, crazy, paranoid, an anti-Semite, a racist, a bigot, a madman, a fellow with an absurdly tiny mustache. We will have to notice, right at the start, that he is issuing a call to arms, and that some are going to die so that others can live in the right way. And we are especially going to have to notice how that call appeals to many of our own fantasies and ideals.

With the 20-20 vision of hindsight, most commentators scorned the Unabomber's "manifesto" as literary trash, the execrably written harangue of an obvious lunatic. They were grandstanding.

Kaczynski could write circles around many of them; and while a close reading revealed the Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 246

inhumanity of his abstractions, much of what he said had a high veneer of plausibility and

appealed especially to the subculture of survivalists and extreme sport enthusiasts.

McVeigh and Kaczynski are dramatic instances of what I mean by mental illness. They are easy

to identify as sick individuals because they did acts of evil – blew up strangers with bombs – but

one reason we can be so confident that they were wrong is because they had no following. We

have much more difficulty damning the generals who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo or the

terror-bombing of Hamburg, because many respected moral authorities have made utilitarian

arguments in favor of these slaughters. Then there are the theoreticians of bombing who never

have to handle explosives in their lives and never find themselves called upon to order an attack.

Kaczynski sent bombs to selected individuals through the mail and Timothy McVeigh detonated

a fertilizer bomb next to a building inhabited by hundreds of people; but during the Reagan

administration, Pentagon potentate Richard Perle dealt in contingency plans that called for

detonating hydrogen bombs in the middle of cities inhabited by millions of people. (For those

who have not wanted to acquaint themselves with the unpleasant realities, a single hydrogen

bomb is 50 to 3000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima

and would destroy everything "inside the beltway" of Washington, D.C. The leveling of Moscow

would have killed more people in six seconds than the Holocaust killed in six years.)

So marked was Perle's infatuation with nuclear weaponry that even his supporters took to lightheartedly calling him "the Prince of Darkness." During the early 1980s, he was instrumental in persuading the American government to institute the largest peacetime military buildup in the history of the world – this at a time when the Soviet Union had sunk into a mire of corruption Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 247

and ineffectuality so great that its military was unable to subdue next-door Afghanistan and failed to react for almost two hours to a Korean passenger plane that had strayed into Siberian air space and was flying over top secret military installations. While Perle was still fanatically pushing for ever more nuclear weapons and gigantic increases in military spending, which helped to quadruple the national debt during 12 years of Republican budgets, the Soviets began democratizing their political system and dismantling their economic system. Before the decade even ended, the Soviet empire collapsed, and a few years later the country itself fell apart and

"world communism" came to an abrupt end. Meanwhile, Perle was proud to serve a senile president who saw parallels between these events and the apocalyptic scenario set forth in the book of Revelation. When an international outcry ensued in the wake of the American arms buildup, Reagan called the protesters communist dupes and alleged that the nuclear freeze movement was financed by Moscow. He tried to revive the civil defense programs that had been abandoned in the early 1960s because he imagined that a nuclear war could be "won" if we dispersed into the countryside and kept our casualties below a hundred million. After pushing defense spending out into the light fantastic and calling the Soviet Union "an evil empire" in a carefully worded speech, thereby setting the entire world's nerves on edge, Reagan tested a microphone at a rally by "joking" that Russia had been outlawed and that "we begin bombing in five minutes."

If McVeigh "must have been crazy," what are we to say about Reagan and Perle?

Let us turn to an August, 1988 U.S. News magazine article by Perle. By the time he wrote this piece, the Cold War was over and the Pentagon procurement scandal had come to light, whereby Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 248

the taxpayers learned that sweetheart deals between military purchasers and defense contractors had cost them untold billions of dollars.

The immediate background to Perle's article was the imminent threat of a so-called

"peace dividend." Some members of Congress – even some Republicans – were looking forward to a reduction in defense spending: the money saved could then be applied to social programs or to deficit reduction. Yes, Pentagon funding – usually a sacred cow – was in jeopardy, due to the astronomical budget, the conversion of the Soviet Union into a friendly democracy, and the public's outrage over $7,000 coffee pots, $600 wrenches, and other boondoggles perpetrated by the military-industrial complex.

In the teeth of these concerns, Perle warned against a cut in defense spending and offered the following sentiment:

Anyone who works at the Pentagon knows that there is simply not enough money available to support the defense program the nation needs.

It would be interesting to pull this sentence apart semantically. What, for instance, is the operational definition of "the defense program the nation needs"? Was the nation undefended when Perle wrote?

Perhaps Perle meant that we need a system so sophisticated that, in the event the Russians simultaneously launch 20,000 nuclear missiles, it would have the capacity to intercept and disarm every single one of them. By such reckoning, his remark that "there is simply not enough money available" is true but meaningless. There could never be enough money, any more than there could be enough to fund the defense program the nation needs to protect us from the possibility that the sun could explode. Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 249

In fact, Mr. Perle was deranged, in the precise etymological sense of that word: his

thought had run off the rails. His mind – not his brain or his body – was sick. On the basis of his

article, he should have been declared mentally ill – that is, unable to think – but the term has been

co-opted and applied to people who do think clearly with the help of a little bit of lithium each

day.

We might stipulate any number of criteria for what I will call "cognitive impairment" by

way of abandoning the tendentious use of "mental illness." We will find that Perle fits all of

them. For instance, we take it to be a sign of pathology if an organ stops contributing to the

overall health of the body. Similarly, we should consider it pathological if an idea no longer

contributes anything positive to the health of the social organism.

Perle sees safety in armaments. But the cost of maintaining an impregnable fortress is destroying the lives of the people contained within it. Perle is like a man who is dying of cancer who, every day, buys another gun to keep the lions and elephants from getting into his garden in

Northwest Washington D.C.

Another of the signs of what I call cognitive impairment is confusion over the relationship of means and ends. Aristotle, master of the obvious, spells out the point that some goods are merely instrumental, meaning that they are provisionally good only because they are useful in acquiring the ultimate good, the end-in-itself. The example that usually comes to mind first is money: as an end-in-itself, it is absolutely barren; but as a means by which the accouterments of happiness may be purchased, it is well-nigh indispensable. The miser is understood to be psychologically crippled, because he converts the means to the end.

Like any sane person, I want to be defended against enemies both domestic and foreign. Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 250

But also like any sane person, I do not want a solution that is worse than the problem. By 1988,

many voters were finally coming to understand that if the purpose of a strong military is to make

us secure and the purpose of security is to allow us to live prosperous unfettered lives, then the

defense buildup had become the enemy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The

country's safety was actually being threatened by the massiveness of our government's debt and

by the wholesale neglect of our ever-worsening social problems. Inside Fortress America,

nuclear superiority meant little to people who stood in constant danger, not of atomic

vaporization, but of losing their property or their lives to criminals; and the happiness of a few

fabulously wealthy cheaters in the military-industrial complex did not seem to be worth the growing misery of the many who found themselves falling out of the middle class into the lower class. How much "defense" can you afford to "support" if you find yourself, at the end of the process, bristling with arms and utterly impoverished?

But Perle's scheme could never have succeeded even on its own terms. Every technological advance in our own capacity to defend against a nuclear attack is sure to be matched by a technological advance whereby the opponent finds a way around the defensive system. President Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" was derisively named "Star Wars" because most scientists and even most journalists recognized immediately that it was a piece of science fiction. But it would have been no better had it been based on fact. In the real world, it was doomed before it ever got off the ground – and many responsible defense analysts said so – for two reasons: first, it could never have achieved the sophistication and sheer size necessary to do perfectly the job it was intended to do (and where hydrogen bombs are involved, the slightest imperfection is total failure); second, had any version of it been built, the enemy nation would Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 251

have then designed an offensive system capable of circumventing it. Constant technological innovation renders every system obsolete, often while it is still on the drawing board.

Some conservatives argue today that Reagan's defense buildup was a brilliant bluff: its real purpose was to bankrupt the Soviet empire by forcing it to play a constant game of technological catch-up. If so, then the plan had succeeded by the time Perle wrote his plea on behalf of the Pentagon, and he should have been bragging about his victory and closing up shop.

In truth, both sides had been caught up in an arms race, and ideologically driven men had been in control of policy in both Washington and Moscow. The proliferation of nuclear weapons had long since passed the number needed to annihilate the entire world. During Reagan's presidency, administration officials had begun to scoff at this equilibrium of "Mutual Assured

Destruction" (designated by the acronym "MAD"), saying that it represented a viewpoint that was mad indeed. But the dynamic captured in the term is precisely what had saved the world from a nuclear war: MAD had meant that neither side could attack the other, because wiping out the enemy would entail wiping out oneself as well. The signing of the antiballistic missile treaty

(ABM) during the Nixon administration had been a calculated step by each side. Both the United

States and the Soviet Union had agreed to leave their cities essentially undefended against nuclear attack, as a way of guaranteeing that neither would launch a first strike.

Reagan found this equilibrium, which was our greatest real protection, emotionally unsatisfying. He wanted to be the biggest kid on the block. He knew it wouldn't do to say this, so he said instead that he wanted us to be truly free of the threat of nuclear annihilation, and to that end was proposing a purely defensive system. The Soviets correctly pointed out that any defensive system that rendered a country invulnerable to nuclear retaliation had offensive Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 252

implications as well, because it made it possible for that country to launch a first strike with impunity. They also noted, again correctly, that any attempt to build Star Wars would constitute a unilateral abrogation of the ABM treaty between the two countries.

In spite of these warnings, Reagan tried to go beyond equilibrium, or parity, and attain superiority. The Soviet Union could not have allowed this. Had Star Wars had any real chance of succeeding, it might have actually tempted Soviet hard-liners to launch their own first strike against us before our defensive shield was up and running. So the final irony is that most

Americans felt more, rather than less, threatened by the possibility of nuclear war during

Reagan's tenure in office. And they were right to feel so: historian Derek Leebaert, capitalizing on the end of the Cold War to gain access to the military records of the Soviet Union, has confirmed that the world stood closer to nuclear war in 1983 than in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians, unable to account for Reagan's behavior by any hypothesis other than his desire to hasten their extinction, and believing that he showed signs of a "military psychosis," gave serious consideration to a preemptive strike.

What we saw during the Reagan era was a perfect example of Hans Vaihinger's Law of the Preponderance of the Means over the End. The military-industrial complex was no longer the means to the end of a secure existence; and "the defense program the nation needs," as defined by Richard Perle, was no longer the means to the end of a safer, therefore happier, life.

Security had been redefined as an end state, a goal to be achieved in lieu of happiness; and it was conceptualized as a condition of invulnerability that could never have been attained. As a result,

"national security" – a mere abstraction – was itself impoverishing the nation and robbing its citizens of their assets and even their sense of safety. Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 253

Stronger than all the armies are bad ideas whose time is always now. Perle resurfaced in the early months of the administration of George W. Bush, beating the drums for an invasion of

Iraq. After the events of September 11, 2001, the concept of national security returned with a vengeance. Once again, the goal was unrealistic and the expense fantastic. The Bush administration engineered a drastic curtailment of civil liberties as a price worth paying in pursuit of an illusory state of perfect security, and thus abandoned the values that had made the United

States a desirable place wherein to be secure.

Early in 2004, Perle co-authored An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. It is a blueprint for world domination that is as mad a document as the Unabomber's manifesto. The title alone reminds us that Perle's paranoically inflected apocalypticism had only intensified: in

1983, he argued that the Soviet Union was our depraved opponent in a great planetary showdown between good and evil; 20 years later, without even pausing for breath, he simply inserted worldwide Islam into the slot vacated by world communism. Of course, it is no more possible for the unilateral actions of a single government to stop terrorism than it was possible in 1988 to pay for "the defense program the nation needs" as defined by Richard Perle. But now as then, wielding the pared-down infantilizing prose of a self-help book complete with simple to-do lists

(force change on Saudi Arabia, put an end to Syria as we know it, teach the French a lesson they will never forget), Perle creates imaginative scenarios, as violent as they are implausible, wherein the United States employs massive force and the threat of massive force to effect wholesale changes in recalcitrant nations all over the planet, to the applause of all decent humans everywhere. As for bringing about "an end to evil," I will leave readers to draw their own conclusion whether the proclamation of such an intention, on the cover of the book no less, does Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 254

not provide prima facie evidence of a delusion of grandeur so pronounced it should be examined by psychiatric authorities. But we should not be surprised by this 20-year progression in Perle's thinking from delusion to greater delusion: clinicians are already well aware that time does not heal the sort of mental illness that afflicts Perle, but exacerbates it. The aging process causes an ossification or intensification of narcissistic, ideological, and paranoid obsessions, as anyone with a crazy uncle can testify.

The book's co-author, David Frum, was an erstwhile speechwriter for President George

W. Bush – the very one who coined the term "axis of evil" in a bid to acquire for his eager employer the kind of cachet that Reagan acquired when he publicly identified the "evil empire."

But a stink of demagoguery clings to Frum's coinage: while no one doubts that Reagan had long believed in the nefariousness of the Soviets, Bush can hardly be said to have devoted any prior thought at all to how or why three such disparate nations as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq constituted any sort of axis – much less one that did not include Saudi Arabia, China, and

Myanmar as honorary members at least. In point of fact, the axis was ginned up at an instant's notice to provide a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. The intention was to make this act of aggression appear more statesmanlike than a narrow grievance against one country that happened to be ethnically Arab and religiously Muslim. North Korea, in spite of the absurdity of linking the world's most xenophobic nation to any two other regimes, was included in the axis because it is neither Arab nor Muslim; then to demonstrate further that we can tell the difference, Iran was included because it is Islamic but not Arabic. (This was the more necessary because

Condoleezza Rice, the administration's high-profile national security adviser, had once seemed shaky on the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims – a matter of critical importance to Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 255

diplomacy in the Middle East.) China was omitted even though, like North Korea, it possesses

nuclear weapons and rattles them periodically at a near neighbor that it wishes to incorporate –

but after all, China is a valued trading partner, and members of the Bush family have been busy

appeasing it for decades, turning a blind eye to the ravaging of Tibet and the massacre in

Tiananmen Square. Saudi Arabia was omitted because, in this case, the entire Bush family has

profited directly from business ties to the family-run dictatorship. The Saudis, of course, have

long been treated by politicians of both parties as good American allies in the Middle East, so

much so that the participation by 15 Saudi nationals in the events of September 11, 2001 has

been studiously downplayed while the Bush administration set out to convince the American

people, by means of the technique famously known in propaganda circles as "the big lie," that

Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack. (After this campaign had worked its magic, a poll

showed that 69% of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the

attack of 9-11, and 50% believed that Iraqis were among the hijackers of the four planes on

September 11; only 17% knew the truth, that not one of the 19 hijackers was an Iraqi.)

That "the axis of evil" was a piece of pure opportunism was confirmed by its virtual

disappearance from the rhetoric of the Bush administration as soon as the invasion of Iraq was

under way. Meanwhile, almost as if to expose the whole thing as a hoax, North Korea began to

posture and threaten and boast about its nuclear weapons, which focused our attention on the

world's most totalitarian regime; and we could not help but notice that Kim Il-jong's dystopia

made Saddam Hussein's seem like a democracy by comparison. Here was evil in full throttle – a

highly militarized rogue nation that starves its own people, hates its immediate neighbors, views

the remainder of the world with intense fear and paranoia, and flaunts its bellicosity. The Bush Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 256

administration responded with infinite patience and spoke of the efficacy of diplomatic contacts.

Most people are convinced that Theodore Kaczynski is a paranoid schizophrenic, even though he does not strictly fit the criteria: when he defends himself against the imputation, he is able to argue more logically than most of his accusers. Many people suspect that Timothy McVeigh was mentally ill – he and the ten thousand militia men who shared his preposterous view of the world

– even if there is no code for his illness to be found in the diagnostic manuals. Why, then, do we hesitate to call Richard Perle insane? His apocalyptic world view – first centering on Soviet communists and now on Islamic militants – was and is no less fictional than McVeigh's.

We call McVeigh insane and Perle a foreign policy expert merely for the same reason, it turns out, that we call the Branch Davidians a cult and Roman Catholicism a religion. Perle's delusions, unlike McVeigh's, are shared, not by a handful of others, but by millions of others.

In Perle we find the narcissistically impaired true believer who, like Stalin, puts his finger on the map and disposes of whole populations in a few sentences: nations here, there, and everywhere must either change their values at our say-so or we will change their values for them.

Perle's penchant for inhabiting a fictional world – a corrupted world in the present that requires heroic action that will lead to a future utopian world – and for thinking in gross abstractions and treating entire societies and cultures as inanimate objects to be organized and moved about like children's toys, is the quality that is implicated in the phenomenon whereby evil metastasizes and becomes "radical."

Narcissism is the foundation of all human evil, but the evil remains limited in scope until it is released by intellectualism from the natural taboo that restrains our proclivity to inflict actual Abstractions and ideals – sick minds in sound bodies - 257

harm directly upon suffering persons known to us. The switch to an abstract, "principled"

perspective releases the narcissist from any claim that could be made by those persons as

individuals. Thus it is that Perle is unmoved by the suffering of innocent individuals during

reprisals taken by the army of the state of Israel against the populace of the West Bank as a

whole, because he thinks only in terms of "the Palestinian people," who en masse make up a

terrorist enterprise.

To carry out the programs fantasized by cognitively impaired zealots like Perle, all that is

further required is the dedicated service of a cadre of careerists who know how to spot the next

trend in the political Zeitgeist. Enter David Frum, who exemplified careerism at the highest level

of the bureaucracy when he prostituted his gift for language (such as it is) and used it to

aggrandize the short-term interests of George W. Bush. He then hitched his wagon to Perle's

dark star. Careerism at lower levels is characterized by a similar self-interest, in the form of the average spear-carrier's obedience to authority. There is no mystery to solve. "When fanatic ideology is combined with authoritarianism, there is no limit to the excesses it can go to." That was said in Nuremberg prison by Artur Seyss-Inquart – and he was someone who knew what he was talking about.

There is, however, a surprising coda that gives us a glimmer of hope in the darkness.

While Perle has remained as demented and potentially dangerous as ever, Frum had reinvented himself as a genuine conservative, cutting his ties with the Republican Party and becoming a valuable critic of its follies. He has opted for the lower-profile career of an independent-minded gadfly – less materially rewarding but infinitely more honorable.

Character, morality, and evil in "The Permanent Washington"

This is a story about enduring values, so the starting point is arbitrary. Perhaps we should begin with a group of friends – Ben Bradlee, Phil Graham, and John F. Kennedy. They have many things in common, not least a fondness for a well-turned ankle. Kennedy is sexually predatory and insatiable, the kind of man who idly doodles about his conquests and crumples the paper and throws it away. Unfortunately for his reputation, his trash is often retrieved for posterity by star- struck aides. Kennedy is, after all, the president of the United States. The casual liaison, the one-night stand, is the preferred m.o. for the first citizen, but he also has more permanent enthusiasms, among them a gangster's moll and a 19-year-old intern he first spotted when she visited the White House on behalf of her high school newspaper.

Graham too is an epic womanizer, conveniently married to a woman so enamored and naive that she has never suspected a thing. In journalistic circles, he is revered as a genius, which is probably an apt enough description for any person of modest means who possesses the social aplomb to snare an heiress. Certainly he has ability: after his father-in-law bestows The

Washington Post upon him as a wedding present, Graham upgrades the newspaper, acquires other valuable properties, and builds a formidable media empire.

Bradlee, at this point in his career, is described by Richard Clurman as a "playboy journalist, a gadabout semi-socialite." He lives in Georgetown and works for Graham. His wife

Toni is artistically inclined and dedicated to her six children, four by a previous marriage and two Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 259

with Bradlee. She and Bradlee are drawn into the fast-moving orbit of the president, because

Kennedy is seriously infatuated with Toni's sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer: when Jackie Kennedy is out of town, Meyer is a frequent overnight guest at the White House; on at least one occasion, she and Kennedy smoke marijuana together.

Graham suffers from bipolar illness, which, in this heyday of psychoanalytic quackery, is being treated without any medication at all. In 1962, he cycles into his most aggressive bout of mania yet, acquires a highly visible mistress, and introduces her to his pal in the White House.

The president is displeased but his own womanizing is so out-of-control that he is hardly in a position to complain. When Graham sinks back into depression and reviews the series of embarrassments he has caused, and considers as well the likelihood that he will never be cured by his shrinks, he commits suicide.

As a result of this tragedy, the ownership of The Washington Post passes to his widow

Katharine Graham. By inclination and training a hostess, she is expected to sell the paper, but instead she keeps it and takes over as publisher. She promotes Bradlee to managing editor, together they print "The Pentagon Papers" and pursue the story of Watergate, and she becomes a legend in her own time. Her straightforward but undistinguished autobiography, Personal

History, wins the Pulitzer Prize. When she dies in 2001, the reporters throughout her media empire bestow upon her a eulogistic retrospective that Winston Churchill might have envied.

Katharine Graham's decision to retain control of the Post did take some courage – until that time, by her own frank admission, she had been a meekly submissive appendage to the life of her husband. She truly loved journalism, and had the moxie to back Bradlee against the Nixon administration. But in saying so much we have come to the end of her substantive achievement. Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 260

The rest of her c.v. owes nearly everything to a single factor: her inherited wealth.

Bradlee deserves the lion's share of the credit for taking on Nixon, but perhaps his most remarkable accomplishment was his longevity working for Graham: the men she fired make up an honor roll of American journalism. But Bradlee, a colorful character with movie-star looks, knew how to charm and bully her in the right proportions.

In 1969 Bradlee hired Sally Quinn – "young, blonde, and sexy," according to Carol

Felsenthal's biography of Katharine Graham – to cover parties for the aptly named "Style" section. (The corresponding section of The New York Times was called "Arts and Leisure.") In

1973, when Quinn left the Post for The CBS Morning News, Bradlee abandoned his family and moved in with her. After she flopped in her new job, Bradlee hired her back, even though the

Post had a policy against such arrangements and had previously fired an editor for having an affair with a reporter. Graham looked the other way. Bradlee finally married Quinn in 1978.

The following year, pursuing the only type of story for which she ever showed any aptitude, Quinn reported that President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had publicly unzipped his fly in front of another Post reporter. Brzezinski went ballistic, all parties to the supposed occurrence denied it, and the Post issued an abject apology along with a lame excuse. But in spite of this black eye, Quinn stayed on the paper.

Eventually she aged into the kind of respectability that is familiar to observers of

Washington, Hollywood, and the world of professional sports – a respectability conferred by age alone, which accrues automatically to anyone who simply stays in the game long enough.

Accordingly, even with Bradlee in retirement, she was still thought by the editors of the Post to possess the requisite gravitas to write reflective pieces on the state of Washington society. On Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 261

November 2, 1998, she contributed (to the "Style" section, of course) a lengthy commentary on

the Clinton impeachment scandal. With polls showing that the public was disgusted, not with

Clinton, but with the Republicans who were trying to destroy him, she countered with the private

opinion of "the Washington Establishment." The burden of the piece was that "Beltway insiders"

(a phrase she used without embarrassment) differ from the public-at-large by hewing to a higher moral standard: Clinton's behavior might be acceptable to people in the provinces, but inside the

Beltway, a sterner view of the president's sexual peccadilloes prevails.

Had I not seen Quinn's byline, I would have assumed that the piece was pure satire, concocted by a Swiftian rogue to lampoon the hypocrisy of Clinton's persecutors in Washington: one of the subheadings was "The lying offends them." But Quinn and her editors were blithely unaware of the unintentional hilarity that might accompany this quote from a social secretary who had worked in the Kennedy White House:

Now it's gone, now it's sleaze and dirt. We all feel terribly let down. . . . We want there to be standards. We're used to standards. When you think back to other presidents, they all had a lot of class. That's nonexistent now.

The mordant humor of this view is not exhausted by comparing Kennedy's Rabelaisian excesses to Clinton's furtive, dreary, and desperate little escapade. There is also the quaint and wondrous anachronism of the speaker's Victorian belief that "sleaze and dirt" inhere entirely in sexual misbehavior, and, conversely, that "class" and "standards" apply solely to matters of etiquette and propriety – or more accurately, to the appearance of propriety. Otherwise, it would be interesting to quiz the speaker on the standards that Kennedy observed when he plotted the assassination of Fidel Castro, or that Richard Nixon followed when he invaded Cambodia and Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 262

created the secret "Plumbers" unit for purposes of political espionage, or the class that Ronald

Reagan showed when he conducted a secret war against Nicaragua and presided over an administration that tried to call ketchup a vegetable so it could stint on the federally funded school lunches of the poorest children in the land.

The doubleness of Quinn's own standard is breathtaking, because she married the man who served as a go-between during Kennedy's most flamboyant White House affair. And that man was a journalist – yet he protected Kennedy and printed never a discouraging word about the presidential liaisons. Decades later, standards had "evolved": the Post led the way among major newspapers that exposed President Clinton's private life to public scrutiny. But we might have expected Quinn, of all people, to lay low.

Instead she pours it on thick. We have Muffie Cabot, President Reagan's social secretary, opining that "Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn't quite as sordid as this." We have Ken

Duberstein, George H. W. Bush's chief of staff, proclaiming that "Every time I went into the Oval office I put on a coat and tie." We have a historian solemnly stating that "There's never been a sex scandal affecting a president while in office." This, of course, was owing not to the moral rectitude of the former occupants but to the tactful silence that shrouded their adventures: Warren

G. Harding and Franklin Roosevelt were among the presidents who installed their mistresses in the White House itself; Eisenhower, Johnson, and the elder Bush were among those who had strayed during their careers. Clinton was not the first president to dally: he was the first president to have the details of his dalliances offered to the public by the respectable media. The responsibility for this is heavy, and must be borne by those who, like The Washington Post, changed the rules governing journalistic propriety. I will only add that the well-financed effort of Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 263

a small cabal of right-wing publishers, Republican "think-tank" zanies, ultra-conservative judges, and a laughably partisan "independent" counsel to bring down President Clinton by any means available was the longest-running major story ever to completely evade coverage in The

Washington Post.

Nonetheless, we should be grateful: morally compromised though it is, Sally Quinn's essay serves as a salutary reminder that there really is a group of Washington insiders who, across party lines, agree that they have a proprietary interest in the government and are quite superior to thee and me. Quinn's indubitable status as a member in good standing of the

Washington Establishment makes her exceptionally trustworthy as its mouthpiece.

The real existence of this unofficial collegial body was further brought home to me by the protracted mourning of The Washington Post over the death of the dowager Graham in July,

2001. I especially took note of the written tribute by Henry Kissinger, because his complacency and senescence made him careless and he said out loud what usually remains tacit.

He begins by invoking one of those apparent mysteries that bedevil only those who are not in the know: how could he and Graham have become such close friends when her newspaper often opposed the policies of the administrations in which he served? He dutifully explains that

"This seeming paradox dissolved in the face of the admiration and affection I came to feel for

Kay as a person." But a more enlightening explanation comes later: "Kay was also a symbol of the permanent Washington that transmutes the partisanship of the moment into national purpose and lasting values."

What the last part of the sentence – the almost incoherent part involving transmutation – really means is that throughout Kissinger's public service he was able to do pretty much as he Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 264

pleased without having to worry that Kay Graham would ever find herself standing on any

principle about which she felt strongly enough to seriously oppose him. There is in truth little

partisanship worthy of the name: instead, the two parties, while bickering violently over the most

trivial details, continually coalesce behind the national purposes and lasting values of capitalism

and imperialism. We have had the bipartisan redistribution of the wealth from the poor to the

rich, the bipartisan war on drugs, and especially the bipartisan support of Kissinger's favorite

purpose and value, a unilateral foreign policy driven purely by national self-interest – or more

accurately, the personal self-interest of that policy's proponents, guardians, and beneficiaries. My

interpretation is verified by his evocation of "the permanent Washington." Identical to Quinn's

Washington Establishment, this is the group of politicians, lobbyists, and journalists, both

Democratic and Republican, who enjoy the satisfaction of running the country and steering the public attitude into the proper channels. These men, and a few token women, are always in

power. When turned out electorally, they remain "inside the Beltway," moving to appointed

offices, or to private law firms adept in subverting progressive legislation on behalf of special

interests, or to foundations, or to the media, where they remain part of the oligarchy.

Kissinger, who upon his retirement from government service founded a fantastically

lucrative consulting agency specializing in foreign affairs, goes on to say that in the permanent

Washington, human relations matter more than "controversies of the day." Puffed up by

admiration for his own capacious humanity, Kissinger, like Quinn, seems unmindful of the

import of his revelation. He forgets that the Constitution tried by every means at its disposal to

ensure that we would always be governed by a temporary Washington. It does not occur to him

that I, a citizen of the republic, might prefer that my public servants do without the proffered Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 265

friendships and instead persevere in taking honorable stands in the controversies of the day. I

might be wary of the very existence of this permanent Washington that Kissinger, as one of its

denizens, finds so reassuring. The ability of an official to maintain good relations with the

publisher of The Washington Post, and to enjoy her A-list receptions and parties, might be less important to me than, let us say, his steadfastness in opposing the war in Vietnam and his willingness to incur the enmity of those dinner partners who are determined to pursue it.

Because The Washington Post eventually published "The Pentagon Papers" and played a key role in forcing the resignation of President Richard Nixon, it is easy to forget that Katharine

Graham supported the massive escalation of the war throughout the 1960s. She did so even after her son Donald, who was stationed in Vietnam, gave her all the information she needed to change the paper's course. She writes as follows in her autobiography:

For a while, the Post had only one reporter in Vietnam, Ward Just, who as early as mid-October of 1967 had a piece in "Outlook" about how hard it was to believe anything about Vietnam. Don read it and agreed, writing me, "There really is too damned much self-deception going on among the US military in this country." From what he could see, civilian casualties in Vietnam were "horrifying," and he added: "It just seems goddamned awful that we are doing such immense damage to people who are truly innocent bystanders, who never wanted us to fight for them, or the North Vietnamese."

Donald Graham had reservations about the war, and most of his friends opposed it, but rather than avoid the draft, the 21-year-old volunteered for military service and went to Vietnam in

August 1967 as part of the First Air Cavalry. He explained his decision to his mother in these words: "The rich are staying in school and the poor are being drafted. I can't live with that."

Almost as soon as he arrived in the country he wrote her that "though I cringe at the thought of what infantrymen do to the people over here . . . I admire them enormously for sticking it out, for Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 266

fighting a war they hate in a country they loathe for a cause they neither care about nor believe in."

In September, he wrote again:

The only thing I can vaguely see from over here is that many policies which seem bad are being pursued because it is impossible for the Administration to change them without admitting serious previous error. Suppose McNamara now concluded that the bombing all along had been doing no good, that it had produced no substantial results and had to be stopped. Could Johnson turn around and say, "Well, we have lost a few planes and a few hundred pilots and a few million dollars but we have decided that we were in error?" [Emphasis in the original]

As it happened, one of Katharine Graham's most valued mentors was Robert McNamara, and she deeply admired and respected Lyndon Johnson. She had been thrilled by Johnson's impromptu invitation to his ranch at Texas for a weekend of special attentions. So the Post lagged far behind The New York Times and the rest of the country in criticizing the conduct of the war.

Then when Richard Nixon came to power, columnist Joseph Alsop, the most unreconstructed hawk among the nationally syndicated commentators, realized that Nixon's paranoia about the

"liberal media" was not only wrongheaded but also a danger to his administration. (The

Washington Post has always been an inveterately conservative newspaper, and is thought to be otherwise only when compared to antediluvian newspapers in the hinterlands.) Accordingly,

Alsop made certain that Henry Kissinger was introduced to Katharine Graham at the earliest opportunity. As a further window upon Graham's political soul, we may note that she disdained

Jimmy Carter, welcomed Ronald Reagan to Washington, and befriended Nancy Reagan. These predilections can best be understood in terms of a single fact: Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara,

Kissinger, and the Reagans all dined with Graham. Nixon and Carter did not. Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 267

Nothing manifests the values of the permanent Washington more clearly than Katharine

Graham's irritation at the Carter administration for its failure to send White House people to

"work the room" when she gave a party for important media figures. (In phrasing the matter that way, she tries to indicate that she is merely making a professional assessment of the administration's amateurishness, but there is no indication she was ever similarly irked when

White House staffers stayed away from other people's parties.) In similar fashion, Tip O'Neill lamented President Carter's failure to "come to the Hill" and massage the legislative egos and cater to their pork-barrel appetites. He blamed Carter, and not himself, for the failure of Carter's energy plan to get through Congress, even though he was Speaker of the House and possessed of a huge Democratic majority. No doubt Carter was supremely naive to believe that his program would be passed simply because it was the right thing to do. But while we may want to acknowledge O'Neill's shrewd grasp of the political realities of Washington, should we similarly honor his conception of his own leadership role? – which was to punish this naivete by presiding merrily over the destruction of every Carter initiative. Then when Ronald Reagan came to

Washington, bringing a cannier, or at least more cynical, understanding of the way to a legislator's heart, O'Neill delivered the Democratic Party, which still maintained its majority in the House of Representatives, lock, stock, and barrel into the hands of a Republican administration that made Barry Goldwater seem like a liberal. Reagan pushed through tax relief for the wealthy, dropped a trillion dollars down the drain of an unnecessary arms buildup, supported regimes in Central America that sent their military units out on night rides that a Ku-

Klux-Klansman could have only envied from the bottom of his heart, and tripled the national debt. Tip never said him nay. And The Washington Post traveled the same path, albeit with Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 268

much liberal hand-wringing and kvetching along the way, and occasional carping over the details. Can this all be explained by Reagan's giving better parties than Carter, and going to dinner at Katharine Graham's house? The suspicion is as inevitable as it is unsettling.

When the "liberal" Post turned on Carter, it did so with a vengeance. After the 1980 election, the Carters invited the Reagans to Washington to prepare for the transition, during which time an astonished Rosalyn Carter learned that Nancy Reagan wanted her to move out of the White House early so that redecorating could begin. The story eventually went public, to the discomfiture of the incoming administration. A year later, The Washington Post proclaimed (in the "Style" section, of course) that the only way Mrs. Carter had known of Mrs. Reagan's wish was by means of an eavesdropping device planted in Blair House, where the Reagans had been staying.

When the outraged Carters demanded a retraction, the first response from Diana

McClellan, the author of the piece, was that the Carters "know perfectly well it is true." When the Post found to its chagrin that its sources were backing down, the acerbic and unrepentant

Bradlee gave one of his more memorable quotes: "How do you make a public apology – run up and down Pennsylvania Avenue bare-assed, shouting I'm sorry?" Then Donald Graham, who had taken over as publisher, weighed in with an editorial averring that the paper had done nothing more than put out a story about a story – had only alleged that "a story was circulating." He graciously concluded that he personally found this story "utterly impossible to believe."

Unfortunately for him, his notion of what a reputable paper should publish in the first place astonished almost everybody, including his own national desk. The editorial became as controversial as the original piece. Only when Carter threatened to follow through on a libel suit Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 269

did the newspaper print a front-page retraction. (Sadly, Graham's editorial was merely ahead of

its time. Today, respected media routinely pursue trivial but sensational stories under the guise

of covering the aftermath of tabloid revelations; naturally, in the course of the coverage, it always

becomes necessary to repeat the original insinuations.)

In his novella Hadji Murad, Tolstoy, writing about the evil that Czar Nicholas I had done to the Poles, made the following trenchant observation: "To justify that evil he had to feel certain that all Poles were rascals, and he considered them to be such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them." As a result of the evil they have done to him, the editors of The

Washington Post have continued to hate Jimmy Carter with an abiding passion, and their animus has followed the ex-president down to the present day. Although Carter has had perhaps the most distinguished presidential retirement in the history of our country, the Post viewed his

accomplishments as evidence of vanity and a devouring ambition to win a Nobel Prize. When he

singlehandedly persuaded the ruling junta of military thugs in Haiti to peacefully relinquish

power and so averted any necessity of a bloody invasion by American troops, the Post lashed out

that he was not a team player. When he negotiated a cease-fire between the Serbs and Muslims

in Bosnia, at a time when the entire rest of the world was resolute in remaining aloof from the

conflict, the Post pilloried him in two editorials for acting out of self-aggrandizement and failing to achieve a lasting solution.

The retirement of Henry Kissinger from public service makes a telling contrast with

Carter's. Kissinger has devoted himself to making enormous amounts of money by trading upon the high-level contacts that he developed while in office. He has earned gargantuan fees especially for his expertise about China. Meanwhile, he has remained the fair-haired boy at the Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 270

Post, which regularly prints his ponderous and predictable analyses of world events even when they are obviously self-serving. On April 27, 1999, the Post carried his op-ed piece on China without giving any indication that the author had a financial stake in the outcome of the political debate that he was attempting to influence. The piece itself was a collection of excruciating platitudes, generalities, and banalities, correcting mistakes no one had made and telling us what we already knew: the brunt of his sage advice was that we must be firm but flexible. But the bland verbiage did drift in a particular direction, namely, that it would be unwise to rock the boat

(which, he neglected to mention, would be highly unprofitable for his business). Accordingly, even though he was granted, as usual, double and treble the space of an ordinary column, he found no room to mention either the Tiananmen Square massacre or the systematic cultural and in some cases physical extermination of the sovereign nation of Tibet. His piece was rendered even more than usually opaque by his effort to imply that somehow it was Bill Clinton who was making a mess of things, when it was in fact Kissinger's fellow Republicans who, being once again moralistically exercised by the un-Christian actions of this nominally Communist and decidedly authoritarian state, were imperiling Kissinger's investments by threatening to revive

Cold War policies. He need not have worried. Throughout his administration, Clinton faithfully followed the genuinely bipartisan foreign policy toward China that had been cynically put in place by his Republican predecessors. "The permanent Washington" had long since agreed with

Kissinger that China is too lucrative a market to sacrifice to a mere principle. The number of people on either side of the aisle who feel moved by the plight of Tibet remains minuscule.

Anyone who has followed Henry Kissinger's career as a statesman and public figure Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 271

would not have expected him to shed any tears over the destruction of Tibet or the slaughter of the students in Tiananmen Square. As the foremost exponent of Realpolitik in our time, he has always viewed diplomatic issues exclusively through the lens of cost-benefit analysis: the cost to others, and the benefit to himself. Early in his tenure with the Nixon administration, he said famously, "I can't believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn't have a breaking point." With astounding brutality, he and Nixon tried to find that point several times, mining the harbor of Haiphong, invading Cambodia, and carpet-bombing Hanoi over the Christmas holidays of 1972 when the war was already effectively over. At the same time, the administration was inexorably withdrawing its troops from Southeast Asia, signaling American willingness to leave

South Vietnam to its fate. As a direct result of these policies, Saigon fell in March, 1975 and the country was reunified under the Communists a little over two years after the signing of the peace treaty that ended the American combat presence in Southeast Asia. Naturally, Kissinger could have negotiated the fall of Saigon in 1969 rather than 1973, but he believed that American

"credibility" (and therefore his own) required the passage of some length of time between the

American abandonment of its South Vietnamese ally and the triumph of the North Vietnamese army. To buy this length of time, famously or infamously dubbed a "decent interval" – 26 months, it turned out to be – Nixon and Kissinger considered it expedient to spend the lives of

20,000 American soldiers, not to mention upwards of a million Vietnamese. To a member in good standing of the permanent Washington, this was an acceptable price to be paid – by those soldiers. Outside the Beltway, people naturally had a different perspective; but as Roger Morris reveals in Uncertain Greatness, his illuminating insider account of these events, Kissinger was angered to the core when he had to hear about it. "Henry," as co-opted star-struck reporters were Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 272

allowed to call him, characterized as "fascism of the streets" the demonstrations organized by the young men who were going to be the individuals who would do the actual paying, in blood, for his policies. Like his idol Metternich, he believed that diplomacy should be left to experts, and nothing offended him more than the effrontery of dilettantes. His job was to forge and direct the policy; the job of the Beltway outsiders was to shut up and carry it out. What he can't explain is why those of us who made up the enforcement arm of his violent enthusiasms should have shared them. What we can't explain to ourselves is why this man is still respected. But he and Sally

Quinn have, between them, done their best to clear the matter up for us once and for all.

What John F. Kennedy, Phil Graham, Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, and

Henry Kissinger all failed to see was that their interests as Beltway Insiders, the Washington

Establishment, the Permanent Washington, were inimical to the interests of the rest of us. Quinn let the secret out, and did not realize it because she thought she was addressing a side show, but the impeachment imbroglio served as a microcosm of this divergence of interests. Her crowd, believing that the government belongs to them in perpetuity, and therefore caring intensely about how their little enterprise appears to others, deplored the indecorous aspects of Clinton's philandering. His real crime – and in her circle it is a real crime – was indiscretion. (No one – no one – can believe that she, or any of the people she talked to, would consider extramarital sex itself, or lying about it, a real crime. Not in light of their own track records. That would be too preposterous.) She was eager to explain how it could be that 70% of the citizens beyond the

Beltway did not perceive this crime of indiscretion the way she and her friends perceived it. But what she also accidentally explained is how it can be that the same 70% of the people never would have supported the war in Vietnam if they had been told the truth, and how they never Character, morality and evil in the permanent Washington - 273

would have supported Reaganomics if they had been given good information. Beyond the

Beltway, the interests of her and the rest of the permanent Washington are not our interests –

their interests are in fact opposed to ours. Since, in the case of the impeachment scandal, we did

have all the facts, courtesy of an independent counsel whose prosecutorial zeal was exceeded

only by his prurience, the desperate efforts of the punditocracy to coach us on how to think about

it failed dismally. (This, needless to say, did not inculcate humility in the pundits. Instead, it

caused William Bennett to write a book saying that the country had gone to hell and it was up to

the permanent Washington to keep moral standards alive in a dark time.)

From our outpost in hell, those of us who still bother to pay attention to national politics

will continue to ask why we should treasure the friendships made over Katharine Graham's table

by men and women who then supported the war in Vietnam to the bitter end, ravaged the

environment, refashioned the tax code to enrich themselves and their cohorts, and gossiped

disparagingly about the shabby ethics of those of us who opposed their effort to bring down a

president by illegitimate means. We will continue to ask ourselves if we have any stake at all in the permanent Washington, and whether it was a good thing that the insiders drove Jimmy Carter out of town by thwarting him at every turn and then mocking his ineffectuality. Quinn got it right: the gulf between the insiders and the outsiders continues to grow, and will only get larger until we citizens, tiring at last of being patronized, plundered, and sent to die in foreign extravaganzas, band together and reclaim the city of Washington as our own.

Principled evil on the Supreme Court

We have already noted the thesis of Alasdair MacIntyre, that today we have abandoned "the

virtues" in favor of various attempts to construct a universal morality, while at the same time

keeping much of the vocabulary of character. Such an insight echoes Nietzsche, who chided

Europe for failing to realize that it had already, in reality, embraced the death of God but could

not bear the sight of the corpse.

We have also examined another way to understand this historical predicament: in terms

of the hidden tension between the benevolent code we publicly profess, especially in churches

with a strong "social gospel" – compassion, fairness, human rights, turning the other cheek – and

the more deeply ingrained code, often held privately or covertly, that embodies the "masculine"

virtues as a morality of toughness or psychological fascism. George Lakoff identifies the

compassion-based morality with political liberalism and the strength-based morality with conservatism, and makes an excellent analysis of how this explains apparent contradictions in politics: for instance, "fiscal conservatives" will spend exorbitant amounts of money on military programs and the building of prisons, and overlook appalling evidence of Pentagon waste and fraud, while "human rights" liberals, who claim to respect the first amendment and to deplore governmental intrusions into private life, will nonetheless support colleges that promulgate

"speech codes" and require professors to undergo therapy after they are found guilty of sexually harassing female students by quoting the Talmud verbatim in their religion classes. But Lakoff Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 275

underestimates the pull of the masculine code on even the most bleeding-heart liberals. Vietnam was a liberal Democratic war; Democrats have prosecuted the demented "war on drugs" as assiduously as Republicans; and Democratic governors are as politically fearful of pardoning inmates on death row as Republican governors. Mario Cuomo – liberal, Christian, and electorally safe – maintained to the bitter end of his last term his stringent policy governing commutations and pardons. It was a Republican governor who placed a moratorium on the death penalty in the state of Illinois. Conservatives do not bother very often proving that they are compassionate enough; but liberals are always desperate to prove that they are tough enough.

The upshot is that we have two concurrent moral codes, which conflict constantly but invisibly. We know something is wrong but we can't say what it is. We continue to laud the qualities of self-discipline, self-control, perseverance, and honesty without assessing very rigorously what sort of achievement these virtues have produced; we praise a man for having "the courage of his convictions" without inquiring very thoroughly into the convictions themselves.

True, when the convictions are overtly evil – where they are, let us say, unapologetically racist – we dismiss their purveyor as a monster, a fool, or a zealot. But where their enactment into law produces a racist outcome without the exponent having openly espoused a racist ideology, we are thrown into a quandary: we aren't sure how to attack the proponent of the bad idea, especially when he claims to have been pursuing, not a racist, but a "conservative" or "realistic" agenda.

This quandary paralyzed the nation's liberals throughout the Reagan presidency, and has deviled them ever since. (It did not help that the national Democratic Party was in the process of morally downsizing itself, eventually becoming little more than a centrally located phone bank for incumbents who run as Lite Republicans. When, during the campaign of 2002, the leaders of Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 276

the party decided to support a resolution authorizing President Bush to make war on Iraq at

whim, hoping to put the matter behind them and thereby turn the attention of the electorate to

issues that were thought to be more favorable to Democratic candidates, they did not so much as

lose their moral compass as sell it. At this point, they touched the bottom toward which they had

been descending for 25 years, and reaped what they deserved at the polls.) Throughout this

period, Democrats rightly opposed the election and appointment of Republicans who want to

punish the poor and reward the rich, inject religion into politics, undo most of the civil rights

programs that have addressed the reality that blacks and whites live in two separate nations, and

"rebuild" the military (it allegedly falls down whenever Democrats are in office.) But when the

proponents of these Republican objectives turned out, as they often did, to be men of "integrity"

– to give every appearance of possessing the virtues – their liberal foes were stymied. The

confusion was manifest in the voters who told pollsters in 1996 that Bob Dole had more

"character" than Bill Clinton but they were going to vote for Clinton anyway. What they meant

was that Dole seemed more honest, self-disciplined, and courageous. They had no words to

express their gut reaction that Clinton was the better man – more intelligent, more

compassionate, more committed to social justice.

Where we have, but cannot acknowledge, this confusion between the two codes, and we cannot untangle the warp of morality from the woof of character, we conclude, rather too hastily, that any immoral opponent must be "a man of low character." The effort to prove that Hitler was a coward, or that Stalin was personally corrupt, never abates: if virtue is morality, we are desperate to prove that such men were bereft of it.

Several times during the Reagan-Bush years, Democrats succumbed to the temptation to Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 277

try to tar their conservative opponents with the brush of low character. Their resort to this strategy naturally coincided with the loss of their own political and moral integrity. Especially where the stakes were high – appointments to the Supreme Court last a lifetime, and five votes can effect a social revolution – the Democrats reached for what they believed was the only weapon that would serve: character assassination. Unable to state their objections to their opponents clearly, in terms of a comprehensive morality that they were willing to back politically, and lacking the courage to stand openly for Democratic principles against Republican principles, they employed varying degrees of the tactics of personal smear. They attacked, in succession, the characters of William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas. They should have simply voted against all three based upon the public record of their judicial behavior.

Rehnquist had opposed desegregation and Bork had supported the right of the state of

Connecticut to ban the sale of all contraceptives even to married couples. In the case of Thomas, the Democrats had additional ammunition in his inexperience and mediocrity, and his evasive answers to their questions in his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but still they chose the low road. Republicans in turn were outraged at the Democratic attempts to slander these men's character, and correctly pointed out that such attacks were a smokescreen to cover up the real reason for the opposition of Democratic senators – namely, their ideological disagreements with the views of the appointees.

Lest I seem too hard on the Democrats, I should say that the prevailing ethos had placed them between a rock and a hard place. Somehow the Republicans had succeeded in conning the

Senate, and the country, into believing that judges should be appointed on the basis of some sort of purely administrative competence and not on the basis of judicial philosophy. It is as if a Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 278

state's voters were urged to elect a governor based upon his effectiveness in preparing a budget and getting it through the legislature, without regard to what sort of programs the budget contained. It was said over and over that appointees to the judiciary should not have to pass "a litmus test"; yet every candidate nominated by Reagan and Bush was chosen according to a reactionary litmus test emphasizing the nominee's repudiation of what was called "judicial activism" and his commitment to what was mendaciously called the "original intent" of the

Constitution. Above all else, Reagan and Bush hoped to achieve a Supreme Court that could be counted on to overturn abortion rights; and had David Souter lived down to their expectations, they might have succeeded. Having been hornswoggled into agreeing to these unwritten rules, liberals were forced either to attack a nominee's character or assent to his appointment. As for the moral high ground seized by the Republicans in these contretemps, that was squandered all the way back down below sea level by their unremitting eight-year assassination of Bill Clinton's character, which began before he even assumed office and hardly abated even after the dishonorable attempt to remove him by impeachment failed.

The Democrats were also cowed by the conventional wisdom that a president should have the "right" to choose nominees who share his philosophy, and these nominees should be confirmed as a matter of course unless they are found to be morally derelict. This too forced the

Democrats into a corner where the character card was considered the only one that could be legitimately played. Again, had they possessed any backbone at all, they would have subjected

Bork and company, those avatars of devotion to the Constitution as written, to a recitation of the clause that specifies the Senate's "advice and consent" without any qualification whatsoever. As far as the Constitution is concerned, the Senate can reject a nominee because it doesn't like his Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 279

face. It can certainly reject a nominee because it doesn't like his judicial decisions.

Before looking more closely at two of the justices who have served on the Supreme Court, it may be worth while recalling the details of the failed nomination of Robert Bork. That Bork could ever have been brought forward should make us break out in hives; and it is even more sobering to realize that he failed to win confirmation, not because his opponents wisely rejected him in light of his views, but only because he was afflicted by bad timing and bad luck – for both before and after the Senate turned him down, it confirmed other nominees who shared his judicial philosophy and went on to vote just as he would have voted.

Bork had long been a great favorite among conservatives, and the election of Ronald

Reagan seemed to ensure that he would get his seat on the Court. He probably would have been confirmed without much trouble in 1986 when Chief Justice William Burger retired and Reagan chose to elevate Rehnquist to the top position; but the president, anticipating a fight over

Rehnquist, wanted a less controversial nominee to fill Rehnquist's vacated seat. With all of the discomfort of the liberals focused (ineffectually) on the Rehnquist appointment, which placed the

Court's most conservative member at its helm, Antonin Scalia skated through his confirmation process untouched and then proved to be to the right of Rehnquist. When Bork's nomination came up the following year, the Democrats went on full alert.

Unfortunately for his aspirations, Bork had left behind an extensive paper trail of his views and opinions. He was nothing if not articulate, and he had never shied away from stating his positions. Indeed, throughout the 1990s he continued to be a forceful spokesman for the philosophy that animated the votes of at least three of the members of the Court. But his Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 280

willingness to take a stand proved to be his downfall in the Senate. It is doubtful if he was really

done in by the aspersions that were cast upon his character: when the public learned his judicial

philosophy from hearings in which he combatively spoke his mind and defended his writings,

opinion turned against him, and a large group of Republican senators joined in voting him down.

I do not wish to endorse the political outcome of this campaign to paint the nominee in

his true colors: Bork paid for his candor with his defeat, while lesser men attained their seats

because of their timidity and their dishonesty in answering questions during their confirmation hearings. Since Bork's rejection, presidents from both parties have tried to avoid a repetition of such a debacle by choosing judges so undistinguished that they have neglected to produce any paper trail at all. Reagan and both Bushes sought to nominate men who were just as conservative but only half as smart as Bork. They did not always succeed in this endeavor – Souter turned out to be twice as smart – but Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts were all selected in large measure because they were thought to be safely shrouded in mediocrity. Clinton, playing it safe in his own way, named two justices who have turned out to be, on some issues, as conservative as the Republican appointees.

As a result of his failed nomination, Bork became a conservative martyr, and began to be treated as one of our leading intellectuals. He had demonstrated in the Senate hearings that his method was to reduce every point of law to a question of whether or not the exact situation under consideration is described verbatim in the Constitution. If the "original intent" of the authors of the Constitution is not spelled out – literally – in the document, he found judicial action to be inappropriate. The inflexibility with which he pursued this "principle" was regarded by his supporters as an indication of a brilliant intellect – as opposed to, let us say, a temperamental Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 281

inflexibility combined with a total lack of intellectual and moral imagination, adding up to a commitment to the status quo that bordered upon clinical obsession.

It was almost a relief to read his book Slouching Toward Gomorrah and find him proposing a constitutional amendment whereby a majority vote in both houses of Congress could override federal court decisions. Thus he came all of the way out of the closet and admitted that he had contempt for the Supreme Court as an institution: he attacked the Constitution itself for failing to distrust the judiciary as much as he did. In short, he had finally drawn the moral of his own commitment to majority rule: since nothing should ever thwart the majority will, why not just scrap the Supreme Court and submit its cases directly and immediately to a legislative vote?

By way of introducing the reader to the judicial issues that will appear throughout this examination of character, morality, and evil on the Supreme Court, let us go over Bork's view of the bill of rights – a view that has prevailed, more often than not, in the decisions of the last three decades.

The founding fathers had a horror of what we call "the tyranny of the majority." They believed that the greatest threat to their liberty would come, neither from criminals nor from foreign invaders, but from their own elected government.

What they gave us – since they were writing a constitution and not a code of law – was a set of general principles to guide us. (Principles are general by definition, but I have risked this pleonasm because the "strict constructionists" mistake these guiding generalities for rigid rules.)

The Constitution is surprisingly short, and the bill of rights is hardly more than a few sentences.

The overarching principle embodied in those famous ten amendments to the Constitution Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 282

is that some rights belong to us so fundamentally that they can never be subjected to a vote. No

legislature can take them away. This principle is strongly anti-democratic, and the miracle is that

a democratic majority was ever found to support it in the first place.

The rights that are listed explicitly in the first eight amendments are best understood to be those that had a recent history of being violated by despotic European governments. One of the eight is accordingly devoted to a property owner's right to turn down the Army when it asks him to take soldiers into his home at his own expense.

The tenth amendment reserves to state governments such powers as are not assigned to the federal government. The all-important ninth amendment reads as follows:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Conservative jurists are proud literalists when it comes to the meanings of the words of their beloved Constitution: they don't go in for "interpretation." Here, in the clearest possible language, is an amendment stating that we have rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the first eight articles. But one way to define strict constructionists like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia is by their contempt for the ninth amendment. They do not, as a rule, construe it at all: they ignore it.

The framers understood that no list of rights, however comprehensive, could possibly exhaust what belongs naturally to a person as part of his or her birthright. They never mentioned a right to remain unmolested in your home while engaging in conduct that harms no one else – because who would ever doubt that you have it? Once you start enumerating in that much detail

– the right to enter into a contract, the right to keep a garden, the right to propose marriage to the Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 283

person of your choice, the right to discipline your children – the very metastasizing of the list

would encourage perverted intellectuals to look for what was omitted. If you can have a garden,

can you have a plastic pink flamingo? Best to say that we have all the natural rights that accrue

to any member in good standing of a rational society.

Precisely this point was made in a brief filed with the Supreme Court in Lawrence v.

Texas by the Institute for Justice. Authors Randy E. Barnett and Dana Berliner argued that "there

are countless private activities that are protected by no tradition or express constitutional

provision."

It would be unimaginable that they could be prohibited in a free society, even if some objection could be raised to them – cooking unhealthy meals, staying up too late, spending a slothful day drinking coffee and doing puzzles instead of accomplishing something productive. Indeed, almost anything that an ordinary person might spend his or her weekend doing, from gardening to cleaning to touching up house paint, would probably not qualify as a "fundamental" right.

Barnett quotes James Madison, who spoke as follows during the Congressional debate of 1789 on whether to adopt the bill of rights:

It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow, by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but I conceive, that it may be guarded against.

This statement by Madison, besides giving us the key to understanding the ninth amendment,

illuminates a fact of history that has puzzled many students who ponder the founding of our

republic: why did the members of the convention of 1787 adjourn without including a bill of Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 284

rights in the original Constitution? Madison's answer is clear: they feared that if any rights at all were listed, individuals could end by having fewer than if none were listed. The authors intended the Constitution to state in positive and definite language what the federal government can do, on the understanding that it can not do anything but that. Since the original seven articles had not empowered the government to interfere with newspapers or to establish a religion – had kept a complete silence about religion and public speech – they considered the first amendment to be superfluous and unnecessary. Indeed, as Madison indicates, they worried that by subsequently mentioning certain specified rights, as if these were not already protected by the original

Constitution, a bill of rights would open the door for despotically inclined presidents and attorneys general to argue that by implication no rights belong to the people except those enumerated in the amendments. Such fears were prophetic. Had Madison imagined that

American jurisprudence could ever produce men such as Bork, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas – men who disdained the notion of unspecified rights and sometimes voted to eviscerate those that are specified – he might not have been so sanguine about the prospect of guarding, by means of the ninth amendment, against the disparagement of rights not included in the enumeration.

Here is Thomas Jefferson, who coined the term "elective despotism" to indicate the tyranny of legislatures that he thought the Constitution and bill of rights should prevent, writing in his Notes on the State of Virginia: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." In a letter to Harper's Magazine (March 2000), William Fusfield glosses this statement in the only manner possible:

Whenever the government seeks to prevent a person from doing some alleged injury to himself, it acts illegitimately. It is a great tragedy of American political history that this principle was considered so axiomatic by Jefferson and the other Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 285

drafters of the Constitution that they neglected to articulate it explicitly there.

If we prefer the more trenchant words of H. L. Mencken, we can rephrase Jefferson's principle

this way: "Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of improving or saving X, A is a

scoundrel." (Fusfield's inclusion of Jefferson among the framers of the Constitution is incorrect,

but not his inference that the authors of that document accepted this principle.) In all fairness to

Bork, however, he had never cared for Jefferson, and said so with characteristic bluntness: he

deplored those mischievous words in the Declaration of Independence about equality and the

pursuit of happiness.

So we see that the Constitution does not profess to contain a list of all our rights; and it

omits some of our most inalienable rights because the writers did not want to insult our

intelligence. Only someone who is deeply disturbed by the very concept of rights could reach

Bork's conclusion that the first eight amendments give us all that we are meant to have.

Even where a right is spelled out – what do the words mean? What does "freedom of

speech" actually entail? When is a search and seizure "unreasonable"? What is probable cause?

What is due process? Again, the authors used simple, broad, general terms that cry out for interpretation in the light of changing times. The founding fathers did not have computers and airplanes and the country did not have Muslims living in it. Can the government seize your computer or search your valise at an airport? Can it interfere with your "right" to download pornography from the Internet at a public library? Do members of religions that forbid the swearing of oaths have to pledge allegiance to the flag? Does a Muslim have the right to swear in court "So help me Allah" instead of "So help me God"?

The Supreme Court is the branch of government that is charged with interpreting the Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 286

words of the Constitution. Therefore its independence from the legislature and the executive is no accident. We all know that elected officials would be only too glad to redefine "freedom of speech" in such a way that criticism of themselves would become a criminal act. They have in fact tried to do so many times. But Supreme Court judges – appointed for life and answerable only to history – are insulated from the appetites of the majority and are in a position to take the same long view that the authors of the bill of rights took. They have often shown, throughout our history, an honorable propensity to extend the protections of those ten amendments to previously disenfranchised groups.

Bork did not like this.

One of the most notable of all their extensions occurred in 1965, when they struck down the Connecticut law that banned the sale of any contraceptive device to any person. It was then that the Court said that people have a "right to privacy."

Bork hated this.

While Bork's proposed amendment would not allow Congress to topple any of the ten amendments as they stand, it would allow Congress to immediately void any Supreme Court decision that broadened one of those rights, or found a new right, like the right of privacy, to be either implicit in the first amendment or included among the unenumerated rights that are reserved to the people by the ninth amendment.

Bork found any departure from the norms of the neighborhood in which he lived to be contrary to nature and a fit subject for the criminal law. He went so far as to say that "knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral." I have added the emphasis to this extraordinary confession to clarify that Bork was asserting his legislative Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 287

prerogative to criminalize any behavior that he did not like, if he could only persuade enough like-minded legislators to vote with him. Naturally he opposed the right of two consenting adults of the same sex to engage in intimate behavior in the privacy of their own bedroom. He approved of laws that criminalized this behavior, because such laws expressed the will of the majority, and he was of that majority. He liked to say sometimes that he did not personally approve of certain laws, like the Connecticut law that banned the sale of contraceptives; but he approved of the principle that allows a yahoo majority to legislatively impose its intolerant will on any minority of its choosing. He did not feel threatened by yahoo majorities, because he shared their values; he did feel threatened by any step taken to thwart the will of yahoo majorities.

Laws that criminalize homosexuality are bigoted and senseless; and because they proscribe private consensual behavior, they can only be enforced arbitrarily, haphazardly, and discriminatorily. None of this matters to a comfortably rich, white, heterosexual legislature; therefore none of this disturbed the comfortably rich, white, publicly heterosexual Robert Bork.

So what if the country contains black people, poor people, gays, Muslims, and atheists?

If they can form a majority of the legislature, says Bork, let them put their own symbols on courthouse lawns; until then, they should shut up and put up with the Christian symbols that are placed there.

Homosexual men and women make up a tiny minority of the whole population. They have long been a despised minority. The discrimination against them has always been based upon animus pure and simple. What are the chances that a popularly elected legislature will ever act on behalf of this minority? Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 288

Well, Bork is not a member of any despised minority, certainly not this one, so he has no

problem if the discrimination lasts until the end of time. When he wrote Slouching Toward

Gomorrah, what exercised him – or perhaps I should say, what caused him to stand in the corner

and hold his breath until we all noticed that he was blue in the face, or purple with rage – was the

close call he had experienced in 1986, when the Supreme Court almost struck down the

criminalization of private adult consensual homosexual acts. The majority prevailed by only one

vote; furthermore, one of the five justices who voted with that majority said later that he regretted

dong so. We had come that close to welcoming homosexual men and women into the American civic community as equals. Bork had a hard time getting over that scare, and wrote his book in large part to try to shake his attack of the willies.

What frightened him was the possibility that another Supreme Court, on another day, would finally extend the bill of rights to gay Americans. This thought kept him awake at night.

His amendment was designed to save us from that doom. But his fellow conservatives respected the Constitution's separation of powers too much to take any interest in his scheme, and Bork lived to see the sky fall: on June 26, 2003, another Supreme Court, conservative by anyone's definition but unwilling to embrace Bork's bigoted vision, struck down a Texas sodomy law and finally ordered the nation's police officers out of the bedrooms of ordinary law-abiding citizens.

It is interesting to ask ourselves why, in Bork's opinion, the elected representatives and senators

can be counted on to possess more wisdom than the nine appointed Supreme Court justices.

They can't, of course. They can be counted on to more closely reflect the brute will of the

tyrannizing majority – precisely the force for evil that the authors of the bill of rights intended to Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 289

thwart, first through the plain language of the ten amendments and second through the interpretations of a court that, because it is freer from popular pressure than any elected body could be, can find it easier to do the right thing.

The most glorious moments in the court's history have come when it did just that, in the teeth of popular outrage. In every case, had Bork's amendment been in force, Congress would have reversed the court's decision the next day. Perhaps that pleases some readers in regard to

Roe v. Wade; but how about Brown v. the Board of Education? We might still be a segregated society if Bork's amendment had passed in 1950. Not that he would have minded; if whites make up a majority and whites want racial separation, that's democracy in action.

Many sidewalk polls have shown us that, when the amendments making up the bill of rights are reworded and put to "the man in the street" for his approval or disapproval, he is likely to oppose them. Upstanding citizens are consternated to learn that a man is free to express any opinion at all, that a newspaper can print an outrageous attack on a public official so long as it is the truth, that mobs of people have the right to gather, and that the freedom of religion also allows atheists to be free from the impositions of religion. This popular disaffection is not really surprising. The bill of rights came into existence precisely because the founders of our country knew that such are the sentiments of majorities.

But what is shocking is to find that a man who had received an education in the law, who had served as Solicitor General, who had been a judge, who was nominated for the Supreme

Court, and who was widely touted as a scholar, agreed with these majorities; was terribly concerned that their will was being thwarted; and rather deplored the bill of rights. And the people who agreed with him claimed the label "conservative" – as opposed to, let us say, the Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 290

label "democratically elected fascist."

The case of William Rehnquist

The paradox posed by moral evil wrapped in social virtue becomes excruciating in the person of

Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He was honored by his colleagues, including those who had rarely voted with him, for his fairness and intelligence in running the Court. He was a man almost without personal faults in the management of his responsibilities. He kept his temper and used a keen sense of humor to good advantage. He was a model of how to "agree to disagree," conciliating his most overbearing colleagues and setting an example of rational debate. He was magnanimous when he won and graceful when he lost. He apportioned the decision-writing with tact and aplomb. Everyone respected him, and felt respected in turn. In the pursuit of his official duties, no one ever alleged that he showed favoritism of any kind to any person, until the occasion of his opinion on December 12, 2000 that awarded the presidency to George W. Bush – and at that extraordinary moment he was joined by four of his colleagues and applauded by a majority of his countrymen.

His respectability had earlier survived a series of revelations that might have damaged another man. He was widely identified as having challenged black voters at Arizona polling places in the 1950s, as part of a clumsy Republican effort to discourage them from casting their ballots; and he once signed a deed with a covenant that restricted the sale of his property to any person of "Hebrew extraction." Furthermore, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he strongly opposed racial desegregation. As a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1954, he wrote a Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 291

memorandum vigorously arguing that "separate but equal" schools were constitutional. (He certainly lied about his recollection of all these matters in his confirmation hearings, but most of us would shrug off such a minor piece of opportunism as a venial rather than a mortal sin.)

Even to recapitulate this history is to push the paradox to its breaking point. How can a man achieve a reputation for judicial probity in the teeth of so much evidence that he is morally obtuse? How do we reach our judgments about a nominee's fitness to sit on a federal bench, if such obtuseness does not seem to count against him? The answer can only be, as I have argued throughout this treatise, that character and morality run on separate tracks, and that "principled evil," far from being an oxymoron, is how most evil in the world gets done.

What are principles? And can Rehnquist possibly have possessed them? The exponents of character like to pretend that principles are hard to come by in this world, and that courage and conviction must be present in equal amounts for anyone to have and to hold them. Actually, to embrace them is natural and psychologically conservative, and takes no courage at all. Rather,

"iron-clad principles" are usually an indication of a timid love of security. Invocation of a principle always signals an attempt to bypass further thinking and to govern the present in terms of the past. The principle operates in lieu of imagination and discourages the troublesome gathering of further information. Obeisance to the principle makes for psychic economy and a quick resolution of conflicts, but does so at the cost of openness to new ideas. Given such advantages, principles are omnipresent in human life: none of us could survive for long without them; and no one could sit for long on the Supreme Court without developing a set of them, if only to make the work easier. But all great-hearted humans have distinguished themselves by knowing when to break free of their thralldom to principles. Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 292

The partisan rap on Rehnquist has always been that his principles were indistinguishable

from those of the Republican Party. I will try to show that this is not quite true – nor would it

necessarily be a fault, if Republicans espoused a sound and consistent judicial philosophy. But

we will also find that there are layers and layers of principle. We will begin with Rehnquist's

rules of thumb for interpreting the Constitution, but as we proceed we will peel the onion of

principle and find deeper and darker allegiances.

Rehnquist knew enough to present a front of judicial integrity: everything he ever wanted out of life depended upon that. On the bench, then, he tried to give the impression that his entire allegiance was to the rule of law, and rather than abandon the consistent application of his judicial philosophy to every case, he would, if principle required it of him, disenfranchise the entire white race on behalf of a single black appellant.

If he had to. But it turned out that the application of his judicial principles made such a

case purely hypothetical: he was in fact the very incarnation of "white power." This is because

he shared with Bork a commitment to the will of the majority, and the majority, in every state of

the union, just happens to be white. Naturally, Rehnquist presented his commitment as

"principled." He arrived at his philosophy, he wanted us to believe, not out of a desire to

aggrandize white majorities, but out of respect for the Constitution as written. But over the

course of history, justices have espoused a variety of judicial philosophies. The Constitution has

given rise to a myriad of interpretations. It is the height of ingenuousness to believe that a

justice's judicial philosophy originates in the Constitution and in no other place. It originates, in

fact, in the justice's moral imagination.

When we assess Rehnquist's moral imagination, we find that it differed in almost no Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 293

particular from that of Robert E. Lee, who, we should remember, thought slavery was

reprehensible but was content to wait for God to end it in His own good time. What seemed

utterly evil to Lee was the effort of certain abolitionists to end slavery sooner rather than later.

Similarly, Rehnquist said that he deplored racial bigotry and hoped that the hearts of white bigots would change; but what has always kept him awake at night was the thought of government action to end racial discrimination before this change of heart occurred.

So remorselessly did Rehnquist favor power over justice, and add to the oppressions of

those who are already disadvantaged, and defend privilege in all its bastions, that his detractors

frequently accused him of pursuing precisely this agenda and then finding the legal justification

after the fact. But this charge appears to be unfounded. In her scholarly study, Justice Rehnquist

and the Constitution, Sue Davis culled from his many opinions a clear and coherent judicial

philosophy from which he usually seemed psychologically incapable of wavering. Certainly it

was a philosophy that sat well with the aims and endeavors of the national Republican Party; but

Rehnquist sometimes showed himself to be willing to place his judicial principles above his

party.

So let us turn to these principles. Davis finds three overarching axioms that governed

Rehnquist's jurisprudence, and further notes that they are hierarchically ordered so that conflicts

among the three are easily disposed of. First, Rehnquist was, above all else, devoted to "states'

rights." (It is misleading of Davis to label this principle "the new federalism." We do not need a

new and ambiguous term when the old familiar term is perfectly clear; and we should not gloss

over how reactionary the principle is.) What this meant in practice was that almost anything

voted up by a majority of your state legislators and signed by your governor was going to be Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 294

upheld by Rehnquist, unless it directly and unmistakably contravened the precise literal language

of the Constitution of the United States.

For example, because of the way the first amendment to the Constitution is worded,

Rehnquist would not have allowed a state to establish an official religion or close down a newspaper; but he did want to allow it to persecute consenting adults who engage in homosexual acts, seize the property of a suspected drug dealer without trying him or even charging him, mandate the teaching of "creation science" in its public schools, forbid the sale of contraceptives to any person anywhere, maintain separate school systems and segregated drinking fountains for blacks and whites, forbid a woman to get an abortion for any reason, and prohibit the burning of an American flag.

Rehnquist, like Bork, had no fear whatsoever of "the tyranny of the majority." Instead, he had a palpable loathing for any attempt by a minority group, or an individual, to defeat the will of a majority by asserting some sort of "right." He especially hated the way such groups constantly appeared before the Court quoting the "equal protection" clause of the fourteenth amendment.

Davis claims to find two additional principles in Rehnquist's philosophy: an occasional respect for property rights; and a highly attenuated but sometimes faintly visible concern for individual rights where they are guaranteed by the Constitution in words that cannot be misconstrued. But as her own analysis repeatedly shows, Rehnquist really has these two principles:

1. The majority is always right.

2. Where an individual claims a right that seems to conflict with the will of the majority, see No. 1.

Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 295

My reduction of his philosophy to these two principles holds true even on those rare occasions where he thinks a legislature has violated a property right or a personal right, because, as Davis shrewdly notes, Rehnquist conceived of the bill of rights as itself an expression of majority will; and while he would reluctantly overturn the decision of a state to violate the clear language of the first ten amendments, he would not have blanched at seeing those ten amendments repealed some day by another expression of majority will. He voted to uphold a bill that banned flag-burning, for instance, knowing that this amounted to an amendment to the first amendment. The notion of placing certain fundamental individual rights beyond the reach of any majority was foreign to him, though faintly comprehensible as itself the will of the constitutionally impeccable super- majority that approved the bill of rights. The thought of expanding those rights judicially was anathema to him.

But I must admit that philosophically, Rehnquist believed that you do have an individual right if the Constitution says in unmistakable language that the majority will is superseded in precisely your circumstance. So, you do have certain rights to your property, because the fifth amendment says that your property cannot be taken from you without due process – but your state government can seize your property with due process, and due process can be defined pretty much the way your state government wants to define it, because of the preeminence of the first principle in Rehnquist's hierarchy. God forbid that five justices of the Supreme Court should overrule a state legislature's notion of due process. And you do possess such individual rights as might be left over after a majority of your fellow citizens have taken away all the ones not mentioned specifically, by name, in the bill of rights or your state constitution. So, for instance, you do have some freedom of speech – I say "some," because Rehnquist believes that the original Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 296

intent of the first amendment did not extend very far beyond political speech – but the framers did not mean for you to have "freedom of expression" or a "right to privacy." At least, they did not say so – the words "right to privacy" cannot be found in the Constitution. You certainly do not have a personal right that can be asserted against your God-fearing neighbors when they want to push laws through their legislatures to allow prayers at graduation ceremonies, to ban doctors from mentioning the word "abortion" in Planned Parenthood clinics, or to confiscate your automobile the moment they find a single marijuana seed in it, no matter how it got there.

To paraphrase a line from a Woody Allen movie, this may remind you more of a Mafia contract than a judicial philosophy. But I agree with Davis that, if we are trying to establish whether

William Rehnquist was a man of judicial principles, it suffices. He was not likely to play favorites in upholding the tyranny of state legislatures. A southern state could have re- institutionalized racism; a liberal northern state could have imposed a "comparable worth" scheme on its payroll in order to equalize male and female salaries. If one state legislature voted to allow gay marriages, that would have been just as satisfactory to him as another state's decision to ban all gays from the teaching profession. If he had prevailed in his attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade, he would have done all he intended to do for the anti-abortion movement: if, subsequently, one state had voted in "abortion on demand" and another state had chosen to treat every abortion, including an abortion to save the life of the mother, as an act of capital murder committed by both doctor and patient, that would have been fine with him. He had two concerns and two concerns only: that the majority be unimpeded in its will; and that where it is impeded – oh, heavy act! – the interpretation of the minority right that is asserted against the Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 297

majority preference be construed as narrowly as possible. He acknowledged that the eighth amendment to the Constitution does indeed prohibit "cruel and unusual punishments," because those four words are found there: but this wording did not, in his opinion, bar a state from executing a child, or a retarded person, or a crazy person, or from sentencing a nonviolent first- time drug dealer to life in prison without parole – after all, a legislature had concluded that those punishments are pleasant and usual. And while the fourth amendment does prohibit

"unreasonable" searches and seizures of property, majorities get to say what is reasonable. If you think the authorities are abusing their power, appeal to those authorities; try to rally the other one or two percent of you who happen to be gay, or Muslim, or homeless, or wrongfully imprisoned, to vote those majorities out of office. William Rehnquist wishes you godspeed and would place no additional impediment in your way as you attempt to lobby your elected officials. But do not waste the time of the Supreme Court asking for judicial redress; that is not its business; the protection of majority will is its business.

See, it is a philosophy.

But my question, I suppose, is this. Since William Rehnquist just happened to be a rich successful heterosexually married Christian Protestant white male lawyer, I completely understand why this was his philosophy. I understand why he implicitly trusted the wisdom of state legislatures, which are overwhelmingly dominated by rich successful heterosexual Christian

Protestant white male lawyers and are likely to continue to be so dominated for the foreseeable future. Just thinking about my state legislature makes my hair stand on end, but I understand all too well how Rehnquist would have thought that such men represent the best of society – how it Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 298

seemed to him that they have arrived at their wealth, power, and influence simply because they are the best and most deserving element in society. I understand how it is that he believed that the laws these men pass are, by and large, good laws, and that the objections raised by women, blacks, atheists, Muslims, homosexuals, the poor, the homeless, the disabled are just so much caviling and carping by special-interest constituencies that are too lazy to work patiently within the system. Believe me, all this I understand.

What I don't understand is how any man could make the judicial defense of this philosophy a life calling. I don't understand how a grown man could dress himself up in robes for several decades, drag his tired carcass to the Supreme Court building, and time after time, like a machine, defend, by means of the same threadbare arguments eternally repeated, the right of a bigoted, brutish majority to impose its values on an unoffending and disenfranchised minority: time after time to uphold the right of the Georgia state legislature to imprison any adult male who has sexually interacted with another consenting adult male in his own bedroom; or the right of the Louisiana state legislature to tell biology teachers to shut up about Darwin and speak up about the book of Genesis; or the right of the Idaho state legislature to tell an 11-year-old girl impregnated by her step-father that she must carry the embryo to full term and give birth to it. I don't understand how a self-respecting person could make a career out of parroting, over and over again, the idea that a state legislature can do anything it wants if the Constitution does not explicitly forbid it. Or how he could argue with a straight face that an American citizen is certainly protected by the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States against

"unreasonable searches and seizures," but that the search and seizure of his own bodily fluids, and the government's authority to requisition it while it is still in his body, and force him to excrete it Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 299

so that it can be impounded and examined, in the absence of any suspicion that he has broken any law, does not violate that amendment, because the subject is under the age of 18 and the government has said it must be given a free hand to stop the scourge of drugs.

I understand perfectly that it pleased Rehnquist that such decisions were being made somewhere, because none of them were likely to mean any skin off his comfortable nose, or to seriously discomfit the other people in his exclusive neighborhood or his private club. But I cannot understand how he could suborn his intellect to the active defense of these ludicrous propositions; and even if I could reconcile myself to his taking them seriously, I still would not understand how he could bear to stifle his creativity and his humanity, and abuse his own common sense, by defending them over and over with the same dreary, robotic application of the test of "original intent." I cannot imagine wanting to be a Supreme Court justice if my so-called principles left me so little latitude to exercise my judgment, use my knowledge, and apply my compassion.

I also cannot understand how a man of his reputed intellect could have failed to notice that our moral progress as a nation has been bound up in our project to expand the scope of individual rights and diminish the tyranny of unjust majorities. It seems to me that he made the mistake – which I am much more accustomed to encountering among cruder intellects – of celebrating the liberalism of the entire past, but only up until the day he himself turned 10 years old, thereafter to set himself against every liberal impulse that originated after that date. How stunted did his moral imagination have to be for him to fall into that trap? And he must have been singularly stupid if he did not suspect how he is going to go down in history: as a desiccated, fixated reactionary; as a man who tried to roll back the clock; as a piece of dead wood Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 300

that had to be swept aside so the Supreme Court could resume its historic role as the protector of

individuals whose rights have been trampled by small-minded, power-hungry legislative majorities; as a man who never showed the least glint of passion in his eyes on behalf of any cause other than that of hastening the day of execution for inmates on death row. (How did this man of wide-ranging interests and historical consciousness fail to notice that every other country belonging to the political tradition he cherished had abolished capital punishment? Did he think that posterity would honor him for the extra effort he expended in putting people to death?)

What do we have when we combine a high I.Q., a sharp wit, and all the social virtues with a complete inability to empathize with people unlike himself, a total lack of moral imagination, and a plodding determination to apply the same ugly, lifeless principle over and over again to the most varied and interesting phenomena? We have William Rehnquist. We have the triumph of "character" over goodness. We have evil.

Randall Adams and the principle of utility

While cogitating upon this unpleasant topic of a malignancy on the Supreme Court – sometimes a little abashed that I would dare to make such an allegation; more often roused by the pain and the poignancy of contemplating so much evil here, of all places, at the court of last resort for people done down by callous officialdom throughout the other branches of government and among the lower rungs of the judiciary, here, where the moral imagination is so absolutely requisite – at this very time, while my mind was dilating upon William Rehnquist's mania for the death penalty, I found myself revisiting the case of the wrongful conviction and near-execution of Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 301

Randall Dale Adams.

Adams was a working man without a criminal record, living temporarily in a Dallas,

Texas motel, when he met 16-year-old David Harris one day in November of 1976 and decided to hang out with him. The two tooled around and went to a drive-in movie in Harris's car. Harris took Adams back to the motel at ten o'clock. Almost three hours later, Harris gunned down a police officer who had stopped him for driving without his lights on. This was merely the most violent of several crimes that Harris was in the process of committing during an extended spree.

When he was picked up, all the evidence fit: his car had long since been identified, he admitted he had been in it, he even led police to the murder weapon. But, he said, Randall Adams had been in the car with him and had pulled the trigger. Assistant District Attorney Doug Mulder liked this scenario, despite an abundance of evidence that Adams was telling the truth and Harris was lying. Mulder simply ignored the evidence and withheld much of it from the defense. He persevered and used Harris's testimony to obtain a conviction and a death sentence for Adams.

In subsequent years, dogged public defenders kept unearthing additional information indicating that Adams was innocent, and also demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prosecution had acted unethically and even illegally; Harris meanwhile went on to commit many more crimes, and finally another murder that put him on death row. Yet time after time various courts, boards, prosecutors, and judges in Texas upheld the conviction. Eventually the sentence was commuted to life in prison, not out of mercy, but as part of a strategy to avoid having the flimsy conviction thrown out altogether in the event that another appeal of the death sentence touched the conscience of a higher court.

Readers may recall that the case was finally broken open by the documentary film The Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 302

Thin Blue Line, which succeeded in demonstrating to the entire nation the truth about this

miscarriage of justice. The film exposed, not just the evidence that guaranteed the innocence of

Randall Adams, but the grislier facts about what can only be accurately called the prosecution's

attempted judicial murder. Any reader who is curious, and wishes to verify my admittedly heated

account, should see the movie and read any of the synopses of the case, which can be found in

most of the books since written about wrongful convictions. Such reading is hard on the

stomach, but perhaps salutary for those who agree with Rehnquist's belief that the affairs of our

republic are so excellently well-ordered by state officials everywhere that the rest of us should

just stand back and watch. Two of the best books to canvass this depressing subject, both

containing accounts of Randall Adams, are Presumed Guilty by Martin Yant and In Spite of

Innocence by Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance E. Putnam.

For most of us, the thought of executing an innocent person fills us with fear and queasiness, akin to the dread we feel at the thought of perishing in a random act of terror. We may shrug off news of a first-time drug offender's 40-year sentence because we are certain we could never be a drug offender. It is harder to say that we could never be an innocent person. Whenever we encounter a story like that of Randall Adams, it momentarily undermines our confidence, not just in the workings of our legal system, but in the meaning of life itself. The thought of Randall

Adams being wrongly executed – or wrongly imprisoned for over twelve years – wakes us up at night. There is little we would not want to do to make this up to him; but there is little we can do.

Lest you console yourself by assuming that such cases of prosecutorial recklessness and Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 303

judicial error must be exceptional, let me again remind you of the decision by the Republican

Governor of Illinois on the last day of January, 2000 to suspend all executions in his state until a thorough review could be undertaken; for of the 25 death sentences that had been handed down since capital punishment was reaffirmed in the 1970s, 13 of the persons convicted had been subsequently found to be innocent. In some cases, all it took to clear the inmate was a

Northwestern University professor's assignment to his journalism students to review the transcript of the trial and visit the crime scene themselves.

When, a few days before he was scheduled to be ceremoniously killed by the state of

Texas, the case of Randall Adams finally reached the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis Powell issued a stay of execution; then the entire Court took up the matter of his appeal. According to

Martin Yani, author of Presumed Guilty, the case compelled the close attention of most members of the Court, but one of them seemed "distracted." That justice was William Rehnquist. I wonder if he was not in fact bored. Throughout his career, he demonstrated a marked lack of human feeling in relation to the cases he judged, with one exception: he was positively avid to increase the pace of executions in this country and devoted himself heroically to the cause of cutting off the possibility of just such appeals as the one Adams was pursuing. It may be presumptuous of me to try to get inside his head, but judging him by the evidence of a lifetime, I assume that he was allowing his mind to wander because he saw no reason for being there: the state of Texas had found sufficient reason to sentence this man to death, and the Supreme Court, in his view, has no authority to intervene and no business interfering.

Defying this sturdy principle, the Court voted 8-1 to remand the case for re-sentencing.

The lone dissenter was Rehnquist. Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 304

Again I must apologize for trying to read Rehnquist's mind, but for the sake of Randall

Adams I hope I can be forgiven – and really, when a man thinks like Rehnquist, and reaches

conclusions so repugnant to our sense of fairness and decency, we cannot help but speculate on

how he manages such a feat psychologically. I am certainly willing to make the same assumption

about Rehnquist that I make about a sociopath: that his actions somehow exemplified, rather than

contradicted, his morality.

I will follow the lead of Sue Davis, who also made an attempt to fathom Rehnquist's

appalling logic, and try my hand at reading the contents of Rehnquist's mind. This entails peeling

the onion and exposing a more covert, more expansive principle that underlies the judicial

philosophy. I think it is safe to say that the Chief Justice was a conscious expositor of

utilitarianism, and that his decisions accorded with the way he thought the principle of utility should dictate both his legal principles and his moral principles. It may be worth while, then, to take a short detour and visit the precincts of moral philosophy.

Briefly, utilitarianism prescribes as a moral duty the action that produces "the greatest good for the greatest number of people." It is a fraught business to define "the good," but most utilitarians and most politicians would settle for equating it with happiness.

People with little or no philosophical training can immediately intuit a problem with this

principle: it would at times commit us to obviously immoral expediencies. It is not difficult to

imagine that we might incarcerate vast numbers of merely troublesome but unoffending

individuals, merely because their removal from the community makes the majority happier. The

Holocaust can be justified on utilitarian grounds. If Hitler had been right about the Jews – had

they been a criminally parasitic race sucking the lifeblood out of the host race – their removal by Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 305

the millions from civil society would have conferred a distinct blessing upon the hundreds of

millions. Please notice that very little changes from the philosophical viewpoint if Hitler is

wrong about the Jews: if he and most good German citizens merely believe that he is right, then

exactly the same benefit is conferred in terms of happiness; for I am just as unhappy if I am

paranoid as I am if someone is really out to get me, and just as pleased if my imaginary enemies

are killed as if my real ones are eliminated.

Further thought provokes further doubts about utilitarianism. It is distinctive for its insistence that consequences are what count: but at what point do we make our calculation of the good produced by an action? During Reconstruction in this country, blacks emerged from slavery and began to flourish. After Jim Crow laws were passed throughout the South, the condition of many blacks became worse than it had been under slavery. In other words, in 1900, all you could say for the Civil War in terms of consequences was that 600,000 young men had died, the southern states had been economically devastated, and blacks were now both impoverished and terrorized. Then in the 1960s, a new wave of civil rights legislation ended segregation. But soon after, beginning with the Reagan presidency, many of the gains of the civil rights era began to be lost. When do we tot up the good and evil produced by the Civil War to find out if it was expedient or not? – in 1870, 1900, 1970, or 2000? Yet most ordinary

Americans today would say that slavery was a great moral wrong and had to be ended at whatever cost. This simple sentiment, which is so unimpeachably moral, exposes utilitarianism as an intellectual fraud.

The version of utilitarianism that I have sketched here is sometimes called "act utilitarianism," because the consequences of any given act are examined for their utility. Some Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 306

philosophers have tried to salvage the principle of utility by applying it instead to a set of rules,

which, if adopted, would promote in general the greatest good for the greatest number. This

disposes of the objection to act utilitarianism that it would require the torturing of members of

terrorist cells and the incarceration and execution of all individuals found unacceptable by the

community. The rule utilitarian can point out that, while we may get an immediate benefit from

an isolated act of torture, we are, over the long haul, better off living in a society where torture is

forbidden. Thus a rule utilitarian can sensibly oppose capital punishment and all forms of state-

sanctioned violence and coercion.

The simplest philosophical riposte to the rule utilitarian is to point out that he is agreeing

in advance to endorse actions that contradict the principle of utility. This is a cheap shot,

perhaps; but there are more substantive complaints. Utilitarianism instantiates the tyranny of the

majority with a vengeance. The history of the world shows that most people in a society are able

to be happy with a system that massively discriminates against a select few members of the body

politic. Yet before we even draw breath to enter this obvious objection, we should notice that the

utilitarian is at a loss to quantify happiness in the first place. How much disutility, for instance,

is produced by the abject suffering of one person, versus the amount of utility produced by the

mild pleasure of a million people? (Do not imagine that I am merely playing with ideas. Almost every journalist in the world believes that the appetite of a million tabloid readers for their daily dose of drivel justifies such abominations as the relentless stalking of the members of Britain's royal family, and even of hounding Princess Diana to her death.)

Utilitarianism, then, has no method of combatting the satisfactions of a debased society: in fact, any person who tries to improve the moral fiber of the majority or to make the Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 307

community-at-large more sensitive is automatically a disturber of the peace, a promoter of disutility. By utilitarian lights, Socrates was a nettlesome fellow and rightly executed. It is no rebuttal to say that the example of Socrates has conferred endless good through the ages: the

Athenian Jury had to render a verdict based upon its best assessment of the consequences for

Athens at the time.

Utilitarianism was concocted in part as an alternative to Kant's categorical imperative,

which seemed to offend against our moral sensibilities by saying that consequences do not

matter. This is partly due to Kant's misunderstanding of his own principle – he prohibits all lying

because he does think that the consequences of trying to live in a world in which no information is reliable would be ruinous – and partly due to our correct understanding that the categorical imperative, as he presents it, is fatally flawed. Nonetheless, the answer is to repair the categorical imperative by making the exercise of moral imagination the single universal duty, rather than use utilitarianism to raise up expediency to the level of a moral principle and so forever after legitimize the way things are. For people are all too likely to be moral sluggards, conceiving of self-satisfaction as the greatest possible good and achieving it by noxiously immoral ends. If 91% of America's 270 million citizens were, as polls reported, elated by the outcome of the 1991 Gulf War, wasn't the price of 160,000 Iraqis worth it? Especially when we also helped so many nice Kuwaiti sheikhs recover their personal fortunes in the process.

I will say in all fairness that the original promulgators of utilitarianism had something different in mind. In the 19th Century, they sought a moral weapon against the tyranny of the rich minority. During the darkest days of the Industrial Revolution, "the greatest good for the greatest number" was a clarion call to redistribute some of the obscene wealth of the aristocrats Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 308

and the great manufacturing families to the huge majority of laborers who were being worked

literally to death. But everything that the principle of utility can do, empathy can do better.

Meanwhile, the principle of utility is easily suborned: the apostles of "trickle-down" economics have become very adept at arguing that the best way to help the poor is to let the rich keep all their money and "invest" it in the economy.

There is a final point to notice: in seeking to compete with the categorical sternness of

Kant's imperative, utilitarianism established a rule that never lets up. If I can produce more happiness by running across the street to help my neighbor weed her garden than by eating my lunch, I am required to forgo lunch. This is contrary to all other systems, even Kant's, which allow us to take a break from moral duty every now and then and indulge ourselves a little in the grosser personal satisfactions. In any event, human nature being what it is, we are never going to live for others; since all injunctions to do so are futile, most philosophers find a way to say that we shouldn't have to. As the English comedian John Foster Hall said mockingly, "We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don't know." Indeed, living for others collapses of its own logical absurdity: it is much more efficient to have each person, by and large, live for himself and so make himself happy, than to have each person try to guess how to make someone else happy. (Some might argue that my intrusion into my neighbor's gardening, which obligates her to miss her own lunch on another occasion and help me, is not really utilitarian in the bigger scheme of things. But this argument founders upon the rock of narcissism: some neighbors would be more than happy to accept favors without returning them.)

Utilitarianism is actually a way to summarize what we have generally tried to do in the public sphere. It is essentially the promise of all political party platforms; it is the morality that Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 309

underlies public policy when it has not been bought off. As such, it has everlastingly produced precisely the world we live in – the world that has so often required the efforts of genuine moral reformers to nudge it out of its brutal expediency.

For a man like William Rehnquist, utilitarianism was practically the whole of morality.

And the best part about it for him was the way it sets duty above empathy. Indeed, it banishes empathy; there is no place at all for empathy to even get a foothold. So the principle of utility played to his strengths.

To return to the case of Randall Adams: Rehnquist, I believe, was a rule utilitarian of such conviction, integrity, and high principle – of such virulence, I might say – that he believed it was better to overlook the execution of an innocent man if in doing so you uphold "the rule of law."

The reasoning is this: the wheels of justice turn inexorably, and sometimes an innocent man is caught in the machinery; but overall, it produces the greatest good for the greatest number if we keep it well-oiled and running continuously. But every time we question the judgment of a jury in a capital case, we throw a monkey wrench in the works: the mechanism grinds to a halt, and the dark forces that are ever arrayed against law and order take heart. So the minor disutility of the unjust execution – it amounts to just one person kvetching about the importance of his own life to himself and whoever will listen to him – is far outweighed by the utility of shoring up the criminal justice system.

In putting such thoughts into Rehnquist's head, I swear I am doing my utmost to put the best thoughts. After all, in light of his record, you cannot expect me to find a moral moral principle as the wellspring of his jurisprudence. Were I malicious, I might imagine him as a mystical zany, who hears God tell him how to vote; or I might write him off as an ethical Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 310

intuitionist – as someone who, invoking the favorite principle of all narcissists, merely does

"what feels right" to him at the time. In attributing to him the principle of utility, I am doing him the honor of assuming he did have principles; and the principle of utility has been mistaken for a moral principle in some of the best intellectual circles of the last 200 years. Indeed, one of the

19th Century's most progressive social reformers, John Stuart Mill, swore by it. (But therein lies a further demonstration of its absurdity: Rehnquist could use it plausibly to oppose everything

Mill stood for.)

Whether Rehnquist's reasoning followed the principle of utility, or some other principle, my response is the same: most of us would abandon our principles before we would allow them to lead us down this path. Most of us would free Randall Adams first, and then see where we stood. If we were left standing on ground zero, then we would start over from scratch.

If the reader, taking my metaphor as literally as I intend it, believes that I cannot be serious, let me insist that I am. Suppose all morals and all principles really were annihilated; suppose we had to recreate the moral universe anew, without the guidance of any of Rehnquist's verities. We would be infinitely better off: we would be free of Rehnquist's conception of duty, where the innocent are executed with the guilty, and the highest principle of life is the protection of the status quo; yet we would still have our common humanity to guide us. Rather than

Rehnquist's morality, let us immediately have no morality at all: with our next breath, we will reclaim the best of traditional morality, because it is the best, and in plain view; but at the same time, we will be freed of contamination by the invisible subterranean morality that shrivels our empathy when we embrace it and condemns us when we resist it.

Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 311

I have discussed sociopathy elsewhere in this study. In the popular imagination, sociopathic

criminals kill "without conscience" and "without remorse." I have argued that these offenders do

have, if not exactly a conscience, nonetheless a morality: they show no remorse because they

acted as they thought best. The apparent contradiction between my view and the popular view

can perhaps be resolved by noting that every child certainly has, if not exactly a conscience, at

least what Sigmund Freud called a superego, which can be described as a repository of all the

adult rules that he or she has been taught to fear and obey. I would agree that grown-up

sociopaths have very little of that sort of conscience: like Barnadine, the unregenerate inmate of

Shakespeare's jail in Measure for Measure, they are "careless, reckless, and fearless of what's

past, present, or to come." They stand by their actions, they sleep the untroubled sleep said to

belong only to the just.

The touchstone of sociopathy, then, by whichever theory we arrive at it, is the doing of

evil without apology. By this way of reckoning, the case of Randall Adams presents to our view a number of individuals who qualify as sociopaths. Heading the list is Doug Mulder, the prosecutor who knew almost to a certainty that Randall Adams was innocent. Since he also knew the identity of the real killer, and could easily have obtained a conviction, the only theory that has ever been floated as to why he prosecuted Adams instead of David Harris – and it is the only theory that makes sense – is that he wanted the death penalty as a feather in his cap and

would not have been able to ask for it had the defendant been Harris: for at that time, Texas law

did not permit the execution of a juvenile. To gain both a conviction and a death penalty, Mulder

had to engage in several types of prosecutorial misconduct that, in many states, would have led to

disciplinary action against him. Next on our list must be Dr. James Grigson, the odious Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 312

psychiatrist nicknamed "Dr. Death" who was practically making a career out of giving expert testimony in capital cases. Invariably he recommended the death penalty because, he would intone, the killer in question could not be rehabilitated and was sure to resume his murderous ways if ever let out of prison. After Randall Adams was released, Grigson stated that he had not changed his mind and he predicted that his testimony would be vindicated when Adams killed

"again." (At this point, we may want to pause: whereas, for most of us, Mulder inhabits the very heart of the darkness of evil – he kills to puff himself up, combining without a qualm the pleasures of competitive sport and career advancement – we are tempted to conclude that

Grigson is so narcissistically impaired and so morally or mentally ill that he is really unable to help himself.) Then there is Judge Don Metcalfe, who was aware of a great deal of Mulder's misconduct and yet ruled against the defendant time after time and kept re-signing the warrants of execution whenever new irregularities were brought to his attention. And we might want to consider the entire Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles: six months after the release of The Thin

Blue Line, a judge wrote to the board requesting immediate action because of all the new, convincing evidence that Adams was innocent; the board turned down the request because, according to one member, it was not the business of the board to consider guilt or innocence but only fitness for parole. (Put another way, the board concluded that Adams was innocent but had not finished serving his sentence.) Finally, I leave it to the reader to make his own finding in regard to William Rehnquist. If he ever showed remorse for his conduct in the case of Randall

Adams, I am unaware of it. Had he been more persuasive with his colleagues, Adams would have been shipped home to Ohio in a Texas state body bag. Judging by the evidence, Rehnquist's nearly fatal error of judgment not only failed to sober him up; it had no effect whatever in Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 313

slowing him down in his holy crusade to accelerate the pace of executions.

The reader may feel that there is a certain degree of rhetorical overkill in my inventory of sociopathic individuals, since it is so heavily weighted with the names of respected government officials and yet conspicuously omits the name of the career criminal whose wanton, despicable, murderous act instigated the entire episode. But I am constrained by our agreement that the defining characteristic of the sociopath is an inability to feel remorse. I quote now from a letter

David Harris wrote to his mother after he had finally cleared the name of Randall Adams:

It seems like my whole life is surrounded by "wrongs" of some kind, and it seems like I've never done the right thing when I could and should have. Absolving Randall Dale Adams of any guilt is a difficult thing for me to do, but I must try to do so, because he is innocent. That is the truth. This may be hard for you to believe; and you are asking how I could have done this. It's a question I've asked myself for many years. The only thing I can say is that I didn't really and fully understand the injustice I had done to Adams. I couldn't except [sic] and face the truth of what I had done, nor could I face the possibility of losing the love of you and Dad because that was the only love I had ever known. I knew I couldn't be a failure at the age of sixteen. I, like any other kid, wanted you all to be proud of me, which is something I felt had eluded me for some reason. I needed to be accepted and gain approval by somebody. It's hard to explain because I can't even understand some of the things I've done, etc. . . . I'm truly sorry for the hurt and problems I've caused you all. I can't do anything about the publicity or I would, because the last thing I want is for you all to suffer for what I've done. Maybe you can understand, maybe not, but I can't carry this burden any longer; if the truth hurts me, the falsehoods hurt even more.

I confess to feeling the tears well up as I copy over this letter. Harris is Exhibit A for the theory of sociopathy that I have developed with the help of the findings of Lonnie Athens. He had within him, not original sin, not monsters of the id, not an inherited animal nature, but the same human potential we all have; and like the rest of us, he "needed to be accepted and gain approval by somebody." Unfortunately, that somebody turned out to be the community of other young Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 314

hellraisers. The subculture of masculine swagger got to him first and held on longest. Usually, after their first stint of hard time, such young men are incorrigible; but I believe that Harris was sincere about his death-row conversion experience – imminent execution focuses a man's mind on matters of importance. The cocky voices of the old phantom community no longer have much to say that is pertinent to the situation.

My tears dry up as I contemplate the odds that the Chief Justice experienced a similar transformation before his death, or came to "really and fully understand the injustice" that he did to Adams and to countless others by his lack of moral imagination. Rehnquist, too, "like every other kid," needed acceptance and approval, and like Harris sought it in the wrong places – in his case, in the country clubs where the tough-minded realists congregated amidst the emblems of their wealth and congratulated each other on their intestinal fortitude. Unfortunately for the state of his soul, Rehnquist found too much approval. Harris's example demonstrates that it is never too late; but Rehnquist's case suggests that success of the wrong type can be a curse, and that as a result, some people may have too much bad karma to overcome in one lifetime.

Antonin Scalia v. the People of the United States

Let us turn our attention now to Antonin Scalia, who was frequently touted by journalists and lawyers as the brightest intellectual light adorning the recent Supreme Court. He was voluble and witty in oral arguments and wrote his opinions clearly, cleverly, and boldly. He also set down his legal philosophy in readable essays.

Scalia's basic argument is easy to understand and has the beguiling false clarity we might Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 315

expect from a man who was filled with religious certitude and enjoyed the comfort of a closed mind. He noted that, in a democracy, the people make laws through their elected representatives.

Judges should not make laws. Five justices on the Supreme Court should not enact what a majority among 300 million American citizens refuse to enact. If the people want abortion-on- demand, or a right to privacy, or a right to die, let them insist that laws be passed or the

Constitution be amended.

If we object that this view seems to instantiate "the tyranny of the majority," Scalia responds that the Constitution, including its amendments, places certain individual rights beyond the reach of legislative majorities. Because of the first amendment, for example, no law can ever be passed that takes away our right to assemble peacefully.

All justices would assent thus far. Scalia departed from his liberal colleagues on the

Supreme Court in deploring the concept of a "living Constitution" – the theory that we must interpret the words of the Constitution according to the way the nation has grown and our sensibilities have evolved. He complained that such a theory opens a Pandora's box, by taking the justices away from the clear wording of the text into a murkier domain of contemporary

"feelings." He described himself as a textualist – someone for whom the text is paramount. And he preferred to be guided by original meaning. So, for instance, since capital punishment is mentioned in the Constitution as one possible sentence among others, it is clear that such punishment was constitutional at the time the document was written, and it is therefore fatuous to argue that the amendment referring to "cruel and unusual punishments" originally meant to prohibit the death penalty. States are left free to have it or not have it; a new amendment to the

Constitution could forbid it; but a justice who calls the death penalty a cruel and unusual Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 316

punishment that violates the eighth amendment to the Constitution is someone who has no respect for the Constitution as written and no respect for the will of majorities in state legislature.

Such a justice is anti-democratic on the face of it, willing to usurp the lawmaking function in the name of "what's best" – best according to him and to the sociologists with whom he happens to agree. Worse still, there is no methodological control over how this seizure of power is to be managed – when to do it, and what principles to follow while doing it. "Interpreting the living

Constitution" cannot be anything other than arbitrary. An individual justice may have his own ethic about the matter, but it is not likely to be matched by the ethic of any other.

Scalia's position was clear, consistent, and rigorous. He showed great fidelity to textualism and originalism throughout his tenure on the Supreme Court. But let us see how this played out in two actual cases.

In December, 1986, the Court heard arguments concerning the Louisiana Balanced Treatment

Act, which proposed that "public schools within this state shall give balanced treatment to creation-science and to evolution science." The intent of the lawmakers was manifest, and openly admitted by some of them: they wanted the first book of Genesis to be treated in high schools as a scientific text, in order to promote respect for the Christian religion and beat back the forces of secular humanism. And while a few scientists with legitimate academic credentials

(all of them Christian fundamentalists) were found who were willing to argue in favor of the geological evidence that the world is 6,000 years old, creation-science then had, and today has, no existence in the scientific community independent of its status as one of the dogmas of

Biblical faith. But Scalia prided himself on the integrity of his textualism: he eschewed "original Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 317

intent," and stuck to the "original meaning" of the words themselves. The state legislative act in question did not mention religion or the Bible: it simply mandated equal time for two opposing

"scientific" "theories."

The decision was handed down June 19, 1987: by a 7-2 majority, the law was struck down as unconstitutional. But Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, dissented from that decision. He did not find that the Constitution places any impediment in the way of a state legislature expressing the will of the majority in the curriculum of its schools, so long as a religion is not thereby established.

Because all educated people, setting aside those who allow religious fictions to trump scientific facts, view creationism, or what is now packaged as "intelligent design," with contempt, we cannot help speculating about the psychology of its defenders. In the case of a fundamentalist Christian who is deeply and irrevocably committed to the literal truth of the words of the Bible, we understand that he feels he has no choice other than to accept the account of Genesis, Chapter One, in the same spirit that Einstein accepted the constancy of the speed of light in all frames of reference as demonstrated by the Michelson-Morley experiment. And we might go on to say that it is no stranger that the earth should appear to be four billion years old, while actually being six thousand years old, than that the speed of light remains constant because the faster we travel, the slower the hands of our watches turn. But where the intellect is not held in thrall by Biblical literalism, a grown man's argument that creationism is science and not religion takes us by surprise. Rehnquist was a pale mainstream Protestant, and in Protestant precincts evolution has long been accepted; Scalia is a devout Roman Catholic, whose popes have rejected Biblical literalism and instructed the faithful that the findings of science are Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 318

compatible with church doctrine. We are entitled to ask, in all fairness, I think, whether these

two men voted as they did because they honestly thought the world may have been created after

the manner described in Genesis; or whether they felt that, although it was not so created, the

Genesis story contains such a profound truth about the nature of the real deity that it deserves a

place in a scientific curriculum; or whether they just felt, in keeping with their respect for state

legislatures, that yahoo majorities and imbecilic parents have a right to insist that their children

be educated according to their own prejudices. Any of the three explanations would serve

equally to disqualify the purveyor of it from sitting on the Supreme Court: but unfortunately, the

confirmation process in the Senate neglects such substantive matters and instead focuses on

"character" as described in the Boy Scout Oath.

The case of Ronald Harmelin v. Michigan was argued before the court on November 5, 1990.

Harmelin was a man without a criminal record of any kind who ran a red light. When stopped by

police, he cooperated by getting out of the car and allowing himself to be patted down. (In many

states, such a search of his person would be unconstitutional, and all evidence gathered from this

point forward would be suppressed. If the fourth amendment means anything at all, it means

officers cannot search your person without a reasonable suspicion that you are involved in

something more serious than a traffic violation.) Harmelin was found to have marijuana

cigarettes in his pocket. Since earlier Supreme Court rulings have affirmed the right of the state

to seize your property before you have even been charged, much less tried, for a drug-related offense – so much for the fifth amendment – Harmelin's car was impounded, and $60,000 worth of cocaine was found in its trunk. This is not a huge amount, really – a little more than a pound- Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 319

and-a-half – and it is not impossible to imagine that a seriously addicted individual would be planning to use the entire stash himself. In any event, Harmelin was never charged with drug-

dealing, as there was no evidence that he had ever sold cocaine to anybody; he was charged only

with drug possession. Nonetheless, his conviction sufficed to automatically trigger a sentence of

life-without-parole.

Michigan does not have the death penalty, so Harmelin's sentence was the same as if he

had massacred a dozen people in a cafeteria, including three police officers. In his own written

appeal, he noted that he had "absolutely no criminal record, harmed no one, [and] did not display

viciousness [or] an inability to reform." He had been convicted of possessing a substance that

"one can buy freely and legally on the streets of Peru."

Most of us with any humanity would overturn this sentence because it is monstrously disproportionate to the crime. Nonetheless, we have some feeling for the force of Scalia's argument that we cannot sit on the high court and just "do the right thing." Before we thwart the will of the majority of the good citizens of Michigan, we must find a precedent for doing so.

Fortunately for Harmelin's attorney, such a precedent lay ready to hand. In Solem v. Helm in 1983, the Supreme Court had reviewed the sentence of a "career criminal" whose sixth conviction had automatically triggered the penalty of life in prison. His career had consisted entirely of petty crimes, and the straw that had broken the camel's back had been the bouncing of a $100 check. In overturning this incredible sentence, the Court had used the eighth amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments to further establish that a sentence must "be proportionate" to the severity of the crime. (Perhaps you imagined that proportionality had always been a principle of our system of justice.) However, four justices – including Rehnquist, Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 320

needless to say – had dissented from that decision: life imprisonment for bouncing a check was

perfectly acceptable to them. Now, in the Harmelin case, Rehnquist was Chief Justice and had

the recently appointed Scalia at his side.

In Harmelin's favor was the venerable doctrine of stare decisis, which is Latin for "letting

the decision stand" – it is "the doctrine that principles of law established by judicial decision be

accepted as authoritative in cases similar to those from which such principles were derived."

Harmelin's attorney pointed to the decision of Solem v. Helm that guaranteed due proportion in

sentencing. As a conservative justice, Rehnquist could usually be counted on to be, with his

brain at least, a respecter of precedent. During confirmation hearings, he had certainly said that

he was. On the other hand, in his shriveled heart, he had always recoiled from all criminals and

deviants, and especially from the "rights" that such maladaptive, discontented, troublesome folk

assert against the majority will. During the oral arguments, Rehnquist mirthlessly joked that the

Court had perhaps not yet "reached equilibrium" on this issue of proportionate sentencing.

A moment's digression is necessary here. Rehnquist's professed allegiance to stare

decisis was very important in securing his appointment to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

First of all, it afforded him a legal fig leaf to hide behind in explaining how he could have

disagreed with the unanimous vote of the Supreme Court justices in 1954 to desegregate public

schools in this country. Since the Warren Court had to overturn an 1896 decision, Plessy v.

Ferguson, Rehnquist was able to say that he agreed with the goal of desegregation but felt that

the great principle of stare decisis should have been respected. Second, it gave him the answer he needed when liberals questioned whether, having once opposed these decisions, he now accepted the desegregation of American schools and public accommodations: he was able to Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 321

reply that his very conservatism, especially his commitment to stare decisis, would make him

reluctant to tamper with laws and precedents that were already in place.

But we have seen that Rehnquist's principles were arranged in a well-established pecking order: the legislative right of a state to fix a schedule of punishments far outweighed the individual right of a felon to protest against its unfairness. Should a justice's principled commitment to stare decisis cause him to overrule his other principles just because courts have

erred in the past?

And perhaps we can digress further, and note that, while he may have evinced a public,

conscious, explicit hierarchy of principles, even the most self-knowing man may find his

behavior sometimes governed by another hierarchy – subconscious, unverbalized,

unacknowledged. If, as I have argued, the behavior of even a sociopath symbolizes a genuine

moral code, perhaps we can say as much of a Supreme Court justice. And intellectual principles

will sometimes have to fall in line behind emotionally driven "moral" principles. I have

attributed some of Rehnquist's decisions to his belief in the principle of utility – but here again,

stare decisis might plausibly appear to have more utilitarian value than proclaiming the Supreme

Court's right to overturn its own decisions every time its membership changes. So let us look

behind all of Rehnquist's intellectual allegiances, and try to get to the core of his thinking. Let us

peel the onion once again, and descend lower.

Confident, unempathic, emotionally shut down for life – Rehnquist was, if I may be

forgiven the bad pun, constitutionally unable to understand the actions of any person outside his

own circle of the respected and respectable. He simply did not believe that criminals have any excuse whatsoever. If you tried and convicted a man for eating hallucinogenic mushrooms the Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 322

day you caught him, in accordance with "due process" as understood by the legislature of a Bible

Belt state, and executed him the next morning, it would not have bothered him, because he just wouldn't see that the man had any very good excuse for his antisocial behavior. Good people behave well; the ones who misbehave have no claim on our sympathies. I have traced this worldview – for it is a worldview, however unkind it is – back to the secret morality that governs most of our judgments. In this debased form of Christian theology, we extol character above all else. Humans, we say, are born with a propensity for evil. A good upbringing with good values, however, counteracts our natural willfulness and instills virtue. When tempted, we resist by means of strength of character. Those who fall are weak – they lack character. Now what are we to do about this? According to this philosophy, evil is much more attractive than good, which tells you something about Rehnquist's inner world; and the weak – who are lazy, lusty, and selfish – stand ever ready to vaunt their diseased wills. Since sin is so tempting, and weakness is, by its very nature, virtually untreatable, we need to incarcerate the malefactors for a very long time, both to keep these particular unregenerate and incorrigible folks from troubling us further, and to send a potent message to other bad actors in the only language that they understand.

It is easy to see, from this account, why the apostles of character loathe "the liberals" – especially those who maunder on about compassion and tolerance. Had Rehnquist possessed any empathy, he would have discarded it as a positive hindrance to his duty.

Implicit in this view is one of the oldest ideas of humankind – that society as we find it is a given, and that the distribution of its goods, at the very moment when we happen to be living in it and come to consider its scheme of things, is essentially just.

In point of fact, society is a construction, fashioned out of our imaginations to symbolize Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 323

our values. We may try to freeze some aspect of it at a particular point in time – by establishing,

for instance, a constitution, or passing a legal code, or adopting thirty-nine articles; but society

then proceeds immediately to evolve, dynamically and haphazardly.

"Tradition" is the attempt to pin this living social organism to a piece of pasteboard – to

kill it and then worship its corpse. Truly demented traditionalists – the fundamentalists of

whichever religion – actually want to re-establish the traditions of a distant past. (To achieve

this, we would have to find a way to re-acquire the much more limited consciousness we

possessed at that earlier historical time, but such a project does not faze these pious devotees; and

as the 20th Century demonstrated, the trick can almost be managed with the help of totalitarian

methods.) Most traditionalists are saner, if less imaginative: like Rehnquist, they date tradition to the world as it was when they were ten years old. This is obviously the type of traditionalism that appeals to those who, by birth and education, are rich and privileged – their grandparents may have been poor, but matters had been satisfactorily settled by the time they themselves were ten – whereas the longing for the distant past naturally appeals to those who, like so many

Christian Reconstructionists who wish to reinstate Deuteronomic Law, are among the lower social castes.

Sadly, the idea that society is a given seems to come most naturally to those who are

completely downtrodden. In light of the antiquity of this idea, and the devotion that it has

typically called forth in all social classes, we cannot help but be inspired by the great figures of

the Enlightenment and the 19th Century who, although born into the privileged class, lashed out

against the injustice of the world's distributive order; and we cannot help but recoil in horror at

affluent men like Rehnquist, who, after seeing the example set by men like Prince Peter Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 324

Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy, continued to adhere to the code of the French Bourbons.

Rehnquist, then, not only could not sympathize with felons who violate the criminal

statutes: his frigid soul could not sympathize with any of society's malcontents – with peaceful

protesters, political dissenters, gay rights activists, feminist provocateurs, welfare mothers,

atheists who don't wish to be subjected to prayers in schools, poor pregnant women who cannot

afford a motel and have to sleep in their cars while waiting 24 hours for their abortions, public

high school teachers who object to having their biology textbooks written by religious fanatics,

or public high school students who object to having samples of their urine taken as a condition of

attending the school. In Rehnquist's view, all these people are either poor and disenfranchised

because they are lazy and weak, or else malcontented because they fail to accept the principle of

fairness that, in a democracy, the majority makes the rules. That the rules are, for the most part,

actually made, not by a true majority, but by a majority among the members of the oligarchy – a

majority to which Rehnquist belonged mostly by dint of the accident of his birth – may or may not have been readily apparent to him; but even if he had acknowledged as much, he would have said that this is the way of the world. And an excellent way it was, for Justice Rehnquist of

McLean, Virginia. (If you are from Anacostia, the black ghetto across the river and just southeast of the Supreme Court building, you must work hard, and America will then reward you

– perhaps you will rise like Clarence Thomas.)

As he sat on the Court and contemplated the case of Harmelin v. Michigan, Rehnquist must have experienced a moment of judicial frisson. Certainly he wanted Harmelin to die in prison; and he believed that the decision that he would have to overturn in order to achieve that result had improperly thwarted the will of a legislative majority. But how could he abandon his Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 325

deeply conservative commitment to stare decisis?

So how does a man adjudicate between two of his legal principles? Perhaps by appealing to the secret court of his true beliefs. After all, most men, if they possess any sort of ethical or religious code, will require their political and social principles to fall in line with it. Rehnquist must have consulted his morality. And there he found the primacy of character in a strength- based moral economy. Harmelin was toast.

Yes, when Rehnquist's conscience, such as it was, became active, it was clear to him that the right of a state legislature to do anything it wants is more important than the consistency of

the rule of law. So the precedent set by Solem v. Helm did not impose upon him a duty to

acknowledge due proportion as a fixed part of American jurisprudence. Now that Ronald

Reagan had handed him a fifth conservative justice, he could follow his heart's desire and revoke

this piece of judicial activism. In the moral imagination of William Rehnquist, the people of

Michigan ought to have the right to establish, without any interference from the federal courts, a

punishment that is hugely disproportionate to the crime, since the words "the punishment must

fit the crime" are not found in the Constitution, and the words "cruel and unusual" cannot be

proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to entail the words "abhorrent, inhuman, and monstrous."

Scalia's brilliance can be illustrated by this line of questioning for Harmelin's attorney:

"Maybe Michigan has a bigger problem with drugs. Isn't a state entitled to feel more deeply about a problem that can cause a loss of human life? Why can't they say, 'By George, we're going to put a stop to it!'? Why is that wrong?"

The decision was handed down June 27, 1991. Some of the justices apparently felt that a punishment should fit the crime – they just also felt that, in this case, it did. This casts a Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 326

shocking light on the power of our national drug hysteria to spread its infection all the way to the

members of the Supreme Court. But Scalia's majority opinion asserted the Rehnquist doctrine:

Solem v. Helm had been wrongly decided, and was now overturned: "The Eighth Amendment

contains no proportionality guarantee."

I want to repeat my question: Would you want to serve on the Supreme Court if it meant that you

had to reach a decision like that? "Proportionality" means fairness; it is a synonym for justice itself. Scalia was happy to find that, according to the words contained in the bill of rights, our system of justice contains no guarantee of justice. By his reasoning, if the Michigan state legislature prefers an unjust system of justice, well, that is a matter for the people of that state to decide. If you are unhappy, you can lobby your state delegates. Put another way, "cruel and unusual" does not mean "unjust and extraordinary" or "crushing and arbitrary."

Perhaps his argument has persuaded you about the meaning of the Constitution. Certainly

I believe that he believed that is the meaning. But how can I understand that he is perfectly

content with this state of affairs – content to find that justice is not a concern of those articles in

the bill of rights that address the workings of our system of justice? How can I understand that

he is now fulfilling a lifetime's ambition to sit on the bench of the highest court in the land and

say to a man who is incarcerated for life, even though that man was never charged with having

harmed anyone or having intended to harm anyone, that his sentence must be affirmed by the

court because the bill of rights contains no verbatim injunction to treat defendants fairly? We do

understand that he does not mind having Harmelin behind bars for life, since it is Harmelin

behind bars, and not himself; but how are we to understand his willingness to sign the piece of Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 327

paper than contains the reasoning?

We might imagine that a person would approve of executions – but how many people are avid to become executioners? We might find ourselves believing that morality itself requires the torturing of a terrorist, in order to prevent a more terrible crime from occurring – but who would volunteer to conduct the torture? To do what they do, men like Rehnquist and Scalia must possess what Spalding Gray called "a terrible certainty" – in this case, that the political, economic, social, and cultural ascendancy of white Christian males is the inevitable result of nature's meritocracy, and that the passing of laws by means of which rich white Christian male legislators aggrandize their position represents a natural mechanism for maintaining a just hegemony.

And because they are "men of principle" and "men of the highest character," they stick to it, they do – they stay the course. The frail and aging Rehnquist issued an angry denial that he was considering retirement a few weeks before he died of cancer; Scalia soldiered on writing the same opinion again and again and again – a parrot would have wearied of it, but a man who has

"the courage of his convictions" will do what he has to do.

The reality principle

Scalia might have been willing to throw the switch; and he might have said that he would not allow emotional arguments to deflect him from administering his principles for the good of the public. So let us return to Scalia's philosophy: I do not want to dismiss it as if it were self- evidently foolish or incapable of commanding intellectual assent. I only think that it is self- Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 328

evidently despicable.

It is true that any abandonment of the original meaning of the text of a constitution or a statute is a step down a slippery slope, for all the reasons that Scalia set forth. What he overlooked – what conservatives always overlook – is the real world in which we live. This is especially ironic, because conservatives pride themselves above all on their tough-minded realism. Isn't their message to all the drug users, unemployed workers, and complaining minorities that they must live in the real world? Aren't the conservatives the ones who say there is no free lunch? (The reason there is no free lunch, incidentally, is because the people with five lunches refuse to give any to the people who have none.)

In the fantasy world of Scalia and Rehnquist, the natural aristocracy of rich white men has dispensed wise laws and constitutions that have created equal opportunities for all. Under this dispensation, anyone can become rich, and the weak and shiftless sink like stones to the bottom, there to find the place that nature and nature's laws assigned them. "Liberals" keep trying to interfere with this natural, and quite excellent, order.

In the real world, the hegemony of rich white men is upheld by palpably unfair legislation that tilts the playing field toward those who are already advantaged. It is not really the will of a majority of citizens that is enacted by legislatures, but the will of a majority of white male lawyers, who are voted in by fewer than 20% of the qualified voters. This entire political process, at the time I write, is bought and paid for by big corporations. Does anybody imagine that the indolent, arrogant, pampered George W. Bush was the most qualified individual that the

Republican Party could find within its ranks to nominate for the presidency of the United States?

And yet he had raised the largest campaign war chest in history before a single debate was held, Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 329

because he had been pre-selected by the guardians of corporate wealth as the man most likely to

serve their interests. With this extraordinary advantage, he was able, in spite of his past history

of alcohol abuse, drug use, incompetence as a business executive, and dereliction of duty during

the Vietnam War as a combat-evading and absent-without-leave member of the Texas Air

National Guard, to defeat a genuinely conservative, charismatic Republican war hero in the primaries.

Bush's opponent, John McCain, called for a reform of campaign financing in this election,

which is one of the reasons that the Republican plutocrats pulled out all the stops to defeat him.

It is worth pausing over this issue. Remember that Rehnquist took a very narrow view of the

freedom of speech that is guaranteed by the first amendment. He believed that the framers

"originally intended" that only political speech should be protected; and he very strictly construed

even that little remnant of a right, for he voted to uphold the criminalization of flag-burning.

(Which is a purely political act, unless you believe that some arsonists just happen to have a

fetish about stars and stripes; but presumably Rehnquist did not see much evidence of speech in

this admittedly symbolic and expressive act.)

Very well: we can certainly recognize the distinctive mark of his jurisprudence whenever

he added his vote to the full weight of state power arrayed against a nonconforming individual.

But on one of the rare occasions in his long career when he rebuked governmental power, he

struck down legislative efforts to curb campaign contributions, because such donations, he

reasoned, are a type of free speech.

Yes, money "talks." Its freedom to do so must be what the authors of the first amendment

had in mind. At this point, however, I withdraw my agreement with Sue Davis that Rehnquist Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 330

was a man of judicial principles. (Those were clearly malleable, which means that they were non-existent – I agree with the apostles of character that something is not really a principle if it can be sold every now and then to the highest bidder.) Rehnquist did have principles, but they had more to do with protecting the excellent scheme of things in which he and like-minded well- organized people continued to thrive.

In the fantasy world of Rehnquist and Scalia, the homeless can also organize themselves

– the Constitution does not prevent their doing so, just as it wisely permits the rich the same right to sleep under a bridge that the poor enjoy. The homeless are at liberty to mobilize public opinion by all constitutional means, and to keep at it until a majority passes legislation benefitting them. And because of Rehnquist's vigilance on behalf of their free speech rights, the poor can contribute unlimited amounts of money to their own favorite candidates – they have that right, and it is as precious as the right of a billionaire. Ditto for prisoners who have been beaten by their guards and children impregnated by their stepfathers – they have the right to organize, petition, vote, and keep at it until the statutes are changed to give them some relief.

In the real world, these groups can rarely succeed in touching the conscience of the majority, because they are a minority, which means there aren't enough of them to constitute a majority. (I am sorry to have to explain this as to a child, but originalists seem strangely incapacitated for grasping this simple axiom.) For instance, the following situation occurred during the presidential campaign of the year 2000: the sovereign state of South Carolina chose to fly the Confederate flag over its capitol; and black citizens complained. For obvious reasons, many of them felt the way Jewish citizens would feel if they saw a swastika there. But there weren't enough of them to win a vote to have it removed. There weren't enough of them to make Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 331

it worth the while of either Republican presidential candidate to come right out and say he was

against that flag: both candidates discovered the formula of saying that the people of South

Carolina should resolve this matter for themselves. And there weren't even enough black citizens

to demand, and receive, a proper representation of their viewpoint in the mainstream media:

every sound bite from the national news told me that, while white Southerners revere the flag as a

symbol of a valiant struggle, blacks deplore it as "a reminder of slavery." This reinforces the

majority white stereotype that blacks are oversensitive at best and stupid at worst. In fact, blacks

in South Carolina and elsewhere oppose the display of the Confederate flag because it is the

unofficial logo of today's redneck nation: wherever bigoted white-trash good-ol'-boys congregate, they "rally round the flag"; and not a half-a-dozen of those cracker boneheads could come within a hundred years of guessing when the Civil War was fought.

Because they are such a small minority nationally, it does not even help blacks that they constitute an overwhelming majority within the District of Columbia. They must trudge past the

F.B.I. building every day on the way to their downtown jobs and see the name of J. Edgar Hoover chiseled into the masonry. Now Hoover was generally an evil man and specifically a racist. He conducted a vendetta against the greatest American public figure of the 20th Century, Martin

Luther King, Jr., who happened to be black, and in the process resorted to illegal wiretapping and blackmail. These facts are not deniable even by those who feel that, all in all, Hoover made the

F.B.I. a force to be reckoned with in national law enforcement. But it turns out that a majority of white Americans don't much care how this feels to black Americans. And they have justices like

Rehnquist, Scalia, and even Clarence Thomas on their side.

I say minorities "rarely" persuade the majority, rather than "never," because after Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 332

thousands of years of being stigmatized as "cripples," the disabled were finally granted access to public accommodations; after a century of lynchings and Jim Crow segregation, blacks were finally allowed to eat at the lunch counters and use the bathrooms of department stores in the old

Confederacy; and after 70 years of being arrested and spat upon when they protested in public, women were "given" the right to vote – but wait a minute, women were a majority. Well, anyway, we do see that, even in the real world, sometimes majorities relent; so Rehnquist and

Scalia were both willing to encourage the one or two percent of Georgia's citizens who were openly gay to take their case to the state legislature and ask that adult consensual sexual acts between persons of the same sex be decriminalized. It couldn't hurt to ask. When that didn't work out, and the Bowers case made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1986, of course they joined the majority in upholding the wisdom of Georgia's wise legislature.

I remember an acquaintance of mine arguing once that while he didn't condone the active persecution of homosexuals, he saw nothing wrong with firing a gay public school teacher.

"We're just saying he can't be a teacher," he said. "Let him do something else. Is that so hard?"

My answer was, "No, that's not hard . . . for you." Some of us have always wanted to use the bill of rights to put people like that teacher beyond the reach of people like my acquaintance. We think that is the spirit animating the bill of rights, and we think further that even though the framers did not include an amendment dealing with private sexual acts, they would have been appalled at the thought of state power reaching into the bedroom.

In the fantasy world of Scalia, we would have continued to tell that teacher, who had spent his whole life preparing to follow this profession and had never done a single thing to dishonor it, that a state legislature has a right to pass a law embodying the majority will and that Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 333

such laws are, by definition, what we mean by justice. We would say, "Just do something else.

This is the real world." Well, this is the real world only if we allow Scalia to run it. But perhaps

the most noxious, the most reprehensible, the ugliest thing about the Rehnquist and Scalia

methodology is its pretense that it embodies the true morality – that by such decisions, the best

values are thereby protected and defended, chaos is averted, and the barbarians at the gates are

once again turned back by a doughty band of stout-hearted Supreme Court justices. Yes, we

should be grateful that there are, still among us, these conservative heroes who will stand up for

the Georgia state legislature.

In the real world, chaos is here, has always been here – the chaos of the haves ranged

against the have-nots (the have-nots still not having shown themselves very capable of ranging

against the haves); the chaos of continual competition which finds its natural apotheosis in war; the chaos of poverty, homelessness, addiction, and crime; the chaos of the physical and emotional abuse of children that spreads disorder far beyond the family when the child grows up; the chaos of cultural debasement fostered by corporate rule. In this real world, the democratically elected legislatures perpetuate the tyranny of the prejudiced self-satisfied majority

over the suffering minorities. In this world, the armies of the disenfranchised have few

consolations. One of the few has been the moral indignation that has, from time to time, been

awakened in a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court. Briefly, windows of opportunity

have opened, and the Court has invoked the bill of rights to cut down the vindictive constraints

thrown upon the unoffending and the powerless by the corrupt and the bigoted.

But, it may be said, what if the state of Connecticut, at the very time the bill of rights was

composed, did have the right to prohibit the sale of contraceptive devices? At least, when that Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 334

law was passed, it was uncontroversial. How, then, could the Supreme Court strike down such a

law in 1965? The answer is that in the real world, the situation had changed dramatically. Life

in the 1960s was nothing like anything the framers had imagined or could have imagined.

Consciousness itself had changed. To take a simple but striking example: women now ran

marathons. Had any woman even contemplated such a thing in 1790, much less tried it, she

would have surely failed (in the unlikely event that she was not first committed to a mental

institution), and it is likely that men too would have failed, because the mental horizons of people

at the time could not encompass such a vision. The first marathon was run during the Olympics

of 1896, and the winning man took over three hours to complete the course. Until the 1970s,

women were banned from the Boston Marathon; the Olympic Committee did not authorize a

women's marathon until 1984. Yet at the time I write, thousands of women have run the marathon faster than the male Olympic champion of 1896. Now we can, if we wish, embody this change of consciousness in new legislation, but what does the privileged class care about the inconveniences imposed upon the many but protested by only the few? Who will stand up for marathoners, mental patients, transsexuals? But even more to the point, adult consensual sexual behavior, like a woman's right to run any distance she wants to run, is obviously one of those areas that belong under the protection of the bill of rights anyway. If the Supreme Court had waited patiently for Connecticut to come to its senses and change its law, it would have been acknowledging that legislatures had a right to interfere in such a matter in the first place.

Remember that each minority is differently oppressed. Homosexuals are discriminated against based upon sexual orientation. High school students are discriminated against because they are young and cannot vote. Death-row inmates are discriminated against because they are so Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 335

poor that they must accept the services of court-appointed attorneys. What are the chances that all these minorities will go to bat for each other, until together they constitute a majority that reforms, in one fell swoop, the marriage laws, drug laws, and tax codes while helping the homeless and backing the atheists? It is only in the fantasy world of Rehnquist and Scalia, the world as it has never existed and never will exist, that the majority is won over by truth and love, and votes to do the right thing for all those it has previously treated as second-class citizens.

In truth, Scalia knew that in the real world, the legislatures will rarely if ever empower the disenfranchised, either through statutes or constitutional amendments. It is likelier that Hell will freeze over than that the hearts of the Georgia state legislature will thaw. He knew very well the truth about majority bigotry and oppression, but he "played pretend" about democratic redress, about good morals enacted into wise laws by deliberative state legislatures, and about the responsiveness of such bodies to social change. This dishonesty is at the core of "conservative" principles, and it is far more sinister than the fudging that Scalia abhorred when his liberal colleagues tried to use the eighth amendment to overturn capital punishment. For however much the master of sarcasm would have fleered at me for saying so, the liberals bend the truth in the right direction – toward greater respect for persons and greater freedom in the pursuit of individual happiness – whereas Scalia always voted to bring the nonconformists, who have offended against nothing but the sensibilities of mossbacks and dullards, back under the thumb of those mossbacks and dullards.

I once was enamored of this game myself. In 1964, I supported Barry Goldwater's position that the public accommodations act was unconstitutional. I disapproved completely of white prejudice against blacks, and would have personally boycotted any restaurant that refused Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 336

to serve blacks; but I could not find any justification in the Constitution for depriving that restaurant owner of what I conceived to be his property rights. I confidently awaited the imminent end of white bigotry, which I believed was repugnant to all decent people. I was sure that segregation would soon disappear because of its manifest ugliness and stupidity.

I was young then.

I have since changed my mind, but not so much about my constitutional logic. Anyone with a devotion to textualism and originalism would have agreed with the argument I offered then. What I changed my mind about was my devotion to strict interpretation of the

Constitution, and even – I may as well say it – the Constitution itself. Paraphrasing Dickens, if the Constitution said what I thought it did at the time, then the Constitution was an ass. Let strict constructionists blanch as they may – there are more things in heaven and earth than our

Constitution. I think I have Thoreau and Lincoln on my side in saying so. Thoreau said that any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one. Lincoln said, in regard to the

Dred Scott decision, that "we propose so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject." He further explained that one way to do this would be to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices.

I not only changed my mind about the Constitution; I also changed my mind about the nature of the real world. I saw that it would not readily correct its own injustices, especially if it were left to the states and localities to be the agents of social change; and I saw that I did not want to go on calling myself the citizen of a nation that turns a blind eye to the spectacle of my fellow-citizens being turned away from hotels and restaurants because of the color of their skin. I did not want to belong to a nation that recognized official, institutionalized racial discrimination Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 337

as a state's right, but did not recognize privacy as an individual right.

Rehnquist, having once reasoned as I did, eventually said grudgingly that he did accept

desegregation as an accomplished (or semi-accomplished) fact; but he never renounced the type of reasoning that caused him to oppose it in the first place.

We all understand the meaning of "principles over persons"; but Scalia was enamored of principles against persons. The heart of this evil is the lie that the world that is governed by prejudice is the world as it should be, and that the Supreme Court decisions that uphold this world are distinctively moral.

In damning those who live in fantasy rather than reality, I do not wish to be picking exclusively

on conservatives. The propensity for insisting that life be as it should be, rather than as it is –

author Brad Blanton calls this insistence the very definition of neurosis – may well afflict liberals

more than conservatives. What makes so many rich Republicans reprehensible is their self-

serving assertion that the world as we find it is organized well enough; but when true

conservatives argue that it is organized about as well as it can be, they have a stronger case and

one that liberals continually ignore at their peril. I do not agree with this conservative dictum.

The whole history of humankind shows a continuing, if fitful, evolution toward greater

distributive justice and individual freedom. But I fully appreciate the force of Ambrose Bierce's

cynical definition that a conservative is enamored of present evils while a liberal wishes to replace them with others. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to disregard "the law of unintended consequences"; and they may also be more likely to refuse to throw in the towel when their utopian schemes have come a cropper. True conservatives have a streak of pragmatism in Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 338

them as part of their self-definition, and know how to cut their losses.

I will cite two trivial but telling examples of fatuous liberal idealism in the 1990s. In response to the cultural crime of "colorizing" the great black-and-white movies of the 1930s and

1940s, a number of artists sought legislation to ban the practice. Their effort ran up against the

Twin Peaks of First Amendment Absolutism: the liberal libertarian right of an individual to do anything that can be construed as free expression; and the conservative libertarian right of a corporation to manufacture and sell any product at all. While the tempest was raging, a classically liberal editorial emanated from the teapot, suggesting that the way to combat colorization is to educate the artistic taste of the American public until the colorized products disappear for lack of an audience.

I owe my second example to the pen of that committed libertarian Nat Hentoff, who performed a valuable journalistic service for many years by monitoring the petty ways in which power-mad functionaries – some of them presidents, some of them high school principals – have tried to limit the first amendment rights of whichever citizens fell under their temporary sway.

When faced with the question of whether the government can limit cigarette advertising, Hentoff found his common sense undermined by his commitment to the Twin Peaks, and suggested that, since tobacco is legal, it is clearly unconstitutional to place any limit of any kind on a corporation's right to advertise it. If tobacco is so dangerous to the health that it should not be peddled commercially, then simply ban it, as we ban the advertising and sale of heroin.

Well, the short answer to Hentoff's excellent suggestion is this: tobacco is so dangerous to our health that it ought to be banned; but in the real world, fifty million Americans smoked it and would become criminals overnight. We can always fall back on the argument from movie Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 339

colorization, and propose instead to educate the people about the dangers of tobacco, so that cigarette sales proceed to shrivel up without any government intervention in the marketplace at all; but back in the real world, fifty million Americans have continued to smoke for forty years since the inauguration of the most comprehensive educational program in the world. More people know about the dangers of tobacco than know the name of the president. It hasn't mattered.

But in liberal la-la land, we go on educating, and when it does not work, we call for more education. So liberals throw money at welfare, because they think that honest poor people will use it to get their legs again and get a job; and when the endeavor produces instead an entire subculture of permanent dependency, they call for more welfare. They hand out affirmative action tokens, and when, a generation later, the overall condition of black people has markedly worsened and a drug-addicted inner-city underclass has sprung up, they call for more affirmative action.

Is my contempt for the liberals clear enough? Let me abandon this branch of the argument and return to the trunk line. There is only one thing more contemptible than a person who would continue to call for demonstrably ineffective liberal bandaids as a solution to the problem of the black underclass, and that is the person who would attribute the entire problem to a sudden, simultaneous, massive loss of character among all the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood. While both persons are impervious to the facts of the real world, there is in the so-called conservative view a brutal complacency. The liberal may truly believe that his programs have not been given enough time or money to work, or be genuinely at a loss as to what to try next; the conservative has no excuse for believing in his fatuous, selfish, and Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 340

malignant theory. We may say further that the liberal is willing to make some sacrifices on behalf of his philosophy, if only in the form of higher taxes, whereas the modern Republican position is that a refusal to spend a penny on the poor is the best way to help them – the moral thing to do. The poor need character – and who ever thought that a government handout could give it to them? We need to restore their dignity by pocketing our wealth and standing aside.

Again: it is a philosophy.

Another of Scalia's arguments on behalf of textualism and originalism – and he would have said it is firmly rooted in the real world of human weakness – was his warning to liberals that, after all, the justices may not always use their activism to expand the scope of the first ten amendments: if allowed to consult evolving sensibilities, they are just as likely to contract the meanings. With his customary "brilliance," he even tried to get away with proving that activist liberals have themselves narrowed the original meaning: he trotted out a number of examples of things that formerly could be done, "but now cannot be done" because of activist interpretation.

The first example on his list: in the good old days, prosecutors could introduce evidence at a trial that had been obtained by an unlawful search; but now that "right" has been taken away from them. And sure enough, all his examples are similar cases of liberal justices striking down the

"right" of the government to violate the rights of individuals.

Well, let us set aside this frivolous and, I must say, ill-judged attempt to convince us that the bill of rights should equally protect both the fourth amendment right of an individual to be free of an unlawful search and the right of a prosecutor to obtain a conviction even when he has violated the fourth amendment. Let us take up his point that, if we liberals are going to play fast Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 341

and loose with the living Constitution, we must be prepared to see conservative justices do

likewise and narrow the protections embodied in the bill of rights. There are two answers to this.

First, we would expect every justice, even the most free-wheeling, to respect the original text as

a floor beneath which it would be impossible to go. A statute establishing the Episcopalian

religion as the official religion of the United States government – it had a long run as the

unofficial religion – would be so obviously prohibited by the implacable meaning of the first

amendment that no justice could possibly justify upholding it. But the second answer is this:

there are no principles that can prevent the abuse Scalia warns against, whether his or anybody else's, if we are determined to treat the Constitution, as my sergeant once treated the relevant army regulation, as "just a piece of paper." Woodrow Wilson, one of our most revered presidents, signed a law that mandated ten- and twenty-year sentences for people who criticized the military draft or who used "disloyal, scurrilous and abusive language about the form of

Government of the United States." The sentences were upheld by the Supreme Court, in those halcyon days before there were any activist liberals to vaunt the theory of the living Constitution; then, all the justices were textualists and originalists. What keeps the first amendment viable is not Scalia's insipid fundamentalism, but something that is simultaneously both more substantial and more fragile – our respect for the bill of rights as it is embodied in our political will. If we don't care, the most conservative court in the world can tear it up. Call it an act of reverse activism, or of strict construction – call it what you will. We liberals realize all too well the danger presented by the shifting sands of judicial activism: the Rehnquist Court itself, in spite of its alleged conservatism, originalism, and textualism, shredded the fourth, fifth, and eighth amendments of the Constitution, and ignored the very existence of the ninth, and Scalia's Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 342

fundamentalism availed us nothing – he was right there with the majority on every vote. All it took was for Rehnquist, Scalia and their conservative colleagues to "strictly construe" the word

"unreasonable" in the original text that prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures," and the word "due" in the original text that prohibits the confiscation of our property "without due process," and the word "cruel" in the original text that prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments."

It did not help us to have a Court of careful constitutional scholars. Indeed, justice would have been better defended by a crew of good-hearted simpletons.

The anatomy of brilliance

Scalia's reputation for brilliance and independence among journalists and attorneys who keep an eye on the Court was no doubt buttressed by his maverick tendency to occasionally thwart his stodgier conservative comrades. But for his deciding vote, the troglodytes on the Court, after having a field day waxing patriotic about the sacrifices of our soldiers and the sight of the flag during the heat of battle, would have upheld the right of the state of Texas to ban the burning of an American flag. But like Martin Luther, John Knox, or John Milton, when Scalia suddenly seems to be enlightened, it is not owing to any empathic breakthrough: it is owing to the fierceness of his commitment to literalism. Scalia was certain – whatever the issue at hand, he was always certain – that flag-burning is a constitutionally protected activity; therefore his own fundamentalist adherence to original intent gave him nowhere else to go. If his fundamentalism makes him unpopular, he stayed the course. We know this type: "I would not tell a willful lie to save the souls of the whole world." Such was John Wesley's bondage to his own brand of Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 343

fundamentalism. But let us take the true measure of the intelligence of such principled zealots:

their confidence, their zeal, their quickness, their conviction, their eloquence, all stem, not from

their having applied their intellects, but from their having suppressed their intellects. The

principles make the decision.

There is only one morality – caring generated by empathy – and there is only one

framework for applying it – the situation in all its uniqueness. The fundamentalists sneer at

"situation ethics," but any ethic that is not situational is not really an ethic. When a framework is

already in place, the person who must decide has already yielded up part of his intellect – and all

of his humanity. If the case is put first into the framework, the decision-maker has abdicated part or most of his responsibility to actually think about it. Why should it take a Scalia more than a few minutes to reach his conclusions? He need ask only two questions: Did a state government do it? Does the federal Constitution explicitly forbid a state government from doing it? In his framework, the state legislature can always do it, unless the Constitution stipulates, in language that no two people could possibly disagree about, that the state is barred from doing it. (These are loathsome principles, and the Constitution would be loathsome if it contained them, but fortunately, as we have noted already, it does not.) With these principles in place, Scalia could begin questioning the attorneys immediately, boldly, clearly. What could possibly slow him down? The Constitution is only a few pages long.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in her slow, painstaking, nitpicking approach to cases, long irritated Scalia, and provoked some of his most stinging retorts in his dissents from majority opinions. Careless writers have agreed with him: "O'Connor did not possess the quick mind or verbal agility of Scalia and John Paul Stevens," says David G. Savage. Right. Her mind was Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 344

open rather than quick; her imagination was agile, so her thought was slow. She tried to find a legal justification for a humane decision. Because Scalia had a mechanism in place that made every decision for him, he had in effect prejudged the cases that came before the Court: he already knew that a legislature can enact any law it wants that is not forbidden by the precise literal meaning of the exact words found in the Constitution. In a state prison, a shackled inmate is beaten by two guards while a supervisor looks on. He suffers a split lip, a broken dental plate, and loosened teeth. In a 7-2 decision, the Court rebukes the state. Thomas and Scalia dissent: while the Constitution says that "cruel and unusual punishments" must not be inflicted, it does not say that "smashing a shackled prisoner in the mouth" is prohibited. In Thomas's written opinion, which dishonored the human intellect and provoked The New York Times to call him

"the youngest, cruelest justice," it seemed to be a point of importance that the prisoner did not look so bad after his ordeal. Had it not been for the humanity of the other justices on the Court, the torturers who are expert in the use of a rubber hose would have been given a green light by

Thomas and Scalia. Yes, in Scalia's "principled" view, where the Constitution has chosen to remain silent, the Supreme Court must simply refrain from interfering with a state government's right to determine for itself, through its elected and appointed officials, what constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment.

Since I assume (although I have no convincing evidence for my assumption) that Scalia would have personally recoiled from beating a shackled prisoner, perhaps we can gain some insight into his soul from the writings of Tolstoy, who noted that the most cruel and revolting edicts are administered by officials who say, tacitly but sometimes out loud, "As a man, I would do differently, but as a (judge, warden, soldier) I must do my duty." If this is the case, then we Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 345

know the respect that Scalia deserves – it does not differ materially from the respect that is owed

to Heinrich Himmler, Augusto Pinochet, and Pontius Pilate. (The complaint that, in these

decadent times of liberalism run amok, there can be found but few who still do their duty, is just

more conservative romantic nonsense.)

O'Connor enraged Scalia precisely because she always started with the full context – with

all the features of the case that was before her, and with a special emphasis on those aspects that

differentiated it, however slightly, from previous cases that might have seemed to set the

precedent. Yes, the Court has previously ruled that juveniles can be executed, but does it change

things in this case if the juvenile is only 15 years old instead of 17? Yes, the Court has upheld

capital punishment, but does it matter that in this case the jury was unaware that life without

parole was an option? Scalia started from the similarities: capital punishment, fine, execution of

juveniles, fine, the Constitution silent on these matters, why are we wasting our time? Certainly

he could have a high old malicious time lampooning the ever-more-subtle vaporizations emanating from his colleagues as they tried to conjure up legal justifications for following their hearts. I won't take the cheap shot of saying that at least they have hearts, because I, like Scalia, place some value on consistency and rigor. I too am uncomfortable with the idea of justices deciding cases based solely upon "what they feel is right": at one time, they felt that child labor, forced sterilizations, and racial segregation were right. I prefer to give the bill of rights a consistently liberal interpretation; I prefer to toss out the narrow application of "original intent" and "strict construction" and let our evolving moral sensibility, which is often founded on newer and better information than was available to the authors of the Constitution, determine what we think is "cruel and unusual." I would count on the original intent of the strictly constructed Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 346

words to limit how far we would allow ourselves to regress, so that if our moral sensibilities ever go into reverse, the eighth amendment's unequivocal meaning to its authors would stand as a bulwark against the revival of medieval tortures; otherwise I want to take the literal meaning as a bare minimum and continue to add such meanings as accord with humankind's slow march forward into greater knowledge and empathy. I want to open the Pandora's box, because the alternative is so much worse. I'll take that chance. Scalia was like a man with the Ten

Commandments posted in his kitchen, whose parents come into his house every day and torture his dog. What to do? One commandment tells him to honor his parents; none of the others says anything about dogs. To extend the scope of the commandments would start him down the slippery slope of activism. Most of us would say, Get me the skis, show me that slope.

O'Connor disappointed me more often than not in her votes, because she did not share the judicial philosophy I have just espoused; but otherwise she did the job in the right way. It is vexing to have to read over and over that Scalia was a brilliant jurist but O'Connor was merely a hard worker. When we praise Scalia at O'Connor's expense, it shows how seriously we undervalued her qualities of quiet competence and genuine conscience. If she showed too little of the moral imagination that is the touchstone of the greatest justices, what are we to say about the brilliant Scalia, who believed that the moral imagination should be put to sleep?

What we called his brilliance was his narcissism. I do not mean we are misled by the brilliance of an otherwise narcissistic person; I mean we actually mistake his narcissism for brilliance. No one would have credited Scalia with a keen intellect simply because of the quickness of his comprehension of briefs or the breadth of his retention of legal precedents. The basis of his reputation for brilliance was his narcissistic certainty. The certainty was buttressed Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 347

by the ersatz strength of his paltry handful of unimaginative principles inflexibly applied. Out of this certainty flowed his glibness – the celerity of his attacks on hapless liberal attorneys, the quickness of his ripostes, the wounding heat of his scalding satires, seemingly improvised but actually long since concocted from his principles set in stone. Out of his glibness grew his confidence; out of his confidence, his charm. For what is charm, more than a man's ease with himself? True, there must be a measure of sensitivity to what works socially, a public manner leavened by humor; but charm is 90% the charming person's palpable pleasure in his own productions, his happiness that all must be well with a world in which he can be so popular and successful. The good cheer engendered by this shatterproof self-confidence radiates out and spreads a beneficent warmth upon all bystanders. (This charm of narcissism was the solution to the putative enigma of Ronald Reagan.) The charm feeds back into the confidence. Scalia loved the Court, and loved himself on the Court. His happiness with himself gave him elán. If we are bowled over by this, it says something about us rather than anything about him – something very disturbing.

Coda

In the course of my investigation of William Rehnquist's conduct as a Supreme Court justice, I had occasion to revise Sue Davis's formulation of his judicial principles. I found that it was true that he tended to repeat a handful of simplistic arguments over and over again, and that most of the time, he reached his conclusions by applying the same principles in the same way. But not all of the time. In the case of Harmelin v. Michigan, he abandoned the principle of stare decisis; and in the matter of campaign financing, he departed from the principle of textual literalism Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 348

when he suddenly discovered that the first amendment implies a right to make unlimited campaign contributions, even though all it says is that we have "freedom of speech."

You may have deduced, then, that Rehnquist invoked his principles when it suited him, and abandoned them when it did not. And such a deduction would be unimpeachable from a factual point of view. But what else did you expect? Only a monster of intellectual vanity would maintain his principles when they produce a bad result. And in Rehnquist's world, it is a very bad result to let a nonviolent drug user out of prison before he dies there, and dangerous to hamper the ability of rich men to buy elections.

In light of these departures from his alleged judicial principles, I began to seek the private principles guiding Rehnquist's jurisprudence. Behind his judicial philosophy I found the ethical principle of utilitarianism; behind this formal principle, a less articulated quasi-religious feeling that character is morality. And undergirding all these intellectual allegiances, I found his emotional commitment to the hegemony of rich white Protestant males: that is the tacit principle from which he never departed. It is the principle he displayed before he ever dreamed of becoming a Supreme Court justice, when he wrote a memo opposing school desegregation, and later when he challenged black voters at Arizona polling sites, and still later when he denounced the civil rights initiatives of the 1960s, and still later when he signed deeds of property with racially restrictive covenants. It is the axiom that unified his tenure on the Supreme Court, whether he was trumpeting his principles or betraying them.

But human nature is a rich and complex thing. Naturally Rehnquist would have denied, both to me and to himself, that this principle, as I have just stated it, was his guiding star, because in our modern world, with its marked predilection for the rhetoric of toleration and racial Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 349

harmony, such a principle is repugnant and would have been attacked on all sides. (It is a pity that Rehnquist was born too late: a century earlier, he could have proclaimed his white superiority views out loud.) Therefore I allowed that he was probably conscious only of the more respectable principle that character is morality. There were ancillary clauses as well, in order to make the principle support the results he favors: one, very popular with the public, was that low character must be relentlessly and remorselessly punished by the government; another, less admissible, and certainly questionable, was that wealth and success are indicative of high character.

Rehnquist's principles were what everyone's principles need to be, if the individual is to be psychologically integrated: they codify the means by which he hopes to achieve the ends that he favors; they are the methods by which he arrives at results that feel good to him. It goes without saying, I hope, that by "good" I mean, in the mind of the principled person, satisfying, right, and seemingly true rather than merely pleasing or productive of conventional success.

Rehnquist was no hedonist: he was a careerist in the civic rather than the mercantile arena, and therefore much more concerned with honor than with money or pleasure. He aspired to be venerated in the select circles of the public service aristocracy and in the history books. Like anyone else, he was engaged in symbolizing his values to the world: his principles were the technology by which he expressed those values and achieved results that were consonant with them. Our task is to judge the values themselves. We should especially beware of the temptation to be favorably impressed by the rigor and consistency with which he applied the principles that promulgated the values. Rigor and consistency make for a good paralegal: if we neglect an examination of the values themselves, and only admire the firmness with which a Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 350

person believed them and lived them, we may find ourselves in a corner, trying again to remember why we neglect to admire Heinrich Himmler.

The great trick of having principles is to find a few – the fewer the better – that automatically deliver your heart's desire while appearing to others to be dispassionate, neutral, and objective in their application. If you are a careerist – even if you are the elevated sort of careerist who prefers professional respect to great wealth – it is helpful if, from the start, your vision accords with that of the people whose notice you are trying to catch. If they are the richest and most powerful, you will naturally be a social conservative in the original meaning of the term, because almost all wealthy and powerful persons want to freeze the conditions that enabled them to attain their wealth and power. This subservience to the god of things as they are will not necessarily discredit you among the impoverished many who are ground down under the heel of the plutocratic few, because time out of mind, those many have themselves shown a stupefied respect for tradition, conformity, and the status quo, and have attributed their poverty to their own failings.

Next, as we have already indicated in our discussion of careerism, it will facilitate the formulation of your principles if you have always found your conscience an inconvenience and you would actually prefer to have it immobilized.

Rehnquist was fortune's favorite – from the start, his moral imagination was so contracted that he was able to find a very few principles that expressed his narrow vision almost all of the time. Given that our government is a de facto oligarchy, with his own kind in power, and given that state governments are even more likely to be run by his own kind than the federal government, Rehnquist had only to follow two simple rules of thumb: any conflict between a Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 351

government and an individual can be resolved in favor of the government, unless the closest possible reading of the first eight amendments to the Constitution absolutely forbids it; and any conflict between a state government and the federal government can be resolved in favor of the state government, unless the Constitution unmistakably supports the national sovereignty over the regional.

In terms of careerism and moral illness, all that really differentiated Rehnquist from

George Herbert Walker Bush was his choice of the judiciary as the arena for his activity. He could afford to make a greater show of consistency because he was not subject to the vicissitudes of the electoral process. It only appears as if Bush changed his conscience from time to time in the cause of personal and political advancement, while Rehnquist kept his conscience firm out of duty to the letter of the law. What this really means is that Bush was at least willing to consult his conscience if he could do so at no risk to himself, whereas Rehnquist put his conscience in cold storage and saw no reason ever to open the freezer door. Bush was the kinder, more decent man, and occasionally threw consistency to the four winds in order to do the right thing.

Rehnquist's idea of the right thing was so frightening that we might have preferred that he stick to his principles and never consult his conscience.

What we celebrated as Rehnquist's strength of juridical character was his adoption and application of a few disreputable principles, which obviated the need for him to demonstrate any psychological mobility at all and obscured the weakness of his intellect, feeling, and imagination.

This produced his merely technical integrity, of a type that so easily takes in the apostles of character. This so-called integrity manifested itself mainly in the machine-like consistency of his arguments. But insofar as he resorted, throughout his life, to a single set of threadbare axioms Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 352

that he had devised to answer every possible contingency, he showed himself to be fearful of

responding empathically and humanly, or even intelligently, to the information that was set

before him. As I have stated several times, ethics must be situational – otherwise the ethical dimension is simply missing. Rehnquist put his soul to sleep at an unusually early age. In his determined old age, the vanity of "character" was all that emanated from his corpse-like presence on the bench.

Yet his soul did wake up. In December of 2000, when Bush v. Gore finally worked its way up from the state of Florida to the Supreme Court, the votes of his colleagues were evenly split, and it was suddenly within Rehnquist's power to name the next president of the United

States. This created a situation in which the application of his lifelong principles would have produced a result that he detested; and he did not even have the sort of fig leaf available with which he had covered himself in the two cases I have cited previously. He could follow his principle that the federal government has no business interfering in the affairs of a state government, and risk seeing Gore elected by an honest count of all the votes; or he could jettison his principle and anoint Bush.

Life is interesting. It finds a way to test us. The one day in the year that I try to go behind your back is the one day in the year when you turn around. Rehnquist had long since chosen his principles shrewdly, so that they would reliably produce the results that satisfied his desiccated soul. Put another way, in Kantian language, the gap between his inclinations and his judicial

"duty" to follow his carefully fashioned principles had always been tiny: the odds were one in a thousand. But he stayed too long on the Court, and the moment came around at last, and the stakes were enormous. Whereupon he did what most of us would do: he flushed his principles Principled evil on the Supreme Court - 353

and found a way to gratify his heart's desire. He based his decision on a far-from-strict construction of the language of that very fourteenth amendment that, throughout his long tenure, he had always treated with contempt.

The easiest thing to do when this happens is to howl at the hypocrisy. Certainly

Rehnquist deserved no less; and he received no less from those scholars and students of the Court who knew his prior record in detail. But we may be missing the point. What Rehnquist's breach of ethical consistency should indicate to us is that nobody wants to crash and burn over something as silly as a principle. Yes, even the emotionally frigid Rehnquist finally found himself wanting something badly enough. Principles be damned!

A more thoughtful response might be to excoriate the content of the principles themselves

– they never were any good, even when he lived by them; so of course he abandoned them in the one situation where they might have accidentally produced a fair outcome. But this too misses the point. The real moral is not merely that his principles were evil, but that principles themselves are evil. They prevent us from consulting our hearts and our minds. Admittedly, there was not much to choose from between Rehnquist's head and his heart: a man like this has to be kept out of positions of power. Indeed, a man like this shouldn't be allowed to be a high school teacher and, as the event proved, is a poor risk even to raise his own children.

Nevertheless, we should take his failure of principle – his, of all people's – as another prime exhibit that every principle fails sooner or later.

Adolf Hitler

Almost from the day of his death in 1945, Adolf Hitler has been widely held among civilized people to be the most evil person who ever lived. However we choose to balance our definition between intentions and deeds, we find this judgment supported by the stark evidence of his career: that he intended to annihilate the Jewish race, at least between the North Sea and the Ural

Mountains, is undeniable; that he pursued this goal fanatically, came appallingly close to realizing it, and was kept from doing so only by the reverses of war is a matter of historical record. Because of his manifest desire to do evil, and his achievement in having gone such a long way toward doing all the evil that he dreamed of doing, Hitler cannot be passed over by any exegete who presumes to shine a light on the subject of evil. I therefore take up the obligatory task of assessing his psychology without complaint.

Perhaps, however, I should preface this examination with a comment on the unseemly debate that has broken out on the back pages of the intellectual journals in recent years.

Following the conservative recrudescence under Reagan and Thatcher, the question has tacitly arisen, "Who was worse? Hitler? or Stalin?" Sometimes it is Hitler versus Lenin. Few have publicly acknowledged the argument's existence in so naked a form, since no one wants to be identified, by even the remotest strand of logic, as an apologist for Hitler. Nonetheless, readers with an eye for such things will have spotted the ongoing give-and-take between the lines of various articles and reviews: Lenin is now often labeled as the originator of the concept of state Adolf Hitler - 355

terror; and the death toll of Stalin's famines and purges is frequently compared directly to the body count of the Holocaust and found to exceed it.

That redoubtable reactionary Paul Johnson is perhaps the most prominent thinker to take up the question directly. In Modern Times, he claims outright that Hitler studied totalitarianism at the feet of Lenin. But this is a book that tries to rehabilitate Calvin Coolidge as one of the greatest of American presidents. More recently, Martin Amis has asked why the Left was so willing for so long to minimize Stalin's evils. This question is valid, if uncomfortable, and deserves an answer – but the answer is fairly simple. To those who intend to take sides in this debate, I wish to make a couple of points.

First, Hitlerism and Stalinism were by no means antithetical systems. Anything said against one is likely to tar the other. It is rarely acknowledged how much real socialism there was in both the Nazi Party platform and in the Nazi state as it existed under Hitler's leadership.

The Reich assumed full responsibility for the welfare of all its citizens from the cradle to the grave, and guaranteed full employment.

It is true that there were important differences on paper between Russian socialism and

German socialism. Hitler unabashedly insisted upon the "leader-principle," whereas the

Bolshevik state claimed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Even more significant – in terms of theory, at least – is that the means of production in the Nazi regime remained in private hands.

The reality is that these differences made little difference. The workers of both nations were owned by the state, and all state power was concentrated in a single individual. Hitler allowed

Krupp's manufacturing empire to remain in the hands of Krupp, but reserved the authority to tell

Krupp at any moment what the Reich required of him and his workers; Stalin directly owned both Adolf Hitler - 356

the workers and the factories, and appointed factory managers to carry out his will. Krupp made

more money than the Russian managers, of course. But the effect on the workers was about the

same: they were cogs in the national machine. The German worker was better off economically,

and less likely to be sent to prison for ten years solely because a local official had to arrest 10%

of the factory roster; but Hitler could not have been clearer about his philosophical belief that

these workers belonged to the German state, to be disposed of as the state saw fit. Meanwhile, in

spite of the misery of the Soviet economy, a managerial elite made up mostly of Communist

Party members did become, as Milovan Djilas pointed out in his famous 1954 treatise, a new

class, thereby exposing as a complete fraud the pretense of the Soviets to have created a classless

society. After Stalin renounced the world revolution and concentrated on "socialism in one

country," (i.e., national socialism) even the differences between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks about "internationalism" paled.

By the 1960s, with Brezhnev in power and Mao set to launch the pathological "Cultural

Revolution," communism and fascism had become joined at the hip. To a 19th century Marxist, class warfare was supposed to last only as long as it would take to break the counter-

revolutionary spirit of the Bourgeoisie. After that, the dictatorship of the proletariat would

"wither away" and a lasting peace would settle over the entire globe. To a fascist, warfare is

heroic, joyous, and everlasting: during the Spanish Civil War, Franco's minions coined the

inimitable slogan "Long live death." In spite of these ostensible differences, the circle of

totalitarianism finally closed when Mao Zedong adopted "permanent revolution" as a concept.

At that point, communists who embraced a perpetual dictatorship of the proletariat, while

looking forward to exterminating the class enemies all over again in every generation, became Adolf Hitler - 357

indistinguishable from fascists on all the main points. (During the very decade that Mao unleashed his mostly teenaged Red Guards on the entire populace, turning the schools over to illiterate peasants and forcing professors to work in the rice paddies, American leftists gave up on the Soviet Union as ideologically moribund and turned to Mao and his "Little Red Book" for inspiration. In other words, at the very moment that communism took its final decisive turn into fascism, the far left began using the term "fascist" indiscriminately to slander every opponent of

China's version of national socialism.)

The most important difference between fascist and communist states was, in the last analysis, rhetorical, and boiled down to the overtly tribal and racist ideal professed by the Nazis versus the centuries-old ideal of global economic justice professed by the Communists. And here we come to the second and decisive point: the Nazis were plainly evil in their stated objective and no one could subscribe to that objective without being tainted immediately by its malignancy, whereas most Marxists clearly intended the outcome of their revolution to be something very different from the Stalinist state. For the Nazis, the Holocaust was not the ideal gone wrong: it was the fulfillment of the ideal. Hitler had always promised a utopia for some at the expense of others. The German war machine, the euthanasia program, and the extermination of European Jewry were perfect embodiments of the vision of Mein Kampf. Hitler's plan for the

Ukraine – to maintain the native population as a permanent underclass, thereby reintroducing chattel slavery, serfdom, and the legalisms of Manu's caste system into civilization – was almost as chilling as the plan for the Final Solution. But anyone who has read The Communist

Manifesto has to admit that the Soviet Union under Stalin – a genuine dystopia, a totalitarian nightmare for everyone and especially for old Bolsheviks – was not at all what Marx had in Adolf Hitler - 358

mind. He never contemplated the physical extermination of the bourgeoisie, and he wished to

take from them only what he imagined they had acquired unfairly. He may have been naive, but

he envisioned a society of justice for all; and it was that vision that moved his followers.

Democratic Socialists who were asked to oppose the Soviet experiment because of

Stalin's atrocities were plausibly caught between a rock and hard place, because they had reasons

for hoping that the USSR after Stalin would eventually come to resemble the Marxist vision. But

no one had any excuse for viewing Hitler's crimes as a deviation from the party program or as

necessary evils on the way to a perfected society. Stalin betrayed the revolution and the Soviet

Union departed further and further from the Bolshevik ideal; Hitler, in contrast, kept his word,

and Europe in 1942 was exactly what he and the Nazi Party had promised. So I would say this to

the de facto apologists for Hitler today: if you find yourself arguing that Lenin or Stalin was

worse than Hitler and someone throws a beer in your face at a party, don't be surprised, and don't

say you didn't deserve it.

Hitler, then, earned his iconic status as the embodiment of evil. But the subject of evil is itself so

doubtful, so ambiguous, so equivocal and elusive, that even here we lose our way. Out of our

own psychological infirmity, we search for single causes and succumb to either-or thinking. As

we dismiss one after another necessary cause because it is not sufficient, we lose all the truth

contained in the discarded propositions; then we force one favorite hypothesis to bear too much

weight. Ponder, then, Ron Rosenbaum's respected best-seller Explaining Hitler, an informative

and readable amalgam of investigative journalism, historical reflection, and philosophical

examination. The entire book can be said to be a meditation upon Milton Himmelfarb's March Adolf Hitler - 359

1984 article in Commentary magazine, which was in turn a response to contemporary arguments

that a concatenation of historical forces, rather than Hitler the self-willed individual, had produced the Holocaust. Himmelfarb's answer to this argument was boldly proclaimed by the title of his article – "No Hitler, No Holocaust." His thesis can be summed up by his bald assertion that "Hitler murdered the Jews not because he had to . . . [but] because he wanted to."

The great value of Rosenbaum's book is that it successfully debunks all the pop psychological explanations for Hitler's animus against the Jews – that Hitler bore a grudge against a Jewish doctor who treated his mother's cancer, or against a Jewish prostitute who had given him a venereal disease – as well as the more rococo theories about how a missing testicle or a predilection for sexual perversions would shine light on his "madness." Rosenbaum also draws out many scholars about the steps by which Hitler arrived at the Final Solution. But from beginning to end, his work is skewed by his own emotional need to find Hitler directly and unmistakably culpable for this unprecedented crime against humanity. To arrive at his conclusion, he continually frames the discussion in terms of false antitheses. He wants to force us to choose one from each of his paired opposites: Either Hitler improvised his way hesitantly toward the Final Solution (the thesis of Christopher Browning) or he planned it from the very beginning (the thesis of Lucy Dawidowicz). Either Hitler was a crazed idealist or he was a criminal politician who murdered his way to the top and kept on murdering. Either he was cut from the cloth of a traditional European diplomat, albeit one adept at demagoguery and chicanery, or he was uniquely vicious and unhinged, a paranoid anti-Semitic populist. Finally, taking up Himmelfarb's argument, Rosenbaum considers the validity of what, since Napoleonic times, has been called the Great Man theory of history: either the Holocaust was caused by Adolf Hitler - 360

historical forces, some originating in medieval times, or it was caused by Adolf Hitler. To frame the last antithesis more generally: Does significant historical change happen according to abstract and still poorly understood laws of historical motion? or only when propelled forward by an extraordinary individual standing at the helm of forces that he himself has unleashed?

The weakness of such framing is that the paired propositions are not mutually exclusive.

Hitler was both a ruthless politician and a crackpot idealist, having this in common with his contemporaries Mussolini and Stalin. And while he was not, as it turned out, a traditional

European statesman, until 1939 he resembled one closely enough to be mistaken for one, and therefore he was underestimated by all his opponents, who assumed that he would eventually settle down to be as "reasonable," pragmatic, temporizing, and narrowly careerist as they were themselves.

There is no contradiction between Dawidowicz's Hitler of November 1918, who attributes

Germany's ignominious collapse to Jewish treachery and begins dwelling on thoughts of revenge, and Browning's Hitler of 1941, who still hesitates until he can be persuaded that the extermination is feasible. The first Hitler is a nonentity and the second is the undisputed master of continental Europe. In 1918, Hitler, like Wagner talking at the dinner table, is fantasizing: he means it, but he is a corporal in a defeated army – it is just talk. In 1941, he is the commander- in-chief of that same army, and has the wherewithal to make his dream come true; but even so, as the leader of the nation, he still has to proceed with caution, and decide how to allocate his resources in the midst of a world war.

Silliest of all is the forced choice between abstract historical forces and charismatic leaders. On the one hand, without the full historical context, Hitler never arrives at power and Adolf Hitler - 361

can do nothing to effect the Final Solution; on the other, even with all the historical ducks in a row, it still takes Hitler to make it happen. Himmelfarb is right that the historical antecedents by themselves do not ineluctably produce the Holocaust: if Hitler had died in 1939, it is hard to imagine any other Nazi leader actually implementing it. So the aphorism, "No Hitler, No

Holocaust," is true as far as it goes – it just does not go very far, because it also makes as much sense to say "No Treaty of Versailles, No Holocaust" or "No Thousand-Year Tradition of

European Anti-Semitism, No Holocaust." Without these and many other antecedents, Hitler is nothing more than a demobilized enlisted man engaged in street-corner harangues, gabbling the way so many American Neo-Nazis gabble today to an audience of a dozen other misfits.

After we have exploded these antitheses, however, we are left with one that is the starkest of all.

Hitler clearly intended to exterminate the Jewish race. But did he know that this was an evil intention? Did he glory in the criminality of the deed? Or, strange as it may sound to say so, did

Hitler try to do good? This antithesis is apt, because this time the postulated opposites really are mutually exclusive.

Near the beginning of his research, Rosenbaum was rocked back on his heels by historian

H. R. Trevor-Roper:

I'd asked him the deceptively simple question I'd begun asking a number of the Hitler explainers: "Do you consider Hitler consciously evil? Did he know what he was doing was wrong?" "Oh no," Trevor-Roper declared with great firmness and asperity. "Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude."

We are so accustomed to the essentially theological proposition that sin must be conscious and Adolf Hitler - 362

willful that we are hardly prepared to entertain the opposite hypothesis. But Trevor-Roper was

not alone in making this argument:

Perhaps the most unexpected echo of his "rectitude" argument – evidence that it's more than an academic quibble – is one I found in the excited rhetoric of the chief Nazi hunter in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem headquarters. When I asked Zuroff, a big, tough, outspoken Brooklyn- born Israeli, whether Hitler was conscious he was doing wrong, he was even more emphatic than Trevor-Roper. "Of course not!" he practically yelled at me. "Hitler thought he was a doctor! Killing germs! That's all Jews were to him! He believed he was good not evil!" To Zuroff, real evil is something he reserved for certain of the war criminals he was hunting, the middle managers of the Holocaust, the ones who participated in mass murder without conviction, for reasons of career advancement, not "banality" but selfish viciousness, cold- blooded personal ambition.

This roughly recapitulates the antithesis I have been at pains to establish between crimes of

narcissism and crimes of careerism. Zuroff believes in evil, but he defines it in terms of self-

aggrandizement and especially moral hypocrisy: he exempts those who are sincerely mistaken in

their beliefs. Rosenbaum cannot accept this conclusion for reasons that are only too familiar: it

goes against our deeply ingrained dogma that evil must be freely and knowingly willed. But it is

undeniable that Hitler believed that he had conferred a benefit upon humanity by authorizing the

Final Solution.

What is excruciating to the confirmed believer in morality-as-character is the obvious fact that the great monsters of history have all been more in the camp of narcissism and idealism than in that of careerism, and therefore have tended to evince "strength of character" in many situations. Rosenbaum spends his entire book trying to get around this fact. Like many of the people he interviewed, he wants Hitler to be conscious of his own evil, and finds the alternative to be too emotionally unsatisfying. His self-imposed task is to prove that Hitler was demonically Adolf Hitler - 363

aware that the annihilation of the Jews was criminal. The logic of desire finally convinces him to

adopt the "laughing Hitler" thesis of Lucy Dawidowicz, who plausibly argues that Hitler had

planned the Holocaust as early as the end of World War I. She draws Rosenbaum's attention to

Hitler's September 1, 1939 speech to the Reichstag affirming the attack on Poland. Strangely, in

this speech, Hitler does not mention the Jews – one of the few times he failed to do so. But three

times subsequently Hitler hearkened back to this speech, misremembering it as the one in which

he famously threatened the Jews with destruction if they "caused" a world war. (That speech was

actually made on January 30, 1939.) Rosenbaum is deeply impressed that in these three later

references to the misdated speech, Hitler repeated some version of the sentiment that "the Jews

laughed at me when I said that, but they are laughing no longer." Plainly, Hitler remembered

with relish his threat to destroy the Jews, and enjoyed repeating it. It is psychologically

interesting, too, that he remembered so clearly having tied his threat to their causing a world war:

this explains why he kept misremembering when he first said it – it seemed to him in retrospect

that he would naturally have uttered it on the day the war started. But does this prove that he

knew that the genocide was evil? Is he winking to his associates when he accuses the Jews of

causing the war?

In his final statement to the world, titled "My Last Political Testament" and dated April

29, 1945, he alluded once more, this time without any reference to laughter, to his threat to punish the Jews:

I never desired that after the first terrible World War a second war should arise against England or even against America. Centuries may pass, but out of the ruins of our cities and monuments of art there will arise anew the hatred for the people who alone are ultimately responsible: International Jewry and its helpers! As late as three days before the outbreak of the German-Polish War, I proposed to the Adolf Hitler - 364

British Ambassador in Berlin a solution for the German-Polish problem – similar to the problem of the Saar area, under international control. This offer cannot be explained away, either. It was only rejected because the responsible circles in English politics wanted the war, partly in the expectation of business advantages, partly driven by propaganda promoted by international Jewry. But I left no doubt about the fact that if the peoples of Europe were again only regarded as so many packages of stock shares by these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is the truly guilty party in this murderous struggle would also have to be held to account: the Jews! I further left no doubt that this time we would not permit millions of European children of Aryan descent to die of hunger, nor millions of grown-up men to suffer death, nor hundreds of thousands of women and children to be burned and bombed to death in their cities, without the truly guilty party having to atone for its guilt, even if through more humane means.

By the words "more humane means," he is referring to the extermination camps. Far from trying to cover up his crime, he wants posterity to know that he kept his promise. The final words of the testament illustrate the tenacity with which he held to his core beliefs:

Above all, I charge the leadership of the nation and their followers with the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples, international Jewry.

In those days, the death penalty would not have been thought an excessive punishment for a poisoner. That Hitler sentenced an entire race to death would not alter the fitness of the verdict if the conviction had been properly obtained in light of unimpeachable evidence. I have never seen any information that undermines my sense that Hitler's beliefs about racial purity were completely sincere. Efraim Zuroff pointed Rosenbaum in the right direction: Hitler tried to do good, not evil. We will never get to the heart of evil unless we accept this recalcitrant fact about it.

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Hitler's words about the Jews are chilling. But this kind of rhetoric came naturally to him at all times and in regard to any subject whatsoever. Consider his dedicatory speech when he opened the "Great Exhibition of German Art" in Munich in 1937. During that same summer,

"Degenerate, Bolshevik, and Jewish Art" was displayed next door in a poorly lighted venue so that viewers could compare the official heroic style of Nazi-sanctioned art with the supposed decadent and depraved style of avant-garde art.

In his extensive remarks, Hitler invokes "that flood of slime and ordure which the year

1918 belched forth." He does not dwell on the Jews, probably because at this point he no longer has to – everyone knows who is responsible for the flood. He does mention that "Judaism had taken possession" of public opinion and that "Judaism was very clever indeed" in its use of art criticism as a tool for "undermining and destroying the general wholesome feeling in this domain." Note his penchant for abstraction: "Judaism" did this.

Here is an inventory of the phrases of abuse that Hitler uses to malign the art that was exhibited for the purpose of being derided: "insane and inane monstrosities. . . . artifactitious stammerings of men to whom God has denied the grace of a truly artistic talent. . . . primitive international scribblings. . . . German art foolishness. . . . wretched, worthless, integrally unskilled products. . . . impertinent nonsense. . . . claptrap." Here are the phrases that characterize the decadent artists and their sympathetic critics: "the also-rans of the art world. . . . prehistoric stone-age culture-vultures and art stammerers. . . . possessors of the gift of jabbering or deception. . . . makers of dumb, mendacious excuses." Hitler vows to "wage an unrelenting war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture."

The National Socialist art in the healthy building, by contrast, presents "the true intrinsic Adolf Hitler - 366

virtue of our people and the honest and respectable expression of those only inwardly experienced laws of life."

Now you may want to conclude that the man who could talk this way about art has already revealed himself to be capable of genocide. That would be my take on it too:

Either these so-called "artists" really see things this way [blue meadows, green skies, sulfur-yellow clouds] and therefore believe in what they depict; then we would have to examine their eyesight-deformation to see if it is the problem of a mechanical failure or of inheritance. In the first case, these unfortunates can only be pitied; in the second case, they would be the object of great interest to the Ministry of Interior of the Reich, which would then have to take up the question of whether further inheritance of such gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes cannot at least be checked. If, on the other hand, they themselves do not believe in the reality of such impressions, but try to harass the nation with this humbug for other reasons, then such an attempt falls within the jurisdiction of the penal law.

. . .

I do not want to leave the shadow of a doubt as to the fact that sooner or later the hour of liquidation will strike for those phenomena which have participated in this corruption.

. . .

I assure you – all those cliques of babblers, dilettantes, and art crooks which lend support to each other and are therefore able to survive, will be eliminated and abolished.

Hitler's speech is surprisingly long and shows that he has given a great deal of thought to art – certainly more than the average American president has. He sets forth definite aesthetic principles and articulates them clearly. Great art, he says, always emanates from a specific Volk, or people; it can be judged by the untutored but honest citizen based upon its adequacy to the reality that is being pictorially represented. Decadent art, by contrast, deals in subjective Adolf Hitler - 367

impressions and inner feelings; it requires the mediation of experts before it can be understood; and its claim to be "universal" (which to Hitler is a synonym for international and cosmopolitan) is just a scam, a way for charlatans to foist their talentless productions off upon a populace that is too intimidated to protest. Hitler's view is in some particulars similar to that of the American satirist Tom Wolfe. I say this not to denigrate Wolfe but to defend Hitler, up to a point. If you are among the many who have looked long and hard at 20th century abstract expressionism and have never seen what all the fuss was about, you may find yourself reluctantly entertained by some of Hitler's attack on it. Notwithstanding the opinions of abstract expressionists to the contrary, Hitler is not shown to be a moral monster by his negative opinion of avant-garde art – those opinions demonstrate that, at the very least, he, unlike most of its detractors and even many of its defenders, took it as seriously as its creators intended it to be taken. The ancient Greeks would have agreed with his premise that art directly affects the development of character and ethics, and Plato would have supported the contention that so important a matter must be regulated by the state. Hitler's potential for evil is shown rather by his certainty that he can draw with perfect accuracy the line separating purity and degradation – he possessed this same insane confidence in his judgment on all other topics as well – and by his conviction that the decadent artists are consciously malevolent and therefore deserve only death. In other words, his evil shows most in his confident attribution of evil to his opponents. In addition, his extraordinary aggressiveness toward those who, he thinks, choose to wallow in filth, which he expresses in images of extreme violence, is exacerbated rather than mitigated by his avidity for abstractions and purely intellectual constructs. From the productions of a handful of individual human agents who, where they were not figments of his imagination, clearly operated out of personal, localized Adolf Hitler - 368

motives, Hitler creates by means of crude generalizations a romantic narrative about the battle of

Armageddon. The artists he execrates, who were in fact struggling entrepreneurs trying to earn a living, are transmogrified into cabalists who are aiming a dagger at the heart of civilization; and by employing a stark, impoverished, vocabulary of the utmost brutality, he converts these hapless scattered individuals into a vast and malignant social conspiracy constituting one of the mighty historical antagonists ranged in an apocalyptic showdown: the "clique of art babblers" versus "the

German people," fifteen rounds with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. It is mystical and silly, but it appealed to millions of listeners who preferred such a colorful fiction to the pale reality of the unheroic humdrum. Today the mighty reckoning is with "Islamofascism"; the apolitical masses have Lord of the Rings.

Hitler's speech about German art demolishes the theory that his evil can be explained by his suffering from a well-defined mental illness or clinical psychosis. Perhaps we are tempted to explain his fixation on the Jews as a paranoid persecutory delusion, but what are we to do with his myriad other hatreds? As usual, we are impressed with our own response to his "madness" and naively expect him and his followers to share it in some sane part of their minds. It would be more understandable to us if he and they were just pretending about the ideology and could admit to motives that are more like our own – money and power, for instance. But in a speech to the

Hitler Youth, the Führer urged them to acquire true spiritual riches, rather than wealth and possessions, by devoting themselves body and soul to a cause higher than themselves – the

Reich. We underestimate the idealism and the aesthetic appeal of this comprehensive world- view. Have we not noticed how many callers to talk radio today speak in the same grand generalities, positing an America that is a light unto all nations and conjuring up images of Adolf Hitler - 369

powerful conspiracies that are sapping our moral fiber? In a campaign to represent Oklahoma in the Senate in 2004, Republican Tom Coburn identified the group that is poisoning the national blood in terms that starkly resemble the rhetoric that the Nazis turned against the Jews:

The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power. . . . That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda.

It must amuse gays immensely to learn of their "extreme power," and it must amuse anyone with a brain and a funny bone to learn that homosexual men and women are having all the abortions.

But would anyone argue that Coburn's talent as a stand-up comedian is evidence of clinical mental illness?

No one demonstrates more clearly than Hitler the danger of pure, unbridled intellectualism, of living in a world of your own ideas and moving gigantic abstractions around in your head; and no one underestimates the danger more than those who dismiss ideologues like

Hitler and Coburn because the ideas are so shoddy. Just such snobbery caused enlightened

Europeans of the middle 1930s to view Hitler as a buffoon rather than the most dangerous man on the planet. We have too high an opinion of ourselves if we think that we are inoculated against nonsense whereas the German people were not. What about the idea that the book of

Revelation provides a key to interpreting the events of the Cold War? How dangerous was it to put hydrogen bombs in the hands of a man who thought that it may be God's plan to kill a third of the people on the earth as a necessary prelude to the New Jerusalem? We should get up every morning and thank our lucky stars that Ronald Reagan had a happy childhood.

In Hitler's sardonic reference to the Ministry of the Interior's interest in checking the Adolf Hitler - 370

inheritance of eyesight-deformation, which no doubt got a laugh from his appreciative audience, we see prefigured the actual euthanasia program that would come later. In the reference to the liquidation of the offending "phenomena" and the elimination of the cliques that produce it, we hear, in 1937, a direct reference to the physical extermination of a whole class of people who

"harass the nation with humbug." I understand that no other Nazi crime is as enormous as the annihilation of European Jewry, and that, given the persistence of virulent anti-Semitism into the

21st century, many Jews take a proprietary interest in the Holocaust and fear to see its definition diluted by references to the other groups marked for elimination. But we have a duty to try to understand the true psychological genesis of the Holocaust, and these quotes from Hitler leave no doubt that mass murder was a habit of his mind. Thinking always in grand, heartless abstractions, he was ready to liquidate any number of classes of enemies. The Jews were first among equals and more numerous, but not uniquely singled out for destruction.

In 1937, when Hitler still expected Britain to cooperate with him in establishing Nordic spheres of influence – he wanted the English to continue to dominate the North Sea and much of

Asia, while he would content himself with controlling all of continental Europe – Lord Halifax paid him a visit and received some impromptu advice on managing the unrest in India:

Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established.

Hitler offered this advice in complete sincerity, and it marks him, not necessarily as a genocidal monster, but as a shrewd man of the world who has retained his street-smarts. He is one of the tough-minded realists and pragmatists. Such a strategy may very well have "worked" with very Adolf Hitler - 371

little loss of life. We should not romanticize the spiritual force of satyagraha. The two most successful nonviolent movements in history have been those led by Gandhi and Martin Luther

King, Jr. Each was blessed by good fortune in opposing a government that usually observed highly civilized restraints on the use of direct physical force and was burdened by a bad conscience. The British refused to countenance Hitler's proposed solution, not because it was guaranteed to fail, but because there were moral limits to what they were prepared to do for the sake of their empire. But what strikes me about Hitler's advice is two things: first, that I have heard a number of Americans make similar proposals; second, that the strategy has proved efficacious innumerable times during my own lifetime. The Chinese government adapted Hitler's advice to local conditions and decisively ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration with great efficiency and, as these things go, very little bloodshed.

As to the conversations I have had with my countrymen, I should set aside the pair of my

Deep South relatives who, in the late 1960s, began enthusing about "giving Moscow and Peking a taste of the big nuke." Even as I listened to them, I was thinking how much they resembled cartoon characters instead of flesh-and-blood middle-aged men, and I fear that what I am about to quote will seem to some readers impossible and to others like something from an absurdist novel by Robert Coover or Donald Barthelme – but one of them went on to say that while we were disposing of the Commies, we should just go ahead and take out New York City too, which would pretty much settle matters with the Jews as well. And then, as God is my witness, and I quote exactly, he started the next sentence with the immortal words, "You can say what you want about old Hitler, but . . ."

These particular individuals, who really would have whooped with joy at the news that Adolf Hitler - 372

Moscow had been obliterated by a hydrogen bomb, had been made mentally and morally ill by their membership in the John Birch Society and their addiction to the literature of political apocalypse. More compelling, I think, is the example of an upstanding citizen during the hostage crisis with Iran. His proposal, set forth with the vehemence that excitable patriots confuse with firmness and gravity, was as follows: we would announce ahead of time, and then after a suitable interval carry out, a policy of dropping one atomic bomb per day on Iranian cities until the hostages were released. Here we have, not the demented fantasy of moral imbeciles like my relatives, but the cool analysis of a sober advocate of Realpolitik. It was the "logic," not merely the craziness, that stamped it with the true Hitlerian touch.

While bulling his way toward the "Laughing Hitler" thesis, Rosenbaum naturally brushed aside every suggestion of a socially conditioned Hitler. Alice Miller, who writes at great length, and with great compassion, about Hitler's violent childhood in For Your Own Good, is dismissed in a few brusquely inadequate paragraphs. Rosenbaum's reasoning seems to be that a brutalized childhood cannot explain Hitler's adult evil because many a mistreated child turns out all right.

But Miller posits the beatings – and of more importance, the denigration and humiliation – as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of Hitler's violent behavior and allows for the uniqueness of

Hitler's response by noting that every child reacts differently to injustice.

Especially curious is Rosenbaum's skepticism about whether to believe Hitler's own account of the beatings. Here his reasoning seems to be that we can't trust this prince of liars.

But Hitler had no incentive to lie about his childhood: it is commoner for despots to exaggerate in the other direction, making their fathers into worthy sires of such glorious sons; and, given Adolf Hitler - 373

German attitudes of the time about obedience, he might have expected most of his readers to automatically side with any father who sees fit to discipline a son by any means whatsoever. For him to admit that his father beat him was almost tantamount to his admitting that he was a bad lot. He could not have anticipated the later psychology that exonerates criminals by creating an

"abuse excuse," and in any case, he never thought that he was such a criminal or in need of anyone's pity.

Those who, like Rosenbaum, find it absurd to posit the thesis that Hitler perpetrated the

Holocaust because he was beaten as a child by his tyrannical alcoholic father do not seem to appreciate how much more absurd any other theory has to be. We have in Hitler a type of man who feels intense satisfaction when he orders, and hears confirmation of, exterminations of entire populations of people entirely unknown to him. Unless we are so fatuous as to credit some version of the reasons Hitler himself gave for his satisfaction – for instance, that he was saving humanity from blood poisoning and thus committing a salutary hygienic act – we are naturally going to ask why he, or anyone, would do something so bizarre; and we do not need psychoanalytical concepts to tell us that some personal rage toward a person or persons he has actually encountered has become displaced. When we make this simple deduction, and then ask who, among the people that he had actually known, would most likely have caused this rage, I think we must move his father to the top of the list rather quickly. Yet there are those who are so literal, and unconscious of the unconscious, as to imagine that the origin of Hitler's hatred must have been some semi-rational grievance formed as an adult against certain other adults – as if the theory that he murdered six million Jews to avenge himself upon the Jewish doctor who treated his mother's cancer is not far more preposterous on its face than the speculation that the Adolf Hitler - 374

indignities inflicted upon him by a wounding and arbitrary parent, when he was too small and defenseless to resist, took root in him in a way that he never himself grasped. For we must assume that he did not himself understand what was driving him: that alone can explain why his vengeance was never slaked, and why every successful massacre left him momentarily elated but still unsatisfied. You can't get enough of what doesn't fill you up. When we see this, we have to admit that such displaced hatred must originate in early childhood: if it starts later than that, it will be direct rather than indirect: the individual in question will know the names of his real persecutors and act appropriately against them. Therefore, as absurd as it seems to say that so much bloodshed and destruction could have been caused by Hitler's attempt to exorcize the legacy of his pompous, strutting, brutal, and ineffectual father, it is even more absurd to say anything else. For that will lead us, I must repeat, in the direction of Hitler's own type of theory, and we will be lucky if we do not end in asking, "Well, what had the European Jews done to weaken Aryan civilization?"

Emerging from his childhood, Hitler carried a fierce need for some sort of revenge on someone or other. It was originally muddled, but eventually came to be narrowly focused – mostly on the Jews, certainly, but also, as Mein Kampf reveals, on Bolsheviks, internationalists, pacifists, parliamentarians, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and abstract artists. All his hatreds were concentrated by his attempt to forge a powerful personality that could stand up to his father and to everyone else. The unifying motif was a glorification of strength and a loathing of weakness – a contempt for the soft side of himself (a side that showed itself at odd moments throughout his life) and a determination to annihilate it. The paradigmatic story about his childhood is the one that he himself told, about counting off the blows his father dealt him and Adolf Hitler - 375

demonstrating his toughness by refusing to cry. He was a psychological and moral fascist, cut from familiar cloth, waiting for political fascism to be invented. When it was, he seemed "born" to lead it.

He loved violence, and this would be a true statement about him even if we accepted his own contention that the violence was ethical. The violence fed his soul; and he could never get enough of it. Where would such feelings originate? To say "human nature," or "our reptile brains," or "the devil" simply shifts the question to why Hitler gave into his animal nature, or his original sin, or his demonic possession, in such spectacular fashion when most of the rest of us do not. In locating the origin of such inchoate vengeful feelings in early childhood – they are so inchoate that they can be displaced onto millions of people whom the killer has never met, without his noticing the absurdity – Alice Miller makes the most obvious and most conservative guess.

Many other things had to happen along the way: otherwise Hitler would have matured into the typical adult child of an alcoholic and abusive parent, tyrannizing a wife and child of his own while otherwise holding down a job and saving for his retirement. It is of the utmost importance to give these other factors their due. To start with his genetic endowment, it appears that, unluckily, he had an "artistic temperament," which ill-suited him for bureaucratic routine and bourgeois marriage but propped up his apocalyptic fantasies of world conflict. Next we would want to investigate carefully how his mother may have encouraged his narcissism. Then there is his education in anti-Semitic Vienna, his mortification at Germany's catastrophic defeat, his discovery of a gift for political activism. Eventually there is his acquisition of absolute power, whereupon his romanticism and charisma acted fatally upon a generation of Germans Adolf Hitler - 376

reared in the tradition of obedience to a strong leader. These additional causes are necessary, and

they have to happen in a certain order and to build one upon another. What Miller is saying, and

I think she is right, is that Hitler's mistreatment in childhood is the seedbed for all the later factors. By itself it would not have triggered mass murder; but all the other factors taken together, in the absence of the childhood abuse, also would not have produced the Holocaust.

The later seeds needed to fall on the fertile soil prepared by the brutalized childhood.

Hitler also possessed the moxie of the resourceful grifter. Rosenbaum, heading down another of his either-or corridors, forces himself to choose one: criminal? or ideologue? In doing

so, he does some good work in reminding us of Hitler's penchant for political murder; and he

honors those journalists whose investigative work at the time have provided us with the historical

record of his crimes. But it is psychologically naive to assume that Hitler's quasi-sociopathic qualities precluded him from acquiring an ideology and taking it with the utmost seriousness. It may well be that sociopaths are our most inveterate ideologues, espousing their theory of ethical egoism to anyone who will listen: "Do unto others before they do it to you"; "He would have taken me down if I hadn't taken him down first"; "Everybody is looking out for Number One." It is not so unusual for such a man to shift this philosophy to his group or his country. "Statesmen" like Hitler follow these proverbs faithfully in the international arena, reframed as "My country right or wrong" and "Speak softly but carry a big stick." Another name for sociopathy, or ethical egoism, in foreign policy is Realpolitik; another famous exponent of it is Henry Kissinger.

Nor is a sociopath precluded from thinking deeply and even religiously about the world.

In fact, given his narcissism, he may be especially susceptible to gnostic explanations of the universe. A few years ago, the author of a book about racist cults like the Aryan Nations found Adolf Hitler - 377

to his own surprise that ideology is very important to the poorly educated men and women who

belong to them. He was, apparently, expecting the members to spout some form of pure bigotry

expressed in spectacular non-sequiturs. But bigotry too is an ideology backed up by a theory. In

Vienna, Hitler acquired that intellectually satisfying Theory of Everything that had afflicted many

before him and has continued to afflict many after him. It is important to remember that Hitler

was not at all intolerant of Jews as a youth, because at that time he associated anti-Semitism with the most benighted sort of religious bigotry. It was only after he encountered "scientific" anti-

Semitism as a young man, and found it echoed in the writings of his idol Richard Wagner, that he had his epiphany – one that explained everything from the greed of Wall Street in racially mongrelized America to the viciousness of Bolshevism in Slavic Russia, and incidentally accounted for Germany's defeat in the war. It even explained why modern art was so ugly.

Such theories are not only complete, comprehensive, and aesthetically satisfying – in short, religious – they also promote the tendency to think in terms of grandiose abstractions. And

Hitler was just such a dreamer as did not need this tendency to be exacerbated. Today's Christian expositors of the "end time" casually picture thrilling scenarios of thermonuclear devastation and billions of casualties; early 20th century believers in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion similarly imagined a colossal conflict between good and evil playing out on the world stage.

Hitler went on to acquire almost unlimited military power over an undefended population, such as few, if any, tyrants have ever commanded. That was the next-to-last element added to the mix, and the most important in a practical sense. The last element was that mysterious event that I have called the X-factor, when Hitler, at a very definite, single moment of historical time, slipped the leash of his already weakened inhibitions and made the decision. Adolf Hitler - 378

Eichmann remembered hearing about it in August 1941. It was conveyed orally to Heinrich

Himmler, the Reichsführer, who conveyed it orally to Reinhard Heydrich, who conveyed it orally to Adolf Eichmann in these mind-boggling words: "I come from the Reichsführer. He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of the Jews." Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz who by his own testimony oversaw the extermination of 2.5 million

Jews, remembered a similar conversation in the early summer, quoting Himmler himself as saying, "The Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question."

There was no single cause: Rosenbaum rounds up all the single-cause theories and disposes of them. There was only the accretion of multiple necessary and contributory causes, which neither by themselves nor all together made Hitler's decision inevitable; this was followed by the mysterious moment when he did make the decision. The great mistake of philosophers of evil – and Rosenbaum repeats it – has always been to focus on that moment to the exclusion of the multiple predisposing factors, as if it contains in itself the one necessary and sufficient cause of the catastrophe. But the X-factor for the Holocaust was Hitler's entire life, which brought him to absolute power while seeming to confirm his every intuition about the meaning of it, combined with the entire nine-year record of daily historical events during his chancellorship that moved all the pieces into place. That record, incidentally, includes a horrifying roster of callous and despicable acts of indifference, complicity, and appeasement on the part of the Western democracies, including the United States. All this was preceded by fifty years of German geopolitical jostling in Central Europe and a thousand years of pan-European anti-Semitism. The long preparation eventuated, perhaps, in nothing more portentous than a good night's sleep, followed by the next day's confidence that all the pieces were in place. Hitler's X-factor is as Adolf Hitler - 379

complex as the sum of everything personal and historical that fed into the moment of decision, and as simple as making up his mind, in the same way that one has to finally make up one's mind whether to have the neighbors look in on the dog or board it in a kennel.

As so often in our analyses of evil, we are driven by our response to it and fail to consider whether what is monstrous to us is not mundane to the murderer. That actual moment of passing from potentiality to actuality in the mass extermination of six million human beings mesmerizes us: the musical soundtrack to this movie rises to such tension and fatality that it all but drowns out the words. But Hitler had been thinking about this for a long time – about that Lucy

Dawidowicz is unquestionably right. As well roll the drums three decades earlier, when he sat in a bar in Vienna listening to some alcoholic philosopher expound social Darwinism and biological racism; or when, in 1935, he proposed the first of the Nuremberg laws circumscribing the civil rights of German citizens of Jewish blood, and no one of any importance, domestically or internationally, objected. In 1941, having already driven all the Jews under German control into ghettos and concentration camps, Hitler had to decide on a next step, with annihilation being one of the few remaining options unless he intended to undo all that had been done so far. Having reached that point, it would have been just as momentous to decide against the annihilation of the Jews; indeed, that decision would have felt very much to him like a failure to decide, leaving him with continued feelings of churning frustration and ambivalence about the continuing extra- national status of these unassimilable human parasites. To maintain the Jews in their anomalous situation would have meant having to deal with "the Jewish problem" over and over; to annihilate them must have felt, in terms of making a decision about them, cleaner and more definite. Nothing short of extermination would have seemed to be a final solution. Adolf Hitler - 380

So there is something unimaginative about our focus on the X-factor, to the relative exclusion of those many preliminary decisions that made this final decision almost inevitable.

All of Europe might have risen up at the promulgation of the first Nuremberg law, when

Germany was militarily defenseless and Hitler was clearly a scoundrel; but the failure of other nations to find anything so very reprehensible in a statute that prevented a Jew from practicing his profession set a pattern for the next eight years and confirmed Hitler in his own stated opinion that the world cared no more about the fate of the Jews than it had cared about the fate of the

Armenians in 1915. The Jews having first been denied a civic and political life, it was hardly that great a step to next remove them from biological life. I would be astounded if the government came to my town and summarily executed ten citizens. But if the ten had long since been placed under house arrest and deprived of all civil rights, I would not bat an eyelash. In

1941, Hitler, having done all that he had done to them to that point, very nearly had no choice other than to eliminate the Jews; and in light of what he had accomplished already, with the rest of the world grumbling a bit but otherwise acquiescent, he had every reason to believe that his final solution would be acceptable to most Europeans, if mildly controversial in liberal circles.

But with the question of whether Hitler made the decision to commit genocide lightly and optimistically, or after a great struggle with himself, we need hardly concern ourselves: the X- factor for that decision is, by its nature, unique; it will never recur in the history of the universe.

The German saying "Einmal ist keinmal" sums up the teasing, tormenting truth: once is never. If something happens one time only, it might as well not have happened at all. We can learn nothing from it.

What does recur are the earlier letters of the alphabet of evil – those dismayingly common Adolf Hitler - 381

elements of narcissism, careerism, idealism, psychological and moral fascism, susceptibility to

abstract intellectualizing and quasi-religious theorizing, and underneath it all some unfinished

business from early childhood that makes murder feel like justice. Many of these qualities cross-

fertilize and reinforce each other. The person who possesses all of them together is not so hard to

find; but genocide is rare because such a person rarely attains absolute power over an armed

force that has total control of an unarmed population. This is always the next-to-last ingredient in a genocide. The last ingredient is the X-factor, which is idiosyncratic for that person in that place at that time and is in any case irrelevant to our project of diagnosing and treating evil.

There are millions of people who might act like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceau_escu, Idi

Amin, Milosevic, or the Hutu architects of the Rwandan genocide, if given the chance. In the last-mentioned case, there was no maximum leader, and thousands upon thousands of perpetrators seem to have participated gladly, without coercion. Our task is not to imagine that a brain scan will be able to identify sociopaths ahead of time so that their names can be placed in a data base, but to figure out how to keep political and military power from falling into their hands.

In the meantime, we can continue to explore the interesting psyche of Adolf Hitler, and try to get inside his head at the moment of decision; but we might better apply ourselves to understanding how Adolf Eichmann could plausibly state that he never met anyone who outranked him socially who expressed any reservations about the Holocaust.

II

CRITIQUE OF PURE VIRTUE

The universe according to William Bennett

No discussion of virtue can ignore The Book of Virtues, which describes itself in its subtitle as "a treasury of great moral stories."

Because the author, William J. Bennett, is a conservative icon, many liberals would like to downplay the significance of his book's success. This would be another case of shooting the messenger. When an 800-page anthology becomes, on the strength of its title alone, a runaway best-seller, this testifies to the timeliness of its idea. Bennett's name-recognition in the upper echelons of the Republican Party would not have sufficed, by itself, to sell very many copies of his tome. We live in a time of social transition and disorientation, and the traditional virtues do seem to be in short supply. While the virtues should not be equated with morality, they are nonetheless valuable in their own right as technologies that promote social harmony and individual mastery. We citizens are longing to see writers address the problem of the disintegration of the American civic community. Just because The Book of Virtues is no solution does not mean that there is no problem.

It would seem, however, that Mr. Bennett's résumé should have disqualified him from offering any advice on the subject. Under President Reagan, he served first as Chairman of the

National Endowment for the Humanities, and next as Secretary of Education. Then President

George H. W. Bush named him as the "drug czar" of the "War on Drugs" after promising the electorate that "this scourge will end." At the time The Book of Virtues was published, the NEH The universe according to William Bennett - 384

was so discredited that Republicans in Congress wanted to shut it down; American public education had declined so far that some conservatives wanted to effectively end it with a voucher system; and the only winners of the "War on Drugs" were millionaire crack dealers. What would a man have to do to be reckoned a failure?

Apparently because, from time to time, he fulminated in a manner sufficiently colorful to make him quotable in our debased media, his blustery style was able to cover over his lack of substance. Celebrity status now belongs to anyone in authority who has the ability to create

"sound bites." For instance, when a blizzard struck the District of Columbia and caught the area without an adequate plan for snow removal, he complained that a little inclement weather should not shut down the schools. Why, when he was a boy, the children walked through the deepest snow in the coldest temperature to blah blah blah. As he waxed nostalgic for the good old days of rural 19th Century America, Bennett, like most foghorns for traditional values, forgot to take off his rose-colored glasses, look out his window, and notice that he lived in a modern city of the late 20th Century. Abraham Lincoln could trudge through ten miles of snow to his one-room schoolhouse because snow was his only obstacle. With the entire city of Washington shut down and the transportation system paralyzed, Bennett wanted children to walk through hundreds of blocks of congested, blighted, and physically dangerous urban sprawl.

Just because a conservative windbag likes a particular piece of classic literature is no reason to assume that it isn't any good. Bennett's book is not without value and readability, and he has contributed mercifully few of his own thoughts to it. Nonetheless, it suffers from terminal sententiousness. The very first sentence of his introduction gives the constipated tone: "This The universe according to William Bennett - 385

book is intended to aid in the time-honored task of the moral education of the young." The moral education of the young! Yes, adults have been applying themselves to this time-honored task since Methuselah was a baby – with what result we all see. I believe we need to attempt, for the first time in history, in the teeth of fearsome odds, the moral education of the old. The ethical thinking of the average high-school student is typically far in advance of that of his principal.

Our task is to somehow prevent the Tragedy of Adulthood, that corrosive process whereby a little boy who snickers at the very idea of the Pledge of Allegiance grows up to agree with the elder

George Bush, who averred during his campaign for the presidency in 1988 that saying the Pledge every day would be morally improving for everyone in America.

Four sentences later, Bennett predictably invokes Aristotle, a man who had no conception at all of what we mean today by the use of the word "moral," and would have labeled "doing the right thing for its own sake" a form of mental illness.

After the introduction, Bennett – trained in philosophy, yet – approvingly provides an epigraph from Plato's Republic, which includes the following rhetorical question:

Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

Is Bennett serious? Plato does not mean that parents should monitor the ideas that their children are allowed to encounter: he means that the government should do this. He is recommending complete legal censorship, to be administered by the "guardians" of a totalitarian society; he also proposed banning much of the Iliad, most musical scales, and the very existence of the flute.

Only if you liked the Soviet Union will you love Plato's ideal state. The universe according to William Bennett - 386

In his introduction to the first virtue, Bennett quotes Mark Antony's famous paean to

Brutus:

This was the noblest Roman of them all. . . . His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that nature might stand up And say to all the world, "This was a man!"

It happens that Brutus was an assassin whose reckless act plunged a mighty empire into years of

chaos. You would think that Bennett, of all people, would know how to abhor such radical

doings. Dante placed Brutus in the Ninth Circle of Hell, just this side of Judas Iscariot.

Shakespeare doggedly dramatizes his continuing episodes of rashness and poor judgment. Mark

Antony, on the other hand, is portrayed as a man of almost no moral character at all – someone

who will say anything in the service of expediency. Like his other public speeches, this one has

an ulterior purpose and is pure rhetoric.

Finally, we get to the anthologized meat of the book. As the fate of civilization hangs in

the balance, and we seize upon the last, best hope of morally educating the young, we turn the page and find a story about . . . the importance of saying "please."

Bennett is not quite an idiot. It is true that, like all traditionalists, he celebrates the pseudo-virtue

of loyalty, but in his introduction to that chapter he actually shows a glimmer of awareness that

the moral universe is not as simple as he paints it: "Virtue by itself is no guarantee of right action,

which requires more than good intentions." For half-a-second, he even seems to sense that loyalties may conflict, and that loyalty to a bad man or a bad cause may be a bad thing. But suddenly he sweeps aside his own doubts in a majestic statement of affirmation: "The times The universe according to William Bennett - 387

when one cannot stand both 'for God and for country' are rare indeed."

No, those times are not rare. They are practically an everyday occurrence. And the administrations that Bennett served so faithfully were assiduous in persecuting those who served

God rather than the government of the United States. Many deeply religious people protested nonviolently against our manic peacetime buildup of nuclear weapons and against the special training that we provided to military officers who proceeded to torture and "disappear" the proponents of social justice in Latin America. Some of these peace activists were sentenced to excessively long prison terms.

The belief that standing for one's country is tantamount to standing for God has caused most of the organized bloodshed of the last five hundred years. Every European nation that participated in the First World War proclaimed itself a Christian nation. In the late 20th century, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia occurred under the twin banners of religion and state. Like Bennett, who attended church and meanwhile served boisterously in administrations that killed people in

El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Iraq, and Panama, many Nazis were loyal to their country and their God. Good Evangelical Lutherans and Roman Catholics almost to a man, they would have agreed that there is no conflict between God and country.

We do understand why Bennett, given the nature of his beliefs, personally encounters no conflict between his politics and his religion; but it is mind-staggering that he fails to notice how many of his sworn enemies around the world resemble him in vaunting the godliness of their secular loyalties. He of all people should have best understood why the hijackers of September

11, 2001 found it meritorious to "stand both for God and al Qaeda." Instead, he responded to that tragedy by launching a contemptible attack on all American university professors who dared to The universe according to William Bennett - 388

point out the connection between America's, and Bennett's, violent enthusiasms in foreign policy and the hatred it engenders in the Islamic world.

By now, all informed readers know the punch line to Bennett's book of virtues. In early May of

2003, Newsweek and the Washington Monthly jointly broke the story of Bennett's long-time bouts of compulsive gambling, during which he had sometimes lost hundreds of thousands of dollars playing slot machines and video gambling games. His patronage was so lucrative to the casinos that they sent their limousines to convey him to and from the gaming rooms gratis: in the most devastating quote, a casino worker confided that the insider term for a high-roller like Bennett is

"loser." For his part, Bennett had gone to great lengths to cover his tracks; but when confronted with the evidence, he airily waved away his predilection as a harmless recreational activity without any moral dimension at all. He thus compounded hypocrisy with denial, and betrayed his narcissism by his failure to gauge how these rationalizations would be perceived by others.

The temptation for many observers is to conclude that Bennett, out of the same human frailty that his religion preaches as the universal condition of fallen man, was too weakly human to practice what he so eloquently and rightly preached. What he needs, according to this view, is to confess the error of his ways, re-read his own book, and apply himself more assiduously to moral improvement. Indeed, after a few days of monitoring the national debate about his condition, he announced that, upon reflection, he would be embracing abstinence – a rash pronouncement in my opinion, since addictive behavior is not easily relinquished and the penitent stands in danger either of backsliding or of enduring serious withdrawal pains. In any case, his reformation clearly owed more to the public perception of his behavior than to any The universe according to William Bennett - 389

internal realignment of his values.

A better moral for the rest of us to draw from the scandal is that Bennett's cherished virtues always were and always will be social rather than ethical in nature. As his own case illustrates, they can easily be faked, with no one the wiser for decades on end; and if the avatars of "character" could be honest with themselves, they would admit that such an appearance is just what they aim at anyway. The simulacrum of virtue is, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the real thing unless, as so poignantly occurred with Bennett, an unfortunate publicity exposes a hidden vice.

Joe DiMaggio and the simulacrum of character

Some may think me hard-hearted and mean-spirited for the pleasure I have taken at the

revelations about the true character of baseball icon Joe DiMaggio. I am delighted by them, not

because they have debunked an American hero and demonstrated his feet of clay, but because

they have exposed us and demonstrated the fatuousness of our hero-worshiping ways.

It was a shibboleth repeated throughout my lifetime that Joe had so much class and

dignity. Now Joe had many things, but "class" and "dignity" are surely the two epithets that we

would withhold from a greedy, grasping, self-regarding loner who not only hoarded his own

money like a miser but bitterly envied the money that anybody else made. It turns out that he had

created and nurtured an image of dignity and class by such simple expedients as dressing in suits

and sending go-betweens to pick up the girls that he chased. Even his misanthropy was turned into a plus by accommodating sportswriters, who cast it as "reserve" and "an aversion to the limelight." Joe was "shy," they said; whereas the truth was that he was totally incapacitated for friendship, love, and intimacy.

His finest public relations stroke, however privately sincere, was his sending of fresh flowers daily to the grave of Marilyn Monroe – the woman he quickly drove out of their marriage

by his possessiveness and self-centeredness. But so superficial are our ideas of character, so

eager are we to project greatness upon our heroes, that such a trivial gesture is all it takes to gull

us. Joe DiMaggio and the simulacrum of character - 391

This points to a disturbing feature of the morality of character: it is notoriously easy to

fake. After all, who knows if DiMaggio felt anything at all when he phoned in his order of

flowers? Who knows if I am really telling the truth about my feelings? if I am loyal in my heart to my friend or boss or country? if I am generous in my thoughts? Who knows if the hero charged the enemy machine-gun nest to save the lives of his comrades and defeat the enemy of humanity in his lair, or to call attention to himself and win a medal? Or did he simply find himself unable to say no when the sergeant asked for volunteers? Nietzsche creates, in the 73rd aphorism of Human, All Too Human, the following suggestive scenario:

In a revolutionary party, there was a man who was too anxious and cowardly ever to stand up to his comrades. They gave him the toughest assignments, knowing that he was more afraid of their bad opinion than of death itself. In his heart he said "no" but he always said "yes" with his lips. His willingness to perform the most dangerous exploits made him a hero and eventually a martyr. When he was led to the scaffold, a member of the party stood nearby in the crowd keeping an eye on him, to guarantee that even with the noose around his neck he would act up to the party's ideals. So fearful was he of losing the esteem of his old associates that even at the point of death, he maintained his composure. Ever since, he has been celebrated as a man of great character.

Anyone who wants the reputation for courage or loyalty or magnanimity knows that it can be acquired by means of specific actions that are bound to be noticed by others and then have to be recognized accordingly. As I have had occasion to repeat several times, "the virtues" are social: by their nature, they are publicly displayed and publicly evaluated. They may be genuine but they can be easily simulated.

Integrity is cheaply won and cheaply held in an environment based upon appearances and

"spin." The most visible spokesmen of character have lied repeatedly, almost to a man, to keep important aspects of their past hidden. Nothing shows more clearly that a reputation for Joe DiMaggio and the simulacrum of character - 392

character is based upon public display and external perception rather than upon self-respect.

George W. Bush concealed his drunk driving conviction, Newt Gingrich pursued Bill Clinton's impeachment while committing adultery himself, Henry Hyde chaired the impeachment committee knowing that his five-year affair with a married woman (he was married himself at the time) had broken up her family, Dan Burton kept his illegitimate child a secret, William Bennett carefully hid his gambling from prying eyes, Rush Limbaugh secretly trafficked in illegal prescription drugs while excoriating the permissive society. If these men had indeed had self- respect – if they had possessed real character according to their own definitions – they would have proclaimed their values loudly and proudly, called upon others to embrace them, and remained implacable in the face of criticism: the adulterers would have stood up for sexual freedom, Bennett would have stuck to his initial claim that gambling is a harmless recreation, and Limbaugh would have told the country he had a right to medicate his pain any way he saw fit. Instead they groveled before their accusers and aped the gestures of repentance because character is about perception, and they wanted to get back in the club by the only means available

– more posturing and pretending in accordance with public standards. There is no peg, other than a poll of one's neighbors, upon which to hang one's so-called integrity. It is all for show and all for dough. Character is thus the religion, not only of politicians in the public arena, but of sociopaths in the pub – as can be quickly discerned by overhearing the rhetoric of character and honor during barroom conversations in the rougher parts of town: "You don't mess with the man.

Either show me respect or I'll put a boot in your behind."

I know that what I find disturbing, many find appealing. To those who find empathy onerous or impossible – while character can be easily faked, real empathy, unlike sympathy or Joe DiMaggio and the simulacrum of character - 393

kindness, cannot – it is comforting to have a list of the virtues and to learn how to ape them. And there is this to be said for them, that you do have to go through the motions. It was interesting to see how some conservatives tried to recast Ted Turner's gift of a billion dollars to the United

Nations as a form of attention-grabbing egotism. Certainly, there was no way to know whether

Turner's heart bled for the victims of poverty and oppression or he said to himself, "I'd like to be celebrated for my generosity." But his critics could not deny that he had really given his money; and they could not portray themselves as equally philanthropic without actually having to part with some of their own. Joe DiMaggio was nothing but his act, and we were shallow indeed to call it a class act. But at least he dressed neatly and never groped a girl in public. He could not have achieved his reputation solely on his own say-so.

But when the first President Bush promised "a kinder, gentler nation" and the second

President Bush called for "compassionate conservatism," why did anyone believe them? Why did the media report solemnly on a new direction for the Republican Party? If we are going to fall in with the morality of character, then let us at least demand that character prove itself in deeds rather than words.

The advice of Polonius to Laertes

As I said at the conclusion of the last chapter, what discourages me may please others: if the virtues can be simulated and a sterling reputation for character can be bought for a song, the only question in the minds of many would be, "Where do I put my money?" Fortunately for those interested parties, there is no dearth of good information. The advice of Polonius to his son

Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet provides us with a handbook on how to get ahead, and our reverence for that advice has long displayed our tendency to mix up the social virtues with moral virtues. For centuries, schoolteachers have set their pupils the task of memorizing it, touting it as a compendium of ethical wisdom. Yet upon closer inspection, every bit of it is directed toward worldly success rather than moral goodness.

Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

This is advice about how to give an appearance of sobriety and maximize your social effectiveness. If you take it literally – as Polonius intends – you will encourage openness in others while remaining guarded and suspicious yourself.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched unfledged comrade.

Since rascals and robbers also have old trusted friends and are careful about making new ones,

this recommendation, like much of what Polonius says, is good advice only if you have already

good values.

Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.

Or as my father said to me, "Don't be the one to start a fight, but be the one to finish it." Such

advice flatly contradicts the Sermon on the Mount; but even if we adopt this more pugnacious

ethic, Polonius does not offer us any criteria for making sure that the quarrel is just. Many men

who are touchy about their supposed honor imagine themselves to be wary of entrance to a

quarrel, but nonetheless find "being in" a frequent occurrence. Laertes himself, later in the play,

is easily manipulated into quarreling with Hamlet on specious grounds.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

The garrulous old man is already repeating himself. He said a few sentences earlier to give thy

thoughts no tongue.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man And they in France of the best rank and station Are most select and generous, chief in that.

This piece of advice obviously has no moral dimension at all, but shines a clear light on the purpose of the whole spiel. The object of life-according-to-Polonius is to cut an impressive The advice of Polonius to Laertes - 396

figure in the world. This is exactly of a piece with Aristotle's so-called ethics: conduct yourself in such a way that others will envy your wealth and eminence. Aristotle does go a little further than Polonius and recommend generosity and magnanimity, but these too are recommended because they gild the lily of your reputation.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This is often quoted, and the loss of both money and friend proves true often enough; but it is also advice that no generous and open-hearted individual will obey. Most of us have violated both clauses. If we borrowed money and did not pay it back, we learned our own character by it.

If our friend absconded with the money we loaned, we learned, sooner rather than later, his character. A little lost money is a small price to pay for discovering the true nature of a false friend.

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

This is the most famous bit of all, and sounds right, but actually will not bear any sort of scrutiny.

Once again, this directive is helpful only to a person who is already morally excellent; but to be already morally excellent is to be already taking the advice. A narcissist, on the other hand, is true to himself and true to others but unable to understand those others; a careerist is true to himself and therefore false to others. Polonius is portrayed by Shakespeare as both narcissistic and careerist. The old councillor knew his audience, though: his advice was not lost on Laertes. The advice of Polonius to Laertes - 397

Near the end of the play, that young man is true to himself and faithful to his primitive sense of honor when he agrees to participate in the underhanded plot to murder Hamlet by means of deception and literal backstabbing.

The advice of Polonius to Laertes is purely pragmatic and even shaded toward cynicism; yet many generations of readers have seen moral fineness in its hymn to expediency. The fault lies not in Shakespeare but in ourselves. It turns out that this speech is a compendium of 16th

Century clichés. The sayings were already so familiar and trite that no audience at the Globe would have mistaken them for the author's own; and he had no intention of passing this advice off as original work. Furthermore, scholars and schoolteachers have known this for almost 200 years: when a copy of the first published version of the play was discovered in 1823 and printed in 1825, readers were able to see that Shakespeare (or the publisher) had originally enclosed all the sayings in quotation marks. Polonius is just mouthing the stock phrases of the day. Yet enthusiasts continued to memorize it and extol it even after this discovery.

Shakespeare put these truisms in the mouth of Polonius to further dramatize him as a sententious hypocrite. In his next scene, the old fool reveals how little he practices what he preaches when he sends a servant to spy on his son in Paris:

. . . and there put on him What forgeries you please; marry, none so rank As may dishonor him – take heed of that; But, sir, such wanton, wild, and usual slips As are companions noted and most known To youth and liberty.

He names gaming, drinking, fencing, swearing, quarreling, and even whoring (the latter in moderation) as examples of slips that would not dishonor Laertes; and he defends his own The advice of Polonius to Laertes - 398

underhanded project by noting the efficacy of operating "by indirections."

Shakespeare knew that the man who is capable of conducting himself in this manner toward his son is also incapable of having any insight into beauty, truth, or goodness. Such a man can only parrot the moldiest precepts from a medieval guide on how to win friends and influence people. We have slandered Shakespeare to attribute any of these precepts to him.

The advice of Polonius to Laertes encapsulates the deficiency of the conception of character as morality. The speech never addresses the core values that are supposed to animate a man of character – or rather, it is taken for granted that the pursuit of one's own reputation is the core value. Furthermore, as delineated by Polonius, character – or more to the point, the appearance of character – can be acquired by following the recipe, without the least inward assent to any of its directives.

That many people find in this recipe the highest morality to which we can aspire speaks volumes about the essentially pre-moral ethic that continues to govern most human behavior.

"The virtues" are social rather than moral. They make us into good neighbors. In so doing, they certainly have their place: anyone who has ever suffered from a bad neighbor knows how much they deserve to be honored. But the Nazi experiment exposed once and for all the gap between virtue and goodness. The Nazis were good neighbors to each other, as are members of organized crime. The Boy Scout Oath has, historically speaking, been binding on Boy Scouts in their behavior to each other: it has never prevented them from joining the army, invading Iraq, and laughing at the abuse of Muslim prisoners.

Character versus morality

The abiding illusion of the virtue-mongers is that character equals morality. To prick that balloon, let me pick a single issue.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in Brown v. the Board of

Education of Topeka, that segregated public schooling was unconstitutional.

As the years recede, and the annual celebration of the Martin Luther King holiday becomes a national tradition – among some Americans, at least – it is easy to gloss over the immediate aftermath of the school desegregation order, and to jump to the next historical milestone in the battle for civil rights, which occurred with the desegregation of public accommodations in 1964. In fact, throughout the late 1950s, the ruling of the Supreme Court was flouted so actively, and the pace of school desegregation proceeded so slowly, that there was reason to doubt whether anything more significant than token integration would ever take place.

Not until the federal courts – going, by necessity, far beyond any step originally anticipated by the Supreme Court in 1954 – imposed racial quotas, school district consolidations, and crosstown busing upon the recalcitrant states, was the possibility of everlasting de facto segregation obviated.

In other words, it is easy to forget that, throughout the South, millions of people, acting through their locally elected officials, planned first to ignore, then to sabotage, the will of the

Supreme Court – the law of the land. They supported a course of action that was, on its very Character versus morality - 400

face, criminal both in intent and outcome. In the patrician state of Virginia, men and women of

the highest character openly and proudly defied the Constitution of the United States, as

interpreted by the Supreme Court, for well over a decade. From historian James W. Ely's 1976

account of The Crisis of Conservative Virginia, we are able to learn that this defiance was

motivated by nothing more elevated than the belief in the intrinsic superiority of the white race

and the commitment to maintain white supremacy in the body politic.

In February of 1956, Harry Flood Byrd, one of the most respected members of the United

States Senate, publicly called for "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's desegregation

order. He did not thereby lose his reputation as a man of character: it was widely conceded even

by his most determined opponents that he was a "man of principle," with courtly manners to

boot. He never ceased to be accorded the utmost deference.

Four years after the Supreme Court's decision, the schools of Virginia remained 100%

segregated. Then in September of 1958, matters came to a head with the court-ordered

admission of a handful of black pupils into previously white schools. Rather than allow this to

happen, Governor Lindsay Almond, prodded by Byrd, closed the schools that would have been

affected. In 1959, Prince Edward County closed all its public schools, and became a national byword as the schools remained closed for five full years.

Ely tells us that white Virginians were nearly unanimous in their opposition to integrated schools. According to the politics of that time, conservatives believed that massive resistance and total non-compliance was the best way to fight the Supreme Court; moderates believed that absolutely minimal, token integration, in conjunction with a scheme to support private schooling for whites with state tax dollars, was a more effective way to defy the Supreme Court; and white Character versus morality - 401

liberals were almost non-existent.

Ely cannot bring himself to believe that so many could have been so wrong for so long: therefore he treats the segregationists with such a fund of sympathy that he almost begins to side with them. By neglecting the moral dimension of these events, and concentrating on social and political history, he ends up very nearly rehabilitating the resisters as principled men who were devoted to the Constitution as written. At one point, he even blames the NAACP for exacerbating the crisis by pushing too hard for the implementation of Brown v. the Board of

Education. For him, the political lesson is that change cannot be imposed from the top down, against the will of the people. This essentially pragmatic argument is allowed to overwhelm the moral argument that desegregation was an imperative of justice.

He is right to defend the Byrd organization against the charge that it conjured up massive resistance as a cynical political ploy to maintain power; but he veers too far in the other direction, by accepting at face value Byrd's pieties about resisting federal encroachment in the name of states' rights. Ely's own research, which gave him access to the private papers of many of the major players in this drama, belies this interpretation: while the massive resisters spoke publicly about state sovereignty and constitutional limits, they wrote letters to each other about the inferiority of the Negro race and the weakening of the gene pool. Massive resistance was principled, all right, but the principle was this: white supremacy and segregation forever. The palaver about states' rights and Jeffersonian principles was just rhetorical soapsuds for northern consumption. (This is not to say that the segregationists did not come to believe their own rhetoric. Since we humans are able to hear ourselves talking, our self-respect requires our rationalizations to be plausible to ourselves. Indeed, since they are rarely plausible to others, we Character versus morality - 402

are, to some degree, the main people who have to be persuaded. The high-flown arguments

never did sway the Northerners who were ostensibly the target audience; but Virginians certainly

succeeded in convincing themselves that defiance of the Supreme Court was an act of true

devotion to the Constitution.)

Ely falls victim to the confusion of values that results from mixing up character with

morality. He assumes, like most of us, that racism is immoral (which is true) and that immorality

is the behavior of people of low character (which is false). Weighed down by these contradictory

assumptions, Ely cannot credit the possibility that white Virginians, one and almost all, could

have been lacking in character. The only way out of his painful conundrum is to temper his low

opinion of institutionalized racial discrimination and grudgingly give his respect to the

segregationists.

A better way out would be to realize that high character as it is understood by the apostles

of character has always been compatible with the grossest immorality. Indeed, people of so-

called high character – precisely because they are men of principle who have "the courage of

their convictions" and are "loyal to the cause" – are more likely to hinder the improvement of

public morality than are time-servers and turncoats. (Nitzsche pointed out the laziness of merely

having convictions: what takes courage is an examination of our convictions.)

It was the white people who didn't much care about civil rights one way or the other who

constituted the tiny vanguard of racial progress in Virginia. The first significant chink in the

armor of massive resistance showed up in an unlikely place: in 1958, a group of businessmen expressed concern about the school closings. (When a corporation like General Electric, attracted by "a favorable business climate," moves to a place like Salem, Virginia, the northerners Character versus morality - 403

who transplant their families want to be sure of the quality of the public schools.) Virginia's businessmen, count on it, were generally indifferent to the disenfranchised status of black people in the state. But with an eye on the bottom line, they were among the first to sense that realism needed to be brought into play.

Senator Byrd's contribution to the greatest moral drama of 20th Century America is a matter of public record. Sensibly, we ought to do one of two things – either judge his character by his morality, or admit that character has nothing to do with morality. As long as we confuse or conflate the two, we will have to fudge the facts to fit our twisted judgments. If we continue to use the rhetoric of character as Aristotle used it, and make it synonymous with morality, we will praise Byrd as a man of the highest integrity who tragically misjudged the situation, or as a man of principle who belonged to an earlier era and could not adapt to the pace of change, or as a man of courage who, like his own hero of heroes Robert E. Lee, honorably and stubbornly defended a losing cause that history, in its implacable way of siding with the winners, has frowned upon.

We will never let the words "racist," "bigot," "defender of privilege," "tinhorn dictator," or "wild- eyed fanatic" cross our lips. But these words are apt enough to describe a man who organized a

"massive resistance" to the Constitution of the United States and closed down the public school system of an entire county, all to prevent so much as a single black child from sitting in the same classroom with a white child.

I am reminded once again of Meg Greenfield's list of the five excuses that we make for evil: we call it "stupid," or "sick," or "not necessarily unconstitutional," or "only to be expected," or "complex." Anything to avoid the word itself. Character versus morality - 404

It is not enough to say that Byrd was misguided, a politician of the old school, the product of his environment, and a good neighbor. We have to be able to see that a conventionally well- behaved man – who keeps his hands off his female constituents, abhors going into debt, and puts on a barbecue with all the fabled graciousness of the Old South – can get on the wrong side of a moral issue. Byrd had good manners and ran a tight ship. His chief virtue was to think like everyone else – what else makes a leader widely beloved? But when moral progress is afoot, lack of imagination is the agent of reaction.

When Byrd was governor of Virginia, black women who shopped at Miller and Rhoads in

Richmond had to walk to the bus station if they needed to use a bathroom. A generation later,

Byrd was given an opportunity to atone. Instead, he sided with evil and egged on the forces of evil. Goodness had to prevail in the teeth of all he could do to thwart it.

As long as we go on believing that people of "character" are "good" people, and therefore the highest product of our culture, we are going to have to call their evil something else. Or if we call it by its name, we will have to see it as a tragedy and absolve its perpetrators. Hegel did this with Antigone: he thought that Creon and Antigone were both moral exemplars, and that

Sophocles was mourning the unavoidability of their conflict.

The truth is not nearly so "complex": Creon is evil and Antigone is right. Byrd walked in darkness, and those forgotten men and women of the NAACP – still reprimanded by Ely as late as 1976 – walked in the light.

Hegel and Ely have too much sympathy for the respect that high position can buy. Men like Creon and Byrd are admired and feared and obeyed. What is that to the purpose? The gods, at least, are not fooled: they reduce Creon to dust. And we will have to take what satisfaction we Character versus morality - 405

can from the fact that Byrd's descendants are drinking from integrated water fountains while the old patriarch rolls in his grave.

The social virtue of duty: Robert E. Lee's character and morality

It will be worth while to digress a moment from Harry Byrd's admiration of Robert E. Lee to Lee

himself. When I moved from parts north to Virginia in 1954, I found to my schoolboy surprise

that "Lee-Jackson Day" was a cherished state holiday, but Abraham Lincoln's birthday was not

observed at all. I also found that Lee was regarded with an reverence only a hair's breadth

beneath that accorded to Jesus Christ. (I say this neither to be flippant nor provocative, but out of

a journalistic obligation to describe the degree of veneration exactly.)

Lee was a man who, beyond a doubt, possessed what William Bennett means by character

– and to the highest degree. He thought slavery an evil and, like Lincoln himself before the war,

looked for it to wither away in the course of time. He was a staunch unionist who never saw any

justification for the revolt of the Confederate states, and said so on the very day that Virginia

seceded. His decision to remain loyal to his state instead of his country gave further evidence of

his incorruptibility, since he had been offered the command of the entire United States Army.

Thus, out of a sense of duty, he sacrificed the goal toward which he had worked his entire life.

As a general, he gave the credit for victory to his troops and took the responsibility for defeat.

Whether we reference the checklist of qualities that make up "the six pillars" of character, or

peruse the chapter headings of any of the best-selling books, we find Lee to be a paragon of

character and the embodiment of old-fashioned integrity.

Finally, it must be admitted that he looked very distinguished indeed sitting on his horse. The social virtue of duty - 407

He photographed well.

Nonetheless, he sided with slavery and secession, rather than with abolition and union; and did so in full possession of the facts, after long and grave reflection.

Douglas Southall Freeman won a Pulitzer Prize for his exhaustive four-volume biography of Lee.

In this immense work, we find only one passage about Lee's ownership and treatment of slaves, and only one other that deals with Lee's own opinion of slavery. Let us begin with the first:

The handling of the slaves, always a difficult matter to a conscientious man, added to Lee's distress. The Negroes at Arlington numbered sixty-three, and the majority of them belonged to a few large families. They were more than Lee could work advantageously with his available capital and land, consequently he had to hire out a few of them by the year in order to supplement the income from the property. The demand for servants was so limited in northern Virginia, and the return was so small that he was compelled to send some of the Arlington Negroes to work in eastern Virginia. This may have caused something of a rebellion among them, for two of them, a man and a young woman, ran away in the hope of reaching Pennsylvania. They were captured in Maryland and were returned to Arlington. Thereupon Lee sent them to labor in lower Virginia, where there would be less danger of their absconding. That probably was the extent of the punishment imposed on them. There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee ever had them or any other Negroes flogged. The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's station forbade such a thing. But. . .

It is an interesting exercise in careful reading to vet this passage for what I like to call "stylisms."

These are sharp language practices that sing the reader's intelligence to sleep without doing any obvious violence to the facts.

Here is an example of what might be called blandifying: "They were more than Lee could work advantageously with his available capital and land . . ." Freeman is admirably direct in allowing the notion of pure economic advantage a place in the proceedings; nonetheless his The social virtue of duty - 408

formulation is colorless. Put another way, Lee owned these human beings, but did not have enough work for them to do; so the only way to make a profit out of them was to hire them out to another man. This meant breaking up their families, and placing them in a situation where their treatment would no longer be subjected to Lee's close scrutiny.

Then we have weasel words – choices of vocabulary that seem to be innocuous but seriously misstate the situation. We are told that Lee had to hire out a few of his slaves; he was compelled to send some of them to eastern Virginia. Please bear in mind that Lee did not have to do anything: if these slaves were an expense to maintain and he did not need their services, he could have set them free. He was not a pauper; he was a United States Army officer and a

Virginia gentleman, as the reference to "people of Lee's station" confirms.

Finally there is the construction of the paragraph. The ostensible "topic sentence" concerns the distress felt by a conscientious white man when he has to dirty his hands with the business of slavery; the passage concludes with a tribute to Lee's humaneness. Buried in the middle of the passage is a perfectly factual statement in the neutral language we might consider exemplary in a historian: "two of them, a man and a young woman, ran away in the hope of reaching Pennsylvania. They were captured in Maryland and were returned to Arlington." Our emotions are not cued here by any use of the vocabulary of distress. We have to supply that emotion ourselves, for Freeman has his sights set on Lee's patrician sensitivities, and not on the misery of his slaves. This is only to be expected in a work that is, after all, a biography of Lee, so

I mean no disrespect to the author. But we need not allow his sympathies to become our own.

Two human beings held in perpetual bondage fled on foot, hoping to find freedom two states away. They were pursued by slavecatchers and suffered the almost unthinkably demoralizing The social virtue of duty - 409

fate of capture, whereupon as punishment, or as the calculated act of a man who wishes to safeguard the value of his property, they were shipped even farther from their original home and deeper into the empire of slavery.

I broke off my quotation with a "but." All the preceding matter has been leading up to the real topic of the paragraph, which concerns the injustice done to Lee by a libelous treatment of the incident in the Northern press:

The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's station forbade such a thing. But false stories were spread, and on June 24, 1859, The New York Tribune printed two communications on the affair.

After Freeman prints the two libels, he states that "This was Lee's first experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators." So this has been the thrust of the whole passage: not even as good a man as Lee could escape the calumnies of the filthy abolitionists.

As for Lee's opinions, they are an excellent window into his soul. On December 27, 1856, after

President Franklin Pierce had publicly defended the spread of slavery into the territories and admonished the North to refrain from interfering with the South, Lee expressed the following views in a letter to his wife:

I was much pleased with the President's message & the report of the Secy of War, the only two documents that have reached us entire. Of the others synopsis have only arrived. The views of the Pres: of the Systematic & progressive efforts of certain people of the North, to interfere with & change the domestic institutions of the South, are truthfully & faithfully expressed. The Consequences of their plans & purposes are also clearly set forth, & they must also be aware, that their object is both unlawful & entirely foreign to them & their duty; for which they are irresponsible & unaccountable; & Can only be accomplished by them through the agency of a Civil & Servile war. In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, The social virtue of duty - 410

but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. This influence though slow, is sure. The doctrines & miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years, to Convert but a small part of the human race, & even among Christian nations, what gross errors still exist! While we see the Course of the final abolition of human Slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who Chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a Single day. Although the Abolitionist must know this, & must See that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means & suasion, & if he means well to the slave, he must not Create angry feelings in the Master; that although he may not approve the mode by which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will nevertheless be the same; that the reasons he gives for interference in what he has no Concern, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbours when we disapprove their Conduct; Still I fear he will persevere in his evil Course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?

The Christian piety expressed here is not called up by the loftiness of the issue under discussion, but is a perpetual reflex in Lee's mode of thought. No doubt it is one of the traits for which he is most revered.

But let us examine the fruits of Lee's religion a little more closely. He considers slavery an evil, but "a greater evil to the white than to the black race." How complacent, or how deluded, would a man have to be to make that statement? Lee lived across the Potomac from Washington,

D.C. He did not have the excuse of parochialism that a planter of the deep South may have had:

Maryland had the largest population of free Negroes of any state in the union, and Lee must have The social virtue of duty - 411

known that thousands of black men and women lived peacefully and thrived in the lower North.

But I can do no better than echo the words of many writers before me: if the white man's burden is greater than the black man's, let him offer at once to switch places and thereby lighten his own load; and let the black man, seeing which way the wind blows, refuse the offer and return to his advantaged position without more bitterness.

"How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful

Providence." Religion seems to stupefy Lee: God will provide. But this reasoning is always recommended to one's opponents, never to oneself. Lee's humble acquiescence to the slow hand of the Almighty applied only to the emancipation of slaves; when it came to the bloody defense of the right of secession, in which he did not even believe, Lee favored an active approach. All his fame rests upon the ferocity with which he led his men to fight in that cause.

Put another way, Lee saw that "the final abolition of human Slavery" was inevitable in the course of time, and he was eager to hasten that day by the aid of . . . prayers. But to preserve slavery in the meantime, he was nothing loath; and in this cause, he did not trust to prayer alone.

The moral world is finally turned upside down, even as Lee cites "a wise Merciful

Providence" in almost every line. To be a slave is a hard thing; to be a master is harder still. But to view the rock bottom of humanity, consider the abolitionist: "he will persevere in his evil

Course."

It remains to be noted that Lee is factually wrong: no objective historian today, viewing the decade of the 1850s, would concur with Lee's opinion that "there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country." With the economic triumph of "King Cotton," and the growth of abolitionism in the North, pro-slavery The social virtue of duty - 412

sentiment in the southern states actually hardened. Wealthy planters became contemptuous of

Yankee values and saw themselves as the true aristocrats of America. There was talk in the

1850s about spreading the blessings of involuntary servitude to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The term "wage slave" was already at hand and used by Southerners to scorn the condition of laborers in the North: slave-owners said, and really did believe, that their blacks were better treated, and better off, than industrialized whites. Lee may have been ignorant of these triumphalist attitudes in the Deep South: but ignorance is a serious fault in a man who so serenely thinks his actions accord with the will of God.

In certain respects, Abraham Lincoln viewed the black race very little differently from Lee; and he reflexively echoed the Bible almost as often. But consider two extracts from Lincoln's published speeches. The first is from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858:

Now gentlemen, I don't want to read at any greater length, but this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery and the black race. This is the whole of it, and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects – certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual The social virtue of duty - 413

endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

Now from the second inaugural address of 1865:

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it – all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war – seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange than any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether." The social virtue of duty - 414

Lee's thought is perhaps not without merit, but Lincoln's thought is a lamp to light our way down

the centuries.

It has sometimes embarrassed modern-day liberals to learn that Lincoln was, in some sort, a white supremacist. In fairness to Lincoln, however, we should note that his views evolved over time. As late as 1862, he was still pushing a plan to send the emancipated slaves away to colonies in Africa. He believed that the two races could not fruitfully coexist. His ideas were rejected by most American black freemen: as one said to him, with the kind of unstudied eloquence that must have impressed the equally homespun Lincoln, "This is our country as much

as it is yours, and we will not leave it." After it became clear to him that deportation was a pipe

dream, Lincoln reached out more and more to men like Frederick Douglass, and began to change

his notions about black intellect and ability. Douglass himself wrote, "In all my interviews with

Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with his entire freedom from prejudice against the colored race."

Lee's views did not evolve; they ossified. The crisis that came upon the United States in

1861 required every person to reassess his position and to see the issue clearly, root and branch.

Lee fell back thoughtlessly upon honor, duty, loyalty. He made a decision that no one could

criticize, grounded in tradition and conformity. Judged from the viewpoint of immediately

advancing his career, he did a hard thing; but allowing that he valued his reputation as a man of

character above the vanity of fame and wealth, he did the easy thing.

The shibboleths of character, while they are not truly indicative of morality, nonetheless

make a fair approximation of morality – most of the time. But not when the time is out of joint. The social virtue of duty - 415

At the great watersheds of moral progress, something more is required: again, lack of imagination becomes the agent of great evil.

The Solipsism of character

Solipsism, in philosophical circles, is the position that, as far as I can know, I am the only reality that exists. I do know my own mind; but every sense datum that I think I experience could be manufactured by that mind.

Like the ontological proof of the existence of god, solipsism is trivial and absurd, and therefore continues to generate thousands of densely written pages in the philosophical journals.

The "problem" is precious (in both senses of the word) because it can never be solved: it cannot be formulated and answered in any way that is proof against refutation. Therefore, it tempts the best philosophical minds to try, just as Fermat's Theorem goaded the best mathematical minds for two centuries. You haven't known boredom down to the ground until you have waded through hundreds of pages devoted to the question of how I can be certain that I am not merely a brain floating in a vat of preservative on a planet near Alpha Centauri, having all my experiences, including the experience of writing this sentence, stimulated by electrical circuitry.

Because this whirligig of intellectual activity about solipsism has been going on for a long time, the word has actually drifted down into the popular consciousness. Surprisingly, rather than undergoing contamination from the rough usage of the epistemologically unschooled, it has instead gained in intelligibility. It means, in the vernacular, my belief that my mind is the only mind that matters.

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Fred Vincy, the careless son of a comfortable middle- The solipsism of character - 417

class family, causes great hardship to a working-class family: he persuades Caleb Garth to co- sign a loan, and when Fred finds himself unable to pay, the combined savings of every Garth family member is required to satisfy the debt. Yet Fred's first thoughts are not of the sufferings of his victims:

Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonourable and sink in the opinion of the Garths; he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them. . . . Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

Eliot's unsurpassed powers of moralization and generalization were never put on better display.

My question to myself is always, "Do I think I have done evil?" This question is not, be it said immediately, automatically equivalent to ethical egoism: I may, in the privacy of my mind, subscribe to values that put the happiness of all other sentient beings ahead of my own. What stamps me as solipsistic is my insistence that, having consulted my own mind and my own values, I have exhausted my obligations, which are solely to myself.

Next, I may ask, "Do others think I have done evil?" But by others, I probably mean first of all the people who are important to me, and after them almost everybody else in the world . . . except my victims. The "other-directed" individual will be easily satisfied by a negative response to this second question, especially if it is delivered by his friends and associates, while the more admired "inner-directed" person will be mollified only when he is able to clear himself with his own conscience in accordance with the first question. But these two types may resemble each other in giving short shrift to the claims of the people who can offer the most cogent testimony.

For this reason, there is no important difference between the fanatical religious believer's The solipsism of character - 418

devotion to God, the Kantian philosopher's reverence for the categorical imperative, and the principled atheist's commitment to make his conduct square with the demands of his conscience.

These three persons may disagree vehemently about the ultimate ground of moral authority; but they are alike in deciding every moral question solely by reference to their own self-respect.

Amusingly, most of us confuse self-respect with the respect of others – "I had too much self-respect to let him get away with treating me that way." What then is the genuine article? It is presumably the determination to reference no code of honor except my own, and to remain loftily indifferent to the dissenting opinions of others. Setting aside the potential solipsism, narcissism, and even psychosis of such a standard, it can seem admirable up to a point, and may sometimes be courageous when the individual, like Henry David Thoreau, holds to a code that is higher than that of the general population. But insofar as one's own code is a code, it is already in place, and thus external to the given situation; and the facts of the case have only to be plugged into the pre-existing format and the machinery will spit out a solution that is felt by "the man of honor" to have been predetermined by morality itself. So theist, deist, and atheist all consult an authority that is fixed and rigid – one that is both anterior and exterior to the configuration of the situation. This authority is unable to have anticipated what may be new in the situation, and will be unmoved by what is new in it. If I go this route, I think of myself as good or evil based upon the congruency of my behavior with the answer that is given in a mechanical fashion by the authority; and the greater my "self-respect," the less I will be willing to allow myself to be second-guessed by any other person, including myself. Indeed, by so much as I adhere to the solution generated in computer-like fashion by the algorithm prescribed by my code, (however I may be tempted by some novel feature in the situation to abandon the principle), the more I will The solipsism of character - 419

seem to be "a person of integrity." Those who adhere most firmly and inflexibly to the

requirements of authority, who show the least inclination to manipulate those requirements or

bend them in a particular direction, are admired throughout the world as "men and women of the

highest character."

It can be breathtaking is to see the representatives of the three camps mentioned here –

the monotheistic, the Kantian deistic, and the atheistic – praise each other across the party lines

of religion and ideology as men of principle, even though each may consider his opponent to be

the abject slave of external authority and completely unwilling to deviate in the least from its

standard, and the standards themselves to be emanating from a source that the admirer considers

to be morally bereft. ("I think his conclusion in the case is monstrous, and based on superstition,

but I admire the firmness of his convictions and the consistency with which he adheres to them.

He is perfectly sincere, incapable of hypocrisy, and would be the last man in the world to sell out

his principles.") All three then join in deploring the supposed lack of principle to be found

among alleged hedonists, materialists, and relativists. There is no greater proof of our thralldom

to "character," yet Alasdair MacIntyre and all the other post-Aristotelians believe that we have strayed too far from "the virtues."

We often speak of a person's probity extending into his or her private conduct, but honor is a public virtue. The men of high character want above all else to be known as men of high character. They are other-directed, often to an obscene degree. Their concern with their own reputation for honor makes them inordinately concerned with the opinions of others. An admiring biography of Jefferson Davis by Felicity Allen demonstrates rigorously (in spite of the The solipsism of character - 420

author's intention) how narrow the terms of success may be and how manifold the pitfalls. Allen delivers many a sermon on what "Southern honor" required of a man, and she lauds Davis for living up to the code. Setting aside her inscrutable, or appalling, belief that this code was honorable – many people at the time thought it was not – she fails to see that obeisance to such a code is not in any case a distinctively moral stance. Davis rose to prominence by answering the call to fight in the Mexican War – one of the most shameful chapters in the military and diplomatic history of our country. He defended slavery, not merely as a temporary evil, as did

Robert E. Lee, but as a noble institution that bestowed the benefits of Christian civilization on heathen savages and constituted the most rational and benevolent relationship that could exist between capitalist owner and plantation worker. He foresaw the continuation of slavery in perpetuity and he favored its expansion into all the unsettled territories of the West. He argued that his chattel slaves were better off than the "wage slaves" of New England. (He neglected only to explain why, if this were so, he did not free them immediately, confident that they would recognize the benefits that he was conferring on them and voluntarily sign contracts to continue working for him in exchange for what he was already giving them.) He continued the desperate rebellion of the South even past the date of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and was captured while trying to get to Texas to continue the struggle by means of guerrilla warfare. He died believing that slavery and the Southern secession had been just. In all these actions, he did indeed comport himself like an officer and a gentleman. He was kind and respectful to his slaves, kept his word, abhorred political chicanery, stood always on principle. As a man of honor he refused, even during the financial hardship of his old age, to collect the military pension that was due to him from the federal government for his service in the Mexican War. He would take The solipsism of character - 421

no penny from the damn Yankees.

Allen's defense of Davis is aggressively sympathetic to the values of the Confederacy,

which is certainly a novelty in our day and time; but she is safely orthodox when she testifies to

Davis's sincerity in hewing to these values. Another biographer, William J. Cooper, Jr., concurs

with her high estimation of her hero's character. Davis was principled, consistent, dependable,

and incorruptible; he was, moreover, intelligent, well-read, and cultured.

Of course, when we list them like this, the virtues that make up character can sound like the Boy Scout oath; and therein lies the problem. Davis knew the items on the list, and set his heart on checking them off. Such a feat can be accomplished by someone who otherwise has very little understanding of the world or of his fellow humans.

The virtues are not exhibited in moral tournaments, but in the arena of everyday events.

Davis put his formidable character behind the defense, not just of slavery per se, but of the right

of the South to impose pro-slavery policies on every other state in the Union; and rather than

allow the constitutionally elected president of the United States to take office and perhaps limit

the spread of slavery (while leaving the institution otherwise unmolested), he led 11 states into

secession, war, and catastrophe, at the end of which the corpses of more than 700,000 young men

populated the cemeteries of our battlefields.

But even setting aside the outcome, which no one foresaw, is it not manifest that Davis's

honor was detached not only from genuine morality, but also from rival conceptions of honor? –

for who would say that Lincoln was not a man of honor? And because consistency is so valued

as one of the emblems of honor, Davis was even discouraged from undertaking a reappraisal of

the narrow terms of his code and adopting a better one. He would not have wished to appear The solipsism of character - 422

fickle.

Viewed in a certain light, living by a code of honor is an especially egregious form of

selfishness. Allen is acutely aware of the challenge posed to her noble picture of Davis by his

view of slavery – which was only strengthened by his lifelong reading of the Christian gospels –

so she works hard to rationalize it; but she remains blithely unaware of the way his obsession

with his own integrity also caused him to be an excessively touchy, brittle, and ultimately

ineffectual leader of the Confederate government. She is so enamored of the manly virtues, and

Davis's embodiment of them, that she glosses over not only his failures of moral imagination but

also his inability to sustain even an Aristotelian reasonableness during the innumerable personal

and political quarrels that plagued his administration.

These lengthy biographies convey Davis's rectitude in dozens and hundreds of set pieces,

but Cooper's fails to give any clear impression at all of Davis's personality, and Allen's, while

painting a more vivid picture, leaves us mystified as to how a man so accomplished and heroic

could have failed at anything he set his mind to do. Neither biographer saw fit to quote this

particular nugget out of the mouth of Davis's devoted wife Varina: "If anyone differs with Mr.

Davis he resents it and ascribes the difference to the perversity of his opponent." By including

the quotation in a one-page sketch of Davis, James M. McPherson brings the leader of the

Confederacy into sudden focus as a gifted but limited individual and fills in a blank missing from

the thousand-plus pages supplied by the two apologists. Honor is socially given. Men who have it are avid to retain it, and do not take lightly the opinion of others who believe that they have lost it – even though one part of the code ostensibly calls upon them to conduct themselves without regard for the opinion of those others. Davis could be moved by no man when he thought he was The solipsism of character - 423

in the right, but he could be stung by any man who questioned his rightness; and he could not understand other men well enough to ascribe to his opponents any other motive than "perversity."

The comparison with Lincoln is once again apt, and highly unfavorable to Davis. Lincoln named his former political rivals to his cabinet and repeatedly humbled himself to keep them happy. As McPherson says simply, "Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument."

In her study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp during World

War II, Gitta Sereny similarly mistakes the template of character for the truth of morality, but in her case the error manifests itself as a poorly reasoned condemnation rather than inappropriate praise. Stangl typified "the banality of evil" even more than Adolf Eichmann: he was a mere administrator who never even demonstrated a casual prejudice against Jews, much less a virulent ideology of anti-Semitism; and unlike Eichmann, he never felt any devotion to Hitler as a leader.

Sereny's diagnosis of Stangl's crime is weakness of character: she believes – because her narrative of character requires her to believe it – that at some turning point Stangl embraced his own corruption. Evil can arise no other way in a character-driven morality. Therefore, in her interviews with him, she pressed Stangl repeatedly to remember the moment when his complicity in genocide came home to him. But she never finds that moment, and Stangl never concedes that he was truly complicit: indeed, he makes a convincing case that he had succumbed, not to temptation, but to fate. In the terminology of philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, he had bad "moral luck." He was born at the wrong time in the wrong country.

Sereny is finally reduced to taunting him that he lacked the courage to desert. But she never convinces Stangl, or the reader, that such an act would have had any beneficial The solipsism of character - 424

consequence: he would almost certainly have perished, his wife and children might have been subjected to reprisals, and the Jews at Treblinka would have died on schedule.

Sereny is gripped by the allure of an updated version of Jefferson Davis's vaunted honor, and it is strange that she becomes so preoccupied with someone else's possession of it: she wants

Stangl to have wanted to be morally clean; to have stood up, or at least to wish that he had stood up, and said, "I won't do your dirty work." He would thereby have saved his own soul and no one else's. It is not clear that "courage" is the right word to describe such an act of spiritual self- aggrandizement – and it should not necessarily even be called a moral act because, allowing for the truth of the rough definition that morality is what we owe to others, there is little reason to believe that any other person would have benefitted from it. "Character" is thus exposed by her own analysis as an ethically empty set of abstractions: I am required to consult, not the reality of other people, but the binding code of conduct that dictates my behavior regardless of other people. The demands of character are satisfied when I act stereotypically after consulting my own desires and needs. (My desire or need to have a reputation for truth, integrity, manliness, or even kindness and generosity, is no less a desire or need than an urge to take what does not belong to me.)

This taint of "inclination" – of my desire to prosper by my act, if only in the realm of moral reputation – was a large theoretical pothole menacing Kant when he set about formulating his categorical imperative. To try to drive around it, he proposed a standard that would be entirely moral and admit no element of expediency. He argued that if any corner of the heart desires the act, then the act is not distinctively moral. Therefore, the only act that can be said to be altogether moral is a wholly disinterested act. This produced one of his greatest errors – his The solipsism of character - 425

ingenuous supposition that there could ever be such an act. As Tolstoy ruthlessly illustrates time and again, as soon as I do an apparently disinterested act, my immediate response is to swell with self-approbation over my moral excellence. Do not ask me to be disinterested – I cannot be so if

I am a sentient being. Judge me rather by my interests. And here the biographical record suggests that Kant's greatest interest may have been, not his fellow humans as lovable but exasperating comrades, but the reputation he gained among them for being a man of principle – one whose pursuit of the truth overruled all mundane inclinations. In fact, he succumbed to one of the most vulgar inclinations of all: what he valued most, what he inclined to most seriously, was just this reputation for integrity, probity, and intellectual ascendancy.

When John Wesley made his morally sick pronouncement that he "would not tell a willful lie to save the souls of the whole world," he spoke as a true Kantian and a man of the "highest character"; but he also revealed that his desire to be, and to be known as, such a man had metastasized into a self-absorption that was so devouring that it could prompt him to imagine and to justify evil on a cosmic scale so long as his impoverished notion of his own self-respect would be vindicated. Kant dared to say in all seriousness that consequences do not count in making a determination of morality. Wesley's statement, to Kant, would be distinctively moral because it is unadulterated by any practical consideration. With touching naivete, Kant overlooks a consequence of tremendous importance to Wesley and altogether contaminated by worldly interest and ambition: this very statement so aggrandized Wesley's standing in the community of religious zealots that it is still quoted today as a signifier of his unexampled piety.

The common denominator in Kantian Morality and the Code of Honor is the irrelevance of empathy to duty. Fairness to others may be one of "the virtues," and Kant may universalize The solipsism of character - 426

such fairness as a "maxim," but in both cases fairness is formal in its requirements and one engages in it out of a duty to oneself. I am commanded by virtue and morality to give you a piece of pie that is the same size as mine, but I am not commanded to listen to you or understand your reasons for requesting a departure from the rule. I have, more than once, had food forced upon me by "gracious" hostesses who would not accept my explanation for my lack of appetite – I had to either force down as many bites as I could or resolve to hurt their feelings. I have never been refused when I asked for an extra helping to assuage an inordinate hunger; but millions of children have grown up in homes where any such request in violation of statistical fairness is regarded as self-indulgence and automatically refused "on principle."

Before our children have the psychological mobility to access other minds, we teach them fairness in the merely external and social sense that I have just indicated. As soon as they grasp the concept, they become fanatics of the letter of the law. Every parent recognizes the falsity of

Freud's imputation of a devouring egotism and selfishness to children: we are likelier to see them insist that the cake be apportioned equally to all. But they will also tend to be punctilious about the exactness of the serving sizes – they would measure to within an eighth of an inch if they had the means to do so. It is only when they achieve psychological mobility and greater powers of empathy and understanding that they are able to say, "You like cake more than I do, it means little to me and a lot to you, so I'll give you some of mine, which will feel the same to both of us."

Moral codes belong to an earlier stage of moral development both in individuals and in the species. The "commandments" do not call upon anyone to understand his neighbor, but instead impose inelastic obligations and duties toward other members of the tribe (and a very different set of obligations as duties toward those who are not members). Moral codes assume a The solipsism of character - 427

lack of psychological mobility. (It is because the Ten Commandments are so morally primitive

in conception that they are the focus of efforts to post them in every school and courthouse.

There is no similar public movement to post copies of the Sermon on the Mount anywhere at all,

not even in churches.)

Because human consciousness is continuing to evolve – because more and more people

are becoming psychologically mobile and individuals themselves are becoming more and more

aware – no religion and no set of principles can be morally valid over time. No fixed

dispensation can keep up with the evolution of our ability to empathize with others.

Once we possess psychological mobility, we do not need rules of conduct except as the

training wheels that acclimate small children to the realm of moral agency. When they are older,

the children will, if they have been well and truly taught, discard such crude orienting devices

and enter the realm of genuine ethical behavior. By means of intelligence, knowledge, and

empathy, they will achieve everything that a rigid code of behavior tries to prescribe in advance,

without the obstruction posed by either the inflexibility of the code or the formalism that would tempt them to believe that they have satisfied the requirements of morality when they have gone

"by the book."

In short, ethics must be situational in order to be ethical at all, and the conservative outcry

against "situation ethics" is the last gasp of the discredited past against the enlightened present

and future. In devising his categorical imperative, Kant got the situational part right but the

ethical part wrong.

Kant made the elementary mistake of projecting his own sentience onto everybody else.

He saw (what he believed to be) his moral duty with the utmost clarity, and he was unable for The solipsism of character - 428

even a moment to forget this duty when he was tempted by (what he took to be) his baser inclinations. His own ethic was impressive: he condemned the diplomatic conduct of all the monarchies of Europe; he risked serious reprisals from the Prussian government for espousing the republican form of government and openly applauding the French Revolution; and he endured threats and censorship because he would not moderate his utter contempt for the clergymen of Germany and their manner of perverting the gospel teaching. But by taking his own moral sense to be an irreducible fact of human nature, he persuaded himself that all individuals know right from wrong and duty from inclination. From this it follows that, in his view, evil is always freely chosen. He defined "radical evil" as the conscious subordination of duty to inclination.

In old age, Kant found that Martin Lampe, who had served him for over 40 years, was drinking excessively and had stolen some money from him. The philosopher could not will it as a universal maxim that all thieves everywhere should go unpunished for their larcenies.

Therefore he discharged the old servant.

The entire truth of this episode is unknown: Lampe may well have been taking cruel liberties with a master who was sinking into senility; and Kant allegedly provided a retirement income for Lampe. But for purposes of comparison, let us assume that Kant encountered

Huckleberry Finn's dilemma and failed where Huck succeeded: if Kant's actual conduct was more magnanimous than my account indicates, I am nonetheless confident that my treatment of the categorical imperative is sound.

The boy and the man each faced a situation in which the prescription of moral duty seems to be utterly clear: Huck is commanded to turn the runaway slave Jim over to the authorities; and The solipsism of character - 429

Kant is commanded to punish Lampe. Huck's crisis of conscience in Mark Twain's novel The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is justly celebrated as perhaps the greatest scene in American literature. Jim has joined Huck on a raft floating down the Mississippi River. Huck is escaping from his brutal father and Jim is hoping to reach freedom in the North. But Huck is bothered by his conscience, which reminds him of the evil that he is doing to Jim's owner by aiding and abetting Jim's flight. Huck has no other template for evaluating the morality of his action than the criminal code and the mores of his society: therefore he sees himself as an accessory to a theft of lawful property. At the climactic scene depicting this conflict, Huck is so tormented by his qualms that he cannot pray. Just to see if his burden can be lightened, he drafts the letter that he thinks he is obligated to send to Jim's owner.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking . . . .

At first Huck thinks about how pleasant it is to be saved, but then he goes on thinking and remembers all the good times with Jim, and all the instances of Jim's kindness and generosity to him.

. . . and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a- trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell" – and tore it up.

Professors of American literature and everyday readers alike savor the irony of Twain's The solipsism of character - 430

presentation, in which the angel of conscience commands Huck to do a deed everyone today

views as despicable and the devil tempts Huck to do the right thing. But the scene also makes its

way into philosophy courses on ethics, because Twain's depiction of antebellum morality is

accurate. In 1885, the year Twain published the novel, the reader had a perspective that would

not have been available to either a fictional or real personage in the Old South. The dilemma

would not have seemed ironic to anyone who experienced it in 1845, when aiding a runaway

slave was a punishable crime as well as an affront to conventional Christian morality. Then it

would have been a straightforward contest between recognizing the commandment of morality

and obeying it or flouting it by "doing what you like."

Huck is a well-realized portrait of an ordinary, relaxed, complacent moral agent. His simple conception of right and wrong is molded entirely by the moral authorities of the day.

Indeed, he has no idea that any other standard could exist: what society says is right is right, by

definition. Kant, in striking contrast, was a more autonomous moral agent: he answered to no

other man in the world, consulted no social code, and tested his maxims against the categorical

imperative in the silent chamber of his conscience.

Yet, strangely, or not so strangely, in the matter of thieving servants, the answer given by the timeless, abstract categorical imperative required Kant to do pretty much what his most morally insensate neighbors would have done. Thieving servants must be discharged, because life would be unlivable if all servants everywhere were allowed to steal. After all, Kant had formulated the categorical imperative and construed the proper means of testing it in a way that would vindicate his own already-existing moral principles – I don't blame him for this, who wouldn't do the same? – and those principles had been inculcated in him by his pietistic mother. The solipsism of character - 431

So, for instance, when Kant in his role as moral philosopher finds that suicide can never be right,

or that lying, even to save an intended victim from a murderer, will always be wrong, he was ratifying maxims that he had long since adopted as the child of religiously strict parents – principles that had enabled him to lead exactly the sort of life that had satisfied his inclination to

be a respected intellectual throughout a long, profitable, and happy tenure as a professor of

philosophy in the quiet city of Königsberg.

So the maxim about thieving servants gave him a result not so different in effect from the

maxim about stolen property consulted by Huckleberry Finn. But never mind particular cases:

the exalted moral law as Kant fashioned it commands us in all cases to act without empathy,

understanding, or imagination and to ignore the human bonds that connect us to other people.

Here, duty commanded Kant to fall to the level of the Prussian state while congratulating himself

for having done the dutiful thing against his inclination to take pity on Lampe. For an

inclination, in Kant's system, will often be of just this type: by no means will it always embody

hedonism, selfishness, or vice. In his most notorious test case, in which he expounds our

obligation to tell the murderer the truth when asked where the intended victim is hiding, Kant is

aware that all our best feelings will be enlisted on behalf of the lie: therefore he admonishes us to

remember that we must allow no admixture of personal motives into considerations of duty. The

title of his tract on this question says it all: "On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic

Concerns." I have supplied the italics: Kant's position is that there is no right to lie, from any

motive however noble, under any circumstance, in any galaxy, at any time in the history of the

universe. And Kant might have argued similarly that you must discharge the thieving servant,

whatever the servant's excuse, whatever his plight, and however attached to him you are. Duty is The solipsism of character - 432

a stern taskmaster.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all – or nearly all, for Huck dares damnation by standing up to it. But Kant fears nothing in the world so much as just this disobedience to his conscience, however obscene its commandments. And at last we do edge close to the abyss of radical evil. Kant thinks that we go over the edge when we subordinate moral duty to our inclinations – even such inclinations as our most benevolent motives (which are still just "what we like"). He cannot imagine that the real conflict may be between two conceptions of moral duty – one that is social, formal, prescriptive, based on limited information, and cruel in its consequences versus another that flows from an empathic response to the novel moral configuration of a unique circumstance. What Kant misinterprets as the tugging of lowly inclination – the pity that a kindhearted master takes on a thieving servant, for instance, or the impulse to help a runaway slave – may be the genuine article of moral duty, an intuition of a future ethic that will make the past seem shameful: but it is easier for us to succumb to the temptation to follow a moral rule, one that cannot possibly do justice to the richness of the never- to-be-repeated human situation in which we find ourselves. So, throughout his life, Kant did his idea of duty, without the least consciousness that his idea could be wrong. It was just this certainty that Nietzsche lampooned so mercilessly in Aphorism 335 of The Gay Science, when he noted that our moral pomposity cannot withstand an investigation into the origins of our principles.

Kant naively thought that inclination always opposes and undermines duty. But as I have suggested and Huck Finn's dilemma shows us, the conflict may be between rival conceptions of duty; and the radical evil may be to obey the ancient despicable duty that is grounded in rigid, The solipsism of character - 433

fixed, inflexible, "absolute," and "principled" imperatives and to ignore the newly minted duty

that arises as an empathic inclination in response to an ad hoc situation. But I might just as well have said that the conflict is between two different inclinations: for not even Kant can write his way, or live his way, out of the paradox that we must possess an inclination to perform our moral duty, or we just won't bother. In fact, his own strongest inclination was to do his duty at all times. This produced, as he hoped it would, a spotless reputation, but it did not prevent even his closest friends from noticing that he talked more than he listened, bristled at contrary opinions, and rarely went out of his way to lend a helping hand to anyone. Most people do exactly what Kant did: they make their own inclination into a moral duty. There is no subordination of one to the other: the two are fused into one. Like six-year-old Calvin in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, they feel a duty to follow their inclinations. In Kant's case, that averaged out to a pretty high standard; but we would be blind to his nature if we did not see how much he wanted to be morally upright – and to be known to be so.

In promulgating such a flawed conception of moral duty, Kant could not transcend the dogma of his early religious training, which told him that man is a fallen angel. He implies that Everyman recognizes the demand of morality and thus knows, on every occasion of dereliction, that he has

"given in" to himself. This seemed the more likely to him because he was so sure that he would know if he were succumbing to inclination – whereas anyone with the smallest capacity for self- awareness would know that the greater peril is our ability to pull the wool over our own eyes.

It is so much worse than Kant imagined: we do evil out of obedience to the moral law as we conceive it. We do it with a clear conscience, certain that we have not given in to ourselves, The solipsism of character - 434

but have instead stayed the course and satisfied the demands of duty. Himmler's famous speech

to his SS officers is the prototype of dutiful self-sacrifice, of the stern setting-aside of tenderhearted inclination in favor of a disinterested and principled course of action. There was nothing in it personally for the perpetrators of genocide, other than the satisfaction of a job well done and a promotion in the normal course of service.

Obedience is an inclination – one of the basest. We humans symbolize our ideas of ourselves with every gesture, performing before an inner gallery of superegoistic judges even when there is no one else in the room to applaud us. We aspire, with all the appurtenances of

vanity, to be known to all onlookers, phantom and real, as "persons of integrity," however

variously we define the meaning of that phrase. Even the sociopath has his dignity, and his duty

to himself, and imagines that he gains the admiration of the right sort of people – other tough

guys – when he does it.

So Kant's principle can be adapted this way: radical evil occurs when an evil inclination –

one that produces avoidable suffering in others – is sincerely mistaken for a moral duty and

enthroned as a maxim under the categorical imperative, and I will it that I myself, and all sentient

beings, should and must perform this duty.

I was reminded, as I surveyed this moral terrain, of musicologist Curt von Westernhagen's

singularly clumsy defense of Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism. He avers that Wagner hated one particular Jew, the rival composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and calumniated the whole race only to rhetorically heighten his indirect attack on this individual. (We may note as an aside that

Wagner's animus against Meyerbeer was fueled by ignorance and paranoia: his information about The solipsism of character - 435

Meyerbeer's alleged machinations against him was no better than his information about Judaism.)

Had Wagner proceeded openly to attack Meyerbeer in person, he would be a caricature of

Kant's radically evil man, subordinating his moral duty to treat Meyerbeer fairly to his selfish

inclination to take revenge for imagined persecutions. He would, of course, be aware of this fall

from grace, and have a touchy conscience about it. In his dealings with other men, his having

succumbed to the evil inclination in one instance of maximum temptation would not necessarily

impair his ability to revert to the good principle and resume a moral life. Aristotle labeled such

men morally "incontinent" – pretty good fellows as the world wags, but given to bouts of

weakness.

The comedy of Westernhagen's defense is that he cannot see how much more despicable

it makes Wagner out to be: we might grudgingly respect the bigot who, with his head filled with

all kinds of intellectual chaff, mistakenly but sincerely believes that the Jews are a menace to

civilization; but what excuse can we make for a man who, because of his disappointment about

the Paris Opera, would stir up vulgar and malevolent feelings against millions of people in order

to get at one man, about whom he is in any case misinformed? Even this hilarious scenario,

however, requires Wagner to be conscious, to some degree, of his evil. But the truth is grimmer

than either Kant or Westernhagen can conceive. Wagner, hating Meyerbeer on personal grounds

and hating all Jews on the basis of abstract principles derived from various pseudoscientfic books

about biology, anthropology, and history, made anti-Semitism a maxim of moral duty binding on all sentient beings. He was glad to test his maxim by the categorical imperative and to universalize the duty to eliminate all such parasitic races which, if allowed to thrive, would doom civilization itself. In fact, the reasoning is perfectly like Kant's inane reasoning about suicide. The solipsism of character - 436

Can we will it as a universal maxim that the human race should, through its own fecklessness, cease to exist? Certainly not. Well, Jewish corruption, says Wagner, will rob us of our very humanity – of our culture, our civilization, and our achievements that have raised us above the animals. The Aryan race would die if all its members simultaneously committed suicide, in violation of Kant's categorical imperative; but it would also die a slower death from blood- poisoning, if Wagner's categorical imperative were flouted. Would not even the Jew himself agree with the maxim that a sentient being must act to resist the parasite that is sucking the life out of him? How much more so must the parasite that endangers the entire race be resisted?

Kant the naive psychologist imagines that a man like Wagner has subordinated true morality – which would be Kant's morality, of course – to his inclination. But Wagner was perfectly sincere. It counts a little for him that he was all talk; but it counts against him that he talked out loud, incessantly, in public. Adolf Hitler read about it and took it to heart. To him,

Wagner's maxims were the acme of moral duty. Radical evil appears, then, not when an evil inclination temporarily overrides a moral principle, but when the evil inclination permanently lodges itself in the person as a moral principle. Duty tempts Huckleberry Finn, and he resists it.

It tempts Kant, and he follows it. And Wagner, believing himself to be a moral genius, and supported in this belief by myriad followers, not only follows it, but succumbs to the further temptation to legislate principles of morality with the serene assurance of a Prophet. In 1941, millions of Germans followed these principles into the Russian winter out of an imperious sense of duty and at the cost of all their natural inclinations to prefer the comforts of home.

At his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Adolf Eichmann, who was the chief bureaucratic administrator of the Holocaust, astounded many in the courtroom by invoking the categorical The solipsism of character - 437

imperative and giving a reasonable layman's account of it. He said that he subscribed to Kant's great principle that one must do one's duty for the sake of duty itself. He further suggested that a

"little man," such as himself, might not be as morally sophisticated as the philosophers, or know as much about the world situation as the leaders who are charged with the grave responsibility of looking after the welfare of the entire nation: therefore he would do well to take his cue from these greater and more learned spirits. If he adopts as his substitute maxim the Nazi formulation of the categorical imperative ("Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it"), is that so wrong? Is that not the conception of duty that is held by most people?

More disturbingly, he said that no respected person of a higher social standing than himself ever suggested to him that the extermination of the Jews was morally wrong. He had done his duty: against any personal inclination he might have had to spare some of the Jews, he had followed the orders of the nation's governors, who had come to power constitutionally and enjoyed the overwhelming support of the population. The indignation that this defense provoked among all the observers of the trial cannot serve as a refutation. Presumably Kant would have opposed the

Nazis on numerous grounds, and have tested the racist maxims of the Nazi Party differently, with different results. But that Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann revered the moral law in all its abstract glory, felt its demands to be categorical, and thought that they were doing their duty irrespective of their inclinations seems to me to be, as Hannah Arendt said about her famous formulation of

"the banality of evil," simply the description of a fact.

In praise of lying

The trend among most so-called moral philosophers is to tell me, at excruciating length and in exasperating detail, what I already know. Professor Sissela Bok's surprisingly successful jeremiad Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, first published in 1978, tells me that

lying is wrong and I should not do it. In support of this daring proposition, she invokes Aristotle,

who says that lying is "mean and culpable" and ought to be avoided – another choice nugget from

The Philosopher.

There needed no ghost come from the grave, nor Ivy League scholar, to tell us this.

The principle of veracity

Here is John Wesley on the subject of lying:

Therefore, there is no absurdity, however strange it may sound, in that saying of the ancient Father, "I would not tell a willful lie to save the souls of the whole world."

If we are allowed to take this statement literally, I think we could make it the basis for a diagnosis of mental illness. Bok grudgingly allows that it goes a little too far:

There are at least some circumstances which warrant a lie. And foremost among them are those where innocent lives are at stake, and where only a lie can deflect

the danger. But, in taking such a position, it would be wrong to lose the profound concern which the absolutist theologians and philosophers express – the concern for the harm to trust and to oneself from lying, quite apart from any immediate effects from any one lie.

So she winds up on the side of Augustine, who, like Wesley, considered every lie a sin, but

allowed that a sin to save a life might be pardonable – if the liar repents.

Bok's own position starts from "the principle of veracity," in support of which she again

references Aristotle. (Quoting the author of the Nicomachean Ethics is the only way for Bok to

top herself, or bottom herself, after her homage to the fanatical and inhuman doctrines of Wesley

and Augustine: with his utter lack of imagination, Aristotle more than decompensates for his

calm secular rationalism.) Bok's principle of veracity is that truth is automatically to be preferred

to falsehood:

This premise gives an initial negative weight to lies. It holds that they are not neutral from the point of view of our choices; that lying requires explanation, whereas truth ordinarily does not.

In short, the onus of immorality is attached to the very act of lying, until it can be proven

otherwise. The liar must make his defense in the face of a presumption of guilt.

Bok's principle of veracity is a three-legged stool: one leg is the liar's loss of integrity; the second is the dupe's victimization; the third is the ripple effect of the lie throughout society.

Over and over again, she reminds me that every time I lie, I damage my own integrity; I abuse the

confidence of the person to whom I am lying; and I weaken the fragile threads of trust that bind

society. This last argument is her trump card in every situation: if I can convince her that my

dupe is unharmed and my motives are pure, she will still insist that the collateral damage from

even the most benevolent lie is sure to be greater than any immediate benefit conferred. In praise of lying - 440

Since Bok spends a great deal of time stating the obvious, allow me also to take the risk of being overly explicit. Criminals, sociopaths, and self-aggrandizing careerists lie for personal advantage. The people to whom they lie suffer real losses. There is no code of morality anywhere in the world that justifies a lie that harms another person who is a member in good standing of the group governed by the code. (It is usually permissible, and sometimes even meritorious, to lie to people outside the in-group, but that is another essay.)

Notice, however, that we do not need to focus upon lying per se in arriving at our conclusion in such egregious cases: we can reason from a definite harm to an injured party back to the cause of the harm.

In any case, not even Bok is going to spend 250 pages preaching to the deaf: sociopaths will not read her, certainly will not heed her; moreover, they agree with her about the viciousness of lying, and differ only in celebrating, rather than deploring, their perpetration of the evil. No, this book is not aimed at the brazen selfish liars – toward people who "lack character"; it is aimed at us complacent conventional bourgeois backsliders who think so highly of ourselves, who try to get away with rationalizing the lies we tell on behalf of ostensible social goods. Therefore, most of her book consists of those interesting cases where the lie is well-intentioned and, on the surface at least, benefits the dupe. This saws off one leg of the principle by minimizing the moral qualms we may have on behalf of the victim; but Bok is convinced that she can still sit comfortably on her two-legged stool, issuing injunctions against all the disinterested liars because of the damage to their own integrity and to society at large.

So Bok conducts an inventory of all the textbook social lies and punctures the justifications for them one by one. Every chapter follows a predictable format: first the situation, In praise of lying - 441

with the liar's self-serving explanation; then her implacable response, which is always just a re- worded citation of the principle of veracity; finally her claim that the stool is still standing.

Here, for instance, is the coup de grace she administers to doctors who prescribe placebos:

The practice of giving placebos is wasteful of a very precious good: the trust on which so much in the medical relationship depends.

And here is her conclusion about legal chicanery:

Once again, what is needed is the ability to shift perspectives and to see not only the needs that press for perjury and lying, but the effect that such practices have upon the deceived and social trust.

She should have taken her epigraph from T. S. Eliot:

You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?

Her one-note approach is especially incommodious because the situations are so incommensurable. For instance, not even the American Bar Association has come out in favor of the specious arguments that are used to justify a lawyer's knowing participation in the perjury of his client – Bok is on firm footing here, but it is also very safe footing. But many of Bok's situations are far less obvious: the doctor who lies to the patient, painting a rosy scenario in order to promote the patient's peace of mind; the lobbyist who, for a good cause, gains the support of the venal congressman by misleading him. Bok reaches her immovable end by her irresistible means in these instances also. In praise of lying - 442

A little fallacy in the principle

Well, since Bok requires such yeoman duty out of the principle of veracity, we had better see if it

holds up.

It does not. In fact, Bok is still on the cover of her book when her argument begins to run

off the rails. What we have in the title itself – Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life –

is a kind of non-sequitur. Lying, in and of itself, is neither right nor wrong; moral choice enters

the picture only after we fill in the details of the situation. In flat contradiction of the principle of

veracity, we can confidently assert that lying is morally neutral, and that truth requires just as

much justification as falsehood.

(It is sobering to realize that a problem can creep in as early as the colon on the book

cover.)

If speech is a technology for furthering the aims of the organism, then there is nothing to

remark about lying. We use language to try to get what we want more efficiently. Sometimes a

lie will serve better than the truth.

It is correct, as far as it goes, to say that language is a means of communication, or a

means of storing and imparting knowledge, but these purposes are secondary. Language is

primarily a tool for gaining our objectives.

There may have been a golden age when humans had the knack of naming and had not yet discovered the efficacy of mis-naming – but it could not have lasted more than 36 hours. My guess is that the story of the Garden of Eden gives us a garbled version of how quickly things In praise of lying - 443

went wrong. The symbolic serpent, in my opinion, originally appeared after the eating of the apple. The apple contained language. One moment Adam and Eve began talking; almost the next moment, lying. Deceit slithered into the world and the happy couple was thrust out of paradise.

Mark Twain, in a short piece titled "On the Decay of the Art of Lying," puts the matter this way:

Lying is universal – we all do it; we all must do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. [Emphasis in the original]

Bok's book is an attempt to refute Twain adverb by adverb. She casts a jaundiced eye upon each implied category – the thoughtful lie, the judicious lie, the healing, the charitable, the humane lie.

The refutation is always the same.

But the heart of Twain's comment is his assertion that lying is universal. Bok might as well put a ban on sex.

In fact, this is an analogy worth pursuing. Trying to put a moral valence upon the act of lying in and of itself is as wrongheaded as putting a moral valence upon the act of sex in and of itself. We cannot examine the morality of sex, or lying, in the abstract: we must examine their morality in a given concrete situation. This is where Kant went so disastrously wrong, and it will be worthwhile to embark upon a brief philosophical digression. In praise of lying - 444

Kant established the categorical imperative as his umbrella principle: "Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." So stated, the categorical imperative is not exactly a moral proposition: it is more like a definition of moral duty, a kind of axiom against which all moral theorems are to be tested.

Kant then plugs the act of lying into the categorical imperative. Could I turn lying into a maxim? What would happen if lying became a universal law?

Well, the human endeavor would collapse. When my friend tells me he will meet me at the restaurant at 9:00, there is no reason for me to believe he will be there at that time and no way for me to find out when he will be there.

There would be no reason to go to the sale at the department store because there would be no reliability in the advertised prices. And so on.

All this may strike the reader as merely sophomoric. What follows from it is monstrous.

Kant, in company with John Wesley, bans all lying in all circumstances and argues – seriously, without winking once – that you must truthfully tell the murderer where his intended victim is hiding.

I do not wish to waste any ink adding to the philosophical outcry against this proposition.

Theory-madness leads predictably to mad conclusions. I wish rather to back up and examine the methodology, because, strange to say, Kant got his principle right and erred only in its application. The categorical imperative itself is not at fault. The problem is that Kant words the theorem he is testing too narrowly. He excludes too much content.

To take the notorious test case of the murderer and his innocent victim: I should not hesitate to will that it should become a universal law that we always lie to murderers whenever In praise of lying - 445

they are asking the whereabouts of their intended victims. As soon as we add the content of the

specific situation to the theorem we are testing, we gain a correct outcome from the application

of the principle.

Now we can back up and see where Kant erred with his earlier demonstration that lying is

wrong. It is impermissible to test lying in and of itself. If, in evaluating the lie we tell to the

murderer, it is correct to add the details of the situation to the content of the maxim, then we

must always add the details, whatever the situation. It is incorrect to try to test any maxim about lying that omits the situation.

If you are horrified by the way I seem to have introduced "situation ethics," I must ask that you take 10 or 15 seconds to think about it. I hope you will realize that ethics must be

situational. Even the Ten Commandments admit exceptions in certain situations. To take the

simplest: should I honor my father and my mother (and thereby obey the fifth commandment)

when they recruit me to kill their neighbor (causing me to disobey the sixth commandment)?

The quest for a moral absolute that functions independently of situations and

consequences is not only futile: it has also caused a great deal of unnecessary heartache and

bloodshed. Absolute imperishable unchanging morality is a chimera, a fever of the brain. Even

Bok thinks so.

Kant, after developing a most sensitive mechanism for elucidating moral duty, completely

disables his machine by feeding it only the starkest alternatives. Was a lie told? It is as if we had

a modern hospital at our disposal, capable of testing every function of every organ, but we were

allowed to ask the staff only one true-or-false question: Is the patient healthy? We are not

allowed to establish gradations of wellness and sickness; we are not allowed to follow up on In praise of lying - 446

sickness and pinpoint its location.

The issues are trivialized by Kant's all-or-nothing approach. His argument about the collapse of the human endeavor is the kind of excursion into Cloudcuckooland that only a philosopher would make. In most situations, no one has a reason to lie: arguments about how society could not exist if lying were universal ignore the simple fact that most of the time only the truth will serve the needs of the organism, and every other organism as well. The manager of the department store has no reason to give me false directions. And the skeptic who likes to argue that nothing can ever be known for sure finds his way to the store just like everyone else.

It is only certain situations that tempt us to lie, and it is those situations that must be plugged into the categorical imperative – one at a time, with all their relevant content.

What this means, then, is that the principle of veracity cannot be taken for granted, because it cannot even be tested.

Testing the morality of lying itself makes no more sense than testing the virtue of any social instrumentality. Kant wants to say that if everyone lied, society would collapse. Yes.

And if everyone refrained from sex, humanity would die out at the end of the next century. Do we conclude from this that I must never refrain from sex with a woman of child-bearing age?

This is silly and gives philosophy a bad name. We are no more threatened by the

possibility of universal lying than we are imperiled by the danger of universal abstinence. We

must move on, and test whether lying, or sexual intercourse, is right or wrong in certain

situations. The upshot of all this is that we are left with situations only.

In praise of lying - 447

But is there danger in abandoning the principle of veracity? I see no reason to think so. Morality

emerges from a configuration of all the relevant data of the situation, and this configuration will

always include the self-aggrandizement of the liar, the betrayal of the dupe, and the further

ramifications of the lie down the road. Everything Bok wants to say about lying in general will

get said when we add her considerations to the particular situation. But by abandoning her

principle of veracity at the outset, we no longer have to be burdened by the presumption of

"guilty until proven innocent." We no longer have an all-powerful prosecutor and a penniless defender: we have a civil lawsuit, and Truth will have to take the stand on an equal footing with

Falsehood, and be subjected to just as thorough a cross-examination.

Yes. Truth, too, must justify itself morally.

The principle of utility

I propose a simple substitution for the principle of veracity: it is the principle of utility. In Bok's language, it might go something like this:

This premise gives an initial negative weight to evil consequences. It holds that bad outcomes are not neutral from the point of view of our choices; that bad outcomes require explanation, whereas good outcomes ordinarily do not.

I am not a utilitarian; I do not wish to endorse the concept of "the greatest good for the greatest number of people." I am a Kantian who thinks that Kant could have admitted consequences into his calculations without sacrificing the categorical imperative. I am willing to accord my principle of utility nothing more than the status enjoyed by the principle of veracity in Bok's In praise of lying - 448

system – as an initial weight.

Bok is herself committed to a consequentialist approach. Why, then, does she reject

utilitarianism?

First, she notes the difficulty, if not downright impossibility, of calculating all the

consequences in a given situation. Note that this is not a refutation of the principle of utility; it is

only a hazard sure to be encountered in applying the principle.

Second, she points out that the principle of utility contradicts the principle of veracity.

This would be a fatal objection had she proven the necessity of the principle of veracity, but she

had merely assumed its necessity, unwisely, on the authority of Aristotle.

Bok trots out all her customary arguments as if they suffice to put an end to the discussion: she complains that the liar is sure to twist the principle of utility in his own favor by cheating when he conducts a cost-benefit analysis of the situation; she points out that the liar will forget to factor in his own loss of integrity. Again, these are not refutations of the principle itself, but of the way the principle could be abused by an ethical egoist. We might as well say that moral arguments against murder are ineffectual because murderers commonly decline to be swayed by them.

Yet strangest of all, after Bok has make her case against the utilitarians, she suddenly reveals that she is a utilitarian:

Although I shall use no moral system from which to derive my conclusion, the questions which I shall ask of justifications advanced for different lies will, in the end, be questions of benefit and harm . . . .

That is, questions about consequences. So, she differs from the classical utilitarians only by her In praise of lying - 449

use of the principle of veracity as a cold shower at the start of every case analysis. Where they

would take up each situation immediately in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, she wishes first to

add her surcharge to the cost, and then conduct the cost-benefit analysis. To switch metaphors: only if the principle of utility can overcome the 800-pound gorilla of the principle of veracity can it proclaim itself the victor.

The logic is strained. Bok is writing a book about the prevalence of lying, which she equates with immorality at the outset – thus accepting as obvious a proposition that she still needs to prove. She then adopts the notion that lying is wrong because of its hidden costs, which always include the liar's own loss of integrity and the damage to trust in general. These hidden costs are argued very briefly, mostly in the abstract. Then they are adopted as a principle and

applied to every situation involving a lie.

We have here the fallacy of hasty generalization. Her haste is owing to her belief that the

principle of veracity is self-evident. Throughout her book, she asserts that lying corrupts the

individual and the body politic, but she rarely proves it. To take only the most obvious counter-

example: successful lies are never found out, which rules out the possibility of a blow to the

public trust. And her insistence that every lie I tell diminishes me is just an old chestnut. It may

be true; but in order to adopt it as a universal principle, she needs to show that it is bound to be

true. She does not bother – by now she has sunk to the level of Victorian breakfast-table

morality. In a world of ethnic cleansing, almost universal subjugation of women, and pandemic

child abuse, she wrings her hands over the loss of old-fashioned integrity: you should have told

the waiter the bill contained an error in your favor.

A philosopher, of all people – courses in logic are part of their professional training – In praise of lying - 450

ought to know that we cannot take the damage done by some lies, or by most lies, or by one

typical class of lies, and arrive at a principle that automatically tars all lies with the same brush.

Bok does not, and cannot, demonstrate that lying always wreaks the havoc proclaimed by the

principle of veracity.

Having adopted her principle as a straitjacket so tight that only the most altruistic lie can

wiggle out of it, Bok then switches to a modified principle of utility in order to examine

individual cases. Predictably, in one case after another, after having shown how a particular lie

may seem to confer a benefit in a particular situation, she vetoes the benefit by citing the hidden

cost posited by the principle of veracity – which is simply the bald assertion that there is always a

hidden cost to be paid, and that it is almost always great enough to override any other benefit.

Why is Bok afraid to proceed on a case-by-case basis, armed only with the principle of utility? – especially since the utilitarian analysis would include the far-reaching consequences assumed in the principle of veracity, if they were indicated.

Bok is afraid to cut loose from the principle of veracity because she cannot win her cases without it. If she cannot win her cases, she cannot thump the breakfast table and write a sermon on the decline of morality in our time.

In defense of lying

Let's get down to some of these cases. I will start with a batch from another judge's courtroom.

In an article for the Utne Reader published in November of 1992, Stephanie Ericsson begins by owning up to four relatively harmless lies. She then sternly subjects herself to an inquisition of In praise of lying - 451

Bokian rigor. The article is her penance, and the conclusion is her vow to do better in the future.

But all four of her lies are defensible, and they suggest some of the ways we might

organize a taxonomy of justification:

The bank called today and I told them my deposit was in the mail, even though I hadn't written a check yet. It'd been a rough day. . . . I was late to a business meeting because I was tired. I told my client the traffic had been bad. When my partner came home, his haggard face told me his day hadn't gone any better than mine, so when he asked, "How was your day?" I said, "Oh, fine," knowing that one more straw might break his back. A friend called and wanted to take me to lunch. I said I was busy.

To take the easiest case first: the lie to her partner is what Bok calls a white lie – one uttered

solely out of consideration for the other person, and of trivial moral import. Had Ericsson been

more self-centered, she would have unburdened herself without regard for her partner's state of mind. Her lie originated in compassion and required a certain amount of self-restraint.

On the grounds just cited, I would be willing to undertake a defense of this lie. But it is

more important to understand that her partner's question was actually a form of greeting that was

empty of content. It was a token deposited in the social toll booth. In polite society (and certainly in an intimate relationship), it is unacceptable to enter a room without speaking. Her partner's words, suitably interpreted, meant only that he acknowledged her presence and did not wish to be rude to her. He may have been willing to hear an explicit answer to the specific question, providing she had good news to tell: "I've had a terrible day, but if anything good has happened to you, that will cheer me up." Under the circumstance, I do not believe it makes any

sense to say that she lied at all. I assume she told her partner about the events of her day at a later

time, when he was more receptive. I would be flabbergasted to learn that he then stared at her In praise of lying - 452

accusingly and said, "You lied when I came in the door."

My guess is that the "friend" who wanted to take Ericsson to lunch was an acquaintance who could be counted on to be "hurt" by a frank refusal based upon the truth. A trusted friend would have taken the truth in stride.

In this case, we have a penumbra surrounding the lie, which includes the character of the person who is being lied to. If the "friend" is narcissistically inclined, then he or she is constitutionally unable to enter into Ericsson's feelings or to see the matter from Ericsson's point of view. Such a person would personalize Ericsson's refusal and convert it into a "narcissistic injury" – an intentional snub. I can think of no reason Ericsson failed to tell the truth – that she was tired and having a hard day – other than her fear, based upon experience, that the friend would believe the truth to be a lie. The subtleties of such a situation are beyond Bok's ken.

Her bank, according to Ericsson, charges $60 for an overdraft. Here the penumbra widens to take in the organization of society itself. The bank is rich and has a great deal of power over me;

I am poor and impotent. The initial premises are weighted against me. Nor is it fair to say that I voluntarily entered into an arrangement with the bank – realistically, no one can function effectively in modern life without a bank, and all banks are pretty much the same. Furthermore, the penalty is out of all proportion to the crime. The lie won't put a dent in the bank's financial health, but the truth will sink mine. Telling the truth in such circumstances would expose me to a suspicion of neurotic self-hatred.

What we have seen thus far is that, in some sense, the person to whom Ericsson lied had In praise of lying - 453

lied to her first. Her partner said, "How was your day? (but I don't necessarily want to know)."

Her friend said, "You can be frank with me (but I will twist what you say and use it against you if

I don't like what I hear)." The bank said, "Open a free checking account and we will meet all your banking needs. (Free, that is, if you maintain a minimum daily balance of $1500, and by the way, we hope flexibility is not among your banking needs.)" We might notice a kind of inverse relationship, too: the farther back the lie started, the more insidious it is; and therefore the more defensible the lie you tell to fend it off.

Finally, Ericsson's client. I suspect he is a victim of our competitive ethos. Tiredness ought to be just as good an excuse for lateness as a traffic jam – or perhaps even better, inasmuch as it should engender a degree of compassion. After all, I might have anticipated bad traffic, and left earlier; but if I am having a bad day, my lateness is a symptom of my condition and therefore its own excuse. If I were physically sick, my client would surely understand. But the unwritten rules of the workplace say that weariness of the spirit is weakness – a failure of discipline and aggressiveness and all the capitalist can-do virtues.

I call this attitude toward life "psychological fascism." At bottom, it entails a morality of strength, and doubtless Ericsson herself is susceptible to it. I fail to see how I can help a sudden barrage of difficulties caused by banks, difficult personalities, and a bad night's sleep any more than I can help the congestion on the roads. But a worshiper of strength equates weakness of any kind – even a letdown in the face of bad luck – as moral failure.

We see this morality played out publicly on the sports pages as part of every post-game interview ever conducted. The loser is never allowed to say, "I was running a temperature of one In praise of lying - 454

hundred and three." That would be "making excuses." He has to say that he played terribly, and

the other player outplayed him, and that he has no excuse. Yet we might take it almost as a fact

of nature that the player ranked 100th in the world could never beat the player ranked first unless

the loser had an excuse. That excuse could be no more than a mysterious, sudden onset of an

unidentifiable malaise – a real enough event in life, if unimaginable as an actual locker-room assertion. We can be sure that there is an explanation other than the only one that is ever found acceptable in the competitive ethos. But we will never be allowed to hear it out of the mouth of the loser. If it comes out at all, it must come from the mouths of his coaches or his friends.

In Ericsson's case, if the client hears the truth, he misinterprets it: he takes it personally that she is having a bad day and cannot "rise above it." On the other hand, he takes the traffic jam to be an act of God and acquits her of letting him down. But what makes him think she is letting him down if she is too tired to function well? None of it has anything to do with him.

What could be stupider than our fetish about high productivity and our equation of long hours with greatness of character? In this final instance, the lie begins the farthest back of all, in the heartlessness and brainlessness of the puritan work ethic; and it victimizes most of us most of the time.

Now let us consult Kant again. The categorical imperative has among its formulations the following axiom: "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether yourself or any other person, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."

Clearly, the sociopathic liar cannot pass this elementary test. He is about to make the dupe serve his own purposes. But in many of the more interesting cases examined by Bok and by In praise of lying - 455

Ericsson, the liar has already been made a means to the end of the person he is about to lie to.

The client, the bank, the friend, are looking out for themselves and have an agenda. Many lies

told to fend off such folks really are a matter of self-defense – not only in the rationalizing mind of the liar, but also in the judgment of a detached observer.

We need to augment the principle of utility with a principle of reciprocity. This means I can respond in kind. I should not be required to tell the truth to someone who has lied to me first; and the strength of this justification increases to the extent that my abuser occupies a position of power over me, and is using it to make me a means to his end.

In brief, I must be allowed to hold my own.

Lying to liars

Bok makes "Lying to Liars" the title of one of her chapters, but she construes the issue far too narrowly. She actually discusses, as if it could be a matter worthy of serious attention, whether or not we might be granted a special dispensation to lie to people who are themselves pathological liars. (The answer, needless to say, is no.)

But the liars to whom we are tempted to lie are mostly self-deceived. They say they do not want to be lied to, but they are lying when they say this. They confirm this diagnosis when they set up conditions that make lying inevitable. For instance, parents continually create situations for their children in which the truth is sure to be punished out of all proportion to the fault that is admitted, whereas a lie will easily pass by undetected. It is not just that this makes the temptation too great to be resisted: unconsciously, the parents who set up such a situation In praise of lying - 456

prefer to be deceived. You cannot put your children, or anyone else, in such a position – where,

if they tell the truth about a matter in which their conduct was innocuous, they will be seriously

penalized, but if they lie, they will get away scot free – and expect the truth to be told by anyone

other than a masochist.

The problem of who lied first is not confined to the level of the individual. Consider the

political landscape. Here we say that we want, above all, candidates who will tell us the truth.

But we are lying when we say this: we want candidates who tell us what we want to hear. In

point of fact, we reward lying with public office; we penalize truth-telling. Let us, by all means, admire such erstwhile truth-telling candidates for the presidency as Eugene McCarthy, John

Anderson, Bruce Babbitt, and Alan Keyes. My admiration, and Bok's, and a dollar bill, will buy them a cup of coffee.

Spouses say, "I want you to be truthful with me at all times (but if you ever tell me you are having an affair, I will divorce you)." Corporations say, "We value candor (but we will certainly fire you for whistle-blowing, and perhaps just for giving us news that we do not want to hear)."

What is actually valued in the corporation, as in politics, is the appearance of candor. In the marriage, the simulacrum of fidelity is valued above truth. In each case, the consequences of

telling the truth are catastrophic, and out of all proportion to the offense. But my point here is

not necessarily to defend the lie told by the philandering spouse or the corporate flack. My point

is that the victim of the lie lied first.

We cannot take a corrupt position and then, in the midst of the corruption, suddenly

become finicky about standards. We know that corporations aim at maximizing profits; we In praise of lying - 457

know that this aim may be at variance with the aims of society at large. Today we take the view that jobs in the tobacco industry are a competing interest with the health of the entire country.

We do not want people to die of lung cancer; but we also do not want the economy to be thrown into a tailspin by massive job layoffs. With one hand we subsidize the tobacco industry; with the other, we wag a finger at executives who prevaricate before Congressional hearings. Well, tobacco manufacturers can prosper only by lying. We cannot expect them to commit corporate suicide. If we do not have the courage to put them out of business, we cannot honorably exhort them to put themselves out of business.

Now let us return to the matter of the placebo. Bok treats the doctor's lie as a white lie, a well- intentioned lie with apparently benign consequences.

She is eager to take up white lies in the very next chapter after she records her dissent from the classical utilitarians, because she knows they were adamant in their justification of such lies, and she wants to put distance between herself and them. So she is especially unyielding here: she fantasizes all kinds of collateral damages and potential abuses.

What she neglects is the culpability of the patient. A hypochondriac may say that he believes in the competence of his doctor (a lie already), but he has in fact diagnosed himself and decided upon a treatment. Such a patient is certain he needs to be treated by drugs and he insists upon a prescription. The doctor is now in a cleft stick. He can deceitfully prescribe a placebo; or he can tell the truth: "Your symptoms will disappear by themselves" or "Your complaint will respond just as well to a placebo as to a drug, but the drug, unlike the placebo, has harmful side effects, so I cannot in good conscience prescribe it." If he tells the truth, the patient will go to In praise of lying - 458

another physician who is willing to prescribe the drug.

The amusing but very serious fact about a placebo is that it only works if you lie about it.

You cannot tell the patient he is taking a placebo, because it is his faith in pharmaceuticals that will produce the improvement in his symptoms. Faith must be faith in something.

We have here a straight dilemma – either the doctor prescribes a placebo, whereby the patient is satisfied and no unnecessary damage is done to his body; or the doctor (or another doctor) prescribes a drug, whereby the patient is satisfied but is put unnecessarily in harm's way.

Leave the principle of veracity out of it. Just examine the totality of the two situations. As Bok's subtitle says, we have here a moral choice – but lying is only one aspect. The truthful doctor who is too full of his own rectitude to prescribe the placebo must answer for the consequences when the patient finds another doctor, gets a prescription, and takes the unnecessary drug with its harmful side effects.

Interested truth

Another of Kant's dicta is that the only thing known to be good without qualification is a good will. Bok admits the liar may be motivated by good intentions. She neglects to add that the truth-teller may not be. The doctor who refuses to prescribe the placebo may care more about his own imaginary integrity than about his patient's well-being.

Or, I may tell the truth because I want to be able to hold the whip hand morally when demanding the truth from someone else. But a good question to ask myself would be: why am I putting this other person in a position where he may be tempted to lie? I had best live so that no In praise of lying - 459

one needs to fear telling me the truth.

(I would extend this principle throughout the moral realm. If you are not otherwise moved by bonds of love, affection, or respect, what would make you "do my duty" toward me?

Surely in the back of your mind would be the thought of eventually collecting on duties owed to you. But it would behoove me to live in such a way that you never have to be merely dutiful to me – to live so that you want to be loving, affectionate, and respectful.)

Bok continually warns us to beware of the hidden agendas of liars. Let us be equally on our guard about the selfish motives of truth-tellers. There is probably no such thing as disinterested truth. Our task, at least in part, is to judge the interests themselves – both of those who lie and those who tell the truth.

The person who tells me the truth may be advancing his own self-interest to the maximum degree while inflicting upon me a gratuitous injury. Anyone can think of the more mundane examples of this offense. Let me take a complex situation – one which illustrates the uselessness of the principle of veracity and the particular relevance of the principle of utility.

Truths that lie, and wound; lies that tell the truth

Now that homosexual men and women are more willing to "come out of the closet" and more and more heterosexual Americans are learning to accept them, the problem of honest disclosure is perhaps being solved. But in previous generations, the ethical propriety of "outing" was by no means obvious. Walter Jenkins, a top aide to President Lyndon Johnson, saw his career ruined by the revelation of his homosexuality. In that climate, surely even Bok might have wished to In praise of lying - 460

justify the lies told by closeted homosexuals to their employers and even their families.

Perhaps, then, we especially admire the courageous few who chose to tell the truth in those days. But truth does not always have impeccable moral credentials. Sometimes we seem to excuse the most insensitive laceration of another person's feelings, so long as the truth be told.

I knew gay men and women in that bygone era who proclaimed their homosexuality to their immediate families and shattered forever the peace of mind of their parents.

It is not difficult to put the onus for this unhappiness squarely on the parents themselves, who did not try to understand, and refused to accept, the reality of their children's lives. But I wish to focus on something else: whether truth was even served.

An entire sociology had conditioned what parents "heard" when their son said, "I am gay." While some parents understood the statement to mean "I am erotically attracted to males," other parents translated these words to mean, "I am a conscious sinner and an unregenerate debauchee." These parents were filled with misinformation and were unable, or unwilling, to unlearn it; they defined homosexuality the way the book of Leviticus defines it. They believed with the Bible that it was a sin; they agreed with Freud that it was a perversion. They labored under the misapprehension that "gayness" meant that their son had been and still was capable of heterosexual romance, but had gravitated toward men out of a disgusting acquired taste for forbidden sexual practices; they thought that his persistence in his gayness means that he was consciously refusing to abandon unnatural acts and was choosing instead to continue a life of utmost moral turpitude.

My question, then, is this: When these parents heard the statement, "I am gay," did they hear the truth? I think not. They now had a much more skewed and incorrect notion of what In praise of lying - 461

kind of person their son was than they had before.

Given the situation, we have not just a failure of compassion: the truth actually misleads the auditor, whereas a lie would be heard in such a way as to give a more accurate picture of the truth.

The principle of veracity has no light to shine upon this case. We cannot seriously believe that the gay man's lie to his parents started him down a road of habitual mendacity – he wanted to tell the truth, and it was only by an effort of the will that he stifled the truth. Nor can we seriously argue that society was damaged by the ripple effect of this lie. Indeed, we have a much stronger argument that society had already done all the damage it could do, by persecuting homosexuals and poisoning the minds of their parents: the truth merely allowed society to move directly to the penalty phase of the proceedings. Finally, we can by no means buttress the principle of veracity here by taking the perspective of the person who is lied to. If we do that, we are starkly confronted by the essential decency of the child's lie and the destructiveness to the peace of mind of the parents of the truth.

Bok would probably argue that we do not know for sure how the parents will respond.

Well, sometimes we don't; but sometimes we do. However the matter stands, it is none of her lookout.

It may also be the case that the truth serves the larger interests of society, by nudging it toward a more open and tolerant stance. But we do not have a right to make individual gay men and women, or their parents, be the means to our collective end.

I am aware of the argument that says the gay man did have "a right" to tell his parents the truth; I am even sympathetic to the argument that it was "the right thing to do" (a totally different In praise of lying - 462

matter). He had his own integrity and dignity at stake; he felt demeaned by lying; and it was

finally his parents' responsibility to come to terms with the truth about him. But this suggests a

thought quite alien to Bok's way of thinking: that for most of us, truth is psychologically the easy

way out. The gay man wanted to tell the truth; lying would have required strength of character.

Let us look more closely at this.

Reflexive truth-telling and pathological honesty

Bok, while masquerading as a moral philosopher, is really a Victorian grandmother with a High

Church homily to preach. So we need to clear away certain mundane assumptions that color every page of her thesis. One is her implicit supposition that truth is hard and flinty and stern and noble, and lying is as easy as falling off a log. I would say rather that for a decent person trained in ordinary virtue, telling the truth comes naturally and may become almost a bad habit.

We might refurbish her principle of veracity this way: not as a prescriptive moral law proclaiming that, in the absence of extraordinary extenuating circumstances, we should tell the truth; but as a descriptive practical law stating that, in the absence of other important considerations, we always do tell the truth.

As we form pictures of reality in our heads, the truth is what pops up on the screen of our consciousness automatically: therefore the truth is what pops out of our mouths. Lying involves cognitive dissonance and therefore requires self-censorship. We have to mobilize our minds to make the effort: we have to be able to see one thing on the screen with our mind's eye and say we are seeing another with our lips. Lying tears us psychically in two. We will not do this to In praise of lying - 463

ourselves without a compelling interest.

Many of us have had this experience: we set out to lie, but lacked the heart to carry it through. Either we did not bother to cover our tracks very well, and were quickly exposed; or we

'fessed up the first time we were confronted and asked about the matter point-blank. The old expression, "confession is good for the soul," captures this dynamic: it just feels better to come clean.

In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe creates an interesting situation in which only a lie will serve to get at the truth. His hero, Sherman McCoy, has been indicted for a crime he did not commit. Sherman has since gained possession of a taped recording of a conversation between him and his mistress, Maria. She has been coerced by an unscrupulous prosecuting attorney into lying before a grand jury; the tape contains her truthful account of the incident. Unfortunately, the tape was obtained illegally. To get the tape introduced into the legal proceedings, Sherman has to lie to the judge about how he acquired it. He finds it difficult to swear to a lie under oath, even to save his own skin and to reveal what truly happened:

And Sherman McCoy, he who had now vowed to be his animal self, discovered what many had discovered before him. In well-reared girls and boys, guilt and the instinct to obey the rules are reflexes, ineradicable ghosts in the machine.

Tomas, the hero of Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, experiences the same predicament when questioned by the agent of a totalitarian government:

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie. The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation. It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him (which makes no sense whatever) than to lie to his In praise of lying - 464

face (which is the only thing to do).

Almost all normal people find lying a strain – this is why lie detector tests really do work. A

friend of mine in the first blush of young adulthood was asked flat out by her employer if she had

missed work because she had gotten an abortion. (He merely wanted to know in a gossipy sort of

way.) My friend, taken by surprise, hesitated and then answered yes. Even later, when the

memory of the incident still disturbed her, she could not see what alternative she had – since she

could not imagine lying.

Perhaps Bok would have encouraged her to say nothing either way. This advice would be

either ingenuous or disingenuous: in an uncertain economy, a minimum-wage worker is not going to tell her boss it is none of his business. And, as we all know, refusing to put a rumor to rest is the same as confirming it. During the 1992 presidential election, George Bush was asked by a reporter from ABC if he had ever had an extramarital affair. Had he been able truthfully to say no, he certainly would have. His refusal to answer was an admission of guilt.

In a given situation, then, I may have a great deal to gain by lying, whereas the person to whom I lie may lose little or nothing. Perhaps that person wants and expects the truth to be told

– but what is at stake for him? As in the case of the employer who asked about the abortion, my interlocutor may simply prefer to know more than he has a right to know, out of idle curiosity.

My lie is purely defensive.

In the more serious cases imagined by Wolfe and Kundera, the interrogators hold all the cards and can afford to tell the truth with impunity. In such a situation, compulsive honesty on the part of the respondent may be more than a virtuous habit. It may mean identification with the oppressor. In praise of lying - 465

Some husbands establish individual household regimes of totalitarian invasiveness, relying upon little more than constant phone calls from work, plus their wives' Bokian morality, to enforce an atmosphere of complete control. "Where were you between noon and 12:15?" The wife's reflexive truth-telling serves merely to save her husband the trouble of hiring a private detective to assuage his pathologically jealous suspicions.

When we lie to those who have power over us in an unjust system, we may be taking the first step toward self-respect. Many battered women get out of their abusive households only after they learn to tell their first lie to their husbands.

Semantic lies woven into society

To this point, I have stayed mostly within the framework that Bok prefers for her analysis – the framework of the intimate one-on-one relationship, which so starkly outlines the figure of the self-aggrandizing liar and the victimized dupe. Bok opens out the perspective only after the lie has been told, when she invites us to contemplate the ripple effect of the lie throughout society.

Society, in her analysis, is as innocent as the dupe.

The feminist rallying cry, "The personal is the political" is ruled out of order by Judge

Bok. In her courtroom, "There is only the personal." No matter how many social factors feed into a lie, finally the situation comes down to one person making a false statement to another. At precisely this point, and never before, Bok begins taking evidence; then her reductive approach kicks in.

This produces rough justice. Every case is decided as narrowly as the Monkey Trial of In praise of lying - 466

1925. There, the judge was not interested in the truth of evolution and the fiction of the Bible.

The judge was not interested in the constitutional right of free expression. The judge was interested only in whether the defendant, Mr. Scopes, had violated the Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. Judge Bok wants only to know if the defendant told a lie.

Most of the time when we lie, we are trying to negotiate a path of advantage through a rotten system that punishes the truth wherever it can. Furthermore, this system has suborned the individuals who serve it. The representatives of the system have an advantage: they are serving a lie, so they do not need to lie. The secret policeman who interrogates Tomas in communist

Czechoslovakia is able to be truthful at the level Bok wants to analyze. The social lie is not in any one thing he says: it is in his tacit claim to serve the cause of justice.

Bok likes to start from the lie and read forward to all the unforeseen consequences of the lie. Why not start at the real beginning? What facts are anterior to the situation?

The big overarching lie might be thought of as a semantic lie. This lie originates back at the very beginning – not just at the beginning of the immediate situation, but at the founding of the society itself. The social system is erected in accordance with certain definitions: these definitions are then woven, almost invisibly, into the fabric of society.

During the Jim Crow era, segregation was legal and integration was against the law.

Black people living in the South could not even imagine an integrated society. Obviously Bok deplores this, but what she fails to see is the moral confidence and truthfulness it gave to the bigots.

During slavery, it was against the law to teach a black child to read. The policeman who enforced this law did not have to lie: truth, justice, and the American way of life supported him In praise of lying - 467

in his function. It was the compassionate white woman who had dared to defy her religion, her culture, and her husband who was tempted to lie. Oh, she could come clean and strike a blow for a higher truth; but her clear conscience about her veracity would be purchased, not only at considerable risk to herself, but at the cost of the reading lessons themselves.

Historically, the time always comes when the truth will set us free. But if you are ahead of that time, the truth will land you in jail.

It is still open to Bok to argue that truth best serves the long-term interests of society. We can do a cost-benefit analysis along her preferred lines. What I am trying to highlight by this discussion is that truth-telling is always nested in a social context, and every aspect of that social context is relevant if we are probing the morality of the choice. Again: Bok stays to the left of the colon: Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. Was a lie told? As soon as we move to the right-hand side of the colon, and try to determine what a moral choice would be in a given situation, we have to analyze all of the situation; and that entails analyzing all of the antecedents to the situation, including the premises upon which the society that engenders the situation is built.

By way of a concrete situation, let us start at the beginning of the "war on drugs," with the premises that are themselves mostly lies, and work our way forward, to where the only lie that

Bok cares about is told at the end of a chain of events.

The war is a classic instance of a solution that is ten times worse than the problem. It is almost a clinical instance of mass hysteria. It happens that a number of people privately alter their behavior with certain naturally occurring substances. Usually, no one is the wiser: professional basketball players have continued performing at high levels of competence, with no In praise of lying - 468

apparent diminution of function or ability, even while indulging expensive habits of drug use;

they get caught only by means of random drug tests or entrapment. By criminalizing the use of

drugs, society has brought upon itself almost all the ills we associate with the drug "problem." If

the government regulated the sale of the so-called "illicit" drugs as it now regulates the sale of

powerful legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, the prices would drop and the dealers would go

out of business. We would have no drug-related murders – or no more drug-related murders than we now have cigarette-related murders. Drug habits would be affordable, so addicts would no longer have to commit crimes to support their habits. Money could be spent for treatment, and those who sought it would no longer have to admit to criminal behavior in order to gain access to it. Policemen could spend their time on violent crimes instead of on hopeless efforts to keep drugs off the streets, and they would no longer be subject to the corruption of drug-money bribes and kickbacks.

The war on drugs is buttressed at almost every point by governmentally sanctioned lies.

Marijuana, for instance, is a drug with virtually no dangerous side effects. It is known to be much safer than alcohol. It is mildly addictive to some "potheads," but apparently it is much less addictive than alcohol, nicotine, and, I would venture to say, caffeine. Upwards of 50 million people smoked marijuana in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and most of these "baby boomers," far from being too stoned to function, went on to be the most productive people in society. Yet when the New York Times Magazine published a lighthearted article about home-grown pot on

February 19, 1995, it drew the following rebuke from a reader on May 7:

Marijuana is hardly a harmless drug that can be used without serious medical and societal consequences. Marijuana use among our youth is associated with deteriorating driving skills, increased risky sexual activity and violent behavior. In praise of lying - 469

This was written by Nelba Chavez, an official in the Clinton administration's Department of

Health and Human Services. Everything she says is debatable, but the assertion about violence is a bald-faced lie: marijuana use diminishes the desire and the ability to commit a violent act.

When a journalist several years ago wrote a column to say that he had tried crack cocaine one time to find out what it was like, he was widely condemned by both liberals and conservatives for telling the truth: namely, that the crack-induced high was a pleasurable experience and that his single trial did not hook him on the drug. He was also excoriated for suggesting that the root cause of addiction is that people in the ghetto have lives that aren't worth living: that in such miserable circumstances, getting high may be perceived by the addict, with good reason, to be simply better than "real life." Very few people doubted the truth of this statement; but they felt that a journalist has a civic duty to lie.

Be that as it may, society has chosen to wage a war on drugs rather than a war on poverty, ignorance, and disenfranchisement. To show that it means business, society has stiffened the penalties. This means that a teenager who is found to be in possession of marijuana really could see his life ruinously altered by a criminal record that would follow him for the rest of his days.

If that teenager is my friend, and I am asked by a member of a narcotics unit whether my friend has ever, to my knowledge, been in possession of a controlled substance, how should I answer this question?

It is fair to sit down and debate this dilemma soberly. I am sure that two decent people could disagree. What is outrageous, intellectually, is to limit the scope of the debate to the question-and-answer situation – to rule that the information pertaining to the origin and sanity of In praise of lying - 470

the war on drugs is inadmissible. Kant wants to radically limit the debate: did someone ask me a question and did I answer truthfully. Bok, unwilling to tell a murderer where his intended victim is hidden, bends a little: did someone ask me a question about someone else's illegal possession of a controlled substance. This allows her to agree with Kant most of the time.

But my subject is to the right of the colon – moral choice. I am trying to do what is right.

I need all the facts, not just those that have been admitted into evidence by a judge who believes that the personal is always just the personal – and also, weirdly enough, that at the moment I am asked to answer the question truthfully, my relationship with the government agent is more personal than my relationship with my friend.

In his 1938 essay "What I Believe," E. M. Forster famously said that if he had to choose between betraying his country or his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. Why did he say this? Did he mean it is better to imperil 50 million people rather than one person? Of course not. He meant that "the country" is the system – an abstraction at best, and at worst, the hydra-headed monster that wages a war on drugs with one tentacle and a war on distant nations with another. But once again, let's get down to cases: the representative of the draft board – not a murderer with a knife in his hand, as in Kant's famous example, but rather a bureaucrat with Uncle Sam's "Greetings" in his hand – asks me if the draft dodger bound for

Canada is hiding in my closet. Judge Bok does not address this case, so I do not know how she will rule. Once again, I insist only upon my right to introduce all the relevant evidence into the hearing. This evidence must include the Johnson administration's fabrication of the Gulf of

Tonkin incident, the truth as revealed by the Pentagon Papers, and all the relevant historical facts about the 2,000-year struggle of the Vietnamese people against Chinese, Japanese, and French In praise of lying - 471

imperialism. We cannot, with Kant or Bok, narrow the question to be tested, so that it reads

starkly: Should citizens respond to their nation's call to arms? We must test this nation, this war, this government, this Secretary of Defense. (We would not have known, in 1965, that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would admit in 1995 that the war was wrong. But in making a moral assessment of how a young man should have responded to the draft in 1965, we need, at the least, all the information that was available to that young man at the time; and if we revisit the topic, we need all the information available to us at this time.)

Bok mentions Vietnam in order to criticize the lies that the government told. No doubt she would condemn any lies the government tells about marijuana. In her last chapter, she passionately calls for widespread changes in society so that truth can hold up its head. But her call for reform sounds hollow after 200-plus pages of reducing every situation to an on-off switch

labeled truth-falsehood. The implication throughout most of the book seems to be that each

individual's regimen of truth will help to bring about a better society. She agrees that we and the

government should start telling the truth; but if the government drags its feet, she thinks we

should start without it. George Bernard Shaw dared to turn this romanticized piece of common

senselessness on its head. In a letter to H. G. Wells, he wrote: "We must reform society before

we can reform ourselves . . . personal righteousness is impossible in an unrighteous society."

Two case studies

Let us take a look at the famous imboglio at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the

nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, when Anita Hill testified that Thomas In praise of lying - 472

had made sexually suggestive remarks to her when she had worked for him.

A little background is in order. The cowardly failure of Democratic senators to block

Thomas's appointment was the real cause of the fiasco that ensued. Anita Hill had been

interviewed by Senate staffers and told them that she did not wish to be called as a witness. She

continued to feel gratitude for the favors that Thomas had done her early in her career. It was

only when opponents of Thomas became desperate that they called her against her will, hoping

that allegations of impropriety would motivate some of their colleagues to reconsider where

evidence of unsuitability and incompetence had not.

I should begin by stating my own position clearly. I believe that Hill told the truth and

that Thomas lied, and my analysis will be based upon that assumption. I further believe that

Thomas was manifestly unqualified to be considered for the Supreme Court, and the nation's

senators had every reason to know it: he lacked relevant experience; he was intellectually

mediocre; he was cripplingly unimaginative; his judicial philosophy was small-minded and cruel.

His performance has been the disgrace that was predicted by his political enemies: he rarely asks questions, and he votes like an automaton under the direction of Antonin Scalia. His rare opinions are reactionary and sometimes shockingly immoral – as when he found no constitutional objection to the physical abuse of prisoners by prison guards.

Nonetheless, I wish, in the spirit of this essay, to defend the lies he told, and to hold him up as a paradigm case of the liar who is surrounded by lies.

A postmodern approach has something of relevance to offer to our overall understanding

of what happened, if we are scrupulous in its application. Some of the best writing on the Hill-

Thomas contretemps has focused on the norms of flirting behavior among black men and In praise of lying - 473

women. How is this for a scenario? Clarence, a rising star in Republican jurisprudence, but

socially awkward, finds himself smitten by his lovely young protogée. He tests the waters for

dating and romance with a campaign of heavy-handed sexual jokes at the office. Anita, herself an ambitious conservative Republican and no stranger to come-ons, handles this hot potato with consummate tact and aplomb: that is to say, she fends him off without putting him off. She laughs heartily at his jokes and teases him gently about his sexual sallies. "Oh, Clarence! You're so bad!" She lets him down so deftly he hardly feels it – gives up his pursuit with barely a pang, continues to enjoy a relaxed frankness with her, and writes glowing recommendations that help her up the career ladder. She has mastered a tricky situation: kept him out of her bed while keeping his good will, thereby protecting herself on the personal front without having to pay a price on the professional front.

A decade later, the social context has changed, and all across the land people are debating earnestly whether a woman can be sexually harassed by the sight of a pornographic magazine on a man's desk. The norms that governed the Hill-Thomas workplace encounters are as obsolete as the feudal code. Does Hill, looking back at these events through the lens of an acuter feminism, exaggerate the rectitude of her response? A postmodernist would say that we must, at the least, proceed with an awareness of the differences between these contexts. In one of them, a reference to "Long Dong Silver" is a conversational ice-breaker; in the other, it is a form of sexual assault.

Let us assume that Thomas's denials were the purest effrontery: the kind of lies that even a postmodernist would recognize, where Thomas knows he said "Long Dong Silver" and now says he never said it. Nonetheless, there is lying and lying. I put myself in his shoes. Yesterday the Congress of the United States was one committee-meeting away from the show of hands that In praise of lying - 474

would put me on the Supreme Court of the United States. It was signed, sealed, and waiting to

be delivered. Today, if I admit to having joked about Long Dong Silver to someone who laughed

her socks off every time I said it, the Supreme Court appointment will be taken away from me

forever.

The reader can make of my next pronouncement what he will, but in such a circumstance

I think I would have to be almost entirely lacking in self-respect if I did not lie.

Because I am surrounded by lies. The same senators who did not have the courage to

vote me down on any legitimate ground – mediocrity, inexperience, and a clearly-stated

opposition to the Bill of Rights – are now getting ready to vote me down on the preposterous

ground that I oppressed the young black woman whose career I had in fact fostered. Worse still, these same senators – among them Ted Kennedy – who are parading as protectors of women are misogynists almost to a man: their agreement with the National Organization of Women about the seriousness of sexual harassment in the workplace dates all the way back to this morning.

Because Thomas knew the unutterable unfairness of what was happening – because he knew that his lies were little lies about next-to-nothing that harmed almost no one, but his opponents' lies were huge, gross and palpable and were going to cost him everything – he was able to lie passionately, with a terrible conviction. He was buoyed by a kind of integrity that was not available to any of his persecutors. His indignation burned like the flame of truth itself.

Next, let us examine the alleged perjury committed by President Clinton when he was deposed by lawyers in a civil suit and asked about a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Under oath, Clinton denied having had a "sexual relationship" with Lewinsky; a few days later, after the In praise of lying - 475

story broke, he told reporters indignantly, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." It later came out that, on ten occasions, Lewinsky had performed oral sex on him.

Here again, I want my own opinion to be clear. Clinton's behavior with Lewinsky was not just adulterous (which would be mostly a matter of conscience between him and his wife) and irresponsible (which could conceivably reflect upon his fitness for office) – it was selfish and immoral. When feminists have spoken of "treating someone as a sex object," this is precisely what they have meant. Clinton clearly violated Kant's injunction that he treat Lewinsky not as a means to his own ends (of sensual pleasure and psychological dominance) but as an end in herself.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to make a case that this behavior should have become the subject of a grand jury investigation – one that eventuated in a special prosecutor's report to

Congress that high crimes and misdemeanors had occurred, and accompanied by thousands of pages rendering every sexual encounter in explicit detail.

Bok's approach is ahistorical – she likes to begin with the lie, stripped of its context, and move forward through the damage presumed to be caused by it. Again, let us reverse her standard operating procedure: let us begin instead at the beginning of the chain of circumstances that ends with the lie.

Early in his 1992 campaign for the presidential nomination, Clinton admitted that he had tried to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, that he had smoked marijuana, and (implicitly) that he had been unfaithful to his wife. He was further embarrassed by the public record of his artfully phrased denials of these accusations during his past political career; and in his evasive manner of coming clean these sins of his youth, he continued to demonstrate his fondness for In praise of lying - 476

maintaining a kind of "technical virginity" about his truthfulness.

The apostles of "character" found it repugnant to contemplate such a man in the White

House. From the moment Clinton assumed the office of the Presidency, they subjected him to

relentless partisan scrutiny. First, they seized upon the Whitewater land deal of 1978 as a

possible scandal that might bring him down. A special prosecutor was appointed, and later

dismissed because he was not, in the eyes of the President's enemies, aggressive enough.

Kenneth Starr, a man whose ties to Republican causes made him manifestly unfit for the job, was

then named the new special prosecutor, precisely because of qualities that should have ruled him

out. When, after three years of investigation with a staff of 100 lawyers, nothing could be made

of Whitewater, Starr went looking for other offenses.

Meanwhile, Paula Jones, a young employee of the state of Arkansas who had once been

propositioned by Clinton during his tenure as governor, instigated a civil suit against the

President on a charge of sexual harassment. The history of this suit is instructive. A trashy right- wing publication, The American Spectator, had named Jones as one of Clinton's girl friends.

Jones was properly incensed, saying that she wished to clear her name and let people know she had done nothing wrong. (Clinton, of course, was only too ready to agree with her.) But instead of suing the magazine for its libelous defamation of her character, she put herself in the hands of wealthy reactionary Republicans who were willing to finance a suit against Clinton himself. This necessitated her going beyond her original allegation that Clinton had crudely made a pass at her.

As she searched her memory for additional information that might justify the accusation of harassment, she was able to come up with little more than her manager's failure to send her flowers during National Secretary Week. That Jones, or more likely her "handlers," were more In praise of lying - 477

interested in nailing the President than in clearing her name, became obvious when, against the

advice of her lawyers, she turned down Clinton's offer to settle the case for $700,000.

Because her case hung on such slender threads of evidence, her lawyers embarked upon a

strategy of tracking down other stories of Clinton's libidinous conduct. During the pre-trial

discovery phase, Judge Susan Webber Wright constantly warned Jones's team about their

reckless invasions of the privacy of numerous women whose names had been linked to Clinton.

Eventually, Wright ruled that evidence about Clinton's other sexual liaisons would be irrelevant

anyway; and shortly thereafter, perhaps angered by the flagrant and continuing misconduct and

defiance of Jones's lawyers in regard to this very point, she found the Jones lawsuit to be so

lacking in merit that it would be a waste of jurors' time even to allow it to come to trial. But

unfortunately for Clinton, her rulings came after she had allowed Jones's lawyers to question him under oath about Monica Lewinsky.

So, before the judge's disgust had quite reached critical mass, Clinton found himself being asked terribly personal, embarrassing questions by lawyers financed by his enemies, in a case soon to be found frivolous and tossed out of court.

A lawyer himself, Clinton demanded that the meaning of "sexual relations" be spelled out to him, and as a matter of plain fact, the definition that was offered by the Jones lawyers did not include oral sex unless you were the active performer of it. (Clinton had cared so little about

Lewinsky's sexual gratification that he was able to make a plausible case that he had indeed never done anything to satisfy her.)

It may be true that "we all know" that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, and that he must have known he was lying. Nonetheless, once again, he managed to stay "on the windy side In praise of lying - 478

of the law" and to avoid an outright lie. He "argued like a lawyer," and used the law to fend off

the law – the law that itself had been suborned by his enemies and used unfairly against him.

Once the Jones case was thrown out, Clinton's lies no longer met the criteria for perjury,

which require that the lie be material to the case. The alleged perjury no longer met the standard for prosecution.

While all this was transpiring, an odious former White House staffer named Linda Tripp, egged on by her bottom-feeding literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, had been illegally taping conversations with Lewinsky, hoping to get the kind of dirt that would transform her stillborn manuscript about the Clinton White House into a salable commodity. (Tripp's most sensational tidbit in the first draft of her book was that the White House dress code was too relaxed for her taste.) Tripp then misrepresented the contents of her tapes to the special prosecutor, stating that they showed that Clinton had asked Lewinsky to commit perjury and had paid her off by using his connections to get her a job. The tapes failed to bear out these contentions, but Starr proceeded anyway. So we come to the biggest lie of all, the overarching lie that renders everything under it a lie as well – the claim that Starr's investigation had any legitimacy

whatsoever. A responsible prosecutor would simply have desisted. All Starr had – and all he

was able to finally send to Congress – was a startlingly salacious record of a sexual liaison

between consenting adults. The allegations of crimes were unsupported by the evidence and

could only be seriously entertained by Clinton's most fanatical opponents.

Clinton, president though he was, stood in relation to Starr's team of prosecutors like any

other private citizen who is the object of a scurrilous campaign by an unscrupulous district

attorney who is out to get him at all costs – a prosecutor who has virtually unlimited funds at his In praise of lying - 479

disposal and no conscience whatsoever about the first, fourth, and fifth amendments to the

Constitution. I say this about Starr not in a spirit of vituperation, but in an attempt simply to describe his conduct. For instance, he seized Lewinsky's computer and entered into the official record the rough drafts of e-mail messages that she never sent. Throughout his proceedings, he showed contempt for the rights of privacy and for due process, turned a blind eye to his own abuses of Constitutional power, and, above all, demonstrated that he had no sense of decency in the ordinary meaning of the word. Consumed by his monomaniacal pursuit of a president who, he believed, had engaged in immoral conduct, he became the embodiment of the phrase "prurient interest." He was dissuaded from his obsession by neither the relevant historical fact that adultery has been a common-enough failing of some of America's most respected presidents, nor by the moral shabbiness of compiling and publicizing an exhaustive record of smarmy sexual details that had no bearing at all upon the case he was assembling – the case itself consisting, finally, of nothing other than these details and the tenuous claim that Clinton had lied about them in judicial proceedings that had no legitimate purpose.

Against this onslaught against his privacy, Clinton took refuge in a narrow, technical reading of the words of the questions asked him, and tried to protect himself as best he could.

Like Clarence Thomas, he was far more sinned against than sinning.

Again, as with Thomas, it is fair to judge his overall conduct – to assess his entire biography. But it is absurd to castigate either of these men for lying under oath. We might as well castigate the victim of a gang rape for kicking one of her attackers in the groin.

Perhaps a final reflection is in order. Clinton certainly did lie about his affair with Monica In praise of lying - 480

Lewinsky – mostly, it appears, because he could not bring himself to admit the truth to his wife and daughter. His enemies have, as a result, felt little compunction about branding him "a liar."

The implicit theory here is that a single lie establishes a permanent fact about a person's character. The man who will lie about an affair will lie about foreign affairs – he cannot be trusted with the presidency.

People with only a little bit of worldliness, but a modicum of humanity, understand that

"having an affair and lying about it is one crime." As we have already noted, the wife who says

"I just wish you'd been truthful with me" is also lying, if she means to imply that she doesn't mind the infidelity but only the dishonesty. Furthermore, most of us know – whatever our personal rectitude – that sex is the wild card in the deck of morality, and that millions of otherwise upstanding individuals have "strayed" in this one area. It is demonstrably false that a person caught lying about an affair is thereby proven to be untrustworthy in all other endeavors.

Experience shows us the opposite. That Bok can have written a book that supports this canard on almost every page is sad evidence that the shibboleths of "old-fashioned character" can discombobulate even a Harvard professor.

A society in which truth is a lie

Trying to take a break from the subject of this essay – the bog of deceit in which we are all mired, which is so deep that lies may more closely approximate the truth than truth-telling – I began leafing through a little student guide titled Reading Shakespeare's Plays, by George R.

Price. In no time at all I was immersed in the details of Elizabethan honor – which meant that I In praise of lying - 481

was back in the thickest part of the bog. The following account owes a great deal to Price's clear exposition of the subject.

The Elizabethan conception of honor was almost diametrically opposed to our modern

American conception. While we believe that honor is achieved, and is part of a person's character, the Elizabethans thought of it as a birthright. A lowborn fellow might, through extraordinary circumstances, acquire honor; but for the most part, a man was endowed with a quantifiable amount of honor by the social position of his family. (Honor in a woman can be quickly described: it resided entirely in her chastity.)

So a man did not, as a rule, acquire honor; he inherited it. Like his property, it was a possession. But like any other inheritance, it could be squandered. How? You might think, by dishonorable conduct; but you would be wrong – a man could engage in all manner of despicable behavior and keep his honor. How then? By failing to defend it if challenged.

If you were powerful enough, and therefore dangerous to others, you went through life unchallenged. But let us say you corrupted the wife of another powerful nobleman, and that nobleman accused you of the dirty deed. The honorable course of action was for you to "give the lie" to your accuser – that is, you told him to his face that he was lying:

"Sir, you have corrupted my wife." "Sir, you lie in your throat."

Notice, especially in terms of our topic, that you must give the lie regardless of whether or not it is the truth. You do not lose your (suppositional) honor by behaving dishonorably, or by lying; you lose honor only by refusing to lie on its behalf and so defend it.

The two gentlemen then proceeded, with much decorum, to the dueling field. Now our In praise of lying - 482

man's honor will depend upon whether he prevails in a trial of arms.

We can perhaps understand how "honor" in such a society is a technical term, or a euphemism. But what are we to make of the vagaries of the word "lie"? To the person who tells the truth about me, I am explicitly commanded by the code of honor to say, "You lie, sir," and to brazen out my own lie even to the point of killing him.

It is not enough to see such a society as morally incoherent. What I want Bok to understand is that the very way words are defined in this society impinges upon every situation that she wishes to view so reductively. If I am the truth-telling accuser in the little scenario outlined above, I will be called a liar in public, and I will be proven a liar because my aim is bad and the blackguard I have challenged is an excellent shot. I will go to my grave bereft of honor, with "the lie in my throat." My devotion to telling the truth will get me a pat on the back from

Bok and a plot in the nearest cemetery with the words "confirmed liar" engraved on my headstone.

The truths we cannot even tell

The power of the semantic lie to shape our consciousness cannot be underestimated. What words cannot say, we cannot think. I was teaching The Great Gatsby to a high school class and got into the following exchange with a bright female student:

Me: What do you think of the marriage of Tom and Daisy Buchanan?

Student: Daisy seems to be promiscuous.

Me: Daisy! Gatsby is the only man she has ever been with besides her In praise of lying - 483

husband. What about Tom? He's had dozens of women. He was out with another woman on the night that his only child was born. He's having an affair with Myrtle.

Student: I didn't think men could be promiscuous.

Me: (She's right, of course.)

My students knew the truth: a woman who sleeps around, or slips even once, is a slut; a man who sleeps around is a stud. We saw an interesting confirmation of this truism in the country's reaction to basketball player Magic Johnson's announcement that he had contracted the AIDS virus. His acknowledgment that he had a girl in every league stopover did nothing to damage his reputation as a fine fellow. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova was the only sports figure who dared to point out how different the reaction would have been had these admissions of multiple infidelities come out of the mouth of a female athlete.

An "uxorious" husband is a man who dotes too much on his wife. The connotation is pejorative. There is no similarly negative term for an adoring wife. The term for a wife who dotes too much on her husband is "a good woman." The language does not allow us to think that a woman could be too devoted to her man.

Consider the revolution in consciousness produced by the term "date-rape." Women have been raped by family members, friends, and acquaintances from time immemorial. But before the invention of this useful term, what did these women think had happened to them? Most of them thought they had made a mistake and blundered into a bad experience, and they vowed to be more careful in the future. I read a woman's compelling account of being raped in the 1950s by her husband's best friend. It never occurred to her to report it to the police or to tell her husband. And here we have another example of a truth that cannot be told – when you try to tell In praise of lying - 484

it, it turns into a lie. Let us suppose that the woman had told her husband. Given the ethos of the time, he would very likely have blamed her. His interpretation would have been distorted by many previous centuries of propaganda depicting women as either weak vessels or seductive bitches. He would not have formed an accurate picture of what had happened. The truth would have seriously misled him.

Subtracting the lie

Hitler said people would believe a big lie quicker than they would believe a little lie. The best technique of all is to go the whole hog and to call black white. Brazen it out.

In my years as an observing animal I have often seen the tyranny and covert sadism of parents toward their children. If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it follows that the patriarchal family must inevitably produce, in some cases, microcosms of totalitarianism. What better way to cover the evil of autocratic domination than by calling it love? This is the semantic fallacy at its most audacious.

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy paints an unforgettable portrait of a father-daughter relationship that would, in today's parlance, be roundly condemned, and at the same time sanitized, with the use of the label "abusive." Tolstoy calls Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky a despot who, in his behavior to his daughter Marya, "knew how not merely to hurt and humiliate her deliberately, but to show her that she was always to blame for everything." The old prince mocks her and bullies her. When she tries to ingratiate herself with him, he drives her from his presence; when she seeks solace in religion, he ridicules her. Almost every word out of his In praise of lying - 485

mouth is designed to wound her. A word like "dysfunctional" cannot begin to capture the prince's cruelty and his daughter's daily pain. This father never misses an opportunity to lacerate his daughter's feelings. To read any part of this account is to suffer.

And yet, as clear a thinker as Tolstoy was befuddled by the word "love." He uses it constantly to explain the old prince's behavior:

This loving despot – the more cruel because he loved her and for that reason tormented himself and her . . . .

But he could not restrain himself and with the virulence of which only one who loves is capable, evidently suffering himself, he shook his fists at her and screamed . . . .

Tolstoy even goes so far as to say the old prince loved her more than he loved himself. If he means anything at all by this – he may just be uttering sentimental nonsense – perhaps it is that the prince would have done his fatherly duty by Princess Marya even at the cost of his own life.

But that is only to say that the prince would have never ceased to be moved by his fear of public opinion.

Ordinarily, Tolstoy was proof against the semantic fallacy. I am even tempted to say that, had he written this novel later in life, he would have deleted the word "love." But if the author of

War and Peace could be taken in by love at any time in his career, the rest of us are surely vulnerable.

I have not drawn my illustration from a novel because real life is deficient in examples – in any event, Tolstoy based these characters on members of his own family. I have utilized War and Peace because it is a brutally straightforward and vivid account of a common enough syndrome, and because Tolstoy's authorial use of the word "love" shows us how deeply the In praise of lying - 486

semantic lie can sink its roots. If the reader prefers "real life," Kathryn Harrison's memoir The

Kiss will be instructive. The author's mother, an extraordinarily shallow, narcissistic, selfish

person who was given to fits of physical abuse in the midst of ongoing emotional abuse, and who

eventually abandoned her daughter, used the word "love" readily and wrote her daughter notes

"comprised of nothing but kiss Xs and the hollow Os of her hugs."

Harrison responded as a child must: she came to define the emotions associated with her

mother as love. Tolstoy as author falls into the same confusion: he responds to the strong current

of emotion that flows from the father to the daughter, and does not know what else to call it. But

it is helpful to subtract the word "love" from the situation. What Tolstoy calls love, let us call by

more objective names. In addition to the contempt, the bullying, the terrorizing, we also see

attachment and dependence – but why not use these ordinary words? What have they to do with

love? There is also tremendous concern; but as Krishnamurti has pointed out, this may only signify a kind of narcissistic extension. Harrison's mother too was concerned: she ordered a gynecologist to break her virgin daughter's hymen so Kathryn could be fitted for a diaphragm.

(The usefulness of this principle – subtracting the love – is hardly confined to novels. I would especially recommend it to any individual caught up in a romantic relationship. Love is often synonymous with possessiveness, suffocating enmeshment, pathological dependence, and sexual obsession. The lovers themselves may equate these characteristics with "love." But there is no need to use an abstract word when ordinary concrete words will do.)

Let us adopt a definition of love that, however unsatisfactory, can be used to throw

Tolstoy's operational definition into high relief. I would say that love is an amalgam of three

impulses toward another person: I accept her as she is; I respect her, not in some merely In praise of lying - 487

conventional sense, but in the sense that I try to take her thoughts and her emotions as seriously as I take my own; and I feel an urge to participate in her aspirations and endeavors and, above all, to celebrate her life – I want her to thrive. (The first two impulses guarantee that I will honor her notion of thriving, not mine.)

By these criteria, the prince not only falls short of love; he is absolutely incapable of love.

What Tolstoy calls love, and what the old prince himself would no doubt call love, is an emotional parasitism of great intensity that is sucking the life out of Princess Marya.

Now, when this father tells his daughter he loves her, he is, by Bok's criteria, telling the truth. But how is Princess Marya to understand this statement? For her own sanity, she needs to understand that it is a lie.

I have said that language is a technology – it is morally neutral. The moral choice starts with the things we want: the lies come later, as a way of getting those things. However evil our own behavior toward our children, we want the reputation of being good parents. We want this reputation with ourselves: we want others to believe, and we want to believe, that we did everything possible to raise the children right. Parents thus always say, and really do believe, that what they do "is in the best interests of" their children, and "for their own good."

Now put yourself in the child's place, hearing this; and hearing, as well, over and over, that truth is sacred – hearing not only the bromide, "always tell the truth"; but also the far more sinister, crazy-making assurance that "I would never lie to you."

Nothing is as simple as Bok thinks it is.

In praise of lying - 488

The inane lies we tell every day

Sometime in the 1970s, among the rising generation of white teenagers, almost an entire gender began dieting, and among urban black teenagers, almost an entire gender got involved with illegal drugs. We reacted immediately with a colossal lie: that we, the society at large, had nothing to do with either of these trends. We treated these millions of people as millions of individual cases of weakness of character. We said we could not imagine where they got their values.

Anorexia was considered a bizarre form of mental illness. At first, nobody connected the advertisements of the fashion industry with the everyday behaviors of the people at whom the ads were aimed.

Today we are a little more savvy. But still our noses keep growing longer.

We tell young dieting girls that thinness is a false idol. But in fact, thinness will bring them happiness in just those ways that their parents recognize – in terms of the goods of this world. We can say whatever we please, but fat girls are pariahs. We can tell them to accept themselves at whatever weight they carry, but no one else, not even their therapists, will really accept them in the only ways that count – for instance, by dating them.

So we lie to ourselves and we lie to the next generation. We say that "looks aren't everything." We say that "violence never solves anything." Anyone can see that, in fact, principled negotiation rarely solves anything; violence, on the other hand, has achieved almost everything. The solutions may not be any good, but violence has drawn the borders of almost every nation in the 20th Century, and thrown the rascals out, and brought intransigent In praise of lying - 489

governments to the bargaining table.

We tell young black men in Southeast Washington, D. C. that they will have better lives if they stay in school and work at fast food restaurants than if they become entrepreneurs of illegal drugs. We say that money is not the important thing. They can look with their two eyes and see that it is. In the 1980s and 1990s, we told them that they must not expect help from the government, but instead must strengthen their family values: then they opened their eyes and saw that a rich white man who lived not far from their own neighborhood, Jack Kent Cooke, disdained the responsibility of paternity and, proportionally speaking, bestowed less of his wealth on his legitimate child than they do on their illegitimate children. He sent his own daughter a pittance. In 1995, his lawyers asked the court to set child support payments at $250.00 per month. Yet this greedy pig of a man was admired simply because he had a billion dollars and owned the Washington Redskins football team. The sports writers of The Washington Post dotingly called him "The Squire." Television announcers referred to him as Mister Cooke.

(Even the president was simply called "Clinton.") When he died, the entire city mourned him.

A young girl joins a nationally renowned ballet company. Classes and rehearsals actually run continuously from 9:00 to 5:00, so that lunch is, by design, impossible. During the summer this girl attends a summer camp under the watchful eye of Suzanne Farrell. When she joins her family later for vacation, she gets off the airplane in the midst of an acute episode of self-induced starvation – almost too weak to walk, and in need of several hours of intravenous feeding at the local hospital to restore her electrolytes. You and I may say, This is wrong. But the girl still has the words of Suzanne Farrell ringing in her ears, that on the very last night of the workshop, at a time when she was dehydrated and visibly emaciated, she had "danced exquisitely." In praise of lying - 490

Is this girl not perfectly attuned to the reality principle, while you and I are lying to her?

The budding ballerina can prove that she is right and her parents are wrong: she can prove that dieting works. She has attained, not just her own goal, but the goal of every aspiring dancer: she has been certified by the experts in her own profession. Suzanne Farrell knows ballet; you and I know only high-fat nutrition.

The world of classical ballet, like the world of high-fashion modeling, is built around an anorexic body image, and anyone wishing to succeed in that world must conform to that image.

We can, if we wish, tell the young girl to give up ballet, to which she has devoted almost her entire life: but we cannot, if we are honest, tell her that she is foolish to go on a diet, any more than we can tell an Olympic athlete that he is foolish to take drugs that enhance his performance.

The reality of the marketplace is that the athlete's refusal to take the drug may render him unable to compete with those who do take the drug, and so effectively end his career.

The drug dealers, steroid abusers, and anorexics are living in the world as it is, and we are telling them to live in the world as we wish it to be.

But when we catch the stray athlete who did not know how to beat the test, we accuse him of living a lie.

The contemptible truths we tolerate every day

My copy of Bok's harangue came from my local library: it had been marked up by a previous patron. The underlinings reflected the reader's infatuation with the most mundane expostulations of middle class morality. At one point, the words "Guidance is hard to come by" were circled. I In praise of lying - 491

would say that we have a plethora of guidance manuals – most of them bad. Elsewhere, the

pencil simply isolated four words in the middle of a sentence: "a code of ethics." The moral sky

is falling, says Chicken Little; we can't even tell right from wrong any more.

We are in the midst of a conservative reaction that must have very deep roots. Our moral

philosophers have abandoned the critique of public injustice and embraced, with the utmost zeal,

the emphasis upon private rectitude.

But when a system is grossly unfair, morality becomes a scam. When well-behaved

citizens regulate their own behavior out of a sense of duty, it is mostly the plutocrats who reap

the benefit. Marx saw this clearly where economic classes were concerned; but as a German

patriarch, he missed the relevance of his analysis to very small systems such as the family.

Living as I do in an unjust society, I confess I am completely deaf to Bok's repeated injunction that I take the perspective of the person who is lied to; and I am equally unsympathetic to, and unpersuaded by, her constant lament about a loss of integrity seeping throughout the

nation. As long as rich men have all the power in our body politic, and domineering men have

all the power in intimate relationships, then telling the truth will function as internalized

oppression and even self-hatred. But if we define morality along existential lines, and affirm the

organism's right to maximize self-realization so long as it is not purchased at the expense of

another, then we arrive, in the case of the victim of injustice, at a categorical imperative to lie.

Bok is right to say that the lying detracts from the human dignity of the liar, and for that I am truly sorry. All the more reason, then, for our so-called moral philosophers to turn their attention toward the debased society that makes lying a kind of duty to oneself.

Like Bok, I believe we really are living in an era when morals have decayed. There is a In praise of lying - 492

greater tolerance of sleazy behavior today. The motion picture Quiz Show, which told the story of the national scandal involving live television contests with rigged outcomes, was nominated for an Academy Award as best picture of the year for 1994; yet the public response was tepid. I believe this is because people who are too young to remember the 1950s are incredulous that the public ever could have believed that television quiz shows aren't fixed. We have a jaundiced attitude today: Do television executives lie? Is the Pope a Catholic?

Nor have we lowered our standards about lying while keeping them high everywhere else: we have made a pact with the devil up and down the ethical line. We have shrugged while the entertainment industry has gravitated more and more to empty, sensational, demoralizing programs emphasizing gory, stomach-churning violence, smutty peekaboo sex, violent sex, and sexualized violence. Perhaps, in a twisted way, Hollywood is more honest today: we no longer have even the pretense that the movie industry has a conscience. The studio heads are now refreshingly frank about catering to the lowest common denominator in the interest of the bottom line. If we have sunk so low that we accept their statements without a protest, then we have created a climate in which lies no longer need to be told – but at what cost?

Where we are this corrupt, truth is hardly courageous. We unthinkingly equate the demagogue with the liar; but where we the people fall below a certain level of competence and altruism – or, to speak plainly, where greed, bigotry, and stupidity hold sway – the candidate who is on the same level with the electorate can afford to tell the truth. Rush Limbaugh is the perfect demagogue, not because he lies hypocritically to his audience, but because he tells the truth as he sees it. Pat Buchanan is even more honest than Limbaugh.

When Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was offered a $4.5 million advance on a book In praise of lying - 493

by a publisher who stood to gain or lose millions depending upon the outcome of legislation pending before Congress, the reaction in the public at large was blasé. Rather than argue the technical merits of the case, I wish only to point out that in the 1950s, the public would have been much more concerned with the propriety of this deal. But standards and expectations have changed to such an extent that Gingrich did not even bother to hide what he did. Does this mean we have made moral progress? I think we have sunk deeper into the cesspool. In the old days, lying hypocrisy was, as the saying has it, the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Politicians hid their venality, with good reason. Today, virtue is something of a laughingstock, so vice can afford to fly its true colors. No one sees anything wrong about a public figure trading on his position to line his pockets, so there is no need for him to lie about it. But truth has not set us free, Professor

Bok; it is only freedom from all restraint that has liberated truth. O Brave New World!

We have, then, a society that forces some people (who would prefer to be honest) to tell defensive lies just to keep the playing field level, while it permits other people (who ought to be ashamed of themselves) to tell the unsavory truth and pay no penalty for it, because nothing is too shameful to hide. That is the problem that needs to be addressed. While the marauders overrun the country, Bok is enforcing the zoning regulations. She turns her attention to the little fence I have put around my house – a full foot higher than the law allows – and tells me to take it down. No, thank you; not until the raiders pack up and leave.

A meditation in praise of cowardice

In Joseph Heller's Catch 22, a patriotic young American aviator in 1944 lectures a cynical old

Italian man:

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for." "And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for. You know, you're such a pure and naïve young man that I almost feel sorry for you. How old are you? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?" "Nineteen," said Nately. "I'll be twenty in January." "If you live." The old man shook his head. . . . "They are going to kill you if you don't watch out, and I can see now that you are not going to watch out. Why don't you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too." "Because it's better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees," Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. "I guess you've heard that saying before." "Yes, I certainly have," mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. "But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes." "Are you sure?" Nately asked with sober confusion. "It seems to make more sense my way." "No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends."

Nately is in the grip of our favorite fiction: life as a theater of heroism. The old Italian man, who cheerfully admits to having kowtowed first to the Germans when they were on top and now to the conquering Americans, values life itself over the hero's garland gracing a fresh grave.

But why is Nately auditioning for the role at all? What keeps the theater in business? In this specific case, other heroes, who took their Germanism and their Italianism as seriously as

Nately takes his Americanism, had already written the first act.

We want to find a way to glorify Nately while condemning his 19-year-old counterpart in

the German Army. Indeed, on March 29, 1996, a Washington Post movie reviewer, Hal Hinson,

worried about a German film that humanized the ordinary infantrymen of the Third Reich who

fought, suffered, and died in horrifying numbers at the Battle of Stalingrad:

The men in the trenches endure unspeakable cold, lack of food, water, medical assistance, you name it. And certainly we're affected by their suffering. But does being so far down the line of command really exempt these soldiers from responsibility?

Well! Is Hinson suggesting that those ordinary German soldiers should have refused to obey

orders? Does he think that is what an American soldier would have done? We could make a factual examination of this premise, except for the difficulty of finding any notable examples in

American military history – not when troops were ordered to provoke the Mexican Army in

1846; not when they were ordered to "pacify" the guerrillas who opposed the annexation of the

Philippines in 1898; not when they were ordered to massacre the villagers of My Lai in 1968; not

when they were ordered to devastate the country of Panama in 1989 and, in violation of every

known canon of international law, seize its head of state and bring him back into our own

country for an illegal trial; not when they were ordered in 1991 to slaughter 160,000 Iraqis at

almost no risk to themselves so as to do the bidding of the dictator of Saudi Arabia after he had

been petitioned by the dictator of Kuwait.

The only American soldier of the 1990s with the courage to disobey an order was Private

First Class Michael New, but it was not an order to kill civilians: New refused to take part in a

peacekeeping mission to protect civilians, because it would have been under the auspices of the

United Nations. This made him a hero to America's "militia men," such as Timothy McVeigh. In praise of cowardice - 496

At the battle of Stalingrad, Hinson would have obeyed orders, I would have obeyed orders, everybody either of us knows would have obeyed orders.

But there is nothing quite like the courage of those who aren't in any danger: in his contraband memoirs, Dmitri Shostakovich railed at the Western journalists who, knowing that he and his fellow composers lived under one of the most terrible totalitarian regimes in history, nonetheless persisted in asking them publicly, when they went on tour, what they thought of

Soviet policies. And Americans today still like to wonder out loud why the Russian people didn't stand up to Stalin, who would have killed the entire Shostakovich family had his serious displeasure alighted on the composer. (That it did not is usually attributed to Stalin's love of bad movies, to many of which Shostakovich wearily provided third-rate background music.)

My tangent may seem to have undermined my point. If so many are deluded by the fiction of life as a theater of heroism, why are there so few heroes who refuse to obey orders, so few who stood up to Stalin? Many readers are going to hate the answer.

Heroism is socially constructed. The courage to run at a nest of enemy machine gunners, or to drop a bomb on Muammar Qaddafi's house, is socially acceptable heroism, and therefore too commonplace to claim our attention very often, while the courage to defy your own government's war machine is anti-social. Therefore it is not called "heroism." The courage to stand alone in a courtroom before a judge who is about to sentence you to five years in prison for following your conscience and refusing to participate in an unjust war is called – this is really choice – "cowardice."

Did you really think that heroism can be ascribed independently of society's definition of it, which changes on an almost daily basis in accordance with the well-established law of In praise of cowardice - 497

expediency? In fact, courage is a purely social virtue: your display of it serves the interests of your commanders and your buddies, helping to further their goals and to keep them safe. They would be guilty of ingratitude indeed if they did not reward your usefulness to them with an occasional accolade. Even Aristotle could see that the virtue of courage depended upon the circumstance in which it is employed, and said the compulsive daredevil is "rash" rather than

"brave." Today we ought to be able to see clearly what he missed or had no words to express: that our commanders and cohorts may be engaged in the active perpetration of a crime.

I am speaking here on behalf of all the deserters from the field of heroism. I am celebrating the cowards, the collaborators, the time-servers, and the turncoats, who show us how to embrace life.

I am praising all the Christians who converted to Islam, all the heretics who recanted and lived, all the Quakers who fled the state of Massachusetts when they were prohibited from preaching, all the Bulgarian Jews who accepted the offer of a compassionate Catholic monsignor to fake their conversions to Catholicism and so save their lives in 1944. (This monsignor sent out thousands of baptismal certificates to be used in this fraudulent fashion, but did not thereby endear himself to his superiors in the Vatican, who had made a very clear distinction in their own minds between such opportunists and any genuinely converted Jews. But much later when he was a very old man, in spite of his unpopularity with his peers, this same monsignor was cynically chosen by the College of Cardinals to occupy the papacy for his few remaining years while the conservatives could regroup and settle on someone more to their liking. He became

Pope John XXIII, the greatest and best loved pope in the checkered history of the church, and one whose conduct did much to efface the dark stain of his predecessor's complete public silence over In praise of cowardice - 498

the annihilation of the Jews.)

Early in the 19th Century, the family of Felix Mendelssohn emerged from the Jewish ghetto into the fully cosmopolitan life of Central Europe and, to facilitate the move, converted en masse to Lutheranism. My guess is that today most Jews and even most mainstream Protestants would unite in contempt for such an act. I say let us praise the Mendelssohns as the children of the wise; let us celebrate the humanism of those who realize that life is for the living and the

Sabbath is made for man. Here we have two monotheistic religions, one wanting to freeze God's revelation as of 2700 years ago, the other, as of 2000 years ago. Big deal. I'd convert back and forth if I got nothing better than a free toaster out of it.

The collaborationists, throughout history, have often been in the vanguard of cultural and moral progress. After the battle of Hastings, those Britons who made common cause with the

Normans helped to accelerate the growth of a unique civilization that was more than Britain and more than Normandy.

Certainly we cannot adopt collaborationism as a fixed principle (if only because we would be wise not to adopt any fixed principles at all): the Vichy government is properly scorned today, and Quisling is a dirty word. But we ought to be able to say even of the Nazi collaborators that they wanted simply to live and thrive if they could, and that we can understand that.

The maneuvers of those who want to save their own skins are, by definition, self-serving; and furthermore may be skulking, conniving, deceitful, traitorous, desperate, groveling, and pathetic. Often, at the last, such efforts prove to be futile anyway: after years of denials, betrayals, and hypocrisies, the collaborators are executed in spite of all. But the damage done to the world by those who want life at any cost is a drop in a bucket by comparison to the damage In praise of cowardice - 499

done by those who have been in love with death – both those who loved killing the identified others, and those who preferred to be killed rather than renounce their precious identities as the others.

Persecutions originate in tribalism: in ethnocentrism, sectarianism, nationalism, and partisanship. These tribal allegiances also fuel the willingness to endure persecutions. When we condemn the oppressors and applaud the resisters, we may be overlooking the sad fact that both sides are actuated by the same ideals.

I grew up believing the fiction that the Massachusetts Puritans emigrated from England in search of religious liberty. Only as an adult did I understand that they loathed the very concept of freedom. They came to America, in the words of Garrison Keillor, "in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time." Throughout the 17th

Century, both Anglicans and Puritans wanted to be able to persecute each other, and all others, with impunity. The Puritans fled solely because the Anglicans were the top dogs and they were the under dogs. In Boston and in Salem, Massachusetts, the Puritans were the top dogs: they could establish a theocratic government free of secular liberal shibboleths such as "tolerance."

The hanging of Quaker women at mid-century gave way to the hanging of each other at the end of the century. The Salem witch trials stand as one of the oldest and darkest stains on our national memory, although we have reproduced their enormities, down to the very details, in our recent episodes of hysteria over day-care molestations. (As in the witch trials, standards of evidence were turned upside down: defendants were, in essence, presumed guilty until proven innocent; sensational charges, made by impressionable children who had been coaxed and cajoled by experts in the invisible world (formerly the invisible world of demons, latterly the In praise of cowardice - 500

invisible world of psychological forces), were admitted without prejudice as evidence under the law, while the same children's recantations were sternly questioned and judicially ignored; coerced testimony was uncritically credited, while freely rendered and unrefuted adult testimony was disregarded; the more outlandish the accusations were, the more readily they were believed; the accumulation of detail to the point of incredibility was taken to be a sign of proof positive based upon the sheer volume of the allegations; convictions were secured in the absence of any corroborating physical evidence; and townspeople remained, even after journalistic exposés of prosecutorial and judicial malfeasance, infinitely credulous, fanatically certain of their "facts," and extraordinarily vengeful toward the defendants, who were the true victims.)

The Puritans are the same people, whether they are the persecutors or the victims of persecution. Psychologically, the martyrs on the rack are often the mirror image of the inquisitors who are wielding the instruments of torture. Even where they aren't – as with those

Quakers who defied the Puritan ban on public preaching – they have often been more than half in love with death.

Homicide and suicide are two faces of the same coin. There is a fatal unity of oppressor and oppressed, whether during the Roman persecution of Christians or during the Christian persecution of heretics: each side glorifies death in the name of religion, one side seeking the other side's death and the other side embracing its own death. It is part of our mythology to celebrate the martyr who refuses to renounce his religion even when tortured upon the rack. But the martyr who throws away his only life rather than give breath to empty words honoring the emperor is no one to emulate.

Part of the horror and unprecedented cruelty of the Holocaust is that the Jews were not In praise of cowardice - 501

even given the option of selling out. But their persecutors did not fare much better: hundreds of thousands of young boys of the Hitler Youth died terrible deaths in the snows of Russia. So I praise also the few Germans who deserted, who surrendered to the Allies against the orders of their officers, who ran away, who hid, who tried to get assigned to safe areas. Some of those who did so were no doubt pure cowards – virulent anti-Semites who wanted only to save themselves. But had more of them been cowards, the war would have ended sooner. Give me that coward, who wants to live, if only for pleasure, over the true-believing man of courage. I can sooner get the hedonist to recognize the humanity of his enemies – if he has any enemies – than ever I can persuade the hero to renounce the very terms of his heroism.

I can at least understand, if not condone, former congressman Mel Reynolds, who salivated at the thought of sleeping with high school girls. In any case, he paid for his predilection with his reputation and his career. I prefer him to Henry Kissinger, who salivated over bombing high school girls.

Give me hedonism over heroism; give me a government of men on the make over a government of men who act on patriotic principle; give me liberty instead of death; make love, not war.

We console ourselves by telling ourselves lies: that the victims of all the terrible persecutions of history died on their feet. No. They died on their knees. They were rounded up for senseless, despicable reasons; sometimes they preferred to die for equally senseless reasons.

And they did die, by the millions, without a movie soundtrack. Their deaths were random, stupid, and meaningless. The only way we can honor the dead at all is to learn from their tragedy, even at this late date in history; and the only correct thing to learn is that their deaths In praise of cowardice - 502

were meaningless. We certainly have to give up killing "the others" when we are the majority; and when we are not, we have to give up reveling in our heroic identification with "the others."

We have to give up our identifications. We have to live for pleasure. We have to live. Life wants to side with life, and we have to let it. Apparently, that is not so easy for us to do: we need a few good examples. God bless the cowards and the collaborators.

The social virtue of modesty

Robert Coles, a national authority figure on children and morality, visited several classrooms as part of the fieldwork for his 1997 book, The Moral Intelligence of Children. He has long been a pioneer in taking the ethical lives of children seriously, and in propounding the view that empathy arises naturally during the course of child development. But at one instructive point, his pedestrian presuppositions about "the virtues" blinded him to an incandescent display of genuine morality.

In his narrative, Betsy, the best speller in her third-grade class, and an all-around excellent student, tells the teacher that she does not want to participate in a spelling bee. When challenged by the teacher, she says, "My cousin is in high school, and he said a lot of spelling – it doesn't make any sense and they should make it easier to spell a lot of words." After the class discusses this novel idea, Betsy says, "I guess I'm a good speller, so far. But that's not what I'd like to be – a speller! I don't want to be bragging all the time – look at how I can spell! So I'd just as soon skip that 'bee' (whatever they call it)."

Coles offers the following analysis:

She had raised with delicacy and without sly boasting the matter of modesty – a moral matter. She didn't want a spotlight on herself, didn't want to be identified as the one who was a first-rate speller. As she talked, one could feel her trying to be self-effacing – having her say quickly, then withdrawing from what was fast becoming a fray. I thought to myself: here is an ever-so-quietly demonstrated goodness, a refusal to show off, a willingness to reign in [sic] one's inevitable The social virtue of modesty - 504

egoism (or "pride," in the biblical sense of the word) lest others feel diminished by comparison.

Summing up: "Here was a child who already knew how to be genuinely modest, no small

achievement in the life of anyone, of any age."

Coles has not only missed the boat; he has failed to show up at the pier. He reads a corrupt adult morality into the true morality of an uncorrupted child. Betsy says nothing about the feelings of others. She says, clearly and insightfully, that correct spelling is a trivial accomplishment. She does not necessarily impugn all bragging – she just snorts at the idea that spelling well is anything to brag about. She notes wisely that she is a good speller "so far." She states that she has never had her own heart set on being a great speller – even if the world does set a good deal of store by it.

We may be tempted to assume, from her conduct and demeanor, that she is not one to push herself to the forefront of things; but she is ready enough to take a stand, and her remarks leave it an open question whether she might not strive for recognition in some endeavor of greater intrinsic merit than a spelling bee.

More to the point, however: when Coles speaks about genuine modesty, I am tempted to say that there is no such thing. All modesty, not just so-called false modesty, is a social production and has an element of phoniness about it. Modesty is a pose of not caring about accomplishments or honors: therefore it is, paradoxically, a form of showing off.

It is an interesting exercise to ask ourselves to define the difference between "modesty" and "false modesty." If a stunningly attractive girl who has carefully dressed for the dance says, The social virtue of modesty - 505

"Oh, I look like an old dishrag," we accuse her of false modesty. If she turns aside a compliment

gracefully, implying that she knows it is unmerited, we say she is genuinely modest. But either

way she is insincere, and the distinction in our minds is really a testimony to her acting ability.

Nor is modesty a matter of morality at all; nor is "showing off" immoral. Modesty is, like

loyalty, a social virtue – it lubricates our relationships. Many arrogant people learn to fake it quite convincingly. Boasting too has very little moral significance: it is an obvious compensation for insecurity, and even small children are able to recognize it as such. The pathetic person who

resorts to boasting may be kind and considerate when he isn't desperately seeking attention and

approval.

Most children are quick to notice that they can garner praise for their demonstrations of

modesty. Betsy is light years away from that. She is not pretending that she does not care about

the bee – she really does not care; and when she sees from her teacher's response that she is

supposed to care, she still doesn't. What ought to captivate Coles is Betsy's emphatic possession

of a set of values that transcends the merely social virtues like modesty and challenges the

superficial notions of the adults around her. She is no shrinking violet – she stands up to her

teacher. She's beyond modesty.

But this is how pervasive the morality of character has become. Coles – trained in psychoanalysis and the author of several books on morality – unthinkingly supports the conceptual framework that equates character with goodness. As if we should want our children

to live in a world where they refuse to celebrate their own achievements out of misplaced

concern for others. As if we should not rather prefer that they could frankly enjoy their successes

and wholeheartedly celebrate the successes of others. The social virtue of modesty - 506

Coles's susceptibility to Christianity leads him astray. He thinks that we want to be bad

and it is hard to be good. He thinks Betsy is doing this hard thing because it is right. He thinks

she wants to be in the spelling bee. No. She does not care about the spelling bee. She has better things to do. It isn't that hard to be good unless you have been assiduously trained, as most of us are, to value evil but to think that it is off-limits. All the other children, who want the evils we have trained them to value – honor, power, riches, fame – would naturally want to star in the spelling bee and would find it a sacrifice to have to miss it. Not Betsy. She hasn't signed on to the world's goods – i.e., to its evils – in the first place, so they are not hard for her to forgo. She is psychologically free to pursue what really is good. Freedom and goodness go together. It is only religion's big lie that if we are free to choose, we will choose selfishly. More people have chosen evil because they thought someone else would be disappointed in them if they didn't than ever chose it because they wanted it for themselves. But if we are denied freedom, if the foot of duty is forever on our necks, we will choose selfishly when we get the rare chance to choose at all – thinking that to go through life and miss what the world values is too high a price to pay for a spotless reputation.

It is bad enough for us to be conned by the "good little children" who ape the gestures of correct behavior and keep their noses clean. Less forgivable is our failure to see the authentic goodness in Betsy's position.

The tragedy of discipline

As affluent societies have become more openly committed to each individual's "right" to self-

actualization, it has become permissible to speak earnestly, if nonsensically, of one's moral

obligation to one's self. Accordingly, the virtue of discipline has risen in estimation. Obviously

in past ages this trait had a civic value, where it was given other now-antiquated sobriquets like temperance and perseverance; but with the nation-state now cast into the role of the blindly repressive enemy of personal fulfillment, what we most often mean by discipline is an individual's rigorous control over his own riotous impulses, which allows him to climb a corporate or institutional ladder of success. Discipline in this sense has no ethical valence at all, and may not even be a social virtue: it is merely a technology of personal effectiveness. But as our individualistic ethic more and more exalts the achievements of careerists who "go for the gold" and "make their dreams come true," discipline has come to the fore as one of the hallmarks of a sterling character. Indeed, it is a kind of meta- or super-virtue, for it gives its possessor an important key to simulating all the other virtues.

To prevent any misunderstanding, I am myself a great advocate of an individualistic ethic, both because life is, or should be, about personally thriving and because society itself, in the long run, stands to benefit more from its creative eccentrics than from its hidebound conformists.

What makes our current cultural landscape so dreary isn't the existence of a large number of people who have been freed by affluence to do what they want – it is what they want to do that so The tragedy of discipline - 508

drags down our national reputation. Values alone, and not the virtues, tell us whether our task is

worth doing.

Discipline well serves a worthy project. But if it is truly worthy, you probably want to do

it; and if you want to do it, then it doesn't "take discipline" to do it. What the purveyors of character usually mean by discipline is our ability to stay at a task that the best part of us says is not worth doing. And obviously this is a quality that must be forced down our throats. I knew a man whose parents aimed conscientiously at "instilling" discipline in him, which boils down to the habit of obediently doing what others tell you to do rather than what you would do yourself.

The end product of this pedagogy in character was an adult who was incapable of deferring gratification in order to attend to life's necessary but mundane tasks. I found him in a bar one afternoon, nursing a beer and reading pulp fiction while another friend of mine waited all afternoon for him to come by and finish painting her house.

What we call discipline flows naturally into any endeavor that is pursued for its own sake because we love to do it. But again, to a moralist like Kant, my having an inclination to do it for its own sake automatically rules it out as a distinctively moral undertaking. This is why the Dalai

Lama's statement that the purpose of life is to be happy sounds so radical: Kant would be spinning in his grave.

If discipline is forced upon the balky child, two things can happen, both of them bad. The lesser of the two evils, exemplified by my old friend, is a rebellious and crippling lifelong resistance to the habits of discipline, such that a person finds it almost impossible to do the things that "have to be done." In the opposite, worst-case scenario, the habit of discipline takes, and the person becomes disciplined indeed – which is to say, an automaton. If such a person is without The tragedy of discipline - 509

any healthy passion – and there are millions such – he makes himself the slave of other people's passions, and thus the perfect functionary in any bureaucratic system, where his obedience is as likely to serve the interests of genocidal extermination as of any more humanitarian program.

In her book, The Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas touches upon the tragedy of a training that is effective:

To the dogs who stayed with me I gave food, water, and shelter, but after my project began I made no effort to train them, even for housebreaking or coming when called. I didn't need to. The young dogs copied the old dogs, which in their case resulted in perfect housebreaking, and all the dogs naturally came when called most of the time, declining to do so only if our demands conflicted with something that was genuinely important to them. A dog who feels free to make such a distinction shows more of his thoughts and feelings in a single day than a rigidly trained, hyperdisciplined dog can show in a lifetime.

Insofar as this is true of dogs, it is perhaps even truer of humans: we can more easily imagine a dog reverting to his canine instincts than picture a human rediscovering his simian nature – or even the human potential that he was born with, which has been educated out of him almost from the day he was born. Such is the malignant power of a training in character: the individual who becomes a shining exemplum of the virtues ironically loses his humanness altogether, as the dog loses his canineness. The person-ality disappears when it is absorbed into habits – habits that are imposed and adopted, rather than discovered and internalized. An exemplum is all that is left.

Thus the attempt to instill character destroys character. A disciplined, obedient child is a robot, divested of the psychological mobility that alone can produce a decision to do a right thing for a right reason – a reason, that is, that has been recognized internally and embraced authentically and wholeheartedly. In spite of all the theological lip service paid by Christians to the theoretical importance of free will, a disciplined upbringing is frankly intended to eliminate The tragedy of discipline - 510

free will – which is, after all, the repository of all that is evil in the human mind. The child is

brought up to substitute for his own sinful inclinations an automatic adherence to the virtues that

have been trained into him. It is precisely his free will that must be suppressed. Therefore all his

displays of character will be simulations. While it may be unfair to label them inauthentic, there

is no way to determine if they are genuine – that is to say, expressive of any part of his own

unfettered desire or inner spirituality. And a goodness that is enacted even though it is unwanted

and perhaps even secretly resented poses a philosophical problem to most of us. This is a strange

and disturbing conception of a human life: that it is best lived when least lived; that never to have

encountered my own mind is a blessing; that safety lies in remaining a stranger to my own true

nature.

In such a well-trained person, genuine moral agency has disappeared: yet there are no

greater devotees of accountability and punishment than the men of character who have undergone

the training. They themselves are, paradoxically, Exhibit A for the unreality of their own

concepts of responsibility and guilt: for like the hyperdisciplined dogs mentioned by Thomas,

they are incapable of acting on their thoughts and feelings, and so are the least free and

accountable beings among us. Jefferson Davis was a machine; and Chief Justice Rehnquist voluntarily relinquished the use of his imagination to reach any conclusion other than the ones that I, or anyone else, could, from a knowledge of his prior decisions, have provided in his stead.

The bitter irony of Rehnquist's case was his belief in the justice of his obscene punishments of others, which he based upon his resolute belief that their free will had left them no excuse. He

could not see that these malefactors whom he so avidly wished to torment and even kill were

merely poor automatons and that he was another such. But once we grasp the narcissism of The tragedy of discipline - 511

character, we even see why he could not see it. We know that he was psychologically compelled

to go on doing as he had done: his behavior seems malicious only if we mistakenly attribute to

him the free will that he mistakenly attributed to others. He had in fact painstakingly eradicated

free will from his own mind. We should deplore the consequences of his insensate rulings and

must seek out ways to neutralize the power of his kind to do us harm; but I doubt if even his most

fervent opponents would have seen any sense in punishing him for the evil he had done. He

would have felt only that he was unjustly persecuted, which is, needless to say, an almost

unanimous sentiment among the inmates of the prisons that he so assiduously tried to fill.

The Bennett Exception is merely an interesting variant on the well-trained type of person.

William Bennett, you will remember, is the morality-monger who preached discipline to others while himself sneaking away to indulge his predilection for high-stakes gambling. I do not name the syndrome after him because his behavior is truly exceptional: such deviations are the norm among disciplinarians, because no person safely within the bell curve of ordinary human impulses can stand to practice what Bennett preaches. I call it the Bennett Exception because, with perfect narcissistic blindness, he viewed his own dereliction from duty as an understandable and justifiable exception to the rules that should govern the conduct of others. Such a man is easy to mock for ostensible hypocrisy – and should be mocked, because his hiding of his behavior shows that he combined lying and skulking with self-aggrandizement and arrogance – but his syndrome is better regarded, not as a failure to live up to a beautiful ideal, but as the unmasking of the ugliness of that ideal. The Bennett Exception points to the deformation of personality that is likely to result from a thorough training in Bennett's published morality.

Bennett's shabby life is the proof that his ideas about life are no good. The tragedy of discipline - 512

My description of conflict between a conscious id or ego and an unconscious superego – my

inversion of Freud here is intentional – accounts for a phenomenon that escapes the notice of

most psychologists, who, naturally enough, tend to create classifications of mental illness out of

their client populations rather than categories of mental health out of the population-at-large.

(Abraham Maslow was an exception.) Many adults do not acquire, in the course of their experience, an ideology or morality that conflicts in any way with that of their upbringing: instead they completely internalize the parental training, and every experience confirms its rightness. This produces a class of colorless beings who pass through life without leaving any footprints – especially if their parents instilled the conventional values with a comparatively gentle hand and themselves epitomized respectability in all its dullness. These gray non- eminences are all around us, almost unnoticed: they are not even describable as "the walking wounded" because to all appearances they are well; but they suffer, or don't suffer – don't suffer – from a condition that only the existential philosophers talk about. They are comfortably attuned to the happy medium: as Prince Hal says to Poins after eliciting his opinion in Henry IV, Part

Two, "It would be every man's thought, and thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks. Never a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine."

Freud might have seen such people as utterly repressed; but on his own account, such a strength of repression should eventually betray itself in a correspondingly strong cathexis, or

"acting out" – because the id can not be kept down. The truth is simpler and more somber: such people are genuinely satisfied and in sync with their surroundings. Profound questions are raised thereby: what is a human life? what is human flourishing? is there such a thing as the unlived life? It may well be that a type of repression has occurred that is more overwhelming than even The tragedy of discipline - 513

Freud dared to guess, since he underestimated the strength of the superego and overestimated the power of the id: it may be that the healthy id has been strangled in its cradle with the superego's rope. The quashing of human exploration and curiosity may create an existential emptiness that, being the presence of an absence, is invisible to the naked eye. But assigning these humans any sort of existential disease is controversial, for as one character remarks of another in a play by

Jean Kerr, albeit sarcastically, they actually seem to have "made a wonderful adjustment."

However, if Karl Popper is right in suggesting that human consciousness, like biological life itself, evolves by identifying problems and working on solutions, then we may be justified in saying that any human who devotes his energy to defending himself against the experiencing of problems or new situations may be injuring himself in the same way that an individual given to sedentary habits is causing his muscles to atrophy. The weakling may say that he is content with his body, and the conformist may say that he is content with his mind. Is the absence of disease a certificate of health? In both cases, it is only outside observers who will see, if not a downright unhealthy person, at the least a person who is unaware of what he is missing and cannot said to be thriving fully. It really is better to be Socrates discontented than a pig contented. But we cannot expect the pig to agree.

There is also the bedeviling question of what, if anything, we should do about such individuals. As Kant said, we have no right to make of them a means to our own ends; and it is presumptuous for us to postulate ends that, out of good will, we benevolently wish them to attain for their own good. These people are ends in themselves, and if they pronounce themselves satisfied with their lives, we would be arrogant indeed to undertake to convince them that they have no right to be. Ibsen wrote The Wild Duck to show us that any attempt to disturb their The tragedy of discipline - 514

psychological equilibrium, with the beneficent aim of inculcating a temporary dissatisfaction in the service of a higher self-realization down the road, is fraught with peril.

The unpardonable virtue

In philosophical discourse, a necessary cause is one that must be present for an effect to occur; if it is not present, the effect simply cannot happen.

Necessary causes are often uninteresting, because they are trivial or obvious. More to the point, the isolation of a necessary cause may do very little to solve the problem we are analyzing, because by itself it is not sufficient to produce the effect. For instance, if I cite "an education in violence" as a necessary cause of malicious violence, I must next vitiate the force of my finding by admitting that every functioning individual is eventually so educated, and yet not every individual will engage in it. (The addition of the word "malicious" is important here, since any biologist would confirm our innate potential for violence if it becomes necessary to ensure our survival or the survival of our group.)

Some textbooks make a place for what are called contributory causes. These are neither necessary nor sufficient, but they increase the likelihood that the effect will occur. A strong contributory cause of violence, for instance, is the ready availability of implements of violence; another may be a situation of extreme stress. What frustrates us about contributory causes is that they are both multifarious and weak. They are present in situations where violence does not take place: therefore they do little to illuminate the salient causes. Yet they may play an important part in specific acts of violence.

Because of our intellectual immaturity, and because much of our thinking about evil is The unpardonable virtue - 516

what I call motivated, we tend to pass quickly over all merely necessary and contributory causes

in hopes of finding a sufficient cause – one that, by itself, will produce the effect with 100%

reliability in all circumstances. We want to isolate the single factor that is guaranteed to produce

an act of violence: if it is present, the act occurs and cannot not occur; if it is not present, the act

cannot occur.

One of the disappointments that have dogged us in our investigation of human violence

and human evil is that we have been unable to locate a sufficient cause. This is a problem not

because it foredooms our attempt to find a solution, but because we make our failure to find it

our excuse for neglecting the necessary and contributory causes. Social workers who cite the

relevant data establishing the firm link between a brutalized childhood and an adult propensity

for violence are only too aware of how often their findings are "refuted" by the jejune observation

that not every beaten child grows up to be a beater of children. There is more involved here than

pointing out a logical fallacy: if we can convict the social workers of making a bad-faith

argument, then we need not follow any of their recommendations for ameliorating these

conditions, which might prove expensive and inconvenient.

It is easy to demonstrate that the lack of a sufficient cause does not render a problem

insoluble. Let me mention one researcher's formidable attempt to give a comprehensive solution

to the problem of psychopathic violence. Psychiatrist Jonathan Pincus finds three powerful

predictors of murderous adult behavior: childhood abuse, neurological damage, and mental

illness. No one of them by itself is sufficient, nor even all three in combination. Instead, Pincus argues that at least two of them operating together are necessary. He asserts that after many years of testing a multitude of criminal offenders, he has never found a single case that did not have at The unpardonable virtue - 517

least two of these contributory causes, and often all three. Childhood abuse is overwhelmingly present as one of the causes, so Pincus states confidently that criminal violence could be markedly reduced by addressing this issue. If he is right – and he almost certainly is – we do not need to arrive at a single sufficient cause, or even a group of necessary causes that together become sufficient, to make great progress toward a solution to the problem of violence.

In order to reach his conclusion, Pincus has to define both mental illness and childhood abuse broadly. For instance, he attributes both factors to Timothy McVeigh, although there is no documentation of actual abuse and no accepted diagnosis of mental illness in accordance with the criteria that are accepted by professional psychiatrists. Instead, Pincus cites the apparent estrangement between McVeigh and his parents as indirect evidence of emotional abuse, and takes McVeigh's ideological thought-world to be ipso facto evidence of paranoia. It is difficult to test the Pincus hypothesis, then: while the psychiatric experts have agreed for the most part on the criteria for their diagnoses of mental illnesses and have published them, they are far from agreeing on when the criteria have been met; and the experts on child abuse (if there are any) cannot agree on a definition of what constitutes it.

I would prefer to adopt a moderate position: all perpetrators have been strongly educated in violence, often memorably, and they further evince demonstrable cognitive and emotional impairment: they are lacking in empathy and psychological mobility; they have a penchant for abstraction; they have vengeful feelings; and they often subscribe to a code of toughness. I doubt that the impairment I have just described will in all cases warrant a diagnosis of either neurological deficit or mental illness. But even if Pincus is not quite correct, he shows us how violence can be caused by a combination of factors known to us and treatable by us; and in The unpardonable virtue - 518

pointing to childhood abuse as the most important etiological factor, he further points us firmly in the right direction.

If a sufficient cause of malicious violence cannot be found, whereas the necessary causes can be identified with a great deal of confidence, why do we persist in ignoring these obvious necessary causes while continuing to pursue the illusory sufficient cause? It could be that we are

"logically challenged," but our ability to send spaceships into orbit around the planet Saturn suggests that we are "morally challenged" instead. We are too deeply enmeshed in evil to want to find a solution. We are desperate to deny the truth of any theory that holds our parents and grandparents accountable for training us in violence. Any such theory offends against our cherished illusions of personal accountability and free will; and we are reluctant to face the bleak prospect that "a normal upbringing" may in fact be pathological, with all the discomfort to us that this finding would entail. Therefore, nothing suits our purposes better than to shunt the problem off onto the siding of nature, genetics, and hardwiring, and to redouble the effort to find the twisted chromosome, or the overactive hormone, or the fatal microbe, or the cellular matter containing the death drive, or the spiritual matter carrying the original sin, that we posit as the elusive sufficient cause of evil. We go down this road precisely because the search is guaranteed to be futile.

By way of illustrating our resistance to finding the real causes of violence, let me remind the reader that there is a factor – known to all sociologists, and furthermore demonstrated in controlled experiments – that does come close, very close, to fitting the criterion of a sufficient cause. If this factor is present, I venture to say that violence will follow in more than 99 cases The unpardonable virtue - 519

out of 100, even in the absence of neurological dysfunction, mental illness, and a history of childhood abuse. Almost all humans on this earth will perform a violent act if this single condition is met, even if no other necessary or contributory cause is present. We are prevented from labeling it a sufficient cause only because of that 1% failure rate: in a very few rare instances, this factor has been present and yet no violent act ensued.

This factor is an authoritative order to perform the violent act.

Individuals do differ widely about what constitutes an authoritative order. For a large majority of us, almost anyone who socially outranks us will possess authority. For a smaller number of us, only officials appointed by the recognized civic power, bearing insignia of unquestionable authority, will have sway over us. But very, very few of us will refuse to obey an order to commit a violent act in all circumstances whatsoever and no matter who is giving the order. If this was not understood before Stanley Milgram conducted his famous psychological experiments, it has been widely understood since; and for that reason, his report is one of the most important documents ever issued on the subject of evil.

We are far from wishing to address the real problem of evil. I stated earlier that an education in violence is currently part of our education in humanity. The commonest locus of this education is the family – most often, parental brutality toward the child, but also parental brutality toward others that is witnessed by the child. This violence may be verbally threatened rather than physically enacted, but it still lodges in the child's imagination. In rare instances, a child of enlightened, generous, empathic parents will learn about violence only from other sources – those sources are, sad to say, legion. But it must be learned, for nothing in our so-called animal The unpardonable virtue - 520

inheritance points to a propensity for violence that is perpetrated and enjoyed for its own sake.

Because no person attains adulthood without seeing images of violence or hearing fantasies of violence, no matter how pacific his upbringing, I did not mention this education as an additional contributory cause to the nearly sufficient cause of an authoritative order to commit an act of violence. Citing it would be redundant: if there are any people present to hear the order, they have been educated in violence. But this factor is not thereby shown to be trivial: we could do something about it. We could counter it with a strong training in nonviolence, and we could further teach our children at every grade level how to resist the authorities when they give improper orders. History is replete with telling examples – mostly negative, where obedience led to catastrophe, but there are also a few scattered positive illustrations of resistance to authority.

Our classroom teachers could be required to celebrate those moral heroes.

Not only is there little or no attempt to educate us about how to resist an authoritative order to perform a violent act: there is even a shared premise of our religions and our governments that disobeying an authoritative order is a sin and a crime. In fact, theologically speaking, disobedience is the gravest of all offenses – the original sin itself. The whole point of

God's prohibition in the Garden of Eden is its arbitrariness: the Biblical writer wishes to emphasize the supreme value and importance of abject obedience as good in and of itself, regardless of the content of the authoritative order.

Almost all Christian theologians have furthermore touted the secular order as a microcosm of the sacred, and have called upon Christians to obey the temporal authorities as readily as they obey the spiritual. Their implicit motto, unequivocally stated by Paul and substantiated by every Pauline theologian since, has been to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's The unpardonable virtue - 521

and what is God's, because Caesar is God's representative on Earth. Martin Luther said so in words that cannot be misunderstood: "Disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft, and dishonesty." That he meant disobedience to civil authority is demonstrated by his response to the Peasants' Rebellion of 1525, when he called for its violent suppression in these terms:

Let anyone who can, strike, kill, or stab, secretly or openly, recalling that nothing can be more venomous, damaging, or demonic than a rebel.

The peasants had been inspired to revolt by Luther's own rhetoric about the spiritual equality of all Christians.

Lutheran morality

It is instructive to restore Martin Luther's notorious pronouncements on obedience to their original setting, where they are shown to be more, rather than less, monstrous than when they are taken out of context. They are part of his discussion of the Fourth Commandment (as numbered by Catholics and some Protestants). The wording of the excerpt reveals that Luther, almost alone among Biblical commentators, believes that the Ten Commandments are given in their order of importance. The first three pertain to our duties to God, and naturally take precedence over the last seven, which pertain to our duties to each other. Furthermore, the fourth outranks the fifth, the fifth outranks the sixth, and so on:

"Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother." From this Commandment we learn that after the excellent works of the first three Commandments there are no better works than to obey and serve all those who are set over us as superiors. For this reason also disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft and dishonesty, and all that these may include. For we can in no better way learn how to distinguish between greater and lesser sins than by noting the order of the Commandments of God, although there are distinctions also within the works of each Commandment. For who does not know that to curse is a greater sin than to be angry, to strike than to curse, to strike father and mother more than to strike any one else? Thus these seven [remaining] Commandments teach us how we are to exercise ourselves in good works toward men, and first of all toward our superiors.

The hierarchical ordering of the commandments explains the awkward wording of his statement that disobedience is a greater sin than murder, theft, adultery, lying – "and all that these may Lutheran morality - 523

include." This clumsy phrase alludes to the contents of the last six commandments taken

together, which are subordinate to the fourth.

In many a passing conversation, I have, in order to make a point about how generalized

and unhelpful the commandments are, often posed the hypothetical question of how we should be

guided if the commandments conflict. Suppose, I say with some jocularity, our parents suborn us

to murder: one commandment forbids the murder, but another enjoins us to honor our parents.

The response to my challenge has varied, but no one has ever upheld the duty to carry out the

parents' orders. Luther, however, leaves no doubt that I must commit the murder at my parents'

behest, because murder is a lesser sin than disobedience to parents. The commandment to refrain

from murder comes after the commandment to honor my parents, and is therefore less important.

I would be justified in disobeying my parents only if they urged upon me a truly sacrilegious action that violated one of the first three commandments, such as asking me to get their cow out of a ditch on the Sabbath.

Lest you imagine that the duty to your parents is binding only during your childhood, and that you may be expected to exercise your adult autonomy in good time, Luther sets you straight:

The first work is that we honor our own father and mother. And this honor consists not only in respectful demeanor, but in this: that we obey them, look up to, esteem and heed their words and example, accept what they say, keep silent and endure their treatment of us, so long as it is not contrary to the first three Commandments; in addition, when they need it, that we provide them with food, clothing and shelter.

The mention of feeding, clothing, and sheltering is decisive: we must obey our parents and

endure their treatment of us all our lives.

Luther also states clearly that the honor owed to parents is owed equally to "all those who Lutheran morality - 524

are set over us as superiors." All persons of authority must be obeyed – government and military

officials, teachers and principals, landlords and other property owners, and corporate officers

higher up in the table of organization:

What is said and commanded of parents must also be understood of those who, when the parents are dead or absent, take their place, such as relatives, god- parents, sponsors, temporal lords and spiritual fathers. For every one must be ruled and be subject to other men. Wherefore we here see again how many good works are taught in this Commandment, since in it all our life is made subject to other men. Hence it comes that obedience is so highly praised and all virtue and good works are included in it.

Such, then, is the scope of Luther's demand: complete submission throughout life to all figures of

authority. And my obedience is not contingent upon my independent judgment about the orders to which I am to submit: the orders are authoritative not by virtue of their moral content but by virtue of their being issued by authorities. To obey an authoritative order is a distinctively moral act and is obligatory irrespective of any other consideration. The merit of obedience washes away the stain of any actual wrong I may commit by following the order. The sin belongs to my commander, not to me. I am thus urged to abjure the exercise of free will and of moral reasoning

– far more credit will accrue to me on Judgment Day if I say proudly that I did as I was told.

When Eichmann defended himself at his trial in Israel by means of precisely this argument, he imputed it to Kant. He would have done better to cite Martin Luther.

The reader may be thinking that Luther must have had an elevated notion of parental benevolence and wisdom. Not so: because of the intensity of his commitment to the doctrine of original sin, Luther believed all humans, including parents, to be a very bad lot. Even so, every child should be utterly subordinate to any adult, because, to say it again, obedience as such is Lutheran morality - 525

always good for the soul. (Luther would have deplored the sexual predation of a priest who takes his pleasure with an altar boy; but he would have damned that altar boy to hell for thinking he had any standing to judge the priest and disobey him for any reason – unless given a direct order by the priest to violate one of the first three commandments. A victim of abuse is, after all, not himself committing a sin, and that is all that matters. A short earthly life of unhappiness is as nothing compared to an eternity of joy. Best not to jeopardize your soul by arrogating to yourself the authority to judge your abuser.)

Benevolence is not a quality that Luther values in a parent anyway. He addresses children as follows:

Not for nothing has He said: "Thou shalt honor them"; He does not say: "Thou shalt love them," although this also must be done. But honor is higher than mere love and includes a certain fear, which unites with love, and causes a man to fear offending them more than he fears the punishment.

Indeed, love is wasted on children, and the project of bringing them up in godliness is constantly threatened by the parental tendency to deviate toward leniency:

This work appears easy, but few regard it aright. For where the parents are truly pious and love their children not according to the flesh, but (as they ought) instruct and direct them by words and works to serve God according to the first three Commandments, there the child's own will is constantly broken, and it must do, leave undone, and suffer what its nature would most gladly do otherwise; and thereby it finds occasion to despise its parents, to murmur against them, or to do worse things. There love and fear depart, unless they have God's grace. In like manner, when they punish and chastise, as they ought (at times even unjustly, which, however, does not harm the soul's salvation), our evil nature resents the correction.

Luther's doctrine is that the child's "evil nature" is recalcitrant to every good thing and in such Lutheran morality - 526

need of constant correction that even an unjust punishment will do him good. That he was giving the most brutal and sadistic parents a blank check to establish a regime of totalitarian terror seems never to have crossed his mind. A regimen of punishment and obedience is so beneficial that too much of this good thing is hardly possible, whatever the motives and excesses of the parents; and the peril of the opposite course cannot be overstated:

There is another dishonoring of parents, much more dangerous and subtle than this first, which adorns itself and passes for a real honor; that is, when a child has its own way, and the parents through natural love allow it.

Thus Luther ends by pathologizing the love of adults for children. (Many conservatives have persuaded themselves that parental permissiveness is an invention of 20th century liberals; but

Luther's blast against liberal parents tells us that some progressives were already sparing the rod, and thus "spoiling" the child, in the 16th century.)

It is strange, however, that religious fundamentalists find a God-given soul in a zygote of

16 cells and accordingly forbid any violence to be done to it. On Luther's account, what the child brings into the world as his very own is utterly evil: it is only by destroying, with as much punishment as is necessary, the child's inborn soul or true personal nature, and then replacing that sinful soul with elements that are entirely taken from sources external to the child, that the untiring parents can produce, through their refashioning of God's unadorned gift, a work worthy of God's notice. If they followed their own logic, I would say that anti-abortionists should argue, not that meaningful life begins at conception, but that it begins at the age of four, or six, or twelve, or even sixteen. The parents need time to instill an obedient grown-up soul to replace the originally sinful baby soul. Lutheran morality - 527

Yet even then, after all the parents can do, God may choose to be unimpressed: for so

irredeemable is the original substance of the child – substance straight from Heaven, which

nonetheless must be violently improved – that the little one can in no way be pronounced to be fit

for salvation even after punishment has accomplished all that it can. According to doctrine,

Grace alone, unmerited but whimsically added to this excellent work of the parents, produces that miracle. So there is this fly in the ointment, that even with the most pious and determined effort on the part of parents, the issue remains in doubt, and the matter must ultimately be decided by God's penchant for working in mysterious ways.

It would seem, then, that the permissive parents may, through the luck of the lottery, see

their children saved and the children of the disciplinarians damned – to which a devout Lutheran

would reply that I have no business allowing my mind to play with such thoughts. A Calvinist,

however, would point out blithely that all deserve damnation anyway, so no one in Hell has any

grounds for complaint; and if some are elected to Heaven in spite of such deserving, do we not

see in these acts of infinite mercy the Hand of a most tender-hearted Judge?

To sum up, then, while it is well for the parents to try to beat the child into submission,

they may not succeed, in spite of undertaking the task with the best will in the world. But no

excuse will serve to extenuate the too-loving parent: even though a regimen of punishment may

fail to break the stiff-necked will of the child, or to save him if it does, that is no warrant to err in

the direction of permissiveness.

The proponents of character can never work their way out of the paradox imposed by their own

dogma. If original sin is inextirpable, what makes them think that character is any sort of Lutheran morality - 528

bulwark against it? And what good is a regimen of discipline if the training is administered by sons of Adam – fallen men, every one of them? The humans who are attempting to impose the regimen and instill the discipline are themselves tainted by original sin. How can they be trusted to inculcate purity in others? How reliable is it to lobotomize the child and to insert a robotic obedience to his parents in the place of his hellish desires, if his parents are no better than he is?

And what becomes of free will if the parents determine everything in this way?

On Luther's own model, with original sin devouring whole populations, why should any child regard his parents as more godly than himself, and why should any person in any situation whatsoever trust his superiors to have a finer moral character or higher spiritual sensitivity than he has? Luther, I think, could not have answered otherwise than to say that there is none truly fit, no not one, to be in command over others – but obedience in and of itself is so salutary that it outshines every other virtue.

This is ethical formalism with a vengeance. The substantive issue of actual right and wrong in the world matters not at all. Lutheran morality depends upon actions that are rigidly prescribed by commandments and must be performed without regard for their consequences. To obey is not the means to a felicitous end, but the end in itself. Indeed, it is more accurate to call this ethical nihilism: as liberal relativism gives us one type, where nothing is ever definitively right or wrong except tolerance, so Lutheranism gives us the opposite type, where obedience replaces tolerance as the only dependable virtue. The common denominator is the abdication of moral judgment. I am never to decide for myself whether something is right or wrong: on the liberal view, because there can be no definite answer to the question; on the conservative view, because my social superiors will tell me the answer and I have no right to oppose them with a Lutheran morality - 529

contrary interpretation.

I have mentioned elsewhere that the Old Testament commandments are actually pre- moral. When imported into modern times, they exist to deaden the authentically moral impulse.

They give the answer before the question can be asked – the question that would indicate that the moral faculty is operating. It is therefore not an accident that there is a movement in this country to post the Ten Commandments in every public building, but no similar movement afoot to post the Sermon on the Mount. We want to be delivered from genuine morality, including the demanding ethic of the New Testament. The Ten Commandments can be relied upon to do that.

Calvinist morality

What is noxious in Martin Luther becomes so toxic in John Calvin that it turns into morbid

comedy. Luther is an extravagant personality, full of passion and striving. He sets obedience as

an ideal and loves it the more for the impossibility of realizing it. He expects to fail: a Christian

life to him is a series of defeats, which inculcate the proper humanity and humility. Then too, he

had himself dared an act of utmost disobedience: he had rebelled against all authority past and

present, armed only with his own reasoning and his own determination to follow where it led.

Luther is a formidable monster, as only the greatest historical figures have succeeded in being. If

comparisons to the murderous dictators of the 20th century seem too invidious, perhaps we

should settle for calling him the Napoleon of the Reformation: both men had positive

accomplishments; each thought well enough of himself to see all Europe go up in flames over the

ratification of his will. Calvin, by contrast, is the desiccated organization man, the pinched,

malignant codifier, the gray figure who turns the vibrant revolution into a totalitarian state –

Stalin to Luther's Lenin. Luther's writing pulsates with his fanaticism and startles us into

outraged resistance; Calvin's writing drones on predictably, but if we stay awake long enough to

see what it is saying, we find that the author's unruffled certainty and inexorable, if humdrum,

logic leads to an even more oppressive world-view. Luther certainly demands complete obedience to all authority, but his vigorous style implies that such a Christian submission can only be the fruit of heroic self-discipline. Calvin expects a complete capitulation with little or no Calvinist morality - 531

fuss: his good Christians will leave no footprints, and the bad ones only their ashes after an exemplary burning at the stake.

Part of the unintentional hilarity of Calvin's writing stems from his unawareness, worthy of Milton's miscalculation when he made Satan a more attractive personality than God, of how strong he makes the case for the point of view that he is opposing and how correspondingly weak he makes his own rebuttal. Consider the following paragraph from his Institutes of the Christian

Religion, which begins in the manner of late Tolstoy, and appears to demonstrate why no

Christian should ever sit on a jury, much less support capital punishment:

Christians are to be a class of men born to endure affronts and injuries, and be exposed to the iniquity, imposture, and derision of abandoned men, and not only that, but are to be tolerant of all these evils – that is, so composed in the whole frame of their minds, that, on receiving one offense, they are to prepare themselves for another, promising themselves nothing during the whole of life but the endurance of a perpetual cross. Meanwhile, they must do good to those who injure them, and pray for those who curse them, and (this is their only victory) strive to overcome evil with good. Thus affected, they will not seek eye for eye, and tooth for tooth, as the Pharisees taught their disciples, but, as instructed by Christ, they will allow their body to be mutilated, and their goods to be maliciously taken from them, prepared to remit and spontaneously pardon those injuries the moment they have been inflicted. However . . .

Knowing something of Calvin's Geneva, we expected, sooner or later, to encounter Calvin's

"however." His inspiring portrait of a society acting up to the standard of the Sermon on the

Mount has been a red herring – it has nothing to do with how Christians will conduct state business:

However, this equity and moderation will not prevent them, with entire friendship for their enemies, from using the aid of the magistrate for the preservation of their goods, or, from zeal for the public interest, to call for the punishment of the wicked and pestilential man, whom they know nothing will reform but death. Calvinist morality - 532

We are to turn the other cheek, but only to those who do not strike it. We are to love our enemies

and reform them by killing them. The "entire friendship" of the executioner for those he

dispatches is the inimitable Calvin touch: the good doctor's armor of sincerity is absolutely irony- proof. He could not have imagined anyone's chuckling at his unctuousness, although he would have known what to do about it.

In regard to the duty owed by citizens to rulers, Calvin starts us off with another inspiring paragraph that could be the basis for every revolutionary manifesto ever issued. His phrases would fit into the Declaration of Independence almost unedited:

In almost all ages we see that some princes, careless about all their duties on which they ought to have been intent, live, without solicitude, in luxurious sloth; others, bent on their own interests, venally prostitute all rights, privileges, judgments, and enactments; others pillage poor people of their money, and afterwards squander it in insane largesses; others act as mere robbers, pillaging houses, violating matrons, and slaying the innocent. Therefore, many citizens cannot be persuaded to recognize such persons for princes, whose command, as far as lawful, they are bound to obey. . . . And undoubtedly, the natural feeling of the human mind has always been not less to assail tyrants with hatred and execrations than to look up to just kings with love and veneration. But . . .

Calvin's "but" can be delayed but never denied. This time he has set up the tenpins of rebellion in order to knock them down with his gigantic bowling ball of law and order:

But if we have respect to the word of God, it will lead us farther, and make us subject not only to the authority of those princes who honestly and faithfully perform their duty toward us, but all princes. . . . For though the Lord declares that the good ruler who maintains our safety is the highest gift of His beneficence, and prescribes to rulers themselves their proper sphere, He at the same time declares, that of whatever description they may be, they derive their power from none but Him. Those, indeed, who rule for the public good, are true examples and specimens of His great beneficence, while those who domineer unjustly and Calvinist morality - 533

tyrannically are raised up by him to punish the people for their iniquity. Still all alike possess that sacred majesty with which he has invested lawful power.

The blandness with which Calvin describes the evils of despotism, and orders all Christians everywhere to nonetheless suffer them patiently, out-Luthers Luther.

But rulers, you will say, owe mutual duties to those under them. This I have already confessed. But . . .

What follows is a wonderful argument from analogy.

But if from this you conclude that obedience is to be returned to none but just governors, you reason absurdly. Husbands are also bound by mutual duties to their wives, and parents to their children. But if husbands and parents neglect their duty – if parents should be harsh and severe to the children whom they are enjoined not to provoke to anger, and by their severity harass them beyond measure – if husbands should treat with the greatest contumely the wives whom they are enjoined to love and to spare as the weaker vessels – would children be less bound in duty to their parents, and wives to their husbands? Children and wives are made subject to the refractory and undutiful.

Citizens are to rulers as wives are to husbands and children are to parents. As to the obedience owed by these two latter classes of beings, it is so obvious to Calvin that he does not bother to argue for it.

What strikes me as a modern reader is not so much the sentiment, which is common enough even in these supposedly enlightened times, but the imperturbability with which Calvin accepts and even seems to relish this state of affairs – the satisfaction he takes in it, the calmness and complacency with which he imposes upon all tyrannized persons everywhere the religious duty to accept with utter passivity the blighting and destruction of the only earthly life they will ever lead: Calvinist morality - 534

Nay, since the duty of all citizens is not to look behind them, that is, not to inquire into the duties of one another but to submit each to his own duty, this ought especially to be exemplified in the case of those who are placed under the power of others. Wherefore, if we are cruelly tormented by a savage prince, if we are rapaciously pillaged by an avaricious or luxurious prince, if we are neglected by a sluggish prince, if, in short, we are persecuted for righteousness' sake by an impious and sacrilegious prince, let us first call up the remembrance of our faults, which doubtless the Lord is chastising by such scourges. In this way humility will curb our impatience. And let us reflect that it belongs not to us to cure these evils: that all that remains for us is to implore the help of the Lord, in whose hands are the hearts of kings and inclinations of kingdoms.

When, 300 years later, Robert E. Lee considers slavery an evil but abolitionism a much greater evil – when he thinks that "it belongs not to us" to cure the evil of slavery, that prayer alone is

called for, but then gets up off his knees to shed the blood of tens of thousands of young men

who merely voted to curb the spread of slavery – we see that ideas have consequences.

Institutionalized obedience

For some time, even though I was engaged in writing a book about evil, I could not find anything compelling in the continuous news coverage about the pedophile priests of the Roman Catholic

Church. The details, however nauseating, seemed at first glance to offer nothing new to a savvy investigator of evil. Yes, it is noteworthy that the priests who sexually abused children never committed themselves to treatment on their own initiative, even though the church was more than willing to keep their secret and the treatment facilities were privately and even clandestinely operated by the church. Yes, once forced into therapy, the offenders showed a marked inability to acknowledge that their actions had hurt anybody: instead, they thought their accusers were making a big deal over very little. And yes, the bishops, in friendly correspondence with the abusers and with each other, usually expressed unwavering support for the perpetrators, while finding few words of compassion for the victims: many sent letters showing a tendency to view the priests as the real victims and the church as subject to an unscrupulous attack. But as egregious as they are, these facts should not surprise us. Criminal predators everywhere continue their activities until caught, and only then latch on to the therapeutic model of their own victimhood. All perpetrators complain that their victims exaggerate the harm that was done.

And the functionaries of venerable institutions have always covered each others' backs.

That the abuse of trust made the exploitation especially repellent did not mean that it differed in kind from other predatory crimes. That it was widespread was a merely quantitative Institutionalized obedience - 536

factor. That all this happened in church should not have surprised anyone worldly enough to know a little bit of history, and especially church history. To have believed that the company men of the Catholic Church would have necessarily lived up to a higher standard than the corporate men of Enron betrays an inexcusable degree of naivete. As a writer, I could not bring myself to feign any sort of surprise that these men of the cloth, who had presented themselves publicly as moral exemplars and spiritual guides, had turned out to be criminals and hypocrites. I had never in the first place thought better of them than of any other group of socially respectable people.

In short, for a long time I did not recognize anything in the unfolding story that was distinctively evil. And thus, without realizing it, I was buying into the Church's own alibi – that we were witnessing a familiar drama of criminal dereliction that did not have any wider meaning other than to serve as additional testimony to the weakness of the flesh. According to this "police blotter" interpretation, those who committed the crimes and those who covered them up were simply bad actors, whose psychology I had already covered in my chapter on sociopathy. Why regard their behavior as a "scandal" in addition to being a crime? Was the media handwringing perhaps a subtle indicator of anti-Catholic bias? This was the view of many Catholics who were genuinely outraged by the abuse but unshaken in their loyalty to the church: they wanted to find the lowlife perps who had so discredited a noble institution and bury them under the jail. The

Catholic Church itself was more than willing to agree with this analysis, for had it not always proclaimed the power of original sin and the ineffectuality of our merely human defenses against it? Priests are, according to the church's own dogma, no more immune to the infection of evil than anyone else. What all these sinners need is a dose of punishment from the civil authorities Institutionalized obedience - 537

and a renewed commitment to the gospel. And the bishops will be only too glad to set up shop

as the experts who can cure the moral illness that they have done such a poor job of policing.

Then I heard the two reporters who had covered the story in Boston talking about it on the

radio, and I found what I did not know I had been looking for. The most striking and disturbing

fact about these molestations, more shocking than the crimes themselves, is that few if any of the

abused children had felt that they could tell their own parents about what had happened to them

– not so much because of the shame and mortification that they had endured, which inhibits all

such victims, but because they knew that they would not be believed. Their parents considered

priests of the Roman Catholic Church to be God's representatives on Earth, and had made it clear

that such spiritual authorities must never be questioned, criticized, or maligned.

These parents did not have the moral or intellectual right to believe that the priests of the

Catholic Church would be better people than their own children – nothing in history, nothing in

scripture, and nothing in common sense entitled them to think that. They could have based such

confidence on nothing except the church's own high opinion of itself in the teeth of two thousand

years of evidence to the contrary.

These parents, who would be among William Bennett's role models for traditional values, sacrificed the psychic health of their children on the altar of blind obedience to authority. None of the victims could tell; yet no doubt almost all of them felt that they had grown up in normal households. Too true they had. The dehumanizing disrespect shown by adults toward children is so normal it rarely attracts any attention. Yet if adults treated other adults this way, there would be daily fistfights on the commuter trains. "May I have that seat?" "Don't interrupt me. Wait at the end of the car until I call you." Institutionalized obedience - 538

You cannot reform any institution that would drive a wedge of arbitrary power between children and parents. You cannot salvage the good and let go the bad. You cannot winnow the supposed grain of spirituality and burn away the chaff of corruption – much though the doctors of the church have experience with burning. The evil is systemic; it has burrowed its way into every cell. There is no spiritual essence, there is no goodness, at the core. At the core is the authority of the clergy and the unwavering obedience of the laity. The closing of ranks among cardinals and bishops to protect their own, their belief in their own victimization by the victims, their inability to comprehend the human damage they have wrought – all this has not been a deviation from the real values of the church, but an expression of them in their purest form. The

Sermon on the Mount means nothing to these men – this is confirmed by any close examination of Catholic history. At the dark heart of the church is only the power of the church: the power, for instance, to forbid birth control and abortions and to exclude women from spiritual equality on the basis of no scripture at all.

The goodness done by some Catholics in and through the church has been incidental, not fundamental, to what sort of enterprise the church is. There are parishioners who have persevered, in spite of every disincentive, with their effort to make the church reflect their own moral excellence; there are individual nuns and priests who have kept it from being worse than it is by their shining humanity. It is time for them to redirect their energies, and time for the rest of us to invite them to join us, to our mutual profit, and to let the church collapse physically into the black hole that it has already become spiritually, imploding upon the few last sad gray men who will cling to its perquisites as long as there is a single collection plate yet to be passed, the proceeds of which can be used to prop up their fading but still very impressive pomp.

The psychology of obedience

Having seen that obedience, when established as the paramount moral principle, is not only

destructive of morality but precludes even the possibility of thinking morally – it requires the

moral agent to follow a commandment or a leader in lieu of examining the situation in the light

of his own conscience, and it forbids him from questioning the moral outcome of doing so – we

are called upon to give a psychological reading of this strange outcome.

Religion is an attempt to recover the security that is bestowed upon healthy animals by the instincts. Doubt makes us neurotic; certainty restores us to a feeling of well-being. Religion

confers a guaranteed rightness on our choices.

Religion must be embodied in absolutes – the fundamentalists are right about that.

Otherwise the commandments cannot do their work as instinct-substitutes. Animals never question their instincts. A religion of the "Ten Suggestions" would collapse of its own inanity.

Understood this way, we see that blind obedience is not merely a consequence of adopting a religion – obedience is religion. Discover those tenets that an individual will obey in all circumstances, and you have identified his sect. The categorical imperative and the principle of utility, too, must be binding in all circumstances in order to give putative secularists the security they crave.

We want to find and identify those precepts that we can ("in good conscience") confidently adopt – the more so if we have been strictly raised. Most of us who have not been The psychology of obedience - 540

psychologically crushed by our parents will, as is well attested, eventually rebel against their

precepts; but typically this produces only a change of authority. Few of us rebel against the

concept of authority itself. We seek a more worthy object of veneration, to which we will be as

obedient as we once were to our parents and to the religion that they imposed upon us. (Those

who make a fetish of rebelling against all authority tend to be marked down, correctly, as

neurotically impaired.)

This engenders the dependable spectacle of the obedient grown-up children raging against

all displays of disobedience by others. Nothing makes conventionally-minded people angrier

than disobedience – most of them believe that obedience in an unjust cause is a much lesser sin than disobedience in a just cause.

Because our nation eventually retired from Vietnam in defeat, the anti-war movement is historically given a disproportionate amount of credit, or blame, for that ignominious exit. In fact, public support for the war, as measured by Congressional votes and public opinion polls, was at first overwhelming and never less than a solid majority, even at the end. The anti-war

candidate in 1972 was crushed by the greatest election landslide in history. During the 1960s, I

would venture to say that perhaps no more than 10% of the population ever opposed the war in

Vietnam wholeheartedly and unequivocally as a moral wrong. At least 30% supported the war

passionately and another 30%, while worrying that it had been rashly undertaken, reasoned that

we had no choice, now that we were engaged, but to persevere in our commitment. This same

impregnable 60% could again be found supporting the disastrous occupation of Iraq in April,

2004 even as casualties from the home-grown insurgency began to exceed those of the war itself;

and it has probably existed throughout every war that has ever been undertaken by an American The psychology of obedience - 541

government, no matter how repugnant to ordinary decency and even common sense. Abraham

Lincoln's principled opposition to the Mexican War made him a one-term congressman and hurt him in the Lincoln-Douglas debates a decade later. Such is patriotism. Meanwhile, the ranks of every anti-war movement appear to be swollen by the remaining 30% of the people, made up of those who deprecate the war on practical grounds: but these opponents despise the out-and-out pacifists who condemn the morality of the war, and they deplore the war resisters for their disobedience to the authorities. Lance Morrow, in his book-length meditation on evil, reveals himself to be one such contradictory soul, going so far as to call the killing by our soldiers in

Vietnam "unsanctioned and unclean," yet criticizing draft resisters for refusing to participate in this killing. In other words, even among those citizens whose ability to gauge the reality principle quickly convinced them that the war in Vietnam was a disaster, anti-anti-war sentiment far outweighed any desire to make common cause with war resisters. Morrow complains that draft evaders and anti-war demonstrators "overturned the order of authority in America." Some, he says, then went so far as to smoke marijuana in defiance of drug laws.

Morrow does not notice the glaring contradiction between statements that are separated by only a few sentences: it so sticks in his craw that the war resisters flouted authority that he seems to forget that he agrees with their estimation of the war. How do we explain this?

It is difficult to avoid the Nietzschean diagnosis of ressentiment – a term which includes everything that we mean by "resentment" while adding a large measure of outward-directed hostility. The fantasy of hell is a pitch-perfect exemplification of ressentiment: since we invent our religion as an embodiment of our values, naturally its dogmas tell us nothing about reality, but they certainly reveal the state of mind of those who have done the inventing. Clearly, the The psychology of obedience - 542

fantasizers are unconsciously enraged over what they think they have given up by being such good little sheep; therefore to see others thumbing their noses at authority and getting away with it is infuriating. Nothing less than hell seems proportionate as a punishment for those who have refused to toe the line.

It might be thought naively that the real impetus for Christian eschatology is the prospect of eternal happiness in heaven – that hell with its punishment of vice is merely the unavoidable corollary of virtue rewarded. But what sort of conception of happiness could such people have?

– who bitterly hate their own portion and correspondingly envy those who have escaped a similar fate. It gives the lie to their old shibboleth that "virtue is its own reward." They don't believe that for a minute. By the spectacle of others who flout virtue and seem to have a good time, they are goaded to ask in their inmost hearts what the good of virtue can possibly be, since it so obviously costs you the reward. They have long since identified the kind of happiness they crave

– the kind that gets you sent to hell. And if the reward in heaven is conceptualized as genuine spiritual plenitude, the believers that I am talking about are too smart and jaded to con themselves into imagining that as any sort of state that could interest them: they have heard of it and have no idea what it could be; they believe that the sinners really do have all the fun and therefore happiness is not for the virtuous. The elder brother in the parable, when he refuses to celebrate the return of the prodigal son, shows how incapacitated he is for enjoyment: he does not even like the taste of meat well enough to come in and eat all he wants. What he wants is to be recognized for his virtue, and raised above others in the very presence of those others. But even an armchair psychologist could tell him that you cannot get enough of what does not fill you up.

The day after his feast, he would feel the emptiness that only the virtuous know. What else can The psychology of obedience - 543

you give him? A blue ribbon? If the reward of heaven is conceptualized as the banquet itself –

the festivity and the conviviality and the smoky aroma of tasty food – then count him out. But he

can at least hope that, over the long haul, everyone else will be counted out too – that if pleasure

is not to be his, it is not to be anyone else's either. Therefore, the best outcome that he can

envision is an eternity of suffering for the dissolute and especially the disobedient – which seems

at least a start at making it up to him for a life unlived. The most venerable church fathers teach

us that, from heaven, the company of the virtuous will be able to watch the writhings of the

damned as a sauce to their reward; but no one, not even the virtuous themselves, would mistake

this for an actual state of joy. Best to say that, during the interminable afterlife, they will be

allowed to remain suspended in their customary anhedonic state of bodily indifference and moral

satisfaction – which is as close as they will ever get, on earth or in heaven, to beauty, abundance,

and mirth.

This belief-system – that pleasure is evil and hateful duty is good – is the most potent

double-bind of all: If I do what I want to do, I am wrong; if I do what I don't want to do, life is

not worth living. Since the organism naturally rebels at suicide, which would be on paper an

intelligible response to the dilemma, the "elder brother" syndrome is almost the best solution to

the problem. Of course, not every morally browbeaten child grows up to be anhedonically self- righteous: the "prodigal son" gives us the other direction that the child can go. He, at least, tastes a little of life, and having gained his experience, is tolerant of others.

The threat of hell for the disobedient is all that makes the life of obedience tolerable. Life everlasting is a psychic necessity to keep the grim march going, because if this is all there is, the rule-followers know, or at least think they know, that here the free-wheelers have the best of it. The psychology of obedience - 544

Put another way, the belief in a broad highway to hell and a narrow path to heaven replicates the "economy of scarcity" that these virtuous humans have erected on earth. Who wants to go to heaven if everyone will be there? Similarly, what good is heroism, any more than great wealth, if the many can attain it? "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger, the national radio scold, praises the handful of moral exemplars as vehemently as she excoriates the millions of weaklings. The high ratio of failure to success is exactly what is demanded by her moral economy.

Our organisms, as the natural outcome of normal metabolic functioning, gravitate toward happiness as the goal of life. The Greek philosophers, to whom we have not yet caught up in moral reasoning, took this for granted. But under the dark cloud of Calvinism that infects the

American ethos, happiness is nowhere touted as a serious purpose or meaningful existence. One day Dr. Laura asked her caller what he was trying to achieve. The caller said, "I just want to be happy," and Dr. Laura snapped, "That's trivial!" On another occasion she said "Suffer doing what's right – then you'll admire yourself." I have called this stance "psychological fascism." It is so antithetical to liveliness and thriving that the political fascists of Spain adopted the motto

"Long live death!" And that was the winning slogan. It has been tacitly adopted by the Islamic fascists of today, who have turned suicide into the most heroic deed of all. But either because we hear a mixed message from the culture, saying that we should be happy even though happiness is trivial, or because we cannot completely condition ourselves, in the teeth of our healthiest instincts, to believe that righteousness is better than pleasure, we are burdened by a sense of gnawing dissatisfaction. We require constant reassurance that our virtuous self-abnegation is

"the meaning of life."

The fragile conviction among the sheep that righteousness is the better course under the The psychology of obedience - 545

light of eternity – fragile because they cannot help their sidelong glances, tinged with furtive

longing, at the happy hedonists – and the concomitant hope that the goats will be punished in the

end, is gratified by 100% of the popular movies that make it on to celluloid. The spate of

commercially produced revenge fantasies is owing to the insatiable demand by moral

conformists for demonstrations that flouters will be annihilated in the end by the forces of

legitimate authority. (The "Godfather" movies merely relocated legitimacy to the good Mafia

family and outlawry to the bad.)

Only by means of moral self-approval, reinforced by repeated pats on the head from the

authorities themselves, are the virtuous able to maintain their admittedly tenuous psychological

equanimity in the face of the world's ethical vicissitudes. Freud, saying that it is

"unpsychological" to do the ethical thing and that narcissistic self-esteem is the only reason we ever would, got that one thing right, at least about the envy-ridden ethical conformists, because it was a truth that he knew from the inside – he was just such a self-pitying person as felt that the rascals pushed ahead of him and that all he got for his decency was pride in it.

But such pride will not suffice for the obedient ones: the spectacle of anti-government protesters taking to the streets without suffering any immediate consequences is an affront to the values of the dutiful majority that cannot be readily endured. Given the power of subterranean emotions to overrule those on the surface, it naturally matters not a whit to them that the nonconformist may be right and the authorities wrong, or even that intellectually they agree with the position taken by the nonconformists. (After the election of a black president, an exception to this rule presented itself: as the "Tea Party" movement showed, the public will be much more tolerant if the psychological fascists themselves are demonstrating against a government that is The psychology of obedience - 546

too "liberal.")

The answer to why things are as bad as they are lies somewhere near the heart of this darkness. To most of us, life truly seems like a zero-sum game, because the alpha males have

succeeded in creating an economy of scarcity not only in economic goods but also in psychic

goods – themselves determining the scale of values in this latter category. Burdened by a sense

of failure in the contest of life, we many losers can do no better than follow the advice of Freud

(the atheist) and Dr. Laura (the religion-monger) to cultivate narcissistic self-esteem based on our

obedience to the "laws" of life, which are actually created by the "authorities" for their own

benefit, and which the materially and psychically rich break with impunity. In this impoverished

condition, we cannot help but be cauldrons of misery and riven by the resentment that is stoked

by our self-loathing – we never grabbed the brass ring and we hate ourselves for that – but these feelings are masked by the contempt that we direct, not so much at the con-men who created the

rules of the game and made us their pawns and buffoons, but at the lax, undisciplined, and

recalcitrant fellow pawns who flouted the rules, did not wait their turn, and moved more than one

space at a time. We come to despise the very sight of beauty, abundance and mirth. Following

the directives of our true masters, we replace the real nourishments conferred by that trio of

graces with the bogus psychic goods palmed off on us by our misleaders: we abandon beauty and

its contemplation for dutiful effort, forsake material and spiritual abundance for mostly symbolic

accumulation, and renounce mirth for moral satisfaction.

Much mention has been made of the harsh homecoming experienced by Vietnam veterans

near the end of the war, especially when obnoxious leftists called them baby-killers; but certainly

the anti-war demonstrators received equally rough treatment from the jingoistic majority, most The psychology of obedience - 547

memorably when a mob of construction workers waded into a protest march wielding various

lengths of lead pipe. No one has ever organized a national parade to thank the war resisters who

tried to avert a national disaster and so proved themselves to be the genuine patriots – whose

efforts would have saved the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers had their wise

counsel been heeded sooner. The public has yet to put up a memorial to those who endured

prison sentences and exile rather than engage in the organized slaughter that claimed two million

Vietnamese lives and killed 58,000 of their countrymen.

If we cannot learn to appreciate such acts of defiance, perhaps at the very least we could stop celebrating blind obedience to authoritative orders as a virtue, dressing up what is obviously a coward's way out in the robes of loyalty and patriotism. As George Bernard Shaw wrote during

World War I, military heroism must not require much bravery at all, given that it is so common.

We could at least teach what a vile and contemptible thing this obedience is, and condemn those who, like Martin Luther and John Calvin, taught it as the highest good. When I was serving my military stint during the Vietnam War as an office-worker in Military Intelligence, a lone protester in Louisville, Kentucky, where I was stationed, refused his induction into the Army and was sentenced to five years in prison. This was the maximum sentence, inasmuch as the judge could hardly imagine a more heinous offense or a more unapologetic offender. Had this young man acquiesced in the draft, or, better still, enlisted (purely out of self-interest, as I had done), he very likely could have sat out the war in a safe assignment – perhaps one as cushy as mine, wearing civilian clothes and living in an apartment near Churchill Downs. I knew I had taken the easy way out, and that most of my friends had gone in the military, not out of patriotism, but solely because it was the only socially acceptable alternative once their student deferments had The psychology of obedience - 548

expired; I knew that none of us had ended up in the infantry unless we had volunteered for it, and none of us had died. This young war resister had acted with tremendous courage, at a terrible cost to himself, as a matter of principle. But my sergeant called him, and not me, a yellow- bellied coward.

III

THEOLOGICAL EVIL

The narcissism of religion

Members of religious congregations may look askance on my devoting an entire section of my study to theological evil: they may suspect me of animus against them, since I have not similarly distinguished any other type of evil for so much additional attention – not totalitarianism, or fascism, or ethnocentrism, or nationalism, or tribalism, or misogyny. Before I state why I have conferred this distinction upon religion, let me say that while the evils perpetrated under the banner of sectarianism may be no greater than those unleashed by other "isms," they are no less.

Not only have many wars been fought over religion alone, but sectarianism is often a contributing cause to other bloodlettings that are regarded as primarily ideological or nationalistic. Christian anti-Semitism fed into the Nazi genocide; and in Yugoslavia, the Serbs fought against Muslims and Roman Catholics in the name of the Eastern Orthodox Church as much as they fought against Croats and Bosnians in the name of Greater Serbia. But there is a single compelling reason to give particular attention to the role of religion in evil: it is because the clerics have set up shop as the experts in the field. For most of human history, trying to understand evil without consulting the priests and theologians was thought to be like trying to understand life without consulting biologists. We still turn to religion for illumination of the so- called "problem of evil," and the churches are nothing loath to advertise on the basis of offering a solution. But once inside the sanctuary, we find that we are in the midst of the evil we had hoped to escape; and the suspicion may grow upon us that this is not merely an unhappy accident, The narcissism of religion - 551

owing to the sad fact that churchgoers too are "only human" and their churches no less

susceptible to the corrupting force of evil than corporations and governments, but that religion

may in fact create a peculiarly favorable environment for the growth of evil, even as a petri dish conduces to the growth of a culture of bacteria. Be that as it may, we have, in religion, a laboratory for the investigation of the phenomena of evil. Its very pretension to define good and evil and to establish the correct moral path makes religion exemplary: for while all evildoers claim to be good at heart and acting for the best, only religious evildoers additionally claim to be just such persons as are uniquely qualified to guide the rest of us toward the good. Therefore students of evil can hardly avoid taking a special interest in religion in light of its spectacular failure, over these last five millennia, to make a dent in the problem. What does a theologian have to do to lose his job? It is as though I hired someone to renovate my house and at the end of the term of contract I was sitting on a pile of rubble. This failure of religion in its own arena cries out for commentary, on the same grounds that Custer's last stand demands discussion in any study of the proper way to conduct military operations against the Sioux.

Evil arises out of the psychological incapacity that I have labeled narcissism and the bad values that I have lumped under the rubric of careerism. These frailties are magnified by the penchant of intellectuals to think in terms of broad generalizations and unfeeling abstractions, especially when they find that power has fallen into their hands. If these leaders suffered physical or emotional abuse in childhood, they are the more likely to take their vengeance where they can; and with the armed power of the state behind them, they can take it pretty much whenever they want. All these frailties – narcissism, careerism, intellectualism, covert vengefulness – afflict clergymen as readily as, although no more readily than, any other group of The narcissism of religion - 552

humans; and with similar results.

But in one respect, religious individuals are especially vulnerable to evil – and the more

pious, the more vulnerable. I have said that we are hardwired to be biologically conservative,

and that as a result we crave the efficiency as well as the security of the instincts. The religious seeker is, by definition, strongly in the grip of this craving, and furthermore takes his search behavior itself to indicate that final answers can be found. If "terrible certainty" is the mark of fanaticism, the religious zealot stands perpetually in danger.

George Bernard Shaw thought that religion, in spite of its offenses against rationality and decorum, is good for emotionally primitive people who would otherwise give free rein to their bestial natures. Tolstoy disagreed, saying that Russian peasants were superstitious brutes only because the priests assiduously taught superstition to them and otherwise conspired with an unjust social order to keep them in brutish conditions. Mary McCarthy, in her vivid Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, splits the difference between these two powerful intellects with the following cogent observation:

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others, it is too great a temptation – a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth. My grandmother McCarthy, I am sure, would have been a better woman if she had been an atheist or an agnostic.

Physicist Steven Weinberg, squaring off against religion and treating it as a formidable, albeit contemptible, opponent, sides with McCarthy when he throws down the gauntlet in an October

1999 article titled "A Designer Universe?"

The narcissism of religion - 553

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.

It is true that many of the best people can be found in church, and I would say of them only that they are deluded in their belief that their religion has made them the decent people that they are.

Instead, they have bestowed upon their religions such goodness as those religions have. But while they are made no worse by it, their less evolved co-religionists, just as McCarthy and

Weinberg suggest, are defiled by the touch of the sectarian pitch.

Why do good people bother with the church at all? The answer can only be that they are looking for an organizational expression of the values that characterize their own orientation to the world. They are mistaken in finding these values in the church, but it is a sincere mistake, which is abetted by their own unconscious modifications of the dogma. I am often taken aback in conversations with churchgoers when I encounter statements like these: "Of course I don't believe that"; "Yes, our minister says the same thing, but he's just wrong"; "Well, the leadership really dropped the ball on that issue, but some of us are working within the church to change its direction." Feminists return stubbornly to the Catholic Church, determined to redeem it from its inveterate sexism. To quote from memory a wonderful comment by a gay writer several years ago, he said that for moral guidance he would sooner go to his cat than his cardinal; but the

Catholic Church belonged to him as his spiritual home and he would not leave it at the behest of bigots.

The literal belief system of religion is, as Freud said so provocatively, infantile; but many

"believers" simply do not take the theology seriously. I often find myself moved, rather than irritated, by those who say grace before meals, because it seems patent that they are not doing The narcissism of religion - 554

obeisance before a touchy heavenly father who has to be thanked for every little thing, but rather expressing gratitude for the abundance of the earth: three times a day we return to its seemingly inexhaustible storehouse, which both nourishes us and provides a pleasurable experience as well.

An atheist might well feel wonder at this plenitude and munificence of the earth, at its ability to sustain not merely life itself but a lifetime of good eating. The more we enjoy a meal, the more we might cast about for some one or some thing to thank for it – not just for the cooking, but for the whole amazing efflorescence of life itself and for the beneficent biosphere that supports it in such style. An angry socialist might caustically suggest that we thank instead the migrant workers who harvested the crops. The most thoughtful and reverent sayers of grace have just that in mind, and furthermore work assiduously within the church to shore up its "social gospel."

Many devotees walk in the center of religion untouched by its corruption, as if they traveled the path of a hurricane remaining always in its eye and enjoying beautiful skies. Their goodness works as a leavening throughout the congregation and occasionally makes the church act up to a practical standard that is higher than the theoretical one that the dogma demands. It might be better still if these good people left their organized religions and formed new communities in their own images – but only if the churches then shriveled up and died because of their absence; otherwise, the churches would fall to the level of their lowest common denominator. So Shaw got it exactly backwards: bad people do not need religion to be better; but religion desperately needs good people to keep it from living down to its own inhuman morality.

Imagine the Catholic Church abandoned by its laypeople and only the priests and cardinals remaining.

The narcissism of religion - 555

Why would I say that religion has a low standard of morality? It is here that I must state the basis of the case against religion: that it is evil "in principle."

Religion is a totalizing explanation that accounts for the fate of the universe and also tells us how to do every next thing. Its purpose is to restore us to the blessed state of security enjoyed by our animal ancestors – the security that is bestowed upon them by the instincts that tell them the infallibly right thing to do in all moments of decision. Our losing these instincts was the unfortunate fall: we have been cast out of the Eden of psychological certainty.

In this broadest definition, it is obvious that religion, contrary to what liberal Protestant theologians tell us, involves a set of propositions taken to be statements of fact. These truths have been "revealed" in some fashion in the past, which certifies them not merely as practical or

"working" truths but as "absolutes." As such, they naturally demand a total commitment from the adherent. If they did not – if religion were merely an invitation to share feelings and to make a collective acknowledgment of the wonders of heaven and earth – then religion could not possibly compete with other intellectual allegiances that do give us the security of a binding program. Indeed, this is what justifies us in calling Freudianism and Marxism genuine religions: in the 20th century, millions of enthusiasts abandoned the traditional religions and embraced these movements, which were sometimes even called "secular religions." But the qualifier is misleading. Doctrinaire Freudianism and Marxism are religions pure and simple. We cannot understand the intensity of commitment felt by a Bolshevik revolutionary unless we see this.

A religion may share a number of premises with science, but the distinguishing "facts" are, needless to say, unempirical, or else religions would be sciences. These "facts" are disguised values, which give rise to explicit creeds and commandments; and these doctrines and rules The narcissism of religion - 556

require a total commitment, in the absence of which the devotee is not merely failing to avail himself of the fruits of the religion, but can be said either to be engaging in sacrilegious behavior or to have abandoned the practice of his faith and to no longer count as a member of his congregation.

Certainly many individuals pick and choose among the dogmas of their sects, believing some and disbelieving others: there will be many people in any organized movement who adhere to its tenets tepidly, erratically, and hypocritically. But such weak followers nonetheless augment rather than dilute the power of religion to serve evil, for the vast majority of them will make common cause with their co-religionists rather than abandon their "faith" when it comes under attack from the enemies of that faith.

Religion, like science, at first tried to explain what was otherwise mysterious: weather patterns and geological disasters, and the origin of all that is. Eventually religion became the book of life, prescribing every known duty, proscribing every imaginable sin, and forbidding investigation of any topic not already covered. This taboo on knowledge is religion's great and enduring crime – a crime that religion cannot fail to commit, because every religion freezes revelation at a particular historical moment and records it in a scripture that, by its nature, cannot be thought to be fallible and therefore is not amenable to alteration in the light of changing information.

For human curiosity and responsiveness, religion substitutes a complete code of behavior, which obviates the need for further research into the facts and effectively forbids a change of mind or heart. Certainly it rules out the possibility of a break with tradition based upon anything so tenuous as empathic identification with others. The stereotyping of beliefs and behaviors that The narcissism of religion - 557

characterizes all religious observance is psychically economical and emotionally satisfying. But

to engage in it is to substitute the past for the present and old information for potentially better

information. Therefore, in the broadest sense, the adoption of a moral code is unethical. We are

allowed to be programmed about everything except ethics. Principles can be invoked everywhere except in moral situations, where we are obligated to be non-principled. The adoption of a code of ethics or a set of commandments automatically banishes empathy from the situation under consideration – in fact, anathematizes empathy as a temptation to set aside the code. Therefore, as truly ethical agents, we must on no account ever conform to a code without first checking it against all that empathy can tell us. Our temptation to subject the code to re-evaluation based upon present circumstances is in fact the voice of conscience. That moment of wondering if, in this instance, it would be right to stick with our principles, is moral thinking. What the moral absolutists sneeringly refer to as "situation ethics" is in fact our moral duty. If our approach isn't situational, it isn't ethical at all.

Had Kant only understood his own categorical imperative aright, he would have very nearly led us to the promised land: there can be no ethics other than the ethics of the never-to-be-

exactly-repeated situation; and he is right that each and every situation must be plugged into the categorical imperative in order to test the maxim upon which the moral agent is about to act. But

Kant made the philosopher's mistake of reducing particular situations to generalities and testing those generalities as universals instead of testing particular situations as if they were universal.

(This enabled Nietzsche to refute Kant by simply pointing out that no two situations are ever perfectly alike.)

Kant tested "killing one's self" by the categorical imperative instead of "my killing my The narcissism of religion - 558

self." Put another way, he tested all people killing themselves at once, instead of taking one

person and testing whether all people in his exact situation would have a right to kill themselves.

Naturally he was able to show that suicide must not be made into a universal maxim of conduct,

because it would extinguish the human race. By the same process of reasoning he would, to be

consistent, have had to argue that I must never refrain from any act of sexual intercourse with the

opposite sex, for to universalize such a refusal would doom the human race to die out within a

generation for lack of procreation. Similarly, Kant tested "truth-telling" instead of "telling the

truth in a particular situation" and found that lying must not be made into a universal maxim of

conduct because we would all become paralyzed by uncertainty. He followed his own reasoning

with impeccable logic to the reductio ad absurdum of forbidding any lie in any circumstance

whatsoever, and so wrote an entire essay to explain why I must indeed tell the murderer where

his intended victim is hiding.

Contra Kant, what I must rather do is take every feature of the situation into account, including all those features that never could be repeated, and then pretend that this utterly novel

and unrepeatable configuration could be repeated some day, in all its idiosyncrasy. I must

pretend that the situation's singularity could be doubled, trebled, and exponentially extended, and

then ask if the lie I tell would be a good lie to tell every time this exact configuration reappeared.

It becomes an easy matter, then, to universalize the maxim that I must lie to the murderer every

single time that he comes to my door in search of his victim who is hiding in my house.

The cognitive activity I have just described is morality at work. Religion, by effectively

ruling out this activity, sets itself up as the enemy of morality and is therefore evil in principle.

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There is another way to illuminate this potential for evil that religion carries as its inevitable burden. I have described narcissism in terms of the individual's mistaken belief that his own psychology is also the psychology of every other human being. This strange error is the result, rather than the cause, of narcissism, which is a psychological deficit that apparently originates in a failure or inability to cultivate, during the developmental window of opportunity, a meta- consciousness that would allow the narcissist to critique his own interpretations and value- judgments. The closure of that window produces what I call "psychological immobility": unable to use part of his mind to watch the rest of his mind in operation, the narcissist is fused with his perceptions and especially with his emotions. But he sincerely believes in his power to empathize with the emotions of others, for he dutifully tries to see situations "from the other person's point of view." This he does by means of what I call "geographic empathy," by literally standing where the other person stands. But he cannot attain to "psychological empathy," which would require him to imagine that another consciousness can differ from his own, and then further imagine how those differences would lead to perceptions other than his. He cannot comprehend that the psychic differences are so great that two people standing in the same place can see the same configuration differently. His inability to imagine another consciousness compels him to takes his own to be the template for all human awareness. What he "sees clearly," by means of what he takes to be his act of empathy, must be (he thinks) what any person would see. The morality that is plain to him must be obvious to all. If there be found any person who denies the obvious, it can only signify a pathological condition. In the physiological realm, a medical condition can explain physical blindness; but in the moral realm, what can explain ethical blindness? The narcissist assumes that the individual sees well enough but pretends The narcissism of religion - 560

otherwise. This conclusion is based upon his confidence that the moral configuration is open to only one interpretation and upon the conviction that the psychological template is the same for all: only then would we say of every person, as most of us do say, that he must surely know good from evil and that evil is always a choice. Inasmuch as the narcissist experiences himself as an agent of free will in seeing and choosing the right, he can only understand his opponent as an agent of free will seeing the right and choosing the wrong.

Religion adopts the stance of narcissism, wills it as a commitment and a decision, and projects onto its opponents the single template, with all the consequences that follow from seeing in our opponents a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the truth. If I am shown truth and see it (I have to see it, I am looking at it with the same equipment as the person who is showing it to me), and yet I reject it, I must have a hidden agenda, and it can only be my desire to thrive at the expense of the party of the good. It can only be that I want the fruits of evil. And this belief – that a fault line exists and can be firmly drawn between those who see the truth and affirm it and those who deny it in order to do evil – this belief that evil exists in others but not in myself and that the fault line can be definitively located – is evil and in point of fact is the only evil. For what every religionist means by evil is what Roger Shattuck calls "moral evil" – no one believes that "natural evil," such as that done by earthquakes, is the same thing as human evil, and if we could show that the depredations of sociopaths and criminals were likewise an eruption of nature, we would no longer call them evil. We would endure the offenses of moral idiots as we endure hurricanes, doing our best to stay out of their way and to deal intelligently with their existence without additionally burdening their acts with the epithet of "evil." We would quarantine the troublemakers, with no desire to punish them – any more than we feel to need to avenge a flood The narcissism of religion - 561

by punishing the river. So the definition of evil always entails an attribution of willfulness and choice to the perpetrator, and triggers in turn the vocabulary favored by Shattuck, of "judgment and punishment, mitigation and aggravation, repentance and remission." And it is precisely, and only, in the administration of what Shattuck considers to be the proper rod of correction, with all the incomparably unctuous terminology that accompanies the ritual, that we find actual human evil blazing forth. The terrible certainty of all the members of the party of the good is the sole instigating cause of distinctively human evil; their belief that human evil exists and must be extirpated is in itself the entirety of evil's dark continent.

Narcissism can also be defined as the imperturbable confidence that one is a member in good standing of the party of the good. As such, it is characterized by radical innocence – by sincerity and conviction, and often by the cheerfulness and courage that are bestowed by these superficially attractive qualities. Translated into the language of the church, narcissism is characterized by an unshakable faith – by confidence in one's beliefs and steadfastness in holding to them. Religion is cultivated narcissism. And while the values adopted under the umbrella of this faith may themselves be mostly benign, the meta-value is always potentially evil, because its adoption entails the willingness to draw the fault line and to act upon the consequences of its existence. Religion, then, is aggressively and distinctively engaged in a way of looking at the world that breeds evil as a carcass attracts flies. Hence its place of honor in this treatise.

By way of illustration, here are three case studies in the narcissism of religion.

Roman Catholicism: Faith means never having to say you're sorry

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Almost from the time that World War II ended, the pontificate of Pope Pius XII has been at the center of a controversy about the Vatican's wartime response to the Nazi extermination of the

Jews. Even those scholars who have portrayed Pius XII in the best possible light have agreed that he was a staunch anti-Communist who always viewed Stalin as the greater threat to

Catholicism than Hitler. As one consequence of this conviction, he created an atmosphere in the

Vatican that encouraged his underlings to arrange the escape of many Nazi war criminals to

South America. The historians who have taken him at his worst have accused him of a complicit silence in regard to the Holocaust – of pursuing an official policy of diplomatic detachment and resolute inaction in regard to the mass deportations of Jews, when a single word from him might have saved at least a few of the victims who were, at one point, marched to the trains down the street that runs beneath the Vatican window.

It may not count against him that, as Cardinal Pacelli with an assignment in Berlin, he negotiated a concordat with the Nazi government. But, given that most of the human beings who carried out the Holocaust were professing Christians, many of them Catholics, and that a majority of them thought that their deeds were consistent with their faith, we might be forgiven for assuming that at some point the Supreme Pontiff would have instructed his flock more specifically about these matters. Indeed, in 1939 his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, was planning to publish an encyclical emphatically condemning the European-wide virus of anti-Semitism, but he died at the inopportune moment. This document disappeared into the Vatican archives when

Cardinal Pacelli was elected to succeed him.

It is a simple-minded mistake for the critics of Pope Pius XII to comb the record of his life, expecting to find some outbreak of Jew-baiting that can be magnified into an accusation of The narcissism of religion - 563

textbook anti-Semitism. It is equally futile for his partisans, by way of defending him, to hope that his good table manners will demonstrate to these same critics that he must be acquitted of the personal vulgarity of bigotry. Goebbels too exhibited urbanity and good breeding. The issue should rather be joined on the basis of the factual record of Christian and specifically Catholic anti-Semitism that now has entries stretching back almost two millennia. Even to secular humanists who cast a lazy and jaundiced eye on all things religious, it often comes as a shock to learn that official Vatican theology had always assigned the guilt for the death of Jesus to the

Jewish people as a whole until Pope John XXIII was elected in 1958.

It was the entire history of Catholic insensitivity and viciousness that Pope John Paul II was expected to address when he visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial in

Jerusalem, on March 23, 2000 – and it was especially hoped that he would clarify the most recent and most controversial events of that history, which included his own strenuous effort to have

Pius XII canonized. Nor was it frivolous to expect this: Catholic popes speak for a Christian institution that claims historical continuity dating back to the year 30. While it is inane for an

American president to apologize to American blacks for slavery, since slavery no longer exists and over two dozen intervening presidential administrations have enforced the thirteenth amendment, it is not so silly for the Pope to address the crimes committed by his predecessors, because the Catholic Church today is a continuation of the Medieval church in a way that the

United States government today is not a continuation of the pro-slavery governments of the

1850s. No president has the standing to speak for all Americans; every pope automatically speaks for all Catholics.

Anticipation was further whetted earlier in the month when, without any advance warning The narcissism of religion - 564

or fanfare, the Pope made some comments regretting the Catholic Church's past persecutions of

various minorities. He alluded to anti-Semitism among a number of other derelictions. Some analysts thought the apology encompassed even the deeds of the Inquisition, but characteristically the phrasing was so broad, general, and vague that no one could be sure what, specifically, he was referring to. Other analysts suggested that such casual remarks on an incendiary subject could only be a preamble to a more serious papal pronouncement. Therefore, the attention of the entire world was riveted on the Pope's appearance at Yad Vashem; and at this extraordinary historical moment the Pope chose to say . . . just about nothing at all. He did not mention Pius XII. The Holocaust was mentioned, as it had to be; but a sociologist from Mars might have been forgiven for thinking that it had been a strange eruption of sociopathic murder enacted by a single generation of reprobates called Nazis rather than the culmination of 19 centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Rhetorically, the Shoah was chalked up to a generalized evil, and its lesson was said to be that we must "ensure that never again will evil prevail." The crushing banality of this exhortation was matched only by its fatuity: several genocides have been perpetrated since the Shoah. The passionately Catholic Croats had conducted an ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Serbs only a few years before the Pope delivered his speech

Rather than make an act of contrition, the Pope explicitly denied the malignant role played by religion in the Shoah:

How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because we had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a Godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people.

This is a brazen lie that any historian could refute without consulting his notes; and it does not The narcissism of religion - 565

become truth when uttered as a pious nostrum by a gaudily dressed divine. There have been

many exterminations throughout history, including a few that were ordered by the God of the Old

Testament, and it is closer to the truth to say that almost all genocides have been carried out by

people who believed they were accomplishing the will of God. (The Pope may have meant to say

"a contempt for God as I understand Him," but in that case he should have said what he meant.)

Near the end of his speech, in keeping with the tepid tone of the remarks that he had made

two weeks earlier, he did acknowledge that there had been "hatred, acts of persecution and

displays of anti-Semitism against the Jews by Christians." It was all very fuzzy as to when it had

happened, who had been involved, and whether more than a handful of Jews had perished in the

"displays"; in any case, speaking for present-day Catholicism, the Pope said firmly that "the

Church rejects racism in any form." Given the historical record, that was perhaps a more radical statement than it appears to be – but clearly, it was not intended to be heard as a repudiation of the Vatican's past, but rather as the pro forma statement of an empty piety.

Finally, the Pope prayed that in the future "there will be no more anti-Jewish feeling among Christians or anti-Christian feeling among Jews." Now religious Jews are certainly as guilty of particularism and bigotry as other sectarians, but given the circumstances, the Pope's comment sounded in my ear rather like a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan deploring "white hatred of blacks and black hatred of whites." All in all, the Pope's statement, in its perfunctory wording and politically correct phrasing, resembled the sort of mollifying press release we might expect from a former Aryan Nations block captain who suddenly decides to run for Congress as a candidate of one of the two major parties.

It is a mistake to view this sort of performance as cowardly, or insensitive, or hemmed in The narcissism of religion - 566

by considerations of church politics. As even his detractors would concede, Pope John Paul II

always had the courage of his convictions – witness the way he bearded the Communist lion in

his den, and his willingness to affront many of his own cardinals with his conservative

pronouncements on women's issues. His speech in Jerusalem was a beacon light of integrity –

the Vatican kind. Catholic theology is anti-Semitic – will continue to be as long as the Gospel of

John is read in church – and it is many other things besides: I am damned by it as thoroughly as

any Jew. Pius XII, who in spite of his vaunted asceticism wielded his absolute power with relish

and loved pomp as a pig loves his trough, was a saint in the eyes of John Paul II. At Yad

Vashem, the Pope refused to apologize for, or even to mention in passing, any moral failings or

errors of judgment that may have afflicted past Vatican administrations, because he did not

believe there were any and he saw no reason that the Vicar of Christ should humble himself

before an unsanctified nation that, as Paul, the first Christian anti-Semite, put it, is still "under the law." As the spiritual leader of a billion souls, John Paul II knew that he need not kowtow to the world's 13 million Jews, and he was not the man to do it in any case. His statement said exactly as much as his conscience allowed. If any Jew anywhere – if any decent person with historical consciousness – was satisfied with it, this is testimony to the socially inculcated, reflexive respect for religion that infects most of us most of the time, and is not so easily shaken, no, not even in atheists, not even by a Holocaust.

Orthodox Judaism: God takes a personality inventory

Anyone who opens the book of Leviticus at random, and reads it with 1% of his mind open to the The narcissism of religion - 567

possibility that it is a human production, is sure to come to the conclusion that it records the

primitive religion of a tribal nation. For one thing, it is flat blasphemy to attribute to the Creator

of the Universe a writing style so lame. But it is no less blasphemous to credit the personality of

that God: violent, thin-skinned, jealous, arrogant, obsessive-compulsive about nitpicking ritual

observances (most of them having to do with slaughtered animals), ignorant about medicine and

hygiene, addicted to his own peculiar pleasures (which involve compelling various forms of

elaborate obeisance from the creatures whom he says he favors), and above all, garrulous to a

great fault – repeating his points two, three, and four times, while interjecting, hundreds of time,

like a man suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, the boastful, self-blaspheming incantatory words

"I am the Lord" as if he is in danger of forgetting.

I do not say that this god is a charlatan and a fool – not when he is the creator of the universe and able to arrange weather patterns and military outcomes for his chosen pets – but certainly he is narcissistic, megalomaniacal, consumed by the absolute power that corrupts absolutely, and a control freak to the nth degree. In brief, he is exactly what his critics have been saying about him since the Enlightenment, and what Xenophanes and Lucretius said of him two thousand years ago: he is made in our image.

The devotees of Torah – and they include the vast majority of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants in America – like to point out certain liberal propositions that occur every four or five thousand words. "Treat the immigrant kindly" is a great favorite. In between these flashes of light we find a great darkness of slavery, misogyny, judicial murder, genocide, and xenophobia. No one, not even the Ultra-Orthodox, lives by the ordinances of this book any longer, whether its demand for animal sacrifice or its obligation to dispense capital punishment The narcissism of religion - 568

for every known sexual offense. Our contempt for such savageries is owing to all the advances in humanity that have occurred since it was written; but it is terribly damaging to the human psyche either to spend any time at all believing that the Creator of the Universe ever could have said these things, or to conduct a modern life contaminated by the sort of doublethink required by the pretense that the book of Leviticus ought still to govern our morality.

Because of the persistence of fundamentalist religion in the modern world, and the thoughtless respect that most secular people have for religion in general, every generation must be educated anew in the evil that is contained in the Bible. So I will quote a few choice passages. I know that what I am about to do has been done by others, repeatedly, throughout the last century, and that such victories over the Bible are cheap indeed; nonetheless, many of my readers are completely ignorant of what can be found there, and many others grew up in a church or synagogue without ever giving very close attention to what Leviticus and Deuteronomy really say – the majority of people think they will get around to reading the Bible cover-to-cover some day, but never find the time. Yet they feel a kind of reverence for "the Book" and for the people who live by the

Book. (I should qualify that: "the people who say they live by the Book." Not one Jewish or

Christian fundamentalist anywhere in the world today keeps all the commandments of the Torah or the Old Testament that were supposedly handed down by God. The reason for this will quickly become apparent.)

First, a brief passage to capture God's style, which, as I have already suggested, indicates a neurological disorder. He is talking about the subject that is closest to his heart – animal sacrifice: The narcissism of religion - 569

On the same day it shall be eaten up; ye shall leave none of it until the morrow: I am the Lord. Therefore shall ye keep my commandments, and do them: I am the Lord. Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the Lord which hallow you, that brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord. [Leviticus 22:30-33]

Now on to God's morality, which we should consider both from the narrow standpoint of the rules he establishes, and the broader perspective of what sorts of things interest him.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; and they shall say unto the elders of his city, "This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard." And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die. [Deuteronomy 21: 18-21]

Implicit in the passage is the parents' right to themselves determine what constitutes stubbornness and rebelliousness.

When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. [Deuteronomy 24:1]

Implicit in this passage is the husband's right to himself determine what constitutes

"uncleanness." It is quite clear that, in those righteous times, divorce for what we would today call "incompatibility" – as defined by men, not by women – was permitted. Yet on her radio program of March 1, 2000, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a fierce spokesperson for the "covenant" of marriage, extolled an Orthodox Rabbi who, unlike his Reform and Conservative counterparts,

"actually follows Torah." I bet he doesn't. I bet he doesn't sacrifice animals and join with the The narcissism of religion - 570

elders in stoning to death all adulterers, gay men, transvestites, and husbands who have sexual

relations with menstruating women. And in the Rabbi's book about marital commitment, touted

by Dr. Laura as if it represents a return to a stricter Biblical standard, I bet he ignores the right of

a Jewish patriarch to shed his wife at the drop of a pen on parchment.

But as Dr. Laura hardened into Orthodoxy during the late 1990s, we were able to see a

clear demonstration of the way religion accelerates moral deterioration. About those other

rabbis, she suggested that they were "doing wrong" by "misleading Jews." Back in her secular

humanist days, her character-driven morality had been equally noxious but she had applied it

consistently to everyone without regard for race, religion, color, or creed. She directed her

tongue-lashings at misbehavior; thought, in those days, was still free. But once she was in the grip of fundamentalism, the circle of those who belonged to God kept contracting, and the size of the population in the outer darkness kept growing. The legions of the damned began to swell with those who merely disagree with her, and the ranks of the faithful thinned until there were but very few left. And so the narrative of heroism played out just the way she liked it – the

courageous few against the evil many, the guardians of Deuteronomy against the despisers of

commandments. In her case, however, she eventually found the ranks so depleted that she was

left standing alone. Saying "I don't get much back" – a fascinating and perhaps psychologically

revealing locution when applied to moral principles and matters of eternal truth – she dropped

out of her synagogue, denounced the entire religion of Judaism and all its adherents for having

failed her, and left for spiritual parts unknown. Well, a religion that projects a narcissistic

personality disorder upon its deity has no cause for complaint if one of its members takes

narcissism too far. The narcissism of religion - 571

If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, "I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid": then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: and the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, "I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; and, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, 'I found not thy daughter a maid'; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; and they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel; and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you. [Deuteronomy 22:13-21]

Now that we know, as one of the discoveries of modern scientific research (of a type that the religion of the past would not have permitted), that women who are virgins do not necessarily bleed on their bridal nights, we can only shudder at what this passage may have meant for certain unfortunate brides of ancient Israel. Presumably the God of the Universe knew what we now know, but withheld the information rather than tell the scribe who took down Leviticus in dictation. In any event, savor these aspects of Yahweh's justice: the punishment for attempted murder is a fine of 100 shekels; the punishment for failing to bloody the bridal sheets (for whatever reason, including falling down a well when you were nine years old) is death. And notice that the husband presents his case and the father of the bride presents hers. She, needless to say, has no judicial standing as a person in her own right.

If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife: because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days. [Deuteronomy 22: 28-29] The narcissism of religion - 572

The lucky girls who be found are forcibly married off to their rapists by their satisfied, reimbursed fathers; the unlucky girls who be not found are raped and unmarriageable as a result.

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. [Deuteronomy 22:5]

There's for transvestites – many of whom, today, still want to be Jews and Christians. It was suggested to me by one such correspondent that this edict was an aspect of the Hebrew rejection of heathen religion – that cross-dressing was a feature of the rites of polytheistic tribes, and the

Israelites wanted no part of such doings. Such explanations, which are usually engendered by hopefulness rather than serious scholarship, rely upon our silly myth of the "progress" of human thought from polytheism to monotheism: we thereby sanitize the brutal tribal religion of the Old

Testament. In fact, the intelligent polytheism of Aeschylus is far more humane than the fanatical monotheism of Samuel; and in any case, the Bible is polytheistic throughout, unless you wish to argue that its angels and devils are the hallucinations of schizophrenics rather than real metaphysical beings. Our sentimentality about the supposedly monotheistic Hebrews causes us to commit the anachronistic fallacy by reading our own belief in a single universal deity back into the People of the Book. The Israelites did not believe that there was only one god; they believed there was only one god for them. In any case, it is clear from even a cursory reading of the

Pentateuch that Yahweh Himself believed in the reality of the rival gods, even if his Chosen

People did not – also that he did not care a fig for any human being who wasn't a Jew. By "false" gods, he does not mean "non-existent"; he means "not kosher." By idolatry he does not mean the The narcissism of religion - 573

worship of an unreal god: he means the adoration of the image of the wrong god. He does not

say, "Thou shalt have no illusions and phantasms before me"; he says, "Do not go whoring after

Baal." He says very clearly that he is a jealous god: and since he is evil but not necessarily stupid, this means that he is jealous of other gods, not jealous of nothing.

While we are stoning women who wear jeans, out of obedience to Deuteronomy 22:5, we might want to pause a moment over an extraordinary omission: Yahweh, with his customary thoroughness, explicitly canvasses every possible incestuous coupling, naming the relationship (a boy with his aunt, a girl with her uncle, and so forth) and prescribing the punishment. Yet his exhaustive catalogue does not include any mention of father-daughter incest. We can no doubt imagine a multitude of erudite excuses for this omission if we are determined to justify it; we can also imagine how unconvincing they will have to be. It may not be possible for us to say with any certainty why this topic was passed over. But if we remind ourselves that, as a matter of fact, we humans write our scriptures, and that Yahweh was a figment of ancient imaginations, the most obvious inference would be that the male authors did not want this prohibition added to the list; and the simplest explanation would be that they feared that it might inconvenience them in the pleasant ordering of their lives. And there are women today who call themselves feminists, yet nonetheless aspire to be observant Jews. Such is the pull of the promise of religion to bring us psychological security.

It would be an easy matter to continue on our merry way, citing, for instance, God's order to Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites and his wrath at the Israelites for failing to complete the job. It is, as I have said, as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I could multiply the instances of God's psychopathology a hundredfold without making it any more likely that a The narcissism of religion - 574

religious believer will reconsider his faith. If there is a transcendent deity who takes a personal interest in our affairs, we may be sure that we will someday have to answer for having slandered him so in the Bible; but if a politician in any American precinct got up and said resolutely that he did not believe the book of Leviticus because it paints a blasphemous picture of God, he would guarantee his defeat at the hands of all the voters who would slap bumper stickers on their cars saying "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it." This dreary phenomenon will continue until we grow up as a species.

Evangelical Protestantism: The banality of apocalyptic evil

"By their fruits ye shall know them" – a popular line from the New Testament. One of the fruits of Christianity would be a "classic" song that can be heard on Christian radio shows, titled "I

Wish We'd All Been Ready." While the tune is innocuous – no musical style in the world is more insipid than Christian folk-rock – the words paint a vivid picture of the apocalypse, when the faithful will be teleported into the sky to meet the airborne Savior and the rest of us will be jumping in place. Everywhere, the song blandly reminds us, terrible things will be happening: children will be horribly dying, lifelong friendships will be sundered in an instant, and the wife will turn in bed and find her husband gone – "she's been left behind." She and all her ilk are mourned, and chastised, in the refrain: "The Son has come, and you've been left behind (oh yeah)."

It is easy to dismiss this as drivel, which it certainly is. But because all of our behavior is symbolic and expressive – that is, moral in the largest sense of the word – such fantasies also The narcissism of religion - 575

reveal our truest ethical natures: how we want the world to be; how we think matters should be arranged. We must judge each other not only by our deeds, but also by our ideas and our aspirations – by the sorts of things we hope are true. What kind of person, then, would want to live in a world, and actually enjoy picturing to himself a world, where billions of his fellow humans will perish painfully in a final conflagration and then suffer eternally, while 144,000 of the faithful will ride away on a magic carpet? What is the psychological type of the person who is pleasantly stimulated by this vision of families being torn apart and most people being "left behind"? The purveyor of such a fantasy must be either a man who, as Nietzsche suggested about Christians in general, harbors ferocious resentment and horrifically vengeful feelings against the vast majority of his fellow humans, or he must be someone who is maturationally stuck in pre-adolescence. At best, then, he is enamored of an especially childish version of the heroic myth – one that appeals to the same mentality that gobbles up "Star Wars" movies, not just as eye candy, but as moral revelation; at worst, he is an ethical monster. Otherwise he would write a song about his decision to remain behind with his wife.

Religion without religion

The only religious path that a disciple could follow without danger to his soul would be one that renounced the certainties of revelation and the duties of punctilious observance and instead fostered in each individual an impulse toward greater openness and self-knowledge and greater compassion toward others. It would be a religion that espoused the need for greater psychological mobility even if it could not always succeed in inculcating it. It would have no The narcissism of religion - 576

dogma at all, but it would espouse a method that amounted to a critique of the habits of narcissism.

Such religion has existed in one form or another since the dawn of morality in the middle of the first century B.C.E. The important figures in this moral revolution – Lao Tzu, the Buddha,

Socrates, Micah, Jesus among many others – all attacked the religion of their own time in terms very much like my own, without trying to install any new religion in its place. The ideas that express this religion are commonplace and often on the lips of the best people without any moral posturing. A friend writes to me, "I believe in mindfulness and compassion, seeing myself and others as fully and completely as possible." Adam Bede, in George Eliot's novel, says that "it's a poor look-out to come into the world to make your fellow-creatures worse off instead o' better."

Democritus is quoted in fragments as having said that every human is a little world of his own and therefore morality is based upon respecting the other person. He also said that we ought to do our utmost to help those who have suffered injustice, that the wise man belongs to all countries, and – in a scathing comment on the psychology of the typical religious follower – that

"we should refrain from doing wrong not out of fear but out of a feeling for what is right." Today in Zen Buddhism, especially in the freer Western forms of it that have shed the vestiges of Asian ritual, the seeker can find, in some practices at least, a refuge from the narcissism of religion.

Even here there is the danger of a cult of narcissism around the personality of the guru, but

Buddhism is remarkably free, through its long history, of the blight of sectarianism. It is beyond the scope of this study to further recommend any religious practice. The author calls himself a

Taoist and leaves it at that. Best to follow no course that would be called a religion by any person who calls himself religious.

Milton's dystopia, or Paradise well lost

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everybody talks about The Canon, but nobody does anything about

it. The Old Guard wants to preserve, protect, and defend every last one of the everlastingly Dead

White Males; the Young Turks, like all other liberals in Ambrose Bierce's classic definition, want

to replace existing evils with other evils hitherto unknown. On the one hand, decrepit tradition

without a thought in its head except self-perpetuation; on the other, political correctness of the most jejune, stultifying, and un-self-critical kind. Canon to the Right of us, Canon to the Left of us.

Those of us in the middle are getting whiplash from ramming head-on into the immovable social Neanderthals, only to be rear-ended by the irresistible acolytes of multicultural identity politics. Is it asking too much to critically assess, one at a time, the actual works found in the canon, and to pick and choose among them? Can't we finally jettison sexist whiteboy

Aristotle (for every imaginable reason, from every possible point of view) and still decide to keep pampered aristocrat Tolstoy?

John Milton is often mentioned by members of both camps. To the groovy postmodernists, he is a dinosaur; to the defenders of the faith, he is a sacred cow. Both sides frame their arguments in slogans and irrelevancies. A book should not be thrown out of the canon simply because it is unfashionable in content and inaccessible in style. But it should not be kept in the canon simply Milton's dystopia - 578

because it has always been in the canon.

Merely through long continuance in the English literary tradition, Paradise Lost has threatened to join Aristotle's Poetics as a book that is critically unassailable. Students are taught, all in one breath, that it is modeled on Homer and Virgil, written in iambic pentameter, and indisputably a masterpiece.

In truth, Paradise Lost is an aesthetic failure using any rule of thumb drawn from any critical apparatus. It fails absolutely with any ordinary, unschooled audience of readers; and it fails by its own lights. It got into the canon in the first place due to political correctness – the

18th century kind, which judged a work by the breadth of its epic ambition and according to whether it supported good, sturdy English religion and morality. Add a dollop of sentimentality about blind Milton. Its prestige was ratified by Samuel Johnson, who epitomized the aforementioned political correctness with a vengeance and buttressed it with unusual wit, learning, and tendentiousness. After that, it could not be ousted. Blake implied that Milton had unconsciously proved the opposite of what he intended – perhaps the largest failure that can be imputed to a work that is designed to improve the reader's morals – but the poem had moved beyond criticism. The Romantics could interest themselves in it only by willfully misunderstanding what it says; we moderns can interest ourselves in it only by completely ignoring what it says. Indeed, we have to place both the content and the form of Paradise Lost outside the pale of critical reason. All that is left is the reputed grandeur of Milton's "organ voice," and the discussion of whether his word order is Latinate or Italianate. (English it isn't.)

Is its theology shallow, untenable, and repugnant? The New Critics remind us to look at how it says rather than what it says. Is it sophomorically obedient to epic conventions a thousand Milton's dystopia - 579

years out of date? Milton is filling old bottles with new wine. Is it sometimes syntactically

elusive? Purposeful ambiguity, says Stanley Fish. In short, the puerile message is beyond the

scope of criticism; and the tedious medium is "Milton's style."

Anyone who has fallen asleep over the washed-out rhetoric of Wordsworth's own attempt

at English epic, The Prelude, will have to admit that Milton had a wonderful ear for blank verse.

(The comparison is the more apt for Wordsworth's servile imitation of Miltonic inversions – the odd result being that his slack pentameters still sound like prose, but a fussy, unnatural prose.)

Nonetheless, however much we admire Milton's technical facility, it is a strange criticism that avers that we should listen to the music of his lines without considering what they say.

The complaints of a reader who has not been programmed to genuflect before Milton's genius would be many. To take only the largest target: the middle four books in toto, a third of the epic, make an embarrassing bow to a moribund tradition – after the conventional beginning in medias res, we have the obligatory narrative flashback. The battle in Heaven is ludicrous in the extreme, since the angels have God on their side; the admonition to Adam is a waste of time because the outcome is a foregone conclusion. (When critics agree with such broadsides, then pronounce a work "great in spite of its faults," the dissenter knows he is up against it.)

Or take a trivial example. After Adam has joined Eve in tasting the apple, he is inflamed with passion. (In Book IV, Milton had celebrated wedded love; but now in Book IX he reverts to the Puritan within and associates purely sexual desire with sin.) Adam courts Eve lavishly:

"But come, so well refreshed, now let us play, As meet is, after such delicious fare; For never did thy beauty since the day I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned With all perfections, so inflame my sense Milton's dystopia - 580

With ardor to enjoy thee, fairer now Than ever, bounty of this virtuous tree."

. . .

He led her nothing loth; flow'rs were the couch, Pansies, and violets, and asphodel, And hyacinth, earth's freshest softest lap.

Not bad. But turn to the Iliad, Book XIV, in Richmond Lattimore's superb translation:

"Hera . . . now let us go to bed and turn to love-making. For never before has love for any goddess or woman so melted about the heart inside me . . . not when it was glorious Leto, nor yourself, so much as now I love you, and the sweet passion has taken hold of me."

. . .

[U]nderneath them the divine earth broke into young, fresh grass, and into dewy clover, crocus and hyacinth so thick and soft it held the hard ground deep away from them.

What Milton knew was books.

1

I wish to focus on Milton's presentation of the great theological drama played out in the persons of God and Satan. But before taking up the cudgels, it might be a good idea to review the essential tenets of Fairness in Criticism. However inviting a target Milton may be, the critic must resist the temptation to use modern ideology as the only stick with which to beat him. From the viewpoint of scientific atheism, secular humanism, or even liberal Protestantism, it is mere Milton's dystopia - 581

child's play to make Milton the butt of mean-spirited laughter. His literalism about the Old

Testament, his schoolmarmish raptures about the goodness of goodness, his serene assumption of

the inferiority of women – sad to say, it is illegitimate to tax him unduly for these predilections, since they were shared by many or most of his contemporaries. The same constraint applies, although less forcefully, to his slavish adherence to epic paraphernalia.

On the other hand, we need not be cowed by Milton's admirers, who repeat endlessly that

"after all, everybody thought the same thing in those days." Such a statement would be misleading even if it were true, because it fails to distinguish between the vast majority of men who believed in, let us say, the book of Genesis in a casual and conventional way, and a puritanical zealot like Milton who saw all of life in terms of the doctrine of original sin. But the statement isn't true: very few men of the 17th century concurred with Milton's specific beliefs

that England had been specially chosen by God to complete the Protestant Reformation of

Europe; that the Bible is superior to Greek literature as literature; that the apocalypse predicted

by the book of Revelation might start any day. Some people would have called Milton a bigot

even in his own time – the Quakers, for instance, who were free of Puritan dogmatism and

intolerance. Furthermore, Milton's admirers praise him inordinately for his occasional forays into

independence of thought. If we are to lionize him for the modernity of his ideas about freedom

of the press and divorce, and to give credit him when he seems, to our way of thinking, more

enlightened than the average Puritan, why may we not blame him for being no better than a

Puritan in his conception of the fall of man?

In any case, Milton is fair game when he fails on his own terms. He stated his agenda in

the most unequivocal words imaginable: to "justify the ways of God to men." When the Milton's dystopia - 582

apologist rejoins that Paradise Lost is a poem, not a theological tract, we are entitled to reply that

Milton himself explicitly puts the theology in the forefront. Milton aimed at nothing less than a successful theodicy and made no bones about it. He was aware of the academic arguments that could be raised against the Christian conception of God, and he was confident he could answer them. He would have been appalled to learn that modern readers treat Paradise Lost as a pleasant excursion into myth sung with an organ voice. He would have much preferred the opportunity to answer this paper, and to vindicate his vindication of God, than to waste his time among mere aesthetes, for whom he never did have any respect. In 1642 he wrote in praise of those poets whose works are "doctrinal and exemplary to a nation." He hoped to give God glory by "the honor and instruction of my country." He believed in the moral function of literature, and would have insisted upon being judged according to whether or not his morality was sound.

In the invocation, Milton commits himself to setting forth a theologically respectable theodicy; in Book I, he further commits himself to dramatizing a character who must embody the principle of absolute evil; finally, in Book III, he commits himself to the portrayal, in a speaking part, of a character who must embody absolute power, justice, and love. We may shake our heads at Milton's audacity, and commiserate with him upon the difficulty of the task; we may say that it couldn't be done, and admire him for trying. But nobody twisted his arm. This is the subject that pleased him "long choosing," which he pronounced "not less but more heroic" than any other epic subject. He gave us precisely this work, and we have the right to judge it according to its own statement of intent, extenuating nothing, nor setting down aught in malice.

The word "theodicy" joins two Greek terms, "Theos" (God) and "Dikê" (Justice). In Christian Milton's dystopia - 583

apologetics, theodicy necessarily involves solving what philosophers have called, with uncustomary simplicity, "the problem of evil." The poet Archibald MacLeish, in his play J.B. (a retelling of the book of Job), poses the problem succinctly:

If God is God He is not good, If God is good He is not God.

I.e., if God is all-powerful, he could have made a world without evil, but apparently chose not to do so, thereby calling his goodness into question; if God is all-loving, he would have made a world without evil, but apparently was unable to do so, thereby calling his omnipotence into question. For indisputably, there is evil. (Milton never attempts, as some modern sophists do, to claim that there isn't.)

In Christian theology, the respectable way out of the conundrum is to assert that human free will entails the possibility of evil, and that free will is so great a gift that life is unthinkable without it. If we are to have the power of choosing at all, the argument goes, then we must have the power of choosing badly. Milton is only too eager to clutch at this straw.

But if our disobedience is an inevitable consequence of our very humanity, how can the bestower of our humanity, our creator, hold it against us? Having created Adam lower than the angels, shouldn't God forgive him for being no higher than a man? And from the concept of error arising out of free will to the doctrine of original sin and eternal damnation is a quantum leap.

Since elsewhere Milton showed a mind of his own about the Trinity, he might also have opposed "what everybody thought" about the fall of man. But the crucial aesthetic point is this: if everybody thought it, then he need not have shown it. The doctrine of original sin could have Milton's dystopia - 584

been kept in the background, as part of the "cultural literacy" of the Christian reader. Milton's

audience would have taken for granted the power, love, and blamelessness of God, and the freely

chosen sinfulness of man. The problem of evil tends to appear only in philosophy classrooms.

Most of Paradise Lost takes place in the Garden of Eden, and all of it might have. Milton

himself put God in front of a microphone, stage center.

What demeans Milton's God in Book III is not so much the argument he makes, as that he

argues at all. When the scene opens, God notes that Satan is traveling toward the newly created

earth. He foresees that Satan will succeed in bringing about the fall of man:

For man will hearken to his glozing lies, And easily transgress the sole command, Sole pledge of his obedience; so will fall He and his faithless progeny. Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Why is God so defensive? The angels never open their mouths, but God seems to suspect that one of them may be about to impugn his integrity. We don't mind Milton justifying God, but is it dignified for God to be justifying himself?

"Ingrate." Given that the consequences of man's ingratitude are, for God, practically nil, whereas the consequences for man are sin, pain, death, and punishment through all eternity, we might be more comfortable if God had sounded a note of compassion rather than the note of self- righteousness. "He had of me all he could have" – except what it would take to fend off the serpent's wiles. "Sufficient to have stood" – the ensuing action gives God the lie. "Though free to fall." Milton, like Aristotle before him, seems to believe you are free to choose so long as Milton's dystopia - 585

nothing physical impedes your choice. But what if psychological factors impede you? Adam and Eve prove to be made in such a fashion (by God himself) that they cannot find within themselves the strength of character to fight off temptation. God knows this – and gives Satan the run of the garden. Is Adam free to fall? or guaranteed to fall?

God proceeds to argue that, had his creatures not been endowed with freedom, their allegiance, faith, and love would have given him no pleasure. They would have served

"necessity, not me." There does seem to be a hint of narcissism in this line of reasoning.

Next God argues carefully and at some length that his foreknowledge does not amount to predestination:

. . . they themselves decreed Their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.

I am accustomed to reading critics who tortuously explicate the justice of God's argument, with examples from everyday existence to prove that the ability to predict the future does not cause the future. They haven't a clue that it isn't so much his logic that diminishes God in our eyes, as the spectacle of his wrangling like a lawyer.

But the apologists are wasting their breath. God's foreknowledge is unlike anybody else's, since he alone has the power to change the entire set of conditions – to predestine some other outcome. For instance, he could at any moment squash Satan like a bug. Indeed, Milton cannot emphasize this often enough, since he is never quite sure he has done enough to glorify God and cut Satan down to size. But God chooses not to interfere with Satan's project. His own angels find their hearts going out to Adam, and he sternly instructs them to stand back. Milton's dystopia - 586

Let us, however, grant that God wins his case on a technicality. Now we come to the pronouncement of the sentence: "He with his whole posterity must die."

Doesn't that just take your breath away? as an example of justice?

The apologist might want to interject a few lines here about how Milton was confined by the biblical account of the story. If so, it would have been politic for him to keep certain facts more or less out of sight.

God explains in line 168-202 that not quite every human shall be lost – some few shall be saved, "Yet not of will in him, but grace in me." This seems to contradict the freedom that was vaunted so recently: man is free to fall through his own weakness but not to rise through his own strength.

God states that man will be able to ward off temptation, but only

By me upheld, that he may know how frail His fall'n condition is, and to me owe All his deliv'rance, and to none but me.

The note of narcissism again. "Me . . . me . . . me."

Some I have chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest; so is my will.

The saving of the special few, and damning of billions of others, seems not to be a sad, recalcitrant fact of the human condition, but the result of heavenly whim.. . or pique.

The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warned Their sinful state . . .

Milton's dystopia - 587

The implied continuation is: "so they won't be able to plead ignorance."

Finally, in the prose synopsis of Book V, Milton says explicitly that "God, to render man inexcusable, sends Raphael to admonish him of his obedience." In other words, Raphael's mission is a charade. The real purpose is not to arm Adam against Satan's aggression, but to forestall any attempt Adam may make later on to put the blame on God. Above all else, God wants to be in a position to issue a snappy comeback: "Don't say I didn't warn you." We have here the disconcerting spectacle of a deity who seems to be psychologically insecure, and unduly concerned about appearances. He is like a hanging judge who wants to make sure that the condemned man thinks well of him.

Thus Milton depicts the Creator of the Universe as operating out of the mind-set of a newly commissioned second lieutenant – and fails to notice that this treatment demeans the object of his veneration.

Original sin – that is to say, the extension of Adam's culpability to every subsequent member of the human race – has often challenged even the most doctrinaire Christian thinkers. Milton too was troubled by this piece of dogma, which is why his God labors so mightily to explain it.

Milton's prose writings offer corroborating evidence that he was uncomfortable with the divine logic of blood guilt. In his theological tract De Doctrina Christiana, a Latin work of prose justification that provides a helpful gloss to his poetic theodicy, Milton approaches every issue by first citing the relevant scriptures. Next he appeals to ordinary common sense. But sometimes he remains unsatisfied even after all that revelation and right reason can accomplish. At that point, he falls back on what "we all know." Milton's dystopia - 588

God's pronouncement of death upon Adam's unborn progeny clearly disturbed him.

Having justified it by all the scriptures and logical proofs he could muster, he finally cites the practice of contemporary warfare, in which the innocent and the guilty were together conquered, punished, and sometimes executed. "We all know what are the recognized rights of war," he writes.

Logically, we have a fallacy that is easy enough to spot – that of deducing the morality of a given action from its preponderance in human affairs. But more to the point, Milton seems unaware of how damaging it must be to his case to say that God's justice is, after all, no worse than that of the military commanders of the Thirty Years War.

Elsewhere, Milton notes that in many Old and New Testament passages, "God distinctly declares that it is himself who impels the sinner to sin, who binds his understanding, and leads him into error; yet, on account of the infinite holiness of the Deity, it is not allowable to consider him as in the smallest instance the author of sin." If we like, we can sympathize with Milton's distress at finding holy scripture to be at odds with his own lofty conception of God. But we cannot allow him to win his point by saying of the opposing argument, "It is not allowable."

To summarize, Milton insisted on treating God as a speaking part and placing us in the front row of the auditorium during the debate in Heaven, and we must be permitted to judge the discussion using ordinary standards of logic, sympathy, and common sense. Milton's God is, according to the exact dictionary definitions of these words, arbitrary, egotistical, argumentative, incredibly thin-skinned, and, if you approach the issue of foreknowledge and predestination with an open mind, monstrously unjust. Yet Milton was attempting, in this character, to show us the lineaments of Supreme Goodness and Mercy. The problem with Paradise Lost, then, does not Milton's dystopia - 589

reside in the reader's inability to imaginatively occupy a viewpoint different from his own. It is

that, in the acerbic words of one critic, the poem's own internal contradictions require the reader

to suspend not merely his disbelief but his intelligence.

2

Many another critic has felt something lacking in the portrait of God, and has turned with relief

to the portrait of Satan, either to admire Milton's artistry or to echo some version of Blake's

famous obiter dicta that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it. It is common to see

Satan called one of the greatest characters in world literature. The 19th century went so far as to

make of Satan a Byronic hero. This overstatement of the case played into the hands of the

Milton faction. It is easy enough to show that Satan is motivated by pure spite, overweening

ambition, and colossal conceit. His grandeur seems to consist almost solely of his refusal to

submit; but this refusal is ignoble, since God is such a magnanimous benefactor (according to

Milton); and it is stupid, since there is no denying or escaping God's infinite power. Satan is

merely self-destructive, and only an age that romanticized suicide could admire him.

Nonetheless, the quickest way into the poem for a classroom full of high school seniors is

to read the famous soliloquy from Book I, ending with the thundering motto, "Better to reign in

hell than serve in heaven." Earlier still comes Satan's creed that his sole delight will be "ever to do ill": in effect he says, I'll just find out what God wants, then do the opposite. Finally in Book

IV we get the definitive statement: "Evil, be thou my good." Yet in the midst of all this dedication to malice, we are constantly given glimpses of ruefulness and self-understanding. Milton's dystopia - 590

Satan knows that God is a good father, and deserves better. He is riven by envy when he observes the happy state of humankind, and by remorse when he prepares to do in Adam and

Eve.

Now does this sound like the embodiment of absolute evil?

It sounds to me like adolescent rebellion, which explains both why the high school

seniors like it and why they may think Satan is the hero of the poem. Many of them have

similarly set themselves against their fathers, simply in the hope of coming away with some sort

of autonomy and individual identity; yet at the same time they, like Satan, find it hard to be

happy.

When a youthful ego is bruised, and a young rebel finds he cannot bear to submit to "the

establishment," the result may indeed be mayhem. Our malcontent may indeed endeavor to

discover whatever the authorities think is good, and then do the opposite. A person willing to cut

off his nose to spite his face may wreak a lot of havoc. A few cars may even be set on fire. But

is this the objective correlative of absolute evil?

We can partially excuse Milton's ignorance about this depressing subject on the grounds

that he was fortunate enough not to have lived during the 20th century – although I cannot

believe that the type of Hitler and Stalin did not exist in the 17th century. But can any

contemporary critic continue to praise Satan as a great piece of characterization after having

witnessed at first hand the appearance of real evil in the world? Satan represents garden variety

evil, of the "arrested development" genus. He is the perpetual juvenile delinquent. He is not

even as scary as the genuine sociopath, who never feels any empathic connection with his victims

or the least bit of remorse. But even a serial killer cannot hold a candle to the Hitlers and Stalins, Milton's dystopia - 591

the Maos and Pol Pots, the presidents and the generals. What has the portrayal of Satan to do

with the anatomy of the greatest evil of all?

Strange to say, one of the most difficult things to hold in our heads when we contemplate

Hitler is the simple fact that he didn't think he was a bad man. We are so accustomed now to

execrating the Nazis as if they were a cabal of master criminals that we find it difficult to think of

them as ordinary politicians, statesmen, and family men. Hitler did not aspire to rule the world.

He was not personally corrupt. He was not a sexually perverted sadist. He envisioned a

Germany that would stretch to the Ural Mountains and last for a thousand years. To achieve this,

he believed it was necessary to purify the blood of the Aryan race. Millions of churchgoing

Germans, moved by this vision of a utopian Reich, voted the Nazi Party into power and

applauded its program of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics. To achieve his goal, Hitler

proposed to exterminate the Jews, enslave the Slavs, and stamp out mental and physical

disabilities by sterilization and euthanasia. Speaking of the latter program, he acknowledged that

it would go hard with the victims, but would only need to be done once and would achieve a

salutary result for posterity. He thought the deaths of millions of people were a reasonable price

to pay for the magnificent empire he envisioned. In ordering the Holocaust, he thought he was

doing his duty.

This, I submit, is the portrait of real evil, evil on a gigantic scale. It always comes garbed

in a vision of goodness. The perpetrators of the most astounding evil have always been people

who believed that what they were doing was right. The evil done by vandals and common criminals under the motto of "Evil, be thou my good" is a tiny fraction of the evil done by the governments under the motto of "This is the greater good." Milton's dystopia - 592

Had Milton looked closely enough, he would have found the prototype for real evil close

at hand – as close as his own heart. The Puritans dedicated themselves to the cleansing of the

commonwealth, believing that God would establish the New Jerusalem right in London if they

succeeded. Their program required the extirpation of every sign of "popery," which included

many of the practices of the Anglican Church. They persecuted ordinary people for following

innocuous religious rituals that had existed for a thousand years, all in the name of . . . the higher

good. They were obsessed with guaranteeing the fitness of every person who took communion,

so eventually, like all other similar revolutionary movements, they fell to purging one another.

Milton himself had bloody hands, in that he fearlessly defended the execution of King

Charles I, an act that horrified even Milton's fellow Protestants in continental Europe. He could

express his outrage over the slaughter of (Protestant) innocents in the Italian Piedmont; but he

could write, with a clear conscience, a sonnet in praise of Cromwell, who ordered the execution

of all those men who surrendered at the Irish (Catholic) garrison of Drogheda, after a slaughter

that had comprehended a great many women and children as well. (Cromwell justified this in the

same language of expediency that Hitler used later, pointing out that if it worked as a deterrent, it

would "tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.") Milton comes into a certain amount

of admiration today for envisioning a true republic in an age of monarchical thinking: but it

would have been a republic of "saints," and to build it he was willing to follow a policy of blood

and iron.

The greatest evil originates in fanaticism, and attains the greatest scale when fanaticism becomes wedded to absolute power. These conditions do not fit Satan at all – that heart-stung teenager, Milton's dystopia - 593

jealous of his image, defiant, full of second thoughts, afraid to back down, bragging, bullying,

complaining, and held on a short leash by the Creator of the Universe. Yet the conditions of evil,

of fanaticism unchecked, do exist in Milton's unwitting dystopia. They exist in Heaven.

"He with his whole posterity must die." God out-Hitlers Hitler. The sacrifice of millions of living people, which Hitler thought would need to be done only once, becomes the sacrifice of billions of people yet unborn. Why? To bring about justice. "Die he, or justice must." (This makes no sense, but we've heard it often in our world.) Like all the great fanatics, God has an idea. And however many deaths it will take to bring it about, they will not be near his conscience. (If he even has a conscience. Satan certainly has.)

Joseph Stalin had an idea about "socialism in one country." Pol Pot had an idea about a brave new world, so perfect that the calendar would start over. When we go to improving our neighbors according to our schemes for universal justice, there is no telling how many of them will have to die.

No, Milton is not of the devil's party – more's the pity. He is of God's party – so much so that he has created God in his own image. He can't see the evil in God because he can't see it in himself.

A cartoonist, Walt Kelly, knew enough to say that "We have met the enemy and he is us."

In his comic strip Pogo, he drew a number of characters equal to Satan in criminal boldness – bad boys, who love trouble, and know where to find it. He treated them as community misfits and spoke of them as mere caricatures. But of Deacon Muskrat, his clerical rodent who is beyond hypocrisy, he first joked that he was the personification of the do-gooder – "he'll do you good if it kills you" – and finally said, "The Deacon is about as far as I can go in showing what I Milton's dystopia - 594

think evil to be."

Is it asking too much of Milton, as he sets about constructing his demonology, to see at

least as deeply into the human condition as a cartoonist who drew talking animals?

3

Milton failed utterly to make of God an objective correlative of divine power, justice, and love;

he failed equally to make of Satan an objective correlative of absolute evil. Given his formidable

learning and intellect, how could this happen?

Milton was a Puritan patriarch, a righteous daddy who never doubted he knew best. (Just ask his unhappy daughters, who were required to be his household drudges.) He fashioned God in his own image, placed Him at the head of the table in Heaven, and then, naturally enough, identified with him totally. What today seems arbitrary, tyrannical, peremptory, and sanctimonious, seemed to Milton to be merely the justice of a father who, after all, is right. To such a father, there is no greater sin than disobedience. Satan becomes, in this scheme, the rebellious young scapegrace who bristles under the yoke – a yoke made all the more unbearable because, in his heart of hearts, he can find no fault with the father. We all know the sad lot of such children: they are perpetual failures, eternal malcontents; most significantly, they never succeed in winning the father's respect or approval, which is what they really crave. Satan undoubtedly nurtures a secret hope that God will notice his courage and resourcefulness and reward him with a pardon. Here, finally, Milton was psychologically on the money.

Adam is merely the prodigal son, but with the infinite misfortune to have Milton's God Milton's dystopia - 595

for a father instead of the kindly patriarch of Luke's parable.

There is another character in Luke's suggestive story – the elder brother. It is important to

understand that, first, he really is a "good" man, and second, that he receives the portion he has

merited. The father says to him, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." But

this isn't enough for him. He is jealous of his younger brother, both because he imagines that the

prodigal has had the pleasure of sinning and escaped paying the price, and because, in

recompense for his own joylessly dutiful life, he has been raised no higher than his wastrel

brother.

In a psychologically revealing passage in the Christian Doctrine, Milton, echoing Paul's

argument in the first letter to the Corinthians, wrote as follows: "Were there no resurrection, the

righteous would be of all men most miserable, and the wicked, who have a better portion in this

life, most happy." This man, who never in his life had to labor with his hands, who was sent to

Europe to complete his education, who spent his days reading, writing, and traveling, who

married, had children, rose to public eminence in the Commonwealth, and ended his days as the

foremost poet of the age, was all the while envying the sinners who have the "better portion." He

was "most miserable," and fancied the hellraisers "most happy"; but the thought of turning the

tables in the next life kept him going in this one.

Spinoza was another contemporary of Milton who did not think "what everybody

thought," and who exhibited in abundance all the qualities Milton so conspicuously lacked, such

as tolerance and depth of intellect. He answered Milton's self-pitying complaint in his Ethics:

"Those are far astray from a true estimate of virtue who expect for their virtue, as if it were the greatest slavery, that God will adorn them with the greatest rewards; as if virtue and the serving Milton's dystopia - 596

of God were not happiness itself and the greatest liberty."

H. L. Mencken defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." Had Milton experienced more of life, he might have known that the pleasures of sinning are vastly overrated, especially by dutiful eldest brother types. Had he enjoyed more of life, he might have been more forgiving.

Milton was a man literally made stupid by learning and religion. (I do not think this is a particularly controversial statement. Few, if any, of the distinguished professors who are defending Milton today would fail to call him, if they encountered him on the quad, a bible-

besotted extremist.) This earnest, moralistic man accepted both the Homeric epic and the

Christian scripture so blindly and wholeheartedly that he was doomed to bookishness and

dogmatism. The original thinking he was able to do was narrowly circumscribed by his doctrinal

allegiances; and he denied himself many of the broadening experiences of life that might have

mitigated the harshness of his ideology. Naturally he marred all that he made.

He is most interesting when he is least consistent, least assured. If you have despised

Milton for as long as I have, and perused him as closely and with as much contempt, you may

finally find a soft spot in your heart for the free spirit who occasionally tried to liberate himself

from the straitjacket of his own godliness. When Milton's young wife left him after only a few

weeks of marriage – no mystery there – he soon found himself a believer in a radical doctrine

expressly at odds with the New Testament. Boldly, he suggested in print that incompatibility is

just as strong a justification for divorce as adultery. My initial scorn for this spiritual

opportunism has since turned into a certain degree of compassion for the cloistered young man

who suddenly encountered a real-life situation and found no solace in his books and theories. Milton's dystopia - 597

Furthermore, he was right. But this episode is almost one of a kind. Had one of his enemies tried similarly to get away with twisting the Biblical law to his personal benefit, only imagine what Milton's tart-tongued response would have been.

Paradise Lost is most moving when it is most at war with itself – when Milton implicitly takes issue with God by pitying man. The depiction of the Garden of Eden is not purely a fantasy: Milton must have seen other men dwelling in Eden, while he looked on longingly; and the sonnet to his second wife makes me believe that he too may have briefly inhabited the outskirts.

The conscious artist in Milton consistently repels us, but we may have a sometime sympathy for the unconscious man. As theodicy, and as poetry, Paradise Lost cannot be salvaged, and must not be allowed to go on taking up room in the canon. But it can continue to be valued as a psychological case study of the life-negating orthodoxies of puritanism, and a demonstration of how they can corrode an otherwise healthy mind and blight a life that could and should have been happy.

Appendix

I said that the canon of Fairness in Criticism restricts the amount of fun we might be allowed to poke at Milton. But in an appendix, we can do anything we damn well please. Let's sample from a smorgasbord of topics.

The submission of women Milton's dystopia - 598

It is true that most writers of the 17th century concur with Milton's opinion that women are

inferior to men. But Milton lays it on with a trowel:

. . . though both Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed; For contemplation he and valor formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace; He for God only, she for God in him. His fair large front and eye sublime declared Absolute rule . . .

Absolute rule. Pity poor Mary Powell, 16 years old and sold into politically expedient wedlock

by her father. These are the words Milton expected to hear from her:

. . . O thou for whom And from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh, And without whom am to no end, my guide And head, what thou hast said is just and right . . .

I won't belabor the many references to "subjection," "coy submission," "meek surrender," and

"submissive charms." Even Samuel Johnson noticed Milton's "Turkish contempt of females as

subordinate and inferior beings."

In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio argues almost exclusively from the principle of

domestic economy: the wife must be ruled by the husband because a house divided cannot stand.

But many of Shakespeare's heroines are manifestly superior to their husbands and lovers in

discernment and morality. Petruchio himself has chosen a woman of spirit and intelligence over

her pretty, docile sister. Milton, on the other hand, believed men to be superior to women in

every respect – anatomically, intellectually, and especially morally. Eve herself acknowledges Milton's dystopia - 599

How beauty is excelled by manly grace And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.

No need to wonder, then, how the apple will act upon fallen Eve. Feminist thoughts bloom in

her brain:

. . . render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesirable, sometime Superior; for inferior who is free?

Milton wishes us to see the immediate consequences of woman's first disobedience. This

longing for equality is the worst thing he can think of.

Adam's sin is, by comparison, large-hearted: he wishes to share Eve's fate. Even so, God and Milton disapprove, because Adam allows himself to be "fondly overcome with female charm."

Milton added the sanction of religion to the oppression of women that had existed time out of mind. His ideas – that sin came by way of the woman, that feminine rebellion against patriarchal domination violates God's law, that men are never so close to Hell as when they succumb to female wiles – have done incalculable harm to generations of women from Milton's day to our very own.

More on God's case

Any amateur psychologist knows how to understand the obsessive insistence upon a single point, iterated and reiterated, in God's opening argument: Milton's dystopia - 600

. . . Whose fault? Whose but his own? . . .

Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. . . .

. . . nor can justly accuse Their maker, or their making, or their fate . . .

. . . they themselves decreed Their own revolt, not I. . . .

They trespass, authors to themselves in all, Both what they judge and what they choose . . .

. . . they themselves ordained their fall.

What clearer admission do we need of the weakness of God's case? Yet after this recital, God avers that "mercy first and last shall brightest shine," proving either that he lies without shame, or, more likely, that the habit of despotism encourages him to imagine that his merely saying something really makes it so. (The angels, like all bureaucratic sycophants and party henchmen, never say him nay. Some commentators claim the debate in Hell is a totalitarian sham, because

Beelzebub manipulates the outcome according to Satan's wishes. At least the devils get to speak.

Satan stage-manages the kind of public extravaganza characteristic of the early formative phase of a totalitarian mass movement. The council in Heaven is what we see when a tyrant's power has become absolute – nobody dares to breathe a word.)

The response of the son must not be taken for a dissenting voice – as God himself says, the son has merely spoken

. . . as my thoughts are, all As my eternal purpose hath decreed.

Milton's dystopia - 601

But notice the winning line of argument in the son's advocacy:

Or shall the Adversary thus obtain His end, and frustrate thine . . .

That's the ticket – appeal, not to God's compassion, but to his vanity. (He would have let the

whole human race go hang, but for his reluctance to allow Satan to have the last laugh on him.)

William Empson, in Milton's God, acknowledges that "the picture of God in the poem . . .

is astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin." But not only does he demur from treating this fact as a

liability, he argues that the poem's thesis requires just such a deity. You would have to have

Empson's subtlety of intellect to appreciate why this is so. Rather than repeat his ingenious

argument and take issue with it line by line, I will just assert that it fails, for commonsensical

reasons, to convince any reader who is immune to Empson's charm and erudition. But even if I

agreed with Empson that a totalitarian God is inevitable if He is given any lines to speak at all, I

disagree that the poem required the set piece wherein the President-for-Life addresses his rubber- stamp parliament in Heaven. Why not begin and end in Eden? Stick with the human point of view: our first parents, given a paradise on earth by their affectionate Father, are set upon by an enemy whose malice is entirely beyond their ken; for mysterious reasons that they never do comprehend, they lack the armament that would fend him off, and are undone by him. Indeed, after all the sterile and demagogic arguments of God, which fail so embarrassingly to indicate any qualities of universal Justice and Love, and after all the excuses of Satan, which fail so markedly to provide a believable representation of Absolute Evil – faults that disfigure the poem and render it by turns old-biddyish, shallow, and incoherent – this is what we are left with at the Milton's dystopia - 602

end of the epic, as Adam and Eve wend their sad way out of Paradise. And this is what we

actually have in human reality: more evil than we know how to account for or combat, and a

question for the universe as to why this should be so. To think that Milton's God, or Milton's

poem, does explain the evil and answer our question is to accept the world-view of a child – and

a very young child at that. No, Milton's best strategy was to keep the divine machinery out of

sight and respect the mystery at the heart of evil. Had he done so, his poem would have gained

immeasurably and perhaps even illuminated his ostensible subject of "man's first disobedience."

If, as I suspect, he could never have stayed in a condition of negative capability and allowed the

mystery to remain, he might have confined himself to a few lines, however unconvincing, that

would have affirmed the Satanic malice and the Godly justice and not done nearly the damage to

his theme that his full-length portraits of these immortal antagonists have done. But if any reader

thinks that Milton justified the ways of God to men by giving us his dramatic rendering of Uncle

Joe Stalin taking on James Dean, the adolescent "Rebel Without a Cause," I cannot do more than

suggest that we have here an instance of iambic hypnosis and, if the reader is a Christian

believer, of complete and utter blasphemy.

God's prohibition

In Book IV, Satan, creeping about the Garden of Eden incognito, learns of God's strange commandment and soliloquizes as follows:

All is not theirs, it seems; One fatal tree there stands, of Knowledge called, Forbidden them to taste. Knowledge forbidden? Milton's dystopia - 603

Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be sin to know, Can it be death? And do they only stand By ignorance, is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith?

No wonder Blake suspected Milton of identifying with the arch-fiend. Satan reasons here as sanely and correctly as the author of "Areopagitica" – that intrepid citizen who scorned a similarly senseless desire on the part of the powers-that-be to limit his right to know. The temptation of Eve will be a snap:

God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just; Not just, not God . . .

This is not evil and seductive; it is merely logical.

And wherein lies Th'offense, that man should thus attain to know? What can your knowledge hurt him, or this tree Impart against his will, if all be his? Or is it envy, and can envy dwell In heav'nly breasts?

God's prohibition is so irrational, and so unworthy of a deity – it exists solely to test man and to trip him up – that Satan's famous guile instead comes across as plain common sense.

But Papa Milton in the privacy of his home no doubt took a different tack from Citizen

Milton. It is after that image that God is fashioned, so to become merely the first in a long line of parents governing by fiat and saying to their children, "Because I said so."

Answering the aesthetic argument Milton's dystopia - 604

No doubt the lover of Paradise Lost is completely out of patience with me. Have I not made an

elementary critical error in treating the poem as a set of ideas? Here to chastise me is

philosopher Suzanne Langer:

Every critic who is worth his salt has enough literary intuition to know that the way of saying things is somehow all-important. . . . The initial questions, then, are not: "What is the poet trying to say, and what does he intend to make us feel about it?" But: "What has the poet made, and how did he make it?"

Langer avers that a reader would never judge Wordsworth's famous ode according to whether it

proves the Platonic doctrine of transcendental remembrance:

Of course a poet usually builds a philosophical poem around an idea that strikes him, at the time, as true and important; but not for the sake of debating it. . . . Propositions . . . are only materials of poetry.

Karl Shapiro summarizes all this in a memorable motto: A poet is someone who asks "what is

the poetry of" the situation he happens to be dealing with.

A fair test. What is the poetry of man's first disobedience?

Milton feels it in fits and starts, nowhere more engagingly than when he gives his sensual man free rein to imagine life in the Garden of Eden, unencumbered by malice, self-seeking, guilt,

and fear. We do experience sympathy for Adam and Eve: they had it all, and they lost it.

But Milton's fundamentalism squeezes his sympathy so severely that he rarely extracts all

the poetic juice out of the predicament of our first parents. Continually, he turns away from his

depiction of human aspiration, conflict, and heartbreak to his desperate defense of God's

despicable jurisprudence and to his jejune conception of Satan's evil. Milton's dystopia - 605

The fly in Langer's ointment is that we cannot separate the way of saying things from

what is being said. Milton's way of saying that man's first disobedience led to loss of Eden is to

emphasize Satan's nastiness, man's culpability, and God's justice. But Satan does not seem all

that bad, man all that blameworthy, or God all that just. These are faults.

As readers, we can try to see Satan, Adam, and God as Milton saw them; but we cannot

help seeing that his view is illogical and spiritually immature. We can agree to disagree about

Milton's theological propositions: what we cannot tolerate is their intrusion into all the important

narrative moments.

Many interpreters of Genesis have discovered tantalizing depths of meaning in such details as the name of the forbidden tree. Is knowledge itself the worm in the apple? Did our ascent to human consciousness automatically entail our induction into sin? Don't bother Milton with such riddles – he's teaching Sunday school. The tree tests man's obedience; failure to obey is and ought to be a capital crime. That is all he knows, and all he thinks we need to know.

Here let us dispense with the uninformed and frankly inane argument, often encountered

in opponents of Christian fundamentalism who nonetheless want to salvage Paradise Lost, that

Milton celebrates man's first disobedience. It is averred that Adam and Eve took a bold stand for

knowledge, autonomy, and self-respect, and earned God's grudging admiration by standing up to

him; they bring about a better world in which virtue has real work to do. A "fortunate fall"

indeed. Perhaps it will suffice to point out that the text, which is doggedly over-explicit on all

points of theology, neglects to advance this most important point of all. God says nothing about

it when he harps on the high crime of disobedience throughout the third book. What makes the

fall fortunate in Milton's shriveled brain is the glorification of the Father and the Son that will Milton's dystopia - 606

flow from Their harebrained scheme of redemption: by means of the judicial murder of

Themselves and the subsequent eating of the divine corpse, they will save the tiny remnant of humanity that is deserving of salvation. (Should I have said, "God's judicial murder of Himself"? or "The Father's judicial murder of the Son"? According to orthodox Trinitarian logic, "it's all one": God's conversation with Jesus is really with Himself, as Milton feebly indicates.

Nonetheless, Milton's dramatization of the separate manifestations of the triune deity invited controversy at the time, and in other ages could have procured his execution after a heresy trial.

The way Paradise Lost is written, it very nearly looks as if Jesus is an independent personality.

There are other difficult points of theology that are perhaps smudged in Paradise Lost. In some circles, I should be careful about saying that any of humanity is "deserving of salvation," as that contravenes the gratuitousness of grace: being given over to "total depravity," all of us without exception deserve eternal damnation. But Milton felt that his dangerously heterodox presentation of certain events in his epic poem could be squared with bottom-line Protestant orthodoxy, and I agree with him.)

Milton feels fortunate just to be able to bear witness to the wonder and compassion of the divine sacrifice, but most of the rest of us, who are now destined for Hell, see little to rejoice at.

We admit we don't understand it; and Milton can't explain it.

At the climax of the entire poem – Eve's plucking of the apple – we are so put off by

God's arbitrariness and meanness, and Milton's determination to justify it, that we lose sight of

Eve's trembling desire. Cause and effect no longer tally. The loss of Eden no longer embodies any psychological truth about the human condition or expresses any intelligible moral vision.

We sink into a colorful story of gods, demigods, and heroes, whose motivations and behaviors Milton's dystopia - 607

seem to be merely the peculiarities of a group of bizarre fairy-tale characters: the Troll forbids

Billy Goat Gruff to cross the bridge, who knows why, and wreaks a terrible revenge when Billy disobeys for no very good reason – curiosity, maybe; henceforth all little goats shall die, except a few that the Troll plans to spare from time to time as a demonstration simply that he can and he will. No stranger than Rapunzel, I guess.

Such faults sabotage the poetry as well as the story. The admittedly beautiful language cannot be heard as absolute music. It is not just saying, it is saying something. And all too often it is saying the fatuous dogma of fundamentalist doctrine instead of the poignant poetry of loss of

Eden.

John Bunyan Superstar: self-flagellation as performance art

Before the service, the Rabbi prostrated himself before the altar of the empty synagogue, and cried out, "I know that before the Holy One, blessed be His Name, I am as nothing. I am unworthy to kiss His feet." The Cantor came in and heard this prayer. He fell down next to the Rabbi and said, "I too am nothing. Before the Holy One, may His Name be blessed, I am a crumb, a speck of dust." The janitor overheard this prayer, came forward, and got down on his knees. "Holy One," said the janitor. "I am nothing, I am nothing." The Rabbi turned to the Cantor and said with a sneer, "Look who thinks he's nothing."

Our lives are performances.

(We need not derail the argument here by asking questions about the audience. It may be as much of a fiction as the self that performs.)

"This above all: to thine own self be true." If analyzed carefully, a staggeringly immoral statement, the motto of every narcissist and know-it-all. But good advice to an actor. We do not say that King Lear is an agreeable man or that his actions are prudent and efficacious: we say that he is "every inch a king" – even when he is out of his five wits. We wouldn't want him to act any other way. We want him to "be himself." In a play.

I have cast myself in a drama, written by me and named after me. It is just as important to my story, as to that of King Lear, that the audience trust the author/actor. "Here King Lear seems for a moment to act more like Hamlet . . . Did Shakespeare, or Barrymore, nod?"

So we are trying to make our lives conform to aesthetic requirements. As Eric Berne noted, we are following a script. The script may not conduce to happiness; but happiness may John Bunyan Superstar - 609

not be the theme. What counts to an actor is a different kind of success. Above all else, the

performance must be right. It must have integrity – a different matter altogether from the integrity we expect from the actor when he signs a contract with the manager of the theater. As the acting students I knew put it, it must be committed. Or as Aristotle said in his mundane way, the characters must act consistently and appropriately. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice actually uses the metaphor of life as a play: he refers to the world as a stage and tells us that his part is a sad one. He prefers staying in character to finding happiness; he would rather die than do something out of character.

When we grasp, sometimes but faintly, that a particular individual is following a script and making his actions conform to an aesthetic program, we may feel ourselves paralyzed to render any moral verdict. We may say of such a man that he lived up to his own beliefs, that he had the courage of his convictions, that he was true to himself: that is to say, his performance was at once an expression and a vindication of his own aesthetic criteria, as mine is of mine. On what ground am I to stand when I judge him?

The answer is simple. The ethical conundrum is only apparent. If people organize their lives around aesthetic conceptions, we are required to morally judge the aesthetic conceptions themselves. In laying down a ground from which to criticize, I am to stand on principles that I can be rationally and ethically defend. My own life then becomes fair game and can be judged in a similar fashion. Others are free to reject both my principles and my life, but they must be prepared to give reasons.

So: John Bunyan was a good puritan; but is puritanism any good?

To rule out this question is, finally, to fall prey to ethical nihilism. But we need not do John Bunyan Superstar - 610

so: all the arguments whereby we abandon the search for moral truth are specious. At the outset,

we have to stop giving religion an automatic exemption from rational discourse – there is nothing

sacred about a sacred cow. Then we have to abandon the radical skepticism and solipsism

implied in averring that such matters are invariably "subjective." They aren't at all – we have

simply been daunted by the kind of opponent who, when we corner him, says that he refuses to

agree and that we can't make him. (In such a situation, tolerance is a cowardly form of

intellectual surrender rather than a virtue. We need to say to our antagonist that he has placed

himself beyond the pale of civilized rational discourse. We cannot coerce his conscience, or his

intuition that the earth is flat; but he has forfeited his place in the intellectual commonwealth and

no longer has standing in the court of public debate. We need to emulate the conduct of the

churches, first shunning him, and finally excommunicating him. The penalty can be enlightened

and up-to-date: not a civil trial and a heretic's punishment; but banishment from intellectual

communion pending his acceptance of the tenets of logical argumentation.)

A kind of integrity, indeed, attaches to some of the most vicious performances. Fictional

Iago attains an appalling grandeur when, caught and threatened with torture, he remains

unrelenting in evil. In our own time, the all-too-real G. Gordon Liddy, a man convicted of a serious felony committed out of misplaced loyalty to a terribly limited and psychologically damaged president, has attained fame, fortune, and even a sort of halo following his incarceration, in part because he maintained the integrity of his performance and stubbornly refused to sing the requisite song of contrition while his cohorts abased themselves and changed their tunes. As one artist sizing up another, I can concede that he showed a certain amount of grit: under considerable pressure, he kept his performance "true." But as a moralist, I know how John Bunyan Superstar - 611

to evaluate the script he was working from. It was trash.

If we indulge in a sneaking admiration of Iago – attracted in spite of ourselves to his moxie, his wit, and his hardness – and if we are drawn into a more open admiration of Liddy, who stood firm and thereby drew down upon himself the longest of all the prison terms meted out to the Watergate conspirators, how much more likely are we to openly venerate those men of religion who suffered for the sake of their beliefs. Yet these same men may have possessed, directly or indirectly, hands much bloodier than those of Iago, who only caused a domestic tragedy in one household and personally dispatched one rapacious dunce, or of Liddy, who so undermined his own soldierly code of conduct by incompetence that he managed to do very little of the damage he tried to do.

John Bunyan's life was a piece of theater more colorful than most. Aesthetically, it was a triumph. But let us read the script he wrote for others – The Pilgrim's Progress – and compare it to his life, and render a moral verdict as well.

When Faithful and Christian are about to travel to Vanity Town, they are forewarned by

Evangelist that one of them will be martyred there – the lucky one:

He that shall die there, although his death will be unnatural, and his pain perhaps great, he will yet have the better of his fellow; not only because he will be arrived at the Cœlestial City soonest, but because he will escape many miseries that the other will meet with in the rest of his Journey.

In the puritan world-view, death is a blessing and life is potentially a snare and certainly a misery. Even to take a nap is a moral crime. As Christian clambers up the Hill called Difficulty, he comes upon an Arbour, made for the refreshment of weary travelers. Our pilgrim is so tired John Bunyan Superstar - 612

that he dozes off and his ticket to salvation falls from his hand. (The allegory in The Pilgrim's

Progress tends to yield its meaning without requiring much from the reader in the way of a gift

for hermeneutics.) When Christian misses the ticket later on, he has to go back:

But all the way he went back, who can sufficiently set forth the sorrow of Christians heart? sometimes he sighed, sometimes he wept, and often times he chid himself, for being so foolish to fall asleep in that place which was erected only for a little refreshment from his weariness. . . . He went thus till he came again within sight of the Arbour, where he sat and slept; but that sight renewed his sorrow the more, by bringing again, even a fresh, his evil of sleeping unto his mind.

The "evil of sleeping." If, as psychologists tell us, all behavior is coping behavior, we are entitled to ask where the benefit can possibly lie for the puritan who pathologizes life itself.

(Incidentally, I can think of no better argument with which to answer the sociobiologists and all those other armchair philosophers who emphasize our so-called "animal nature." You may be able to prove to your own satisfaction that our most sophisticated behaviors reduce themselves to sexual competition; you may likewise demonstrate that animals laugh and play and would pray if they had words to pray with. But you will never find another creature who determines that life itself is inimical to its own best interests – that if he, like Faithful, could be assured of dying well, he were best to die soon. Even lemmings perish due to a combination of migratory enthusiasm and nearsightedness, rather than suicidal tendencies.)

It is one answer, and true in part, to say that the puritan is indoctrinated at a young age and cannot break free of his surroundings. But this merely forces the question back upon the parents. It is another answer, also correct as far as it goes, to point out that a man who is easily persuaded of his own sinful nature and the need to purify himself is unduly susceptible to social John Bunyan Superstar - 613

control: therefore his habits of self-examination will be encouraged and so reinforced by his superiors. But this view is finally too cynical: for some of the clerical controllers are themselves obviously sincere, and some of the laity have been known to rebel against the laxity of their leaders, overthrowing them and instituting even more stringently authoritarian and puritanical regimes. Indeed we might say that the tragedy of the heroes of puritanism – Paul of Tarsus,

Luther, Bunyan – is that they were better men and more original thinkers than their parents and priests. Paul saw through the formalism of Judaism, Luther through the hypocrisy of

Catholicism, and Bunyan through the ritualism and complacency of Anglicanism. These men wanted a religion of integrity.

Indeed, they were aspiring saints who became ensnared in the paradox of moral perfectionism – which is that even if your conduct passes muster in terms of the 613 laws or the

39 articles, it won't get past the ever-vigilant internal censor. Each went as far as he could go in the direction of disciplined purification, only to sense the futility of the exercise; each then recoiled from the vanity of conscious moral effort and from the inadequacy of the solution to his problem that was offered by his own corrupted religion. Nor was it given to any of them – and a social constructionist would say that, given the milieux that they grew up in, it could not have been given – to find the enlightenment of Taoism or Stoicism. The solution had to come from within the dogmatic religion that had posed the problem in the first place. All found it, therefore, in the most radical possible interpretation of Christian justification by faith alone.

The first component: I am utterly sinful, through and through. I am totally depraved

(John Calvin's felicitous term). I am an enemy of God. The sin is inborn and inexpungeable.

The sum of a lifetime of good deeds cannot amount to more than a fraction of the credit needed John Bunyan Superstar - 614

to offset the debit of my human nature. No one merits salvation. All without exception deserve

damnation.

When Faithful explicates the experience of grace to Talkative, we learn that, clean

contrary to what we might have expected, or at least hoped, grace bestows upon the lucky

recipient, not a sense of well-being, but quite the opposite:

It gives him conviction of sin, especially of the defilement of his nature, and the sin of unbelief, (for the sake of which he is sure to be damned, if he findeth not mercy at Gods hand by faith in Jesus Christ.)

Talkative is so far from the true path as to believe that grace is signified by the heart's "great cry-

out against sin" and the acquisition of "great knowledge of Gospel Mysteries." Here we can

follow Faithful's thought part of the way: he distinguishes pertinently between verbally

deprecating sin and genuinely abhorring sin; and he points out that knowledge alone is barren.

But the distinctive puritan touch is self-loathing. Hate the sin and hate the sinner.

On the straight and narrow way, Christian meets a young fellow who does believe in God and in justification through faith in Christ – but not quite in Luther's formula of justification through faith alone. In brief, this man believes that he should also make himself fit for Heaven by thinking good thoughts and doing good works. He receives this rebuke from Christian:

To explain my self: The Word of God saith of persons in a natural condition, There is none Righteous, there is none that doth good. It saith also, That every imagination of the heart of man is only evil, and that continually. And again, The imagination of mans heart is evil from his Youth.

The fellow traveler, somewhat taken aback, replies, "I will never believe that my heart is thus

bad." Christian then lashes out at him, excoriating his faith as fantastical, false, and deceitful, John Bunyan Superstar - 615

and telling him that he has well merited his name – Ignorance.

As George Bernard Shaw noted, Bunyan is harder on complacency and self-satisfaction than he is on vice itself. This contempt for mere respectability earned Bunyan the approbation of that later moralist, Shaw's atheism notwithstanding; but what Shaw misses is the contradiction between puritan self-perfectionism, which he admired, and the lip service it pays to Christian humility, which might seem to require a man to keep his perfection to himself. I suppose we can say that Christian is loving his enemy by trying to direct him toward the path to Heaven; but I detect an unholy pleasure in the upbraiding of his neighbor.

The first component of puritanism seems to answer to the depth of the unworthiness that men like Paul and Luther claimed to feel about themselves, but something is surely wrong in our psychological portrait – for were not all these men, Luther especially, extraordinarily sure of themselves and quick to consign any opponent to the devil's party?

Well, perhaps we should take up a discussion of "the charisma of self-loathing" in a fundamentalist milieu.

We are social creatures all – and to a social constructionist, the size of the society is beside the point. John Bunyan knew what it was to be fleered at by the respectable rich and the religiously orthodox: but he was supported by a band of brothers; and even when most alone, in prison, he performed, like John Milton in lonely retirement, for a "fit audience, though few." I leave aside how sincerely he may have believed that audience to be God Himself; it is enough for me to insist that a handful of real men and women applauded him as well.

In the puritan community, great credit accrues to the man who most loudly proclaims his John Bunyan Superstar - 616

own sick sinfulness. In his writings and his preaching, Bunyan portrayed his ordinary well-

behaved childhood as one of rampant lust and vice. This is conventional behavior among

puritans; nevertheless, it is legitimate for us to point out that Bunyan was lying, even if he

thought he wasn't. For whenever he was publicly accused by others of the very sins he seemed to

have confessed to, he vigorously defended his honor. It turns out that he was never drunk a day

in his life, was chaste before marriage, faithful to his wife, and, he says, never even so much as

improperly flirtatious with any woman in the world ever. In the words of Thomas Macaulay:

The worst that can be laid to his charge is that he had a great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat and reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton.

Needless to say, he overcame these evil practices one at a time while still a young man.

Whereupon did he discover, in common with Paul of Tarsus and Martin Luther, that when everything possible under the law has been accomplished, and the sense of sin remains, then and only then can the dark night of the puritanical soul be said to have truly begun.

Having nothing more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies which seemed like to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam. At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a Jew. At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry" and to stake his eternal hopes on the event. Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the neighbouring villages was past; that all who were to be saved in that part of England were already converted; and that he John Bunyan Superstar - 617

had begun to pray and strive some months too late. Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broomstick, to the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the valley of the shadow of death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption. Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating close to his ear the words, "Sell him, sell him."

Surely, the way out of his spiritual torment, according to his own doctrine, would have been a life of endless humility. He should have become a stable boy and prayed silently while he shoveled manure.

Instead, he became a superstar celebrity in the 17th Century's biggest entertainment industry: he took to preaching sermons and writing tracts. The subject: his erring but undeniably interesting self. Tom Wolfe was exactly 300 years late in identifying the "Me Decade."

(And right on cue, after those 300 years had elapsed, the Communist novices who confessed most freely to capitalist backsliding in their secret hearts, and asked most humbly for the help of their comrades in cleansing themselves of bourgeois tendencies, often commanded the most admiration in the "struggle sessions." Those who, like Talkative and Ignorance, denied their own rottenness of soul were the ones most likely to wind up dangling at the end of a

Stalinist rope.)

There are multiple forms of vanity. As Milan Kundera notes, no one sits on the top of a pillar in the desert without wanting to be noticed. Or in the words of Krishnamurti, "The saint is trying to break a record like the athlete." Bunyan's alertness to the least sign of his own John Bunyan Superstar - 618

sinfulness could not save him from the deadliest of the seven sins – spiritual pride. He tried to

fool his fate by continuing to proclaim, from every pulpit, his own unworthiness. But even in the

calm of his library, with time to reflect and leisure to match his prose to his pose, he could not

find a way to hide the delight and self-satisfaction he takes, through his proxies Christian and

Faithful, in scornfully correcting Ignorance, Talkative, and Mr. By-Ends of Fair-speech.

So we have a society that greatly values public confession and amply rewards its virtuosos of self-abasement.

The second component of puritanism follows ineluctably from the first: I am not worthy, but I am

nonetheless to be spared. To answer my condition of utter depravity, infinite grace alone can

suffice; fortunately for me, God is infinite in power and mercy. Acting freely and gratuitously,

God spares the elect. That this is mercy indeed is proven by His permitting so much as a single creature to escape the justice that cries out to be satisfied: for, as Paul says, "There is none righteous, no, not one."

We might say that it takes a vast amount of grace to expunge so correspondingly vast an amount of (theoretical or genuine) self-hatred. Nothing less than God's own sacrifice of Himself will do to wash out the stain of corruption. On the other hand, a tremendous reward is dangled before the miscreant, a reward that requires of him little more than a trick of the mind; and his

"second birth" when he is "slain in the Holy Spirit" is often as public an event as his confession of unworthiness. After toppling into the waiting arms of his brothers and sisters in the communion of saints, he arises with the seal of salvation placed upon his head.

When I had less understanding of puritanism, I wondered that so little is required of the John Bunyan Superstar - 619

elect: merely to believe. But how could more be asked of us? We would have to do that something more, whereas according to the dogma, we can do nothing. I recently heard a theologian of the Reformed Church discussing the doctrine of justification by faith, and he cautioned that not even faith belongs to us as our achievement. For faith does not justify us; only

Christ justifies us.

The existence of the big reward in Heaven introduces a note of expediency. We are tempted to admire the puritans for the heroic proportions of their self-denial; but they believed their regimen guaranteed them safe passage to the greatest of all possible prizes. When Christian is warned by Mistrust that the straight and narrow way is hazardous, he replies – all Freudian ego now – with a careful calculation of the odds:

Then said Christian, you make me afraid, but whither shall I fly to be safe? If I go back to mine own Countrey, That is prepared for Fire and Brimstone; and I shall certainly perish there. If I can get to the Cœlestial City, I am sure to be in safety there. I must venture: To go back is nothing but death, to go forward is fear of death, and life everlasting beyond it. I will yet go forward.

We could not ask for a clearer statement that the puritan way is, given its premises, entirely pragmatic and self-serving. Christian himself constantly recommends it to others on grounds of prudence; and we can only wonder that Bunyan was not a little ashamed to put such a motive forward. Luther also spoke literally about his safety when he defied the Catholic Church at

Worms:

Unless I am convicted by scripture and by plain reason (I do not accept the authority of popes and councils because they have contradicted each other; my conscience is captive to the word of God), I cannot, and I will not, recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen. John Bunyan Superstar - 620

By "safe" he meant ticketed for Heaven; by "conscience" he meant, not his autonomous ethical intuition, but merely his understanding of the meanings of ordinary words. Luther's rebellion at

Worms proceeded out of self-interest, as he candidly admitted: he disobeyed the authority of the popes and the councils because he was afraid that they were wrong, with his soul at stake. But once he believed he had found certainty in the words of the Bible, he obeyed that authority with pedantic exactitude and abject submission, following his own advice to tear out the eyes of reason. He only stood up to authority when he was certain he would lose everything by sitting down.

It is of the utmost importance to stress that, in the view of the Reformed Church, after you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you are not transformed. There is still none righteous. Your human nature is still totally depraved. As long as you remain alive, you remain contaminated by original sin. What happens is that Christ acts in you, overriding, so to speak, your human nature. That is why Bunyan defined grace, not as a person's awareness of

God's gift of salvation, but as a "conviction of sin, especially of the defilement of his nature."

At this juncture, then, having introduced the belief in Jesus Christ as the linchpin of salvation, we must venture down another bypath. Vicarious atonement is the mechanism on which everything depends: how, exactly, is it supposed to work? Put one way, why didn't God snap his fingers and say, "From now on, those who follow my words are eligible to enter into eternal life"? Put another, how is it that only His Son's death – and not, say, his life, or his teaching – redeems us?

I had a moment's excitement when Hopeful posed my very question to Faithful: John Bunyan Superstar - 621

I asked him further, How that mans righteousness could be of that efficacy, to justifie another before God?

A moment's excitement, I say, and no more – for John Bunyan's otherwise vigorous prose seems

to falter here, and only here:

And he told me, He was the mighty God, and did what he did, and died the death also, not for himself, but for me; to whom his doings, and the worthiness of them should be imputed, if I believed on him.

Bunyan might as well have written the following:

I asked him further, How does vicarious atonement work? And he told me, It does too.

What is it about the atonement that is opaque to me but so transparent to a tinker that he treats it

as self-evident and neglects to explain it out of fear of insulting my intelligence?

I encountered the same disappointment, incidentally, from reading a book written nearly

three centuries later, Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. This is one of the most confident and

arrogant screeds ever penned, but Lewis, like Bunyan, becomes tongue-tied by the atonement:

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary . . . .

This from a book that otherwise takes the atheist step-by-step through the rudiments of the

Christian religion in a spirit of frank and manly common sense. And indeed, Lewis recovers his pose of bluff candor and no-nonsense practicality almost immediately, when he urges us to avail John Bunyan Superstar - 622

ourselves of this great benefaction whether we understand it or not: for do we not consent to eat our nourishing dinner whether or not we grasp the chemistry of nutrition?

I am afraid the answer to my question is evaded by these authors not because it is a mystery – a thing not of this world, or for greater intellects still to come – but because it is ancient and obvious. We must begin with a notion that seems primitive – but persists to the present day – of evil as something literal, physical, palpable, tangible, and therefore conveniently susceptible of actually being gathered up and placed on a person or an animal. (Bunyan's pilgrim carries the burden of original sin as a load upon his back.)

The next feature is the fashioning of gods in our own image. These deities, like us, require satisfaction in kind. Pay up.

Everything is in place, at this point, for the introduction of the scapegoat. Our sin can be externalized; and God can be bribed. The purity of the sacrificial victim follows as a matter of course: you don't dare offer second-rate goods to God. Besides, you don't want any misunderstanding: the sacrificial victim is not paying off his sin; he is paying off yours.

In ancient days, the payment covered any patch of misfortune, with little distinction between evils caused by weather and evils brought on by human malefactions. In fact, we are safe in assuming that formal religion began much earlier than any psychological sense of one's own sin.

Every primitive society that we know about possessed rites of purification. In some cases, the tribal god was simply a landlord who demanded rent. In this conception, sin hardly exists: there are good times and bad, depending upon the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the big boss. Next, the Greeks introduced a conception of sin, or at least human error, closer to our own, John Bunyan Superstar - 623

but audaciously blamed the gods themselves. In the Iliad, for instance, Agamemnon offers an apology – of sorts – to Achilles: "Sorry I stole your girlfriend, but what could I do? The god entered into me and made me crazy. My bad luck, and yours." Agamemnon does recognize that he did a wrong thing, but it was a thing put on him and taken off again. He transfers all the responsibility to a god. Achilles accepts this explanation without objection.

We consider it progress to pass from a conception of bad luck to a conception of sin and thence to the Hebrew conception that the sin resides in us. We would prefer to see Agamemnon own up – "like a man." Nietzsche, however, was dismayed: he thought it healthy and optimistic to be able to feel good about ourselves and bad about the gods, and a great debasement of the human condition to turn to Christianity and feel bad about ourselves and good about God.

When we compare the Hebrew religion to the Greek, we actually see, in addition to our favorite myth of an "advance" from polytheism to monotheism, the special tensions that arise when goodness is assigned to God and evil to man. On the one hand, God's demands for personal piety and purity increase – the laws of observance multiply and multiply. On the other hand, because Judaism was (and for many Jews still is) a tribal religion, evil and impurity can be projected upon other tribes that do not enjoy the patronage of Yahweh. As the Old Testament makes abundantly clear, the members of those other tribes are not always thought to be fully human, and can sometimes be marked (by God, of course) for extermination.

The heroes of the Iliad on both sides of the war are fully human to each other. By modern standards, the Homeric vision of what a man ought to be is barbaric (the sentimentality of classics professors notwithstanding); but the warriors are engagingly honest about their ambitions. A man fights because that is what a man does; naturally, he brags when he wins; John Bunyan Superstar - 624

when he loses, he blames a god. And even the greatest warrior can be felled by a god – not

always justly, because the gods are not always just.

When we move from the world of the Iliad to that of Periclean Athens, we encounter a view of society having something in common with our own. The community, or polis, is far more important to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle than it is to us, but partly for a reason that we have incorporated into modern liberalism – it allows the individual to flourish.

By contrast, among the Hebrews of the Pentateuch the tribe is everything – as God's interminable instructions in the book of Leviticus make clear. And the narcissism that we are accustomed to find in individuals like Achilles and Hector is transferred to the group, and to God himself: the Jews are the Top God's Chosen People. It doesn't get any more special than that.

Nietzsche was not the man to object to a healthy dose of cheerful narcissism. Samuel, confident in the Lord, proceeds on his violent and genocidal way with the brazenness of an

Achilles. Even so, in the Old Testament, scape goats still have to die on the altar for the sins of the tribe; and the sins may be so serious that God will sit out an entire military campaign and sell his stiff-necked People into slavery to teach them a particularly painful lesson. (Pain is good.

Gets the attention. Promotes learning and obedience.) Nonetheless, if you are a Jew, you aren't going to be permanently un-chosen: God watches over your Babylonian Captivity and redeems you when your sentence has been served. The Hebrew world is thus, in some ways, a more reliable place than the Greek, because God is more steadfast on your behalf.

It would seem that scapegoating should have vanished once monotheism prevailed and expounded a single universal deity. When misfortune was thought to be owing to the operation of arbitrary external forces, it made sense to believe that it could be banished by means of equally John Bunyan Superstar - 625

arbitrary external rituals; but once my sins are truly my own, how can any one but me expiate

them? Indeed, within the Old Testament itself, there are signs of a shift away from the ancient

primitive conception: the jealous god of the Pentateuch demanded sacrifices with a punctilious

concern for proper etiquette; but Micah asks whether the Lord does not prefer those who do

justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God to those who make burnt offerings. With its

introduction of the God of loving forgiveness, the New Testament might have been expected to

complete the eradication of scapegoating: for now, a man need not put his sin off on another, but

can admit it frankly to God and count on absolution.

Instead, Christianity reintroduced the most ambitious scapegoat mechanism ever

conceived – all the sins of a Christian are handed over to one God who bears the total burden as

scapegoat for the entire human race. (I do not know if this is psychologically unhealthy; it

certainly strikes me as intellectually shameless.)

It takes a great deal of pious palaver to stoke the engine of this mechanism: Calvin found

the last degree of it when he attributed "total depravity" to his own nature – the better to flatter

the deity who can forgive so much. But what this mechanism achieves in fact is an appalling freedom of action for those who are "saved." Calvin burned Michael Servetus at the stake over a quibble about the Trinity. If we start from the premise that there is none righteous, then a promise of redemption is rather an extraordinary blank check to be made out to any man born of a woman.

It is true that the Christian conception requires a man to stigmatize (or say he stigmatizes) his own human nature, as Paul – the real founder of Christianity – so clearly does. But perhaps

Nietzsche, in deprecating the self-abasement of Christians, overestimated the extent to which John Bunyan Superstar - 626

they truly internalize their sin. As Bunyan himself says, talk is cheap; as we say today, the

puritans talked the talk but did not walk the walk. It is one thing to proclaim your own depravity

in empty words that follow the formula laid down by your church; it is another to pass both the

test of sincerity (I really believe what I am saying) and the test of authenticity (my words match

my life). Bunyan was aware of the problem and tried his utmost to purify his thoughts of secret self-approbation. But I believe that he felt good when he thought about his sins, since it was then that he showed himself fittest for salvation; and he very much enjoyed correcting the Anglicans and the Quakers on points of theology.

He was, in fact, a spiritual hedonist.

The paradox won't go away. If you are thinking about your sins, and feeling bad, that's good. But if you find yourself thinking that it is good to think about your sins, and feeling good

about yourself because you are thinking in the right way, that's bad.

When Bunyan, as an earnest young adult, was least spiritually assured and most aware of

his sins, and most truly conscious of the thorn in his flesh – and so, according to his own theory, completely in a condition of grace – he could hardly bear to go on living. In the teeth of his own definition in The Pilgrim's Progress, that grace gives a man an abiding conviction of his own

sick sinfulness, the "Grace Abounding" of his autobiography is really a celebration of the relief

he finally attained from self-laceration and self-loathing.

Original sin to the contrary notwithstanding, humans both ancient and modern have recoiled from conceptualizing evil as something inside themselves or as part of their nature. The dogma of the puritan says one thing, but the deed says another.

What is a "defense mechanism" but a fortress against mortification? We cannot bear, John Bunyan Superstar - 627

finally, to think badly of ourselves. Those who persist in self-hatred kill themselves or spread a kind of psychic death around themselves. The great saints of puritanism were all afflicted by self-loathing early on, but achieved the breakthrough into self-satisfaction at last. To judge by their works, in later life Paul, Luther, and Bunyan all enjoyed perfect security in their faith, and indeed counted themselves infallible judges of the lineaments of grace. Bunyan wandered in the wilderness the longest, and suffered the most; but he ended in supreme confidence and set about correcting all of England on the points of salvation. When scapegoating does the job, it does the job thoroughly.

The genuinely spiritual solution to the problem, by the way, is suggested by philosopher

Nel Noddings:

What is wrong with the vast majority of us? The answer I have been suggesting all along is that we do not understand or accept our own disposition toward evil and that we lack a morality of evil. . . . Evil is neither entirely out-there nor entirely in-here; it is an interactive phenomenon that requires acceptance, understanding, and steady control rather than great attempts to overcome it once and for all.

As she argues elsewhere, we have done a singularly poor job even of defining evil, much less facing it squarely. So when she speaks of the "disposition toward evil" that resides in all of us, she is not in the least agreeing with the facile assumption of the fundamentalists or the Freudians that we are all monsters underneath – and the same monster at that. Since fundamentalists do not even begin to comprehend evil – since they are so confused about it that they can find in the

Bible, and approve, a positive duty to inflict pain upon other people – we must deny them any authority to speak on the subject.

The puritan, notwithstanding his proclamation of his own sinful nature, has barely begun John Bunyan Superstar - 628

an investigation of the subject of evil, having concluded too hastily that it is pandemic, pervasive, ascendant in the human heart, and inextirpable but through the grace of God and the sacrifice of

Jesus Christ; from this it follows that, having enamored himself of picturesque fictions about cosmic conflict and paradise lost, he has very little understanding or acceptance of his own mundane but all-too-real disposition toward evil. The evidence for this can be found both in his words, where he levels all distinctions and says that every imagination of the heart of man is evil

– an absurd statement that cannot possibly correspond to any person's real sense of himself – and in his deeds, when he hangs the Quaker women who will not desist from preaching, and then fails to count this as one of his filthy dispositions.

Since there is none righteous, and since grace bestows a "conviction of sin," we might have expected puritanism to put an end to such Pharisaism once and for all. Surely no man is clean enough to judge, much less punish, his neighbor. But by positing universal total depravity as the baseline of human nature, puritanism only appears to reject all the confident systems that divide humankind into good and evil. Theologically, it restores Manichaeistic dualism by proposing a perfection of goodness in heaven and a totality of evil on earth. Then the dark god of

Manichaeism sneaks in the back door as a rebel angel permitted to prey upon the predestined damned; and human righteousness returns as the politics of the born-again. It is only the

"natural" man who is under the law; the puritan, having embraced the Atonement, proceeds with a clear conscience.

The puritan errs in thinking that sins are committed only by the unregenerate, that redemption removes the impulse to do evil, and that repentance offers a way around the evil already done. He deludes himself both that his old sins are taken away and that his present John Bunyan Superstar - 629

hanging of the Quakers – coming, as it does, after his spiritual rebirth – cannot be a new sin.

We are too quick to credit the puritan with strength of character in his appearing to face up to his own depravity and to undergo imprisonment by his spiritual inferiors. Actually, since he imputes an equal amount of depravity to everyone else, he can, even if he is sadly incontinent in his moral life, always think secretly that, sinful as he is, he is at least as good as his neighbor.

And the athlete of self-abasement, given Calvin's theory, has no right to claim to be worse than another man. If we are all in a condition of total depravity, then Bunyan's reputation as the preacher who most thoroughly abased himself was just a rhetorical triumph.

Bunyan tried to state the puritan case against himself as strongly as possible: "The imagination of mans heart is evil from his Youth." But what were the sins of his youth? They were "dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat and reading the history of

Sir Bevis of Southampton." Later, he entered into contentious dispute with the representatives of the Anglican Church, never suspecting that his adult appetite for a purified worship, along the lines laid down by him and his friends, at whatever cost of social disharmony, might itself be one of the defilements of his nature.

Pace Bunyan, most of the imaginations of our hearts are pointed toward the good. And as

Noddings says, we do have powers of "acceptance, understanding, and steady control," which, if cultivated as part of our education and applied to ourselves (rather than to Mr. By-Ends of Fair- speech), can check our tendencies toward evil. But the puritan has actually sung his powers of discernment to sleep and so given his sensual man free rein: for there are few pleasures so keen – or so fraught with evil – as the imposition of one's own will upon another.

The view of Noddings, then, is more optimistic than the puritan view. But it is, in John Bunyan Superstar - 630

another respect, sterner: for while people can be genuinely moral, moral people can do bad deeds; and a thing done wrong is done wrong forever. The hanged women cannot be brought back to life; the harsh words of Christian to Ignorance cannot be unsaid; "what's done cannot be undone." In short, sin cannot be atoned. This is just as true if someone else tries to pay for you – nor is the situation materially changed by that someone else's being the Son of God.

But if the past is irredeemable, it is also past. And in spite of what the past contains, you, the person who did the thing, are still, even at this late date, no matter what Calvin says, a moral being. So you do not need to atone, or get someone else to atone: you need to live in the present, there to do all the good you can do. Sufficient unto the day the goodness thereof, if you will forgo the past and the future.

Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief

Christians often wish to recommend a book that will make the case for their religion without insulting the intelligence of well-read secular humanists. Time after time, Mere Christianity by

C. S. Lewis comes into the conversation. Who better to address the reservations of a skeptic than an Oxford intellectual who once upon a time shared them? Lewis is further recommended by his

"masculine" virtues: his no-nonsense pose, his muscular prose, his clarity, his common sense, his methodically rational approach to building up the case for Christian theism.

I would agree that there is no better spokesman for "mere Christianity," by which Lewis means those propositions that are held in common by all orthodox Christian sects and that constitute the bare minimum of belief. He is right in his definition of the "Highest Common

Factor": if you assent to all these tenets, you can pick a church at your leisure, unabashed by the sometimes vicious quarrels that can break out among partisans over, for instance, transubstantiation versus consubstantiation; if you demur from any, you are in danger of falling out of the Christian fraternity altogether into the abyss of heresy or unbelief.

Today, with Christians eager to excommunicate each other over minutiae and the rest of us not much caring, the cogency of Lewis's presentation may be lost. But it does matter how we construe the word "Christian," and there is no better guide than Lewis. He is a great argument- settler and a more reliable separator of the grain from the chaff than any other polemicist I know.

Christianity is what he says it is. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 632

That's the problem right there – Christianity itself. Lewis revives the primitive theology

of John Bunyan point by point, which is indeed, by every objective historical yardstick, mere

Christianity; and so he ineluctably arrives at something so dark, childish, and unconsciously

blasphemous that we can only marvel at his blindness to the results of his handiwork. No book

better demonstrates how religion taps into our most infantile wishes and fears; yet none tries

harder to wrap itself in a cloak of maturity. Step-by-step Lewis proceeds, clause by clause; his care is unmatched by any other popular Christian apologist; and his failures of logic, and their invisibility to their author, are therefore among the wonders of the literary world.

Those who have little invested in the outcome can enjoy the intellectual fun of matching wits with Dr. Lewis. He is a compendium of fallacies, but they are so artfully concealed by his simple analogies and suggestive parables that the unwary reader may be carried along by them.

The true value of his opus, however, lies neither in its usefulness as a primer of jejune theology nor in its serviceability as an exercise book for students of chopped logic – it lies in its revelation of the psychology of the true believer. For all his intellectual savoir faire, Lewis does blurt out, unwittingly, the underlying hopes and fears that lie at the heart of his faith.

Our author structures his campaign with great tact. Himself a recovered atheist, he makes a show of respect for the scruples of the non-believer. In the first part of Mere Christianity, he eschews all sectarian dogma and attempts no more than to prove, by means of ordinary reasoning, the existence of a Higher Power. His argument is specious but nonetheless appealing to earnest truth-seekers. It starts from the bedrock of human nature:

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 633

over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

This sounds incontrovertible, but he has already fudged a point of great importance. Who is

"they"? Presumably, the pronoun is stable in reference throughout the paragraph and comprises all of us everywhere. But most people would assent to the statements while shifting the exact reference a bit: "they" (all humans, but certainly my friends and I and the members of my group) know the law of nature; "they" (especially foreigners, radicals, criminals, and atheists) break it.

Put another way, we humans (speaking generally) know the way to behave; yet we humans

(generally speaking) misbehave. But passing from Proposition 1 to Proposition 2, are "we" really the exact same people? Do I know that I do not behave according to the law of nature? A great deal is riding on this small distinction. Lewis would say without hesitation, yes, we all know that we all break the Law of Nature. But I would tighten up the denotation and slightly modify his two points. First, each individual human being, anywhere on the earth, has the curious idea that he knows the Law of Nature, which corresponds very closely to the values of himself, his family, and his community. Second, while he thinks that he occasionally falls a little short in following these Laws, and is willing to admit it, he thinks that most other people, especially those outside his culture, fall a great deal short – indeed, they flout the Laws with impunity. I know the Law of Nature, they break it. Lewis himself evinced my two amended points with irrefrangible

English chauvinism.

I would not deny, however, that while Lewis was appalled to see the wholesale breakage of the Law by unsanctified others, he did also have an acute sense of his own falling short. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 634

Indeed, this thorn in his side is the fount and origin of his religion, and perhaps of all religion.

So rather than tax him with the double standard that so obviously afflicts most preachers of self-

abasement, I would rather call the reader's attention to the unconscious anthropocentrism of his

surmise that the "curious idea" about the imperative of right behavior comes to us directly from

God:

[There is] a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.

It is Lewis's conceit that this voice of his conscience is the Voice of God.

Now as a therapist once commented to me, in the offhand manner in which the most

illuminating insights are sometimes delivered, "Guilt is just your brain making a record of a

mistake so you won't repeat it." Guilt is normal neurological functioning. In response to it, I need only learn from my mistake and move on: the record will then erase itself with the passage

of time. There is nothing unusual here. Consciousness of error is obviously adaptive. All

creatures, down to the lowliest organisms, have this ability to learn from a bad experience: as

Darwin taught us, those that do not quickly lose their evolutionary footing.

But most of us humans, as a result of the mixed blessing of consciousness, are so

constituted psychologically that we cannot bear the messages of correction – they lay waste to

our self-esteem. Some of us, like Lewis, are in an especially bad way. We are so eager to

"resolve" the guilt, and especially to find a way of living that neutralizes it, that we forget to

accept an occasional dollop of bad conscience as the natural outcome of normal bodily

functioning. The key to religion can be found in this discomfort with fallibility. Lewis is quite Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 635

honest in locating the impetus for religion in what he calls a state of despair; but he mistakenly

identifies the inevitable mental jab that we experience when we err as a moral qualm planted in

us by the Creator of the Universe. He has merely confused cause and effect: in fact, the Creator

was planted in us by our moral qualm. Our feeling of perpetual inadequacy, of falling short day

and night, of failing right and left, is the natural concomitant of the guilt engendered in us when

we disobey, in the least particle of duty, our internalized authority figures. Lewis is right to

assert that this feeling is shared by all humans – or if not quite all humans, certainly all properly

brought up English boys. And anyone would want to get rid of this negative feeling if he could.

So we invent a deity – a Higher Authority with the power to overrule the lower authorities of the

superego and free us from our chains. It is not a matter of "God, then the awareness of sin";

rather, "the awareness of sin, then God." God was invented by man to be scapegoat, redeemer,

whatever it takes to get us out from under that awareness. It is all a trick of the mind.

But do not tell Lewis: he has great confidence in his mind, a confidence that I cannot help

attributing in part to the heritage of a well-bred member of the Church of England, one who went

on to have a comfortable life and a successful career in the home counties of the world's greatest

empire. No man could ever less imagine that his mind played any tricks on him.

In all this, there is nothing new. In Lewis we find repeated, unmodified by modernity, the

temperament of Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Bunyan as it plays itself out in the familiar

intrapsychic drama: first perfectionism, then failure, then self-contempt, and finally, by means of surrender to a god invented for the very purpose, a cathartic deliverance from the excruciating misery that can only be caused by an imperious superego. The Confessions of St. Clive start with the resolute atheist troubled by his faults: the good that he would do, he does not; the evil that he Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 636

would not do, that he does. Of course, like Bunyan, Lewis is not committing any offenses that would make the rest of us sit up and take notice – may be he has done no more than put off writing a letter. But he does fall short of perfection every day, and this tormenting fact tells him, as he generalizes spectacularly from his own experience, that we humans – every man jack of us

– know what is right but still do wrong. Then with unconscious egotism – and this is a man whose ego is voracious but whose unconscious is terra incognita, a man who can write a book telling every person on earth how to live and then contemplate an eternity of suffering for those who reject his advice – Lewis believes, nay, knows, that this inner voice, which tells him that he should have written that letter earlier and has no earthly excuse for failing to do so, is the Voice of the Creator of the Universe, the Maker of a hundred billion galaxies.

So let us fill out Lewis's portrait of himself as a young atheist: he takes the everyday working of his brain, which releases a few chemicals whenever he commits a social faux pas, and extrapolates from this fact about himself a moral order in the universe; then with a bit of further reflection, Lewis concludes that the Founder of this moral order, on the evidence of His having bothered Himself over it, must Himself be very like a man. Xenophanes stopped right here: he realized that a donkey, reasoning as Lewis reasons, would naturally conclude that God is very like a donkey. But Lewis, wearing the bulletproof armor of innocence and ignorance, is undeterred by the intimations of anthropocentric superstition that are already contaminating his argument. With only another step or two, he arrives at the concept of abasement as the key to

Christian redemption: he sees, or claims to see, that he and we have not one attractive quality, and yet God loves us "just because we are the things called selves." In all this, he does not recognize a self-esteem so great that it demands, when he errs, the personal attention – nay, the Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 637

steadfast love – of the Immensity that set the Universe in motion.

Before his conversion, Lewis, like his famous puritan predecessors, was riven by his rage

for perfection and his unendurable exasperation over falling short of it. To convert him,

Christianity offered to satisfy the gargantuan appetite of his ego with its story that the Universe

humbled Itself on his behalf, came to his home planet, and allowed Itself to be murdered by a

bloodthirsty mob so that he could have the option of mastering his guilt once and for all.

Underlying this ontology is the bizarre and incomparably narcissistic notion that he ought to be

able to demand perfection of himself and attain it – if not here, then in Heaven, enjoyed eternally

in his resurrected guilt-free body. In short, Lewis meets any affront to his ego in the boldest way

possible: he refuses to accept the mortification of mistakenness; he retools the Universe until Its

main business is the eradication of his guilt. With breathtaking aplomb, he posits a religion in

which, mirabile dictu, all his sins have been wiped out through no effort of his own by the death

of a divine scapegoat; and he avers that simply by believing this he can live forever "in an ecstasy

of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman

on this earth is mere milk and water." Is it possible to deserve more?

Now Lewis cannot quite see his way to insisting that the Universe do this for himself

alone of all the human beings who ever lived – that would smack of those madmen who vaunt their individual specialness to God. So he allows that the offer is made to all; but only he and his

Christian cohorts have accepted it. When this split second of cosmic time is over, he and they will shed the last vestiges of fallibility and claim their birthright of perfection at last – they will gain bliss in their physical bodies for trillions of years, which will be only the beginning of their joys. The rest of us will be dead, or worse, for a long time. And then he calls this a religion for Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 638

grown-ups, and accuses me of "wishful thinking" when I reject, as much for its blasphemy as its unlikelihood, his scenario.

I said that Lewis found it unendurable to have to experience the unhappifying chemicals released by his recognition of his social indiscretions. Why did I not say, "by his recognition of his own incorrigible malevolence and evil"? Well, there is no evidence from his writing that he ever thought himself guilty of reprehensible moral crimes, at least as the rest of us define them, although he, like Bunyan, may have imagined that his mildest lapses and minutest derelictions were matters of great moment to God. Of course it is necessary, and good public relations to boot, for all such sermonizers to proclaim themselves the most inveterate of sinners. It would be impolitic to say otherwise; and the doctrine requires it. Throughout his book, Lewis includes himself in his repeated descriptions of human depravity. In the loudness and insistence of his professions of unworthiness, he bids fair to out-Bunyan Bunyan:

The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. . . . The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. . . . [A man] cannot get into the right relation [with God] until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy. . . . but the difficulty is to reach the point of recognizing that all we have done and can do is nothing. . . . The Three-Personal God, so to speak, sees before Him in fact a self-centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. . . . We must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry us even through the next twenty-four hours as "decent" people. If He does not support us, not one of us is safe from some gross sin.

This may seem to be laying it on a bit thick, but Christians apparently believe that God never tires of hearing this sort of thing. He is not easily bored, and He never suspects toadying. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 639

If we have any prurient interest – I certainly do – we cannot help having our curiosity piqued about Lewis's moral ledger. Tell us, Clive, at least one "gross sin" that you committed during your atheistic years, when you had not yet learned to ask for God's support – and not just your atheistic years, because you also remind us that the most sobering experience of the newly converted Christian is his realization that he is still plagued with sin and has not yet learned to appreciate his helplessness against it. Tell us he does:

When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed.

There you have it. Even after turning to Christ, he still loses his temper. Hosanna on the highest to a God so great that He can salvage any good at all from the moral wreckage of such a dissolute soul, one so hardhearted, recalcitrant, and unregenerate that he sometimes sulks.

This is what we mean by "praising oneself with faint damns."

No, Lewis does not see in himself any malevolence or evil. In fact, he shows no aptitude whatsoever for identifying evil in its true lineaments. He goes out of his way to justify capital punishment as a proper Christian chastisement administered by some carriers of original sin to other carriers of original sin; and he gives no indication that he views the great systemic evils of poverty, inequality, discrimination, and injustice as requiring any response from us at all. He explicitly denies that Christ, although the Creator of the Universe and Author of all Morals, said anything new or startling about morality or intended us to think that the words of the Sermon on the Mount are telling us anything that we did not already know.

This last assertion, made about the moral teacher who suggested that we return good for Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 640

evil, may be baffling at first. Lewis is, however, emphatic: "The first thing to get clear about

Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality." A moment's thought will remind the reader that this point was implicit in the opening section of Mere Christianity, titled "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe": Christ could not tell us any new thing about morality because all people everywhere already know what is moral; He could only remind us that we are bound to fail, and then offer us redemption.

In jumping to my analysis of the anthropocentrism of Lewis's argument, I passed over its defiance of plain fact. It is stupefying that Lewis, with his breadth of education, failed to notice that societies, and therefore the individuals who belong to them, do differ radically as to what constitutes moral behavior. As a first-rate medievalist, he must have bumped up against the moral confidence of the Inquisitors who burned thousands of witches and heretics. In his own day, he must have noticed that the Nazis promulgated an ethos very much at odds with his own.

Well, in fact, he did notice that about the Nazis; but he blandly concluded that they had merely let themselves go. Based on his own metaphysic, the only conclusion he could properly come to with regard to differences in morality is that the malefactors know in their hearts that they are wrong. This is a remarkable failure of imagination. I have defined narcissism as the belief that human psychology is a universal template – that all humans perceive reality, especially morality, alike. Lewis is sure that properly brought up Englishmen know the moral law and occasionally fail to follow it, although generally they follow it well enough to make civil society quite pleasant; whereas a few Englishmen of very poor breeding, and almost all Germans, know the moral law and fail spectacularly to follow it, creating such messes as grand theft auto and the Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 641

Second World War. The point he wants to emphasize for the sake of his polemic is the failure rate in all groups, however greater it may be in some than in others. But it is outside his ken to suppose that anywhere on Earth there are humans who fail but say they succeed – who do what is wrong while stubbornly thinking that it is right. And he considers it impertinent and even absurd to propose that he is one such human – i.e., someone who also does wrong while thinking that it is right. He does bother himself to answer such critics when he deigns to take note of them, but he is smilingly confident about setting them straight: with the air of a confirmed pedant, he delves into the nuances of New Testament Greek to justify capital punishment, and then moves on with undiminished complacency.

Thus does Lewis underestimate the range of behaviors that humans have rationalized under the banner of morality; and this wholesale misreading of the sociological and historical evidence betrays the laxity that reappears when he conflates social virtues with moral virtues and renders himself unable to distinguish venial from mortal sins. It is a great falling off, he thinks, when he is snappish; but his sense of his own failure must be very pleasing to God, because it signifies Christian humility when he maintains such a high standard for himself and displays such an acute awareness of falling short. But it is not necessarily a great failing to participate in organized killing as long as the perpetrators evince the Christian virtue of charity:

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves – to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. This is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good . . . .

For pure unctuousness, it is really hard to top this passage. How could he write it? And yet we know that Lewis would be amazed at my imputation. About Parolles, in All's Well That Ends Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 642

Well, this question is entertained by the other characters: if he knows the sort of man he is, how

can he still be that sort of man? In cases of narcissistic blindness, we ask the opposite question:

how can he be the sort of man he is, and not know it?

There is little to add about Lewis's comprehensive dogma. It is in all essentials identical to the

bumpkin theology of John Bunyan. We have the perfect three-personal god, modeled after an

English public school headmaster – autocratic, strict, benevolent, and above all else, promoting

the values that make up an excellent rugby player; we have man, not merely tainted by original

sin but deeply noxious and despicable, without a single quality that is admirable or lovable; we

have the devil, "Prince of this World," trying to lure us into Hell by such stratagems as

insinuating the "damned nonsense" of pantheism into the intellectual debate about religion; and

we have Christ and his inscrutable act of atonement, which puts us right again in spite of our

total depravity and all that Satan can do.

We can quickly pass over God and the devil and come to the nub of the matter. There are

really only two salient parts to it: I am unworthy; I am saved anyway. Grace, as Bunyan said so

trenchantly, gives a man, not heavenly relief, but a "conviction of sin, especially of the

defilement of his nature, and the sin of unbelief." This means that Lewis's self-loathing – we must for the moment quell our suspicion that it is mostly rhetorical – is pleasing to God. As a reward for confessing, not his participation in the great evils perpetrated daily by the British empire and its vicious institutions, which had produced lifelong suffering in oppressed populations all over the globe and in his own township, but his little lapses in social conduct, which had produced those unbearable pinpricks of self-disapproval, God will grant him peace on Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 643

earth and eternity in heaven.

Whether this degree of self-absorption can be said to be a lamp to guide us, I will leave to the reader; but surely it does cast a strong light upon the pretensions of its sufferer. Lewis's stance can be summed up as Bunyan's Paradox:

1] There is none righteous, not one. Every imagination of the heart of man is only evil, and that continually. Therefore, when I try to do the right thing, I fail completely. And if I am so deluded as to think that I am good, that's bad – that's very bad. That is ignorance; worse still, that is spiritual pride, the deadliest of the seven sins.

2] But when I think I'm bad, then I am in a state of grace. That's good.

3] Oh no! Was I just now thinking that I'm good? Ignore Number 2! I'm bad! I'm really, really bad!

4] So listen to me. I don't think I'm good. I think I'm bad. Never mind what I said about grace, I'm not going to say anything more about that, please shut up. I'm bad, let's just leave it at that. But listen to me. I've written several books, which tell you the immutable truth about right and wrong, good and evil, the way to God, the path to salvation. Did I tell you that I'm really bad? But you had better read my books. They are infallible about these matters and eternity is a very long time for you to be damned. Now I'm not saying that your being damned and my being saved makes me better than you. How could I say that? I'm very bad. But read my book: it is God's truth and the fate of your soul depends upon it.

This combination of fake humility and real megalomania deserves a classification of its own in our psychiatric manuals, but we are slow to come to terms with the pathology of religious belief because it is so widely shared as to pass for normal. Suffice it to say that the prognosis for any party so afflicted is poor.

Bunyan's Paradox, while worthy of a tinker, is still too subtle for a doctor of philosophy. Watch Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 644

with bated breath as Lewis skirts perilously close to the abyss of heresy:

Humanity is already "saved" in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation.

Do you see the trap that the devil has laid for him? If we can "appropriate" salvation, then we

can get it through an effort of our own:

If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us.

If we choose to lay ourselves open, then obviously we have the ability both to want a good thing

and to do it. Yet Lewis has told us on every other page that "all we have done and can do is

nothing" and that we "must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry

us even through the next twenty-four hours as 'decent' people." And it is this darker view that is

the orthodox Protestant position: our having faith in Christ does not save us – that would mean

that we could take charge of our salvation and achieve it through our own act. The familiar

formula is a refutation of that liberal fallacy: we are saved "by grace alone, through faith alone, in

Christ alone." It is the grace that does the saving: faith in Christ, although necessary, is not

sufficient, for we remain all unworthy; the grace must be bestowed in spite of our unworthiness.

Heresy is the most serious offense a Christian can commit, worse than murder. Why does

Lewis risk eternal damnation? Well, he wants to encourage us to embrace mere Christianity; and our decision for Christ will have to be an exercise of our free will. But theology states clearly that we have freedom to fail but not freedom to succeed. Lewis needs to keep this out of sight, if only because even the dullest readers will realize that there is no point in buying the book if it Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 645

can't do them any good; but also because humans, he as well as we, cannot truly embrace so

bleak a theory – one that, in spite of its lip service to free will, proposes a stricter determinism

than any materialist has ever propounded. We are so constituted psychologically that we never

can believe that we do not have free will. The members of the congregation have to believe that they can do something – otherwise they are just huddled together on an exposed rock, waiting to see if lightning strikes any of them. And experience shows that they certainly do believe in the efficacy of their positive efforts: before we can blink twice, we see them not only "laying themselves open" to Christ and thereby "appropriating" salvation, but also making that salvation secure by praying, singing hymns, taking communion, and calling each other out for heterodox opinions. And writing books.

This should serve to establish once and for all that free will is just a debater's trick for absolving God of any responsibility for the frankly scandalous state of affairs that afflicts His

Earth. Having gained His acquittal by sheer sophistry, the theological lawyers for His defense can then shift to the point of overriding importance, which is our abasement before His majesty, the better to avail ourselves of His reward. But with unconscious irony, the same sophists now argue that our free will, which was so prodigious in producing the scandal, is impotent to work off any of our sins or deserve any good thing at the hands of our Creator. At the end of the day, it is only the secular humanists who claim free will for humankind and believe that we can make progress through our own efforts.

Such are the paralogisms into which theology drives adult men and women.

It is said over and over by liberal theologians that we must not look for the essence of religion in the creeds and dogmas. But they have never been able to explain why, if the center of Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 646

religion be found elsewhere – in "community," in "spirituality," in "love," – adherents do not simply dispense with the nonsensical propositions that lie on the periphery. Why continue to espouse these maddening contradictions and non sequiturs about sin, grace, and redemption if dogmas do not really matter one way or the other, and the disciple can attain the fruits of the religion merely by making the coffee for the Wednesday night meeting?

Fundamentalists like Lewis, who represent the vibrant center of Christianity, know better.

They know that the doctrines are life and death matters. It is difficult to improve upon Lewis's blunt statement about the Atonement: "That is what has to be believed." And he goes on to make it clear that he means this the way Pascal meant it: you had better believe it, by any means necessary.

Indeed, Lewis resorts with appalling frequency to just this strongarm tactic: it is one of his idiosyncrasies that puts a peculiar bullying stamp upon his threadbare Protestant homiletics; and it makes an amusing, or chilling, contrast with the note of sweet reasonableness and calm logic that he tries to strike elsewhere. He usually writes with hearty assurance, making clear what other writers leave cloudy, and treating complex matters with the faux simplicity and frankness that make him so appealing to those who find him so; but whenever he bumps up against a part of the creed that can be believed only, as the saying goes, "because it is absurd," he resorts to a feint that should be beneath the dignity of an Oxford don. It goes something like this:

The point that balks you is a holy mystery; with my finite human intellect, I am not going to be able to explain it; but Christianity was not invented, it was revealed; I may not know how it works, but work it does, because God has told us it does; therefore you had best relinquish the fine compunction that makes you hesitate over believing what you cannot understand. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 647

Here is Lewis on my hesitation about the Atonement: "Any theories we build up as to

how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary." Yes, I agree – I don't want a

theory so I can address a convention of theologians. I just want to understand it, because it

doesn't make sense. Lewis was waiting for me to say that:

When you are talking about God – i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend – it is nonsensical to ask if It could have been otherwise. It is what It is, and there is an end of the matter.

Similarly, he notes the complaints of those who argue that God, being our creator, should have made us a little more resistant to evil – that we would happily have relinquished some of our free will in exchange for the wherewithal to make a stronger stand against the devil (himself created by God to test us) and thus undergo less risk of eternal damnation:

Of course God knew what would happen if [people] used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. [N.B. Lewis equivocates strangely on the word "risk" here. The sentence says that God took a risk – a risk that people might use freedom the wrong way. But God risked nothing. All the risk was on our side, when the freedom was thrust upon us whether we wanted it or not.] Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to think at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will . . . then we may take it it is worth paying.

In other words, to question dogma, even due to an inability to comprehend what the words mean

on the page and out of a sincere desire to understand it, is the devil's work. But if all my

reasoning power comes from God, why am I ever in doubt? Oh, never mind. In our next quote,

tautology reaches its ne plus ultra: Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 648

You may say "I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings." That is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread there is no toast. If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings.

Anyone who has been to high school has probably encountered a version of Lewis's universe:

"Why are we doing this?" "The principal says to do it." "But it doesn't make sense." "Yes it does, the definition of 'sense' is 'whatever the principal says.'"

Reasoning so fatuously, Lewis, like Milton in Paradise Lost, can shed little light on God's justice and mercy, which resemble, to most of the rest of us, injustice and caprice; but with the air of a full colonel, he reminds us that we have no business questioning a direct order but had better, if we know what is good for us, obey it, and quickly too.

Here we run up against one of the most odious features of organized religion: it is the argument that one ought to suppress any intellectual scruple that stands in the way of belief, by means logical or illogical, in order to secure one's salvation. It is only atheists who respect God enough to think that He might despise such a self-serving maneuver. But they would do well not to count on God's thanking them for it: if the account of His character that has been rendered by

His followers is true, God may well prefer the insincerity of base flattery to the authenticity of honest dissent, and the atheists will find themselves right where Lewis wants them.

Let me emphasize this last point: right where Lewis wants them. I will content myself here with reminding the reader of Nietzsche's penetrating psychological analysis of Christian ressentiment: all you need to know about Christian theology in order to understand its real origin in human invention is that it does promise to put Lewis where he wants to be and the people he Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 649

disapproves of where he wants them to be. And then he gives the following advice to me: "The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs."

Lewis has an irrepressible habit of threatening the reader. One final instance of it must suffice:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say.

What follows is Lewis's own restatement (without acknowledgment) of a renowned "trilemma" propounded by Scots preacher John Duncan. Here is how Duncan was quoted in 1870:

Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.

Lewis's version gives us the forced choice of liar, lunatic, or Lord, thus showing himself to be massively ignorant of, or indifferent to, several generations of Biblical exegesis that had questioned the historical provenance of many of Jesus' sayings. Perhaps a majority of scholars in

Lewis's own time had come to doubt whether Jesus ever claimed to be the Son of God: research had shown that it is much more likely that such words were put in his mouth by authors who wished to shore up the theology of the early church. But this unscrupulous trick of offering us false alternatives is endemic to Lewis's polemics.

The excerpts that I have quoted probably serve as well as any to explain Lewis's enduring popularity as an expositor of Christian dogma: like Ronald Reagan, he seemed to be a down-to- Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 650

earth, plain-spoken man of simple virtues and, above all else, robust common sense. As an

author, he is especially the master of the homespun metaphor. He tells us, for instance, that our

condition is like that of a man floundering in a river, while God stands on the bank and offers a

helping hand. Lewis would deny the plain truth that God threw the man in the river in the first

place, but he would grudgingly acknowledge that God made the river, and made the man both

foolhardy and a poor swimmer. However that may be, Lewis thinks that Father Knows Best, by

definition, and it would be silly and self-defeating for the man to refuse God's help merely

because he has intellectual misgivings about the ethical whys and wherefores of this situation.

Don't be a ninny; let God pull you out of the water.

But all such apologies for God's treatment of us come to grief in the harsh light of the

inescapable fact that He created us. Despite Milton's claim to the contrary, we are obviously so

made that we are free to fall and insufficient to stand – which speaks to a flaw in the design. It is

said that free will is a gift of inestimable value. Well, because it allows us to mistakenly follow

our natural instincts for 70 years and then wind up punished for eternity, most of us would like to

return God's wonderful gift. If our inability to see the value of His gift is, once again, owing

entirely to our own short-sightedness, that too would seem to be a flaw in His design of us. I will

conclude with my own metaphor: God is most like a father who lames his son by breaking his leg; then the father says, "Take my hand, I'll get you where you want to go." This is really just a slightly starker version of Lewis's own metaphor. Now few of us, I think, will want to follow

Lewis in next proclaiming such a father to be the epitome of infinite mercy. But we can probably all agree with Lewis's contention that the son had better take that hand – the father has a history

of violence against those who spurn his offers, and both the will and capacity to make his Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 651

punishments stick for a long, long time. Self-abasement is a price any psychologically healthy

person would gladly pay to avoid an eternity of pain.

For Lewis, however, the whole metaphorical business is one more trick of the mind. He

is neither floundering in a river nor crippled – he goes jauntily to his club every evening and

enjoys a ripping good time. His religion requires him only to say that he is lame, or thrashing

about in the water, and to throw in some praise of the Almighty and some reverence for the

Sacrifice, and the Hand will reach out and take him to the heavenly shore.

Mind-games are of the essence. Lewis's screed re-emphasizes the cynical truth that

religion must be what we want while we claim that our wants cannot touch it. It must answer

every question about what to do next in life. It must explain the meaning of the past, the present,

and the future, from the origin of the cosmos to its extinction in fire or ice. It must replace the

animal instincts with a binding program that bestows upon its believers the lost security of those

instincts. And it must offer us a shot at the complete vindication of our lives. All this it does. It

makes its appeal to those who cannot bear doubt and therefore demand security. Obedience to a

dogma that is self-contradictory and even absurd is more comforting than the endless series of

choices that would otherwise attend a person's decision to live in the present and rely upon active

intelligence to work out the right and wrong of it on the fly. Religion especially appeals to someone who, like Lewis, possesses, in addition to a craving for certainty, a relentlessly persecutory superego. The sham self-loathing of the puritan was a great relief to Lewis after he had suffered the genuine self-hatred of the perfectionist during his atheistic days.

Thus the personal transformation effected by religious conversion leads, not quite to the peace of genuine equanimity, but to a veneer of serenity and self-acceptance that does sometimes Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 652

seem to onlookers to resemble a real psychological gain. Because the transformation comes in the guise of Christian faith, we are at first hard-pressed to recognize the Bunyanesque megalomania behind it: we are cowed by the automatic respect that is accorded, even by hardened secularists, to sincere religious conviction. "Belief in the evidence of things not seen," which makes a man laughable in every other department of life, renders him socially acceptable and admired if he proclaims it as the basis of his religion. Perhaps the most important point, however, is this: both before his conversion, and after, Lewis could go to his club and take the pleasures of an English gentleman.

Because Lewis, in an excess of confidence, is so remarkably and even catastrophically unaware of the import of his own statements, and how they reveal what he would have been wiser to conceal, he is the indispensable guide to the psychology of the committed Christian. We find throughout the self-absorption that is the genuine hallmark of all those who are preoccupied with salvation.

I have elsewhere devoted a chapter to "the solipsism of character," pointing out that many misguided ethicists urge us to decide moral questions entirely within the court of private opinion.

It may seem courageous to disregard the opinions of others (for polemical purposes those others are often called "the herd") and to base decisions "solely on what is right": when a whistle-blower takes a lonely stand "against society," we applaud. But another name for society is "organized others"; and since morality can be broadly defined as "how we should act toward others," it is contradictory to espouse a course of action and call it specifically and even distinctively moral while holding the wishes of those others in contempt. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 653

Of course, our judgments in these cases of the individual against society are highly

colored by perceived success or failure: it is true that we have made moral heroes out of those

few who, being in advance of their times, braved the wrath of the crowd and suffered the

condemnation of their moral inferiors; but when the person who stands against society is, in our

opinion, wrong, we join with the crowd in branding him, however bravely he has acted, a

criminal or a moral imbecile – and a thousand of these occasions present themselves to every one

of the other kind.

Lewis is especially guileless about proposing a solipsistic morality:

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole. . . . If we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments: relations between man and man; things inside each man; and relations between man and the power that made him.

You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two. . . . And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to begin with the first thing, with social relations.

Since morality is, by definition, our obligations to others, it would seem to be not merely "quite natural" to begin with social relations, but also mandatory; and to end with them, too. But Lewis considers social relations to be the least of the three departments of morality; and to emphasize the triviality of our duty to others, he makes the following astonishing statement:

For one thing, the results of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day: war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work. And also, as long as you stick to the first thing, there is very little disagreement about morality. Almost all people at all times have agreed (in theory) that human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to one another. . . . Disagreements begin with the second and become serious with the third. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 654

As we have had reason to note repeatedly, the reign of evil on earth has not been produced by the violence, graft, lies, shoddy work, and unkindnesses that members of a group inflict upon each other, but by the blank check that some groups have given themselves to inflict all these hardships upon other groups and call this good.

But how can we call it good, if, as Lewis avers, all people at all times have agreed that it is bad? Lewis does not answer, but dozens of more discerning philosophers of evil do: we claim that what appears to be evil is really a higher good, and that we are obeying a loftier standard – often one that we say has been imposed upon us, if Lewis would please notice, by "the power that made us."

Lewis would likely riposte that all evils, including this evil of calling evil "good," flow from original sin when it breaks through the weak defenses of a low character. The evildoer's invocation of the will of God is just sin piled on sin. Lewis's reason for emphasizing his second and third departments of morality is to shore up our defenses. Even so, his point that there is

"very little disagreement" about social morality commits him to the idea that no one really confuses good with evil. In so arguing, he commits the narcissistic fallacy: certain in his own mind of his own rightness, and certain that what is right is therefore "obvious to all," he cannot credit the sincerity of any other man's idea in opposition to his own. Certain that the Nazis are evil, he is sure that they know themselves to be evil. Not recognizing the possibility of narcissism in himself, he cannot recognize it in others, or even imagine what it could be like.

Does he not see the hand before his face? Very well, then, there cannot be two opinions about the hand: a genuine mistake is too incredible. When he argues for capital punishment, he not Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 655

only cannot conceive of the possibility that he is wrong, he cannot even conceive of the possibility that any other decent person could think that he is wrong. If I tell him that narcissism is precisely his inability to recognize what is before him, due not to physical blindness but to psychological factors that disable perception and interpretation, he will very understandably refuse to believe in the possibility of such a condition because, suffering it, he cannot see it.

Perhaps he does look for those factors that supposedly blind him; but, needless to say, he does not find them.

The solution for the narcissist is to think everyone else is a careerist: those who pretend to see what is not there, and not to see what is there, are following their agendas. Or perhaps the opponents of capital punishment have been corrupted by demons (in which Lewis believed literally).

So Lewis is candid about celebrating, indeed demanding, ethical solipsism: he locates the essence of morality first in obedience to God, and then, at one remove, in obedience to conscience. Other people hardly come into it at all:

I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him.

[A Christian society] is always insisting on obedience – obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands.

Lewis's progression is counter-intuitive and, I would venture to say, unempirical: first, he says, obedience to God; then through obedience, love of God; then as a result, love of both self and Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 656

neighbor. I find it mysterious why I should not start at once with the neighbor, who is able to make his wants and needs quite clear to me, and do to him as I would be done by. It is not clear to me that I need to love him, and it is certainly not self-evident that I will learn to love him by first obeying God, and then, through obedience, learning to love God. Even Martin Luther did not claim so much for obedience, but rather, with slightly more psychological acumen than

Lewis, recommended blind obedience as the higher principle and warned against love as a potential pitfall.

Did Lewis not observe, simply as an everyday phenomenon, the neighborly love of many skeptics and atheists? Had he never been helped by a humanist? Ah, he has already anticipated just such doubts and answered them: when any of those lost souls did him a favor, the credit belonged not to them but to the "invisible Christ" acting through them, for of their own free will they would rather have pushed him in a ditch.

We are in a position now to understand some of Lewis's unusual statements about morality. "Every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself." Since morality is how we ought to act toward others, we might assume Lewis meant to reverse that proposition and write "certainly to others and probably to yourself." In fact, a moral fault that is harmless to others would seem to be as confused a concept as a married bachelor. But what you do to others is the least of Lewis's moral concerns. "Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices." I want to speak up for human beings here. A moral choice that does not produce an external action leaves little to judge. But Lewis cares only about the drama that is being performed in the theater of his soul. And thus we reach the acme of his self-absorption, and incidentally of God's: for implicit Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 657

in Lewis's morality is a deity who similarly cares only about Himself. He comes to us in the

flesh, yet tells us nothing new about how to treat each other: He wishes only to instruct us about

how we must treat Him – and especially, how we must think about Him in the privacy of our

minds.

Such an ethic may seem merely quaint until we draw all its consequences. Lewis says

that my actions are irrelevant to how I stand with God, Who judges only my internal state. If I

perpetrate a genocide, I may cause trouble for others, but more importantly for myself – I may

have jeopardized my relationship with God. (In fact, the testimony of the Bible indicates that

God is quite relaxed about genocide, and sometimes orders one up on the spur of the moment;

but let us assume that on this occasion, I have acted on my own and offended Him.) Then too,

since all that matters is my inner state and its relation to His inner state, I may have a defense of

my genocidal action based upon its origin in my sincere attempt to harmonize myself with His

divine plan. If, in my mind, I had subordinated the effect of my external actions on others to the

primacy of my moral effort to do the will of my Creator, then according to Lewis I had my

priorities straight.

Did Lewis fail to recognize in Adolf Hitler precisely a man who had ordered a genocide

out of absolute conviction? Did he not see that Hitler perfectly exemplified the three-tiered moral hierarchy? "Social relations" indeed came last with Hitler, after he had first squared his conduct with eternal principles that he sometimes even called God, and then disciplined himself to put the principles first in his moral economy. Again the answer: Yes, Lewis saw this, but since Hitler's conclusions about right conduct differed from Lewis's, Hitler must have known that he was evil. (After all, right and wrong are "so obvious" that not even Jesus could tell us Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 658

anything that we did not already know.) On this view, Hitler was weak, succumbed to evil, and lied. What more need be said?

Such is "moral clarity."

It may seem strange that Hitler, or any man, even a man who has sold his soul to the devil, would go to so much trouble to visit so much murder upon so many distant people, living for years in a military bunker when he could have sated himself on the fruits of unfettered power and hedonistic pleasure closer to home. I have argued throughout this treatise that we cannot understand an act like the Holocaust as originating in evil motives alone. Even if diabolical motives lay at the core of Hitler's plan, it would never have been carried out by millions of other people unless it inspired in them a strong response of idealism, duty, and obedience – precisely those qualities that are recommended throughout Mere Christianity and taken to be the signature dispositions of the right sort of person. In the teeth of these plains facts, Lewis postulates a fairy- tale evil after the fashion of his friend and fellow writer J. R. R. Tolkien. These lazy metaphysicians posit evil as a consuming id, reveling in its own badness, loving death and destruction for its own sake. How far we are justified in reading Lewis's trite depiction of evil as a projection of his own animosities, I do not know: but it is undeniable that this childish fantasy – of a valiant embrace of Christianity in the midst of "enemy-occupied territory," of a lonely stand against vast powers of darkness – found a congenial home in his mind.

Lewis does mention one possible escape hatch, whereby he might be able to credit

Hitler's sincerity and still find evil in him:

The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 659

moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the Victoria Cross. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

Lewis's confidence that God will judge matters exactly as he does is a wonder to behold. But I

wish to praise him for this passage about sin and disease, as far as it goes. The moral

perspectivism that is espoused here is foreign to most of the dogmatic Christians who take their

theology straight from Biblical literalists like Lewis himself; so he is to be commended for

holding on to it. Yes, the mitigation of a cruelty may cost the serial killer more effort than the

sacrifice of his own life costs the martyr. As Mark Twain put it with sardonic wit, "When certain

sorts of people do a sizable good deed, we credit them up a thousand-fold more for it that we would in the case of a better man – on account of the strain." It is true that these insights would be unremarkable in any bright 14-year-old, for it is soon after the onset of adolescence that we begin to notice the troubling disparity in different people's capacity to act well; this dawning awareness of moral complexity, no less than the shock of unruly hormones, contributes to that unhappy "loss of innocence" that occurs when we are catapulted out of childhood. When I was still in high school, I wrote a poem sarcastically titled "Fashioned in God's Image": it is full of my disillusionment at finding ulterior motives in every act, including my own. The rhetorical climax is my self-accusation that even in the writing of the poem I am seeking admiration and applause. I end with a plea that one truly good deed be found somewhere, a disinterested deed done for the sake of goodness alone. Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 660

However obvious, Lewis's point is exemplary: we cannot judge any two people by the

same standard – which wipes out all standards. Lewis, without realizing it, has opened the door

to relativism – to a sliding scale of evaluation based upon circumstances. Consider this passage:

It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. The proper motto is not "Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever," but "Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can." God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers.

Again, Lewis's pipeline to the deity enables him to go right inside the Mind of God and speak with assurance about the finer points of divine logic; but faults of human logic dog this author like an Old Testament plague. God, he tells us confidently, takes differences in intellectual equipment into account and will not expect mathematical aptitude from a dullard. But three sentences later, he is equally certain that God does not take differences in moral aptitude into account. On what grounds? That intelligence is inherited and moral capacity is acquired? But how acquired, and when? If, as Lewis has already conceded, a man can be "perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing," then a propensity for cruelty is no less imposed upon a human being by nurture than his I.Q. is imposed upon him by nature; and Lewis is right to factor that accident into the equation of judgment. But why stop there? Is an idler's laziness any less a given than a dullard's slowness? What entitles Lewis to be so magisterially sure that the dimwit cannot choose to be smart but the slacker can choose to be disciplined? Is he sure for any better reason than his queasy suspicion that his entire theology will collapse if he is wrong about this? I rather suspect that God may make as many allowances for the slacker as for the dullard, Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 661

as many for the comfortable self-righteous prig as for the poor wretch with a criminal psychosis.

Who is Lewis, or even God, to judge the smarmy grasping narcissistic self-righteous careerist who, although blessed with material advantages and endless good luck, nevertheless devotes every waking moment to self-aggrandizement? Who are we to say that such a man's insatiable hunger for recognition, for getting ahead at all costs, for taking all credit to himself and deflecting all blame to others, is not a continual torture to himself as he strives to fill an immense emptiness with the wrong kind of nourishment and to stave off the terrifying fear of having to confront his existential emptiness at last? He too may be unable to help his noxious behavior: he may be no more able to reckon morally than the simpleton is able to reckon arithmetically. In fact, if we were to judge from experience, we would admit that, on the evidence, he has less capacity to change himself than any person we know.

For that matter, who is Lewis to judge himself? – either to noisily condemn his earlier skeptical incarnation for phony faults or to coyly approve his later converted self for bogus virtues. And who am I to judge Lewis for his smugness and his delirious confidence in his own judgments? I will close by comprehending Lewis in my call for unconditional global absolution: self-infatuation to such a marked degree can only be a defense against humiliations originating so early in childhood that they do not admit of ready excavation. Fear alone must be at the root of so much blustering certainty. I know that my words sound patronizing in the extreme, and if

Lewis were alive to hear them, he would reject them indignantly: no adult likes to be diagnosed as a wounded child. But why not? Anyone who accepts the diagnosis will find himself in good company with the vast majority of the human race; and the recognition of its aptness is the beginning of wisdom. In fact, Lewis was wounded more than most – he lost his mother when he Clive Staples Lewis and the psychology of true belief - 662

was very young and his father was incapable of empathy. His own account of the futility of

trying to make his father understand him is painful to read.

Lewis is valuable only as a powerful negative example. We need no longer follow him in

erecting an entire religion out of the personal sense of inadequacy and mortification that is so

assiduously instilled in us as children. We need no longer assuage our feelings of emptiness with

fantasies of cosmic potency and infinite gratification. We can abandon the fatuity of purification

rituals and salvation histories, and eschew the covert and inchoate longings that drive our

vengeful eschatologies. It is no good thing that the hurts that we once suffered at the hands of

our childhood oppressors have long since been transmogrified into a fixed, albeit unformulated, animus – an animus against all those who refuse to take up our cross. Such unknowingness leads in time to a pronounced moral deterioration, when we patriotically and self-righteously undertake to cleanse the world of those who will not abase themselves before our dogmas. Instead let us set about healing ourselves. Once we see where we are, the prognosis is good.

Transubstantiation

Transubstantiation, in the definitive words of The Catholic Encyclopedia, is "a conversion of the total substance, the transition of the entire substance, of the bread and wine into the Body and

Blood of Christ." The change occurs when the correct words are spoken by a properly ordained priest during the Eucharist.

Martin Luther, as part of his wholesale attack on the Catholic Church, introduced the revolutionary idea of "the priesthood of all believers." According to this thesis, an ordained priest is no more qualified to accomplish the sacrament than a layman who has read his Bible: the change in the substance of the bread and wine is therefore accomplished, not through any words spoken by the presiding official, but by the faith and purity of the community. (Accordingly, there have been "puritans" throughout the history of Protestantism who have periodically attempted to cleanse the congregation, with as little or as much bloodletting as was required, of those whose impurities would undermine the efficacy of the change. The Catholic doctrine, by contrast, is a comfort to the communicant: if the correct words are spoken, it matters not how lecherous or even atheistic the priest may be. The bread changes completely and the sacrament is efficacious.)

Luther also felt that, apart from the irrelevance of the priest to the why of the change, the

Catholic doctrine of how the change occurs is flawed, and the term "consubstantiation" was soon coined to express the correct understanding. Yet Martin Marty, an expert in the history of the Transubstantiation - 664

Protestant religion, acknowledges that it is difficult to locate the exact difference between the

Lutheran view and the Catholic view. In the Lutheran "Formula of Concord," Christ is proclaimed to be a Real Presence "in, with, and under the bread and wine." These famously obscure words do little to penetrate the fog that envelops this issue. Perhaps The Catholic

Encyclopedia understands Protestantism better than Protestantism understands itself when it defines consubstantiation as "the coexistence of the substance of the bread with the true Body of

Christ." On this interpretation, the Protestant position would be that the bread is still present, but imbued with the Body of Christ. Since the Catholic position is that the bread is now gone, having been changed completely into the Body, the encyclopedia article deprecates the Lutheran view as "a fiction, with no foundation in Scripture."

To further muddy the waters, some Lutheran theologians insist that their doctrine is neither consubstantiation nor transubstantiation: according to The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran

Church, the "old dogmaticians" preferred to speak of a "true and real conjunction" rather than a

"consubstantiation." Presumably these dogmaticians knew what the difference was. The

complexity and conflict did not end there: in the interest of harmony, the authors of the Formula

of Concord had to leave a key point unresolved. They took no position on whether the Real

Presence is due to "ubiquity" (because Christ is everywhere all the time anyway) or

"ubivolipresence" (because Christ chooses to be present). Ubiquity was the Swabian belief, and

presumed to be the position of Luther himself before he died; ubivolipresence was the North

German belief, thought by the Swabians to be contaminated by Calvinism.

Luther was confident that all such disputation would end when every believer read the

Bible for himself, because, with his incomparable narcissism and naivete, he assumed that no Transubstantiation - 665

reasonable person would find anything in the scripture contrary to what he had found. But within a few years of his posting of the 95 Theses, Protestantism was riven by schisms. In 1523, the movement headed by Huldrych Zwingli in Switzerland published the following controversial proposition: "It cannot be proved from the Holy Scripture that the body and blood of Christ are corporeally present in the bread and in the wine of the Lord's Supper." These words imply a total rejection of any "Real Presence," whether via transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or conjunction. Communion was designated a commemorative and symbolic act.

We modernists and postmodernists are readily attuned to Zwingli's view that the Biblical words "This is my body" should be construed as a figure of speech: "This signifies my body." As we no doubt remember from our high school literature classes, if a poet were to write "My love is a red, red rose," he probably would not mean to indicate his erotic attachment to a flower, but instead would mean the same thing that Robert Burns meant by using a simile instead of a metaphor: "My love is like a red red rose." As a rhetorician whose parables show a considerable flair for style, Christ may have simply preferred one figure of speech to another: a clunky phrase such as "This is like my body" does indeed turn evocative poetry into pedestrian prose. But

Luther, although himself a stylist of no small accomplishment, turned a deaf ear to these subtleties and (like President Clinton when he was in a tight spot legally) opened his dictionary to the definition of "is." Projecting his own fanaticism onto his opponents, he penned an aggressive tract, "That these Words of Christ 'This is my Body' still stand firm against the

Fanatics."

In 1529, a scant dozen years after the 95 Theses – ample time to set Protestants at each other's throats – the Colloquy of Marburg was convened to restore unity and amity to the Transubstantiation - 666

Reformation. Of 15 disputed doctrines, complete agreement was reached on 14, but the Real

Presence defeated every attempt at compromise. Zwingli, in the interest of harmony, pronounced himself ready to acknowledge that Christ was spiritually present in the bread and wine: he hoped

that this would go far enough for Luther, who had after all fiercely rejected the Roman Catholic

belief that the substance of the bread and wine is changed completely into the substance of

Christ's body and blood. But at Marburg, Luther wrote the words "This is my body" on a

blackboard and pedantically insisted upon their literal meaning. When Zwingli asked Luther

whether it is permissible for a Christian to ask how Christ can be bodily present in the bread and

wine, Luther gave a characteristic reply: "A servant does not fret over his master's wishes. We

must shut our eyes. And if God commanded me to eat dung I should do it." Zwingli, concerned

to protect the dignity of the deity from Luther's moral imbecility, responded simply, "God does

not give that sort of command."

Luther's peevish statement accorded well with the title of one of his articles against

Erasmus: "The Bondage of the Will." Yet we cannot help but see in the whole of his conduct at

Marburg an almost frightening rampancy of egotism. His will was subject neither to reason nor

the interests of concord.

So the Colloquy ended in an impasse: "At present we are not agreed as to whether the true

body and blood are bodily present in the bread and wine." Luther refused to celebrate

Communion with the Swiss delegation and declined to shake hands with Zwingli, to whom he

said, "You have another spirit than ours." He meant the spirit of the devil, of course. A decade

after the start of the Reformation, Protestantism was a house divided, with Luther shoring up the

conservative wing and sounding, at times, more Catholic than the Pope. Transubstantiation - 667

John Calvin, while praising Luther for his rejection of transubstantiation, could not ignore the negative impact of Luther's character on the Colloquy of Marburg:

For instead of explaining himself in such a way as to make it possible to receive his view, he, with his accustomed vehemence in assailing those who contradicted him, used hyperbolical forms of speech very difficult to be borne by those who otherwise were not much disposed to believe at his nod.

This is a just reproach; but Calvin is, naturally enough, praising himself by damning Luther.

Inasmuch as he had the soul of a petty bureaucrat, with that appetite for complete totalitarian control that is found even more often in librarians than in revolutionary leaders, and given that he lacked Luther's passion and warmth, Calvin did indeed eschew vehemence and hyperbolical forms of speech. He preferred to make his points by an accumulation of numbing platitudes and citations; yet for all its dryness, dullness, and prolixity, his style betrays the insane confidence of the confirmed despot who has come to believe himself the final authority on everything from foreign policy to the best shoelaces. He wished to legislate all matters under heaven, to regulate all conduct everywhere, and to bestow final answers to all questions; and if his words seem to us to be opaque, the reader in 16th century Geneva would have found them so at the peril of his life.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is once again a valuable resource for stating the terms of this

Protestant squabble objectively and intelligibly:

Luther was the only one among the Reformers who still clung to the old Catholic doctrine, and, though subjecting it to manifold misrepresentations, defended it most tenaciously. . . . In the meantime, at Geneva, Calvin was cleverly seeking to bring about a compromise between the extremes of the Lutheran literal and the Zwinglian figurative interpretations.

Transubstantiation - 668

So Calvin composed his Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of Our Lord Jesus Christ and settled the matter of the Lord's Supper once and for all:

The bread and the wine are visible signs . . . . Though they are signs, the reality is conjoined with them . . . . The internal substance of the sacrament is conjoined with the visible signs . . . . The bread is called the body, since it not only represents but also presents it to us. . . . The name of the body of Jesus Christ is transferred to the bread, inasmuch as it is the sacrament and figure of it. . . . The sacraments of the Lord should not and cannot be at all separated from their reality and substance. . . . We must then truly receive in the Supper the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Nothing could be clearer – to Calvin. How then did "errors and superstitions" arise? The devil,

"after his usual manner," had "stirred up contention to impede, nay altogether to interrupt the course of the gospel." The gospel has now been elucidated by Calvin, and mistakes corrected.

"Transubstantiation is an invention forged by the devil to corrupt the true nature of the Supper."

There's for Catholics. "That Jesus Christ is enclosed under the bread and wine, or conjoined with it, is a fancy insinuated by the devil." There's for Lutherans. "The devil has introduced the fashion of celebrating the Supper without any doctrine at all." There's for Zwingli and the

Anabaptists. The Scots Confession of 1560 expatiated on this last point with a violence of language that captures the darkness at the heart of Calvinism: "We utterly damn the vanity of they that affirm Sacraments to be nothing else but naked and bare signs."

It may be that a theologically unsophisticated reader such as myself would fail to see that

Calvin's solution to the problem is simple and clear – to a trained eye. Therefore, I consulted the expert contributor to the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica for a summary of

Calvin's position:

Transubstantiation - 669

The Lord's Supper is a spiritual feast where Christ attests that He is the life-giving bread, by which our souls are fed unto true and blessed immortality. That sacred communication of His flesh and blood whereby Christ transfuses into us His life, even as if it penetrated into our bones and marrow, He in the Supper attests and seals; and that not by a vain or empty sign set before us, but there He puts forth the efficacy of His Spirit whereby He fulfils what He promises. In the mystery of the Supper Christ is truly exhibited to us by the symbols of bread and wine; and so His body and blood, in which He fulfilled all obedience for the obtaining of righteousness for us, are presented. There is no such presence of Christ in the Supper as that He is affixed to the bread or included in it or in any way circumscribed; but whatever can express the true and substantial communication of the body and blood of the Lord, which is exhibited to believers under the said symbols of the Supper, is to be received, and that not as perceived by the imagination only or mental intelligence, but as enjoyed for the aliment of the eternal life.

This is a welcome clarification, is it not? Christ is truly exhibited, but only by the symbols of bread and wine; the body and blood are presented, and received, and not just mentally or imaginatively, yet Christ is not "affixed to the bread or included in it." But neither is the

Eucharist just a "vain or empty sign." The Britannica author goes on to dismiss Zwingli's position: "His peculiar theological opinions were set aside in Switzerland for the somewhat profounder views of Calvin." Well, peculiarity is in the eye of the beholder. In any case, I am glad that our author did not live in the 16th century and say so much, or so little, in Geneva.

Calvin would not have taken kindly to hearing that his views were only "somewhat" profounder than Zwingli's, and he was always wide awake to the finer shadings of words: it has been accurately stated that he ordered Michael Servetus to be burned at the stake because Servetus argued that Jesus was the Son of the Eternal God rather than the Eternal Son of God.

Perhaps we should turn once more to our friends at The Catholic Encyclopedia for genuine clarity, since neither Calvin nor his apologists can provide it:

Transubstantiation - 670

Instead of the substantial presence in one case or the merely symbolical in the other, Calvin suggested a certain mean, i.e., a "dynamic" presence, which consists essentially in this, that at the moment of reception, the efficacy of Christ's Body and Blood is communicated from heaven to the souls of the predestined and spiritually nourishes them.

This is probably as close as we are going to come to Calvin's meaning; and so honest an attempt to comprehend it by those he damned to hell is a striking example of the intellectual scrupulosity that he so conspicuously lacked.

The Real Presence resurfaced in the Oxford Movement of the 19th Century, when

Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman tried to reintroduce it in the Church of England. Pusey is described in the Encyclopædia Britannica as "a warmhearted, sincere, and humble man" who ministered to the sick during the cholera epidemic of 1866. He also found the time to write many books, among them the 722-page examination of The Doctrine of the Real Presence in 1855 and a further treatment of this subject, The Real Presence, in 1857. I confess to having an idle curiosity about the contents of these two books: I do wonder how it is possible to extend the topic much beyond two pages, even with the example of Calvin before me; but I am determined to remain in ignorance.

Meanwhile, Roman Catholics have maintained rigor and consistency from first to last. If there can be no compromise about what the bread and wine change into, there can also be none about what is changed. In August 2004, when a parish priest substituted a rice wafer for wheat during Holy Communion to accommodate the medical condition of an eight-year-old girl among

the communicants – she was allergic to wheat gluten and the reaction to it could have killed her –

the diocese invalidated the sacrament. According to the Associated Press, Bishop John M. Smith

of Trenton, New Jersey said, "This is not an issue to be determined at the diocesan or parish Transubstantiation - 671

level, but has already been decided for the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world by

Vatican authority." The parents of the girl were outraged and appealed to the Pope, but

presumably they did not understand what is at stake. After all, Christ did not hold up some corn-

on-the-cob and say, "This is my body." No doubt He could have transubstantiated corn or even a

rubber band had He chosen to do so, but He did not so choose: it was bread that He was holding

when He said the words, and if there is no wheat gluten present in the wafer, there is nothing that

can be converted into His body. Thus His flesh would not be present, and the communicants

would not be participating in His sacrifice by consuming His flesh; and it is this participation that

absolves them of sin. Similarly, according to the Vatican, there must be some alcohol present in

the grape juice, whatever the consequences for recovering alcoholics. These are, after all,

matters of eternal life and death.

What is the relevance of this chapter to a study of evil? A quick answer would be that, between

the time of the proto-Protestant heresy championed by Jan Hus and the end of the Thirty Years

War, hundreds of thousands of human beings were slaughtered over these doctrinal differences

about the Eucharist. But it is easy for modern readers to shake their heads over such long-ago quarrels and assume that nothing of the sort could occur today. At worst, an eight-year-old girl can be discomfited, certainly as much by her parents' avidity to remain in a church that is trying to kill her as by the church's dogmatic intransigence. Therefore, we may easily miss the exemplary quality of this history. It is true that we currently view such theological debates as quaint and the attempts to settle them militarily as monstrous, but only because most of us – the

Pope excepted – no longer think that the fate of individuals and societies rides upon a correct Transubstantiation - 672

interpretation of the Christian sacraments. Throughout the Cold War, however, we thought that the fate of individuals and societies depended upon the implementation of the correct economic and political systems; and not only did millions of people in Southeast Asia perish over this question as it pertained to a handful of tiny agrarian countries, but Pentagon and Kremlin planners created scenarios for a final reckoning between the opposing ideological systems that would have killed upwards of half-a-billion people in seven hours. This happened even though the capitalist nations had all become quasi-socialistic, with progressive income taxes, publicly financed education, and "safety nets" that guaranteed minimum annual incomes to all citizens, and the communist countries were all gravitating toward capitalism by various subterfuges.

More recently, similarly apocalyptic views have rigidified around the presumed conflict between

Western secular democracy and Muslim theocratic fascism.

The admiration still accorded Luther and Calvin by hundreds of millions of Protestants around the world tells us that the emotional makeup and habits of thought displayed in times past by these violent, arrogant, and profoundly damaged men are hardly anachronistic. Today, as yesterday, the human intellect is brittle, and human emotions are warped by covert agendas of dominance and revenge.

What we believe changes constantly; how we believe does not. In general, we evince a pronounced need to believe with fierce certainty; to require others to believe similarly; and to oppose, with as much aggression as it takes, those who foster opposing beliefs. Thus we fill our prisons with nonviolent individuals who have never criminally harmed any other person, because by their actions they dissent from our belief that no person anywhere should be allowed under any circumstances to ingest certain naturally occurring botanic substances that alter perception. Transubstantiation - 673

Our pathological clinging to this belief against all factual, rational, and moral considerations, and especially our simultaneous insistence that the toxically harmful substances tobacco and alcohol do not count among the dangerous substances, is a clinical example of mass delusion and even hysteria. Similarly we relegated, until a highly controversial Supreme Court decision on June 26,

2003, the entire class of persons with a homosexual orientation to a condition of partial citizenship. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, we adopted a posture toward Muslims whom we deemed to be "possible" terrorists that was so sweeping and inflexible that we evoked it to invade a sovereign nation that had no connection to any terrorist attack on America; and after we conquered that country, we began to torture its people in the same prison that had been used for that purpose by the tyrant we had deposed. Had Richard

Cheney, the architect of this policy, been called to a colloquy in Marburg to explain his obstinacy in continuing to disregard the canons of international law and ordinary decency, he would have written the words "We are engaged in a war on terrorism" on a blackboard. If asked how such a war can be said to be waged when the people of Iraq, who were not then and never had been associated with al Qaeda or the attack on the World Trade Center, were being slaughtered by helicopter gunships during their wedding celebrations and tortured in the Abu Ghraib prison, he would have said that he was going to shut his eyes to any objections, and if he had to command

Arabs to eat dung, he would do it. And to tens of millions of Americans, this would have sounded like patriotism, common sense, non-appeasement, integrity, tough love, and a commitment to persevere in all that is right and true in spite of the caviling of a few malcontents who hate their own country and prefer to speak up for the enemy.

The hair-splitting over the Real Presence was silly indeed. It was also evil. It was Transubstantiation - 674

distinctively evil before anyone took up arms over it. A ruinous military conflict followed upon it as the night the day. Zwingli's death on the field of battle, and the Lutheran elation upon the hearing of this news, was prefigured in it – in the narcissism, the insane commitment to abstract ideals, and the underlying hatreds that fueled the debate even when it was "just words."

Similarly, the treatment of inmates at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib was inevitable in light of

President Bush's repeated promise that terrorists would learn the meaning of "American justice."

I wondered at the time how American justice should be understood to differ from plain justice.

The answer came when terrorists, prisoners of war, and ordinary Iraqi citizens who went down the wrong streets were arrested, detained without being charged, denied access to lawyers, and tortured. In other words, it turned out that "American justice" meant what other nations mean by

"injustice." Even words have to change their meanings to accommodate our insistence that reality be, not what it is, but what we say it is.

The riddle of apostasy

Is there really such a mystery about evil? The epigraph to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of

Motorcycle Maintenance reads as follows:

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Do we not see good-hearted people all about us, and recognize them immediately? Is not the contrast between them and the grasping, selfish people striking? In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,

Levin's search for spiritual truth ends suddenly during a casual conversation with Theodore, an old peasant, who makes the following comment:

Oh well, you see, people differ! One man lives only for his own needs: take Kirilov, who only stuffs his own belly; but Plato is an upright old man. He lives for his soul and remembers God.

Levin reflects:

Theodore says that Kirilov lives for his belly. That is intelligible and reasonable. We all, as reasoning creatures, cannot live otherwise. And then that same Theodore says that it is wrong to live for one's belly, and that we must live for Truth, for God, and at the first hint I understand him!

He concludes that we all know "what we should live for, and what is good." And while good- The riddle of apostasy - 676

hearted people may make mistakes of judgment based upon inadequate information, and even do

much damage out of ignorance, we rarely confuse them with genuinely evil people.

What religious conservatives say is that, in a state of nature, there are no good-hearted people.

Everyone is naturally evil-hearted. The will itself is tainted, and cannot be good. The first of the

"Five Points" of Calvinism is Total Depravity.

The way old Plato attained the appearance of a good-hearted person was by means of a thorough training, from a very early age, in the virtues, which he naturally detested with all his heart, but which were inculcated in him by whatever means were necessary.

It is a strange view of humanity: what is inside the human is "inhuman." What we mis-

call humanity – goodness, humane behavior – is unnatural to our species and has to be imposed

coercively from without.

This is where Freud betrays his kinship with the fundamentalist Christians: both say that

we are "depraved, not deprived." According to Freud, the unconscious harbors "all that is evil in

the human mind." The "authentic" person, when he is unencumbered by rules and therefore free

to follow his true desires, is a monster of selfishness, lust, and violence. Therefore Freud too

believed that externally imposed rules were the essence of morality.

It should be easy to see that, if this is so, I am peculiarly damned. According to this

theory, the pursuit of happiness is the serpent in the garden. Whenever I want something just

because I want it, whenever I am tempted to pursue my heart's desire – precisely that is evil.

Fulfilling a moral destiny means renouncing my human nature.

There is an obvious paradox in this. If we humans are innately immoral, and morality has The riddle of apostasy - 677

to be forced down our bloodthirsty throats, who is to do the forcing? Clearly, other humans. But where did these moral policemen get their ideal – the "man of character" – if not from their humanness?

Given our inborn rapaciousness, violence, and selfishness, or, at the least, our inclination toward indolence and inebriation and sensuality, where would any of us have come up with the notion that we should deny our own natures?

Where could we have gotten a glimmer of goodness, if not from ourselves? But where in ourselves would we have found it?

The fundamentalist answers triumphantly: We couldn't have found it in ourselves; it isn't there. God alone gave us the ideal, and the strength to attain it (if only we borrow His strength).

But how could we have even recognized the ideal as an ideal? Why would we ever have accepted something so noxious to our true values?

The fundamentalist, clutching the Old Testament as tightly as the New, answers again:

We didn't recognize it or want it when we understood what it was. We resisted like the spoiled brats that we are, and God, seeing the magnitude of the project, picked out one tribe to alternately punish and cajole until he had trained and disciplined its people in the virtue of abject obedience.

We see, then, why theism, revelation, and biblical inerrancy are a package deal for the fundamentalist, and why obedience is the supreme virtue.

An early training in character, backed up by the legislation of morality throughout our lives, becomes the mechanism by which we replace the habits of the all-too-human heart with the behavior of the angels. It is not enough to read the revealed Word of God – not even enough to pray to Him. We need discipline – above all, self-discipline. Because the flesh is so weak. But The riddle of apostasy - 678

how could we acquire it? Where would we get it? Our instructors are themselves vessels of total

depravity.

So we are damned – not peculiarly, says the fundamentalist, but thoroughly, and above

all, justly. But if that is so, what to do?

It is only the secularist who is baffled by this seeming cul-de-sac of hopelessness: the believer knows that his damnation can, by the surrender of his humanity, be shuffled off in half- a-second. In place of his own personal authentic human nature, the believer acquires . . . the divine nature of Christ Jesus. The sinner no longer acts for himself; Jesus acts in his place and for his person. So again: not to put too fine a point on it – the sole spiritual task of a human being is the renunciation of his humanness.

By such an analysis, the fundamentalist who righteously wields the rod of correction is vindicated – the duty of the parent is, just as Martin Luther asserted, to break the will of the child. Instead of his own thoughts, the child must think only the thoughts that have been injected into his mind by totalitarian methods. A squeamish parent need not blush at the assignment – it is all for the child's ultimate good. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate – that the child would pursue his own idea of his own happiness, and thereby conduct himself into eternal damnation; and that this should happen to him because his parents were too morally lazy to undertake his salvation by means of constant vigilance, overwhelming force, and relentless punishment.

It is a perverted and toxic ideology, an excuse for endless cruelty wrapped in a cloak of piety, but it is maddeningly self-consistent – almost. While fundamentalists cannot be persuaded by any The riddle of apostasy - 679

rebuttal, and free thinkers are already well aware of religion's cruel and demented tautologies, the reader may find a grim satisfaction in the following refutation of the doctrine – one that issued from the mouth of an unwitting believer.

On Christian talk-radio, Hank the Bible Answer Man holds forth nightly expounding biblical inerrancy – he speaks often of "the pale of orthodoxy," the better to place his many opponents outside it. He also takes calls from anxious listeners, and these often illustrate the depths of ratiocination employed by Christians who possess even the skimpiest of formal educations. Very rarely do the questions relate to actual human conflicts and how to resolve them according to the Sermon on the Mount: rather, they betray the anguish that orthodoxy engenders in the fearful hearts of the trying-to-be-faithful. The callers probe the doctrine of

Christ's sacrificial atonement for reassurance on the only point that really matters to them – their own eternal fate. The prize of prizes is the "secure salvation" – the perfect confidence of "the saved" that they are bound for Heaven. Many are the agonized callers who have not yet felt the warm breath of the Holy Spirit and so been assured of their Election. They crave the secure salvation and wish to hasten its acquisition, suffering in every intervening second the torment of imagining the damnation that is certain if death should come too soon. Hank exudes a calm assurance for the benefit of these earnest seekers. God, after all, and strange as it sounds after a recital of His protocols, loves them.

In purveying his advice, Hank demonstrates a memory as astounding as it is trivial. He seems to know the Bible by heart, and furthermore the exact pedigree of literally hundreds of arcane cults and heresies. But even this living, walking encyclopedia of all things biblical was stumped when a caller posed the riddle of apostasy to him. The riddle of apostasy - 680

It goes like this. When Christ "enters in" and takes over during a believer's direct experience of the Holy Spirit, He abrogates the natural man. But original sin is not expunged, since it is intrinsic to human nature; it is merely overridden by the Presence of Christ. As Hank says, even after I am born again in spirit and in truth, "I" am still sinful and corrupt – "of course."

I can do nothing good on my own. It is even heretical to say that I am saved when I accept the

Grace of God. That would make it sound as though I could achieve my own salvation, through my own act, whereas every good Christian within the pale of orthodoxy knows that I, in my natural condition, am so sinful that I can do nothing, and my salvation comes "by Grace alone through Faith alone in Christ alone."

But once Grace does come, Christ takes over my self. Christ-in-me performs in my place.

He acts. In the words of C. S. Lewis, taken from Mere Christianity, "when Christians say the

Christ-life is in them, they do not mean something mental or moral. . . . They mean that Christ is actually operating through them." Calvinism avers that we can no more refuse salvation than earn it. The fourth of the Five Points is Irresistible Grace, meaning that we cannot resist God's election of us, and the fifth is Perseverance of the Saints, meaning that we cannot lose our salvation. (The second and third points of this poisonous dogma are that God has unconditionally elected a few undeserving humans to be saved in spite of their total depravity, and that Christ's atonement had the very limited scope of applying only to these few – He did not die for the sins of the damned, but only for the secure salvation of the Elect.)

But if I am elected and Jesus has taken "me" over, how can apostasy happen? How can

"I" turn back to sin?

Do you see the conundrum? I am not here any more; Christ is here, and only Christ. Can The riddle of apostasy - 681

He turn back to sin? Or if a bit of me is still present, is it – am I – strong enough to overpower

Christ? As Paul would say, "God forbid!" But how, then?

Hank answered as all such confidence men have answered since the beginning of time: he

denied that there was a problem; he turned the question that he couldn't answer into another

question that he could answer; he expatiated on his new question-and-answer at considerable length, with biblical glosses galore; he offered his solution to the substitute problem suavely and ingratiatingly; and he soothed and comforted. The confused caller, silenced by Hank's sophistry, retreated. But the riddle of apostasy will not go away. It is the bull of subversive contradiction in the china shop of Christian theology, and the dogmatist is impaled on the horns of its dilemma:

either our human nature is so engrafted that not even God's Grace can change it; or, having been

changed by God's Grace, it could not possibly revert to itself against God's sovereign will. After

all, it only makes sense to say that we can do nothing either way: if we cannot, by merit and

piety, compel God to enter into us, then surely we cannot, even with the aid of Satan himself,

thrust God out again either. If we can resume our sinful ways – and this has to be the fallback

position of every dogmatist, for the obvious reason that apostates are legion – then the devil is

stronger than the Not-So-Almighty God, and God's Grace isn't worth very much. In which case,

to hell with it.