Great Books Archives - Page 10 of 26

Shall We Talk About Politics?

Let’s talk about Politics. Yes, I heard you groan.

But, I think you may have misinterpreted the opening sentence. Let’s talk about Politics, the book.

(Then again, maybe it was the idea of discussing Aristotle that caused you to groan.)

Has the level of political discussion declined of late? Yeah, rhetorical question. Thoughtful disagreements on the political issues of the day seem to be forbidden by some unwritten rule. The causes for this state of affairs are undoubtedly overdetermined, but perhaps the root problem is that people no longer read Aristotle.

Consider the question he raises in Book 3. Is the good man the same thing as the good citizen? That question can be framed in many interesting ways. Is being morally good necessary to being a good citizen? Is being morally good sufficient for being a good citizen? Is being a good citizen necessary or sufficient for being a morally good person?

Now right away, you are objecting that this question begs the questions of what makes someone a morally good person and what makes someone a good citizen. Exactly so. Aristotle address the first in Nichomachean Ethics, but we don’t need his definition here. Use whatever moral code you have for yourself. What is the relationship between that moral good and being a good citizen?

Ah, but what does it mean to be a good citizen? Answering that question requires a taxonomy of forms of government. For some types of government, being morally good may be antithetical to being a good citizen; for others, they may align. But, even in governments where being morally good aligns with being a good citizen, it is only people involved in governing for whom this matters. If you are not involved in governing at all, you can be a perfectly good citizen and a morally corrupt person.

The next question: what type of government should we have? If we want a good state with good citizens and good people making decisions, what type of government is best? That takes a bit more time to examine, but it becomes clear once Aristotle asks whether it is better to be ruled by good laws or good people. The latter is unambiguously better; good laws are nice and all, but they cannot account for every contingency. Good people making decisions can adapt to changing circumstances, ensuring that good laws are applied in a good way.

So, the best form of government possible is a kingship in which the king is the person “surpassing all others in goodness.” This good and benevolent dictator, excelling all others in moral goodness, will make for a most outstanding kingdom. If you want a great government, put the perfect person in charge and then go about your daily life.

Easy, right? Well, that only works as long as your ruler is a person of exceptionally high moral quality. If you end up with a bad king, then you get tyranny. Tyranny is one of the worst forms of government. So, unless you live in a world in which everyone is good or unless you have found a king-selection process to ensure only good kings, then maybe this single ruler thing isn’t such a great idea.

Should we then have a democracy and allow everyone to rule collectively? Again, this is marvelous if the society is populated by morally good people. If it isn’t, then you get mob rule. The passions of the moment rip through the populace; cooler heads do not prevail. Demagogues arise. The majority imposes its will on the minority, which sounds great unless you are in the minority.

The American Founding Fathers knew this; hence the US Constitution. It is a document for a world of imperfect people in which there are many checks and balances allowing, as Publius put it, ambition to check ambition. In this way, the Founding Fathers hoped that while we cannot generate good rulers at least we could get good laws.

But, Aristotle is one step ahead even here.

The greatest, however, of all the means we have mentioned for ensuring the stability of constitutions—but one which is nowadays generally neglected—is the education of citizens in the spirit of their constitution. There is no advantage in the best of laws, even when there are sanctioned by general civic consent, if the citizens themselves have not been attuned, by the force of habit and the influence of teaching, to the right constitutional temper…

What happens when the population no longer agrees with the spirit of the constitution? What happens when a generation rises up which is not attuned with the right constitutional temper? What happens when the people decide that the constitution gets in the way of doing what the people want to do? We would have a problem.

Imagine a society in which there are many people who no longer agree on fundamental principles, all of whom are vying for power. When one party gets control of the levers of power, there is no compulsion to compromise. Might makes right. The competition for power will resemble a civil war, because that is in fact what it is. Your side is Right; the other side is Evil. You do not compromise with Evil; it must be destroyed.

Sound familiar? Aristotle wrote about this state of affairs

Both sides are based on a sort of justice; but they both fall short of absolute justice. For this reason each side engages in factional conflict if it does not enjoy a share in the constitution in keeping with the conception of justice it happens to entertain. Those who are pre-eminent in merit would be the most justified in forming factions (though they are the last to make the attempt); for they, and they only can reasonably be regarded as enjoying an absolute superiority. [emphasis added]

Aristotle wrote that 2400 years ago. Perhaps the solution to our present problems is simply this: maybe, just maybe, if we all paused, took a deep breath, and read through Politics to remind ourselves of fundamental things, we could see our way past the present factional conflicts. After all, the end result of the present course is a choice. Would you prefer tyranny or mob rule?

Wright’s Unbearable Rage

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! That is truly one of the great rallying cries of all time.

(Trivia note: as you know, Patrick Henry is the source of that line. But, he probably cribbed it from Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy which has the lines: “It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”)

Richard Wright’s collection of short stories could well have been entitled with Patrick Henry’s immortal line. Instead, he called it Uncle Tom’s Children. Five stories (plus an autobiographical foreword), all of which are tales of a regular person driven to extraordinary acts of endurance in the face of implacable evil.

Wright is an amazing prose stylist, so these are incredibly well written stories. If you want a violent tale of good vs evil, reading any one of these stories would fit the bill. Perfect for a high school class that wants a model of an old fashioned morality tale.

Actually, the closet approximation to Wright’s stories are superhero comic books. That isn’t a joke. The villains in these stories are straight out of comic books—really evil people doing evil things for no reason other than the fact that they are evil people who like doing evil things. These villains are evil all the way down. If you are hoping that maybe the Evil Villain will show a shred of human decency, you are going to be bitterly disappointed.

The problem is recurring. You read the first story and evil triumphs. Evil triumphs again in the second story. And the third. And the fourth. Are you still hoping Good will triumph in the fifth story? Rather foolish of you. Evil always wins.

As odd as it sounds, there is more nuance in a Marvel comic book than there is in any of Wright’s tales. That is, after all, his goal. You can see the anger dripping off of ever page in these stories. There is no room for nuance here. Wright is waging a Race War, and he will not take prisoners.

In Wright’s war, the heroes are black. So are all the good, noble people. So are all the people who struggle to do the right thing. White characters come in only two varieties: extraordinary evil people and dreamy, hapless communists. The latter never actually do any good, but at least they aren’t just totally evil.

If you haven’t read the book, you might think this assessment is rather harsh. But, you don’t have to take my word for it. Richard Wright thought less well of this book than I do.

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom’s Children. When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.

Even bankers’ daughters! He is right. Wright wants to convey his anger and you the Reader are also inevitably angry at the evil people in this book. But Wright didn’t want to focus the anger on the cartoon villains. He wanted those banker’s daughters to feel complicit in the evil, not weep over it and feel good about themselves because they wept. But the stories don’t have enough depth or nuance to ever generate any other reaction than a feeling of moral virtue because you are not that evil.

The most amazing thing about Uncle Tom’s Children is that it was written right before Wright wrote his masterpiece Native Son. Reading these stories, you would never imagine that this author would be capable of turning his magnificent ability to write prose into a vehicle for a book with depth and nuance. Instead of one dimensional evil people, Native Son casts Society itself in the role of the villain. Native Son’s protagonist Bigger is doomed not because of some evil two-bit sheriff, but because the entire society leaves him no place to turn.

What then do we do with Uncle Tom’s Children? Is there anything to learn from a collection of comic book stories written by a master of prose? Yes, but it really isn’t the lesson Wright wants us to learn. In the face of formidable evil, how should we respond? Wright’s anger is one option. In the last story, “Bright and Morning Star,” Wright lays out the other option. At the outset of the story, the protagonist is humming the song from which the story title is taken. Wright rejects the answer of that song. Wright castigates that answer as the voice of the wrong side in the Race War. But, that other answer offers a promise of a reaction to evil that is something other than Wright’s Unbearable Rage.

I’ve found a friend in Jesus, He’s everything to me,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul;
The Lily of the Valley, in Him alone I see
All I need to cleanse and make me fully whole.
In sorrow He’s my comfort, in trouble He’s my stay;
He tells me every care on Him to roll.

Refrain:
He’s the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.

He all my grief has taken, and all my sorrows borne;
In temptation He’s my strong and mighty tow’r;
I’ve all for Him forsaken, and all my idols torn
From my heart and now He keeps me by His pow’r.
Though all the world forsake me, and Satan tempt me sore,
Through Jesus I shall safely reach the goal.

He’ll never, never leave me, nor yet forsake me here,
While I live by faith and do His blessed will;
A wall of fire about me, I’ve nothing now to fear,
From His manna He my hungry soul shall fill.
Then sweeping up to glory to see His blessed face,
Where rivers of delight shall ever roll.

A Cautionary Tale

“You know these new novels make me tired….Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”

Thus says a character is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. (Gotta love Fitzgerald having a character complain about Fitzgerald’s previous novel.)

Shoddy realism. That is not something the characters in this novel only want to avoid in their books. They also want to avoid it in their actual lives. Given the choice between a life mired in shoddy realism or a life imbued with romanticism, which would you prefer? It’s a pointless thing to contemplate, of course. You are stuck with realism, shoddy realism at that, in your life.

You are stuck with realism, but are the characters in this novel? They are Beautiful. As you know, the Beautiful are not like you and I. They have more Beauty. They lead Beautiful lives surrounded by Beautiful things and Beautiful people. And by the way, they are also Damned. (Note there is no “the” before “Damned” in the title.)

What’s the problem?

Anthony and Gloria, the Beautiful and Damned of the title, have it all. They have youth and beauty and money. The world sits before them, its wares on display and all for the having. They can do anything they want. Anything at all. What do they want to do? Ah, there’s the rub. Going to parties and getting drunk then moving to the country and getting drunk then moving back to the city and getting drunk, year after year after year after…well, it gets a bit old.

But, this is not a repetitive and dull book. I had the occasion to talk about it with a few former and current students. Every one of them found it terrifying. Why? Loathe as they were to admit it, they all recognized themselves in Anthony and Gloria. Graduating from an elite liberal arts college, full of the energy and beauty of youth, dreaming of a life where they can do what they will, they are faced with all the promise of being the Beautiful. Who could want anything more than my current and former students have?

Starting off the novel with a wonderful image of their future selves, seeing people living that perfect life to the fullest and getting exactly what they want, it is easy to remember only the first two words of the title and imagine this is going to be a story of glittering success. The descent starts slowly enough, but as it gains momentum, you became a bit alarmed. Anthony and Gloria are not alarmed, however; they just keep going on, leading their beautiful lives which are becoming less and less beautiful by the moment. By the end of the novel, Anthony and Gloria are still living in their world of dreams, and it is only the Reader who realizes the Dream is a Nightmare.

How did this happen?

“I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success.”

Anthony says that, and he is exactly right. The problem was that Anthony did indeed have everything he wanted. He didn’t have to work for a thing; all of life was just handed to him. And, as a result, Anthony never developed that one thing which is indispensable to leading a life worth living: Good Character. It is not enough to have wealth and beauty. You also need a work ethic, a moral code, the willingness to sacrifice today to reap benefits tomorrow, a vocation, a higher purpose. Without these things, all the wealth and invitations to the right parties and the new toys are meaningless nothings. Without these things you can be the beautiful, but then you are also the damned.

It is not that Anthony and Gloria are unaware of the need for building character. In a rather amusing moment, when Anthony mentions that he has done some work and Gloria scoffs, Anthony points to an essay he wrote, exclaiming, “And what’s more Gloria, you know I sat up till five o-clock in the morning finishing it.”

If you didn’t laugh at that line, it is because you are a recent graduate of an elite liberal arts college. These colleges accept the Beautiful: the smart or wealthy or talented or (the gold mine) all three. We run them through a “rigorous course of study.” That “rigor” requires the students to occasionally stay up until 5 o-clock in the morning to do an assignment. Not finish an assignment—do the assignment. It’s not that the students do not work; they do stay up those nights before an exam. What most of them never do, however, is engage in concentrated effort on a single project over a sustained period of time. There are students who do senior theses and there are classes requiring substantive research papers and other classes with large high-stakes exams. But, it is a relatively easy matter to navigate the modern college and avoid all those things that require developing a work ethic which will enable the person to work for long stretches day after day on a difficult project. Don’t blame the students. It is the faculty who have switched away from the “high stakes assessment strategies” to the more “student-friendly” grading.

As a result, the students, both the ones who did work hard in college and the ones who did not, no longer view the world as a cruel and hard place where to succeed you must work very hard. They are truly like Anthony and Gloria. That is why this novel is so terrifying to them.

Dick: (pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.
Maury: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

There is the point of The Beautiful and Damned. The book itself is a meaningless romp watching some characters make a whole bunch of really bad decisions. What makes the book worth reading is that maybe, just maybe, it will remind you that life is more than getting the things you want. A Good Life is a Life with Meaning. What is the meaning of your life? What is your chief end? Answer that and you have a chance of escaping the fate of having your life be described by the title of this book.

Roth and Original Sin

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner wrote that line in Sanctuary, published in 1931. In this sense, Philip Roth is Faulkner’s heir.

Roth is a strange author to recommend. He writes beautifully, wrestles with deep questions, and his books are quite well described by his own definition of satire: “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.” But, along with the good, you have to take a lot of ruminations about sex.

Fifteen years ago, I tried to read Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint) and about two dozen pages in, I gave up, thinking I would never return. Then along came one of those bright, fascinating students with whom every conversation was lively, fun, and thoughtful and she really wanted to read a Roth novel as part of an independent study. I figured I might as well give him another chance. The Plot Against America. Wow, it was good.

So, the next semester, she did another independent study and all we did was read Roth. Since then, his novels have been regularly on my To Be Read list. The Library of America has his complete works! (A curious thing about the Library of America Roth novels—the spines on the dust jackets are formatted differently than on every other LOA volume. It is strange looking. I have no idea why they broke the format for Roth.)

The latest read: The Human Stain.

First, the title. It shows up in the novel in a discussion about crows. A crow raised by humans escapes the house and finds itself attacked by the other crows.

“That’s what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia. “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That’s how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it’s inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia’s take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection.

Roth is thinking about Oedipus (more about that anon), but another name for “The Human Stain” is “Original Sin.” Original sin precedes disobedience. Original sin encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. Try to explain Original Sin and you’ll see; it is very hard to make sense of how we all become permanently stained with original sin before birth. But we are. Augustine knew this, which is why he has that odd bit at the start of Confessions lamenting how sinful he was as a baby for selfishly crying for milk.

Original sin is in everyone. It is indwelling, inherent and defining. It is inescapable. It is a horrible, elemental imperfection.

It is interesting to look at the reviews of The Human Stain. Most of them miss the point entirely, largely because they neither noticed the title of the book nor the epigraph from Oedipus the King. Most reviews focus on the event that kicks off the novel.

Coleman Silk was a professor and the Dean of Faculty at Athena College, the fictional place in the Berkshires near where Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman resides. Well, Silk, it turns out, is also an old Jewish man, so Roth has two alter-egos in this novel. Roth likes to put himself in his books. (He even has a set of books where the fictional protagonist is named Philip Roth.)

Silk is teaching a class on the Greeks late in his life. Fourteen students. Half-way through the semester, he had only seen 12 of the students. So one day he asks the dozen students who are there about the ones who have never shown up to class, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”

Career over.

The two students whom he had never seen were Black, and thus his comment was obviously interpreted to be racially motivated. He protested that “spooks” means “ghosts” and he had never even seen these students, so how could he possibly be using a racial slur? His protests fell on deaf ears. He ended up leaving the college. The novel picks up when Silk visits Zuckerman and asks him to write up the story. (Curiously, Roth later revealed that this episode actually happened at Princeton. A professor actually said exactly what Silk said in the novel and the furor ensued.)

So, at the start of the novel, you think you are settling in for a long tale of the academy. Easy target. But then there is a genuinely surprising development (well, surprising unless you have previously read a review or you read what comes next in this here blog post). Silk had lived his entire adult life deceiving everyone. He is Black. His skin is light enough that when he joined the army, he changed his race and when he got out of the army, he walked away from his family, and proceeded to live his life as if he was a white Jew. He got married, had children and none of them ever knew any different.

So, when the furor erupts at Athena College, Silk cannot say that he is not just some old white professor hurling racial slurs. He has spent his whole life trying to escape from his past. In the end, his attempt to avoid his past becomes the very reason he cannot solve the problems of the present. Cue Oedipus.

The story is set against the backdrop of the national news story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And in a conversation Silk overhears in a local café, three young men are discussing how Clinton’s problem is that now that he was on the President, he could not escape his Arkansas past.

Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him….What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you’re still back in Arkansas, you don’t fall from a very great height…the scale was right in Arkansas. Here it was all out of whack. And it must have driven him crazy. President of the United States, he has access to everything, and he can’t touch it. This was hell.

Silk cannot escape his past. Clinton cannot escape his past. And as soon as you notice the pattern, you realize that nobody in this book can escape their past. Everyone is stamped with the Human Stain. “We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint.” There is nothing that can be done about it.

As the tale of Oedipus shows, it is impossible to cure ourselves of the fact that we leave that stain on the world. There is no purification possible. The attempt to cleanse is a joke. But, that is not enough for Roth. He goes even further: “The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity?”

Because Roth is thinking about the Oedipus story, this conclusion follows. Oedipus is doomed. Indeed, the whole of Greek tragedy teaches the same lesson. We are all doomed. Our flaws define us and we fall and there is nothing that can be done. It you attempt to cure the stain, you make things worse.

The Human Stain perfectly captures the underlying tone of all of Roth’s novels. There is a fatalism in Roth. He cannot escape his own past. He cannot escape the moral outrage he feels when seeing the effects of the Human Stain, of original sin. And so, he turns to satire, to that comic art, to being the clown talking endlessly about sex, but underneath the clowning is that outrage that we are all Oedipus and we are all doomed.

How deeply does the Human Stain mark us? Consider: What if Roth is wrong? What if there was a way to purify yourself from the Human Stain? Would you even be interested?

Faith and Uncertainty

There is something about the human mind that does not like uncertainty; a mystery leaves a hole in the psyche that simply must be filled.

This is a rather good thing for the survival of the species. If you heard a strange growl behind you and you didn’t wonder what was causing it, you might not be around to generate offspring.

That doesn’t explain, though, why we like to know what happened in a bit of fiction. Consider Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” The story is Henry James looking right at you and saying, “You don’t like uncertainty. It makes you anxious not to know what is going on. Well, here, let me turn the screw a little more and increase your anxiety.”

The plot in brief: a governess goes to a large country manor to watch a couple of wonderfully charming children, a boy and a girl. While there, she sees a male ghost, whom she finds out look just like a former servant on the estate. Shortly thereafter she sees a female ghost, who looks like the former governess. She keeps seeing the ghosts. Nobody else ever sees the ghosts. Her terror mounts. Then the ghost appears in the presence of one of the other servants and the young girl. Neither one sees the ghost as the governess shrieks in terror. Afraid of the governess and her crazy tales of seeing ghosts, the servant and the girl leave the estate. Soon thereafter, left alone with the young boy, the governess sees the male ghost coming into the room to attack her or the boy. In her terror, she murders the young boy. End of story.

The question: are the ghosts real or just a figment of the active imagination of the governess?

Oh, that wasn’t actually the plot of the Henry James story.

The plot in brief: a governess goes to a large country manor to watch a couple of what we will soon discover are terrifying children. She discovers to her horror that the ghosts of a pair of former servants are haunting the place. Even more terrifying, the children can see the ghosts, yet refuse to acknowledge that they are there. She begins to realize that the children have a connection with these ghosts. There are hints that she is afraid that before they died, the former servants may have had a relationship with these children, perhaps even a sexual relationship. The ghosts and the children may or may not be planning to all unite again in a sort of ghostly family. Eventually she catches the daughter running off with the female ghost, but when she exposes the matter, the daughter becomes furious and refuses to have anything more to do with the governess. The young girl leaves. Left alone with the governess, the young boy is in the room when the male ghost shows up. The governess sees the ghost first, and then the boy screams out, “You devil” and then mysteriously dies.

The question: was the young boy calling the governess a devil because she had exposed the existence of the ghosts or the ghost a devil because he was afraid of the ghost?

Now, Dear Reader, you have two plot outlines, both of which lead to a question. The answer to the question will color how you read the entire story. You can hunt for clues in the story to answer the question. Enjoy.

But, first, which one of those is the real plot of “The Turn of the Screw”?

Before you answer, there is also this important tidbit: the bulk of the story is a manuscript written by the governess herself. Is she a reliable narrator?

This is the brilliance of the Henry James story. If you just read it, having no idea what to expect, you might very well think you just read a rather conventional tale, without a lot of mystery. I read a story about governess who was slightly insane and just seeing things until her mind snapped and she murdered a young boy. Ho-hum, I thought. Then I Googled the book and discovered that everyone else also knows exactly what this story is about, but that there is zero agreement which story is the correct one. I then chatted with a couple of former students about the book, and discovered they also read a different book than I read.

That, of course sends everybody back to the text to see why everyone else is wrong. Going back, you discover something remarkable. James, ever the precise writer, has oh so carefully arranged every trace of evidence for your preferred theory in a way that it can actually be read in a completely different manner.

This is not the case of a book which just doesn’t make any sense. Thomas Pynchon writes books like that; when you hit the end there is absolutely no point in going back to try to figure out what just happened in the novel; the novel (take your pick which one—they are all the same—but if you want the best example, Gravity’s Rainbow) deliberately makes no sense—that is the point.

“The Turn of the Screw,” in contrast, makes perfect sense. There is a perfectly coherent story here, and there is a ton of evidence that the story is saying exactly what you thought it said. Moreover, there is not a single unexplainable part of the story. It all fits neatly in a little box.

That is true, no matter which of the above plots you think is the actual plot of the story.

The Big Question: how does this uncertainty about the plot of “The Turn of the Screw” make you feel? Is the answer simply that the story has no meaning? Can you read it and say, “The ghosts are like Schrodinger’s cat, neither there nor not there, but the box is one which it is impossible to open”?

What if I told you that “The Turn of the Screw” was a true story? It comes with an introduction where a narrator, who could very well be Henry James, is talking with someone who has the governess’ manuscript. Maybe the story isn’t fiction at all. (OK, you know it is fiction (how?), but pretend for a second that you don’t know.) If the story is true, are you still perfectly willing to accept that there is no correct version of the plot?

Life is like that. The history of theology and philosophy is full of explanations of the nature of life. You might think you could just sit down and reason out the world, but you will rapidly find that many have gone before you and reasoned about the world. What did they find? Not the same thing.

You cannot escape the fact that if you are going to understand the world, you have to start by believing one thing. Then you can work out the rest. You can test your theory of the world against the world to see if it collapses. Is it possible, for example, that in “The Turn of the Screw” the people you thought were real are the ghosts and the people you thought were ghosts are the real people? I haven’t tried to see if that works too—I didn’t see anyone propose it, so I have no idea if anyone has ever tried to see if that theory works. Maybe it works. Maybe there is some place in the narrative that it would break down and demonstrate it doesn’t fit the world. In that case, you’d toss the theory aside and begin anew.

That is how we live our lives. We start with faith. We must start with faith in something. And from there, we build up a world. People are confused about this fact all the time. People think it is faith that needs to be examined. People think that other people’s faith is silly or childish or something. But, the faith isn’t the only question worth discussing. Another interesting discussion is whether starting with wherever you place your faith, do the facts of the world fit? What does that story of the world look like? Are there wobbly parts or unexplained parts?

As Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy, if a man starts by believing he is Napoleon, there is no point in arguing with him about whether he is Napoleon. Far more interesting is to explore the world of this Napoleon. Ask, him “If you are Napoleon, then why is the world the way it is? Why don’t you fix this shabby little world if you are the Great Napoleon?” That conversation is really interesting. You might learn something about your own world in that conversation.

You say that there is a God. Then why did God create the world in this way instead of another way? You say there is no God. Then why do you follow a moral code? You say that the world is determined. Then why do you have faith in your own mental processes? You say you have free will. Then why do you decide to do so many things you wish you did not do?

“The Turn of the Screw” is a lesson in world building. What you start believing has consequences for how you interpret a great many details of this world. How certain are you that the facts of this world are not better explained by that person over there with a different starting place, a different faith?

Frontier Justice

“Gil and I crossed the eastern divide about two by the sun.”

We just left civilization behind. The Wild West is the protagonist in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident.

The genre? It sure look like a novel, a Western with cowboys and all, but it really belongs in the political philosophy section of your library. Great Book.

The story: Gil and Our Narrator roll into town just in time to hear about some cattle rustling which resulted in the death of a cowboy. The sheriff is not around. A lynch mob forms and heads out to bring…what? Justice? Murder? That is the question.

As you sit in comfort in the heart of Civilized Society, it is easy to imagine that you are protected by that large impersonal force called The Law. You are unlikely to be murdered today by a stranger; everyone you meet is likely to respect your rights to keep your property. The Law is your friend.

But, that abstract entity called The Law cannot maintain itself. It is maintained by the fact that the people you meet have internalized it; they obey its dictates. Why? Why do people obey The Law? It’s either good character or fear of punishment. Truth be told, you don’t really which; you are just glad that they obey The Law.

You will most likely go your entire life never having to think more about The Law. It is mere background to your daily life. Sure every now and then you’ll run afoul of the minor manifestations of the law; jay-walking and exceeding posted limits on the speed with which you may drive your motor car are your most frequent infractions. But these are merely minor annoyances. They are not The Law.

Law is more than the words that put it on the books; law is more than any decisions that may be made from it; law is more than the particular code of it stated at any one time or in any one place or nation; more than any man, lawyer or judge, sheriff or jailer, who may represent it. True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind. None of man’s temples, none of his religions, none of his weapons, his tools, his arts, his sciences, nothing else he has grown to, is so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice. The true law is something in itself, it is the spirit of the moral nature of man; it is an existence apart, like God, and as worthy of worship as God. If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

That is part of the argument of Davies, who is desperately trying to stop the lynch mob from its extralegal activity.

If Davies is right, The Law is something above any one of us; a thing pure and worthy of veneration. If Davies is right, then it is indeed a test of character to abide by the dictates of The Law even when it seems expedient to do otherwise. If Davies is right, The Law trumps our preferences. If Davies is right, then it is better to let the murderers and cattle thieves escape than to go forth and hang them.

A man lies dead. His blood cries out. The Law has been broken. Justice is demanded. But, because there is no sheriff around, the killer goes free? Is that Justice? Davies again:

“If we go out and hang two or three men,” he finished, “without doing what the law says, forming a posse and bringing the men in for trial, then by the same law, we’re not officers of justice, but due to be hanged ourselves.”
“And who’ll hang us?” Winder wanted to know.
“Maybe nobody,” Davies admitted. “Then our crime’s worse than a murderer’s. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.”

Them’s some fine words to be sure. But, who, one might ask Davies, gets to enforce The Law? Who gives the sheriff his authority if not the people of the town? And if the people of the town decide to grant that authority to the lynch mob they all just joined, who is to say that this was not a duly constituted legal arrangement? Winder is onto something there—you don’t hang the hangman. The hangman only has the right to hang someone because the society has given him that right.

In the East, in civilization, there are those trappings of government, the kings or the elected officials who bring a veneer of respectability to the appointing of the hangman. But, what happens when you cross that divide and enter the land where civilization is in its infancy? A wrong has been done. Is it your job to right the wrong by bringing justice to the wrongdoer or to stand aside and let the wrongdoer go free?

The problem is even worse. You think you are an individual, but how free are you to make your own decisions? You are, after all, part of the pack. As young Tetley explains:

“Why are we riding up here, twenty-eight of us,” he demanded, “when every one of us would rather be doing something else?…We’re doing it because we’re in the pack, because we’re afraid not to be in the pack. We don’t dare show our pack weakness; we don’t dare resist the pack.”

I hear you. You are thinking that this is a perfect explanation for why the lynch mob is a bad thing; everyone knows it is a bad thing but have joined it anyway because everyone else is joining it. But, your new advocate, young Tetley, is a coward and a weakling. He would be quite happy joining the pack if it would have decided to just stay home. He doesn’t want to be out of the pack; he just wants a weaker, more cowardly pack.

How sure are you that your instinct that the lynch mob is wrong is not simply your desire to avoid the responsibility of enforcing The Law? How sure are you that you aren’t afraid to join the lynch mob simply because you know all your friends are cowards too and you live in that cowardly pack in which nobody is brave enough to be the hangman?

The Ox-Bow Incident is a marvelous reflection on the creation of a society, the nature of justice, and the rule of law. It is also great story, well-written and gripping. So, why is it not more widely read? Westerns are out of favor these days; we no longer tell tales of cowboys. The Library of America just included this story in its new volume The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 50s. Let us hope this brings attention to a book well worth your time.