James E Hartley

Big Brother Doesn’t Need to Watch You

Big Brother is watching You.
Newspeak.
Thoughtcrime.
Doublethink.
Two minutes hate.

George Orwell’s 1984 needs no introduction.

I read this book with one of my reading groups in the Fall. In this particular group, each of the students sends in a question which crystalized in her mind while reading it. Just a question; there is no obligation to try to answer it.

There is one question which has haunted me since it showed up in my Inbox.

But, first the background. Our hero, Winston, has been captured by the Party and is undergoing his mental retraining exercises (commonly called torture) in the dreaded Room 101. In the midst of this process, his tormentor notes the following:

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside—irrelevant.

That is a striking claim. Is it true?

Let us first note that in the modern age, everybody talks as if it is true. Well, it is true of other people.

Think about the current discussion about politics. There are many interesting facets of the polarization which is on everyone’s mind, but for now think about how people on the other side of the divide from you get their news and their views on current events. You immediately thought of FOX News/Talk Radio or Mainstream Media (MSM, if you are really hip).

Now what do we know about those people on the other side? They have been brainwashed, obviously. They have been conditioned by Fake and Misleading News to believe a narrative about the world which simply isn’t true.

You, of course, get your news from reliable news sources and you think for yourself. But, those other people are clearly deluded. It’s really quite obvious, isn’t it? Surely, no thinking, reasonable person would ever agree with them.

Those other people are incredibly malleable. They cannot resist the manipulations of the nefarious forces wielding misinformation and lies in an attempt to gain power.

So, yes, the quotation above is scary because you know it is true. You are watching it unfold. Malleable people being blindly led into a world of Newspeak where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and most importantly, Ignorance is Strength.

You do know those other people think that you are the one who is malleable and misled. But, you also know that is absurd. After all, you are the thoughtful one who reads widely and thinks clearly.

Set aside for a second the question of why you are so certain you are right. (Don’t worry. Of course you are right. It is really rather silly to even wonder if you are. Those people on the other side of the political divide are the hapless sheep following malevolent forces trying to lead us to doom. You, on the other hand, are free-thinking, thoughtful, and right. It’s obvious.)

Here is the question from the student which has haunted me:

In Room 101, hypothetically what would have happened if Winston hadn’t given in? I know that’s very unlikely because of the amount of physical and psychological torture he had already gone through, and the fact that the room contains each person’s worst fear. But isn’t there some possibility that someone would be able to resist even the torture in room 101? Or as Winston thinks later, rebel by hating Big Brother in the last seconds before the bullet hits their head? It just seems like there has to be some way to retain even the smallest amount of independent thought, even after going through Big Brother’s torture and conditioning.

Am I infinitely malleable? Could I retain even the smallest amount of independent thought in the face of a coordinated and systematic attack upon it? Note the start of the last line in that question: “It just seems like there has to be some way…” It must be true? Right?

Why must it be true? The alternative is terrifying. What if the Party is right? What if every last bit of independence in me could be driven out?

And then the real horror steps in: why am I so certain that this hasn’t actually happened to me already? What if I have already been completely formed by people outside myself? Why am I so certain that I do have independent thoughts?

The reason this question has haunted me is not because I am concerned that I no longer have independent thought. Obviously I do. The thing that concerns me is that I am not concerned about that question. After all, actually having independent thought and being infinitely malleable would be indistinguishable to me—in both cases, I would think that I was the one forming my opinions.

Like I said, I am not really worried about that. But, this generated another question, also implicit in my student’s question. In an age when everyone knows that those other people are mindless, infinitely malleable sheep, why have I been able to so firmly resist the siren calls of the Party? If everyone else is so susceptible to losing independence of thought, then what is the secret to resisting it in the face of exactly the same pressures everyone else is facing?

Another way of putting it: If many people are infinitely malleable and have lost independence of thought, what is the thing that allows the free thinkers to avoid that trap? Curiously, the first thought is that the free thinkers have found all the other free thinkers and are influenced by those people rather than the brainwashers…but, that rather begs the question doesn’t it?

I don’t know the answer to the question of how to preserve independence of thought in an era when so few people seem to have it. Like I said, my student’s question has haunted me.

But, I suspect the answer has something to do with the Great Books and a genuine liberal arts education. Reading and thinking deeply about a range of books which were not written in the current era but speak timeless truths has to help. Most importantly, the fact that the authors of all those Great Books agree on precisely nothing also helps. When you struggle with Plato and Nietzsche and Orwell, you have to think about deeper things and you realize that no matter what you conclude, hard thinking requires humility. What if this author is correct?

What is the way to preserve independent thought? I have no idea if it would work in Room 101 (and I hope to never find out), but surely treating Great Books authors seriously, even when (or especially when) you think they are wrong, has to work. It just seems like this must be true. Right?

The Love of Scrooge

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Obviously, I recently reread A Christmas Carol. I’ve been reading this story every December for three decades. If the definition of a Great Book is one which you can reread many times and always discover something new, then A Christmas Carol is indisputably a Great Book.

If T.S. Eliot were to write A Christmas Carol, it would begin with an old man, stiffening in a decaying house, unconsciously saying, “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?” In the face of a dying world, we are all Ebenezer Scrooge. When I have noted in the past that we are living in the Waste Land, I am frequently met with an objection that the world isn’t all that bad. Indeed, to compare us all to Scrooge will strike many (most? all?) as absurd. So, consider anew Dickens’ tale. And then ask yourself, Whom do you Love?

Love has been unbelievably corrupted in the modern world. Consider this: When I say I love my wife and my kids, everybody nods politely. (Or, if they are Mount Holyoke students, they say “Ahh, that’s so sweet.”) If I say I love humanity, well, it’s actually just boilerplate and nobody will bat an eye. But if I say I love my students, then either it sounds like another banal triviality or something sounds a bit off. And if I were to look a student in the eye and say to her, “I love you”…well, you can imagine the reaction.

But why? The second greatest commandment is what?

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22: 34-40, ESV)

And, what does it mean to love your neighbor?

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, ESV)

Now I can say I love Humanity and that’s OK. But the Good Samaritan didn’t love Humanity; he loved the hurting man on the side of the road to Jericho. He loved him enough to make sacrifices for that man; he cared enough for that man to take the time to treat the man as if he was important, solely because that man was inherently important. The Good Samaritan is a model of love.

And Scrooge is also a model of love. Scrooge is what we can become. Because of Christmas, because in the juvescence of the year /Came Christ the tiger, we have the possibility of loving our neighbors.

Yet, we have no language with which we can express that love. I do love my students. It’s my Christian obligation to do so, but that doesn’t make the love somehow less genuine.

Some of my students I love a lot. I hope those students know that, but sometimes I am not sure they do. It is surely a sign of the poverty not of our language but of our culture that I cannot simply tell those students, “You know, of course, that I love you.” Most of the time, this probably doesn’t matter all that much. But every now and then, I have been talking to a student, for whom the simple statement “I love you” would make a world of difference, and yet because of the degradation of our culture, there is no way to say those words without the very real risk of them being terribly and horribly misunderstood.

We all know that feeling loved is vital to the human soul; it is not some strange accident that the two greatest commandments are both about Love. And yet, we have lost the ability to express the very idea of a love without an overtone of the romantic or the erotic or the merely abstract.

And so, this Christmastime, I want to say to those students, both current and past, with whom I have a deep bond of friendship, and I hope you know who you are: I love you. A lot.

If you haven’t read A Christmas Carol yet this year, I’d highly recommend it. And, even better, read the text from which that book draws its moral lesson. Then, emulate Scrooge at the end of the story, and pick someone you know who is not a member of your family and for whom you feel no romantic or erotic attachment at all, and tell that person, “I love you.”

The Future of Charlie Brown

From Peanuts: The Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, 1953-1954.

Scene: Schroeder at his piano, Charlie Brown leaning over the piano facing Schroeder, handing him a piece of paper.

Panel 1: Charlie Brown: “I want to show you my new comic strip, Schroeder because I think you’ll appreciate it.”
Panel 2: Charlie Brown: “This one musician asks the other if he can play the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ See? And this guy says, ‘Oh, I guess I can Handel it!’”
Panel 3: Charlie Brown: “Get it? Get it? Pretty good, huh? Huh?!!’
Panel 4: (Charlie Brown alone, walking away): “It’s sort of sad when you think of a kid like that going through life without a sense of humor.”

One of the interesting byproducts of the demise of printed newspapers is the looming end of the Comic Strip. Once upon a time, the Comic Strip was a cultural landmark, the sort of thing everyone read. The Peanuts were as well-known as anyone could be.

Take the strip above, for example. What kind of piano is Schroeder playing? Why would Charlie Brown assume Schroeder would appreciate the Handel joke? Why didn’t Schroeder appreciate the Handel joke? What does Charlie Brown mean when he says “a kid like that”? The whole joke of the comic strip hinges on the reader knowing the answers to those questions. There is nothing in the strip itself that explains why it is funny.

The comic strip as an art form is actually quite amazing. Four panels on Monday through Saturday; a larger set of panels in three rows on Sunday. The Sunday one had an extra feature; the first row had to be detachable; it needed to relate to the second and third rows, but the second and third rows had to be standalone because not all newspapers printed all three rows.

Now do that every single day of the year. You can’t skip a day. Every day a new little story with a punch line. You can reuse punch lines if the setup is slightly different, but you can’t just reuse the whole strip. And, if you are serious about it, you never miss a day.

Over his career, Schulz created 17,897 comic strips. Think about that for a second.

That is a prodigious achievement. Stunning, in fact. There really isn’t anything like it. Calvin and Hobbes is probably the second most well-known comic strip. There are 3,160 strips in that series.

And, as noted above, with the demise of newspapers, it is a feat which will never be matched. There are on-line comics, but it simply isn’t the same. The newspaper imposed a structure on the form. It is much like the rules for creating a sonnet. There are other kinds of poetry, but to be a sonnet, it has to follow the rules.

Peanuts stands alone in this art form. Yes, there are other great comics which expanded the possibilities of the art form (e.g., Calvin and Hobbs, The Far Side, maybe Dilbert or Doonesbury). But, nothing had anywhere near the cultural reach of Peanuts.

Over the years, readers would get to know these characters. The present volume for example starts with Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Violet, Shermy, Patty (not Peppermint Patty) and Snoopy all as staple characters. Pigpen shows up. (So does Charlotte Braun, whom I had never seen before—thankfully, Schulz ditched her in 1955—a character whose sole features are that her name was similar to Charlie Brown and she shouted all the time. Zero potential there.)

All these characters are clearly in their infancy; later on they grow and change. Snoopy, for example, is an amusing and playful dog, but there is no hint here that he will develop an intense inner life and end up in battles with the Red Baron. Lucy has not yet opened her psychiatrist booth. Linus does not yet have his security blanket. Charlie Brown has not become fully Charlie Brownish. Sally and Woodstock and Peppermint Patty haven’t arrived. And yet, even here in the early years of the strip, the format is set. It is homey.

The odd part of reading a collection of comic strips is that it changes that homey feeling just a bit. It was quite different when every day you woke up and read the next installment in the life of the Peanuts. Collected together, you can breeze right through them, one after another. All the charm is there, but again, the form of the daily comic strip imposed its own way of reading. At the end of each strip, you necessarily had to pause for a whole day before moving on. That left a feeling that you were moving through life with these characters. You just can’t get that same feeling in a collection.

(The same thing is happening in TV these days. Binge watching means you don’t have to wait a week to see what happens next.)

All of this presents an interesting problem. I love Peanuts. I found this collection utterly charming. A marvelous book to read slowly, a few pages a night. But, if you didn’t grow up with Peanuts, would the book have anywhere near the same charm? Consider:

Charlie Brown sitting next to Violet on the curb
Panel 1: Charlie Brown, “Nobody loves me.”
Panel 2: Charlie Brown: “Nobody even Likes me.”
Panel 3: Carlie Brown: “In fact, nobody even Tolerates me”
Panel 4: Violet: “We do, too!”

That is funny. But imagine you had no idea who Charlie Brown or Violet are. Imagine you just saw that strip out of the blue as two kids sitting on a curb. Then, it is not funny at all; in fact, it is really mean and depressing.

So, will the next generation ever discover Peanuts? I asked a few students about it. One remarked, “Oh yeah, my grandparents read it.” Sigh. My own kids are no better. “Schroeder? Is he the one with the piano?”

Read some Peanuts today. Or at least watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special this year. This is a cultural heritage; it is incumbent upon us to ensure it is not lost.

What is Creation?

File this under: Books that should be much more widely read than they are.

Creation and New Creation: Understanding God’s Creation Project, by Sean McDonough

If you have any interest at all in Christian theology, you should order this book right now. You can even use the image of the book cover to the right to do so.

Theology is a tricky genre. Books tend to fall into three camps.

First there are the books written by and for academic theologians. Like all academic books in any discipline, most are dense, unreadable and not really worth reading. The exceptions become the Great Books. These are the books you read because you want to know what the author has argued. Think: books by people who will become the next Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin. Authors like that are worth reading. It is not a criticism that most people trying to write deep works of theology are not writing Great Books. That is the nature of the game. But, if you are outside the guild, most books in this genre are not worth reading.

The second type of books are the commentaries. The audience here is a combination of other academics and pastors. For the most part, commentaries are very tedious to read. They seem designed to allow a pastor faced with having to give a sermon on verses 10-19 of some chapter in the Bible to have a one-stop source of enough anecdotes and cross references to fill up a 30 minute sermon. There are some genuine insights in a Great Commentary, but even the best commentaries makes lousy reading on a Tuesday night.

The third type of book is aimed at a mass audience. Most of these are Theology Lite combined with some exhortation to Go Forth and Do Good. There is some genuinely good work done in this genre, and many people read and profit from these books. Finding the good books like this is like looking for gems in a desert; you know they are out there, but you really need a map to find them.

So, into which category does McDonough’s book fall? None of them. And that is the thing that makes this book stand apart.

As the subtitle notes, McDonough sets out to examine “God’s Creation Project.” Someone lent me a copy of the book, saying I would like it. I flipped through it to see what it was and instantly realized I needed to buy a copy because this was a book I was going to seriously mark up.

The book is structured around questions about the Creation Project. Chapter by chapter, McDonough raises a series of deep theological questions about Creation and then launches into an exploration of the assorted answers people have given to the questions. McDonough is a crisp writer, sketching out complicated theological puzzles with seeming ease.

But, then, McDonough does something extraordinary. He never gives into the temptation to pretend there are good answers to the difficult questions. He fairly examines the strong and weak parts of assorted answers and then if there is no obvious answer, just leaves the question on the table.

When I teach courses or give lectures on Western Civilization, I always start by noting that the History of Western Civilization is a history of questions, not a history of answers. That is what makes Western Civilization unique; it is constantly in search of answers. Theology is like that too. We still have not discovered all the depths of God or Scripture; there are always new things to learn. And the way to learn these things is to start by acknowledging we don’t have all the answers.

What makes McDonough’s book so extraordinary is that I finished reading it with more questions than I had when I started. I learned questions in his book I did not know existed. I discovered answers I had when I started evaporated under McDonough’s deft exploration of alternatives.

In other words: I know less about God’s Creation Project now than when I started this book. I am vastly more fascinated by the subject than I have ever been before. That is extremely high praise.

What does the book cover? Here are some of the questions.

Why did God create the world?

Was the purpose of Creation to enable Christ to redeem it?

Did God choose to create the world or was creating the world a necessary part of His being? In other words, is being a Creator an inherent characteristic of God or a choice God made?

Is this the best of all possible worlds?

How does an infinite, eternal God create a finite, temporal world?

When was the world created? That is not just how old is the world, but also what does it mean to discuss the time before the world was created?

Where is the world (or more properly, the Universe) located?

Is God in the Universe or outside the Universe? Or, is the Universe inside God?

Was the world created from nothing?

Was Eden inside or outside of time and space? Was the first human created inside or outside of Eden or the world?

How important is Plato in understanding Christian theology?

Would a theology without Platonic influence be a superior or inferior theology?

Is creation an event that has happened or is creation continually happening?

What exactly is beauty?

Let me be very clear. The above list of questions is not exhaustive. There are many more in this book. I have answers to some of those questions which I am reasonably confident are correct. I don’t even have a guess about how to answer others.

I am perfectly confident, however, that if you are at all interested in this topic, you read that list of questions and are intrigued by some of them. That is why you want to read this book. It may not give you an answer; it may make you even more confused and doubtful of the answers you thought you had. You may not find every question equally interesting. But, if you like thinking about Big Questions that don’t have obvious answers, then there is no way you will read this book and not be very glad you did so.

Related Posts
Benedict XVI In the Beginning… “Why Creation Matters”
Sayers, Dorothy The Mind of the Maker “You are a Creator”

Bad Blood

There are two competing narratives about the financial sector in America. It has always been this way. If there is one societal institution which has sharply divided Americans since the Founding, it is banking and finance. From Andrew Jackson’s War on the National Bank to Operation Wall Street, it’s the same argument over and over.

On the one side, we hear that America is secretly being run by a very clever set of nefarious financiers. These evil masterminds control large sums of wealth which thy use to create large businesses, bringing them ever more profits while destroying the small businesses and jobs of regular Americans. Wall Street dominates Main Street in every way possible, both financially and politically.

On the other side we hear about the American miracle of growth driven by a free and open economy which allows funds to flow to businesses which will make the best use of those funds. The noble financier makes this all possible. Through the purchase of stock, a hard-working laborer in Nebraska can easily become an owner of Apple. America has grown because the system works so well, rewarding the industrious and clever and eliminating the outdated and failures. The financier makes this all possible.

These narratives are everywhere. It is likely you subscribe to one of the other.

Here is the funny thing. Pick your favorite narrative. Then try to explain Theranos.

John Carryrou’s Bad Blood is a rollicking tale about a fledgling startup company which rocketed to the top and then crashed and burned in the most spectacular manner possible. I learned about the book when I was the moderator on a panel of alums at Mount Holyoke who had come back to give tips to the students on how to get started in business. One of the questions I asked was what book each panelist would recommend. Two of the five panelists suggested Bad Blood; both clearly loved the book. So, I assigned in in my Introductory Economics class this semester. It was indeed a riveting story.

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to pursue her dream of founding the next Great Tech Company. The company was Theranos. The idea: build a small, easily portable device which could take a mere few drops of human blood and run just about every blood test in existence.

The possibilities of such a device are endless. If you need to do regular blood tests, you could have one in your home. Drugstores and supermarkets could have blood testing stations in the corner of the market. The military could put them in the back of a Humvee. Instant analysis of your blood, any time, any place. No needles necessary; just prick your finger and this marvelous little machine will do the rest.

It is certainly an attractive idea. Everyone agreed about that.

Now to build something like that, you need money. And Elizabeth Holmes was very good at convincing people to give her company money. Lots of money. Staggering amounts of money. She was young, perky, dressed like Steve Jobs, and had an intense gaze and boundless self-confidence. People were lining up to fund her company.

There was just one problem. The machine didn’t actually exist. Not only that, but nobody in the company could figure out how to actually create the machine. Not only that, it didn’t take long for everyone who showed up to work for the company to figure out that there really wasn’t any way to get a machine to do all these tests with so little blood. Not only that, but every prototype of the machine was an absolute disaster. The results generated by the machines were all over the place; there was absolutely no reason to trust the results of these machines.

So, how was Holmes able to convince so many people that Theranos was on the verge of rolling out this marvelous product? The prototypes she used for her presentations were fakes. They pretended to analyze the blood, but they weren’t actually do it.

Eventually, Theranos started rolling out their product into Walgreens stores. The whole thing was a sham. For many of the tests, instead of taking a drop of blood, they would get the blood the old fashioned way—with a needle. They would then send the blood to a regular lab with regular equipment. You were lucky if they did that, by the way. If they used their machines, then you might well find out you had some terrible disease which you didn’t actually have.

Yet, the company kept growing. At one point, the Theranos Board of Directors had the following people on it: Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Sam Nunn, William Perry, Gary Roughead, and George Schultz. Two former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, two former high ranking military commanders, and a former Senator. If a company with that Board of Directors tells you they have this neat new product, why wouldn’t you believe them?

And wow, did people believe it. Tim Draper, for example, invested a million dollars in the early years. Rupert Murdoch invested $125 million in the later years. Over all, the company raised $700 million. And remember, there was never a functioning prototype or even a realistic schematic of a prototype that might actually work. There was nothing at all.

Eventually, Carreyrou, a Wall Street Journal reporter, got wind of what was going on at Theranos, and exposed the whole company for the fraud it was. The house of cards crumbled. Bad Blood is the story.

The amazing thing about the book is that by the end of chapter 2, you know the end is about to come. The rise of Theranos goes on for another chapter, and you know this has to be the end. Then, chapter by chapter, Theranos just keeps getting bigger and bigger. All the signs of the problems were there right at the outset. But, that did not stop Elizabeth Holmes.

How did this happen? And here is where those conflicting narratives about American finance get stuck. If financiers are such evil or clever geniuses, why did they fall for the spiel of a young Stanford dropout? People lost a lot of money here. Why?

The reality is that far from being omnipotent forces for good or evil in the world, the modern American financier is just a person with large ambitions and the same range of insight and intelligence as the rest of the population. The reason they seem so much more brilliant is selection bias.

Imagine average people each picking an individual company as the wave of the future. Some of those companies will fail and we will never hear about those investors again. But some will succeed and we will hear about those investors. They will naturally attribute their success to their cleverness and brilliance. But, was it?

That is an answerable question, by the way. All we have to do is look to see how the investors who made successful choices in the past do on their subsequent investments. It turns out they look very average. In other words, having had one success has no predictive value on whether they will have future success. We just hear about the ones with the lucky streak. The unlucky ones vanish.

Elizabeth Holmes was perfect for this world. She was the type of person every 60 year old successful man wanted to believe in. So, they believed in her. And they lost.

Elizabeth Holmes’ trial on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud is slated to begin next year.

Too Much Talk About Liberty?

James Fitzjames Stephen is not a well-known name these days.

He was a 19^th century English judge and author of a decent sized body of work. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was his magnum opus, and chapter 4 of that remarkably little known book has much to say about the state of political discussion in the early 21^st century.

In a recent discussion of Mill’s On Liberty, I had occasion to note the mixed effects Mill’s argument is having on college campuses these days. On the one hand, there is that bracing call to freedom of thought and speech. On the other hand, the “harm principle” has been stretched beyond recognition to include all sorts of mental and emotional harm.

Stephen noted the problems of Mill’s arguments when Mill was making the argument. In the chapter “The Doctrine of Liberty in its Application to Morals,” Stephen argues that Mill’s argument is going to have extremely pernicious effects.

He begins by noting that this principle of Liberty can be used to defend all manner of things which most people find abhorrent and would happily ban from the society. Stephen’s particular example is quaint:

A number of persons form themselves into an association for the purpose of countenancing each other in the practice of seducing women, and giving the widest possible extension to the theory that adultery is a good thing. They carry out these objects by organizing a system for the publication and circulation of lascivious novels and pamphlets calculated to inflame the passions of the young and inexperienced.

Stephen thinks that would be a very bad thing. Stephen would be aghast at the combination of modern college fraternities and the internet.

But, we don’t have to think about that example. Consider necrophilia. Would you like to live in a society which had no prohibitions on that practice? It harms no other person, so Mill’s argument would seem to allow it. I trust that you, dear Reader, are not so inclined to permit it.

As a result, Stephen argues, Mill’s absolutist position on tolerance has a giant problem. We don’t necessarily want to tolerate everything:

Complete moral tolerance is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other—that is to say, when society is at an end. If, on the other hand, every struggle is treated as a war of extermination, society will come to an end in a shorter and more exciting manner, but not more decisively.
A healthy state of things will be a compromise between the two.

Ah, compromise. That is a lost art.

What happened to compromise? Why on a modern college campus does everyone seem to be at war all the time? Why does everyone treat every issue as a war of extermination? How did we go from the Academy being the center of disintegrated debate to ground zero in the spread of intolerance to All Who Dare to Disagree?

According to Stephen, it is Mill again. What happens when you raise up generation after generation who are indoctrinated with gospel of liberty?

Practically, the effect of the popularity of the commonplaces about liberty has been to raise in the minds of ordinary people a strong presumption against obeying anybody, and by a natural rebound to induce minds of another class to obey the first person who claims their obedience with sufficient emphasis and self-confidence. It has shattered to pieces most of the old forms in which discipline was a recognized and admitted good, and certainly it has not produced many new ones.

That could have been written today. First, we preach the doctrine of liberty, teaching every kid to “Just Do It,” to shake off the shackles of tradition, and to live your own life in your own way. Nothing is certain; there are no fixed points, things which we should do simply because that is the way things are done.

Then, people who have been raised to reject authority reach college and meet The Woke, that endlessly self-confident group who demand obedience to the Higher Cause. Many people looking for some fixed point in a rootless life are naturally attracted.

If Stephen is right here, then it raises a rather fascinating question. Is it possible to extol Liberty too much?

Until now, I have always thought of Liberty as one of those inherently good things, one of those things you teach your children to love. But, what if talking about Liberty in this way produces harm? What if talking about Liberty induces a rejection not just of totalitarian oppression, but also tradition? What if talking about Liberty as an abstract good leads directly to an embrace of second-rate totalitarians who promise even more freedom from oppression by joining in the war of extermination against all opponents.

The practical inference from this is that people who have the gift of using pathetic language ought not to glorify the word “liberty” as they do, but ought, as far as possible, to ask themselves before going into ecstasies over any particular case of it, Who is left at liberty to do what, and what is the restraint from which he is liberated? By forcing themselves to answer this question distinctly, they will give their poetry upon the subject a much more definite and useful turn than it has at present.

Part of me want to reject Stephen outright. Surely preaching Liberty does not lead directly to the guillotine, right?

Ok, obviously sometimes preaching liberty does lead to a reign of terror.

The question for the day: is it possible that Stephen is right that the Committee on Public Safety arises not because of a deficiency of support for liberty but because of an excess in belief in liberty? I have never thought of the question framed precisely this way. I am suddenly afraid the answer might be yes.