A Guide to Dorothy Sayers II

Yesterday I began a review of the allusions that Dorothy Sayer introduced in her plan for a hypothetical poem. These are references drawn largely from British history of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Her point was that these references will become obscure over time, just as the various references of medival Italy now seem quite obscure to us.

The passage of time has proven her right in this. I've decided to see if I can say something about every one of her references, just as if these were for the annotations of a real poem.

Continuing then:

Spencer – presumably Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the systematic philosopher who coined the expression “survival of the fittest,” and whose work inspired others to coin the expression “Social Darwinism.”

Spenser – probably Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) a Tudor-era poet, and an advocate of a scorched-earth policy toward the Irish.

Lord Castlereagh – (1769 – 1822), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1812 until his suicide in  1822. As one might expect, he acquired a lot of enemies during that period. The poet Shelley wrote, in “The Masque of Anarchy”: “I met Murder on the way/ He had a face like Castlereagh….”

Lord Castlerosse – Probably refers to the courtesy title of Valentine Browne (1891 – 1943) the first member of the British aristocracy ever to write a newspaper gossip column.

Lawrence [of Arabia] --  T.E. Lawrence (1888 – 1935), British officer who served as liaison to anti-Ottoman Arab forces, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany and Austrio-Hungary.

[D.H.] Lawrence – (1885 – 1930) – novelist and poet. No less an authority than E.M. Forster called this Lawrence “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”

“Butcher” Heydrich (1904-1942)—head of Hitler’s Gestapo early on in the Second World War, killed by Czechoslovak resistance fighters in May 1942.

W.G. Grace (1848 – 1915), a physician and cricketer. A legend in the world of cricket, he is said to have made more money there than in the practice of medicine, an astonishing fact in those innocent pre-TV years.

Grace Darling (1815-1842), the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, she earned renown for her efforts at saving 13 of the victims of the wreck of the SS Forfarshire in 1838. This was a paddle-wheel driven steamship..

Captain of the Jarvis Bay – Sayers seems to have gotten the spelling of the ship’s name wrong, but Fogarty Fegen (1891-1940) was the captain of an armed merchantman Jervis Bay, sunk by a German battleship in 1940. A memorable poem was made out of the incident, “The Jervis Bay Goes Down.”

The Sisters of Haworth  -- an allusive phrase for the Bronte sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Ann,  who lived at Haworth parsonage.

The Woodcutter of Hawarden – William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) – Hawarden was Gladstone’s estate – he was prime minister four separate times, essentially alternating with Benjamin Disraeli through the second half of the 19^th century.

The Ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler (1739 – 1829)  and Miss Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832)  founders of a literary circle in Wales in the late 18^th century.

Pluralism and the Big Experiment

On Friday, I quoted William James thus:

"See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."

This is from The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, an essay in which James anticipated the point of view that later came to be known as "value pluralism," a theory in meta-ethics associated with Isaiah Berlin and Joseph Raz.

Henry responded, in the comments section, that James was too optimistic. Surely the advocates of some of those viewpoints were after things nastier than seeking the maximum amount of good that can be gained and kept in the world?

Yes, I answered, they were. And their counterparts today are. Indeed, James' language about those he here calls "radical darwinians" suggests he thinks of them as rather malevolent. He isn't referring simply to the Spencerian notion of failing to assist "the weak," but to something more active, the "suppression" of the weak, which seems to me a reference to the spread of eugenic ideas in his day.

But still, as Henry notes, James refers to these radical Darwinians as part of the great higgle-haggle with the others, so they must in some sense be part of the Big Experiment. Isn't this too optimistic a view of them?

I think James would say that the functioning of one particular faction within this Big Experiment does not depend upon the motives of anyone involved. Thus, for instance, at least some of those "free lovers" he mentions might be motivated by old-fashioned lust, and an unwillingness to abide by the contraints of monogamy. rather than by a desire to produce the best possible mutual accomodation of conflicting values. Still, if such a movement finds resonance, if it builds a base and becomes politically or demographically significant, it will be because it speaks to some dissatisfaction. It will be because the status quo locks out some sentiments, frustrates some energies, and there will be -- should be -- a constant press to include what is so far excluded.

And, yes, one could say the same about Nazism. Hitler didn't build a popular following because a lot of Germans decided they wanted to kill a lot of people. war. He built a following because life in the Weimar Republic was miserable for many, and he gavwe them a vent for that misery. This qualifies Nazism, too, as part of the Big Experiment deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world, even though nobody involved would have described it that way, and even though that particular trial was an enormous failure by that test. The idea of a Big Experiment is a way of understanding history, and thus a history-based way of understanding morality. It is not a hypothesis about the psychology involved among the people 'making' history.

Even the wreckage of Nazism, BTW, left some benefits behind. In the English-speaking countries, especially, the war seems to have thoroughly discredited eugenic ideas, for example, so that have disappeared from the fray.

Idiosyncrasy and History, Conclusion

My narrative yesterday brought us, with Henry's help, to a conflict in the way of looking at history. Tolstoy and Spencer are on one side of this conflict. Carlyle and James are on the other. Henry and I both, I would say, fall into the broad middle.

The issue is: how important (if at all) are the individual characteristics, the idiosyncrasies if you will, of the handful of people in a society who occupy its most august positions in social, political, or military hierarchies? Do the specific facts about "great men" (or let us say pooh-bahs) matter at all? Spencer and Tolstoy would both answer "no," in the sense and for the reasons I sought to explain yesterday. Carlyle responded, in effect, that hardly anything else matters! You wish a link? -- 'tis done.

Spencer responded to Carlyle, on behalf of his own conception of history as moving according to grand forces that entail whole populations. Spencer thought that the Carlylean conception was only "theocracy once removed," and has to be abandoned if out aspirations are scientific. James, in turn, responded to Spencer. And here we emerge into material new for this day.

James begins his discussion with a man who slips on the ice of a porch and cracks his skull. We might, to make the hypothesis interesting, suppose that several months before he had dined at a table as one of thirteen. "There are no accidents," we might say. "The whole history of the world converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, the slip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would is to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. The real cause of the death was not the slip, but the conditions which engendered the slip, -- and among them his having sat at a table, six months previous, one among thirteen. That is truly the reason why he died within the year."

From the viewpoint of a hypothetical omniscient investigator, there may be truth in this. All things everywhere may impact all other things in infinite lines of convergence, and a divine intelligence could see a line of convergence between the banquet of thirteen and the fatal flaw. But we, as humans, have to proceed with greater particularity, or else we'll neglect to put ashes on the ice on that porch, or "some other poor fellow, who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door, and fall and break his head too."

There are different cycles of operation in nature -- some macrocosmic, some microcosmic. They proceed relatively independent of one another, and for the secular purposes of human beings on most occasions we can and should treat them as independent. This, James says, was one of the great insights of Charles Darwin. Here he was using Darwin against Spencer -- two names more often bracketed in his day than distinguished. Darwin's key insight was that the variation in the form of an organism from one generation to the next may be the result of "internal molecular accidents, of which we know nothing," as James put it. The finch on one island may get a wider beak than the finch on the nearby island for natural molecular reasons, "accidental variations." The process of natural selection is separate from that. The environment selects some beaks as suitable, rejects others into the trash bin of extinction.

Napoleon, then, may well be the ice on the porch. Or, put differently, Napoleon may be the "internal molecular accidents" within a finch. The Big Picture -- the analog to Natural Selection -- comes into play only after that particular finch with that particular beak comes on the scene. Will the conditions of a particular Pacific island support that finch and allow it to thrive? Would the conditions of post-revolutionary France and for that matter the rest of Europe at the time support a particular short-statured Corsican and allow him to thrive?

It is not "theocracy" to entertain the suspicion that (a) Napoleon too harbored internal molecular accidents, which affected the decisions he made in particular circumstances, and (b) the environment allowed him to thrive to a degree than made those decisions of great importance. And if (a) and (b) are both the case, then it is clearly possible -- nay, plausible -- that if Napoleon had not been born for whatever reason, the other strong man who would have shown up in his place in the history books would not have made all the same decisions -- would have had different "internal molecular accidents," -- and these would have mattered to history.

So, yes, it seems that the idiosyncrasies of the pooh-bahs have been vindicated as a general historical cause.

It does not follow that we should revert entirely to Carlyle and hero worship. James wrote that the differences between the past and the present are due to "the Grants and the Bismarcks, the Joneses and the Smiths."

By "Grant," there, James was of course referring to a General, without whose idiosyncrasies the United States may have fractured into its constituent parts. By "Bismarck" he referred to the "Iron Chancellor" of Germany. But he then used the terms "the Joneses and the Smiths" to indicate that history is more complicated an affair than we can ever grasp if our focus remains always upon the poohbahs.

Idiosyncrasy and History, Part One

Henry and I have been having a neat discussion in the comments section to my entry Sunday on "The Invention of Lying," last autumn's Rick Gervais movie. I think it is worth bringing that discussion out of that thread, into the open, because we have reached a point of close contact with the original animating purpose of this blog -- refreshing the pragmatic philosophy of William James.

We moved from the question of the consequences of lying in politics to the issue of individual idiosyncrasies and their broad consequences for history. Said Henry in pertinent part:

Suppose that Napoleon's mother had induced Napoleon's father to marry her by lying that she was pregnant. Later, after the marriage, Napoleon was conceived. If she hadn't lied, then she might never have slept with Napoleon's father, and Napoleon would never have existed. According to Tolstoy in War and Peace, however, this wouldn't have mattered, because someone else would have played Napoleon's role, as the causes of history are too complex to depend upon one person's actions.

I said in reply that someone else would likely have played Napoleon's role in a general way -- the role of the man-on-a-horse who often takes over a revolutionary situation when the fervor of the crowds has waned. Someone would have gotten on the horse had Nappy never been borne. But this allows for the possibility that Napoleon had individual idiosyncrasies that made it important that he filled this role.

Napoleon sought to subdue Haiti, sending an army there in 1801. He lost that army, and this loss had enormous consequences beyond Hispaniola. Napoleon's desperate need for money after the loss in Haiti, for example, forced him to sell Louisiana to raise cash. And -- since Henry adduced Tolstoy -- the loss of the army in Haiti may have reduced the number of troops available with which to strike eastward into Russia years later. Might some other post-revolutionary strongman have produced a very different history by deciding against a Haitian expedition?

To this, Henry responded on behalf of Lev Tolstoy: Napoleon presumably did not decide to fight a war in Haiti on a whim; rather, that decision had multiple causes, not all of which was Napoleon necessarily aware. Therefore, Tolstoy might say that Napoleon was a puppet of these causes, as would any alternative leader of France have been at the time.

Tolstoy might indeed say that, so let us consider it. Is it plausible to consider that any possible leader of the French state in 1801 would have been the puppet of the same causes, and so would have necessarily sent an army to Haiti? Is it plausible, then, to entirely eliminate from history the idiosyncrasies of heads of state, generals, and other such pooh-bahs?

Let me acknowledge one aspect of Tolstoy's point. A lot of interesting history has little or nothing to do with heads of state, generals, and other pooh-bahs. Historians can and do discuss, for example, education and literacy in the provinces far from Paris in the early 19th century. In a book on that subject, some now-obscure schoolteacher may play a much bigger role than the Emperor. Insofar as Tolstoy in his observations about history was pointing aware from exclusive concern with the pooh-bahs, he was doing something healthy.

But humans are still going to wonder: do individual idiosyncrasies at the top of the social/political hierarchy have consequences? And if Tolstoy was saying they don't, Tolstoy's position was wildly implausible.

William James wrote about exactly this subject. For James, the paradigm of the deterministic view of history was not Tolstoy but Herbert Spencer. And Spencer (who himself was targeting Carlyle -- it is always convenient in writing of abstract matters to have a concrete target in view) wrote as follows against the significance of "great men."

"If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers: his origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural? Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed -- or, rather, not removed at all....Is this an unacceptable solution? The origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, andits multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant...."

I think that Spencer is on the Tolstoyan wavelength here and I note that James finds this unpersuasive, as a way of banishing the "great men" or their idiosyncrasies. But this post is already a good deal longer than is my norm, so I think I will make you wait for tomorrow for more.

The knower is not a mirror

A Jamesian passage for us to contemplate today: "The knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere,and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth on one side, while on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action -- action which to a great extent transforms the world -- help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to the mind, from its birth upwards, a spontaneity, a vote."

Review of Spencer's Definition of the Mind

Half a century

I reach the half-century mark today.

Birthdays are arbitrary, and the idea of giving special significance to one birthday per decade is doubly so. But there is that human impulse to divide the flow of time, and the digital imperative of making the divides subservient to the base ten number system.

There's an episode of Monk, in fact, in which Adrian complains about the packaging of eggs by the dozen. A new acquaintance, trying to become his buddy, says, "I see what you mean. We've got a base ten system, let's stick with it!"

So we watch the odometer of our lives spin about and look with some awe at those moments when another "0" comes up on the right side.

Since I was born in mid-October, and I've long been a baseball fan, one way to measure my life and its landmarks involves the fall classic, the World Series. I was delighted Thursday by the Red Sox' come-from-behind win to keep alive their chances for a World Series appearance this year. But I was reminded that the event itself is creeping forward in the calender, creeping toward colder days.

Looking at the big picture, over the decades, the trend has been toward expansion of the leagues and then division. The marketing folks have felt the need to get more teams involved in the post-season play, so more fans stay interested longer. This in turn has made the post-season longer.

There is a lesson in that, I suppose. As any set gets larger it tends to break up into sub-sets, and those into further sub-sets, and so on in fractal fashion.

As people age, likewise, we find that we've had more experiences, so we divide them too into sets and sub-sets. We have more categories of "things to think about" and ways to try to think about them. And our efforts at them sorting out ... need sorting out. The sorting efforts break up into subsets and sub-subsets!

The World Series of sorting-outs arrives, if at all, on one's death bed. That would be one of those classically literary death beds, where the protagonist says, "Aha!" and then imparts the distilled wisdom of his years to young'uns gathered round.

I'll try to avoid my death bed for a few decades yet. Obviously, I need a lot more time with this wisdom-distilling stuff. When I try to come up with something these days I end up reaching for Monk and baseball.

Let's end, instead, with a quote from Herbert Spencer. He thought it described the history of civilization -- it might better describe a human life, or at least mine as I look back in self-definition and forward in hope.

"Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity."