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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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3. The Rise of Reason It is a general weakness of men delivering ideas that they are able to convince themselves their words represent a break with the past and a new beginning. In the early stages of a revolution, history is at its most malleable. Disorder and optimism combine to wipe out those truths artificially manufactured by the preceding regime. At the same time, they usually wipe out the memory of any inconvenient real events. The men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, were not wrong to condemn darkness and superstition. They were writing close to a time when it had been common to feed a consecrated Host to a sick cow in order to drive out the demon; a time of saint worship and of church corruption. [1] And, of course, a time of willful political leadership. If the philosophers of reason believed that nothing provokes violence so effectively as fear and that fear is the product of ignorance, it was because they had arrived on the scene after two hundred years of religious and civil wars. These had produced levels of civilian violence not achieved again until the twentieth century. The reasonable men of the eighteenth century wanted to cut the roots of this fear. Their strategy was to attack what Isaiah Berlin called the "dark mysteries and grotesque fairy tales which went by the names of theology, metaphysics and other brands of concealed dogma or superstition with which unscrupulous knaves had for so long befuddled the stupid and benighted multitudes whom they murdered, enslaved, oppressed and exploited." [2] It was quite natural that this assault on darkness and on the divine aspect of the absolute monarchs who presided over it should eventually have been called the Enlightenment. The fact that the leadership came from France added a particular excitement to the affair, given that the leading European example of absolutism and of royal divine right was the French king and his court. And the French intellectual opposition had grown into a veritable army of thinkers in all domains -- philosophy, yes, but also agriculture, science, military organization and, of course, novel writing. The novelists were like deep-penetration patrols, striking out where least expected. By virtue of his devotion to the publication of the Encyclopedie, Diderot was the chief of staff of the operation, supported by faithful staff officers like d'Alembert. The strategist and champion of individual combat was Voltaire. He was constantly on the front lines of public debate, constantly inventing the phrases which might make change possible. What these philosophes do not seem to have noticed, however, was that the very methods they were about to loose upon the world, in the name of reason, had been in. ever- increasing practical use throughout the two preceding centuries of violence. In fact, these methods had been used by Richelieu 150 years earlier precisely to create the absolutist state against which the Enlightenment was now rebelling. Perhaps Voltaire and his friends believed that the forces of reason had suffered from being scattered in a disordered way around the previous century, when they had been used for a variety of causes, both worthy and corrupt. What was needed was to capture them so that reason could devote knowledge to the development of morality and common sense. That was how the philosophes presented their crusade. Of course, neither morality nor common sense were new issues. They had once been integrated into the medieval concept, had then been rescued by new thinkers and reintegrated into the concept of divine monarchies. And here they were, once again lost in the degenerate structures of an aging system, being rescued by yet another group of thinkers who proclaimed the supremacy of reason as the new solution to man's problems. This eighteenth-century revolution in mythology was therefore not so much something new as it was the repackaging of disparate forces already at play. The most revolutionary effect of their consolidation was the replacement of the control of the old class structure by two new sorts of leadership -- that of the technocrat and that of the Hero. This tendency has been leading the way ever since, even though there is still no popular or official or philosophical consensus that these two are the complementary heads of the rational power structure. The technocrat began his existence as the ideal servant of the people -- a man freed from both irrational ambition and self-interest. Then, with surprising rapidity, he evolved into one who used the system with a distant contempt for the people. The Hero was a more complex phenomenon. He appeared unexpectedly out of the shadows of reason, drawn forward when the people showed uncontrollable impatience with the way they were being governed. This impatience may have been provoked by poor or selfish government, by the inability of the new technocracy actually to govern or even by leadership which somehow bored the populace. With the old royal-baronial rivalry gone, there was no fixed structure to take up the slack of unpopular government. The idea of elections was new and, even now, two centuries later, does not easily convert the people's desires into appropriate government. And so it was that, in those moments when there was maximum confusion, the Hero took to stepping forward out of the shadows and presenting himself as the exciting face of reason; the man who could deliver the people's needs and be loved by them; the man who could take over the difficult labour of reasoning on behalf of the tired and confused citizen. Trapped between these technocrats and Heroes were the reasonable men who thought of themselves as true men of reason -- men who held firmly to their common sense morality. But they were neither efficient enough nor exciting enough to hold their own in a squeeze between vicious structuralism and heroic logic. Many did, in fact, hold their own for a period of time -- Pascal Paoli for twenty years in Corsica, Jefferson for even longer in the new United States, the first Pitt for several decades in England. Michel de L'Hospital almost succeeded in preventing the French wars of religion. The host of those who served the good cause, and still serve~ in the way Diderot would have hoped they might, is legion. But they are not the ones who have defined the main line of the last four and a half centuries. They have been the exceptions to the rule, fighting a rearguard action in defence of humanism. That main line has been obscured by .two of our obsessions. One is an uncontrollable desire to give ourselves the impression that we have made yet another fresh start. We are, constantly declaring new ages. The conversion of the original Age of Reason into the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was only a first step. Had humanity turned a great corner in the process? Not according to most definitions of the Enlightenment; for example, as a "conviction that reason could achieve all knowledge, supplant organized religion and ensure progress towards happiness and perfection." [3] The rational machine continued on from there, being redefined ad infinitum, notably by Kant, until at last Nietzsche theoretically rejected the concept itself. But Nietzsche's discovery that reason was subject to passion and to supermen came a full half century after the real superman had actually galloped onto the public stage and given a demonstration. Napoleon had ridden in on the back of reason, reorganized Europe in the name of reason and governed beneath the same principle. The subsequent effect was to bolster the rational approach, not to discourage it. This tells us a great deal about our other obscuring obsession. We have great difficulty dealing with philosophy in the context of real events. These two categories seem to live on separate planets, For example, we are still convinced that violence is the product of fear and fear the product of ignorance. And yet, since the beginning of the Age of Reason, there has been a parallel growth in both knowledge and violence. culminating in the slaughters of the twentieth century. Does this mean that knowledge creates greater fear than does ignorance? Or that the rational system has distorted the value of knowledge? Or something else? One thing it does demonstrate is that the separation of philosophy from real events has encouraged the invention of-mythological obscurantism. The constant launching of new philosophical ages is part of that invention. *** Revolutions do not begin on dates, although we constantly search for that kind of reassuring touch point. An argument can be made that the assumptions and methods of applied reason were first developed by the Inquisition. In its revolutionary approach to what a question consists of, what constitutes an answer and what is truth, all the key elements of modern intellectual thought can be found. The Inquisitors were the first to formalize the idea that to every question there is a right answer. The answer is known. but the question must be asked and correctly answered. Relativism, humanism, common sense and moral beliefs were all irrelevant to this process because they assume doubt. Since the Inquisitors knew the answer, doubt was impossible. Process. however, was essential for efficient governance and process required that questions be asked in order to produce the correct answer. When the Inquisition was created in the thirteenth century no one, least of all Pope Gregory, understood what was being set in motion. Issuing a bull which made the persecution of heresy the special function of the Dominicans hardly seemed a revolutionary step. The Inquisitors' definition of truth was arrived at slowly. as was the process which' permitted them to establish it. But as each detail of that process emerged, so the assumptions involved became clear. Everything the Inquisition did -- except the execution, of the guilty -- took place in secret. Public silence surrounded the work of the travelling Inquisitors. Unlike judges, magistrates, nobles and kings, who have always worn some symbolic costume, the Inquisitors wore the simplest, most anonymous black, like the proverbial accountant. And while their power permitted them to do their work on the basis of accusations and denunciations, what they really wanted were complete inquisitions. Being already in possession of the truth, they were interested in the rational demonstration of it by each victim. Perhaps the most telling detail was that each of these secret tribunals included a notary. His job was to record every word of every question and answer. These notarised manuscript became the perpetual records of truth. But again, the purpose of such exactitude was to glorify the methodology, not the outcome. The notary was there to confirm the relationship between a priori truth and assembled fact. On the surface the Inquisitors were torturers and monsters. On a more profound level they were moral auditors. If one is looking for an individual father of the Age of Reason, Niccolo Machiavelli is probably the right candidate. After all, he laid out in The Prince (1513) and in The Discourses (1519) a governing method which is with us to this day. The humanists of the Renaissance attacked him violently, as did the Encyclopedists in their time. They recognized in Machiavelli their elder brother from the dark side." A detestable political system which can be summed up in two words -- the art of tyranny." [4] But this ex-senior civil servant of Florence, with a particular interest in military reorganization, remains nonetheless a man of our times: an ambitious individual, tainted but not swallowed by nationalism, constantly in search of an employer. Faced by the Medici princes after their destruction of the Florentine republican government, he wrote his books in good part in order to win favour with the new regime. He would have been a perfect recruit for the new class of intellectuals sought four and a half centuries later by Henry Kissinger -- men who, by virtue of not belonging to or believing in anyone concrete thing, could be considered independent. Of course, if viewed with the less trusting eye of an employer, that emotional and intellectual freedom could also be seen to offer the neutrality of a mercenary. Machiavelli's message -- that "new modes and orders," that is a new system and new ways, would reward the sharp-eyed sceptic -- made him into the lasting symbol of the Age of Reason. Popular mythology insisted that he was the prophet of political immorality. In truth, he was indifferent to moral questions. He was a modern courtier in search of employment. Vitality, not Virtue, was the characteristic he sought in a political leader. At the centre of everything he wrote was the theme of political efficiency. To this day, men who find themselves burdened by the adjective Machiavellian also find their careers severely limited. And yet the question that might be asked is: Why do so few men carry the adjective? If you were to edit the sixteenth-century references out of The Prince and then to retitle it Power and the Executive or Effective Government, the book would immediately be adopted by all contemporary management courses aimed at training businessmen, civil servants and professional politicians. It would be considered an ideal manual for the. preparation of the modern world leader. Hard on Machiavelli's heels came the third act of the rise of reason -- the schism in the Catholic church. Luther's 95 Theses (1517), the Church of England (1531), Calvin's Institutio Religionis Christianae (1536) burst out like a single large explosion. The arbitrary nature of official Catholicism was probably responsible for lighting the fuse. But a growing awareness of the rational argument also made people believe that reform was possible. And an almost unconscious common sense populism pushed the instigators to translate the Bible into various vernaculars. That simple act of vulgarization destroyed the priests' monopoly over the word. It remains one of the most successful blows ever struck against manipulative secrecy. The clarity of such early ideas as freedom of dissent, personal responsibility and individual freedom was soon drowned, however, in a sea of blood. As the massacres produced by these religious wars passed from the thousands to the hundreds 6f thousands to the millions, both sides seemed. to lose sight of their purpose. In the end the Reformation dearly changed Europe. But the ambiguity inherent in the whole process was so great that the shape of the future was determined more. by those who fought reform than by the reformers. *** Ignatius Loyola was an unlikely leader for the Counter-Reformation and an even less likely formulator of modern rational methodology. A minor Spanish noble, ambitious and much given to both war and womanizing, he had a talent for playing the royal courts. These skills of the courtier were to be essential later in his life. While he was in battle as a young man, a cannonball passed between his legs, smashing the bones and crippling him. His manic drive refused this situation. He forced upon himself a series of extremely risky operations in which the legs were rebroken and reset. The final result still wasn't pleasing to the eye. The operations had left a piece of bone protruding out of line on one leg, and so, in a last act of courtly egotism, he forced the doctors to begin' all over again in order to saw off the distorting bone. [5] This final folly of pleasure broke him, physically and mentally, and the resulting crisis brought on his passage towards God. His actual conversion was full of the sort of mysteries and meetings with the divine that one would expect from an important saint. Then, abruptly, the predictable became unpredictable. The classic road to salvation turned into a revolution. No sooner was the initial miraculous part of the process over than he attached himself to a rigorously intellectual view of the Church. That intellectual abstraction was neatly tied up, thanks to his notary-like obsession with detail, law, procedure and, eventually, structure. This solidification process took only a few years. It began with Ignatius -- alone on the roads of Spain, limping towards God (the operations had not been entirely successful), preaching and teaching in towns and villages, carried forward with the aid of love and what appeared to be a natural communion with the people; indeed, a natural communion with the earth itself. Suddenly, others began to follow him and his example. The Church could not ignore this little band, all dressed in simple black and out working their faith among the people. At first observers imagined that these young men were renewing the example of Saint Francis of Assisi, that theirs also was a vow of poverty and simplicity. But the uniform of Ignatius's band was the result neither of humility nor of a spirituality which left them indifferent, let alone unconscious of, their physical well-being. Ignatius went out among the people to reason with them. To draw them to God not through love but through logic. He had not dispensed with his fashionable appearance in order to bring man closer to God. Rather, his appearance had been consciously tailored to advance the cause of winning individuals back to the Church. He sought discretion by costuming himself in simplicity. Ignatius was in the process of becoming the first complete rational technocrat. In those times any religious initiative was dangerous. Ignatius was regularly and anonymously denounced to the Inquisition. The Inquisition, with its mastery, of fear, was indeed the guiding spirit of the new era, but others were learning from its methods and carrying them further. The Inquisitors were failing to keep up with their own concept -- power through structure. It became obvious how badly they had fallen behind when the time came to deal with Loyola. In 1535, about to leave Paris with his followers, he heard by rumour that someone had denounced him and his book of religious Exercises. His life was therefore in danger. Without hesitation he went directly to the local Inquisitor and announced that he was leaving for Spain. If they were going to accuse him of heresy, they should decide quickly. The Inquisitor, caught off guard and probably wondering whether the young man's brazenness meant he had important friends, replied that the accusation wasn't important. On the other hand, he would be curious to see Loyola's book. In the Inquisition's long experience, the best way to catch a man was through his writings. The Inquisitor read the Exercises on the spot, praised them and asked if he might keep a copy. In other words, he wanted to keep a copy to examine it carefully for heretical laws. The little book might also be a potential sword which could be held over Loyola's head if he needed to be manipulated later on. Ignatius agreed but insisted they indict him immediately in order that he might be tried and cleared. The Inquisitor reassured him that it wasn't necessary. That is, he wished to keep his options open. Ignatius went out, found a notary public and brought him back to document and witness the Inquisitor's praise for the Exercises, as well as his refusal to prosecute. [6] This small, private scene was of monumental importance. The first organization ever to be built upon reasoned terror had just been outmanoeuvred by the future creator of the second. Only four years later Loyola had personally convinced the Pope to allow the official proclamation of his order. Its documents of creation began with a statement of the methodology to which it was devoted. This methodology contained the essence of all that the Age of Reason would later propose as its aim:
The message was clear. First you must belong to an organization, one which possesses a method. Entry to the organization will be limited by the method. Its members will therefore be a trained elite. Its power will rest upon precision, research and movement. The elite will use its methods to educate the people and through this education to sell a particular point of view. And its success will be measured. The word progress, from those early times until today, has been used as a synonym for the word measurement. This cool, professional approach was. of course, the product of an experienced, battleworn, ex-professional soldier. who organized the Society as a religious army. The process had little to do with the blind faith and the arbitrary powers of the old Church. Suddenly, it became clear that the Jesuit order held the keys to the future: organization and party policy. Doctrine shrank to little more than a useful tool. The role of God became quite secondary. Instead, the new order forced the Catholic world to put the interests of the Church itself -- the mother organization -- in the front row. In so doing they gradually reduced the religious wars from a fanatical level of belief and emotion down to the practical level of political interests. Practical meant negotiable -- suddenly impossible questions of religious principle were converted into territorial claims. alliances through royal marriages. and financial security or insecurity. Loyola's election to the generalship of the Society was an illustration of his methods. He had no rivals. His leadership was accepted by everyone. The result of the members' vote was a foregone conclusion. And yet Loyola refused to accept it. He turned and manoeuvred and stalled for two weeks with a modesty which. given that this was the same man who had just outsmarted the Pope and the Vatican bureaucracy. can only have been false. He then forced his companions to vote a second time. The result, of course, was the same. At last he wandered out across Rome to see his confessor and to ask his advice. The poor man could hardly recommend that Loyola refuse. The entire Church leadership would have been furious with him. Loyola made his confessor commit his advice to paper and send it over to the Society. On the basis of this sealed recommendation, which was the closest thing a mortal could arrange to an order from God, the theoretically modest man finally accepted. The Society was an immediate success. By the time Loyola died in 1556, seventeen years after its creation, there were one thousand members. By 1700 there were twenty-three thousand -- the most powerful political force in the West. They were running most European governments from behind the scenes, to say nothing of running their colonies. Even the Pope came to fear them and so eventually their enemies got together just long enough to have the Society disbanded in 1723. Nevertheless, it was the Jesuits who had almost single-handedly stemmed the tide of the Reformation. At all times Loyola had used a careful, reasoned approach, free from dogma. For example, he pushed for the introduction of the Inquisition into Rome, to block the rise of new heretical errors, but opposed its use in Germany, where the Church hadn't enough power to make it stick. In the same "political" way, Loyola was for capital punishment when dealing with heretics, but "this seems to be beyond what the present situation in Germany can bear." [8] His instructions to Jesuits struggling there might have been written in the twentieth century: people infected with error should be eliminated from government and teaching positions; heretical books should be burned; whatever the books, if by a tainted author they should be burned so that people could not learn to like the author; synods should be convoked to unmask specific errors; it was forbidden to call an heretic an "evangelical." [9] This last simple instruction is one of the most fascinating because it heralded the future dictatorship of vocabulary, which has become so important in the twentieth century. Loyola was the first to recognize the force which specific words carried. It was therefore essential to control those words, To capture them absolutely for the use of the Church. Better still, by treating these captured words as icons, they could be packaged in order to produce a politically useful meaning. Thus, in the past there had been all sorts of "evangelical" figures, some good, some bad. The word simply meant bringing the good news. In the future only those speaking for the Church could benefit from the word. In this century words such as capitalism or revolutionary or free are used in the same way. The very act of getting the word free into the public domain on your side places the other side in a difficult position. That is why politicians or businessmen, about to cut back on social benefits or to close factories, always invoke fairness as part of their justification, along with such concepts as justice, rationalization and efficiency. These mythological words come to replace thought. They are the modern equivalent of an intellectual void. Almost immediately, the Society of Jesus began to produce an educated elite inside the lay population. No other education of that time could match what it offered. Those. who sought success for their children couldn't help but consider a Jesuit school. And yet, from the very beginning, the Jesuits' success was mixed with outside criticism of their cynicism, ambition, Political interference, and amoral intelligence -- everything that an Enarque or a Harvard MBA might be accused of today. At the base of this criticism lay one fundamental truth. Whatever good the Society did, it seemed unable to avoid either deforming policy or producing brilliant students who were also somehow deformed. The more brilliant the student, the more shocking this deformation seemed to be. The origin of this flaw lay in the original premise of the Order. The Protestants were the first active, widespread messengers of reform. Loyola stole the method which had delivered their message and applied it to defend a cause that stood resolutely against reason. What at first sight appeared to be a fundamental contradiction turned out to be a great success. In fact, reason was stronger in his hands than it had been in those of the reformers. What he had created was a flexible, unfettered weapon, free of all obligation either to morality or to specific ideas. This severing of method from any roots provided the Jesuits with superficial strengths which were in fact profound weaknesses. The resulting system was incapable of defending itself against the inevitable invasion of extraneous, contradictory and destructive ideas, both moral and intellectual. And so it wasn't surprising that before the sixteenth century was over, the Society of Jesus had been invaded by virulent cynicism. *** No great skill is needed to trace the pattern emerging from these three events. The Inquisitors, Machiavelli and Loyola were all devoted to a priori truths and the service of established power. Their profession was administration. Two of them were courtiers and drew heavily on their military experience. Their methodology was unrelated to ideas or morality. Fear and secrecy were their favourite weapons. They favoured personal anonymity, public discretion, simple dress and power exercised from behind a facade. Out on the cutting edge of social and political reform, methodology was becoming a mercenary for hire. The next step was decisive. Early in the 1600s, rational technocracy found its long-term partner -- the nation-state. This passionate marriage took place under the authority of a theoretically absolute monarch -- Louis XIII -- and was engineered by a Cardinal. Of course, when we look at those years, the tendency is to become mesmerized by the philosophical fireworks which filled them. Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes led the West in rejecting the medieval past and creating two opposing rational schools, one drawn from the new science, the other from mathematics. Bacon went to great pains to layout the difference between constructing an argument in order to produce an answer, which he rejected, and doing so in order to seek an answer." The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions, than to help the search after truth. So it does more harm than good." [10] With perfect, effortless simplicity, he showed the fundamental difference between thought and judgment. This clarity, once released, seemed to languish for a century and a half, until the Encyclopedists seized upon Bacon and John Locke as their principal inspiration. On closer examination, however, Bacon's clarity and open spirit seem less obvious. His personal career had been that of a courtier, with highs and lows not unlike that of Machiavelli. He betrayed his patron the Earl of Essex, further advanced himself by agreeing in a particular case to a torture-confession procedure in the Inquisition tradition and used public power to great personal profit. He appears to have been more Machiavellian than Machiavelli. .Bacon wrote a great deal about truth but rejected the supremacy of common law and therefore of Parliament. He considered natural law or reason to be supreme. This definition of the source of truth required an absolute monarch served by a wise adviser -- himself. And when, in his novella The New Atlantis, Bacon set about imagining an ideal society, the result was a dictatorship of technocrats who sought knowledge and truth. They then hid both from the citizen. Knowledge and power were married to secrecy and chastity. This chastity or asexuality may at first seem to be an oddity particular to Bacon's rational vision, but it will gradually show itself to be part of the general pattern. A great deal is made of the differences between English and French philosophy, with Bacon and Descartes used to illustrate the parting of the ways. Their technical arguments are certainly very different. But the intent and the result are virtually indistinguishable. Descartes, of course, remains the demigod of rational thought. His Discourse on Method formalized an astonishing view of reason. He was educated by the Jesuits and seemed to take from that -- among other things -- a submissive respect for authority. He even took the initiative to withdraw one of his books from circulation rather than risk displeasure. His celebrated exploration of doubt gradually showed itself to be a conservative force which prevented sensible arguments for change from passing the impossible tests of rational truth. Descartes (1596-1650) was an exact contemporary of Richelieu (1585-1642). It was the Cardinal who, without reference to the thinker, would go on to build permanently into the first real modern state and into its methods all of Descartes's deductive ideas: One could even argue that it is Descartes who is in debt to Richelieu and not the contrary. By the time Descartes's Discourse on Method appeared in 1637, Richelieu had already been Prime Minister for thirteen years. As early as 1627 the Cardinal had introduced his thirteen-point proposal for "a Rational Reorganization of Government." The degree to which he was creating our future can be seen in such details as his restructuring of the educational system in order to produce more graduates in the scientific, practical professions and fewer in the general arts. For someone who held power four centuries ago, Richelieu was a remarkable combination of the best and the worst of the twentieth century. As an individual he was the classic example of a technocratic leader. He had a nervous, impatient temperament, which made him far more effective behind the scenes than in public. He often dealt with widespread opposition by singling out and destroying one enemy in the group while reassuring' the others. He had a cynical view of human events which made him think that the mere application of his own intelligence could manipulate history and change its direction. He was obsessed with detail and therefore with unending work. This work consisted to a great extent of placing himself at the centre of the flow of information in order to control or to collect it. By the end of his life he was manipulating an extraordinary system of agents and was the master of everyone's secrets. Secrecy was central to his methods. In his very first public act as a young, relatively unknown bishop at the Etats-Generaux in 1614, he proposed a two-part method for their deliberations: first, laying out the precise hours at which they would meet, and second, insisting upon the absolute secrecy of everything said and done. Precision, hard work and secrecy. If this does not seem a clear enough model for the technocrat, then one can add, for example, his vindictiveness. Twenty-eight years later, as he himself lay dying, swollen, in unbearable agony and fully conscious of the fact that he was within days of his own demise, he concentrated his mind upon the trial and condemnation to death of his great enemy, the Marquis de Cinq Mars. Of the thirteen judges who had just tried the young man, eleven voted for execution. What Richelieu insisted upon knowing -- he had no legal right to -- were the names of the two dissenters. [11] Had his own disease given him even a short reprieve, he no doubt would have insisted that only traitors could have believed that Cinq Mars wasn't a traitor. Richelieu had another characteristic, a peculiar one, which is often found in people who are better at dealing with systems than with individuals. In public, he could force himself to be the essence of cool reason. In private, he was given to particularly personal and vicious attacks. Richelieu specialized in anonymous or ghosted pamphlets. There was, for example, his anonymous published attack on Louis XIII's favourite, the Due de Luynes. According to the Cardinal, the man had six major vices. He was "incompetent, a coward, ambitious, greedy, an ingrate and a cheat." [12] Language, for Richelieu, was a means of hiding his actions and thoughts rather than of communicating them. To his taste for private malice should be added a weakness for intrigues, which often accompanies both an obsession with secrecy and the seeking of power through structure. But where did he get these tastes for intrigue and manipulation, this sad view of society and of the citizen and indeed of himself? The Chinese castration of imperial advisers was a means of removing dynastic dreams from ambitious young men. Certainly Richelieu's methods remind one of the eunuch approach. And the idle speculator can't help but gaze back at Bacon's praise of asexuality among rational elites or for. that matter, back further at Ignatius Loyola, creator of the rational system, and wonder about the exact height at which the cannonball passed between his legs and the exact damage it did on the way through. Reason seems to have created a system which, whatever its good points, . is often felt to be castrating. Is there any reason, then, to be surprised if it attracts to positions of power individuals who are prone to an asexual view of the world? The structure that Richelieu put into place was, of course, filled with worthwhile and progressive characteristics. He had set out to create an honest administration, including that most difficult of things, an honest tax collection system. He was hard on elites that opposed him but relatively eager to help the poor, even if they had supported his enemies. He sought to remove the willful, irrational element from royal government.
The trademark of the nation-state was to be centralization and it was Richelieu who devised how to make this process unstoppable. He did this largely to create an efficient, honest government but also to destroy the negative power of both the Church and the aristocracy. It is difficult now to realize just how revolutionary all this. was. His nationalism was a new idea, scarcely understood, let alone accepted. He was struggling against the mainstream of power and against the general belief in aristocratic rights. In many ways the modern republic and its equivalent, the constitutional monarchy, are Richelieu's creations. At the same time, all his actions -- positive and negative -- were accompanied by the use of fear, that essential tool of modern organization. "Punishments and rewards," he wrote,
At one point in his career the Cardinal was forced out of office. Abruptly he became clumsy, even incompetent. He said and did the wrong things. He showed sijll1s of uncontrollable paranoia. His skills seemed to be suited to being in power, not in opposition. But if the rational method had grown out of the defence of established power, then why would one expect a great technocrat to flower in opposition? The effective use of power excludes the idea of honourable opposition. A list of Richelieu's characteristics and policies makes him appear absolutely modern, but he should also be seen as the first man to fulfill Machiavelli's dream. Not to become the perfect prince. Machiavelli's prince was only the necessary, practical focus of a political method, given the time and the place. Richelieu was rather the fulfillment of Machiavelli's personal dream -- that of the employee who uses the cover of a prince in order to institute a new system. Louis XIII, despite his weak character and emotional instability, was the perfect marionette for Richelieu. Those who concentrated on the Cardinal's operatic day- to-day relationships with the King and the Queen Mother saw constant chopping and changing and minor intrigue. They missed what was really happening to France. In the hands of a consummate technocrat, it was being transformed from a feudal kingdom into a nation. The absolute monarchy which followed, and which is habitually seen as the glorious swan song of the old ways, was in fact the first complete manifestation of the rationally administered nation-state. Beneath the palace theatre of absolute monarchy ran the growing power of Richelieu's state, devoid of any real attachment to royal rights or to morality of any kind. Versailles was the modern state in disguise -- an elaborate game of charades. It was only a matter of time, given the forces which Richelieu had set in motion, before the prince was replaced by something even more malleable -- the constitutional democracy, in which governments came and went, while the cardinals, or their secular equivalents, remained. *** In Buddhism there is a phrase -- the middle way -- which has always fascinated Westerners dissatisfied with the direction our society has taken. On closer examination that middle way turns out to be extremely arduous. But the phrase nevertheless expresses a reasonableness which is absent from our own rational absolutism. The tendency of eighteenth-century writers to set allegories in the East was tied to the idea that these people were more likely to be sensible. Not that moderation has been absent from Western thought. Bacon strained after it in his search for openness of mind, as did Richelieu in his attempts to create fair institutions. And certainly Blaise Pascal laboured to cover up the still-warm tracks of Descartes by establishing the moral fibre of reason: "All our dignity, then, consists in thought. It is· upon this that we must depend.... Let us labour, then, to think well: this is the foundation of morality." [15] In a sense Moliere was Pascal's alter ego. And Moliere's enormous popularity might have given the impression that there was hope for reasonable action. But those who told straight truths to large audiences -- as Moliere did -- came to play a specific role in societies where judgmental power dominated the state, learning, business and every other key area. They fulfilled the function of a Punch and Judy show. After the citizen had given his day, year, life to the real system -- the one that had power -- he went out to dream and to laugh in the theatre, where Moliere knocked his superiors about. Still, Pascal could not be totally ignored. He could be admired, which meant he needn't be listened to. He could become like an honoured saint, better than other mortals but impossible to follow. As opposed, for example, to Thomas Hobbes, who was making an enormous impact in England by proposing a mechanical and secular social contract which depended on an absolute monarch and, above all, on fear as the control device. Someone like John Locke was far more attractive. He attacked the old powers and the unexplained, unexplainable established order. And that was welcomed. Yet at the same time he led the citizenry, with his contractualism, farther along the easy path opened up by Bacon and Descartes which eventually brought them to an obsession with proofs and therefore with facts. Facts at that time were such rare nuggets that no one realized how they would multiply. Everyone believed them to be solid and inanimate -- to be true facts. No one yet understood that life would become an. uncomfortable, endless walk down a seashore laid thick with facts of all sizes and shapes. Boulders, pebbles, shards, perfect ovals. No one had begun to imagine that these facts were without any order, imposed or natural -- that facts were as meaningful as raw vocabulary without grammar or sentences. A man could pick up any fact he wished and fling it into the sea and make it skip. A practiced, talented arm could make it skip three, perhaps four times, while a lesser limb might make a single plunk with the same concrete proof of some truth or other. Another man might build with these facts some sort of fortress on the shore. As for Locke, he certainly did not think that facts would rapidly become the weapons, not only of good men but of evil men, not only of truth but of lies. Had he but looked back at Richelieu's career, he might have seen what was to come. At the age of twenty in Rome, Richelieu had argued a sermon before the Pope in order to prove a particular point. The very next day he was again before the Pope and argued the same sermon in order to prove the opposite point. [16] Europe had hardly reached the supposed birth of modern reason, and yet hints of the force of the future blind logic were already in the air. There were those who saw what was happening and who warned eloquently. Jonathan Swift's trenchant words came too soon and were too harsh. With books like Gulliver's Travels (1726) he became popular but was immediately categorized as marginal and peculiar. And there was that unhappy professor, Giambattista Vico, who tried to advance his ideas in the very Catholic city of Naples. He used an historical approach to combat the Cartesian self-justifying abstractions. Rationalists tended later to categorize him as an obscure reactionary in order to discount what he was saying. But he wasn't seeking to defend the old order, and certainly not the worst of the old order. Rather, he was striving for the same inquisitiveness as Pascal, the same care in seeking out right and Wrong." Today," he wrote in 1708,
As for the new methods of analysis, "It is impossible to deny anything they say unless you attack them from the beginning. [18] Vico was perhaps the first to recognize the irresistible strength of the new and theoretically free methods of argument, which in fact were structured to make a particular answer inevitable. He and Montesquieu both condemned the loss of the "political vocation" as it had been preached by the Greeks and the Romans -- a vocation in favour of the cult of truth, a vision of society as a moral whole. [19] It was Montesquieu, a jurist from the minor nobility of Bordeaux, who initiated early in the eighteenth century the admiration of French philosophers for English freedoms. But if truth was becoming nothing more than a structured argument studded with useful, malleable facts, then what was left of the moral whole except Machiavellianism on the one hand and raw sentiment on the other? Common sense, which might also be called careful emotion or prudence, was squeezed out of the picture. Vico and Montesquieu sensed what would happen after the anchors of the old system had finally been cut away -- technocracy would reign in a curious coalition with almost animal emotion. The perfectly normal human emotive needs, in the absence of a social context which could deal with them, would degenerate into sentiment. And it was that base sentiment, unleashed by the rational technocrat, which would turn into the cult of the Hero. *** The Lisbon earthquake struck in 1755 and shattered the moral legitimacy of established power. It did to the psychic inviolability of Church and absolute monarchs what the Vietnam War later did to that of the United States. This catastrophe, which killed indiscriminately thousands of children, women and men, poor and rich, seemed somehow to require an immediate explanation. The people of Europe asked themselves a collective Why? The Church and the constituted authorities couldn't stop themselves from replying that God was punishing sinners. Instinctively the citizenry found this answer ridiculous. Lisbon wasn't a particularly sinning town, certainly not in comparison to Madrid, Paris or London. And those children, women, poor. They could know nothing of important sins. The claim of divine retribution was so obviously ridiculous that, abruptly, people felt liberated from any obligation to believe anything the authorities said. In particular the Church discredited its power to give or to withhold moral sanction on the way people led their lives. Of all the citizens, those belonging to the aristocracy were in the most complex position. It had been decades since they had believed unquestionably in the foundations of their own legitimacy. However, they profited from the maintenance of a pretence of belief. That pretence was quickly cut to ribbons by the philosophers of the Enlightenment who, being in full flood, pounced with all their acerbic wit on the official Lisbon story. None of this was immediately clear in any concrete or structural way, but the veil had been rent. In that same year, an event occurred which made it possible to believe for the first time that reason was not a mere idea, that reason could govern men. Philosophers would no longer have to invent mythical Oriental nations, as Montesquieu and Voltaire had done, in order to illustrate their arguments. They could now simply refer to the republic in Corsica. [20] History is particular in the events that it chooses to retain. Retention usually requires the continued existence of a solid group -- an organized nation or a reasonably, numerous people -- that will integrate the event into its mythology and nurture it over the centuries. The Corsican republic has slipped out of general memory because there was no one off the Mediterranean island interested in remembering. The philosophical ideas that Pascal Paoli applied, when constructing his republic, were largely French. And it was the French who destroyed his republic: first Louis XV; then the Revolution; then, definitively, Bonaparte. Even on the island itself, integration into France meant that the importance of the Paoli republic would be, indeed had to be, played down by the authorities. Corsica had belonged to Genoa since the sixteenth century. The Genoese had always concentrated their power in the island's ports and kept a loose hold on the mountainous interior, where most of the population lived. From time to time -- and increasingly in the eighteenth century -- the rival Corsican clans would agree on a common leader and then rise up in revolt. Paoli's father had led one of these liberation forces with great success. But the Genoese then asked the Austrians and the French to support them militarily and in 1738 the elder Paoli fled to Naples, taking his thirteen-year-old son with him. Pascal Paoli was therefore brought up in exile in Italy, where he memorized the classics, learned Italian, French and English, was trained as an army officer and read all the eighteenth-century philosophers. In 1755 the clans again came together and, "by the general voice," elected the then thirty-year-old exile their leader and asked him to come home. Paoli came determined to apply the ideas of the philosophes to that piece of the real world. He transformed what had begun as yet another clan revolt into something so different that the island was soon liberated except for a few besieged ports. In desperation the Genoese again turned to France for help and Louis XV sent an expedition. (By chance the future revolutionary Mirabeau was among the French officers.) Paoli's army used guerrilla tactics to make mincemeat of these regulars, but Louis's response to defeat was simply to send a second, larger expedition in return for Genoa's title deed to the island. This invasion stirred Rousseau to write: "I still find it hard to believe that France is Willing to ,call down upon herself the censure of the world." [21] The first Pitt, who was later to support the American revolutionaries against his own king, spoke up in Corsica's defence, saying of Paoli that he was "one of those men who are no longer to be found but in the Lives of Plutarch." [22] The second French force included a young major, Count de Guibert, the future inventor of modern military strategy. Now that their own 'territorial expansion was in question, the French applied themselves seriously and the imbalance of numbers and of available funds combined to weaken Paoli's army. Then a single major strategic error in 1769 led to a Corsican military rout halfway across a mountain river on the Ponte Nuovo. The republic was dead. Paoli fled. His senior officers -- including Napoleon Bonaparte's father -- went home. And Paris began its standard absorption of newly conquered territories. This included an interdiction on the teaching of the Corsican language and a gathering up of the local young male elite to be educated as Frenchmen on the mainland. Paoli, meanwhile, was on his way to exile in England. At that time most philosophers believed that the English enjoyed the greatest political freedom in Europe. And Paoli had the expectation of being welcomed there thanks to James Boswell, who had come to Corsica a few years before and written a book devoted to glowing descriptions of Paoli's republic. As the defeated leader crossed Europe on his way to London, he was greeted as the great hero of political reason. Enormous crowds -- often so thick that he couldn't leave the houses he was staying in -- followed him everywhere. His likeness was sold on handkerchiefs. The kings of Europe sought him out as he passed and paid homage. When he reached England, John Wesley wrote: "Lord, show him what is Thy will concerning him and give him a kingdom that cannot be moved!" [23] This was the period leading up to the American Revolution, and the colonials had only three foreign heroes -- Pitt the Elder, John Wilkes and Paoli. Corsica played a key role in the rise of the republican ideal within the thirteen colonies. Ships and children were named after the martyred leader. When the Revolution came, the rebels used his name as a rallying cry during charges against the English troops. And in later years the old revolutionaries throughout the American republic raised their glass in his honour on the night of Paoli's birthday. It is difficult to imagine today the impact that the Corsican republic made on Europe and America during its fourteen years in operation and then again during the French Revolution, when Paoli was called from exile in London across to Paris. There he was cheered by the entire National Assembly, from moderates to revolutionaries, as the first man to have fought the kings and governed under the sign of reason. All of them -- Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre -- knew that in 1762, when Paoli's republic was only seven years old, Rousseau had written in The Social Contract:
Various philosophers imagined themselves in this role, but Paoli himself was obliged by circumstances to fill it. Without being an ideologue, he saw himself as the agent of reason. His great common sense permitted him to act in a reasonable manner while the absolutist forces -- old and new -- flew about. In the end he was defeated by both: the tail end of the absolute monarchy combined with the new, strident forces of nationalist reason. The modern equivalent of Corsica's popularity among the intellectuals and young of eighteenth-century Europe and America is perhaps that of Alexander Dubcek's Czechoslovakia or Salvador Allende's Chile in the 1960s. And yet the situation was quite different. Paoli was the forerunner of an absolutely new idea. He was the first leader to try and to succeed. And then he was crucified -- first by the old interests, then by the new. He popularized the rule of reason and thus carried the idea for the first time beyond the intellectuals and out to the general population of Europe. In popular terms his impact was like that of John Kennedy. Later, in exile, he came to resemble Norodom Sihanouk, the wandering shadow of a small country destroyed by the large powers. Behind all these reverberations lay Paoli's practical invention of the modern republic, by no means an ideal creation. He was dealing with a poor population still divided into clans. Their election of him was representative only in the sense of a clan-based election. At best it could be said that if ever there was a society which resembled Marx's unconscious democracy, it was the Corsica on which Paoli landed in 1755. He attempted to carry his country directly from the middle ages to the Age of Reason, jumping over the age of the absolute monarchs in a way which made use of every modern ideal. First he appeared to be the model republican leader. He dressed in simple clothing and refused the moneys voted him by the Assemblies. He created a public school system and a university. Although a believer himself, he dismantled the political and economic power of the Church, instituted a fair legal system, encouraged local industries in what we would now call a social democratic manner, and helped the Assembly to produce a model constitution, which encouraged decentralization and delegation. His enlightened ideas on a variety of subjects were reported to the world by Boswell and other visitors, as well as through his vast correspondence. He admired politicians in their role as the servants of the people. He was a nationalist within the limits of public service and of a free state. He admired William Penn's peaceful colony, where the people were "happier than Alexander the Great after destroying multitudes at the conquest of Thebes." [25] He had a strong sense of virtue and a "faith in the people" which be followed all of his life. The Corsican Constitution of 1762 drew on the ad hoc body of existing laws and upon the principles of the Enlightenment. His opening speech to the elected Consulta in May of the same year was a model of reason in action:
It was Paoli who first wrote of free citizens ready to accept "only liberty or death" and ho, on returning to his country after twenty-one years of exile in England, fell to the ground to kiss the earth, thus sealing the link between reason and the love of country -- an equation which, more than any other of that time, has been deformed to serve the opposite purpose. Paoli's republic, much more than the American, was the precursor of the French Revolution. In 1790 Mirabeau, in order to cleanse his own hands, which had been "dirtied" by participation in the military expedition sent by Louis XV to destroy the Corsican republic, moved that the Assembly invite Paoli back from exile in England. The French Constitution of 1790 was an imitation of the one Paoli had instituted a quarter of a century before, and so he came to Paris as a hero. A wild reception greeted his entry into the Assembly. The leaders filed one after the other to the podium to praise him. Robespierre set the tone: "You defended freedom when we did not even dare to hope for it." [26] The excited and unstable tribunes of Paris sent him to Corsica to govern in their name and in that of reason. Paoli was welcomed home as the national saviour. As in 1755, he put all temptations of personal glory aside and got to work. But this was the last high point of his life. Having invented the first government of reason, he was about to be squeezed between the two forces that were set to dominate the West -- the technocrats and the Heroes -- the classic division of modern rational society. Paoli's honesty, his age and the smallness of Corsica in the centre of this hurricane, all limited his freedom of movement. He set about carrying out his mandate, only to discover that as Paris writhed into ever- greater confusion and the revolutionaries set about destroying each other, it was virtually impossible not to fall foul of them. It was hard to know whether his distance from the capital was an advantage or a disadvantage. In any case he was soon under attack from the Assembly, which did everything it could to destabilize him. The element most susceptible to destabilization was the new generation of young Corsican aristocrats who had grown up during the twenty years of French rule. They were a curious group. Almost schizophrenic. Educated in France a d drawn into the Parisian orbit -- with all that implied of superficial urban superiority covering up the demons of a provincial inferiority complex -- they were nevertheless sons of clan leaders and themselves Corsican nationalists who resented the French conquest. Paoli was their spiritual father. Now, with the Revolution in Paris, a new phenomenon -- romantic reason -- was in full flood. Every young man began to see himself as a potential Hero, created not by the Paolian ideal of the self-sacrificing public servant but by the new dream of the unleashed ego. If a young man felt endowed with enough courage to snatch personal glory, then destiny and reason somehow empowered him to do so at the expense of whoever was in the way. Betrayal of causes and homeland were nothing when weighed against glory -- the new word for personal advancement. Voltaire had already written in his Philosophical Dictionary: "He who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself." [27] For a young Corsican consumed by the fires of Heroic ambition there could be no greater obstacle than Paoli, the living spirit of reasonable public service. The Bonaparte brothers led the way in this new worship of the Hero. Paoli had every reason to believe in their loyalty. Not only had their father been one of his best and closest officers, their mother had been a famous patriot, following her husband through the mountains from battlefield to battlefield during the campaign against Louis XV's expedition. She had been there, six months pregnant, on May 8, 1769, when the Corsican republic suffered its great and last defeat at Ponte Nuovo. With her husband, she managed to flee the catastrophe and to reach their home in Ajaccio, where Bonaparte was born. Twenty years later, the young man was serving in the French artillery, but he was still fiercely loyal to the Corsican cause. Like Paoli, he had initially been encouraged by the Revolution of 1789. Then, as the confusion and jingoism in Paris turned against the interests of his island, Bonaparte wrote to Paoli of his hatred for the French and of his feelings for the poor Corsicans, "weighed down by chains even as they kissed, trembling, the hand which oppressed them." [28] In truth, however, the factionalism and subterfuge of a revolution gone wrong were already drawing these young Corsican aristocrats into the emotional turbulence. Who was pure? Who wasn't? Who a revolutionary? Who a traitor? What was liberty? What was the public good? Who should hold power? Who should die? Abstract rational thought was operating at full force and with an immediate impact on the real world. Paoli refused to let Corsica slip into this violent dialectic. Instead he continued on a course of steady, calm reform. The Paris Assembly was at its most radical stage and was looking for diversions. They declared Paoli a criminal and threatened to invade Corsica. They also focused on the young future clan leaders living in Paris and convinced them that Paoli's moderation was antirevolutionary. A small group was sent home to provoke Heroic, revolutionary events. Paoli countered by calling together the Corsican Consulta -- 1,000 strong. They declared the island an independent republic for the second time in forty years. But when the old man discovered that a group of young Corsicans, including the Bonapartes, was actually plotting against him to win power in Paris, he despaired and sought a counterweight to France. Only one existed -- England. He placed the Corsican Republic under British protection, then discovered that they were just as rapacious as the French. London sent a governor -- a Sir Gilbert Elliot -- who turned out to be a technocrat of limited talents. Vain, given to plotting and flattery, jealous of prerogatives, an administrator who stayed inside his palace, Elliot could not accept that the support the English had on the island came entirely from the people's confidence in Paoli. Instead he saw the old man as a rival and plotted with the English authorities to squeeze the Corsican out. Elliot believed that his own inability to control the island could be reversed through administrative manipulation. The problem, he argued, was Paoli's age. The old man slowed events by his lengthy consultations with the Corsicans. And his desire to support a state built on the principles of reason, while opposing French imperialism, was an idea too complex to function with a world war raging about them. Elliot believed that if he could get rid of Paoli, he would control the man's administrative system and therefore the government and the island. It took some time before his mandarin skills could force the old man into his third exile. This was followed by a night or so during which Elliot was technically in absolute control. Then everything evaporated around him. One minute he was master of the island. The next it wasn't safe for him to leave his palace. Shortly after, the English were obliged to abandon the island. On paper, of course, Elliot had not lost Corsica. He had decided to withdraw from it. If any blame was due, it was to Paoli. Had the old man left sooner, Elliot would not have had to withdraw at all. In fact, there were lots of people he could blame in his reports. And, in what would later become the tradition of the staff officer -- promoted for losing battles -- Elliot managed to have himself rewarded with the title Baron Minto of Minto. He put the national symbol of Corsica -- a moor's head with a white bandeau into his family coat of arms. As for Bonaparte, he had fled back to France the moment his plotting was discovered and had since concentrated his ambitions there. In some ways, having no attachment to the country made him a perfect model for the Hero. The importance of a detached or mercenary approach had been a recurring theme in the writing of rationalist thinkers since Machiavelli. The Bonaparte brothers were still leading the way in the practical creation and worship of the rational Hero. By being first, doing so as an organized family group and getting a solid hold on power for more than a decade, they were able to define Heroic action for the next two centuries. The only problem they had in creating this mythological aura stemmed from the fact that they had made their way by betraying the first great rational statesman, who had also been their father figure and that of Corsica. In other words, they had also betrayed their own country. Napoleon's embarrassment could be seen in his studious avoidance of Corsica once he had got hold of power in Paris. He also pushed ahead With the integration of the island into the French structure. The extraordinary educational and mythological machinery, centered in the French capital ensured that Paoli would be eliminated from or deformed in, every aspect of organized culture and government. Since the Revolution was to be presented as the expression of reason and Napoleon as its natural inheritor, Paoli had to be presented as the enemy of reason. The official mythology, therefore, gradually balanced the idolatry of Bonaparte with its ridiculing of Paoli. This formula was finally perfected in the twentieth century, in Abel Gance's brilliant but totally inaccurate film deifying Bonaparte. The young man is presented as an idealistic, disinterested, virginal -- indeed, physically beautiful -- nationalist, who must deal with Paoli, a degenerate, corpulent, corrupt - indeed, syphilitic - old dictator. The fact that Paoli was scrupulously honest, died poor, led a monastic life and introduced democracy, while Bonaparte went on to political, military and financial excess through uncontrolled, egocentric ambition, disappears effortlessly beneath the full flood of organized cinematic mythology. Even the personal physiques of the two men were inverted by Gance. Paoli was a tall, aesthetic figure. It was Bonaparte, an extremely short man with an undescended testicle, who ran to fat. But none of that mattered. After all, the creation of the Hero had as little to do with reality as did the administrative effectiveness of Sir Gilbert Elliot, later known as Baron Minto. *** Long before this disastrous period in Paoli's life, the example of his first republic had already been embraced in the American colonies. There, reason was given a second opportunity to prove itself. The colonials were far luckier than the Corsicans. London was a long way away. The power of the British Parliament tempered the power of the king. And the power of the colonials' friends within Parliament in turn weakened the war party. The colonies were also reasonably large ,and led not by one brilliant man but by a remarkable collection of men. Within this group were two who would replace Paoli In international mythology as the republican ideal. It is fair to say that had the United States not produced Washington and Jefferson, its history would have been quite different. Without a calm first president, equipped with perfect honour and a limited ambition, and a third president who possessed in addition a genius that could both imagine the republic of reason and put it into effect, it is highly unlikely that the revolutionary excitement could have been channelled and the country put onto a reasonable track. Not that the Revolution was entirely satisfactory. The resulting Constitution, as the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall has pointed out, was "defective from the start." [29] Even after a civil war and momentous social transformations, the current system of government is still unable to deal with the terrible economic disparities, the violence and the growing, uneducated, nonvoting percentage of the population. Nevertheless, Washington and Jefferson managed to hold the republic in place long enough for emotions to cool and for the nation to get off the revolutionary roller coaster. The French experience shows what might have happened. Caught in full revolution with no great republican leaders, they were thrown, as if in an epileptic fit, from republic to dictator to king to republic to dictator to republic to dictator and back to the republic they have today. Our standard view is that the violent change provoked by the French Revolution was much greater than that of the American. France's subsequent instability is supposed to be the result. But if we are talking about profound social changes, then the analysis is wrong. In France the real revolution had already taken place, gradually, over the preceding twenty years. The rising intellectual and administrative class was already converted to reason, Most of the latter came from the aristocracy, albeit the minor aristocracy, which was more accurately a manifestation of a new upper middle class. Many of the modernizing administrative changes they sought had already been made or were in process by the time the Revolution broke out. The Ecole Royale desPonts et Chaussees (the national civil engineering school) had been founded in 1776, followed by the national mining engineering school and the Ecole Normale Superieure (for the training of professors). Even the greatest of all the national schools, the Polytechnique, was created in midrevolution by the middle-class elements who felt they were involved in a continuing process, rather than beginning something new. The army structure had already been modernized under Louis XVI to an extent that the British would not reach until late in the nineteenth century. The revolutionary army, which amazed everyone by beating the great Prussian army at Valmy in 1792, was in fact the re-formed royal army, commanded in large part by the products of that system -- young, well-born, professional officers, who had been converted to the principles of rational management well before 1789. As for the king's divine right -- that official enemy of the Revolution -- no one had actually believed in it for years. How could they? Most of the ruling elite hardly believed in God. They certainly didn't believe in an active, hands-on God. The superficial forms, which Louis XIV had originally given the state, were now its only cement. Louis XIV had dressed and lived like a Sun King in order to give the aristocracy and the population a concrete emanation of his power. On the rungs which descended from his throne of grandeur, each aristocrat had a perch in declining order of visible magnificence. Louis sought to tie the aristocracy to this meaningless code in order to control them while he consolidated his own power. He was, after all, a man who enjoyed great simplicity, a man perfectly conscious of the difference between his appearance as Sun King and his reality as the functioning head of state. Particularly during the second half of his reign, he tended to escape from sight whenever possible, shed his extravagant costumes and, like an actor offstage, sit quietly in a small salon with his wife. It took only a century for the sense of that division to be lost. Louis XVI and his entourage had actually come to believe in the reality of appearances. They believed that it was this masquerade, this publicity system, which made Louis king; that without it, he was nothing. What's more, if appearances were all that mattered, there was no reason to worry about his real incompetence when it carne to doing his job. This reasoning may sound familiar, because it resembles the assumptions often made about political leadership today. Again and again during the Revolution, Louis was incapacitated not so much by his own weak character or his drinking or his wife's stupidity as by his inability to differentiate between appearance and reality. This came to a head during his abortive escape attempt of 1791, which ended in recapture at Varennes. Confusion in his own mind between his royal dignity and the need to disguise himself caused him to reject several effective escape plans. He settled for the most cumbersome approach and disdained any proper disguise. Louis wore a pink wig, as if the whole business were a costume party rather than a desperate, real moment. A government structure in which the leader and his senior advisers are willing to 'risk the existence of the entire system over whether the leader should or should not wear a proper servant's wig for twelve hours is not simply a sclerotic system. By normal clinical standards it is already dead. But why was the result of revolution so much more destabilizing in France than in the United States? The first answer has already been given -- America was lucky in its revolutionary leaders. The second is that, unlike France, America did not try to become a republic in more than name. Washington's job description fitted Voltaire's of a benevolent monarch in almost every way except for the title. Third, it is not clear that the history of the United States has been any more stable than that of France. For example, the ongoing high levels of violence associated with American civilization are usually attributed to the frontier tradition. They could just as easily be attributed to the syndrome of solving social problems with force, which was produced by the Revolution. The real answer, however, may be far more general. The threat or promise of change brings out the frail nature of mankind's psyche. And sudden change is an imposition of instability. The rational argument, from its modern beginnings, has tried to avoid dealing with this reality. The multitude of abstract social models -- mathematical, scientific, mechanical, and market based -- are all based on an optimistic assumption that a schematic reorganization of society will be good for the human race. Even the idea of man as a perfectable being is dependent on an idea of manipulation from outside or above. The technocrats and the Heroes are the two favoured types of rational manipulators. But what the French and American revolutions should have told us is that human beings do not respond effectively to this sort of manipulation. And the more abstract it is, the more they resistor slide on to an emotional and political roller coaster. In that sense revolution is a sign of the failure of both those who lose power and those who gain it. It provokes an instability which the people and the new leaders seek to control as rapidly as possible. But once let loose, this instability takes on a momentum of its own -- a momentum that provokes physical suffering and blood. The end result may be that certain problems are solved, but in the process the civilization is permanently scarred. by the violence. The violent act usually fosters both increased levels of inflexible extremism and absolutism and yet more violence. *** With this much hindsight, it is relatively easy to identify the long-term destabilizing effects of extreme social engineering. People living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a far harder time reading the signals flashing all around them in a confusing array. Those who sought the middle way -- like Paoli and Jefferson -- had to grope through the disorder as best they could, aided by their common sense. An interesting example of this process was Edmund Burke -- a great Whig; a careful, inquisitive thinker; and a supporter of Corsica, Irish independence and the American revolutionaries. With his "Address to the Electors of Bristol" he laid out one of the first reasonable proposals fur a practical relationship between the voter and the elected. He also opposed slavery. He did make, however, one important "ideological" error in his career. He opposed the French Revolution. Some of his arguments against it were brilliant; others were patently wrong. France was not a country he knew a great deal about and so, out of ignorance, he praised the ancien regime. But his practical sense did help him to see what was disastrous-about the Revolution. He pointed out that he was in favour of a "moral regulated liberty as' well as any gentleman in France [but would not] stand forward and give praise [to an] object stripped of all concrete relations [so that it stood] in all the solitude of a metaphysical idea." [30] This opposition caused him to be recategorized by the great flow of rationalist philosophers, including Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; as a reactionary, rather in the way earlier philosophers had categorized Vico. In a sense Burke suffered the intellectual equivalent of condemnation by the Inquisition or elimination for serious consideration by Cartesian logic or a Stalinist show trial. Those who categorized him didn't like his stands in favour of Paoli and Washington anymore than they liked his opposition to the French Revolution. In fact, it wasn't his stands they disliked, it was how and why he took them. It wasn't that he opposed reform or justice, which he ,didn't, but that he rejected the new logic. On most days Burke had a solid historical sense, He was able to see events as they were and to see where an approximate moral truth lay. He was a practical man who relied on common sense, He didn't use a priori arguments. He was therefore an enemy of the new age. To rational thinkers his support of reform in certain areas seemed to contradict his conservatism, in others. But Burke saw reform and the maintenance of stability as part of a balance or a compromise which reflected the real world. And the real world was filled with contradictions which could not be eliminated by the egotistical sweep of an abstract hand. In that sense, even at his most conservative, he was closer to the middle way than were the optimistic rationalists, who imagined whole populations sliced free of their limiting past and present, then flipped over to fry in a new, clean future with all the inanimate passivity of a Big Mac. This was the reality that Burke groped for when attacking the French Revolution: the more complete the idealistic future proposed, the more certain it was to require some overriding dissolution imposed either by the initiators or by those who would appear in extremis to establish authority in the resulting anarchical situation. In either case the effect would be to unleash a level of violence which, in this clean, new world liberated from experience and common sense, would be virtually unrestrainable. Burke, of course, wasn't the only reformer to have doubts about the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson was the American ambassador to France from 1785 to 1789. He and Lafayette had been friends during the American Revolution. In 1789 Jefferson was the only experienced and successful revolutionary in Paris and so his house became a mecca for the newly elected Assembly members. They asked his advice and he soon began to tell them they were slipping off course, that matters were moving out of control, not just for the king but for the reformers and the revolutionaries. They were losing sight of the concrete wrongs which had provoked the whole business. Real opportunities to consolidate democratic political power and social justice were slipping by because everyone was getting caught up in enormous battles over such abstract things as the true nature of man and which were the absolute solutions to all problems. Mirabeau and Danton were distracted by these large ideas and their own personal petty corruption. Robespierre and Saint Just were emerging as the reincarnations of the Inquisitors and Loyola disguised in the garb of revolutionary avenging angels. *** Jefferson's own revolutionary origins and his record as a fair and honest president have in the long run put him beyond the sort of intellectual show trial that Burke suffered. In fact, Jefferson may be the sole example of a great man of reason able to keep himself above and beyond the judgmental scourge of the rational ideologues. He was thus highly successful both in his ideas and in his political execution. His faults are there to be counted, but he was arguably the greatest public figure the modern world has produced. Philosopher, writer, architect, farmer, inventor, revolutionary, politician, head of state; a man surrounded by friends and by love. He avoided intrigue. Did not believe in secrecy. Understood the difference between the primacy of peace and the extremity in which war is justified. He failed to convince his colleagues to deal with the slave question in the Declaration of Independence but wrote: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free." But if "it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up." [31] He had the true democrat's faith in the people as "the source of all authority." [32] He acted in a constant state of moral consciousness." An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second." "Though you cannot see, when you take one step, what will be the next," he wrote to a nephew, "yet follow truth, justice' and plain dealing, and never fear their leading you out of the labyrinth, in the easiest manner possible. The knot which you thought a Gordian one, will untie itself before you. Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition that a person can extricate himself from a difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery. by dissimilation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an unjustice." [33] His words ring today like those of a choirboy. But that reflects upon us, not upon the words. Jefferson dealt as he spoke." No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth." [34] Yet all the time he knew that the violent origins of the United States had created a mythology which its people were obliged to be proud of, and that pride could not prevent such violence from becoming an historical weight." The blood of the people is become an inheritance." [35] It was something that had to be slowly absorbed by the new system. Nowhere does he suggest that being a genius or a Hero or a champion or, for that matter, being someone capable of producing right answers was necessary to the function of good government. His description of George Washington is a veritable eulogy to the qualities of not being the best:
It isn't surprising that Politicians of all sorts have tried to claim Jefferson as their own. They usually hang their claim not on his general philosophical, moral or political beliefs, but on some specific concept used by Jefferson to reflect a concrete need of his time. President Reagan was particularly adept at this hijacking of isolated moral precepts, which he then used to justify actions that would have horrified Jefferson. What these pillagers of words avoid, however, is the great common sense that Jefferson brought to reason and morality, as well as the historical view to which, like Burke, he managed to marry all three. But then the historical view implies a solid memory of how the past had unfolded and that in turn hampers the clean lines of freestanding rational solutions. How different France's revolutionary experience might have been had it had either Washington or Jefferson to guide events, Instead the people, their hearts still racing with the excitement and anguish of revolt, were lost in a sea of superhuman ideas and expectations, while being led by brilliant but immature egotists who rapidly murdered each other. When these were replaced by a group of venal and rather ordinary politicians, the people felt more than disappointment. They slipped into a national depression and sought desperately for the promised answers. It was then they needed leaders capable of explaining that the true glory of freedom was something as boring as an honest politician. Or that the process of reason was slow and cumbersome. Or that restraint of the individual ego was central to the victory of reason. *** Instead, out of the confusion, there appeared a full-blown male version of the base sentiment that Montesquieu and Giambattista Vico had warned of seventy-five years before. The anchor of the old system had been cut away by an abstract revolution, The rational thinkers and technocrats were unable to give the pitching ship a direction. And so, in the absence of any stable social context, the perfectly normal emotive needs of the population degenerated into sentiment. It took on concrete form as the cult of the Hero, the golden calf of reason, Bonaparte, disciple of Paoli, came fresh from the betrayal of both his mentor and his homeland, That he was a foreigner made him a more perfect Hero. He was there not to repair the anchor but to sail the ship away. In other words, the Hero turned out to be reason's magician, who replaced memory and history with himself. Of course, Bonaparte made the impact he did because he had undeniable talents, He still stands as the great modern general, He had a passion for administrative and legal reorganization. He couldn't conquer a city without wanting, like a Roman emperor, to open an avenue through the centre and then build something grand at either end, In fact, almost everything he did was subject to the effects of uncontrolled ego, And from the moment of his coup d'etat on the eighteenth Brumaire -- when he panicked at the podium of the Assembly and his brother had to carry it through -- the chasm between the myth of the rational Hero on the one hand and the reality of the man and his acts on the other never ceased to widen. In that context, it is worth pointing out that of the first four modern republics, Bonaparte destroyed three: Corsica, Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, was thrown into a damp, cold prison to die of exposure, and France. And he didn't get on with the fourth, the United States. Bonaparte quickly revealed the face of the Hero, and from the very beginning it contained all the characteristics of blind reason. He was judgmental -- impatient of unclear situations. Not long before his coup d'etat, he said that what France needed was a "complete victory for one party. Ten thousand killed, from one side or the other. If not, we'll have to keep starting over." Along with his judgments came a contempt for the people." What they need is glory, the gratifications of vanity." [37] Beyond that he exploited a vaguely democratic vocabulary he didn't believe in. The real message he took from the Revolution was the necessity for rational administration. "Once the happiness of the French people is based upon the best organic laws, all of Europe will become free." [38] In other words, reason equals structure equals happiness and that is freedom. Reason means contented efficiency. Bonaparte understood that the power given by efficient methods and rational argument was 'far more absolute than anything the kings had known. The only thing needed to make this combination irresistible was an emotive personality. Thus, emotional instability -- known as charisma -- combined with a talent for rational methods, became the recipe for the modern absolute dictator. Outside the Assembly on eighteenth Brumaire, just after his coup, Bonaparte felt his courage coming back and so began to harangue his soldiers: "This state of things can't go on. In three years they will lead us back to despotism. We want a Republic based upon equality, morality, civil liberty and political tolerance. With good administration, all individuals will forget which faction they belong to and they will be able to be French." [39] In other words, he carried out a coup to prevent despotism. He promised various liberties at the very moment that he was suppressing liberty. He promised efficiency, again, as the magic potion to produce what he had once called "happiness" and, now called "French." That reason could have led so fast to blind nationalism is astounding. It followed that he should next shut down the new -- and even the old -- mechanisms of free speech. After all the Bourbon monarchy had been a fairly loose organization in its last years. Even Voltaire had come back to Paris and been cheered at the theatre with the Queen present. Napoleon wouldn't have tolerated Voltaire for two minutes. He reduced the Assembly to a mouthpiece. Writers fled into exile. He took Richelieu's idea of a spy network a step further by developing the first truly modern and effective secret police system under the control of Fouche. He recreated Louis XIVs diversionary social control system by crowning himself emperor and distributing grand titles which required grand uniforms. Then he cynically set about distributing more medals than any state had ever seen: He referred to them as baubles. And all the time he continued working on his own Heroic mythology. At the heart of it lay his most brilliant and most deformed discovery -- the emotional trick which would bond a disturbed population to the Hero. This trick involved a very simple concept: all Heroes have a tragic destiny. They are married to the people. They sacrifice themselves like a virgin on the altar of mystical service. Napoleon's secretary, Count Roederer, recorded that when the Hero moved into the Tuileries -- the dark, damp, but royal palace -- the following exchange took place:
For years he went on repeating this sort of mystical trash. While Moscow burned, for example, he engaged his confidant, Count Narbonne, in romantic conversation:
Suddenly it becomes clear why Bonaparte was the only real hate of Jefferson's life. Even Alexander Hamilton, who had some of the makings of a dangerous Hero, was treated as an opponent, not a monster. But in dealing with Hamilton, it was the American system that was in question and Jefferson must have believed he could bring out the best in it. Therefore Hamilton would fail. Bonaparte functioned in another system and Jefferson knew, from his time in Paris, that there were no reasonable leaders to oppose this Hero. The American's fury was provoked also by his inability to admit that the success of reason depended entirely upon the presence of the right men. The proof of how easily it could be deformed was the success of Bonaparte, who had already betrayed everything reason had to offer. He was a
Jefferson wasn't simply provoked by the irreparable damage Bonaparte had done to the promise of reason. It was also that this damage had been done within the first decades of the system's existence, when it should still have been full of unsoiled vitality. In one letter he attempted to reassure himself by comparing his own career to Bonaparte's:
Of course, other men in the United States, in France and in other countries have since tried to do as well as he. And there have been multitudes of talented and dedicated public servants, elected and employed. They have accomplished wonderful things in the handful of nations which make up the West. But the aberrant myth of the Hero, with his tragic destiny, has nevertheless rolled on, always ready to interpose itself when the public servants slip too deeply into the manipulation of systems and the public loses its sense of direction. *** By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was filling up with Kaiser Wilhelms and General Boulangers and Cecil Rhodeses -- half-baked Heroes egged on by half-baked philosophers, who suffered in many cases from mental instability. This marriage of brilliance with insanity, which Friedrich Nietzsche still incarnates, created a perfect match for the glorification of the unpalatable. In 1912 Leon Bloy, then a well-known French writer, published L'Ame de Napoleon. "Napoleon is inexplicable anl1, no doubt, the most inexplicable of men, because he is, first and above all, He who comes before the ONE who must come and who is perhaps not far away." [44] You might imagine that these rantings would have caused people. to laugh or to brand him as a deranged personality and to put him out of their minds. Instead Bloy became popular as part of a strange, unforeseen phenomenon, which was increasingly successful at creating a link between the rational Hero and the pre-Christian roots of earth religion. What Bloy was saying may superficially sound like Christian imagery. In truth it had more to do with animism. What he was really dealing with was the phenomenon of the inexplicable and the inevitable; the oneness of things, in which everything, animate and inanimate, is alive and the Hero is us. When the eighteenth-century philosophers killed God, they thought they were engaged in housekeeping -- the evils of corrupt religion would be swept away, the decent aspects of Christian morality would be dusted off and neatly repackaged inside reason. Inadvertently they rendered that morality nonessential to their new society. Or rather they rendered it optional: The new essential element was structure. And so, while there was no room for a Leon Bloy in the official ranks of philosophy, by the late nineteenth century there was a growing desire in society to believe in something that went beyond arid structure and beyond the rather sad judgments of the new rational leaders, whether they be middle-class politicians or technocrats. Certainly Bloy's prophecy turned out to be perfectly accurate -- Napoleon was indeed a precursor." He who comes before the ONE." The unexpected element. was perhaps that the ONE turned out to be not French, but the bastard son of an Austrian customs official. Leon Bloy may have been less intelligent than Nietzsche, but he was certainly no crazier. And while Nietzsche built a perfect philosophical nest for the cult of the pre-Christian Hero in the very heart of modern reason, Bloy had the advantage of bringing it all down to mystical practicalities in a manner which would satisfy the middle-class Sunday lunch convictions of the new twentieth-century Right wing. What is more, Bloy certainly wasn't much crazier than Oswald Spengler, who began a justification of the first great Hero as follows: "The tragic in Napoleon's life, which still awaits discovery by a poet great enough to comprehend it and shape it." [45] Although Spengler wrote of the age of Heroes as if it were the end of our civilization, he also found the beginnings of the new civilization in. yet another Hero, supposedly of a different kind, cutting a swath through Africa and building a new, virginal civilization in his own wake. Cecil Rhodes was to be "the first precursor of a Western type of Caesar." [46] In fact, all Spengler is saying about Rhodes is that it was easier to be a Hero in Africa, where there were no deep foundations of Western civilization to slow you up. These writers are usually dealt with as three separate phenomena -- Bloy, an eccentric marginal; Spengler, a flash in the pan, overobsessed by cycles and too egocentric to be able to influence the Nazis for the better; and Nietzsche, not tarred by the Nazis' use of his ideas because he was not himself an anti-Semite, racial nationalist or indeed a German nationalist. Thus Nietzsche alone remains unsullied enough to become a major inspiration for contemporary thinkers of all political varieties. The truth is that when the technicalities are swept away, what remains is their deification of the Hero. All three accomplished this by marrying the earth-religion god-Hero to the modern Hero of reason. Nietzsche's brilliant analysis of the superman is merely a tarted-up version of Bloy's crude abasement of the individual worshipping at the feet of the megalomaniac dictator. And when an educated individual allows himself to be titillated by the sophisticated musings of Nietzsche, he is simply satisfying the need of modern rational man to feel what Bloy admitted was the excitement of being dominated. In the case of all three writers, the superman gains his power thanks to the death of God on the one hand and to being invincibly armed with the excalibur of reason on the other. *** There is in the late twentieth century a general feeling that Hitler and perhaps Stalin, although people in the West feel no personal need to take him into account -- was an accident of history. He caught us off guard, but we recovered in time to meet this force of evil in combat: Now he is gone. A horrible aberration. It isn't surprising that no one wants to hold on to the memory of Hitler as an image of modern normalcy. But if this is still the Age of Reason and if Hitler is the great image of reason's dark side, then he is still very much with us. As human beings we find it impossible to accept the idea that a man can do certain things unless he is crazy. We cannot accept that such evil is within us. That is a sign of man's unshakable optimism and even of his desire to be good. We have, therefore, placed the establishment, staffing and running of death camps in the category of a lunatic act. Of course, there was a strong current of lunacy in both, the man and his regime. But these organized massacres were not part of that lunacy. History is weighed down with repeated massacres of nations, cities, armies and religious, social and political groups. But those earlier massacres were always tied to some relatively concrete political, economic or social ambition -- the seizure of private property or of territory, the increase of one group's power, the extinction of a rival group's beliefs, the erasing of financial· debts, or the setting of an example. This was true even of Genghis Khan's Mongol armies. They often began their occupation of a newly won territory by massacring the entire population of one city. This convinced other cities to cooperate with the occupier -- to pay any taxes, to accept slavery for their sons. What Hitler organized was something quite different. It was the first absolutely gratuitous massacre in the history of man. It wasn't lunacy that made this possible, even if some of those who carried it out were clinically insane. Nor was this the simple product of traditional anti-semitism. It was more like the profound panic of a world somehow abandoned to a logic which had cut the imaginations of the perpetrators free from any sense of what a man ought to do versus what he ought not to. The Holocaust was the result of a perfectly rational argument -- given what reason had become -- that was self-justifying and hermetically sealed. There is, therefore, nothing surprising about the fact that the meeting called to decide on "the final solution," was a gathering mainly of senior ministerial representatives. Technocrats. Nor is it surprising that this Wansee Conference lasted only an hour -- one meeting among many for those present -- and turned entirely on the modalities for administering the solution. The systematic, scientific way in which those modalities were subsequently carried out has been categorized as an adjunct of lunacy or shrugged off as part of a phenomenon called the banality of evil. The massacre was indeed "managed," even "well managed." It had the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study. There was no practical reason for it. No property was gained, as it had all been expropriated already. No territory was at stake. The killings were a money-losing proposition - Nazi Germany was destroying a slave population capable of great production at a time when Aryan males had been sent away to fight. Judaism was not in any serious way a rival religion, since it did not proselytize. The power of Germany was not increased by their deaths. And no example was being set for other groups. After all, the whole process was kept secret. An act of pure logic carried out in a rational manner, the Holocaust was a child of the marriage between the two key practitioners of reason -- the Hero and the technocrat. To put it down to lunacy or to the banalization of evil in modern technological society is to miss the point. And while we might have hoped that the dark side of this marriage had burnt itself out with the exposure and destruction of Hitler, the events of the last forty years indicate that the opposite is true. Not only is the Napoleonic dream stronger today in our imaginations than it has ever been, but one can already feel the slow falling away of moral opprobrium from our memory of Hider. In another fifty years we may well find ourselves weighed down by a second monstrous dream of pure grandeur to match that of the Emperor. Two men who dared. Two men who were adored. Two men who led with brilliance. Two men who administered fairly and efficiently. Two men who were modest in their own needs but surrounded by lesser beings who profited from their situation and came between the Hero and his people. This last invocation is the "campaign bed syndrome" -- the Hero wishes only to sleep on his metal folding bed in a tent, to fight for the people and to walk among them in simple garb. If he must wear a uniform, he will make it simple, without braid, without medals. He is the people's soldier. Only the necessities of Heroship oblige him to sacrifice himself by sleeping on gilded beds in palaces, dressing up in the morning and creating a splendid aura for the people to admire. Needless to say, the rapacious elites, from whom the Hero protects the people, benefit from this. And so there are two men who were betrayed by those who surrounded them but not by the people. Two men who were destroyed, as befits the tragic destiny of Heroes. The idea that Hitler may be treated with honour one hundred years after his death shouldn't be surprising. Napoleon, who suffered equally ignominious defeat followed by exile, was returned to Paris in a coffin with Caesarean pomp only twenty-five years after being deposed. The two men were responsible for approximately the same number of deaths. And the Napoleonic dream -- that of combining efficient administration with the brute force required to ensure that it is properly applied -- lies today beneath the pillow of every ambitious colonel who drops off to sleep at night in the hope that the tooth fairy . of power will slip in before he awakes. In a few more years all the witnesses capable of imagining what the Hitlerian regime actually did will be dead. All witnesses of all sorts will be dead. Then mythology will be free to do whatever it wishes. And what will mythology do with the murder of six million Jews? In the absence of witnesses, that abomination will become a tragic abstract flaw proper to the Heroes' tragic destiny, rather in the way that Napoleon's invasion of Russia is referred to as the single great error of his career. The rapidity with which this normalization process is advancing can be seen in the new boldness of the Holocaust revisionists. We now assume that we have rejected all dreams of supreme leaders and of violent government. And yet the language of even the most insignificant minister of postal services is filled with Napoleonic images of strength and efficiency. The public appearances of political leaders are routinely organized as imitative Napoleonic triumphs. And our tolerance for both dictatorship and violence has never been greater. Our friends and allies around the world over the last forty years have included an astonishing collection of mass murderers, drug dealers and practitioners of widespread torture. Even the Khmer Rouge were reintegrated into the international community without great difficulty on the pretext of solving a relatively minor legal problem. We simply accept that the world will produce Heroes and that those Heroes will kill countless masses of people.
The posted declaration of the Khmer Rouge authorities at Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng Prison, their principal interrogation centre, is a reminder of their Western rational education. Thousands died within its walls. Their motto might have been posted in Latin at an Inquisition interrogation of the seventeenth century. Or in a Czechoslovakian prison of the 1950s. Or in any contemporary Western military intelligence service, although modern methodology now finds that psychological torture is more effective than physical. The very problems which theoretically set off the original desire for reason have now reappeared as the official tools of reason. What's more, actions such as "torturing ... to get answers" do not seem to carry with them any real, lasting stigma. Instead we concentrate our relatively abstract moralistic feelings on one or two chosen massacres, which graphically illustrate our horror -- a civilian airliner downed by terrorists or a small, innocent village burned -- as if our minds were unable to register and digest in a meaningful manner any more than that. There is no point in attempting to model ourselves on a man like Jefferson, whose genius enabled him to apply fully both a personal and a general moral standard. He was fortunate to be the man he was, but to emulate him would be to make of Jefferson precisely that thing he most detested -- a Hero. And in doing so we would be ceding to the dream that we ourselves might also rise to that Heroic level. The public domain requires, therefore, not a multiplication, but an abstraction of morality. And moral standards. since they are personal and applied, cannot be abstracted. That hasn't prevented us from seeking solutions to our problems, and the modern solution has been to set standards through constitutions and laws. But again, constitutions and laws are abstractions and subject more than we can accept to the will of those who manage them. And they are either technocrats or Heroes.
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