by Josef Steiff
And yet, roughly a hundred years after Holmes’s career, long after sweeping projects in secularization such as Maoist China, Soviet Russia, and Nazi Germany bathed the first half of the twentieth century in oceans of blood, we still find ourselves in a society not yet entirely willing to admit that Reason (science, technology, reasonable discourse, and information) does not have all the answers. In fact, we see an ongoing, growing movement, which can be traced back all the way to the Age of Reason in the seventeenth century, spearheaded today by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher, advocating a Rationalist worldview. I use this term here to mean a blending of scientific Materialism (the view that only matter exists, and that all phenomena have a knowable explanation, as a boundary against the super natural or spiritual) with political positions regarding a secular society. Staunchly opposed to any even vaguely speculative approach to pursuing Truth, Rationalists are ever increasingly adamant that the longer we wait to cast aside superstitions (their assessment) like Religion in favor of Reason (science, technology, reasonable discourse and information), the longer we risk the obliteration of the human race. We have to wonder if these Rationalist thinkers have ever stopped to notice that humankind’s best efforts at wiping itself off the face of the Earth, like Communism and National Socialism, have been direct products of radical secularization, not of misguided religious zeal. And so the question lingers, is Holmes the champion of Rationalism, or the harbinger of its inevitable doom?
A New Man Emerges for a New Era
In 1994, the late Jeremy Brett gave his final performance as the definitively Victorian Sherlock Holmes in the small screen adaptations which dominated the final decade of his life and career. In fact, the last sentences Brett ever spoke in the role are those which I quoted above from “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.”
Brett gave us a Holmes so obsessed with thinking, with reasoning, with deducing, and with The Chase that when the case was solved, his enthusiasm would get the better of him, often resulting in behavior which caused no end of embarrassment for his companion, Dr. Watson. But these eccentricities are mere symptoms of his great mind, not some kind of psychological profile.
We do not live in the Victorian Era, we live in the postmodern Era. The postmoderns were, and are, those post-World-War period philosophers who, often in direct reaction to the atrocities of those wars, voiced ideas starkly critical of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century assertions that the human capacity for Reason could eventually drive social progress to an ideal end. They prefer to take a much more cautious view of humanity’s ability to reason its way out of the mess it has made of the world.
No surprise then that in the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, Robert Downey Jr. gives us a postmodern Sherlock Holmes. A neurotic, tortured action hero who is solving crimes through adventure and violence, not deduction and Reason. He is calculating, but not deductive. He has amazingly precise timing, but not particularly precise thinking. He is emotional, often arguing and dismissive of his companion—showing far more strain on the friendship than is strictly speaking true to the original texts. Rather than Doyle’s description of a physically fit, slim framed, well trained boxer, he is an anachronistic mixed martial artist and middle weight power house. Rather than being utterly disinterested in women and romance, he is a jilted and pining lover. Rather than a vocal champion of his innovations and methods, he is secretive about his work. Rather than a highly disciplined person for whom idleness bred a despair so complete that his discipline crumbled, he is a shambles of a man at all times who can barely pull himself together for long enough stretches of time to be presentable in public without causing a distasteful scene. To say that this film adaptation was a shock to the purist lovers of Holmes the Saint of Science would be an understatement in the extreme.
But, is this transformation of the Victorian Father of Forensics into a postmodern steam punk romper stomper a sign that contemporary culture is resisting the siren song of Rationalism? While it may make for arguably lower quality story telling, does it make for better philosophy? There are at least two reasonable interpretations of this film, and one of them allows us to see this film as a repudiation of the contemporary Rationalist position.
Who This New Man Is Not
Two conflicting interpretations of the film have occurred to me. The first interpretation appears to refute my claim that the film rejects Rationalism. In this interpretation of the movie, the villain, Lord Blackwood (played by Mark Strong), stands as the personification of Religion. Secretive, mystical, arcane, and ultimately evil, he uses elaborate ritual magic to spread fear as a tool to control government, and by extension the population at large, to gain power. Holmes stands as the personification of Reason; public, methodical, scientific, and ultimately good, he uses deduction and logic to prevent the success of Blackwood’s schemes. The whole film becomes a neat and tidy morality tale about how Religion is patently false, irrational, a tool for duping the gullible and ultimately impotent when facing off against the power of the human mind, put to it’s proper, that is to say scientific, use. However, there are serious problems with this interpretation of the film which ignores several key elements which render it an insufficient analysis.
Who This New Man Is
The second, I believe more accurate, interpretation of the movie takes these additional elements into account and reaches a very different conclusion. Lord Blackwood does not stand as the personification of Religion. He stands as the personification of Science in the hands of ambition—Technocracy. His rituals are a ruse. He does not rely on arcane magic, but chemistry, machinery, and psychology. Holmes does not stand as the personification of Reason. He stands as the personification of Science in the hands of the military—Dictatorship. The conflict between Blackwood and Holmes does not boil down to religious magic versus the logical mind, the conflict between Blackwood and Holmes boils down to who can dish out the most carefully aimed violence to eventually defeat the other through complete incapacitation—death, in fact. Holmes does not out-think Blackwood, he beats him to a pulp and then drops him off a bridge with a noose around his neck. And in the end, both Holmes and Blackwood lose to Professor Moriarty (who personifies Science in the hands of greed—Terrorism) who uses the distraction of their conflict to steal their most powerful tools. What could more perfectly encapsulate our post 9/11 cultural neuroses? But again, our question looms unanswered—Is Holmes the Victorian Scientist or the Postmodern Soldier? Can Reason save us, or will it destroy us in the end?
The New Man or the Old?
The twentieth century gave us a world in which almost all scientific and technological research is either conducted by the government (through the military or direct grant funding)—Dictatorship. What little technology is developed by the genuinely private sector remains in the hands of a select few very wealthy persons with personal ambitions—Technocracy. Sometimes these technologies, such as the nuclear material from the former USSR, get lost and ends up in the hands of criminals—Terrorism. The militarization of the Fruits of Reason have made those fruits decidedly unreasonable. It’s all well and good to argue that the capacity of the human mind can ultimately save the world as a purely abstract, intellectual proposition, but the practical reality of the world around us is that the capacity of the human mind has been predominantly applied to ensuring that the poor stay poor, the powerful stay powerful, and that anyone who tries to change the rules gets reduced to a forgettable red smear—or less.
If we’re honest about both the philosophy and history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we must accept that while it may be that Religion is ultimately false, the role which Religion played within the fabric of society, shaping culture, politics and morality into some normative cohesion, may ultimately be not only crucial, but singular. The sweeping secularization experiments of the early twentieth century had a great hope that there existed some other normative, foundational principle upon which civil society could be based—Scienc
e, Social Progress, the Collective Good, Innate Superiority. A century into these experiments, our society is ever increasingly pluralistic, fragmented, contentious and violently uncivil. While we may have skirted the disasters of perpetual world war and deliberate nuclear holocaust, we remain on the brink of destruction because of climate change, terrorism, poverty and other consequences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century excesses. While it’s true that we cannot produce an unassailable philosophical defense for faith or religion, ultimately those kinds of beliefs lie beyond the boundary of the reasonable mind, it’s also true that Rationalism is a siren song. If we continue to insist that we can replace Religion with Science, we are eventually going to be dashed to pieces on the rocky shores from which that song is sung.
So where does this leave the boy who grew up enchanted by deductive reasoning applied with outrageous style? Can I love and enjoy Sherlock Holmes and reject the nineteenth-century philosophy and twentieth-century catastrophe with which it is inexorably intertwined? Which, then, is the “real” Sherlock Holmes: the devotee of science and technology, the last man of the Age of Reason, or the paranoid crank, begrudgingly among the first of the Postmoderns?
The answer, like the answer to so many big questions is not either/or, but is both/neither—Sherlock Holmes truly stands alone at the brink of a new age, with a foot on both sides of the divide. Perhaps this is why such a character can be as popular in the twenty-first century as he was in 1887.
Chapter 21
The Thing the Lion Left
Brian Domino
Nearly a decade after Mrs. Ronder’s scheme for happiness went horribly wrong and left her disfigured, Holmes and Watson stand in her secluded apartment. After she has told them the truth of what happened that night, and that Leonardo, her one true love, recently died in a swimming accident, Watson and Holmes prepare to leave.
With his trademark perspicacity, Holmes detects that she’s contemplating suicide. After a brief exchange, Holmes avers: “The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.” These words apparently stop Mrs. Ronder as two days later, a bottle of Prussic acid arrives by post for Holmes with the note, “I send you my temptation. I will follow your advice.” Ostensibly, the hyper-rational Holmes (recall that in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” Holmes tells his chronicler “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”) convinces Mrs. Ronder of the truth of his quasi-Stoical life philosophy.
To interpret the story as the triumph of reason over the emotions misses what is most striking about the shortest story in the Canon. It is Mrs. Ronder but not Holmes who faces the challenge of constructing a rational basis for hope in the shadow of the death of God. She finds that solace in that most postmodern of constructs, the text—specifically in her case those of Dr. Watson. More pointedly, the crux of this story is hope, a word that occurs only once in it.
The Soul, Uneasy
Mention “hope” to an English speaker and he or she is likely to think of the cliché, “Hope springs eternal.” This is a line from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man.” The entire passage reads:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always To be Blest.
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Pope’s poem is a rhymed version of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s optimistic philosophy. Curiously, Holmes himself offers a version of it when he claims “The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.”
Leibniz hesitates less than Holmes, and wants to assert that the world is not a cruel jest. At the heart of his argument, Leibniz makes two claims about hope, both of which are encapsulated in Pope’s poem. The first is a psychological claim that hope is necessary, if not for survival, then for human happiness. The second seems to also be a psychological one, but both Leibniz and Pope would understand it as a theological or metaphysical claim, namely, that hope requires the existence of a God who interacts in the world to bring about justice.
Leibniz charged his predecessor Descartes with failing to appreciate the first claim, due largely to his nearly wholesale adoption of Stoic and Epicurean ethics. The second claim is also lodged against Descartes, but Leibniz recognizes that since he subscribes to deism, Descartes is being consistent in rejecting hope as a rational possibility.
Possession of the Gods
When Holmes realizes that Mrs. Ronder intends to kill herself, he warns her: “Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.” The claim that we are mistaken if we believe our lives are among our possessions to do with as we please, including terminating them, is at least as old as Plato. In his Phaedo, Plato has Socrates identify humans as possessions of the gods. He argues that just as we would be “angry if one of [our] possessions killed itself when [we] had not given any sign that [we] wished it to die,” the gods will be angry with us for ending our lives when they did not want us to do so. Holmes is not the only fan of this dialogue, as Leibniz recommends it as holding views parallel to his own (pp. 241f, 283).
This can be a powerful argument when used on a believer who has failed to think of him- or herself as a divine possession. It is ineffective on Mrs. Ronder. In response to Holmes’s claim about the rightful ownership of her life, Mrs. Ronder asks “What use is it to anyone?” The natural reading is that this is a rhetorical question since the life of a veiled hermit lacks value to others. In making this response, Mrs. Ronder ostensibly denies that a human life can have divine value. She does not retort “I don’t see how God could find me useful” but keeps her answer on the human plane. Her earthly answer is consistent with both deism and atheism.
The Most Precious of All Lessons
Mrs. Ronder’s implicit rejection of a god who remains active in the world after creating it means that Holmes cannot offer her hope; instead, he asserts that “The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.” Holmes’s remarks and Mrs. Ronder’s actions fit in nicely within a debate in ethics raised by Leibniz. In a letter to Molanus, Leibniz concludes that “Descartes has good reason to recommend, instead of felicity, patience without hope” (p. 242). By “patience” Leibniz means the intellectual fortitude to be unperturbed by the outcomes of fortune, over which we lack control. Stoic patience might be more accurately described as resignation, if that term is taken neutrally. Indeed, Leibniz himself uses this term elsewhere to describe the lives of many ancients who believed “there were neither providence nor an afterlife” (New Essays, IV.viii.9).
For Leibniz, the lack of hope stems from Descartes’s conception of God. Hope requires the possibility of divine justice, or of God taking an interest in our well being. Leibniz’s charge against Descartes in one sense turns on a psychological claim: “Patience without hope cannot last and scarcely consoles” (G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, p. 241).
Most of us believe that it is human nature to find something to hope for no matter how grim the situation. Most of us see this as among the most positive, laudable aspects of human nature. It will sound surprising, then, that the Stoics taught their followers to reject hope as ultimately harmful. For the Stoics, hope falls prey to the same problem as the other emotions, namely, that they are more indicative of an error on our part than any truth about the world. We hope for things that we believe are good, if only from our own often narrow perspectives. People who have recently ended a relationship frequently hope to be reunited with their former lovers even if, as it usually turns out, this would not be for the best.
If the world is mechanistic as Descartes thought it to be, hope amounts to saying “I would like it if it came to pass that . . . .” It is much like the situation of the gambler at the roulette wheel. She places a bet and hopes that her bet wins, but her bet is no more likely to occur than any other. Her bet is simply the outcome about which she has positiv
e emotions. Hope can be seen as a particularly damaging emotion since it nurtures the expectation that one’s hope will come to pass. It might be better to allow events to occur, and subsequently look for the good in them (Annette C. Baier, Reflections on How We Live p. 229).
In contrast to the Stoics and Cartesians, Leibniz connects hope with a morally perfect and omnipotent God. This gives a reasonable foundation to hope because no longer is the universe unfolding mechanistically but rather is controlled by a God who makes the morally right action occur. Of course I can be wrong about what the morally right action is. I may, for example, hope that my former lover wallows in anguish when she realizes she should not have left me, but that may not be the morally correct outcome. So to the extent that our hopes mesh with divine plan, in other words, to the extent that we are virtuous, we can rationally hope.
Alias Sherringford Hope?
Doyle originally christened Holmes as Sherringford Hope, a surname that for a variety of reasons would have been ironic.
In “The Adventure of the Second Stain” an important letter is entrusted to the Secretary for European Affairs, Trelawney Hope. Should this letter fall into the wrong hands, its contents could be used as an excuse to start a war. At night Hope puts the letter in his bedside box, surely a poor security practice. Indeed the letter is stolen from that very box. When Holmes later locates the letter and secretly returns it to the box, Hope is so happy that he unquestioningly accepts its magical reappearance. It turns out that Hope’s wife, whom Watson describes as “the most lovely woman in London,” had stolen the letter. She had taken the dispatch because she was being blackmailed. Holmes points out to her that had she confided to her husband about this matter, none of this needed to happen. She, however, views the situation emotionally and does not believe that a reasoned conversation would have solved the problem. In short, we have Hope described as irresponsible (who would bring such an important document home?), child-like in his acceptance of “magical” events, beautiful but irrational and entirely emotional (Mrs. Hope).