Cesare Furore concluded that either way it was argued, annulment or desertion, Peregrine and Charity Bentham were no longer married, had not been married for years, and had possibly never been, legally speaking, more than “unconsummated marriage partners” (the Volvo episode being legally challengeable, something about it not being a place of residence). Cesare Furore promised Peregrine that there had been no acrimony in his legal actions against Peregrine, that he had been acting correctly to protect his wife, his daughter, and all’ their futures.
Peregrine interrupted, “I have no future.”
Cesare Furore answered, “I am sure we can move on that. My brother, as you might know, has served in the Senate. My family is not, and I am not, without influence in Washington.”
Those were said to be Cesare Furore’s last words; this might be apocryphal, a newspaper editor’s idea of drama. Peregrine attacked him. He grabbed him by the throat and hung on. The two wrestled from one side of the room, crashing through the flimsy superstructure and into the promenade on the other. Skaldur ordered his men to get them apart; they were either idiots or impeded by the woodwork. I cannot portray the contest blow for blow. I cannot believe the newspaper reports were anything but lies. It is fair to assume that Cesare Furore did fight back. It is not clear if he knew right away that he was in the death grip of a man made insane by passion, longing, injustice, vengeance, hopelessness, self-hatred. Having seen Cesare Furore just before, I doubt if he understood how sick Father was. He might have thought he was dealing with a runaway child. He actually was baiting and fighting with a man in a delirium of despair and remorse, who felt himself a trapped, mortally wounded animal. More, I argue now that Peregrine was likely so ashamed of what he had done to Charity Bentham on the ramp, of what little he had to show his lost wife for those eighteen desperate years, that he had wanted to destroy himself, and that his self-loathing had been deflected upon the persecutor at hand, Cesare Furore, who had stupidly invoked the idea of “Washington,” Peregrine’s blackest, most fantastic foe. Peregrine hanged a man, yes; he must have also thought he was hanging 1972, Nixon, the Selective Service Act, the Congress, men of property, all that he believed had condemned him unfairly and totally, had left him, as he said, a man without a future.
This is not to excuse Father. He did an ugly and wrong thing, a criminal thing. He suffered for it the rest of his life. He suffered for it immediately as well. The guards—with Skaldur screaming orders, with Charity Bentham begging Peregrine to stop—pounded Peregrine from all sides. Peregrine cleaved to his crime. Do I seem to favor Peregrine’s supernatural strength in murdering Cesare Furore? I do not mean it so. He was my father. They beat him mercilessly. They smashed him with bricks and boards. They fractured his skull, broke his ribs, shattered his knee, trying to cut him down. Cesare Furore tore at Peregrine’s face, and did gouge Peregrine’s left eye so badly that it later required two torturous operations before it had to be removed in the King’s prison.
Skaldur, in desperation, produced a pistol and shot Peregrine twice in the back. That the bullets did not kill Peregrine outright was not only a miracle but also an act of fate that preserved Peregrine for further punishment. The bullets did stagger him, and he dropped Cesare Furore. Peregrine went to his knees. The guards dragged Cesare Furore’s body away from Peregrine. Peregrine would not go down and, lunging forward, crawled toward Cesare Furore on that shattered knee, screaming oaths so mad and dark I shall not repeat them. The guards encircled Peregrine, momentarily disoriented by his macabre perseverance. Peregrine’s bloody face was said to have radiated an aura of demonic lust. That is nonsense.
Charity Bentham fell upon Cesare Furore. Peregrine screamed at her, “You’re mine!” At that, fearing he would attack the woman, the guards pummeled him flat. Peregrine lay broken and alive, not an arm’s length but a lifetime of defeat from his beloved Charity Bentham. And Charity Bentham lay insensate atop her second husband’s corpse. She was alive also but—and this I say because I swear by it—eternally undone by her own proud, ambitious, duplicitous heart, that had loved two men, and betrayed two men, and cursed two men.
Brave New Benthamism
IN hiding in Vexbeggar for nearly five years, I had abundant time, and more abundant persuasion, to study Charity Bentham. I was embarrassed that I had not understood her prodigious learning. I felt that if I could puzzle all of her out, perhaps I could also understand why Peregrine lay alone in isolation on the King’s prison island near Stockholm. Back then, I am not sure that I did more than further confuse myself as to the way of the modern world where, according to what Israel said, “if you step out-of-bounds just once, you can’t get back in.” Now I can tell this about that woman’s mind, because I truly believe it has meant everything for what has happened to me and mine, for where I am today, here, alone, less angry than argumentative about what I have learned.
Charity Bentham was a utilitarian. She advocated the principle of utility, or goodness. She maintained that only Good is Good, that only Good is desirable, that the correct action among many possibilities is the one that produces the greatest amount of Good, and that one can recognize what is Good by the fact that Good causes happiness, while that which is not Good causes unhappiness. She further maintained that common morality, common decency, and common sense are intrinsically utilitarian concepts. Rational men and women are said to know that only by doing Good can one be happy and make others happy.
I caution those who find, on first glance, that utilitarianism seems trivial. It is not that. It seemed to me, at first, very clever and above all else a practical way to live. For crucial example, ethics is a profoundly important kind of philosophy; the business of ethics is to recognize good and to do good, a most desirable endeavor. According to utilitarians, only utilitarianism provides ethics with a rigorous method both to recognize Good and to do Good. Utilitarians opine that utilitarianism comforts one while at the same time it guides, advises, assesses—providing a rich tradition with which one may resist and overcome the enemies of reason and reasonable men. These enemies are said to be habit, prejudice, custom, ritual, instinct, feelings, or any other characterization of nonintellectual ethics, which are collectively called “deontological ethics.” (Deontology is the study of moral obligation and is regarded as stuff and nonsense by utilitarians, who are exceedingly sensible people.)
In sum, utilitarianism is said to confirm the enlightened man as the superior man and, more importantly, as the right man.
How does it work? With simple arithmetic, and also with what Jeremy Bentham (the eighteenth-century founder of utilitarianism, and Charity Bentham’s ancestor) called the “hedonic calculus.” Jeremy Bentham proposed that experiencing Good could be measured in units of pleasure, each assigned a positive 1, and that experiencing what was not good could be measured in units of pain, each assigned a negative 1. Jeremy Bentham declared that neither a unit of pleasure or a unit of pain can be analyzed, but that both can be easily recognized.
When one is confronted with a decision, one need consider how many units of pleasure (positive) and pain (negative) each possible alternative action will engender; and then one need only compare the sum for each action, choosing the action that produces the largest sum, the greater or greatest Good.
It might seem that assigning units of pleasure and pain to one’s conduct is arbitrary and silly; however, it is just because the hedonic calculus requires discretion, awareness of limits, and a temperate worldliness that, say the utilitarians, utilitarianism appeals to men and women who have nothing in common with each other but their utilitarianism. Utilitarianism might seem sloppy, piecemeal, even timid; it is still argued to be more useful than any other sort of ethics in coping with modern experience. More, utilitarianism in its many aspects—act, rule, universal, ideal, et cetera hair-splittings—is said to be best not as a descriptive ethics (what must be done, what should have been done) but as a normative ethics (what ought to be done, what might have been done). It whispers before the
fact. It reigns after the fact. It is fueled by caution, dispassion, endless reconsideration, wordy objectivity. Utilitarians shift their positions, opinions, judgments, proscriptions, according to and depending upon perceived circumstances. The overwhelming characteristic that emerged from the scrupulous debates—Jeremy Bentham versus J. S. Mill versus Henry Sidgwick versus G. E. Moore versus Charity Bentham—was that these were extraordinarily pragmatic people. They did not want an ethical example that stood apart from history, as they said did Judaism, Catholicism, Marxism. They wanted a system that adapted with history—come what may.
With utilitarianism, everything is in the example. So I offer, for example: Charity Bentham married Peregrine Ide, which I assign two units of pleasure; Peregrine abandoned Charity, which I assign two units of pain. The sum is zero. Charity Bentham then married Cesare Furore and gave birth to Cleopatra, which I assign three units of pleasure; in order to do so, Charity had to unmarry Peregrine, which I assign two units of pain. The sum is positive 1.
A utilitarian, comparing Charity’s historical action to her choices, would say that she acted correctly, with utility.
There are two objections here. The first might come from the deontological ethicists. These people, who argue that an act is right or wrong in itself, regardless of consequences (e.g., divorce is always wrong), would say that Charity’s marriage to Peregrine was fine and that her happiness afterward was not significant, that her unmarrying Peregrine was wrong (or “cruel,” as Israel said), and that her subsequent marriage to Cesare compounded her wrong, as did everything consequent of her second marriage—love, birth, fame.
Utilitarians would answer deontological criticism thus: Charity’s marriage to Peregrine was meaningless, since it produced no Good. In correcting her miscalculation, Charity produced Good, and produced more Good than not correcting it would have produced. Therefore, Charity was right, under the circumstances, though perhaps not as praiseworthy as she might have been if she had married Cesare initially. However, praise and blame do not signify.
The second objection might come from what I call the sentimentalists, those who consider the heart before they regard the intellect. They might say that Charity was a dear fool to marry Peregrine the very day of his flight, that she was more right than wrong in unmarrying Peregrine afterward (especially since she was probably deeply hurt by the news that Peregrine had a son), that she was blessed in making such a good marriage to Cesare, and that she should have anticipated that, though her conduct was proper and understandable, there were aspects of the affair that made her appear less than kind and virtuous.
Utilitarians would answer sentimentalists thus: stuff and nonsense. Folly, pridefulness, fortune, kindness, and virtue do not signify.
Charity Bentham did not win her Nobel Prize because she married Peregrine, or because she bore Cleopatra. She was famous because she applied her utilitarianism and intelligence to what she called “Brave New Benthamism.”
“The New Benthamite holds,” wrote Charity Bentham in the preface to her New Benthamite Reader, “that the State desires Good. The State conducts itself correctly when it engages in activity that produces Good, and produces more Good than if it had not engaged in this activity, and produces the greatest Good to be gained from this activity.”
Charity Bentham followed this to its logical conclusion, and innovatively beyond, taking her lead from Jeremy Bentham’s thesis that the basis of the State was the principle of utility. Jeremy Bentham had opined that the State was a construction resulting from the fact that its citizenry sought, with the hedonic calculus, happiness for themselves and their fellow citizens.
Significantly, Jeremy Bentham argued that the State was no superbeing, no Leviathan, with a mind and motives of its own. Rather, he wrote, the State was the sum total of its citizens’ pursuit of Good, was what a later follower of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy, or Benthamite, would describe poetically as “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Men and women ceded authority to the State, Jeremy Bentham concluded, not because they feared the State, but because in so doing they increased the Good resulting from the exercise of the authority of the State. And the amount of Good was always in proportion to the number of citizens supporting the State: democracy produces more good for a citizenry than benevolent despotism; tyranny produces more good for a citizenry than anarchy.
It was clear to me why Jeremy Bentham had wielded profound political influence in the eighteenth century on both the early American Republic and the fledgling French Republic. More, I understood why Jeremy Bentham and the Benthamites (especially the English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who renamed the movement utilitarianism) became the philosophical heroes of the liberal democracies of the nineteenth century, particularly for the United States of America and for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, both of whom exported their utilitarian forms of government to their colonial empires. The historical development (either by evolution or revolution) of sophisticated capitalist and communist states, so far from detouring from the principle of utility, tended to institutionalize it in suggestively prosaic manners, hence the abundance of people’s republics, democratic republics, unions of socialist republics, and parliamentary monarchies. Utilitarianism seems the basis for the twentieth-century State.
Charity Bentham seized on this result and, with scholarship and what could be considered some philosophical sleight of hand, developed it for her own purposes, that is, New Benthamism.
She acknowledged that the State was not a Leviathan. But then she proposed that there was wisdom in inquiring why it was that a State’s citizens preferred to anthropomorphize their government, such as the Americans’ Uncle Sam, the Britons’ John Bull, the Russians’ Bear (or Party). This was romantic fantasy, Charity Bentham admitted; yet it was so persistent an aspect of international politics since the Enlightenment that it must be regarded as a popular expression of yearning toward a way of thinking of the world. Given mankind’s penchant for (perhaps utter dependence upon) analogy, Charity Bentham argued that a State’s citizenry thought of their State with reference to other States as one extraordinarily large person amid other extraordinarily large persons. The State was not demonstrably a Leviathan, she added, but since men thought of it as a Leviathan in relation to other States, was it not appropriate to pursue this idiom? It seemed the will of the people, and the lesson of modern history, said Charity Bentham, that men and women thought of international diplomacy as if it were being conducted by superagents (States) operating with the principle of utility.
Thus, a State was a utilitarian. A State desired only Good. A State, operating with the same dynamic as the lowest of its citizens, acted to increase its happiness, its pleasure. A State should be assessed in terms of the effectiveness of its utilitarian conduct, as to whether its conduct was appropriate in terms of the Good produced in comparison to other possible actions. It was therefore meaningless to speak of a State as moral or immoral, as legal or illegal, as decent or indecent, as virtuous or vice-ridden, as human or inhuman, as godly or blasphemous.
This all seemed removed from me at first reading. As with traditional utilitarianism, everything about New Benthamism is in the example. So it was not until Charity Bentham discussed the United States of America’s conduct with regard to the Vietnam war, 1955-1975, that I realized the weighty and, yes, sinister significance of Brave New Benthamism.
Following the French Republic’s (Paris) abandonment of its Indochina colonies in 1954, the United States of America (Washington) was confronted with three choices in Southeast Asia. Washington could have supported the Republic of South Vietnam (Saigon), for two units of pleasure, Washington’s and Saigon’s, while at the same time opposing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Hanoi), for one unit of pain, Hanoi’s: a balance of positive 1. Or, Washington could have remained neutral toward Saigon and Hanoi, for no pleasure or pain: a balance of zero. Or, Washington could have supported Saigon and Hanoi, for three units of pleasure, though this would h
ave led to such severe contradictions for Saigon and Hanoi that there would also have resulted two units of pain: a balance of positive 1.
With this model, Washington’s historical decision supporting Saigon and opposing Hanoi was viable. Though it did not produce the greatest Good, there was no greater Good.
Once Hanoi revealed its desire to destroy Saigon, Washington’s support for Saigon, positive 2, was offset by Washington’s military opposition to Hanoi (war), negative 2: a balance of zero. There was no Good to be gained by remaining committed, in Vietnam. According to Charity Bentham, Washington’s historical decision to remain supportive of Saigon and belligerent toward Hanoi was neither immoral, illegal, indecent, sinful, inhuman, nor blasphemous. It lacked utility.
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