Washington’s decision to remain in Vietnam was explained by American leaders as Good because, they asserted, to withdraw as Paris had would permit not only the triumph of Hanoi, one unit of pleasure, but also the destruction of Saigon, one unit of pain, the probable destruction of the Khmer Republic (Phnom Penh) and the Kingdom of Laos (Vientiane), two more units of pain, and the weakening of Washington’s armed forces, another unit of pain: a balance of at least negative 3. As American leaders, for two decades, exhorted, Washington’s decision to remain in Vietnam achieved the greatest Good.
In time, as it appeared that Saigon, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and the deployed American armed forces could not resist Hanoi without excessive support by Washington, the utility of the international relationships had to be recalculated. This was a gradual, contradictory process, Charity Bentham conceded, involving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Moscow) and the People’s Republic of China (Peking) and many others. It would be fair to sum up, argued Charity Bentham, that Washington was eventually placed in such a position wherein its support of Saigon and belligerence toward Hanoi resulted in several units of pain. To remain in Vietnam was bad. To withdraw from Vietnam was bad. The wise statesman could see that to withdraw as Paris had was less bad than staying, or more Good. The principle of utility indicated that Washington should abandon Saigon, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and its armed forces, four units of pain, that Washington should make peace with Hanoi, two units of pleasure, and that Washington should seek other ways to offset further the pain of the situation. In utilitarianism this often means that one should enlarge one’s model.
That Washington historically did this, by rapprochement with Moscow, two units of pleasure, by entreating Peking, two units of pleasure, was strong evidence, wrote Charity Bentham, that New Benthamism dominated modern diplomacy, that it was the modern political ethic.
To those who would cry out that war is outrage; that Washington’s conduct in Vietnam was a disgrace; that Saigon was a corrupt tyranny that ruled by torture; that Hanoi was the spiritual leader of Vietnam, though it too ruled by torture; that the American leaders who persisted in supporting Saigon despite a popular uprising among draft-age Americans had to do so by trampling on reason and imposing a legislative dictatorship, thereby violating human, natural, and especially civil rights, thereby alienating the citizenry from its own elected officialdom to the point where the democratic process was dismantled and only chance exposure of Nixon’s misdeeds saved the Republic; and more; Charity Bentham replied: stuff and nonsense.
Utilitarianism denied such concepts as social contracts, natural rights, human rights, civil rights, inalienable rights. These ideas depended upon deontological systems—ones that claim that theft, torture, murder, and war are always wrong—and are therefore subject to the contradictions—the stuff and nonsense—of habit, prejudice, custom, ritual, instinct, and feelings. Social contracts are said to be legal fictions. Inalienable rights are a logical contradiction. And civil rights must remain continually amendable in order to comply with the ongoing pursuit of the Good—they are never inviolate.
At this point in my study, it was apparent to me that New Benthamism was what Peregrine and Israel would call “the bad guys.” New Benthamism had made a dispassionate system of everything that Father and his friends had fought against and been crushed by. It was the practical philosophy of a pragmatic elite. Its genius was that it was matter-of-fact. Its strength was that it explained the international status quo with what amounted to a defense of that status quo. As Israel liked to say of the ruling class, New Benthamism had its cake and then it had the crumbs that had fallen to the floor.
I discovered it was much more insidious. It seemed that there was a certain problem that had once worried thinkers about the principle of utility. How, critics asked, does one keep utilitarianism from becoming simply self-love? The utilitarians proposed in defense what they called “generalized benevolence,” which is a way of thinking that tends to keep a person’s pleasure in proportion to others’ pleasure. The utilitarians added that if a person’s self-love conflicted with another’s, then the larger the model—the more agents involved in a conflict—the more likely each person was to shape his or her need to conform to the group’s. This was not self-sacrifice. It was cunning self-promotion. Pleasure yourself but do not overdo it, or, as the Greeks said, moderation in all things. The happier everyone is, the happier each will be.
Charity Bentham adapted generalized benevolence into her theory of New Benthamism. At that time I thought her adaptation to be a supplement to the system. I have since learned that it was in fact the linchpin, the absolute center, of New Benthamism. She called her version the Charity Factor. A State should first identify its best interest in a conflict, she said. But then that State should consider other States’ concerns. It was the wise State, the powerful State, that sought its goals with charity toward other States.
Charity Bentham wrote that the Charity Factor has many names: the communist countries called it “friendship gifts”; the capitalist countries called it “foreign aid”; the nonaligned countries called it “mutual assistance”; international treaty organizations such as the United Nations called it “emergency relief.” What I did not understand then, and what makes the Charity Factor so crucial to the whole, is that it is, over the sweep of time, usually more applicable to international conflict than military war, trade war, disarmament, and peace treaties. The Charity Factor is what wise and powerful States do to foolish and weak States. It is foreign policy during the state of affairs called peacetime, when small wars, civil wars, and blood feuds smolder, when the larger wars are said to be mutual suicide. What I understand now is that the Charity Factor is as militant as a battleship; it is as useful to national aggrandizement as conquest and occupation. For the beaten, the lost, the diseased, the exiled, the undone, the Charity Factor is the only hope and the only enemy. I mean to stress the paradox. I have much more to say, in time.
In the Vietnam war, Charity Bentham explained, Washington’s self-love was to maintain Saigon and to defeat Hanoi. When this position was abandoned, Washington acted with charity. It bribed Hanoi, dispatched conciliatory diplomats to Peking and Moscow, dismembered its armed forces, and offered refuge—of sorts—to the defeated Saigon. Washington’s real strength was said by Charity Bentham to lie in its ability to act with charity and to encourage commensurate charity by Hanoi (which failed to offer it rigorously, degrading Saigon, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, alienating all Indochina, blundering into confrontation with Peking and subservience to Moscow) and by Peking and Moscow. Deontological critics of Washington afterward condemned this charity as concessions. They were not that, Charity Bentham argued, rather they were efficient power plays. The wise State understood that the happier other States were, the happier it would be.
Not surprisingly, Charity Bentham criticized traditional worldscale cliques, like the Free World, the Communist Bloc, the Third World, the Arab League, and the numerous subordinate defense organizations, as distorted versions of deontological systems already discredited as prejudicial because they depended upon habit, custom, religion, feelings. More, she said, the politics of confrontation (sometimes called “firearms races”) would always fail to achieve its goal because it did not act with either the principle of utility or the Charity Factor. It was best, she said, for a State to stand alone, to keep its own counsel, and to depend upon the world-scale equivalent of common sense, called “the balance of power.” Charity Bentham concluded that if each State conducted itself with the principle of utility, then the give-and-take of diplomacy would dispose all parties in a conflict to cooperate. There were no genuine allies or foes. There were only States with needs that simply had to promote the Good, with an a priori belief in charity, in order to achieve “the greatest Good.”
I admit I have conflated Charity Bentham’s work, avoiding her biographical essays on the ancient Epicurus, the Enlightenment’s Locke, Voltaire, Hobbes, and Hume, and on the nineteenth cen
tury’s Hegel, Comte, and Marx. I have also bypassed her analysis of the New Benthamism inherent in the foreign policy of the twentieth century’s Theodore Roosevelt, Lenin, Neville Chamberlain, Mao, and Charity Bentham’s favorite statesman, Henry Kissinger (who wrote the introduction to The Greatest Good). I have ignored the economic models for her arguments, and her papers discussing the legitimacy of enormous corporations functioning as quasi states, and the need to repeatedly resubmit what at first appear inequitable (painful) situations to ever larger models of utility (e.g., the territorial wars in the Middle East were regionally harmonizing). I give her great due here, though, for her prose was always tactful, cautious, temperate.
Still, with regard to her economic science, which was why she had won her Nobel Prize, I admit I did not then comprehend its worth and cannot now say that there ever was, or is, anything to such wind but smoother ways of rationalizing historically disproportionate ownership of property—why some work too hard and eat too little, why others own children and their future.
For this disinclination, I plead ill education and impatience. After what I have seen and done, it is a matter of merit to me that I do not rant thereupon. Charity Factor. What arrogance. What heartlessness. It reminds me of nothing so much as the tale of the Norse ogre who lived at the edge of Jotunheim, the land of the giants, and whose wife was renowned for taking in, and feeding, and giving succor to orphans who fled the wars between the gods. When this ogre came home at night, drunk and lustful, he would eat the soft flesh of the children to whom his wife had given refuge, until he was nearly insensate. Then he would stumble to his wife’s bed, blood-soaked and self-satisfied, and would grumble to her as he fell upon her, “Now that I’ve had my way, you can give those left all the charity you want.”
I say this here and for now about Brave New Benthamism. What Grim Fiddle thinks does not matter. What Grim Fiddle has done about what he thinks, there is the proper subject for his passion.
Mord the Hard-Fisherman
IN my third year at Vexbeggar, the news from Stockholm grew ominous. I had been comforted that summer by Molly Rogers on vacation, but in the fall she hurried back to Israel to keep him from dangerous, irrational acts. They wed soon after, perhaps the result of a near breakdown by Israel. I was never sure and never asked, since I missed the ceremony, and afterward it seemed irrelevant. Molly sent me verse about the ordeal, “Quiet Israel Quiet,” and it reassured me that the marriage had been the proper culmination of a twenty-one-year courtship, Earle giving the bride away, Guy crooning old folkie favorites, the manse draped with Thord’s elegant friends.
Israel’s honeymoon only temporarily interrupted the gloom in his letters. Israel took it very hard that Peregrine suffered alone in the King’s prison—since none had ever dared visit him for fear of reprisal. The King’s Spies were much on the highways then, suppressing those who were called seditious troublemakers but were more properly identified as aliens, that is, brown-eyed foreigners.
This shame needs brief explanation. Like other countries in the North, Sweden never recovered from the shocks of the wars in the Middle East. As widespread egalitarian propriety decreased, chauvinism and concomitant bigotry flourished. I have no desire to explicate this formula. I am sure the New Benthamites justified it at great length. It is enough to say that my mother’s people came to place a misinformed emphasis on their own heritage, especially on their folklore and their so-called aristocracy, a corrupt lot who responded to this miraculous resurrection with pomposity and wrongheadedness. A spastic feudalism was imposed on a people who had been free of such stupidity for three centuries. Fashion dictated assemblies, processions, balls, baroque etiquette, and a boastful endeavor to remake what had been a struggling industrial state, become slightly inert with socialism, into a painted court in the midst of a much reduced subsistence economy and actual starvation. There was nothing logical about the transformation. The Earl of Gotland could share a horse-drawn carriage (the affection for automobiles disappeared with the petroleum supplies, was replaced with equestrian affectation by the elite) with a chief engineer from the Kiruna iron mines. It was the ridiculous leading the ridiculed. In their covetousness, the only thing all segments of the citizenry could agree on was bigotry. There developed a witch-hunting not seen since the Dark Ages. The Kingdom of Sweden became a stranger to reason.
I know Sweden was not alone in such degenerate politics. That was no comfort to the laborers and hangers-on from the Middle Eastern and African kingdoms (and some from European republics drifting toward anarchy) who were driven from their homes to the streets, and from the streets into what were called halfway camps, from which they were provided passage out of the country on merchantmen leased by the King’s government. Pogroms swept Sweden of the dark races first, then of the less dark, the yellow, the sallow, and finally of those few Jews who were caught once again in history’s spasms.
The triumph of successive pogroms did not satisfy the most extreme chauvinists, a political party called the Loyalist League for Swedish Homelife, or Loyalists. There seemed an escalating need for ever more cruel measures against shadows. In America, Israel told me, this battle would have been understood as red-blooded Americans versus Them; in Sweden, it was the blue-eyed Norse versus Them. I do not care how it compared to historical race wars. It was hellish. Families were arrested and separated unless they complied with ad hoc relocation programs organized by vigilante groups and permitted by the King’s silence. The few desperate men who dared to resist the witch-hunters were maimed or murdered. And there was always the fire that they used to burn out the intransigent.
The random hangings and seeming suspension of habeas corpus panicked the few libertarian groups, one of whom, the Cartesian League for Reason and Decency, organized small rallies in Stockholm. This was in the late 1980s. Sadly, the Cartesians were unable to agree on a single strategy. Denouncing racism and murder is admirable; it also lacks specifics, such as naming the guilty. At the last rally, the Cartesians presented many diverse speakers, who confused the crowd with poetry and high ideals. The crowd chanted “Crush Infamy!” meaning the King’s government. This resulted in a chain-swinging match with the mob dispatched by the Loyalists to bait the Cartesians. The riot that followed blocked streets and shattered shop windows. It was predictable mayhem. That was the night the old Royal Palace was burned down, along with four blocks of the foreign quarter—the mickey mouse club included.
The next day, the Cartesian League was suppressed by the King’s Spies, a thousand-year-old Norse tradition of security police revived by the King’s government in order to assuage the Swedes’ persecution fantasies and to complement the aristocracy’s power fantasies. All financial contributors to the Cartesian League (Thord Horshead among them) were notified that they were under investigation for conspiracy to foment treason. It cost Thord heavily to escape that net. There were many nasty turns in all this, such as an undercurrent of Loyalist prejudice against homosexuality and possibly sexuality in general. What is important here is that the Cartesian League contained more than a few of the Swedish and American radicals from the War Resisters League of the 1960s.
In time, the Loyalists directed their loathsome rhetoric against the small American exile community. Soon enough, all Americans in Stockholm, regardless of their politics, came under attack. The Swedes chose to forget the King’s onetime Social Democratic government’s opposition to the Vietnam war. Peregrine, Israel, Guy, and Earle were anachronisms. The word was passed that they and their kind were under suspicion, along with everyone else not certifiably Norse. This blanket slander was helped by the fact that many of the Americans had police records dating back to the 1960s, and many of them were genuine gangsters, still dealing in contraband and rackets. I do not overlook the fact that my family enjoyed the succor of a Swedish smuggler.
The Loyalists denounced the whole of the American exile community with a part of it, an old trick, Israel assured me. Whenever the King’s Spies arrested a thug who happened
to be an American, the politicians would haul the stars and stripes through their foul mouths. This resulted in a precarious existence for the Americans, some of its impetus dating from as far back as the American embargo on European technology in the early 1980s. Nevertheless it might well have calmed down if not for a gruesome crime in the halls of the King’s contrived splendor—Peregrine Ide murdered Cesare Furore at the Nobel Prize Ball.
Peregrine’s trial delighted the Loyalists. They aroused their faithful by emphasizing Peregrine’s seeming lack of remorse. The King’s prosecutor, a Loyalist sympathizer, insisted that Peregrine tell the court why he had murdered. The defense counsel, provided by the court, tried to prevent such testimony; but Peregrine spoke anyway, in a whisper, his larynx damaged permanently in the murder:
“I—because I wanted to.”
When the King’s court sentenced Peregrine to life imprisonment, the Loyalists exploded with hate. They demanded Peregrine’s life be forfeit. They wanted his heart cut out. They wanted his head fed to the fish. They wanted him to die in screams. I do not exaggerate. They said these things, repeatedly. I heard worse on the radio. And since there had been no death penalty in the Kingdom since the defeat of the German blasphemers, the Loyalists achieved the neat trick of increasing their power by demanding from the King’s government what it could not sanction. There was still an inherent decency in Sweden that no amount of cant had been able to overcome. The King, who was not as stupid as he seemed, even went so far at his birthday address to declare, “I shall not wash my hands of this man’s fate.”
This was ill-advised imagery. The Loyalist mobs chanted “Fiend! Fiend!” in reply to the King’s bravura; it was not clear if they meant Peregrine or the King or both. The Loyalists manipulated the King’s dilemma. Peregrine became the goat that one could flail without restraint, knowing the whole while that one was actually castigating the King’s government. Whenever the Loyalists were denounced by the good men left in government for another of their race riots, the Loyalists screamed about the moral corruption of the “American fiend’s protectors.” The illogic was intentional. The politics were effective. The Loyalists wrapped themselves in piety, dared anyone to mention the blood on their hands. The contest became as religious as it was political. There was talk of the need for an evangelical republic in order to restore order and what was called godliness to the land.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 7