Politics without pain
Kenneth Minogue
Political Theory and Practice Bernard Crick (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press E3.50) It must be a rare scholar who does not at times regard new books with a bleary and a jaundiced eye. The best comment on the current level of British book production (30,000 new titles per year) comes from Lord Halifax and was written in 1684: "It must be more than an ordinary provocation that can tempt a man to write in an age over-run with scribblers, as Egypt was with flies and locusts." Instead of desiring to write, Halifax went on, a man should wish, for his own ease, that he could not read. Next to the textbook trade, there can be nothing that more provokes a jaundiced glance than the man who gathers together the articles of a decade (" fugitives" as Lionel Trilling once aptly called them) and calls them a book.
Churlish though it may seem, these reflections are provoked by Professor Crick's new vOlume. And they will justifiably seem churlish to anyone who correctly recognises Professor Crick as in many respects a model of liveliness, vigour and sanity. Here is a writer whose main theoretical concern has been to vindicate the Aristotelian conception of politics against a variety of unsavoury fanatics. The very same concern appears in this book, for at its centre ides Professor Crick's inaugural lecture at Sheffield on 'Freedom as Politics.' "Freedom," we learn " depends upon people continuing to act freely in actual public affairs, and in being willing to run risks by speaking bluntly in public, not in constantly taking one's own temperature, according to some abstract standard laid down by god, don or judge, or according to the foundation myths of one's own country, to see if one is still free or not." Professor Crick is, further, in favour of toleration, and tells us that "the concept of toleration, while not an end in itself, represents the only kind of social condition which allows for development of both equality in the large society and identification with the smaller societies." As is the way with academics, he thinks we don't know enough about it, and recommends that there should be more empirical study of its origin and conditions. He is, sensible about student influence on universities, and would favour an extension of lively teaching of politics in schools. And he does not approve of Enoch Powell, who has stirred up intolerance.
Most of this is so entirely in the commonsense mainstream that we ought perhaps to forgive Professor Crick the odd foray into a daring eccentricity: his defence of tyrannicide. This curious exercise is focused around St Thomas Aquinas's four conditions of tyrannicide which Professor Crick still finds "amazingly relevant" — so relevant indeed that he unleashes them upon two extreme cases: Harold Wilson (then prime minister) and Adolf Hitler. No prizes are offered for guessing which of these two is the likelier candidate for political surgery. " Tyrants," runs the conclusion "should be defined, closely and then killed," and this unblinking faith is based upon the premise that " the worst abuses of power are limitable by fear of personal retribution."
Since it is easy to regard this doctrine as a charter for' the homicidally righteous who dominate our headlines, it is tempting to indulge one's disagreement. Tempting, but not very profitable, for it is unlikely that the potential terrorists of the world will be swayed either way by the level of argument Professor Crick presents to us. And the more one reads these essays, the more one is forced to recognise that the level of argument — practical, statesmanlike, complex but never technical — is responsible for one's impression of the whole book. It represents Professor Crick's chosen mode of academic discussion of politics; he expressed the aspiration that he will be found to belong to a British tradition of relevant profundity, which avoids both "the mathematical models of the Americans and the metaphysical hairsplitting or else ruthless objectivity' of so many of the Germans." It is difficult to resist an appeal to one's patriotism, but the attempt must be made: and in making it, one must recognise that each national style has its own virtues and vices. British common sense may be a political virtue, but it often turns out to be an intellectual vice.
And this, it seems to me, is the case here. The weakness is nowhere more evident than in the central preoccupation of the book's title: the relation between theory and practice. On this question there are two interesting and diametrically opposed views. One of them (espoused, for example, by Professor Oakeshott, who seems to haunt these pages) is to the effect that anything properly called philosophy has no implications for practice whatever. The other is the ideologicnl insistence that the two things are inseparable, and that every theory is also a practical commitment. Professor Crick characteristically straddles the issue. To what, he asks, should the theorist be committed? " To relevance, always: he cannot avoid it, but not to specific solutions especially by specific means " comes the reply. Such an answer bristles with philosophical questions; it is the point at which the real discussion should begin. But the argument slides rather than probes, and we move on to further vague and difficult utterances: the political thinker "should beware of overrating his own influence, either for good or evil." No doubt; but there cannot be many ears waiting very anxiously to hear such a message.
The problem of level, then, is crucial, and the level is unmistakably that of an editorialist. As a manner of thinking, its external features are closest to that mode Df academic inquiry which may almost be defined in terms of its avoidance of technicalities: philosophy. But real philosophical sophistication is missing. Thus after a casual exercise in political taxonomy, in which governments have been classified as autocratic, republican or totalitarian, Professor Crick goes on to claim that his scheme is not only analytically fruitful but also "empirically true." And when he refers to the "largely meaningless dispute [my emphasis] between science and evaluation" one can only wonder what he conceives the quarrel to be about. Does chalk dispute with cheese?
With characteristic honesty, Professor Crick recognises some of these difficulties: "Like many academics nowadays, I tend to do too much and spread myself too thin." Another part of the explanation of this barrenly intermediate level of argument lies in what one can only call the obtrusive persona, which indulges the utterance of opinion on every subject which fancy tosses up for review. It is this temptation which so often leads to the fracture of syntax, which trails its melancholy way like a wounded albatross through these over-qualified pages. Long ago, after some years in the dark obscurity of graduate life, Professor Crick wrote an excellent book on the American Science of Politics. Since then, as all serious Crickologists know, he has succumbed to photophilia, leading to surfeit of limelight. He has been too long at the mercy of editors, campaigners and editors of festschriften. Those who know of what he is capable can only wish for a new period of fruitful darkness. its paradoxical charm; and the scope and seriousness of Lewis Carroll's nonsense is wha lies behind the permanent appeal of the Alice books.
Dodgson has exactly touched on the quality of his own nonsense: words, and whole books, have an independent function, beyond what a writer gives them. When Alice tries to repeat her school-room poems, the words take charge of what she is trying to express, and her real thoughts emerge, unknown to herself. This is of course how word and symbols function in dreams and jokes, where meanings conflict and relate on different levels. Alice's two dream experiences present all kinds of meanings that Carroll did not consciously intend, and several, perhaps, that he didn't intend in any sense at all, because the words and sequences have taken on a life of their own.
From an account of some childish adventures, lightly dismissed by Dodgson as "friendly chat with bird or beast," Wonderland and Looking Glass take shape as a Bildungsroman, a diseased world of disorder, mysterious threats and the prefiguration of death, a satirical anticipation of the New Criticism, "a comic horror vision of the chaotic land beneath the man-made ground-work of Western thought and convention," and an allegory of High and Low Church strife in the Oxford Movement. Part of their meaning is an assertion of childish vision as superior to adult capriciousness, and the absurdity of adult convention, or Lewis Carroll's desire to remain a child without the limitations of childishness.
Robert Philips's collection of essays presents all kinds of meanings, some of which seem hardly justified. The Bowdlerizing and well-regulated Dodgson wrote "Whatever good meanings are in the book I am very glad to accept as the meaning of the book." But goodness lies in the consciousness of the interpreter, and even Alice had begun, after her fall, to lose control of meanings. Reading these essays is in fact very like becoming Alice again. With half-forgotten and largely useless certainties to judge by, drifting between Intentional and Affective fallacies, the reader is bullied and cajoled by interpretations. The essays themselves are often like the dream-creatures, contrary, improbable and fascinating.
The only creature in Wonderland to give Alice useful advice was the Cheshire Cat, who in Empson's words was detached, amused and formidably clever. In some enigmatic way the Cheshire Cat understands the nonsense of Wonderland, and comments with an ironic grin. The most notable Cheshire Cats among these essays are William Empson's and Harry Levin's. Their interpretations are, as one might expect, original and fairly incontrovertible, and the other good essays in the book complement and corroborate them. Both see the Alice books as an allegory of growing up, in all senses of the phrase, and both make use of a Freudian interpretation of symbols without obsessively tilting at windmills. Empson puts the books into his tradition of pastoral, and Alice becomes the child-as-judge. He argues that Carroll's eccentric, introspective use of the pastoral enables him to comment on any topical or moral concern: the symbolism of the Caucus race, in which all the animals get prizes from Alice is clearly very rich and partly "supports natural selection . . . to show the absurdity of democracy, and supports democracy (or at any rate liberty) to show the absurdity of natural selection."
Empson makes out that Lewis Carroll was opposing the tradition of child-sentiment with the related tradition of children's innocence and unity with nature, deriving from such writers as Vaughan and Words worth. Out of this opposition "which puts a subtle doubt into the eternities open to the child," arises Alice, both judge and emulator of grown-ups. The essay is full of careful insights, such as Carroll's association of the development of sexuality with death, mirrored in Dodgson's repressions, and also the bitterness inherent in parody. Harry Levin sees Alice as the eternal ingenue, a combination of Miranda and Daisy Miller, and refers her back, through Walter de la Mare's essay, to Henry James's heroines of brimming consciousness. The books project and resist the painful metamorphoses of maturing. Levin also argues that English excellence in nonsense is directly related to English common sense, that it is "the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the evercise of reason." The Alice books also offer Dodgson's apologia: "Virginia Woolf discerned that he had preserved a child within him intact; meanwhile his outer self had become a pedant, who measured everyone's words with a literalness which exposed the contradictions by which they lived; yet in the dialogue between the incongruous pair, childhood took the measure of pedantry.
He emphasises the importance of parody, as does Florence Miller. in her comparison between Carroll's poems and their originals. She makes all the necessary points about Carroll's languagegames, without the verbiage that linguistic critics oddly find necessary. Douglas Rackin, John Hinz, Elsie Leach, W. H. Auden and F. B. Lennon have similar approaches, but not quite the same luminosity: they have the substance of the Cheshire Cat without the memorable grin.
If the Cheshire Cat stands for illumination, Humpty Dumpty stands for the reverse. J. B. Priestley testily points out that Humpty Dumpty prefigures the idiocy of certain kinds of literary criticism: he is a self-satisfied pedant, who believes that every question is a riddle, and that words are in his pay, so that he can employ them to mean whatever he chooses. " Glory " for Humpty Dumpty means "a nice knock down argument." He is the archetype for several of the essays in this collection, which are nearly as implausible and funny as he is. Kenneth Burke's essay in the Freudian section illustrates the heresy which can never call a sneeze a sneeze: he even suggests that Alice's desire to be a queen is really a wish to achieve the " throne " of every good " potty-girl's " aspirations. Martin Grotjahn's interesting analysis of symbols in Wonderland lapses into a long, idiotically funny description of the girl-asphallus, in the form of the American drum majorette, a figure more remote from Alice than sexual awareness itself.
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