Courting Disaster

 

 

            Give no thought to the morrow.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  We have that on the highest possible authority, but I am no more able than the vast majority of my compatriots to cease from worrying about the next day, and the next after that.  A general pandemic anxiety, often vague but always disconcerting, has suffused our household and probably most households.  There has been and continues to be plenty to be worried about: the virus and its medical and economic devastations, police brutality, mob brutality, violent storms, raging wild fires, an impending general election already characterized by rancor, suspicion, and (whatever the results of the voting) premonitions of outraging approximately half of our fellow citizens.

 

            One of the gaudiest floats in the fast-moving pageant of impending dangers is dedicated to the donnybrook awaiting us in the confirmation process for a new nominee to the Supreme Court.  The nomination is not yet a week old, but the first brickbats were already being hurled in the actual public announcements of Justice Ginsburg’s death on September 18.  As seemliness has long since disappeared from our politics, we can hardly wonder at its absence in much of our political journalism.  Be that as it may, the opposing forces have formed their ranks.

 

            Our Supreme Court was one of the most extraordinary innovations of our Constitution.  There was no very close model then in existence, and there have been surprisingly few close imitations since.  Only in the first decade of the nineteenth century did the court’s principal task, judicial review, become explicit.  The famous early Chief Justice, John Marshall, put it this way: “It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.”  That dictum itself, was, of course, already an interpretation of the written document that was to be the final arbiter of the validity of all legislation proposed by Congress and confirmed by the signature of the President.  That document was, and is, the Constitution.  Thus I can say emphatically, using Marshall’s word, that the Supreme Court is a body of literary critics charged with adjudicating the meaning of written texts—laws proposed by the Congress—in the light of an older one, the governing Constitution of the United States.  Since my whole career as a professor of literature has been devoted to the attempt to explain the meaning of old literary texts, I consider myself qualified to comment, in a general way, on the Court’s performance in that same genre.  A cat may look at a king.

           

            The unspeakable is not the same thing as the not spoken about, but not infrequently the two are close allied.  The American Civil War had several contributory causes, and some historians of the war, like some of their predecessors who were participants in it, have been eager to cloud the obvious principal cause in some kind of redeeming complexity.  Not so Lincoln.  In his justly famous Second Inaugural, the President said this: ”One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”  Even if “all knew” that slavery was the cause of the war, there was a preference for talking about other causes, mainly more abstract and high-minded or at least less concrete and sordid ones, such the preservation of the Union or the sovereign rights of individual states.

 

            Talking about secondary or even factitious issues is in political circles a time-honored means of avoiding real ones that are controversial.  In any political system in which continuing access to power depends upon the short-term popularity of elected representatives there is bound to be a lot of dodging and weaving.  Sometimes admirable motives seem to justify the grossly politic in all politics.  The framers of the Constitution were so eager to achieve a fragile political union that they thought they could get by with passing the buck about slavery.  Not to do so might have doomed the national project from the start.  After the Civil War politicians thought they could get by with passing the buck about unjust social arrangements that frustrated the promises of emancipation.  They have been doing that more or less ever since, with results so lamentable only the blind can fail to see them.

 

            The anticipated battle over the proposed confirmation of Judge Barrett is not unrelated to the unhappy history of avoiding unpleasant topics.  I venture to suggest that, as Lincoln would put it,  “all know” that “somehow” the cause of this war is abortion.  But it is ever so much more comfortable to talk about other things, such as the outrageous hypocrisy of Senators McConnell and Graham, the fate of Merrick Garland, the high-handedness of Harry Reid, the borking of Robert Bork by Ted Kennedy—well, I’ll cut it off there, but we could easily continue on a bipartisan grievance tour probably going back to the British Enclosure Act of 1773 and beyond.  These topics are all of great interest, and have undoubtedly contributed to the poisonous atmosphere in which the battle will be joined.  But outrageous hypocrisy is nowhere mentioned in our secular Sacred Text, nor is there any suggestion that a duly elected President cannot offer a nomination three weeks or three days before the end of his statutory term.

           

            Abortion, though a supremely contentious issue in the country, nonetheless commands a kind of strange and paradoxical consensus.  Most Americans don’t much like the idea of abortion; most Americans don’t much like the idea of criminalizing abortions either.  That pretty well describes my own state of ambivalence.  What is for some a settled matter of constitutional right is for others an everlasting affront to conscience.  One can well understand why prudential legislators have been willing to let the literary critics on the Supreme Court deal with the matter.

 

            Any intelligent American can read the Court’s decision in the case of Roe versus Wade, which is based in an exegesis of certain phrases of the Fourteenth Amendment.   The Court’s vote in 1973 was not even close, seven to two.  We now know what the law is because “it is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.”  But though that same intelligent American is obligated to honor the force of the law, she is not forbidden from regarding the exegesis on which it is based as highly curious.  As early as the period of classical antiquity Stoic logicians bewailed the near impossibility of meaningful written communication “because all words are ambiguous.”  Yet they could only be interpreted through other words.  “That is like bringing a quenched candle into an unlighted room”.  The heirs of such ideas, in trendy modernized form, are today very common in university departments of literature.  This is one reason why much literary criticism, which in earlier periods commanded a broad audience among general readers, has become an arcane, mandarin, and above all unconvincing enterprise uncongenial to lovers of literature.   You may or may not buy the argument that Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost quite without Milton’s realizing that fact.  That was a rather mad idea floated by William Blake when Paradise Lost was not quite as old to him as the Constitution was for Justice Blackmun when he wrote the majority decision in Roe versus Wade.  There is not a lot of “real life” consequence in that interpretation of Paradise Lost, which is now commonplace in Departments of English.  Yet it is neither more nor less obvious than the interpretation of “unreasonable search and seizure” in the Fourteenth Amendment made by the court in 1973.  That is why both parties in our duopoly have been at times quite open in insisting that the crucial issues in a presidential election are the President’s powers of nomination and the Senate’s power of confirmation.  Power is often unattractive in its naked form, but eventually real issues do emerge even, or perhaps especially, when Congress doesn’t want to deal with them.  But the issue here is not really a clash of high-minded moral principles— let alone the struggle of good and evil so often invoked to describe it.  It is a squabble of literary critics and a contest of textual interpretation.  Not that high principle plays no role.  The high principle of the Republicans is that their candidate must be confirmed.  The high principle of the Democrats is that that must never happen.  The situation seems rather bleak, yet not quite so bad as last night’s alleged “debate.”

 

 

 

Pro-Ambivalence

As I write this, the Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam,  is struggling to keep his job as his own top political party leaders, backed by a vast army of bien pensants with Twitter accounts, are demanding his resignation from office.  His alleged offense, no small one even when it was committed some decades ago, was to engage in some stupid high jinks now regarded as so hateful to God and man as to render their perpetrator unfit for elective public office, utterly and in perpetuity.  I am not a Virginian, and until recently I could not have recognized this man’s name if it were on a multiple-choice quiz.  Nor did I ever suppose that medical students assemble yearbooks, let alone ones that would embarrass your average Alabama high school.  Yet as it happens, by the time the story of the appalling photograph was surfacing, I had actually seen Gov. Northam in a television clip responding to questions about an abortion rights bill under consideration by the State Legislature.  He was saying that he approved of the measure, and that it would indeed allow, under certain circumstances, infanticide.  He didn’t use that word, and I don’t think he actually meant what he did say.  I doubt that he actually accepts the necessity of infanticide.  But that is what he said, and the only likely reason he said it was that he wanted to demonstrate his progressive bona fides to his party allies.   Not that I believe that infanticide is progressive or that people who call themselves progressives generally do either.  But the two episodes—abortion interview and the flap about the photograph—are not unrelated.  It now appears that Northam was “outed” with regard to the now infamous photograph by somebody outraged by his extraordinary remarks about the abortion bill.

Ordinarily I would avoid such a dispiriting subject as the abortion question.   It is a topic that invites passion and outrage and nearly guarantees the exacerbation of ill will with only the slimmest chance of advancing comity and ethical clarification.  It will continue to do so as long as we continue to act as though “Pro Life” and “Pro Choice” are not inadequate slogans but definitive adversarial categories like skins and shirts or Guelfs and Ghibellines, tribes or teams to one of which each of us gives our unqualified support.  There actually is an American consensus on the issue, but one unsatisfying to the righteous appetite for certainty.  Most Americans are “against” abortion.  Most Americans are “against” the criminalization of abortion.  This means that most Americans are ambivalent about an issue concerning which strident voices are demanding certainty.

What is progressive in the development of civilization is the abandonment of barbarity, not its continuity.  Some brutal practices of Antiquity are rarely remembered, but they do show up in myth, legend, and literary texts.  The motives for infanticide were many, but their common denominator was the social or economic inconvenience or potential long-term military or political threat posed by the child to living adults.  The “exposure” of unwanted infants—dumping them to die in some desolate place—was not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world.  You don’t come to be raised by wolves, even if you are Romulus and Remus, under ordinary circumstances.  The voice of the Hebrew exile in the beautiful psalm Super flumina anticipates with pleasure the prospect of dashing the skulls of Edomite children against the stone walls of the city.  C’est la guerre.  In medieval penitential texts there is frequent mention of something called “overlying”.  In peasant households several people might sleep in the same bed.  Babies were not infrequently stifled in the night, asphyxiated by the weight of heavy adult bodies, leaving moralists suspicious that many such mishaps were not in fact accidents at all, but acts of postnatal birth control.  Unless we wish to imagine widespread depravity, and deny any natural bond of love between parent and child, such episodes were evidences of a terrible desperation.           

In fact our literature, which is after all supposedly an “imitation of life,” has been on the whole perhaps more truly enlightening than street demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.  Among modern writers few are grimmer than Hardy, and Hardy’s grimmest moment is probably in Jude the Obscure, in which a child, believing that his father’s life chances have been blasted by his need to support a family, murders his two junior siblings and hangs himself, leaving the chilling note: “Done because we are too many”.  It is impossible to absorb the horror of the deed without considering the horror of its motivation.  Hardy was not the first to believe in a malign biological trap in which the sexual instinct was and forever would be a generator of tragedy for large swaths of the human race.  Dreiser actually put that word in the title of one of the great novels of the last century, An American Tragedy, closely based, of course, on a “real life” criminal case.  One of my recent posts concerned Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.  In it the “biological trap” is but one factor in a world that seems expressly designed for the destruction of its pathetic anti-hero.  But surely you don’t need to “shout your abortion” or acquiesce, as Governor Northam did, in the idea of “abortion” on the delivery table to avoid returning to that world.