Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Sozomen recounts an incident at Aulon when Marcellus, the violently iconoclastic Bishop of Apamea, led a band of soldiers and gladiators in an attack on the local temple. ‘He kept out of range of the arrows, for his gout prevented him from fighting, pursuing or fleeing. While the soldiers were attacking the temple, some of the pagans discovered he was alone, seized him, and burned him alive.’ In 391 another militant bishop, Theophilus of Alexandria, led a massed attack on the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, in Alexandria, said to be the largest place of worship in the world. This complex contained an immense wooden statue of the god, which threatened earthquakes if anyone touched it. According to Theodoret’s Ecclesiastical History, ‘The bishop looked on these tales as the drivel of drunken hags, and sneering at the lifeless monster’s vast bulk, told a man with an axe to strike it. . . . Serapis’s head was cut off, and out ran a multitude of mice. It was broken into small pieces and burnt, but the head was carried through the town, in mockery of those who worshipped it.’ Also brought to light were a number of weird priestly tricks, such as hollow statues of wood or brass, with hidden apertures from which priests had whispered oracles or maledictions. These seem to have born a striking resemblance to the various frauds, such as the Boxley Rood, later brought to light during the first great wave of iconoclasm at the Reformation. The destruction of the pagan temples indeed adumbrated many of the attitudes on both sides produced by the puritan campaign against sixteenth-century Christian ‘idolatry’. The weakness of paganism, in fact, was its dependence on external show and, among its upper-class defenders, on a purely aesthetic approach to religious practice. Third-century pagan intellectuals, such as Plotinus and his biographer Porphyry were unable, like the earlier critic Celsus, to attack Christianity as a barbarous superstition, unworthy of educated men. They wrote on the defensive, conceding much of the Christian case. The inability of pagan thinkers to supply a credible alternative to what was now the dominant religious group in the empire completely undermined Julian’s attempt to reimpose paganism by state power in the 360s. The attempt ended with his early death in battle, a misfortune seen naturally as a judgment on his cause and we cannot know how successful perseverance might have proved. Julian’s method, in effect, was to graft Christian practices on to paganism, while presenting the Christians as intolerant, brutish and destructive. He compiled a catechism, introduced pagan charities and constructed an ecclesiastical hierarchy on Christian lines, with a system of discipline and canon law. He deliberately promoted pagans to

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But finding that his affairs, as is usually the case with merchants, were entangled here, there, and everywhere, and being unable quickly or easily to unravel them, he decided to place them in the hands of a number of different people. All this he succeeded in arranging, except that he was left with the problem of finding someone capable of recovering certain loans which he had made to various people in Burgundy. The reason for his dilemma was that he had been told the Burgundians were a quarrelsome, thoroughly bad and unprincipled set of people; and he was quite unable to think of anyone he could trust, who was at the same time sufficiently villainous to match the villainy of the Burgundians. After devoting much thought to this problem, he suddenly recalled a man known as Ser Cepperello, of Prato, who had been a frequent visitor to his house in Paris. This man was short in stature and used to dress very neatly, and the French, who did not know the meaning of the word Cepperello, thinking that it signified chapel , which in their language means ‘garland’, and because as we have said he was a little man, used to call him, not Ciappello, but Ciappelletto: and everywhere in that part of the world, where few people knew him as Ser Cepperello, he was known as Ciappelletto. 2 This Ciappelletto was a man of the following sort: a notary by profession, he would have taken it as a slight upon his honour if one of his legal deeds (and he drew up very few of them) were discovered to be other than false. In fact, he would have drawn up free of charge as many false documents as were requested of him, and done it more willingly than one who was highly paid for his services. He would take great delight in giving false testimony, whether asked for it or not. In those days, great reliance was placed in France upon sworn declarations, and since he had no scruples about swearing falsely, he used to win, by these nefarious means, every case in which he was required to swear upon his faith to tell the truth. He would take particular pleasure, and a great amount of trouble, in stirring up enmity, discord and bad blood between friends, relatives and anybody else; and the more calamities that ensued, the greater would be his rapture. If he were invited to witness a murder or any other criminal act, he would never refuse, but willingly go along; and he often found himself cheerfully assaulting or killing people with his own hands. He was a mighty blasphemer of God and His Saints, losing his temper on the tiniest pretext, as if he were the most hot-blooded man alive. He never went to church, and he would use foul language to pour scorn on all of her sacraments, declaring them repugnant.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  legislation impugned or attacked the status of slavery or even questioned whether this condition was compatible with Christian principles. It merely dealt with the treatment of slaves, their manumission and their marriage – and on the last point it backed the owner, since the Council of Châlons, 813, decreed that marriages of slaves owned by different masters were invalid, unless the owners agreed. There were, too, hideous blemishes on this Christian society. Legislation codified a good many earlier Spanish and Roman anti-Jewish decrees, which, among other things, prohibited Jews from holding public offices or owning Christian slaves, obliged them to keep to their homes on Christian feasts, and punished with excommunication any Christian who ate a meal with a Jewish family; marriage between Christians and Jews was dismissed as fornication. The Christian society which the Carolingians and other contemporary Christian rulers tried to shape was in many ways incorrigibly crude; its racial, if not its pagan, origins could not be erased. Despite the charisma of things Roman, in northern Christendom at least, the Church was Germanized, rather than society Romanized. The law was Germanic rather than Roman; Church organization, in the dioceses, tended to correspond to the German folk-system; where kingdoms were feudalized, the Church was feudalized too. In England, the king addressed his archbishops, bishops and abbots as he did his earls and thegns; the prelates were his servants, in effect, and their benefices and estates in his gift and control, as well as under his protection – it was significant, for instance, that he could grant the rank of bishop without the office or benefice. If society was a theocracy in one sense, it was also a royal tyranny in another. It was a very harsh age, and in some ways society had to set its sights low. We have an insight into the Church’s view of secular sanctity in a little life by Odo, second Abbot of Cluny, of St Gerald of Aurillac, who died at the end of the first decade of the tenth century. Gerald was a count, a major landowner and a soldier; he was prevented from renouncing secular life by public opinion, backed by the Church itself. It is not exactly clear why he was generally regarded as a saint. Odo himself felt this difficulty. He was critical of those who ‘extol him indiscreetly, saying that Gerald was powerful and rich, yet lived well, and is certainly a saint’. Yet he admits he cannot find much evidence of miracles or successful prophecies. He goes on, rather lamely the modern reader may think: ‘There is much evidence for the wonderful things which Gerald did. For it is well known that he preserved those things which were given him by his parents and by kings . . . that he increased his property without

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As you all know, Fiesole, which stands on top of a hill, clearly visible from where we are now, is a city of great antiquity,2 and was once very large. Although it has now fallen into total ruin, it has never been without a bishop, and there is one living there to this day. Some years ago, a widow of gentle birth called Monna Piccarda had an estate there, not far from the principal church; and since she was not the wealthiest of women, she resided there for almost the entire year, in a house of modest proportions, together with her two brothers, a pair of very worthy and polite young gentlemen. Now, this lady went regularly to the nearby church, and since she was still a very beautiful and charming young woman, its provost fell so passionately in love with her that she alone commanded the whole of his attention. And in the end he waxed so bold as to acquaint the lady with his wishes, imploring her to be content that he should love her, and to requite his ardent passion. Though elderly in years, this provost had the mentality of a small child, being haughty and presumptuous, and possessing a mighty high opinion of himself. He was forever picking holes in people and making himself generally unpleasant, and was so pompous and tedious that he was disliked by everybody, but especially by this lady, who not only disliked but positively loathed him. But being an intelligent woman, as we have said, she replied: ‘Sir, I am extremely flattered that you should love me. I am bound to love you in return, and I shall do so with all my heart, but there must never be anything unseemly about our love for one another. You are my spiritual father, you are a priest, and you are fast approaching your old age, all of which things require that you should lead a chaste and honourable life. Besides, I am no longer a young girl, able to take affairs of this sort in her stride, but a widow; and you know how essential it is that widows should follow the path of virtue. You must therefore excuse me, for I can never love you in the way you request, nor do I wish to be loved in this manner by you.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘With a cacophonous voice like that, you could charm the vultures out of the trees.’ ‘If you hadn’t heard it with your own ears,’ said the Master, ‘you wouldn’t have believed it possible, would you?’ ‘I certainly wouldn’t,’ said Bruno. ‘I know lots of others,’ said the Master, ‘but let’s forget about those for the moment. Such as you see me, my father was a nobleman, though he lived in the country, and on my mother’s side I was born into a family from Vallecchio. 13 Furthermore, as you will have seen, I have a finer collection of books, and a more splendid wardrobe, than any other doctor in Florence. God’s faith! I have a robe that cost me nearly a hundred pounds in farthings, all told, ten years ago at the very least. So I do implore you to have me enrolled in your company; and if you get me in, God’s faith! you can be as ill as you like, and I’ll never charge you a penny for my services.’ Bruno was more than ever convinced, having listened to his prattle, that the man was a complete nincompoop, and said to him: ‘Shed a little more light up here, Master, and just be patient till I’ve finished putting the tails on these mice, then I’ll give you my answer.’ When he had finished off the tails, Bruno pretended to be very worried by the doctor’s request, and said: ‘I know about the great things you would do for me, Master, but nevertheless the favour you are asking, though it may seem trivial to a man of your rare intellect, is anything but simple to my way of thinking, and even if I were in a position to grant it, I know of no one in the world for whom I would do it, apart from yourself. And I would do it for you, not only because I love you as a brother, but because your words are seasoned with so much wisdom that they would startle a pious old lady out of her boots, let alone persuade me to change my mind; indeed, the more time I spend in your company, the wiser you appear. Besides, even if I had no other reason for loving you, I am bound to love you on seeing that you have lost your heart to such a beauty as the one you described. I must however point out that I am not as influential as you suppose in these matters, and it is not within my power to grant your request. But if you will give me your solemn pledge, as a gentleman and a moron, to keep my words a secret, I shall explain how you can achieve your aim without my assistance. And since you have all those fine books and the other things you were telling me about, I feel certain that your efforts will be crowned with success.’ ‘Have no fear, you may speak out,’ said the Master.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  All this commotion put paid to our supper, so that, as I said, not only did I not gobble it down, but I never ate a crumb of it.’ On hearing this tale, his wife perceived that other women, even though their plans occasionally miscarried, were no less shrewd than herself, and she was strongly tempted to speak up in defence of Ercolano’s wife. But thinking that by censuring another’s misconduct she would cover up her own more successfully, she said: ‘What a nice way to behave! What a fine, God-fearing specimen of womanhood! What a loyal and respectable spouse! Why, she had such an air of saintliness that she looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth! But the worst part about it is that anyone as old as she is should be setting the young so fine an example. A curse upon the hour she was born! May the Devil take the wicked and deceitful hussy, for allowing herself to become the general butt and laughing-stock of all the women of this city! Not only has she thrown away her own good name, broken her marriage vows, and forfeited the respect of society, but she’s had the audacity, after all he has done for her, to involve an excellent husband and venerable citizen in her disgrace, and all for the sake of some other man. So help me God, women of her kind should be shown no mercy; they ought to be done away with; they ought to be burnt alive and reduced to ashes.’ But at this point, recollecting that her lover was concealed beneath the chicken-coop in the very next room, she started coaxing Pietro to go to bed, saying it was getting late, whereupon Pietro, who had a greater urge to eat than to sleep, asked her whether there was any supper left over. ‘Supper?’ she replied. ‘What would I be doing cooking supper, when you’re not at home to eat it? Do you take me for the wife of Ercolano? Be off with you to bed, and give your stomach a rest, just for this once.’ Now, earlier that same evening, some of the labourers from Pietro’s farm in the country had turned up at the house with a load of provisions, and had tethered their asses in a small stable adjoining the lean-to without bothering to water them. Being frantic with thirst, one of the asses, having broken its tether, had strayed from the stable and was roaming freely about the premises, sniffing in every nook and cranny to see if it could find any water. And in the course of its wanderings, it came and stood immediately beside the coop under which the young man lay hidden.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  FOURTH STORY The Provost of Fiesole falls in love with a widow, but his love is not reciprocated. He goes to bed with her maid, thinking it to be the widow, and the lady’s brothers cause him to be found there by his bishop. When Elissa came to the end of her tale, which in the course of its telling had brought no small pleasure to the entire company, the queen turned to Emilia and indicated that she would like her to tell her own story next; so Emilia promptly began, as follows: Worthy ladies, it has already been shown, as I recall, in several of the stories we have heard, that priests, friars, and clerics of all descriptions will stop at nothing to force themselves on our attention. But however much we may discuss this particular subject, more will remain to be said; and I therefore propose to tell you a story about a provost 1 who was determined, come what may, to obtain the favours of a certain widow, whether she wanted to grant them to him or not. But being highly intelligent, the lady, who was of gentle birth, treated him according to his deserts. As you all know, Fiesole, which stands on top of a hill, clearly visible from where we are now, is a city of great antiquity, 2 and was once very large. Although it has now fallen into total ruin, it has never been without a bishop, and there is one living there to this day. Some years ago, a widow of gentle birth called Monna Piccarda had an estate there, not far from the principal church; and since she was not the wealthiest of women, she resided there for almost the entire year, in a house of modest proportions, together with her two brothers, a pair of very worthy and polite young gentlemen. Now, this lady went regularly to the nearby church, and since she was still a very beautiful and charming young woman, its provost fell so passionately in love with her that she alone commanded the whole of his attention. And in the end he waxed so bold as to acquaint the lady with his wishes, imploring her to be content that he should love her, and to requite his ardent passion. Though elderly in years, this provost had the mentality of a small child, being haughty and presumptuous, and possessing a mighty high opinion of himself. He was forever picking holes in people and making himself generally unpleasant, and was so pompous and tedious that he was disliked by everybody, but especially by this lady, who not only disliked but positively loathed him. But being an intelligent woman, as we have said, she replied: ‘Sir, I am extremely flattered that you should love me. I am bound to love you in return, and I shall do so with all my heart, but there must never be anything unseemly about our love for one another.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But why go traipsing round the village in this awful heat?’ ‘By the grace of God,’ replied the priest, ‘I’ve come to keep you company for a while, for I met your husband on his way to town.’ Belcolore came downstairs, took a seat, and began to sift a heap of cabbage seed that her husband had gathered earlier in the day. ‘Come now, Belcolore,’ said the priest, ‘must you always drive me to despair like this?’ Belcolore began to laugh, and said: ‘What have I done to you?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied the priest. ‘But the trouble is that there’s something I’d like to do to you, something ordained by God, and you won’t let me do it.’ ‘Bless my soul!’ said Belcolore. ‘Priests don’t do that sort of thing.’ ‘We certainly do,’ replied the priest. ‘Why on earth shouldn’t we? What’s more, we do a much better job of it than other men, and do you know why? It’s because we do our grinding when the millpond’s full. So if you want to make hay while the sun shines, hold your tongue and let me get on with it.’ ‘What sort of hay do you mean?’ said Belcolore. ‘You priests are all the same, you’re as tight-fisted as the very devil.’ ‘You only have to tell me what you want,’ said the priest, ‘and you shall have it. Would you like a pretty little pair of shoes, or a silk head-scarf, or a fine woollen waistband, or what?’ ‘That’s a splendid choice, I must say!’ exclaimed Belcolore. ‘I already have all those things. But if you’re really so fond of me, why not do me a little favour, and then I would do whatever you want?’ ‘Tell me what the favour is, and I’ll do it gladly,’ said the priest. So Belcolore said: ‘I have to go to Florence on Saturday to deliver some wool that I have spun, and get my spinning wheel mended. And if you’ll lend me five pounds, which a man like you can easily afford, I shall call at the pawnbroker’s and collect my black skirt and the waistband I wear on Sundays. I wore it on my wedding-day, you understand, and ever since I pawned it I haven’t been able to go to church or anywhere else. Do me this one favour, and I’ll be yours for evermore.’ ‘So help me God,’ said the priest, ‘I haven’t the money with me, or I’d gladly let you have it. But you may depend on me to see that you get it by Saturday.’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Belcolore, ‘you all make these fine promises, and then you fail to keep any of them. Do you think you’re going to treat me as you treated Biliuzza, who went away empty-handed and ended up walking the streets because of what you did to her? God’s faith, you’ll not fool me so easily.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  by mass shootings without trial. The republic and Catholicism thus seemed natural enemies. ‘My aim’, said Jules Ferry, speaking for the republic, ‘is to organize humanity without God and without kings.’ His Catholic opponent, Count Albert de Mun, accepted the dichotomy: ‘The church and the revolution are irreconcilable. Either the church must kill the revolution, or the revolution will kill the church.’ In an age of mass electorates, when even a pope was driven to advise Catholics to accept a republic, Catholicism had to be identified with popular issues: that was what the new triumphalism was about. It possessed its own machinery for evangelizing the workers. In 1845 the ultra-Catholic Père d’Alzon had founded the Assumptionist order specifically to work among the lower classes. They had their own publishing house and printing-presses and took a rabid right-wing populist line. There were other Catholic extremist papers, like L’Autorité, run by Paul de Cassagnac, which proclaimed that it did not matter whether the country were run by a legitimist king or a Napoleonic emperor ‘provided the bastard [republicanism] is crushed’. But the Assumptionists’ La Croix, a daily from 1883, became the most powerful, its circulation boosted by salesmen called ‘Les Chevaliers de la Croix’, and its leaders written by Père Vincent de Paul Bailly under the pseudonym ‘Le Moine’. It was not the only Catholic publishing house in France but it was the only one to make money, and this gave it a good deal of freedom from the hierarchy. 1 In the 1880s the anti- republicans, searching for a popular issue, began to whip up anti-semitism. The tone was set by Edouard Drumont’s La France Juive, which concluded: ‘At the end of this history, what do you see? I myself see but one thing, the figure of Christ, insulted, covered with opprobrium, torn by the thorns, and crucified. Nothing has changed in 1800 years. It is the same lie, the same hate, and the same people.’ The Jews were behind the Republic, its financial scandals, the betrayal of the army at Sedan, the success of Jew-controlled Germany, and of course behind the campaign against the Church. La Croix took up the theme with energy, and the truth seemed miraculously confirmed when, in October 1894, the only Jew ever to have been on the general staff of the army, Captain Dreyfus, was arrested for high treason and spying for Germany. In fact the Dreyfus case proved a disaster for the French Catholic Church. The activities of the Assumptionists identified Catholics as a body with the worst aspects of the anti-semitic campaign. Le Moine wrote at the time of the Zola trial: ‘Thus it is free thought, defender as it is of Jews, protestants and all the enemies of the church, that is at the bar with Zola, and the army is forced, despite itself, to go over to the

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The democratic method of resolving social conflict, which some romanticists hail as a triumph of the ethical over the coercive factor, is really much more coercive than at first seems apparent. The majority has its way, not because the minority believes that the majority is right (few minorities are willing to grant the majority the moral prestige of such a concession), but because the votes of the majority are a symbol of its social strength. Whenever a minority believes that it has some strategic advantage which out-weighs the power of numbers, and whenever it is sufficiently intent upon its ends, or desperate enough about its position in society, it refuses to accept the dictates of the majority. Military and economic overlords and revolutionary zealots have been traditionally contemptuous of the will of majorities. Recently Trotsky advised the German communists not to be dismayed by the greater voting strength of the fascists since in the inevitable revolution the power of industrial workers, in charge of the nation’s industrial process, would be found much more significant than the social power of clerks and other petty bourgeoisie who comprised the fascist movement. There are, no doubt, rational and ethical factors in the democratic process. Contending social forces presumably use the forum rather than the battleground to arbitrate their differences in the democratic method, and thus differences are resolved by moral suasion and a rational adjustment of rights to rights. If political issues were really abstract questions of social policy upon which unbiased citizens were asked to commit themselves, the business of voting and the debate which precedes the election might actually be regarded as an educational programme in which a social group discovers its common mind. But the fact is that political opinions are inevitably rooted in economic interests of some kind or other, and only comparatively few citizens can view a problem of social policy without regard to their interest. Conflicting interests therefore can never be completely resolved; and minorities will yield only because the majority has come into control of the police power of the state and may, if the occasion arises, augment that power by its own military strength. Should a minority regard its own strength, whether economic or martial, as strong enough to challenge the power of the majority, it may attempt to wrest control of the state apparatus from the majority, as in the case of the fascist movement in Italy. Sometimes it will resort to armed conflict, even if the prospects of victory are none too bright, as in the instance of the American Civil War, in which the Southern planting interests, outvoted by a combination of Eastern industrialists and Western agrarians, resolved to protect their peculiar interests and privileges by a forceful dissolution of the national union. The coercive factor is, in other words, always present in politics.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Sometimes specific economic interests prompt their bellicose ardor; at other times they find it convenient to strengthen their rule at home by permitting the fever of war and the resultant hysteria of patriotism to confuse their interests with the general welfare more perfectly than would be possible in a sober nation. More than one ruling caste has saved itself by an opportune war. The inept Russian aristocracy tried to beguile the Russian public from consideration of the misery into which it had been thrown by the venality and incompetence of its rulers during the World War, by fanning the flames of jingoism to a white heat. The effort proved futile only because the decomposition of Russian society had progressed too far. {108} The prejudices, hypocrisies and dishonesties of privileged and ruling classes are less determined by class loyalty than similar national attitudes are the consequence of loyalty to the nation. Members of privileged classes are not incapable of loyalty to their class and of concerted action when their common privileges are imperilled. But the attitudes of their several members are under less group pressure than in either the nation or the proletarian class. They merely represent the uniform consequence of a given set of circumstances and the unvarying effect of interest upon attitude and conviction. The group egoism of a privileged class is therefore more precisely the sum and aggregate of individual egoisms than is the case in national selfishness, which is sometimes compounded of the unselfish loyalties of individuals. This may mean that the unethical character of class prejudices may, being less complex, be more easily dissolved by reason than similar national attitudes. Nevertheless the task is not as easy as it seems to rational moralists, who are themselves too much the product of comfortable circumstances to understand the desperate problem of social justice. While some of the pretensions of privileged classes are consciously dishonest, most of them arise from the fact that the criteria of reason, religion and culture, to which the class appeals in defense of its position in society are themselves the product of, or at least colored by, the partial experience and perspective of the class. When the intelligent member of a class appeals to the court of reason and justice the biased judgments of the court are all the more dangerous for having the prestige of impartiality. A higher degree of intelligence and a more acute rational perception might conceivably destroy class bias to some degree. It can certainly increase the number of individuals who are able to penetrate through the moral illusions which confuse the mind and conscience of a majority of the class. It might even qualify the certainty with which most of the members of the class hold to their illusions, and thereby insinuate a rational element into the inevitable struggle between the classes. But it cannot abolish the egoism of a class.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The English word “generous” springs from a Latin root (generosus), which reveals that generosity was also regarded as a unique aristocratic virtue. That was natural enough, since only the wealthy had the time and the pecuniary strength to engage in conspicuous helpfulness to their fellows. Mr. Thorstein Veblen cynically interprets the generosities of the privileged as efforts to incite the envy of their fellowmen by a display of their resources. {91} That is probably as near to the truth as the moral estimate which the wealthy and leisured classes make of their own philanthropies. We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice. The devotion of the aristocracy to art and culture offers it another occasion for moral justification of its privileges. This devotion may be a refined form of conspicuous waste or it may be prompted by the ennui of men who are not under the necessity of earning their livelihood. Nevertheless social inequality has been so basic to the history of culture that Mr. Clive Bell is able to regard the aristocratic organization of society as a prerequisite of high culture. {92} Both the arts and the sciences had their inception in the leisure of Sumerian and Egyptian priests, who, being priests, could maintain their privileged positions in society with less effort than the soldier, and were consequently free to devote their leisure to arts and speculations which had no immediate utilitarian advantage. The fact that culture requires leisure is, however, hardly a sufficient justification for the maintenance of a leisured class. For every artist which the aristocracy has produced, and for every two patrons of art, it has supported a thousand wastrels. An intelligent society will know how to subsidise those who possess peculiar gifts in the arts and the sciences and free them of the necessity of engaging in immediately useful toil. It will bestow leisure upon those who have the capacity to exploit it, and will not permit a leisured class to justify itself by producing an occasional creative genius among a multitude of incompetents who waste their leisure in vulgarities and inanities. No complex society will be able to dispense with certain inequalities of privilege. Some of them are necessary for the proper performance of certain social functions; and others (though this is not so certain) may be needed to prompt energy and diligence in the performance of important functions. But rational privilege must be related to function and to the capacity to perform it. If such a principle is incompatible with complete equalitarianism, it is equally incompatible with the preservation of class privileges. Privileged classes are maintained by the inheritance of privileges without regard to individual capacities for exploiting them for the common good. Furthermore, the degree of privilege inherited has no relevance to what is necessary for the performance of function.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  It is literally the difference between the less favored and the more favored workers, between those from whose perspective modern capitalism is really hopeless, and those whose slightly more favorable experiences encourage a more hopeful view. Whether the crises of capitalism and the consequent insecurity of the workers will finally reduce all industrial workers to the status of the former, is a question which history alone can answer. Meanwhile it is rather interesting that economic determinists should be so prone to accuse melioristic and parliamentary socialists, whose convictions obviously grow out of their economic experiences, of moral turpitude. They know that revolutionary sentiment can develop only in economic misery, but they find it difficult to square their moral judgments with their deterministic convictions. The individual proletarian leader, whose philosophy of society grows not out of his own experience but out of an imaginative understanding of the experiences and necessities of the working class, is of course justified, from his own point of view, in criticising those whose theories spring from the experiences of the more favored rather than the less favored workers. Since he is imaginatively identified with the least favored proletarians, he feels that those who stop short of such an identification are wanting in either courage or imagination. Interestingly enough Lenin was never sufficiently consistent in his determinism to claim that orthodox Marxism was the natural product of working class experience. He believed that the worker was incapable of elaborating an adequate social philosophy without aid. “The history of all countries,” he writes, “testifies to the fact that the working class can evolve only a trade unionist consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to coalesce into unions in order to fight the employers, to demand laws in favor of labor, etc. The doctrine of socialism grew up out of the philosophical and historical theories that were elaborated by educated members of the propertied classes, by the intelligentsia. Marx and Engels and the founders of scientific socialism of today belonged themselves to the bourgeois intelligentsia.” {114} The idea that the superior historical perspective of the educated man must be added to the actual experience of the worker, who lacks perspective, before a theory can be evolved which will do justice to that experience, is an interesting qualification of pure determinism. It enabled Lenin to avoid many mistakes into which purer determinists fell. The moral cynicism of Marxism and proletarianism, which discounts all ethical pretensions and achievements in the field of politics, is particularly apparent in its estimate of the democratic state. The true proletarian regards the democratic state as the instrument of the bourgeoisie for the oppression of the workers. His complete cynicism upon this point stands in striking antithesis to the sentimental overestimates of the achievements of political democracy which are current in the middle-class world. Lenin declared “In their sum, these restrictions (of middle-class democracy) exclude and thrust out the poor from politics and from active share in democracy.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  But the victory is insignificant in comparison with the previous introduction of the morals of intergroup relations into the intimate life of the group by the very establishment of slavery. Barbarism knows little or nothing of class distinctions. These are created and more and more highly elaborated by civilisation. The social impulses, with which men are endowed by nature are not powerful enough, even when they are extended by a growing intelligence, to apply with equal force toward all members of a large community. The distinction between slave and freeman is only one of the many social gradations which higher societies develop. They are determined in every case by the disproportion of power, military and economic, which develops in the more complex civilisations and in the larger social units. A growing social intelligence may be affronted by them and may protest against them, but it changes them only slightly. Neither the prophets of Israel nor the social idealists of Egypt and Babylon, who protested against social injustice, could make their vision of a just society effective. The man of power, though humane impulse may awaken in him, always remains something of the beast of prey. He may be generous within his family, and just within the confines of the group which shares his power and privilege. With only rare exceptions, his highest moral attitude toward members of other groups is one of warlike sportsmanship toward those who equal his power and challenge it, and one of philanthropic generosity toward those who possess less power and privilege. His philanthropy is a perfect illustration of the curious compound of the brutal and the moral which we find in all human behavior; for his generosity is at once a display of his power and an expression of his pity. His generous impulses freeze within him if his power is challenged or his generosities are accepted without grateful humility. If individual men of power should achieve more ethical attitudes than the one described, it remains nevertheless typical for them as a class; and is their practically unvarying attitude when they express themselves not as individuals but as a group. The rise of modern democracy, beginning with the Eighteenth Century, is sometimes supposed to have substituted the consent of the governed for the power of royal families and aristocratic classes as the cohesive force of national society. This judgment is partly true but not nearly as true as the uncritical devotees of modern democracy assume. The doctrine that government exists by the consent of the governed, and the democratic technique by which the suffrage of the governed determines the policy of the state, may actually reduce the coercive factor in national life, and provide for peaceful and gradual methods of resolving conflicting social interests and changing political institutions. But the creeds and institutions of democracy have never become fully divorced from the special interests of the commercial classes who conceived and developed them.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The proletarian is as certain that the hopes of the latter represent a futile sentimentality as he is that the protestations of the former are hypocritical. He is going to build an ideal world, not by trusting in the moral resources of individuals but by remaining on the level of the men of power and using their own instruments against them. Since it is obvious that most middle-class idealists overestimate the available moral resources for radical social change, the proletarian is manifestly not completely mistaken in the moral cynicism which informs his political strategy. But since he is too completely immersed in the social group and too much the victim of group brutalities, he may not have the whole truth about the moral resources of human life. The brutality of his political strategy can be justified only if the moral cynicism which inspires it is true to all the facts. On the other hand the middle-class idealist may, and probably does, live under illusions. He is too completely an individual to be conscious of the most significant behavior of groups. He does not suffer enough, in his comfortable position, from the brutality of collective man, fully to understand his dominant impulses. He may have separated himself from those impulses and detached himself psychologically. But he is not detached economically and therefore does not feel the full force and the real meaning of the impulses of dominant groups. He sees moral forces working efficaciously within the confines of his group, and erroneously imagines that they can be extended until they resolve all group conflict. The differences in moral outlook between the proletarian and middle-class world can therefore not be judged by any purely a priori criteria. The question between them can be solved only by a study of history. And some of the history which must be studied has not yet been made. Wherefore every analysis trenches inevitably to a certain degree into the field of prophecy. Meanwhile it is important to recognise, that revolutionary strategy is not wanting in either the motives or the objectives which give it a solid moral basis. Neither do its motives or objectives guarantee the validity of its methods or means. These must be judged in the light of all the facts and possibilities in regard to collective human behavior. If a season of violence can establish a just social system and can create the possibilities of its preservation, there is no purely ethical ground upon which violence and revolution can be ruled out. This could be done only upon the basis of purely anarchistic ethical and political presuppositions. Once we have made the fateful concession of ethics to politics, and accepted coercion as a necessary instrument of social cohesion, we can make no absolute distinctions between non-violent and violent types of coercion or between coercion used by governments and that which is used by revolutionaries. If such distinctions are made they must be justified in terms of the consequences in which they result.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Patriotism is a high form of altruism, when compared with lesser and more parochial loyalties; but from an absolute perspective it is simply another form of selfishness. The larger the group the more certainly will it express itself selfishly in the total human community. It will be more powerful and therefore more able to defy any social restraints which might be devised. It will also be less subject to internal moral restraints. The larger the group the more difficult it is to achieve a common mind and purpose and the more inevitably will it be unified by momentary impulses and immediate and unreflective purposes. The increasing size of the group increases the difficulties of achieving a group self-consciousness, except as it comes in conflict with other groups and is unified by perils and passions of war. It is a rather pathetic aspect of human social life that conflict is a seemingly unavoidable prerequisite of group solidarity. Furthermore the greater the strength and the wider the dominion of a community, the more will it seem to represent universal values from the perspective of the individual. There is something to be said for Treitschke’s logic, which made the nation the ultimate community of significant loyalty, on the ground that smaller units were too small to deserve, and larger units too vague and ephemeral to be able to exact, man’s supreme loyalty. Treitschke was wrong only in glorying in this moral difficulty. Try as he will, man seems incapable of forming an international community, with power and prestige great enough to bring social restraint upon collective egoism. He has not even succeeded in disciplining anti-social group egoism within the nation. The very extension of human sympathies has therefore resulted in the creation of larger units of conflict without abolishing conflict. So civilization has become a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities. The device gives men the illusion that they are moral; but the illusion is not lasting. A technological civilisation has created an international community, so interdependent as to require, even if not powerful or astute enough to achieve, ultimate social harmony. While there are halting efforts to create an international mind and conscience, capable of coping with this social situation, modern man has progressed only a little beyond his fathers in extending his ethical attitudes beyond the group to which he is organic and which possesses symbols, vivid enough to excite his social sympathies. His group is larger than that of his fathers, but whatever moral gain may be ascribed to that development is partially lost by the greater heterogeneity and the diminished mutuality of this larger group. The modern nation is divided into classes and the classes exhibit a greater disproportion of power and privilege than in the primitive community.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  For this class, living in comfort and security, is unable to recognise the urgency of the social problem; and, living in a world of individual relationships, is unable to appreciate the consistency with which economic groups express themselves in terms of pure selfishness. The conception that what society needs and, if intelligent enough, will be able to secure, is “trained and experienced specialists” to perform the “expert functions” of government, betrays an additional class prejudice, the prejudice of the intellectual, who is so much the rationalist, that he imagines the evils of government can be eliminated by the expert knowledge of specialists. Any kind of government must of course avail itself of the specialised knowledge of experts. But the idea that such expert knowledge can ever guarantee the impartiality and justice of a state is to overestimate the impartiality of reason in general and the reason of experts in particular. Politics are given their general direction by the pressure of interest of the groups which control them; the expert is quite capable of giving any previously determined tendency both rational justification and efficient detailed application. Such is the inclination of the human mind for beginning with assumptions which have been determined by other than rational considerations, and building a superstructure of rationally acceptable judgments upon them, that all this can be done without any conscious dishonesty. If the expert can function under any type of regime, whether conservative or radical, the experience of socialist governments of Britain and Germany proves that the civil servant is more inclined to conservatism than to radicalism and that he sometimes knows how to frustrate and divert the general policy of the government which he serves by the kind of detailed application which he makes of its general line of policy. A careful study of the history of political and economic life proves conclusively that the educators, as all other middle-class moralists, underestimate the conflict of interest in political and economic relations, and attribute to disinterested ignorance what ought usually to be attributed to interested intelligence. Their very error in this regard is a result of the faulty perspective of their class. There will always be individuals in the more privileged classes who will, by force of rational and moral idealism, identify themselves with the less privileged classes and fight their political battles. But the number of these will probably always remain limited. Whatever social intelligence is created in the total body of any privileged class, can be used to mitigate the conflict between the classes, but it will not be powerful enough to obviate the necessity of such a conflict.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Without an almost miraculous increase in human intelligence it will not be easy to resolve the conflicts of interest between various national communities even after the special privilege and the unequal power, which now aggravate international conflicts, have been destroyed. Nevertheless the whole history of mankind bears testimony to the fact that the power which prevents anarchy in intra-group relations encourages anarchy in intergroup relations. The kings of old claimed the loyalty and the sacrifices of their subjects in conflicts with other tyrants, in which the interests of the state and the welfare of the people were completely subordinated to the capricious purposes of the monarch. No personal whim, which a human being might indulge, is excluded from the motives, which have prompted monarchs to shed the blood of their unhappy subjects. Pride, jealousy, disappointed love, hurt vanity, greed for greater treasures, lust for power over larger dominions, petty animosities between royal brothers or between father and son, momentary passions and childish whims, these all have been, not the occasional but the perennially recurring, causes and occasions of international conflict. The growing intelligence of mankind and the increased responsibility of monarchs to their people have placed a check upon the caprice, but not upon the self-interest, of the men of power. They may still engage in social conflict for the satisfaction of their pride and vanity provided they can compound their personal ambitions with, and hallow them by, the ambitions of their group, and the pitiful vanities and passions of the individuals who compose the group. The story of Napoleon belongs to modern and not to ancient history. He could bathe Europe in blood for the sake of gratifying his overweening lust for power, as long as he could pose as the tool of French patriotism and as the instrument of revolutionary fervor. The fact that the democratic sentiment, opposed to the traditional absolutisms of Europe, could be exploited to create a tyranny more sanguinary and terrible than those which it sought ostensibly to destroy; and that the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity of the French Revolution could turn so quickly into the nightmare of Napoleonic imperialism is a tragic revelation of the inadequacies of the human resources with which men must try to solve the problems of their social life. The childish vanity of the German Emperor, who wanted a large navy so that he could stand on equal footing with his royal English uncle at naval manœuvres, helped to make the World War inevitable. {15} He would not have been permitted to indulge this vanity however had it not seemed compatible with the prejudices of his people and the economic necessities of a growing empire. Theodore Roosevelt belonged to a little junta which foisted the Spanish-American War upon the American people.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  TENTH STORY Paganino of Monaco steals the wife of Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica, who, on learning where she is, goes and makes friends with Paganino. He asks Paganino to restore her to him, and Paganino agrees on condition that he obtains her consent. She refuses to go back with Messer Ricciardo, and after his death becomes Paganino’s wife . Every member of the worthy company complimented the queen most warmly for telling so excellent a story, especially Dioneo, who was the sole remaining speaker of the day. And when he had finished singing its praises, he addressed them as follows: Fair ladies, there was one feature of the queen’s story which has caused me to substitute another tale for the one I was intending to relate. I refer to the stupidity of Bernabò, and of all other men who are given to thinking, as he apparently was, that while they are gadding about in various parts of the world with one woman after another, the wives they left behind are simply twiddling their thumbs. I will grant you that things turned out nicely for Bernabò, but we, who spend our lives in the company of women from the cradle upwards, know perfectly well what they enjoy doing most. In telling you this story, I shall demonstrate the foolishness of such people as Bernabò. And at the same time, I shall show the even greater foolishness of those who, overestimating their natural powers, resort to specious reasoning to persuade themselves that they can do the impossible, and who attempt to mould other people in their own image, thus flying in the face of Nature. There once lived, in Pisa, a very wealthy judge called Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica, who had rather more brain than brawn, and who, thinking perhaps he could satisfy a wife with those same talents that he brought to his studies, went to a great deal of trouble to find himself a wife who was both young and beautiful; whereas, had he been capable of giving himself such good advice as he gave to others, he should have avoided marrying anyone with either of the attributes in question. He succeeded in his quest, however, for Messer Lotto Gualandi agreed to let him marry a daughter of his called Bartolomea, who was one of the prettiest and most charming young ladies in Pisa, a city where most of the women look as ugly as sin. 1 The judge brought her home with an air of great festivity, and although the wedding was celebrated in truly magnificent style, on the first night he only managed to come at her once in order to consummate the marriage, and even then he very nearly fell out of the game before it was over. And next morning, being a skinny and a withered and a spineless sort of fellow, he had to swallow down vernaccia, 2 energy-tablets and various other restoratives to pull himself round.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  We cannot be unmindful that without any design on our part the war has brought us new responsibilities and duties which we must meet and discharge as becomes a great nation on whose growth and career from the beginning the Ruler of Nations has plainly written the high command and pledge of civilisation.” {66} When after a great deal of negotiation among the commissioners and much debate between imperialists and anti-imperialists in America it was finally decided to ask for all of the Philippines, Secretary Hay wrote to the commissioners: “You are instructed to insist on the cession of the whole of the Philippines....The questions of duty and humanity appeal to the President so strongly that he can find no appropriate answer but the one he has marked out.” {67} There were American citizens, of course, who saw through all of this hypocrisy. “Why,” declared Mr. Moorfield Storey, one of the great liberal spirits of that day, “should Cuba with 1,600,000 people have a right to freedom and self-government and the 8,000,000 people who dwell in the Philippines be denied the same right?” {68} But these critics were not strong enough to prevail against the will-to-power of a vigorous young nation. The instructions to the army, after Spain finally ceded the islands and the peace treaty was signed, complete the chapter in hypocrisy with an almost perfect touch of dishonesty: “It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner possible that we have come not as invaders or as conquerors but as friends.” {69} Later Mr. McKinley explained to a group of clergymen just how he arrived at his decision on American policy: “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I went on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night it came to me this way—that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.” {70} America has not been altogether disobedient to Mr. McKinley’s heavenly vision, for it has done a rather creditable job of education and sanitation in the islands. Nevertheless a modern observer of western imperialism in the orient, Nathaniel Peffer, gives a truer estimate than Mr. McKinley of the real motives of imperialism when he observes cynically: “Much might be said of their fitness for self-government, but why? What does it matter? The Filipinos will seize the government and proclaim themselves independent tomorrow if they had the power, And if and when they have the power, they will, whether fit for self-government or not.