Esteem: Love in Wycherley's The Country Wife

William Wycherley’s The Country Wife is one of those Restoration comedies that you either hate or love. I fall in the latter category, which may reflect more on my sense of humor than on my strict adherence to expressions of so-called virtue. I acknowledge that the play presents humans as fairly vicious animals, more interested in acquiring money and power and in the gratification of their sexual desires than in almost anything else—except, perhaps, for due attention to the social standing that, in the play and in the world that it depicts, is called “honour.” But then that’s the job of a satirist, to strip away the masks that hide the reality of existence. In Hamlet’s more expansive way of putting it, the task of art is “to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Satire’s mirror always reflects scorn.

I also acknowledge that Restoration comedy is often a stew of misogyny. There are obvious exceptions, of course, as in the plays of Aphra Behn where women’s agency is foregrounded. I think, however, that the best Restoration comedies are not so much misogynistic as they are misanthropic.

 

The Country Wife is clearly scornful, gently so perhaps, of ignorant women such as Margery Pinchwife, the “country wife” of the title. Unlike the subtler, more penetrating comedies of Shakespeare, among others, the play suggests but does not analyze the reasons for Margery’s ignorance. The satire does not directly address, but rather simply presents the gendered inequities of the seventeenth century. More ruthlessly, the play focuses squarely on sexual viciousness. The coterie of sexually starved women—Lady Fidget and Mrs. Dainty Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish—who people the play will do anything they can to get a good fuck so long as it doesn’t entail loss of “honour.”

 

That is why they so admire Mr. Horner. They abhor Horner when they think he has become entirely impotent, but they adore him when they discover that the report of his impotence is his ruse to convince husbands to leave their wives in his company. As Lady Fidget says when Horner reveals the truth to her,

But, poor Gentleman, cou'd you be so generous? so truly a Man of honour, as for the sakes of us Women of honour, to cause your self to be reported no Man? No Man! and to suffer your self the greatest shame that cou'd fall upon a Man, that none might fall upon us Women by your conversation; but indeed, Sir, as perfectly, perfectly, the same Man as before your going into France, Sir; as perfectly, perfectly, Sir?

In France the cure for the clap—loads and loads of mercury—would have made Horner “no Man” indeed, and the good Lady Fidget is in awe that he provulgates that falsehood so that he can enjoy women’s “conversation” without destroying the ladies’ “honour.”

 

But Wycherly does not limit the satire to women. The men are in for as much scorn as they are. The women have good cause to be dissatisfied with the bargains they made in marrying their mates.

 

There is Mr. Pinchwife, who marries ignorant little Margery according to his principle, that “he's a Fool that marrys, but he's a greater that does not marry a Fool; what is wit in a Wife good for, but to make a Man a Cuckold?” Under that principle lies the truth, which Horner worms out of him when he asks why, if he is so worried about becoming a cuckold, he doesn’t simply keep a mistress. “A Pox on't, the Jades wou'd jilt me, I cou'd never keep a Whore to my self.” Horner draws the proper conclusion, that “you only marry'd to keep a Whore to your self.” Why the whores would jilt him is left unexamined, but the implication is that when it comes to sexual performance he is at least a bit insufficient.

 

Pinchwife’s sexual self-doubt acts as the catalyst for much of the comedic plot of the play. He does not believe in Horner’s self-proclaimed impotence, and so that part of the plot hangs on Horner’s maneuvers to deceive the husband, Pinchwife, as he tries to get the wife, Margery, in bed—or at least in compromising positions. In short, Mr. Pinchwife is so thoroughly sexually inferior that he is the major image of scorn in the play.

 

And there is Sir Jasper Fidget, a city knight, as they said back then, a newly rich urban merchant of some sort whose goal in life is to keep making as much money as he can. Eager to get business, he is happily willing to believe in Horner’s impotence so he can leave his wife and daughter alone with Horner while he hies off to Whitehall to ingratiate himself with king and courtiers and so manage his financial affairs. Another locus for scorn, then, is the venality of the men.

 

And there is Sparkish. In his case, the mirror of satire presents two images of scorn. Venality is one element of the scorn. Sparkish is meant to marry Alithea, the wonderfully heroic hero of the play, not because he loves her but rather because he will be getting five thousand pounds in dowry from Pinchwife, Alithea’s brother, to do so. One aspect of Alithea’s heroism is that, although she is not ignorant and naïve as Margery is, nonetheless she trusts in the good will of others. When Mr. Harcourt, the male “hero” of a play where there are no male heroes, tries to woo Alithea away from Sparkish, the action at the heart of the romantic plot of the play, she rejects him because, she says, Sparkish “loves me, or he wou'd not marry me.” To be fair to Sparkish, he seems to have equal faith in Alithea’s truth and virtue. Alithea thinks so, at any rate, and asserts that “'tis Sparkish's confidence in my truth, that obliges me to be so faithful to him.”

 

As it turns out, it’s not so much Sparkish’s confidence as it is his foolishness that makes him so accommodating to Alithea. Indeed, the other element of scorn in the image of Sparkish is his profound folly. As Dorilant, another man about town, says, “to pass for a wit in Town, [Sparkish] shewes himself a fool every night to us.” A wit-wannabe, Sparkish demonstrates how easily men descend into idiocy. Sparkish is not ignorant, as is Margery, but he is so full of himself as the icon of the latest fashion and the purveyor of the latest gossip, that he is easily, and repeatedly, mocked, scorned, fleeced. Ultimately, when Harcourt’s machinations convince Sparkish that Alithea has betrayed him, Sparkish shows that he can be jealous: “Cou'd you find out no easie Country Fool to abuse?” he asks Alithea, “none but me, a Gentleman of wit and pleasure about the Town”?

 

At the heart of Sparkish’s relation to Alithea is the untenable position that Alithea finds herself in. Yes, Sparkish seems to trust Alithea, who in truth is a virtuous young woman. But on the other hand, Sparkish also takes as gospel truth the default general notion about women that animates the sexual games of the play. As he says to Pinchwife, “Cuckolding like the small Pox comes with a fear, and you may keep your Wife as much as you will out of danger of infection, but if her constitution incline her to't, she'l have it sooner or later by the world.” In short, all women are or will be harlots. Harcourt paints Alithea as just another woman, and therefore Sparkish comes to see her as cuckold-maker in waiting. Recognizing that Sparkish is no different from the run of the mill “gentleman” who can never trust a wife, then, Alithea is happy to change her mind. Pinchwife is as happy to have Alithea marry Harcourt as Sparkish—indeed, Harcourt is socially and financially a better catch than is Sparkish. And so, says Alithea, “I find my Brother would break off the match [with Sparkish], and I can consent to't, since I see this Gentleman can be made jealous.”

 

The sexual malaise of the society that the play reflects is nowhere clearer or sharper than it is in Horer, a “true” wit. Horny as his name indicates, he deploys his wit to fulfill all his sexual desires. Witness the wonderfully funny scene where Sir Jasper Fidget warns his wife, who has locked herself into Horner’s chamber, that Horner is about to penetrate Lady Fidget “the back way.” Ostensibly the good lady is selecting the best “china” that Horner owns. But behind the closed door, as the lady says, “Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.” There is no doubt that Horner comes indeed, so that when eventually he and Lady Fidget exit his chamber, she holds up “the pretti'st piece of China” that she has taken from him. Seeing the prize, Mrs. Squeamish says, “Oh Lord I'le have some China too, good Mr. Horner, don't think to give other people China, and me none, come in with me too.” The depleted Horner demurs, however: “Upon my honour I have none left now.”

 

The question the character of Horner raises is whether the expenditure of energy in the pursuit of a fuck is worth the effort. Horner himself defines the kind of women that his claim of impotence is designed to prey on: “Why, these are pretenders to honour, as criticks to wit, only by censuring others.” Women like the Fidgets or the Squeamishes are female versions of men like Sparkish and Pinchwife. All of them, men as much as women, are simply proper objects of satirical scorn. If that is the case, then Horner is a much debased as is Lady Fidget.

 

Alithea is the counter to so much debauchery. Until Sparkish proves himself to be just another accuser of women, she is steadfast in her loyalty to him. It’s obvious that Harcourt attracts her. He is, after all, exactly what Pinchwife understands him to be: “His [Harcourt’s] estate is equal to Sparkish's, and his extraction as much better than his, as his parts are.” Alithea does not even think of Pinchwife’s first consideration, Harcourt’s estate. But she does recognize that Harcourt is infinitely superior to Sparkish in wit and grace.

 

Although it is not absolutely clear in the play, it seems as well that Harcourt is not so thoroughly misogynistic as are the other male characters. He certainly admires Alithea, not just for her beauty but also for her wit and for her virtue. At the first meeting of Alithea and Harcourt affirms the truth that the play presents, that “Marriage is rather a sign of interest, then love; and he that marries a fortune, covets a Mistress, not loves her.”

 

At no point in the play does Harcourt expressly accept Alithea’s watchword, that “Love proceeds from esteem.” But his behavior from the first meeting limns out the fact that he does indeed esteem Alithea.

 

The climax of the comic plot involves Margery putting on Alithea’s clothes and, in that disguise, going off to an assignation with Horner. In the mish mash of identities that ensues, Alithea’s “honour” comes under suspicion. Alithea is distraught because, newly engaged to Harcourt, she assumes that he will reject her much as Sparkish has: “O unfortunate Woman! a combination against my Honour, which most concerns me now, because you share in my disgrace, Sir, and it is your censure which I must now suffer, that troubles me, not theirs.” Alithea’s concern for Harcourt’s reputation, and her fear that he will no longer esteem her, are evident. But Harcourt is a man of a different stripe. “Madam, then have no trouble,” he replies, “you shall now see 'tis possible for me to love too, without being jealous, I will not only believe your innocence my self, but make all the world believe it.”

 

Harcourt does not use “esteem,” the word that underlies Alithea’s ideal grounds for the flourishing of love. But it’s clear enough that Harcourt so esteems Alithea that he cannot even begin to believe that she has in fact lost her “honour.” When the two marry it will, without a doubt, be a matter of mutual esteem that underlies the union.

Too Immature for a Democracy

            It was sometime in the 1960s, early on in that decade, when some disturbance in some Central American country took place. I was too young to notice what or where the event was. But I do remember what one of my aunts said: “Those people are too immature to handle a democracy.”

            I’m not sure who “those people” were supposed to be. After all, we all were sitting comfortably somewhere in Coral Gables, where we found ourselves after we were incapable of handling our own democracy back in Cuba. I’m pretty sure that I came to think of “those people” as meaning all Latin Americans, all of  us too immature to manage the delicate politics of a democratic polity.

            Later I started to think more carefully about the idea of “democracy” in a Latin American context. Certainly in Cuba what we had lost in our move to exile was not a democracy. Fulgencio Batista, the “president” of the country, was straightforwardly a strong man who had led an initial rebellion against a duly elected president back in 1940, and then, after a period out of the country, returned in 1952 to halt an election and appoint himself president. Not exactly the most democratic of polities, it turns out—and perhaps evidence that “those people were too immature to handle a democracy.”

            In a myriad of ways the same strong-man politics, caudillo power, governed the realities of almost every single Latin American country, from Trujillo in Santo Domingo to Rawson and Perón in Argentina and the coffee baron Paulistas in southern Brazil. Except for Costa Rica, where the actions of the military led to the abolishment of the armed forces and so the end of caudillo politics, all of the Latin American world was “too immature to handle a democracy.”

            Or was it only Latin America? The framework of European colonialist traditions in Latin as opposed to non-Latin American countries suggests otherwise. In North America, French and British ways of governance militated against caudillo politics. To be sure, the French Revolution was late enough so that some vestiges of European latifundism wriggled its way into French colonies. But the pressure in France, as in its colonies, was away from strong-man rule and towards liberté, égalité, fraternité. Certainly that spirit invested the slaves of Haiti, who successfully deposed their colonists—only to have France set out systematically to oppress, repress, depress the new nation so that, two hundred twenty years later Haiti is still incapable of sustaining itself.

            Fortunately for the British colonies in the New World, the English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution had taken place early enough so that the idea of strong-man rule had become anathema to British subjects everywhere. Of course, the idea of being British subjects did not include the natives of the lands the British conquered, or the slaves they imported to support their economic interests. But from the perspective of the polities they established in the New World, democracy was the default state of affairs.

            Or so it seemed. There were exceptions to the rule of a more or less egalitarian polity even in what became the United States. The latifundist impulse is clear enough in the plantations of the American South, which echo the same phenomenon in the Latin American world. But even in those circumstances, the latifundists saw themselves as privileged in the same way that the landed gentry and aristocracy of Britain were privileged. So the franchise was restricted to the land owners and the rich.

            From that sense of privilege, anti-egalitarianism wormed its way into the American polity. In the American context, rotten and pocket boroughs that give the landed gentry so much power becomes the inegalitarian two-senators-per-state rule and the domination of presidential elections by the inegalitarian Electoral College. Americans celebrate the idea of one man one vote, but in practice the Constitution, not to mention the rulings of the Supreme Court from Citizens United onwards, dictate that the rich and the landed control the government. It is a late postmodernist version of latifundism.

            In Britain much the same thing applies. To be sure, rotten and pocket boroughs no longer exist in law. But the next best thing is the domination of public spaces by the wealthy and well-heeled, whose power and authority is as dominant in the 21^st as it was in the 18^th century. The same kind of reality obtains in India, in China, in South Africa, in Russia, in Japan, in Nigeria, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Indonesia, in the Philippines—the world belongs to the latifundists.]

            Except for the initial demonstrative adjective, my aunt was right. It’s not “those people,” but rather “we people are too immature to handle a democracy.”

Harvard

I suspect that a great many Americans are ambivalent about Harvard University. It is an elite institution in a country that does not fancy elitism. It is unashamedly academic in a world that mistrusts academics, intellectuals, and experts. Huck Finn had America in his sight when he expressed his dislike of book learning. 

 

I’ve had mixed emotions about Harvard ever since I went there. To be sure, I had a wonderful experience. I met some great people. I dove into and swam in the libraries, which are stupendously great. I remember coming across an edition of Father Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du vieux testament, translated into English in 1685, in the open stacks. I brought it to the attention of the staff at Houghton Library, the repository of rare books at Harvard. They told me that they had the first edition, 1682, already in Houghton and didn’t need the 1685 version. Of course I availed myself of that open stack copy for my dissertation. But I still marvel.

 

I also encountered the self-conscious superiority of the place and of some of its students. 

 

Two examples and then a generalization, entirely partial in all senses of that word, as I hope I can go on to argue.

 

First example. A midterm exam in one of the big lecture halls. Time was up. We teaching fellows in process of collecting blue books. The leader of the teaching fellows, a very sweet young man who died from a brain tumor soon after this episode, demanding from one kid that he turn in his blue book. Said kid loudly proclaiming, “Do you know who my father is? I’m going to report you to the president.” Idiot child, to be sure. But still.

 

Second example. Being a poor grad student, I work-studied my way to a brighter future at Widener Library, in the Preservation Section of the Department of Collection Development. My work entailed sustained and constant use of the card catalog—yes, I’m that old. At the time of the incident the Harvard libraries were migrating to an online catalog, what became HOLLIS, which meant that the old card catalog room was discombobulated and topsy-turvied.

One alphabetical section of the catalog had been shoehorned into a narrow, square corner of the room, with a table in the center to rest the catalog trays as they were being used. Because space was at a premium, it was imperative that the corner be kept uncluttered—no pulling a tray halfway out and riffling through the cards while you blocked everyone else’s access. And having removed a tray and finished using it at the table, it was essential you return the tray to the catalog to open up space at the table.

 

That’s the context for the experience.

 

So there I was, working my way through a tray along with two or three other library workers when a kid—maybe a sophomore?—pulled out a tray, used it, and then was about to leave it on the table as he hurried off. I asked him to replace it in the catalog. In one of those Brahmin accents that you have to learn to tolerate, he responded: “I don’t have the time. I’m a scholar.”  I suggested that were he to leave the tray in situ he might find his scholarship rammed up his rear end sooner rather than later. He replaced it. But the attitude remained.

 

From these two, really three examples, then, the general case. Harvard institutionally and as a conglomeration of individuals is almost insufferably cock-sure of itself. It is arrogant. It is relentless in asserting itself and its interests. It is self-satisfied to a fault. My finding Father Richard Simon’s book in the open stacks, it turns out, was much like my discovering the arrogance of the student in that exam or my encountering the self-absorption of the “scholar” in the catalog room of Widener.

 

Still, Harvard as an institution of higher learning is irreplaceable. It is the source of much that makes American science, medicine, scholarship paralleled only by a handful of universities in the entire rest of the planet. It has given so much to America that, in its absence, America would have been an entirely different country. That greatness—a word I hesitate to use, but in this context must—has not always been for the good, to be sure, any more than the history of the United States has been always for the good. But the influence of the university has been and continues to be overwhelmingly beneficial to the country and to the world at large.

 

The most recent evidence of that contribution to American greatness is the university’s response to the Trump administration’s root and branch effort to take over the running of the institution—whom it hires, whom it admits as students, what it teaches, which direction its many-headed research efforts take. Without resisting those dictates, the university, and by force of the university's significance in the life of America, the whole of American society and culture, would become a mere appanage of the federal government.

 

Harvard is not an object to be given to the children of a king. Indeed Harvard’s resistance reminds us that there is no king who occupies this "shining city on a hill." That phrase derives from the Gospel of Matthew. It is first applied to what would become the United States in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, even before he and the settlers of the Bay Colony had left Old England and come to the New one.

 

In the spirit of that phrase, only six years after Winthrop used it, the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established the New College, soon renamed Harvard College, with a mission to “advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.” In other words, to set up the light of truth, Veritas as the university’s motto puts it. The initial direction of the learning was par for the course in what John Milton called “the Wars of Truth” of the seventeenth century, to prevent the “leav[ing of] an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

 

Since then the wars of truth have expanded far beyond the theology of the Puritan ministry in the Bay Colony. What the Trump administration wants to do is to put out the light of truth and substitute the will-o-the-wisp gaslight of dogmatic ideology.

 

To paraphrase the writings of another academic, English rather than American, this will not pass. And I, finally, find myself proud of an institution that I’ve found so difficult wholly to embrace.

"Remediation" in Colleges and Universities

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1920 22% of Whites and 6% of Blacks had a high school degree; 4.5% of Whites and 1.2% of Blacks has a bachelor’s degree. It has no data for Master’s or higher degree until 1995.

In 2013, the last year for which I can find data, 94.1% of whites, 90.3% of Blacks, 75.8% of Hispanics, 95.4% of Asians, 95.5% of Pacific Islanders, and 84.7% of Native Americans had a high school degree; 40.4% of Whites, 20.5% of Blacks, 15.7% of Hispanics, 60.1 of Asians, 24.7% of Pacific Islanders, and 16.6% of Native Americans had a bachelor’s degree.

Do a great many people, of all races and ethnic backgrounds, need help with their educational aspirations? Absolutely. A parallel bit of data: PISA scores for kids who go to the highest SES schools outdo the scores for the most impressive national scores, like those of Finland or South Korea: 545 for the highest SES schools in the US and 541 for Finland. But the PISA scores for kids who go to the lowest SES schools are abysmal—in the lowest of the SES schools the scores amount to a measly 434. Those numbers are from 2009, when I did the research.

To be sure, in the US SES is so closely associated with race/ethnicity that it’s not surprising that only Asians and Whites have PISA score in the range of Finland. You can of course attribute the difference to race. I attribute the difference to SES.

By the time my kid had graduated from college, he had been to innumerable museums, had seen innumerable plays, had travelled overseas, and as a little kid had had book after book read to him until he picked up the reading habit for himself. He graduated from a very low SES school in PA. But his family, my wife and I, had the wherewithal to make up for what the school may have lacked—and I emphasize the MAY because in fact, with a couple of exceptions, the school district did pretty well by him and his cohort in the highest “track.”

It's always a matter of SES.

Given all that, I think maybe instead of bitching about the support that some of our students need, we should be celebrating the fact that, overall, 89.9% of American kids have a high school degree and 33.6% have a bachelor’s degree. That doesn’t mean that the education they’ve achieved is stellar. That will come when the SES evens out.

Sweat and the Single Boy

 When I was a tiny tyke the barber would come to our house to cut hairs for all the males on the premises—nine of us when everyone was around. I hated to have my hairs cut—or rather, I hated to have someone handle my noggin in aid of cutting my hairs. So I would hide wherever I could. Once I hid under the barber's car. Fortunately, I guess, I was removed and shorn before he could run me over. I suspect I'd have preferred death. But there you go.

But it wasn’t only the noggin-touching of the barber that I disliked. When I was still a wee lad, and well into my adult life, any body to body contact, with sib, friend, or stranger, put me off almost entirely. Fortunately in my Marist Brothers school, where I was a studious little brat through the beginning of third grade, we were not physical educated. At some point one of the brothers did institute a set of basketball teams during recess, to be sure, but that was for fully clothed kids, required essentially no bodily contact, and so no real threat to my contact phobia.

 

But then we became exilic, and in that cauldron of bodies called the public schools, where—mirabule dictu!—there were people of the female persuasion cheek by jowl with boys, phys ed became a requirement. Again, we were all fully clothed, so very little infringement of the bodily contact exclusion. Except when we had sessions of square dancing. Ay me! Swing your partner and do-si-do indeed. A coincidence, to be sure: it was during one of those square dancing sessions that we all learned of JFK’s assassination.

 

And then came the move to junior high school. There we were obliged to change from regular clothes to phys ed gear. I didn’t mind the nudity in the locker room. In fact, it was interesting in its own way—the visible differences, the comparisons, the strutting and fretting. Still, the boys’ locker room gave onto the phys ed teachers’ office, with expansive, wall to wall windows overseeing the whole cadre of naked boys while the adults gazed on. That was a bit of a put off, particularly because the gentlemen kept their college frat paddles, which they used from time to time to warm some of those naked bottoms, adorning the top of the windows.

 

But there was worse to come.

 

In that junior high school we were instructed in the fine art of wrestling. We all know what wrestling entails. Bodies locked together in mortal—or what passes for mortal—combat. Limbs locked, fingers fumbling, torsos tortive. We kept our gym shorts on, praise be, but had to remove our shirts. And all of us in seas of sweat—this was Florida, after all—we grappled. Compared to wrestling, the square dancing of elementary school was anodyne. Shangri-la. Eden itself. After so much body against body, I welcomed the shower, even as the phys ed teachers gazed on.

 

Wrestling continued through the end of high school, and always the shower was more than welcome. College was a different story. We were required to have graded credits in phys ed back in those days, so phys ed was kismet.

 

My initial experience with the phys ed department was less than stellar. We had to prove that we could swim and float in the water, so we boys—in the days of sex segregation such exploits demanded separation—dutifully showed up at the indoor pool to perform our natation. I automatically took my swimming trunks because it seemed a gimme. A number of kids did not, however. And they learned that they would have to perform in the nude. I suspect that would not happen nowadays.

 

We also had to prove that we could run a certain distance, perhaps a mile?, in seven minutes or less. At the time I was a smoker. Of tobacco. As well. I went through two or three packs a day, and did so until I couldn’t afford the cost, when I started to roll my own cigarettes. I couldn’t keep track of my consumption then. At any rate, there was no way that I could possibly run for anything like a mile in seven minutes—or half an hour, for that matter. So I was obliged to take remedial phys ed for my first credit. Since all of us up for remediation were equally dead physical losses, we didn’t do much for that credit beyond show up and walk around the track that we were supposed to be running. Every now and then an instructor would crack a verbal whip. With no notable effect. One result of that experience was that my otherwise perfect 4.0 average for the year was marred by the C I got for the class. It was a gift.

 

Such demonstrations of prowess aside, we could choose what activity to experience. And I learned that I could game the system. I chose to take exhausting classes, like bait casting, which entailed us standing on one side of the gymnasium, elevating our school-provided rods and reels with a plumb weight at the end of the line, and aiming to hit a bull’s eye target on the other side of the gym. I did not sweat a great deal in that class. But I did get pretty good at the task, and ended up with an A, no less. The first and only A ever in a phys ed class for me. I got a little more adventurous and signed up for a class in fencing. That was fun, except that all of the instruction was for right-handed people. Oh well. And I took a class in ice skating, which was fun as well. I can still skate fairly well.

 

The point of all those choices was that they required absolutely, positively no body-to-body contact at all. Glorious! And yet square dancing came my way again. I chose to take a class in folk and square dancing—not to relive my elementary school nightmare, but rather because by that point in my life I’d learned to make exceptions in the bodily contact exclusion rule when it came to people of the female persuasion. I may not have known the young lady with whom I danced, but invariably she, a series of shes, seemed cheerful and attractive. A little hand-to-hand contact was OK, I thought, especially since the gym where we danced was nicely airconditioned, so sweat was minimal at worst.

 

But square dancing would rise up again for me, alas not in airconditioned comfort. One hot July night, for some unknown and possibly unknowable reason, the woman I loved, who not much later became my wife, decided that it would be neato keano if we went to a square-dancing venue out in rural Massachusetts, somewhere west of Boston, at any rate, and rural insofar as the dancing took place in a real live barn. Not airconditioned, to put it mildly, in the heat of that hot hot July evening.

 

I was prepared to dance and enjoy myself, not just because I had the college phys ed class under my belt, but also because I’d be dancing with my beloved, with whom bodily contact was absolutely not to be avoided in dance or in any aspect of life. What could go wrong? What my soon-to-be wife had not told me was that the rules of the dance required that no one partner the person they came with. Lordy lordy. The whole evening was a nightmarish mishmash of sweaty palms and a stream of sweat every time partners swung. But I endured. Ain’t love grand?

A Foreign Country

 

William T. Vollman's review of This Is Not Miami, by Fernanda Melchior—in the New York Times Book Review for 14 May 2023—juxtaposes two phrases that seem to me to require more than the mere pass through implied by the only conjunctive statement:  "And never mind."  First Vollman correctly says that Hernan Cortés is a "conqueror-torturer."  Then, on the other side of the "never mind," equally correctly, he says that the people whom Cortés conquered-tortured were "human-sacrificing Aztec overlords" (13).

What I think needs unpacking in those two phrases is the alienness of the past, which seems to be impossible for contemporary folks in the US to consider, accept, and contend with.  From the left side of the political spectrum, the past is always the subject of outraged moral judgments that make the behaviors of the past so reprehensible that they are perceived to be entirely alien to the present—so beyond the pale that the only possible response to the past is pure opprobrium.  From the right side of the political spectrum, the past is an anodyne story of greatness, when men were men and women weren't, and America—or, if going back far enough, Europe—was great.  The inevitable conclusion to that perspective seems much like Buck Turgidson's response to Soviet ambassador Alexi de Sadesky's description of the Doomsday Bomb:  "Gee I wish we had us one of those."

Maybe because I come to the question of the relation of past to present from the perspective of the left, it seems to me that the right side of the equation is simply nonsense.  Just one day of living in the past as it really was would make even the most rabid of the MAGA crowd think again.  Smallpox, anyone? Bubonic plague? How about the complete subordination of women to men, so that a woman could not own property under her own authority, or have her own bank account, or . . . fill in the blank for whatever right you value the most.  Want to return to the day when a Black man even glancing at a white woman led to a lynching? Or to a time when Native Americans who objected to their own exploitation were slaughtered and then their bodies dumped in an oil barrel?  If you see those behaviors as fine and dandy, then you're welcome to join the neo-nazis. But please stay out of the present.

From the perspective of the left, it's important to recognize the validity of L. P. Hartley's comment in The Go-Between, that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." That truth just cannot be dismissed by the cursory "And never mind" of Vollman's review. Seeing things from the left, as I said, I know only too well that it's difficult to curb the impulse to judge the past by terms that are current in the present. But the past, in its different epochs and its different cultural milieus, has its own evaluative criteria.

Michel Foucault argues that history proceeds by discontinuities rather than by narratives of the same. And that's the grounds on which I see the connection between Cortés and the Aztec overlords. It is a necessary and uncontested aspect of Aztec ways of being, not only that humans should be sacrificed to the gods, without which practice the whole universe would be endangered, but that the struggles of the gods should be reenacted in the game of ulama, a "ball" game in which the heads of the losers of the game became the "ball" used in the game.

No doubt we in the present recoil at that practice, just as we recoil at the practices of the Spanish conquistadores, whose actions against the natives of the so-called New World are disgusting. And yet, just as the practices of the Aztecs were necessary for maintaining the universe, so too the practices of the conquistadores were essential to the expectations of their culture. I am not at all persuaded by the idea that Europeans came to the New World in order to spread the truth of Christianity and save the souls of the poor benighted "natives." Pelf and wealth seem to me the clear underlying motives, as is the case with Cortés, certainly, whose exploits converted him from mere soldier to the Marqués del Valle. But the way that the Spaniards approached the natives simply reflected the way that the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula took place, in the same way that the treatment of Native Americans by the English settlers of North America reflected the way that the "Plantation" of Ireland took place.

The underlying point is pretty simple: people do what people are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is given by the complex intersection of what Foucault calls discursive practices that form the grounds from which a culture springs. Our discursive practices arise from moments of disruption, again according to Foucault, which make the past the "foreign country" that Hartley describes. If Cortés or Montezuma had behaved as we do in 2023, they would have been housed in an insane asylum—of which, of course, there were none in 1520. Instead, they would have been treated by their respective priesthoods for possession. Conversely, if St. Joan of Arc were with us today, she would be in an insane asylum rather than in the panoply of Catholic saints.

The problem of a proper evaluation of the past becomes a serious problem, then, because it seems inevitably to lead to an ethical relativism that smacks of weak-kneed liberalism, in the older, mid-twentieth-century sense of liberalism as something that makes it impossible to make any judgments at all.

Perhaps that is true.

But I like to think of it differently. A solid consideration of the past requires very careful study of the past and its difference from the present. I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates's problematic response to Queen Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba, in Between the World and Me as a case in point.  His initial response to her power is to admire her because, when the Dutch ambassador with whom she was negotiating tried to humiliate her, she showed "her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body" (45). In the ruthless power games of the 17th century, Nziga outperformed the Dutch man. She was for Coates, then, "a weapon" to wield against the equally ruthless power games of twentieth-century American race relations.

In his first response to the Queen, Coates was a bit like the MAGA crowd, seeing in the practices of the past a mirror to what the present ought to be.

And then Coates thought again—or rather, he took a class in which his professor, Linda Heywood, reframed Queen Nziga's behavior. When Heywood "told the story of Nziga," says Coates, "she told it without any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a sucker punch." What hits him is that, in the realitiy of the present, he would not be Nziga's avatar, but rather he would be like her adviser, "broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit" (54). That idea runs so deeply counter to the practices of the modern world that it produces a response equivalent to my response to Cortés or Montezuma.  Revulsion.

I think, however, that neither the initial nor the secondary response is a full one. Yes Cortés and Montezuma and Nziga behave in reprehensible ways. But they behave in ways that are essential and necessary. If Cortés is going to perform as he is expected to perform; if Montezuma is going to act as his religion requires him to act; if Nziga is going to overwhelm her antagonist, then all three must, absolutely must behave as they do. My judgment that such behavior is simply unacceptable in the modern world is, ultimately, irrelevant to the historical moment of 1520 or 1640. I am not being a relativist, in other words, but a contextualist, fully aware of the evil of the past but also fully aware that such a judgment is couched in terms of the present.

Free Speech 2

All the BS talk about free speech in social media made me think of a sad but all too true matter of fact. My local newspaper, owned by a conglomerate that operates “local” newspapers throughout the southeast of Pennsylvania, has a strict policy that it will not accept nor publish letters that express any criticism of the management of the newspaper.

The stricture is very broad. I’ve had letters summarily rejected because I’ve pointed out the grammatical and logical solecisms that appear in the paper. Just today, for instance, a column headed “Today’s birthdays” begins with the following entry: “1547—England’s King Henry VIII died at age 55.” As errors go, that’s not in the range of a Mount Everest; but it is ridiculously stupid and as good as erases whatever seriousness the paper might lay claim to.

 

Still, I’ve never thought of the paper’s policy as being in restriction of free speech. It’s a private enterprise, after all, and its owners can choose to publish what they decide to publish and exclude what they decide to exclude. So too printing presses, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, radio stations, TV channels . . . all of them are guided by editorial principles that are congenial to the owners’ point of view.

 

When Zuckerberg or Musk make the argument that they will not allow fact checkers to vet the posting on their online versions of publications, I am therefore more than skeptical. It’s obvious that the rejection of fact checking is entirely partial. If I were famous enough to be followed by several million Twitter users, and if with such a following I were to ridicule Musk, I know that I would be banned. So much for free speech—except that it seems to me entirely within Musk’s right to censor his site. So too Zuckerberg and any other owner of a private publication of any sort.

 

The First Amendment is crystal clear: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The key term in the amendment is “Congress,” and because the power to make laws is explicitly the purview of Congress, the point extends to the government as a whole. In short, then, the government of the United States is constitutionally prohibited from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

 

It's not Zuckerberg or Musk who are prohibited from silencing speech, in other words. It is the government. In light of that fact, therefore, the newly imposed restrictions on the speech of government agencies and employees strikes me as profoundly unconstitutional. There can be no reference in government documents to “woke,” as they call it, issues, like gay rights or the historical contributions of Black Americans or climate change, or anything that troubles the buzzing brains of the president’s MAGA acolytes.

 

Where does the right of the government to censor speech come from? Is that not simply an unconstitutional prohibition? And if we simply let that unconstitutional act slide by, what other unconstitutional act will we accept?