Cassandra Voices

Tag: Public Intellectuals for our time

  • Public Intellectuals: Voltaire

    Voltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.

    It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.

    Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.

    So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.

    Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
    1. Freedom Of Speech

    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

    If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.

    Ronald Dworkin  towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:

    Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.

    Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.

    In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.

    Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having  They are merely his intellectual offspring.

    Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
    1. Religion

    If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

    The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.

    Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’

    Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.

    On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.

    Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.

    Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.

    In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”

    and

    God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

    Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
    1. Miscarriages of Justice

    It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

    In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.

    On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.

    At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.

    He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.

    He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.

    Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.

    In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.

    A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.

    He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:

    …You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?

    Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies

    Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’

    Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
    1. Post Truth

    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

    and

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other

    Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

    1. Self-Care

    We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s

    The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

    and

    Let us cultivate our garden.

    And he did so for twenty-five years.

    So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.

    He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.

    He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.

    Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon

  • Public Intellectuals: Thomas Mann

    Born in 1875, like many in his era Thomas Mann was initially a Great German Conservative, but by the outbreak of World War II he was making anti-Nazi speeches for the BBC.

    Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his chronicles of German families in Buddenbrooks (1901), and for his bildungsroman The Magic Mountain (1924), along with a number of well received novellas and short stories. Among his later publications, the novella Death in Venice (1929) is a terrific book, expressing his repressed same-sex attraction; it is a worthy expression of a hyper-civilised, fin de siècle aesthetic intelligence. The film by Luchino Visconti with Dirk Bogarde, though laboured, is also a masterpiece. It includes the famous adagio by Mahler, with whom Mann was acquainted.

    Mann seems to have known almost everyone who was anyone in his time, and was very catholic in his tastes and company. He remains, however, a crucial bridge between the tradition of nineteenth century letters and the twentieth century. Indeed, the earlier novels referenced above may appear at times like caricatures of that tradition.But great aestheticism does not necessarily equate to human greatness.

    As alluded to, Mann was a supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm during the First World War, and a romantic German nationalist with a lifelong fascination with Nietzsche. He lived for most of his adult life in Munich and his lifestyle consisted of work, an eclectic set of friends and a digression into unconventional Germanic behaviour. He was married to a Jewish woman, Katia, who he adored, notwithstanding a suppressed homosexuality or bisexuality: they had six children.

    As a novelist, not only Kafka but also Musil and arguably Broch, are greater twentieth century writers of fiction or prose within the Germanic tradition. But greatness also involves moral influence. Although, there was little until the 1930s to disclose his abundant moral courage, it was almost unparalleled among great writers even including Albert Camus. The stakes were higher.

    Colm Toibin’s recently published zeitgeist book on Thomas Mann The Magician (2021) reveals at one level a set of character traits crucial to how he achieved greatness. He was innately Protestant, despite a Brazilian, Catholic mother, modest and hard working. Commenting on his own prose style, Mann said it was ponderous, ceremonious, and civilised. This he said was all that fascists hate.

    And boy did he hate them. He hated in fact all forms of human fakeness, lies, deceptions and misinformation; an inclination very evident in the early novel Mario the Magician (1929). He also hated a lack of order and fecklessness, which was apparent in his attitude towards his brother Heinrich. And he hated barbarism.

    Thus, the arch conservative of Lubeck, in response to the rise of fascism and barbarism, changed his colour. Like Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, the caterpillar became a butterfly.

    The change was gradual. First, he had supported the Social Democrats in the Weimar government, writing treatises on his conversion to socialism as the Nazis emerged triumphant over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s.

    Mann simply could not deal with Nazis. At an implicit level, it might have been simply a matter of bourgeois taste, as he had an impeccable personal and aesthetic sensibility and was cosmopolitan but not decadent in his outlook.

    In American exile, where he was suspected of harbouring communist views, he was asked about his views on the avowedly communist Bertold Brecht. He said he did not like his writing, but that if he liked a communist writer he would have no problem saying so.

    Book burning in Berlin, 10 May 1933.

    Exile

    On holiday in 1933 he was advised not to return to Germany after many of his books had been burned in the modern day auto–da–fé. It is noticeable that it was mostly the books of Jews and communists that were burnt, but the German Student’s Union, spurred on by Goebbels, also burned Mann’s work.

    In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver an address saying:

    No to decadence and moral corruption … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.

    Mann was excommunicated as a citizen in 1936. His life was threatened, and he was a moving target for the fascists for the rest of his life. Thus he left Germany when he was almost sixty, and apart from some brief post war visits never returned to reside there again.

    One wonders what would have happened if he had been more compliant. He was not Jewish and only a socialist at a stretch. It is possible that they would have showered him with hollow accolades if he had shown more deference. But unlike Martin Heidegger, he did not succumb, and thereafter in exile in Switzerland and America he became a more complete human being, which is reflected in the marked improvement in the quality of the prose thereafter.

    His wartime broadcast relayed on the BBC might be regarded as a kind of inverse Lord Haw Haw. On one of his eight-minute broadcasts from 1940 Mann condemned Hitler and his ‘paladins’ as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture.

    In another noted speech, he said: ‘The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture.’

    ‘Crude Philistines’…

    At the end of the war, he refused to allow his nation off the hook. They had turned mad; it was collective hysteria and even the 1945 atrocities documented so well in Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: the Downfall 1945 (2002) were in context to him condonable:

    Those, whose world became grey a long time ago when they realized what mountains of hate towered over Germany; those, who a long time ago imagined during sleepless nights how terrible would be the revenge on Germany for the inhuman deeds of the Nazis, cannot help but view with wretchedness all that is being done to Germans by the Russians, Poles, or Czechs as nothing other than a mechanical and inevitable reaction to the crimes that the people have committed as a nation, in which unfortunately individual justice, or the guilt or innocence of the individual, can play no part.

    Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten.

    Unamerican Activities…

    Extremism cuts both ways. In exile he was forced to testify before the House for unamerican activities as a suspected communist. Here is how he responded:

    As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’. … That is how it started in Germany.”

    Moreover, when Mann joined protests the jailing of The Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found ‘the media had been closed to him.’ Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress, and in 1952, he returned to Europe. Th Overton window of the thought police fell on the great writer, as it does to many today. He was now nearing eighty years of age.

    Exile created both a looseness and precision of prose style. A spring in the step. Dr Faustus (1947) is one of the best books ever written. It is a masterpiece and worthy of Broch or Musil or indeed Kafka. The stilted Germanic prose style becomes freer. The theme inspires: good versus evil.

    The book is about the composer Leverkuhn who sells his soul to the devil. The Faustian pact is Fascism. It is also about the corrupting influence of atonal music and its nihilistic dissonance which creates a valueless universe, like the structuralists and deconstructionists of our time. The great prose meister was having none of it.

    In my view, Dr Faustus is also about Martin Heidegger the other central intellectual figures in Germany at the time. Heidegger fell for the bait and took all the Nazi accolades, entering the Faustian pact despite his Jewish mistress Hannah Arendt, who wrote eloquently subsequently about the banality of evil. Mann, though a man of considerable means, said no.

    A theme central to his existence was that an artist cannot abandon politics at least not in such a period as the 1940s, and must recognise the moral consequences of his actions.

    Dr Faustus frequently references Leverkuhn’s veneration of Albrecht Durer, the great Renaissance artist, and his pictorial representations of moderation, judgment, melancholia and the apocalypse. Indeed, as the Nazi state collapses, he becomes obsessed with melancholia.

    In the search for spirituality, Mann invokes in a man who has lost all reason and his soul. When composing Dr Faustus, Mann showed and lectured on this to a fourteen-year-old girl who was visiting, who was Susan Sonntag. Thus, the magician bridges generations and resonates through the ages.

    And then at the end of Days with the light dimming he showed in his book about the conman Felix Krull the darkly comic humour at the heart of capitalist chicanery, which, if left unchecked, culminates in fascism.

    Mann is the great Protestant Germanic intellect of the last century, but he was also an ethereal magus and magician.

    His legacy lies in the assertion of standards, of discipline, of stable family values, and of a certain amorphous sexuality. Above all it is in the condemnation of extremism, the condemnation of barbarism, the assertion of civilised values, the rejection of censorship, the hatred of chauvinism and the social cleansing from the left or right. A consistent hatred of intolerance from all sides.

    That is what is needed now.

    His life is also an example of moral courage. The Germans wanted the magician back, but he was not satisfied that they had changed. It was him judging them not them judging him. He did not think they were displaying appropriate contrition for what they had done. He was right.

    In a different context, in Chile, when Pinochet was forced to call an election – as our conservative rulers will soon be required to in Ireland – a persecuted advertising expert advised the opposition as to how to orchestrate a campaign. No reference to mass murders or internment camps, just young Chileans with the slogan JUST SAY NO.

    That is what Mann said to fascism, and what we must now say to the ruling parties in Ireland. No images of homelessness, no incessant exposure of state corruption and criminality. JUST SAY NO, before it is too late.

    Feature Image: Thomas Mann in 1905.