The Rules of Perspective
by Theodore Dalrymple (Feb. 2009)
If I were asked, without time to give the question much thought, to name the greatest political virtues, I should reply, ‘Prudence and a sense of proportion.’ A New Jerusalem could not be built of these virtues, of course, but neither could a Hell on Earth; and since Hells on Earth are two a penny in human history, but New Jerusalems are infrequently encountered in it, to say the least, there is much to be said in presumption of those admittedly tepid and unexciting qualities.
No doubt prudence is in part a genetic gift, for people vary by heredity in their temperament. Some there are who are born excitable, and some who are born phlegmatic, though experience will generally teach even the most irascible of people to control themselves when it is in their interests to do so. No one is so adventurous that he puts his hand into the same fire twice – as Heraclitus never said.
But a sense of proportion is the more difficult and elusive quality. How is it learned or achieved? Does experience teach it, or reflection upon experience?
O where is fancy bred?
Or in the heart, or in the head?
The same question could be asked of a sense of proportion.
I was impelled to think about this question by a recent book review in the British liberal newspaper, The Observer. The book under review was Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life, by Timothy W. Ryback. No sooner had one read the title than one wanted to read the book. Hitler is one of the very few figures in history of whom, somehow, one can never have enough biographical information, as if, were we to pluck out the heart of his mystery, we would simultaneously have plucked out the heart of the mystery of human evil. And the books that he read, and the annotations that he made in them, hold out the promise, or at least the hope, of some new insight into his character. No doubt this is illusory (for very obvious reasons), but I shall still buy the book. Indeed, I await its arrival with excitement.
The review begins in unexceptional fashion:
Dictators tend to be night workers, immune to the exhaustion that
topples the rest of us. Napoleon, in an official portrait by David,
posed in a study with closed curtains and a clock marking 4 am;
as if on sentry duty, the vigilant emperor oversees his dormant,
submissive realm.
Two lines further down, we read:
The sergeant who issued orders to Corporal Hitler in the trenches
in 1915 was impressed by his insomniac underling, who even
then seemed – at least in the officer’s obsequious recollection –
to be destined for greatness.
But what of the two lines squeezed between Napoleon’s and Hitler’s insomnia (or, really, in the case of Hitler, his sleep reversal)? What third example – for examples must always come in threes, like serious accidents such as plane crashes, for rhetorical effect – are we offered?
If you are now trying to think of sleepless dictators who came between Napoleon and Hitler, give up now. The reviewer is nothing if not anachronistic:
Margaret Thatcher boasted of making do with an hour or two of
sleep.
This is no mere slip of the pen; for, having described how Hitler contemptuously claimed to the abovementioned sergeant that sleep was for others, and did not matter to him, the author of the review continues:
But such hyperactive despots have a problem. What can you do
during those white nights, with the rest of your government
peacefully snoring?
So Mrs Thatcher is a despot to be uttered in the same breath as Napoleon and Hitler. (Actually, I don’t think Napoleon and Hitler are to be mentioned in the same breath, psychopathically indifferent as Napoleon might have been to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.) There could not be a clearer instance of a lack of that sense of proportion that I have extolled as among the greatest of political virtues.
Here, let it be clear, I do not speak as an apologist for or uncritical admirer of Mrs` Thatcher. Her achievements are likely to look more considerable to foreigners than they are to native Britons. Her effect on her own society was equivocal, to say the least: some things she did were good, but some dreadful, in their long-term effects. Perhaps this is hardly surprising. It is not in the nature of practical politics to bring about unequivocal benefits, and politicians are men (and women), not gods.
Nevertheless, I do not see how any reasonably sensible person, with pretensions to intellectual balance such as a book reviewer is supposed to have, could put Mrs Thatcher in the Napoleon class of despot, let alone the Hitler class. No doubt she was brusque with her own colleagues sometimes, but this is not the same as leading an army of 600,000 men into Russia and returning with at best a few thousand of them, apparently personally quite unchastened by the whole experience.
How does such a grotesquely unjust, absurd and morally frivolous comparison come to be made, by an author who is in all probability proud of having made it?
There were undoubtedly many thousands, indeed millions, of people in Britain who were harmed, at least in the short-term, by the so-called Thatcher revolution. Mrs Thatcher was determined that never again would a British government be held to ransom by the coal miners’ union; and so she set about destroying the latter by means of closing down the coal-mining industry altogether. Environmentalists, I suppose, can only applaud this decision.
There were many towns in Britain that were wholly dependent economically upon coal mining; and since they had been dependent upon it for upwards of a century, a strong, and in many respects admirable, sub-culture had grown up in those towns. This sub-culture that went along with the hard, dangerous and unhealthy life of coal-mining was destroyed utterly by Mrs Thatcher’s reforms, and many of the towns in question became sinks of despair, in which the only alternative to unemployment seemed to be sickness. In the town of Merthyr Tydfil, for example, in South Wales, twenty-five per cent of the adult population claims to be too ill to work rather than merely unemployed.
Now if some person from a town like Merthyr Tydfil had placed Mrs Thatcher in the same category as Napoleon or Hitler, one could understand it, and perhaps even sympathise with it a little as an expression of understandable despair. (Few people, mind you, can work up the same rage at the leaders of the Miner’s Union, that provoked a suicidal showdown with Mrs Thatcher, and were at least as responsible as she for the closing of the mines.)
But however much one sympathised with the person making the comparison, it would still be wrong, if it were meant seriously, if it were meant to imply that Mrs Thatcher was as morally monstrous as Hitler. The man making the comparison is unable to see that his own grievance, even if justified, and very real as it is to him, cannot be sufficient grounds for such a comparison.
It is a fair bet, of course, that the author of the review that included Mrs Thatcher in the class of maniacal despots did not suffer at all during her period of office, unless hatred of her be regarded as a form of suffering. Indeed, it is far more likely (though I do not know this for certain) that the author of the review was one of the class of beneficiaries of her reforms.
His lack of a sense of perspective about her therefore does not even have the experience of personal suffering caused by her to extenuate it. Indeed, it seems to me more likely that the lack of a sense of perspective exhibited in the review derives precisely from the lack of suffering ever experienced by the author, at least as the result of living under a despotism, as well as a failure of the imagination. A man who could seriously compare Mrs Thatcher with Hitler has clearly made no serious effort to enter imaginatively into life under the Nazi regime.
This failure is by no means uncommon. Virginia Woolf exhibited it just before the Second World War. She had little excuse, for she had travelled in Nazi Germany with her husband Leonard, himself a Jew. Nevertheless, in her book Three Guineas, she systematically failed to notice a difference between the Britain of her day, unsatisfactory in many ways as it no doubt was, and Nazi Germany. Indeed, she saw no difference, or none worth remarking upon, and in her book she sided decisively with book-burners (though she wanted to burn different books from those the Nazis burnt). She was misled into such foolishness, I think, by her inability to distinguish between the occasion of her own dissatisfactions on the one hand, and manifest evil on the other.
Another prominent author who made a not dissimilar mistake was Salman Rushdie who, shortly before being condemned to death by the late Ayatollah, also compared Mrs Thatcher’s Britain with Nazi Germany, and therefore Mrs Thatcher implicitly with Hitler. No doubt he has somewhat moderated his position on this matter; but the interesting question is why it should take a death threat for a man who, after all, had a degree in history from one of the greatest universities in the world, to betake some thought? Actually, only a fraction of a second’s thought is necessary: I don’t have a degree in history, but I do not think I should experience much difficulty in pointing out significant differences between Britain under Mrs Thatcher and Germany under Adolf Hitler.
Not only do many intellectuals appear to have difficulty in distinguishing between their own little psychodramas and great world events, so that leaders for whom (sometimes justifiably, sometimes for petty personal reasons) they conceive a dislike become in their minds equal to the greatest monsters in history, but they are inclined to mistake the vehemence of their denunciations for good and sufficient arguments.
The author of the review disliked Mrs Thatcher intensely; he therefore compared her with despots, indeed with one of the worst despots who ever lived; and this, in turn, constituted for him evidence of just how bad she was. Otherwise he wouldn’t have compared her with despots in the first place.
Of course, it is possible that there was a simpler error of logic at play:
All despots sleep short hours.
Mrs Thatcher slept short hours.
Therefore, Mrs Thatcher was a despot.
But if so, the error was probably the consequence of the strength of the desire to reach a fore-ordained conclusion.
I do not exclude myself from the temptation to lose sight of perspective. When I work myself up into a pleasant lather of indignation about something in the world (pleasant, that is, for me), which happens not infrequently, I cannot claim always to place it judiciously on a scale of human misfortune.
To complicate matters further, it is sometimes – no, often - to the benefit of civilised life that people get things out of proportion. If no one overestimated the moral importance in our society of cruelty to dogs, for example, there would be no people to rescue dogs from such cruelty, and society would be a little the worse for it.
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