Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on ancient and modern writers reconsidered:

No one, at least no one who wanted to be taken seriously by serious people, ever talked about how much money they had, and no one running for public office would have thought to brag that money made him more qualified than anyone who was not rich. And now, suddenly, money, and vast amounts of it, seem to have become almost the only qualification anyone needs to have. The question is whether this almost slavish devotion to wealth, this idea that money proves ability, is a new phenomenon, or something that was there from the beginning, implicit in the very principles on which the modern world was created. It is not a new question. It is the question Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan and John Locke in The Second Treatise on Government tried to examine: whether it was time to make a final break with what Plato in The Republic and Aristotle in The Politics had insisted were the ways in which human beings should live.

The question that Hobbes and Locke thought Plato and Aristotle had failed to answer adequately, is not a question that gets asked very often anymore. We know, or think we know, how we should live. We know, or think we know, what we want and what we need to do to get it. We know that nothing is more important than economics and that money is the only real measure of success. Instead of educating citizens, men and women who know how to rule themselves, our universities are judged by how many of their graduates are able to compete in the world market. The liberal arts have been replaced in importance by the schools of business, philosophy and history by accounting and computer science, and scarcely anyone thinks this a loss. Freedom, we are told, is the most important thing, and freedom can only exist where there are free markets, where men and women are free to buy and sell, where capitalism is allowed to work.

The ancients did not think so, nor did anyone else for nearly two thousand years. Montesquieu noted the difference, and the change: “The Greek political writers, who lived under free government, did not recognize any force which could uphold them but that of virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufactures, commerce, finance, wealth, and even of luxury.” Rousseau expressed the same thought more concisely and with greater flair: “The ancient politicians spoke incessantly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.”

Why had this change taken place, what had happened to make the ancient way of looking at things seem outmoded and even difficult to understand? Why did the “ancient politicians” speak only of morals and virtue, and the modern ones only of “commerce and money?” The ancients thought that the pursuit of private wealth would destroy a republic and the moderns thought that it was the only thing that would save it. Montesquieu thought the ancients were right, that “the less luxury there is in a republic, the more perfect it is.” And then he adds:

“So far as luxury is established in republics, so far does the spirit turn to the interest of the individual. For people who have to have nothing but the necessities, there is left to desire only the glory of the homeland and one’s own glory. But a soul corrupted by luxury has many other desires; soon it becomes an enemy of the laws that hamper it. When those in the garrison at Rhegium became familiar with luxury, they slaughtered the town’s inhabitants.”

The slaughter at Rhegium is an ancient example, an example which shows that the ancient reliance on morals and virtue was not always sufficient, that despite what they may have been taught about how they should live, the passions of men were often stronger than their reason and always a threat to free government. This became the basis for a central criticism of ancient thought, especially ancient political thought that, as Descartes put it, built superb palaces on foundations of mud and sand. The problem, the modern problem, was how to build a structure that would last. The foundation had to be something that could always be relied upon, something that, no matter what happened, would not change. Plato had said that the human problem, how human beings should be governed, would only be solved when wisdom and power were joined, something that if it ever happened would almost certainly never last. But if reason would not work, only passion remained: the desires, the bodily motions, the pushing and pulling, the urges, which are part of the nature – some would say all of the nature – of human beings.

All of the passions, all of the natural desires, are important, but one of them is much more fundamental than the rest: the desire for life itself, what Thomas Hobbes in the l7th century called the fear of violent death. Not the fear of death, the inevitable passing away of everything that comes into being, but violent death, the fear of what, without someone to stop them, other men might do. This may not seem like much, little more than a statement of what human beings might have to face were they to be thrown back into a state of nature in which, as Hobbes described it, life was “nasty, brutish, solitary and short,” but it revolutionized so much the way we think that it now seems a commonplace, an assumption with which everyone agrees. The fear of violent death leads us to seek the protection of others. An agreement, a social contract, is formed in which one of us is given the power of all of us in exchange for his promise to use our combined strength to protect the lives of each of us. This absolute monarchy is necessary because otherwise difference of opinion will arise as to what government should do, and differences always lead to faction and faction always leads to “the death of the commonwealth,” civil war.

Writing later in the century, John Locke agreed that self-preservation was the strongest, and most reliable, passion, but precisely because everyone was concerned with their own preservation no one was as interested in protecting anyone’s life as much as his own. To give the power over your life to anyone else was as much to lose it as to save it. The only way to make sure your life was protected was to be free to choose for yourself the means by which to preserve it. This meant a republic in which everyone had liberty, and not just liberty, but property, because without that it was impossible to be free, because without that you would be dependent on someone else for the food, shelter and clothing which you needed to live. The protection, or as Locke put it, the “fence” for my life is liberty, and the fence for that liberty is property. Thomas Jefferson, who considered Locke one of the three greatest minds, not just of modernity but all time, made this the father to that famous phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ which he wrote into the American Declaration of Independence.

For Hobbes and Locke, for modernity altogether, everything is based on the importance of the individual and what is most important to the individual, his own preservation. For the ancients, for Plato and Aristotle, and Cicero as well, the individual is an individual only as part of the whole, and whatever rights he may have are derived strictly from his duties. Everyone owes everything to the city, or the polis, in which the laws, the traditions, and the dictates of religion are obeyed without question or hesitation. In Sparta anyone could propose a change in the laws, but if that proposal did not pass, you were killed. This had a certain sobering effect on anyone who thought things could be improved. Everything had to be ordered in light of a single, overriding end. The serious question for the ancients was what that order or end should be. For Plato and Aristotle, and for Cicero as well, it seemed obvious that the proper end is the perfection of that which distinguishes the human being from all the other beings, his reason. Philosophy, the quest for wisdom, for knowledge of the whole, is the highest calling, the distinctly human aim, and that becomes the central thread around which everything else, including the question how people should live, how they should be governed, must be judged and decided.

The search for wisdom, knowledge of the whole, what the ancients were certain was the highest human achievement, the most important thing men could do, was for Hobbes and Locke, and with them modernity altogether, the most serious threat to the only kind of political and social order which can provide any stability at all. If self-preservation, the fear of violent death, is the only reliable foundation on which to build, anything which makes people believe there is something more important than life becomes a danger. Ancient philosophy had taught that how you lived your life, not life itself, was the only thing worth notice; that death in battle, for example, fighting for your city, was far better than to die of old age. Death did not matter; the only thing important was how you died. Hobbes, who translated the Greek of Thucydides into the marvelously elegant English of the l7th century, could argue that when soldiers ran forward to face the enemy and the possibility of death they were really running away from the certain death which would be inflicted upon them by the officers behind them, but it was not ancient heroics he was worried about, it was Christianity.

The promise of eternal life, of life after death, is a promise that, if believed, makes death something to be welcomed instead of feared, but Christianity, instead of turning our attention to the teaching of ancient philosophy, turns all the ancient virtues, like pride and magnanimity, the great-souled man of Aristotle’s description, into vices that damn one to the flames of hell. By demanding that instead of retaliating against an injury, one should turn the other cheek; by insisting that it is “evil to speak evil of evil,” Christianity emasculated humanity and turned everyone who was not a priest into a slave.

Hobbes thought to solve this problem by giving to the sovereign the power to decide all questions of doctrine; by placing the church, and religion altogether, under the control of the civil authority. Locke was more subtle and infinitely more effective. By arguing that the liberty required to preserve one’s life was meaningless without the right to acquire the means, that is to say the property, without which one could not live, he connected freedom with acquisition and made acquisition legitimate. Far from an outgrowth of the “Protestant ethic,” far from being an expression of religious belief, capitalism came into the world as a way to destroy, or at least diminish, the power of religion over the minds of men.

When Thomas Jefferson was asked why he had used that famous phrase about life and liberty from Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, he supposedly replied that “I understood my charge was to be correct, not original.” Locke’s influence went beyond the author of the American Declaration to the author of what might be called the bible of modern capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, a book published the same year, l776, as the Declaration itself. Adam Smith replaces the fear of violent death, for Hobbes the principle and decisive passion of human beings, with a slight modification of Locke’s emphasis on the freedom to acquire life’s necessities: “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” This desire, if “protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous,” will produce a society that is both free and commercial. The traditional virtues, whether those of the ancients or those of Christianity, will be replaced by what the most insightful student of Adam Smith’s teaching describes as “the controlled passion of self-preservation through gain, the unhampered motion of which is commerce.” Capitalism, in other words, replaces virtue however understood. The moral restraints imposed by both civil and ecclesiastical authority, the prohibitions against unfair dealing or any other species of injustice, are now considered an infringement of liberty, an attempt to interfere with the free workings of a market that functions best, and, it may be argued, can only work at all, when everyone is free to follow the immediate promptings of their own self-interest or ambition.

The ancient and traditional belief that the object or aim of civil society is the common good and that reason is to determine what the common good requires, is replaced by the belief that the best political order, like the best economic order, is the result of actions which are not themselves guided by any concern for the public welfare. The good order, the rational order, is produced by the free expression of the passions, the desires, of human beings. The rational has no existence by itself, but is ultimately dependent on the irrational; like the atoms of Democritus, chaos produces order out of itself.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of The Declaration of Independence, followed Locke in his insistence that the rights of the individual are paramount, the foundation of everything else; James Madison, the principle architect of the American Constitution, writing in the tenth of the Federalist Papers followed Locke in his insistence that the first object of government is the protection of the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property. The function of government is not, as the ancients insisted, to teach character to its citizens, to make them better people; the function of government is to protect the ability of individuals to acquire as much of what they want as they think they need. Instead of a vice or a sin, acquisition has become a virtue; the desire for gain not the mark of an illiberal greed, but the very foundation of the freedom we enjoy. And if, as Adam Smith recognized, the system of economic competition leads to mediocrity and the dominance of small-minded men intent on making money, it at least provides a barrier against those who would use the power of religion to make it “evil to speak evil of evil,” in Machiavelli’s ingenious, not to say devilish, phrase.

And so we find ourselves wondering, once again, whether something has gone missing in the world, whether the “dominance of small minded men” is not itself too high a price to pay, whether it might be time to read again those ancient writers and with the benefit of what they teach us, decide whether the modern world that Hobbes and Locke helped create might itself need a new beginning.