Psalm 23
1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Unprotected, Undismayed
By J.M. Smith
JUNE 1, 2018
The Orthosphere
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2018/06/01/unprotected-undismayed/#more-18247
“Let a fellow sing o’ the little things he cares about,
If a fellow fights for the little things he cares about
With the weight of a single blow!”
Rudyard Kipling, “The Native Born” (1894)
Last night an old friend expressed a wish that is, I daresay, familiar to many who have staggered into the oasis of the Orthosphere, parched by the desert and panting for refreshment. He said that he wished there was someone on his side. My friend is, like me, a white, Christian, cishet male, without fortune, connections, or compromising tapes of powerful individuals. In other words, he is a man marked by the stigma of that dwindling class of Americans who are not, today, a protected species. Anyone is at perfect liberty to mock him and “the little things he cares about,” and if their mockery is sufficiently witty, they may well find themselves employed by the New York Times.
As I
wrote in this place a couple of years ago,
“
To learn who the truly marginal nobodies are, simply ask who you are allowed to mock, ridicule and call rude names in polite society. If you can make a group the butt of a joke, or the object of scorn, and still be invited to the next wine and cheese party, that group has no lèse-majesté. They are marginal nobodies.”
I should have written that such a group does not enjoy the protection of laws against
lèse-majesté, since
lèse-majesté is, properly speaking, the crime, and not the privilege of protection against that crime. The French phrase translates as treason, and literally means an attack on the awesome grandeur of the state.
It has long been recognized that laws against treason are naturally spongy, and therefore impossible to write or apply in a consistent way. It is impossible to give a precise definition of the state, or of the interests of the state, and no one can say precisely where a recalcitrant subject becomes a rebellious subject, or when a rebellion becomes full-blown civil war.
Thus, as one legal historian puts it,
“laws in regard to high treason and state treason easily assume an indefinite character” (1).
What he means is that laws against
lèse-majesté are, by their very nature, highly mutable. They have an “indefinite character” because the salient terms of “state,” “interests,” and “war” can be defined so narrowly that it is almost impossible for a citizen to commit treason, or so broadly that it is almost impossible for a citizen not to commit treason. Is a citizen free to attack his state in any way short of raising an army with which to conquer it? Or is a loyal citizen constrained to praise his country and its leaders unreservedly and in every particular?
It is very common for laws against
lèse-majesté to extend their protection to the ruler, his family, and the ruling class generally, so that physical attacks on the bodies or interests of these persons are treated, not as mere civil crimes, but as attacks on the state. It is also common for these laws to extended their protection to the reputations of these “men and women of distinction” by attaching extraordinary sanctions to the defamation of noblemen, their families, and the nobility in general. This sort of special exemption from defamation was said to have begun under the Roman emperor Augustus, who, Tacitus tells us,
“for the first time applied the law to libelous writings, being indignant at the outrageous and scurrilous attacks made by Cassius Severus upon men and women of distinction” (2).
It is worth noting that attacks on the ruling class grew more abusive, and protections against these attacks more robust, just when the Roman republic became the Roman empire.
Finally, it is common for laws against
lèse-majesté to extend their protection to the state’s established religion, official cult, or ruling ideology. When Rome persecuted Bacchantes, Druids and Christians, it invoked laws against
lèse-majesté. In refusing to burn that pinch of incense, the Christian became a
publici hostes or public enemy, the most egregious form of traitor.
Every state rests on a religious or philosophical foundation, has a clear interest in preserving this foundation, and therefore extends its protection to this foundation. This is true even in a liberal state. As the arch liberal John Stuart Mill explained, there can be no “permanent political society” without a “feeling of allegiance, or loyalty,” and for there to be a feeling of allegiance or loyalty, it is essential that
“there be in the constitution of the State something which is settled, something permanent, and not to be called in question . . . . In all political societies which have had a durable existence, there has been some fixed point; something which men agreed in holding sacred; which, wherever freedom of discussion was a recognized principle, it was of course lawful to contest in theory, but which no one could either fear or hope to see shaken in practice” (3).
Attacks on this foundation used to be known as “spiritual treason” or
lèse-majesté divine, and in the old religious societies they fell under the heads of sacrilege, heresy, witchcraft, simony, blasphemy. Spiritual treason in our society is what we call political incorrectness.
* * * * *
The liberal state was formed in a reaction against the authoritarian states of the early modern period, in which the laws against
lèse-majesté had been very wide-ranging and rigorous. The liberal state was designed to minimize the incentives for treason by opening the political process to all men, the hope being that no man would conspire to overthrow a state of which he was already (theoretically) a part.
The liberal state also greatly relaxed the laws against
lèse-majesté, whether spiritual or temporal, and granted an unusually large space to criticism and dissent. It permitted very vigorous verbal attacks on the superficial arrangements of the political order, and even condoned radical inquiry so long as this remained, as Mill said, explicitly theoretical. Reversing the position of Augustus Cesar, the liberal state granted citizens a special license to launch “outrageous and scurrilous attacks . . . upon men and women of distinction,” and it of course legalized all of the old forms of “spiritual treason.”
This is why treason is defined so narrowly in the U.S. Constitution, and why so many Americans think a man cannot be a traitor unless he is actually trafficking in military secrets, and that perhaps only in wartime.
* * * * *
The recent shemozzle over Roseanne Barr and Valerie Jarrett reminds us that Jarrett is part of a protected ruling class, indeed a nobility. It suggests that similar protections may extend to all female politicians, and more especially those of color. These protections are not written in the statute books, of course, but they are nevertheless amply supplied by the controlled and social media, where public shaming, denunciation and ostracism are a formidable force.
You don’t need me to enumerate the races, religions, and erotic impulses that today enjoy this sort of special protection against offensive speech. All I will say here is that offensive speech is a verbal
attack, unique protection from such attacks is a
privilege, enjoyment of this privilege is the mark of
nobility,and nobility is conferred because doing so is
in the interest of the state.
There was a time when a Black man would be severely chastised for insulting a White man, and more especially a White woman. An “uppety Black” committed a crime of
lèse-majesté because his insult was political, not just personal. In offering his insult to a member of a protected class, he of course offered an insult to the political order in which that class was protected. This is why he was looked upon as a traitor, and this is why his punishment was severe.
Today, a White man can expect to be severely chastened for insulting a Black man, and perhaps more especially a Black woman. He will not be whipped or hung by the neck, but he will most certainly be made “a hissing and a reproach among all the nations.” He will not be wrenched from his bed by night riders, but he will probably be wrenched from his job by a galloping hoard of twitteratn. And this is because he is guilty of
lèse-majesté, of treason against the liberal social order.
* * * * *
Like my friend, I have often wished a champion was at my side. When some later-day Cassius Severus launches an outrageous and scurrilous attack on the little things
I care about, I am not above wishing that some later-day Augustus would burst in and shove the blowhard’s head into the toilet. And when I read the thousandth glib defamation of men like me, and am told we are all fools, fiends, or fat cats, I indulge for a moment in the fantasy that we are, instead, a protected nobility, and that the rascal who wrote this libel will be stripped and flogged at public expense.
But this is all moonshine. Men like me are not noblemen, and if a later day Augustus decides to give swirlys, we will be the ones with the corkscrew hairdos.
And to tell you the truth, I prefer it this way. I don’t want the state to be my helicopter mom; and I don’t want to be rescued by a galloping hoard of twitterati. I want to fight my own fights, take my own licks, and annoy the world with my own brand of
conservative intransigence.
If I am not up for this, I should just shut up. For as the great man said (this time with the critical emphasis),
“Let a fellow sing o’ the little things he cares about,
If a fellow fights for the little things he cares about
With the weight of a single blow!”
If, yes, and only if.
(1) Carl Ludwig von Bar, A History of Continental Criminal Law (Boston, 1916), p. 41.
(2) Tacitus, Annals1: 72.3.
(3) John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge,” London and Westminster Review, 33 (March, 1840), pp. 257-302.
