“That we are not a poetical people has been asserted… Because it suited us to construct an engine in the first instance, it has been denied that we could compose an epic in the second. Because we were not all Homers in the beginning, it has been somewhat too rashly taken for granted that we shall be all Jeremy Benthams to the end.” –Edgar Poe
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) is a ghost who haunts Scarriet. This brilliant writer, who is mostly out of print, hated the Tories, loved liberty, lived in the United States as a boy (a beautiful Unitarian church in Boston was co-founded by William Hazlitt Sr.), glimpsed Napoleon (he was a fan), and published an essay called, “On the Pleasure of Hating.” Adam Smith taught his father, Jeremy Bentham was his landlord (where Milton once lived); Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats were friends. He was an excellent portrait painter. Women troubles, vindictive Tory magazines, and a less than tactful personality severely damaged his reputation.
In this essay, I’ll quote Hazlitt liberally on utilitarianism. Two resurrections at once.
Utilitarianism, a political philosophy mostly forgotten, gained traction all over the world as the American and French revolutions were defining democracy for the ages. It is safe to say one really cannot be a modern political thinker unless one has been tortured by the whole question of Utility, as it applies to logic and politics itself.
The paradox (Bentham and Mill, typical of the stubborn British, obstinately did not think it one) of Utlity is inescapable.
Utility is scientific democracy—calculating the most pleasure for the most people.
The triumph of utilitarian logic unfortunately cancels everything individual, local, Romantic, and usefully mad.
The philosophy of Bentham sees Hobbes and Hume trample Socrates and Christ into dust.
Hazlitt was certain Bentham was wrong. This ruined Hazlitt’s career.
Bentham’s philosophy was the excuse for the over-reach of Empire (Hazlitt lived and worked in the belly of the beast) as well as the logical engine of increasing democracy (and fashionable hedonism). Opposing Bentham left Hazlitt and other Platonists like Coleridge and Keats high and dry. Blackwood’s clobbered both Keats and Hazlitt. The Tories, with their hatred of Napoleon and fear of the French Revolution, finally carried the day.
Hazlitt would be a conservative today. He was a liberal in 19th century Britain.
Here’s where I flash-forward to the present, to remind us of how utilitarianism, though largely forgotten, continues to shape democracy and liberalism as we understand them. It is still the paradox which cannot be escaped.
In 2022, colonialism not only persists, its effects seem to be growing. “White privilege” and “cultural appropriation” are considered extremely dangerous and extremely real, as if the labor of small white nations—15th century Portugal and Spain, (joined by the Dutch and the English in the 16th century)—ruling the entire world were now closer than ever to occurring.
Blacks in the United States feel more disenfranchised, more ready to blame whites than ever. The two political parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats, increasingly appear on the brink of civil war, their voters as different as night and day, their leaders threatening to jail each other.
It is very much like the passionate Whigs and Tories, the Catholics and Protestants in Renaissance England—torn by vicious civil war as a prelude to Britain almost taking over the globe.
Even as the left accuses the American conservatives (average law-abiding citizens who pay their taxes) of racism, white supremacy and fascism, and even as the right accuses liberals (average law-abiding citizens who pay their taxes) of mass psychosis and treason, there is a nagging suspicion among a few of us that indeed the white people are finishing what they started in the late 15th century—when Columbus and Magellan discovered where India, China, Indonesia, Japan, Oceania, the West Indies, and the Americas were—and the British East India Company (with one minor setback in Yorktown) said, “well, look what we’ve found.”
Even when whites fight each other, terrible as this is to admit, they win. The British and Americans, sworn enemies, as we all know, eventually become friends. English is the globe’s language. Germany kicked up a devastating fuss in the 20th century—turning the United States into a Superpower, a platform—from which a New World Order of Woke Corporations consolidating left and right, public and private, government and business; old opponents now indistinguishable, is poised to take the colonial model even further. The United States is a kind of meaner, leaner British Empire 2.0 for the 21st century.
The British Empire had no trouble losing its identity in pursuing open borders (the price you pay when taking over the world).
Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, conservative, U.S. patriots, (some say racist jingoists) sounded the alarm against America submerging its identity in open borders, per the old British Empire.
Foolish Ann and Tucker: if the people you favor— those whom you consider Americans—won’t breed, America has no choice but to import foreigners at a sufficient rate. The liberal today intuitively understands this. The principled conservative does not.
Liberalism can indeed be traced to Jeremy Bentham, (with whom Edgar Poe strenuously disagreed) and Bentham’s once-famous philosophy of Utility. Utilitarianism is pragmatism which thinks outside the box. War, inflation, and disease can very well be good things in the Darwinian universe of utilitarianism.
Birthrate is the sort of hyper-practical consideration which may occasionally escape the notice of patriots—but not utilitarians. Birthrate is fast becoming the Musk v. Gates, not-so-secret, political buzzword of our age. Think of all the controversial and vital ramifications associated with that one word.
Deliberate policy failure at the top cripples lives at the bottom and shocks the understanding of the middle classes. A Malthusian nightmare inhibits Godwin’s utopia as calculated by Bentham—and only Hazlitt, the aesthetic journalist of full-blown wariness and common sense, can figure it out.
More than ever, we need profound and oracular wisdom to sort out for us the policy disasters which manage to burn to the ground both “right” and “left” solutions. The mind is squeezed. The art critic, the journalist, the poet, even the philosopher, are frozen. Chomsky and Nixon have become the Byron and Wordsworth of our soul. We have been Benthamed.
Hazlitt made vivid and pertinent remarks on Bentham as he strongly disagreed with him (all quotes are from William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age):
“Mr. Bentham is one of those persons who verify the old adage, that ‘A prophet has most honour out of his own country.’ His reputation lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chile and the mines of Mexico. He has offered constitutions for the New World, and legislated for future times.
**
“Mr. Hobbhouse is a greater man at the hustings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu. The reason is, that our author’s influence is purely intellectual. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths, and to those studies—“That waft a thought from Indus to the pole”— and has never mixed himself up with personal intrigues or party politics.
“Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among poets:—in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely goes out, and sees very little company.
**
“His eye is quick and lively; but it glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought. He is evidently a man occupied with some train of fine and inward association. He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer. He meditates the coming age. He hears and sees only what suits his purpose, or some “foregone conclusion;” and looks out for facts and passing occurrences in order to put them into his logical machinery and grind them into the dust and powder of some subtle theory, as the miller looks out for grist to his mill!
**
“The gentleman is himself a capital logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water. If we attend to the moral man, the constitution of his mind will scarcely be found to be built up of pure reason and a regard to consequences: if we consider the criminal man (with whom the legislator has chiefly to do), it will be found to be still less so.
“Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue or the perpetration of crime. We are afraid the human mind does not readily come into this doctrine, this ultima ratio philosophorum, interpreted according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are made up of sympathies and antipathies, of sense and imagination, of understanding and prejudice. The soul, by reason of its weakness, is an aggregating and exclusive principle; it clings obstinately to some things, and violently rejects others.
**
“Mr. Bentham’s plan would be a feasible one, and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, would be the best possible ground to place morality upon. But it is not so.
**
“All pleasure is not (morally speaking) equally a good.
**
“There are some tastes that are sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly; and there is a similar contradiction and anomaly in the mind and heart of man.
**
“It has been made a plea (half jest, half earnest) for the horrors of war, that they promote trade and manufactures. It has been said, as a set-off for the atrocities practiced upon the negro slaves in the West Indies, that without their blood and sweat, so many millions of people could not have sugar to sweeten their tea.
**
“You may as well preach philosophy [utilitarianism] to a drunken man, or to the dead, as to those who are under the instigation of any mischievous passion. A man is a drunkard, and you tell him he ought to be sober; he is idle, and you recommend industry to him as his wisest course; he gambles, and you remind him that he may be ruined by this foible; he has lost his character, and you advise him to get into some reputable service or lucrative situation; vice becomes a habit with him, and you request him to rouse himself and shake it off; he is starving, and you warn him if he breaks the law, he will be hanged. None of this reasoning reaches the mark it aims at. The culprit, who violates and suffers the vengeance of the laws, is not the dupe of ignorance, but the slave of passion, the victim of habit or necessity. To argue with strong passion, with inveterate habit, with desperate circumstances, is to talk to the winds.
**
“The charm of criminal life, like that of savage life, consists of liberty, in hardship, in danger, and in the contempt of death: in one word, in extraordinary excitement; and he who has tasted of it, will no more return to the regular habits of life, than a man will take to water after drinking brandy, or than a wild beast will give over hunting to its prey.”
Hazlitt is saying to Bentham “you can’t legislate morality,” which is Shelley’s message in his “Defense of Poetry” and Poe’s throughout his works—according to Poe, didactic approaches are less successful than reverse-psychology; the human soul is not a machine.
This doesn’t stop Bentham’s logic holding sway, however, in abstract realms, which is more than sufficient to both confuse and shame our selfish, illogical souls. It takes a great deal of individual conviction to resist utilitarianism; it is one thing to say “passionate criminals won’t heed your utilitarian logic,” and quite another to contemplate one’s own intransigence in the face of pure logic’s pure good. It is our fate, since Bentham, to understand we are always wrong in whatever political stance we take: either the “many” are deprived of pleasure, or the “many” see to it that everything we hold dear, including our own unique soul, has no validity.
It isn’t a question of which side is right—it is the realization that both sides are wrong, and how this realization politically paralyzes every sensitive and thinking person.
The only major difference between the previous U.S. president and the current one on race is that Joe Biden is allowed to be racist; whites promote racism against themselves because they know a race war ultimately benefits themselves—thanks to those like Biden who damn themselves with a smile; just as in the same manner inflationary, eco-conscious, anti-business environments favor the biggest and strongest companies: “survival of the fittest” is the ultimate foil against any utilitarianism which might trouble the conscience of those who lobby for uniqueness and freedom.
The winning formula: Divide-and-Conquer Empire, pushes right past both Utility and its opposite, Romanticism, while stealing energy from both.
The fracture, the divide, which most of us know as political reality, the deal sealed by belonging to one of the two sides (Whig, Tory; Liberal, Conservative), is but the prerequisite landscape of the higher political adventure most of us fail to see, or understand.
Politics is finally the sneering: “What are you (victim of political strong-arming, propaganda, or corruption) going to do about it?”
Therefore the enlightened who want to effect reform flee to religion and art—unless these are crushed by politics, which is the case today; and so politics becomes once again the arena, and art climbs back to significance on the back of politics (lose/lose since art, by definition, is not politics) or by an artistic breakthrough of some kind, which unfortunately we are not seeing today.
Free speech, real debate over ideas, is as enlightened as the art of discourse and rhetoric is going to get. Remember when religion, politics, and literature existed almost as one entity, (thanks to writers like Hazlitt) in Great Britain during the early 19th century, during (was it coincidence?) the poetry renaissance of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron? Much of this was due to the response, then, of the most materially advanced nation on earth—a fiercely party-divided Britain, to the American and French revolutions.
Recall that Hazlitt told us the stay-at-home-former-priest Jeremy Bentham, the most influential philosopher outside of Britain, had no party affiliations.
A similar figure was Thomas Malthus, a priest and literary figure whose economic theories were off-the-charts influential and controversial. “If you have too many children they will starve to death” clashed with “death is the result of not having children.”
Hazlitt, in the calmest and most logical manner possible, destroys Malthus. He not only caught the famed economist in a plagiarism; Hazlitt toppled Malthus precisely where his famous pessimistic formula lives: “There is evidently no inherent difference in the principle of increase in food or population; since a grain of corn, for example, will propagate and multiply itself much faster even than the human species. A bushel of wheat will sow a field; that field will furnish seed for twenty others.” (The Spirit Of the Age) Everyone says we had to wait for 20th century improvements in farming techniques before the anti-utopian Malthus could be decisively debunked, but Hazlitt (ignored on this count) simply and prophetically wasted no time.
Titanic ideas both inform and transcend party politics. In the name of free speech, we should, as both citizen and critic, embrace heavy debates, and not run from them. Hiding from these debates in the momentary safety of political party affiliation is finally cowardly and unenlightened. And not good for art, either.
One important caveat, however: when I say “embrace” these debates, I do not mean embrace the lunacy, exactly, which the last few hundred years of rhetoric in the West has produced. We need to look at where these ideas come from precisely to “dial down” the crazy. Bentham is inescapable—which is why we need to unpack and disarm him.
Welcome back, Hazlitt.
Scarriet Editors
Salem, MA 6/3/2022