lloydtown 

Nicolson: Final Thoughts

World War II: Nicolson was in the "Churchill group" that met to decide how to make Chamberlain take a tougher line on Hitler, and how to prepare for war. He was also in a small group that was apparently all Tories except for him. (He was still National Labour at the time; a diminishing group that remained loyal to Ramsay MacDonald while Atlee led the "real" Labour Party). Famous members of the group were Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan--both future Prime Ministers--and Duff Cooper. May 31, 1939:

[blockquote][the Whips] respect Eden, Duff Cooper, Amery and the big bugs. But they are terribly rattled by the existence and the secrecy of the group itself. They know that we meet, and what they do not like is that we do not attack them in the House[/blockquote].

I take this to mean: the "big bugs" would later be forgiven because of their stature, but Nicolson would not. When he first left the Foreign Office, Nicolson flirted with a political affiliation with Oswald Mosley--later a fascist. After the war he ran as a "pure Labour" candidate, still didn't get the peerage he was hoping for, alienated some friends and family, and said he was an "ass."

Sept. 2, 1939: Chamberlain still won't declare war. There is silence after his speech, then huge cheers for the Opposition leader--otherwise quite obscure--who says Britain should help Poland "at once." A Tory yells out that Greenwood speaks for Britain. "In those few minutes [Chamberlain] flung away his reputation."

Sept. 26, 1939: Chamberlain makes a speech, to very little applause. Churchill, obviously enjoying himself (let's face it--he liked war), gets the House cheering and laughing.

His delivery was amazing. One could feel the spirit of the House rising with every word. In those 20 minutes Churchill brought himself nearer the post of Prime Minister than he has ever been before.

Modernity: Process over Substance?

Tying together what I've said about punishment vs. retribution, and then the Schiavo case: I guess the genius of modernity has always been in putting process over substance. Instead of "what is the good/best life?," what is the soul, what is virtue, what does God want--the big substance questions which had caused instability, doubt, and wars--there is an emphasis on how to make progress that is more or less non-controversial, i.e. material comfort. Technology is more and more dazzling, but it notoriously answers the question of how, not why.

Talk Radio

There is a great article in Atlantic (April 2005) (subscription). (I'm still getting to the Rehnquist article).

David Foster Wallace writes on John Ziegler, a Rush Limbaugh type on local LA radio.

There's lots of good detail about Ziegler's show and career, but I think this is the key paragraph:

Having repeated some of the usual stuff about how AM talk radio guys aren't real journalists, don't check facts, recklessly spread pain and bad feeling, etc., Wallace says:

It should be conceded that there is at least one real and refreshing journalistic advantage that bloggers, fringe-cable newsmen, and most talk-radio hosts have over the mainstream media: they are neither the friends nor the peers of the public officials they cover.

Schiavo Synopsis

I still think the people Kaus calls the anti-tubists are trying to answer a substance question with one or more process answers. The substance question: is a human being with some consciousness alive, such that it would ordinarily be wrong to kill her? If the answer is "yes," then even a living will is a process answer, to say nothing of power of attorney, court precedents, states' rights, federalism, the consistency of positions held by parties/individuals.

Kaus quotes Robert George:

NRO: As you know, there's some question about what Terri Schiavo's wishes were or would be now. How much should turn on this question?

Even if we were to credit Michael Schiavo's account of his conversation with Terri before her injury — which I am not inclined to do — it is a mistake to assume that people can make decisions in advance about whether to have themselves starved to death if they eventually find themselves disabled. That's why living wills have proven to be so often unreliable. One does not know how one will actually feel, or how one will feel about one's life and the prospect of death, or whether one will retain a desire to live despite a mental or physical disability, when one is not actually in that condition and when one is envisaging it from the perspective of more or less robust health.

Consider the case of a beautiful young woman — an actress or fashion model perhaps — who is severely burned in a fire. Prior to actually finding herself in such a condition, she might have supposed — and even said, if the subject had come up in a conversation — that she would rather be dead than live with her face grotesquely disfigured. But no one would be surprised if in the actual event she did not try to kill herself by starvation or some other means, and did not want to die.

The Right to Suicide?

Somewhat to my amazement, a (male) student came up to me before class, when I was still busy with my notes, the board and what not. "I'm really not comfortable talking in class, but there's something I want to say. Locke says individual rights are basic to government, but there's no right to suicide. His thought is the foundation of the U.S. Constitution, and a lot of American thought. Isn't it time to re-consider a right to suicide? The Schiavo case (he had trouble with the name) is really bothering me."

So I guess he is convinced Terri Schiavo's parents are trying to prevent her from exercising her right to refuse treatment. Her wishes as expressed to her husband are adequate as a "living will," and/or, in any case, he as spouse can act for her in her sad state.

We did have a bit of discussion about Schiavo. I had Googled Cruzan v. Missouri (1990), and I said that if there were a living will, that would seem decisive for the courts. I'll have a bit more to say in a later post.

On Locke: I didn't get into this with the student, or in class, but suicide is an interesting test case of Strauss's interpretation of Locke--one of the cases where he was consciously opening up, making fun of, or attacking "traditional" professorial, boring interpretations that completely failed to follow an author's intention.

Strauss: Natural Right and History p. 220: "We thus arrive at the conclusion that Locke cannot have recognized any law of nature in the proper sense of the term."

pp. 226-7: "There is, then, an innate natural right, while there is not innate natural duty."

Nicolson: Approaching the End

The older he gets, and the clearer it is that he really hasn't accomplished his major goals, the funnier he is. Maybe this is the secret of a great diarist: a strong sense of personal failure, a certain amount of malice and spite directed at people who were (perhaps undeservedly) more successful; and of course, real intelligence, and interest in a lot of things including conversation.

July 16, 1953:

At the Beefsteak there is an American called Colonel Matthews. I beg him that when he returns to New York he will not encourage the idea that England is deluged under a flood of anti-American hatred. It isn't that. It is that we are frightened that the destinies of the world should be in the hands of a giant with the limbs of an undergraduate, the emotions of a spinster and brain of a pea-hen.

I mind this as I feel it is humiliating and insidious. But I also mind it since it gives grounds for anti-American feeling, which is I am sure a dangerous and quite useless state of mind. They are decent folk in every way, but they tread on traditions in a way that hurts.

Viti says that she asked you to call her "Vita," and you must call me "Harold". That is far simpler. I always called my own beloved father-in-law "Lionel", and it seemed quite natural after the first ten years or so.

He asked me where I was off to. I said I was going down to Windsor to study the archives. He asked whether he might enquire what was the subject of my new book. "Une biographie," I answered, "de George V." He expressed surprise that there should be any documents at Windsor about any such person. Rather puzzled, I replied that there was a whole room full of papers. "Quelle étrange personne," he said, "avec cette passion presque nymphomane pour les hommes." I was much startled by this and then found he thought I had said George Sand.

Now I when young I was as happy and irresponsible as a lark. It is in my late age that happiness has become clouded. But if unhappiness comes to the young it gives them depth; coming at my age it confirms my superficiality.

Terry Schiavo again

A post from October 2003.

I'll also add a link to a fairly recent reading that says the "persistent vegetative state" diagnosis is used too liberally.

Dahlia Lithwick blandly
repeats a report that there are 35,000 PVS patients in the US. Should they all be killed? Is it all up to that one crucial person with legal authority? Isn't it relevant that in the Netherlands, where they have physician-assisted suicide, they also have people being killed who, er, didn't ask for it, yet who had the mental capability to discuss the subject.

Our daughter definitely felt pain and discomfort, and communicated it to all of us very clearly. Yet she didn't focus her eyes, or respond consistently to stimuli. Would the experts who favour starving Terry Schiavo say our daughter experienced only "somatic" pain, whatever that is? It might be a common-sense question to ask why we didn't kill her; the idea of starving her would have seemed grotesque.

Thanks, once again, to Mickey Kaus. It does seem likely that the lonely and the frail are at risk of being killed because of "conditions" that would not lead to the death of the more fortunate. Those who are prone to depression will be talked into giving up.

Yes, the Republicans collectively are suspicious on this issue--coming at the very end, trying to make one vulnerable Democrat in Florida look bad, etc. But it's an interesting debate, in the elected Congress (not just among a few judges). Who else was going to trigger this debate? In a way the progressives seem to win the debate in the end; the main result of the Nancy Cruzan case was that the public accepted that food was a medical treatment; the main result of Schiavo seems to be an increase in living wills. Still, with the boomers getting old, we may all want to consider: when do we push someone onto the iceflow, and when do we not?

Nicolson again

Harold Nicolson left the British Foreign Office when he was about 40. He had been a pretty senior person at the Embassy in Berlin. Partly he left because his wife refused to accept all the postings and travel along with him; partly he fancied a career as a man of letters. By the time he was 50, nothing had panned out all that well, and he began to think seriously about running for Parliament. He had a very junior position in Churchill's government early in the war, and then was dumped because Labour wanted one of their own people.

Nicolson admits briefly in his diary that he is homosexual, yet it is obvious that he is madly in love with his wife, Vita Sackville-West. I guess it came out sometime later that Vita had a long, passionate lesbian affair. These two may have fit in well with the Bloomsbury group--Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, J.M. Keynes, etc. There is actually a discussion of this very point (September 2, 1940):

[blockquote]Viti [i.e. V S-W] says that our mistake was that we remained Edwardian for too long and that if in 1916 we had got in touch with Bloomsbury we should have profited more than we did by carrying on with ... the Edwardian Relics. We are amused to confess that we had never even heard of Bloomsbury in 1916. But we agree that in fact we have had the best of both the plutocratic and the bohemian world and that we have had a lovely life.[/blockquote]

There is a letter in which V S-W says she is devastated at the suicide of Virginia Woolf.

His diary qualifies as very good, if not great, in that he knows a lot of people and has pretty good stories about them.

Ramsay MacDonald, who was HN's party leader for a while, commenting on the "abdication crisis" (King Edward VIII was in love with Mrs. Simpson, an American divorcee): "The people don't mind fornication, but they loathe adultery." Words for Prince Charles to live by.

HN on Mrs. Simpson: "The upper classes mind her being an American rather than her being divorced. The lower classes do not mind her being an American but loathe the idea taht she has had two husbands already."

Mind her being an American? But the phenomenon of the old families marrying rich American wives was well known: Churchill's mother and aunt were examples.

After Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's last speech on the subject in the House, HN congratulates him, and Baldwin speaks frankly:

[blockquote]"You see," he went on--still holding me by the arm, "the man [i.e. the King, later Duke of Windsor] is mad. MAD. He could see nothing but that woman. He did not realize that any other considerations avail. He lacks religion. I told his mother so....I do not mean by that his atheism. I suppose you [meaning HN] are either an atheist or an agnostic. But you have a religious sense. I noticed it the other day. (That meant my sticking up for Ramsay). You realize that there is something more than the opportune. He doesn't realize that there is anything beyond. I told his mother so. The Duke of York [later King George VI, father of QE II] has always been bothered about it."[/blockquote]

Reminds me of Brideshead Revisited: the creepy Canadian millionaire is missing the part of the soul that would respond to religion.

News Story on Drudge

Neb. Prodigy, 14, Dies in Apparent Suicide

OMAHA, Neb. -- A musical prodigy who completed high school at age 10 apparently killed himself at 14, authorities said.

Brandenn E. Bremmer, who taught himself how to read at 18 months and began playing the piano at 3, was found dead Tuesday at his home in southwest Nebraska with a gunshot wound to the head, sheriff's officials said.

Patricia Bremmer said her son showed no signs of depression, had just finished the art for the cover of a second CD of his music, and had plans for Wednesday. She did not disclose details of how he was found.

"We're rationalizing now," she said. "He had this excessive need to help people and teach people. ... He was so connected with the spiritual world, we felt he could hear people's needs and desires and their cries. We just felt like something touched him that day and he knew he had to leave" so his organs could be donated.

Bushies Going Pre-Modern?

Eugene Volokh, professor of constitutional law, has prompted some discussion. (As usual, he helpfully links to related posts).

Commenting on a rather gruesome execution in Iran, directly ordered by the mullahs, you might expect him to say: that's barbarism. That's why we're fighting this war--to stop that. Instead, because the executed criminal was convicted of the rape and murder of many children, Volokh goes the other way: can we do that too, please? Even if it requires amending the U.S. Constitution?

For at least some convicted criminals, Volokh argues, it is good to draw out the execution, and deliberately make it slow and painful. Even better is to have the family members of victims take part: they're the ones who want and deserve revenge, and understand exactly what this punishment is all about.

I guess this is thinking outside the box. You don't have to be too cynical to think Volokh is beginning to suspect there are going to be a lot more stories about torture carried out by Americans--and not just to stop a ticking bomb. To anticipate the debate, Volokh is saying: not only do I favour torturing a grab-bag of towel-heads, some guilty of something, some not--but I think we should be incorporating quite a bit of torture in our legal punishments of U.S. citizens at home.

Taking Volokh at his word, however, he seems to be defending pre-modern and pre-philosophic thinking.

Hobbes and Locke both advocate capital punishment, and they would probably both allow the government to practice torture as well--particularly in war. Hobbes says:

before the Institution of Common-wealth, every man had a right to every thing, and to do whatsoever he thought necessary to his own preservation; subduing, hurting, or killing any man in order thereunto. And this is the foundation of that right of Punishing, which is exercised in every Common-wealth. For the Subjects did not give the Soveraign that right; but onely in laying down theirs, strengthened him to use his own....

...every man...by the Right he hath to preserve Mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them, and so may bring such evil on any one, who has transgressed that Law, as may make him repent the doing of it, and thereby deter him, and by his Example others, from doing the like mischief.