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WOLLSTONECRAFT Philosophy, Passion and Politics
ISBN 978-0-691-24175-3
Mary Wollstonecraft was a remarkably advanced thinker. Her
achievement is all the more impressive given the weight of prejudice
against women in her time. Some of her ideas would give today’s Tory
Party (which may not last much longer) a fit of the vapours. She was
anti-racist, recognising that the human species is one while her
contemporaries took for granted the superiority of the pale-face.
She was sexually enlightened arguing that frigidity is a degradation
of sex and more or less equating sexual responsiveness in women with
virtue. It isn’t often recognised that the male domination of women
robs men of one of the greatest delights in life. It is a pinnacle
of male stupidity to want women to be cowed and incapable of love
and passion. Yet, though Wollstonecraft must be highly praised, she
made some fundamental mistakes. Chief is the notion of native human
benevolence. There is an obvious, glib response: how is it
compatible with centuries of injustice, violence, oppression,
prejudice, tyranny? A slightly more nuanced view is that we are
neither benevolent nor malevolent by nature. We are capable of both.
What matters are the choices we make. It’s perfectly sensible to
argue that benevolence is often predominant: by and large, people
behave generally well towards one another; we are shocked by acts of
random cruelty or violence, and when cruelty is politically
organised it has to conceal itself behind high-sounding phrases.
Benevolence is to some degree normative, a default setting. Yet if
its opposite wasn’t possible, we wouldn’t recognise it. Everything
is what it is only because it isn’t something else. It might be
accurate to say that benevolence grows from the satisfaction of our
needs. A curious feature of our culture of pursuit of wealth and
consumerism is the more we have the more dissatisfied we are;
obviously because pursuing wealth is not the same as attending to
our needs and may well be incompatible with it.
The first chapter considers what Wollstonecraft liked and loved. She
had an appreciative sensibility and a healthy imagination. She
thought poetry flourished best in “the infancy of civilization” and
that “flights of the imagination and the laboured deductions of
reason, appear almost incompatible”. She’s surely right that
imagination has the power to condense, to evoke with minimal means
while most of what passes for “reason” is often verbose
over-extension. When Kafka writes “A cage went in search of a bird”
he’s saying what a more discursive mind might take paragraphs to
explain. Wollstonecraft didn’t believe in an eternal opposition
between imagination and reason; negotiating the difference between
them was a matter of “discernment”. She didn’t like Burke. She felt
his defence of “romance” was support for fashionable emptiness. She
was onto the phoniness of a culture which feared simplicity of
feeling, a Holden Caulfield of the eighteenth century. She was
contemptuous of artificial pleasures ( just as well she didn’t live
to see the internet and virtual reality).
She had a curtailed affair with American capitalist Gilbert Imlay, a
man well below her level of imagination, discernment, sensitivity
and generosity. He was the father of her daughter Fanny. She spotted
in him the need for superficial variety as an antidote to the ennui
that afflicts those out of touch with their own feelings. She was an
advocate of high-minded eroticism in which physical pleasure melds
with the self-transcendence of love. Lust and its attendant
degradations she viewed as a failure in rising to a demanding ideal
of sexual love. She didn’t think much of drunkards either, seeing
intoxication as “the pleasure of savages”. None of this is
moralistic, however; she wasn’t some early-day Mrs Whitehouse. She
was authentic. Capable of genuine pleasure and release she had no
use for the common forms of phoney hedonism.
“It may be confidently asserted,” she wrote, “that no man chooses
evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good
he seeks.”
Defining evil isn’t easy, but maybe it could be said that to know
something is wrong but to do it anyway, might pass muster; which of
course, begs the question what we mean by “wrong”. The Hippocratic
position is valuable: if we do no harm, or at least strive to, we
should avoid evil, or the worst of it. Is Wollstonecraft right? Is
Putin pursuing happiness in Ukraine and blind to the evil of his
invasion? He certainly can’t be unaware of the harm he’s causing.
Does he consider it worthwhile for a greater good? Wollstonecraft
may be slightly naïve in her assertion: it’s almost certainly true
that people deliberately choose courses of action which harm others
but conceal their motivation (from themselves as well from others,
to some degree) by adopting a moral pose. What she’s getting is that
we are moral creatures by nature; but what that means is we have to
choose between harmful and beneficial actions. Some people do choose
evil. In fact probably, by default, a lot of people a lot of the
time. Live the standard life of a first world citizen and you are
almost certainly harming someone in a developing country.
She was a great advocate of imagination, of what might be termed a
poetic orientation; but she recognised not all people were equally
capable:
“the generality of the people cannot see or feel
poetically..”
She’s probably wrong. There may be degrees, but that some people are
devoid of imagination (apart from a few tragic cases of severe brain
problems) probably reflects the class structure of her time. Most
people don’t have the wherewithal to write like Jane Austen or
compose like Fanny Mendelssohn, but they enjoy stories, music,
drama, rhyme, rhythm. What she calls the “glowing minds” have a
responsibility. In our debased society, this is virtually never
mentioned. The talented are supposed to make their way to fame and
fortune, but Wollstonecraft’s suggestion is correct: if you can
write like George Eliot or
paint like Bridget Riley, you have a responsibility to do so
in ways which enhance life for everyone.
Wollstonecraft, to her credit, was amongst the critics of Edmund
Burke, particularly his views on the French Revolution. Burke’s most
famous maxim is that for evil to triumph, it is necessary only for
good men to do nothing. The evil in question was the subversion of
the ancien regime. She saw him as reactionary, irrational and
emotionally labile. Of course, The French Revolution was born in
idealism and died in blood, but she’s right to castigate Burke’s
anti-democratic instincts. His attack on Richard Price and his
famous sermon, in which he typified the events in France as of the
same kind as 1688 and the American Revolution, she saw as unworthy.
She perceived the possibility of a transformation of all social
relations, including the personal, in and through the attempt to
overthrow the ancien regime. In this she was right: the
intimate is socially mediated.
Nevertheless, she believed in a “natural elite”: “the persons
pointed out by nature to direct the society of which they make a
part, on any extraordinary emergency.” In this she’s confused. It’s
perfectly true of course that capacities differ from person to
person, but how does that confer the right on some to “direct”
society? This is the idiocy of meritocracy, rightly satirized by
Michael Young. In any social formation it’s sensible for skills to
be assigned to those best able to fulfil them, but that doesn’t
imply a right to power over others. Such power doesn’t derive from
the possession of skill but, finally, from the use of force. Richard
Lewontin’s observation is crucial: differences are biological,
distinctions social.
Wollstonecraft wrote about Catherine Maccaulay, the world’s first
female historian and an advocate of political equality who
scandalously married aged forty-seven the twenty-one-year-old
William Graham (brother of the more famous James). Like her,
Wollstonecraft believed that “ignorance is a soil in which no
uniform virtue can take root.” This was important in the debate over
free-will: she contended the will could not be free if people were
sunk in ignorance (think of Trump’s base). We are free to choose,
but not entirely. We are bound by necessity, but not entirely. We
can’t choose to leap a thousand metres in the or to live to be three
hundred. Paradoxically, our liberty rests on narrow biological
limits. Absolutists blench from paradox. Wollstonecraft is right,
understanding what we are, what the world is, as far as we can, is
indispensable to making rational choices, which is why tyrants love
ignorance.
Engaging in an interesting anthropological speculation, she argues
that when laws were first introduced, it would have been natural for
people to be selfish, because they couldn’t have envisaged how a
future society would make interdependence obvious. The notion that
laws were introduced is intriguing: in the sense of written statute,
of course, there was a period when this began; but we have never
lived without laws, or rules, since we became what we are, creatures
with language and abstract thought. The anthropological evidence
suggests early society was characterised much less by selfishness
than ours, that without property the arrogant had no basis for
control and could easily be brought down a peg or two by mockery.
In her late twenties she was a governess in Ireland, an experience
which increased her contempt for the aristocracy. In Lady
Kingsborough’s petting of her dogs she saw the cruel sentimentality
of her class. She was without “any softness in her manners” but
soppy about her animals. Hitler was the same. Psychopaths are
notoriously sentimental, but what Wollstonecraft spotted in Lady K
wasn’t an individual pathology, but a class sensibility. Fawning on
her dogs, the narcissistic toff was formal towards her children,
denying what Wollstonecraft saw as a fundamental moral duty.
Despite her contempt for the aristocracy, whose distorted
sensibilities are the product of the social pre-eminence which
accompanies property, Wollstonecraft believed in property: “The only
security of property that nature authorises and reason sanctions is
the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and
industry have acquired….. and to bequeath them to whom he chooses.”
On the other hand, she was a critic of inheritance, arguing that
property should be “fluctuating” and recognising the injustice of
primogeniture. She believed that parental affection but also
“superior merit” should determine legacy. Applied strictly, her
definition of property would eliminate great wealth: what a person
can produce from their own talent and industry is very limited. All
significant wealth flows from making use of the talent and industry
of others. Yet she appears not to recognise this, as if she has
fallen for the myth that the rich have made their fortunes through
the sweat of their brows. If property is limited to what individuals
can produce by their own effort, there will be little to be passed
on. Wollstonecraft has hit on the moral outrage of an economic
system which permits people to enrich themselves from others’ work,
but at the same time asserted “property, once gained, will procure
the respect due only to talents and virtue.”
There is a strain of anarchism in Wollstonecraft’s thinking. She was
in favour of individuals having the liberty to develop to the
fulness of their capacities and to choose how to do so. She
exhibited a healthy degree of mistrust of governments. At the heart
of her moral vision is the conviction that vanity is the abiding
evil. It’s the pursuit of self-worth which undoes us. Of course, how
our sense of self is constructed depends on the kind of society we
inhabit. Wollstonecraft recognised people in her time were hungry
for the gaze of others. This is not our natural condition. When
people are valued for their wealth or power rather than their human
qualities, narcissism is bound to flourish. Being denied the
attention we all deserve, people identify with those who gain
excessive attention (celebrities, billionaires, dictators). A
genuine sense of self is denied, in its place comes the phoney
selfhood of fawning identification. Just as property sucks wealth
from society and deposits it in the hands of a few, so a sense of
worth is concentrated in the few and the rest are tormented by the
sense of emptiness which haunts our culture. What Wollstonecraft was
thinking of when she wrote of vanity was almost certainly
narcissism, a term which she didn’t have to hand.
This keys in to her view of women. She recognised the irony that her
society turned women into fribbles, and then held them in contempt
for being so. The process goes on: women are eye-candy, their bodies
are used to sell cars and ice-cream, pornography abounds and its
essence is to turn women into meat. Today’s feminism has more or
less abandoned the will to radically transform our economic and
social arrangements and substituted a few women shinning up the
greasy pole as the best to be hoped for. Wollstonecraft would surely
have despised such failing expectations.
Tomaselli is a good writer and her research is excellent. This is a
thoroughly fascinating book, full of enhancing detail. Maybe she
could turn her attention to Catherine Macaulay, a remarkable woman
who deserves to be much more widely known.
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