In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, one sees moral indignation bursting out of newspaper pages and social media posts.
One is also regaled with obscene gloating and shrieks of joy, but let’s disregard those for the time being. Let’s just concentrate on what the good people are saying.
Let’s also agree with them: the hideous creature who committed that crime should follow his victim to the celestial crossroads, where their paths will diverge. Kirk will go up to join the angels, whereas his murderer will be evenly browned on all sides by the fires of hell.
However, inductive thinking takes some commentators from this particular crime to a general, absolutist statement: any assassination is wrong. Is it though? This is a genuine question, not an expression of doubt.
Imagine for the sake of argument that some far-sighted, trigger-happy chap killed both Lenin and Trotsky in September, 1917. It’s plausible that a Bolshevik coup wouldn’t have happened the next month: those two energumens were the principal engines of that evil event.
We are none of us determinists, are we? We don’t think that, if things happen, they were bound to happen. So yes, what Lenin called a revolutionary situation did exist in Russia. But with him and the other ghoul gone, it’s possible that situation would have fizzled out.
I’ll spare you a list of tragedies that would have been prevented, the exact count of the millions of lives that would have been saved, wars that would have been averted. So is assassination really wrong? Any assassination?
Or look at what happened in Munich on 9 November, 1923. During the Beer Hall Putsch, the police killed 15 rampaging Nazis. Hitler, along with Göring, Hess and Rosenberg, was in the front row of the marchers, but he survived.
What if he hadn’t? Again, it’s conceivable that the Nazis wouldn’t have risen to power, which would have spared the world untold miseries. That’s another blow delivered to the conviction that all assassinations are wrong. That absolute turns out to be interlaced with relativism.
Suddenly we are entering the area of what used to be called ‘Hottentot morality’, a term that was coined in the 17th century with deplorable disregard for the future placing of racism at the top of the deadly sins. The concept is usually encapsulated in the phrase: “If he steals my cow, that’s bad. If I steal his cow, that’s good.”
Once we find ourselves in this territory, God only knows where we’ll end up. For example, Boris Johnson was, and Sadiq Khan is, the mayor of London. Would you have been equally outraged had both of them found themselves on the receiving end of an assassin’s bullet?
Yes, I know, you’d be outraged in both cases. But equally? Don’t lie to me, your mother taught you to tell the truth. Admit your response would be at least partly tinged with your feelings about those gentlemen – I know mine would be.
Moving on, pacifists insist that any war is evil, and fair enough: most wars are. However, some wars, evil though they may be, prevent a greater evil. In that case they are just, and Augustine settled that point 1,600-odd years ago.
Relativism again breaks into the beautiful edifice of a priori certainty, forcing us to make a judgement, something today’s ethos insists we shouldn’t do. ‘Judgemental’ and ‘opinionated’ are among the worst things to be, almost as bad as ‘racist’ and ‘transphobe’.
Yet the very people who use those words that way express opinions every day and pass judgement every minute. Theirs, however, come down from a high moral ground, which spares them the branding iron of ‘judgemental’ and ‘opinionated’. It’s that relativism again, following us everywhere we go.
Even such beautiful concepts as freedom stop working if unqualified. There the English language offers an essential nuance absent in many other languages, such as French.
We distinguish between freedom and liberty, with the former being more inward, spiritual and the latter more outward, political. Freedom is more or less God-given; liberty is more or less a matter of consent.
But absolutes don’t apply to either: Penelope’s freedom to play the piano at home may interfere with our neighbours’ freedom to have a nap whenever they feel like one. People’s freedom to gridlock Westminster to register a lawful protest impinges on my freedom to drive to Covent Garden. Everyone’s democratic liberty to vote may destroy the country by giving it Keir Starmer.
An equitable accommodation, which is to say compromise, must be found in each case. But it takes subjective judgement to decide what is or isn’t equitable, so there goes another absolute, relativised right out of the window.
How do we make judgements, especially moral ones? What if my idea of morality is different from yours, yours from theirs, and theirs from anything known this side of hell?
How do we decide? More important, how do we throw all those private moralities into a cauldron, boil them together and produce a homogeneous and reasonably palatable mix called civilised society?
I know only one answer to this question, although I’m happy to entertain any others. All those relativist judgements must be traceable back to something immutable and unmovable. RG Collingwood called it the ‘absolute presupposition’, I have referred to it as the ‘metaphysical premise’, but we both meant the same thing: religious faith.
If we each practise our little relativities and at the same time judge their morality, that’s like the same man acting as both player and referee in a football match. If rules don’t come down from a single moral authority superior to us, it’s children’s time and there are no rules. Read Lord of the Flies to see what happens next.
Our judgements are all at least latently comparative. When rating the morality of a person, we judge him against a certain unquestionable standard and find him either wanting or in agreement. That doesn’t mean we’ll all reach the same conclusion; we may not.
But at least we’ll have a subject for sensible discussion. We may argue, but only about interpretation, not the criteria.
At the end of the argument, we may agree or disagree. In either case, we may remain friendly enough to have a drink together (mine is whisky, in case you’re wondering). More to the point, we’ll be able to squeeze our individualities into the framework of a corporate entity called society.
If, however, we have no such absolute authority, we’ll have not freedom but license, not liberty but anarchy, not society but an aggregate of atomised individuals illustrating Hobbes’s idea about war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes).
That may not happen instantly or even quickly. But if our relativities aren’t all originally built on the foundation of something all or most of us accept as absolute truth, it will happen eventually. That’s how civilisations end, and it’s arrogant in the extreme to think that ours is any different.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Collingwood write ‘absolute presupposition’?
You are right! What a stupid typo — senility must be setting in.
The ‘what if’ speculations of history are of course endless, and purely illogical. A chess match to a real war. Assassinating Trotzky, Lenin, in September 2017; and Hitler in November 1923, would have been a crime, and morally wrong. They were innocent still (at least of murder), and free to become or not become the mass murdering ghouls that they would eventually be. More speculation: Perhaps, conversely, some no name or two have perished in camp, or from a criminal’s bullet, who otherwise would have already reduced the world ‘to radioactive dust’. Or perhaps Robinson himself misses, Kirk becomes US president eventually, and mayhap helps Putin achieve his expansionist dreams.
What about assassinating Lenin in 1918 and Hitler in 1934? In any case, both men had spelled out what they’d in power long before they acquired it. Anyone could have predicted the general thrust, if not every detail. Would it still have been morally wrong to kill the preemptively?
Ideally, I would that they could be resuscitated, in aeternum, to face a firing squad, in aeternum.
‘ I saw Hitler once more at close range. This was in the autumn of 1932, as the fever began to take hold of Germany. Friedrich von Mücke and I were dining at the Osteria Bavaria in Munich when Hitler entered and crossed the restaurant to the table next to ours—alone, by the way, and without his usual bodyguard. There he sat, now a power among the Germans … say, felt himself observed by us, and critically examined, and as a result became uncomfortable. His face took on the sullen expression of a minor bureaucrat who has ventured into a place which he would not generally enter, but now that he is there demands for his good money ‘that he be served and treated every bit as well as the fine gentleman over there …’
There he sat, a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismarck who would certainly have had to go to bed for four weeks if he had ever tried to eat just one of Bismarck’s breakfasts….
I had driven into town, and since at that time, September 1932, the streets were already quite unsafe, I had a loaded revolver with me. In the almost deserted restaurant, I could easily have shot him. If I had had an inkling of the role this piece of filth was to play, and of the years of suffering he was to make us endure, I would have done it without a second thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip, and did not shoot.
It would have done no good in any case: in the councils of the Highest, our martyrdom had already been decided. If Hitler at that point had been taken and tied to railroad tracks, the train would have been derailed before it got to him. But when his hour strikes, the end will come down upon his head from every possible direction, and from places, even, that were never thought of. There are many rumours of attempts to assassinate him. The attempts fail, and they will continue to fail. For years (and especially in this land of successful demons) it has seemed that God is asleep. But, to quote a Russian proverb:
‘When God wills it, even a broom can shoot!’’
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
Absolutely brilliant. Thank you for reminding me about one of my favourite books. I suppose I’m rather less of a determinist than he was, but his points are good — and beautifully expressed. I don’t think any book on the subject has ever moved me more (Klemperer’s is a distant second).