[Blogger’s note: I may or may not be able to post tomorrow. I’ll be having cataract surgery, and experience suggests I may not be able to read a computer screen for the rest of the day. Thank you for understanding.]
But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world. Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all: they take them at their word.
I make it a practice to read Andrew Klavan’s non-fiction books at least twice. (And there’s more than a good chance I’ll get the audiobook of The Kingdom of Cain to listen to while I drive to Minot for Høstfest this fall.) So I sat down with it again yesterday, and found it just as compelling as on the first reading. Klavan offers new insights on good, evil, and art. And sometimes – I flatter myself – we think on parallel lines.
When I first reviewed The Kingdom of Cain, I mentioned two famous murders Klavan describes, which have gone on to inspire numerous works of imagination – the case of Ed Gein (who inspired “Psycho” and string of slasher movies), and the case of the original murderer, Cain.
But I neglected to cite one murder he spends considerable time on, one which – though pretty sordid in its own right – has had a remarkably prestigious literary progeny. That is the case of Pierre Francois Lacenaire, a pretentious Parisian thief who, with an accomplice, murdered a con man and his bedridden mother in 1834, to steal money that wasn’t there. It was far from the perfect crime – the two murderers were quickly arrested by the “stupid” police and put on trial for their lives.
But for Lacenaire, this development provided the one thing he’d always wanted – celebrity. He was a handsome man, and now he assumed the role of Byronic hero. He was, according to himself, a genius chained down by poverty and the injustices of society. He had struck back against the universe like some Titan out of Greek mythology. The public ate it up. Ladies loved him. Lacenaire went to the guillotine, but he went a famous man.
Lacenaire, Klavan says, was treading in the footsteps of the Marquis de Sade, whom he considers the only really self-consistent atheist philosopher. If there is no God, Sade reasoned, there is nothing in the world but power. Since one can’t be certain that other people even exist, and since one can’t feel anyone else’s pain, the only moral course is to increase one’s own personal power. Greater power gives one the scope to increase one’s pleasure, the only good we can know. One ought to do everything one can to increase one’s power, so one can force others to serve one’s pleasure. Any talk of love or compassion is unscientific sentiment, the excuse of the weak and cowardly.
Fyodor Dostoevsky recognized this logic – and rejected it. He had suffered imprisonment, had almost been executed, and had found God in suffering. So he wrote Crime and Punishment, one of the world’s great novels, based on Lacenaire’s crime, but refuting its logic.
But Friederich Nietzsche recognized the argument, too. And he agreed that God was dead – that we had killed God. Therefore, we now faced the terrible duty of becoming gods ourselves, so that we could forge a new, stronger morality.
Nietzsche despised antisemites. But his sister, who became his literary executor, was a violent hater of Jews. She worked to popularize her late brother’s writings among the rising Nazi Party.
And we know what fruit that bore.
That sequence is just part of the whole narrative of The Kingdom of Cain. The book is not only an essay on art, but a work of theodicy – an effort to explain how there can be evil if God is good. The answer to that, Klavan argues, will not be found in reason, but in art. Because art speaks in a more compelling language, offering not arguments, but a loving Face, for those with eyes to see.
Anyway, The Kingdom of Cain is a great book. It may prove a classic. It has my highest recommendation.
