Peace in the Middle East was impossible—until it wasn’t. Donald Trump started to traverse that impassable domain in his first term with the Abraham Accords. Then, just a few days ago, he managed another impossible passage when he brokered peace between the irreconcilable forces of Israel and Hamas. Almost as impressive, Trump solicited and received the support of Muslim countries from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Amazing.
How did he do it? Well, in part, it was “the art of the deal” in practice. But stepping back, Trump’s forceful yet patient endeavor on behalf of peace reminded me of Walter Bagehot’s insights in his neglected masterpiece, Physics and Politics. First published in 1872, this curious book is partly a contribution to political history and partly an exploration of the often forgotten truism that not all things are possible at all times and in all places. If political liberty is a precious possession, Bagehot saw, it is forged in a long development of civilization, much of which is distinctly, and necessarily, illiberal.
The notion that human beings—and, by analogy, advanced human societies—had developed out of more primitive forms had been in the air for decades by the time Bagehot began Physics and Politics. Evolution—often called “descent with modification” or simply “development” in the early nineteenth century—was an Enlightenment idea par excellence. Darwin’s theories about the place of natural selection in biological evolution, published in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, gave the idea of evolution new scientific authority. But the basic idea of evolution—minus the explanatory motor of natural selection, which Darwin adopted from Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population (first published in 1798)—was part of the mental furniture of the age. Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, was one of several books on the subject that influenced Bagehot. The crudities of “Social Darwinism,” put forward most famously in the writings and speeches of Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley, were a natural outgrowth of these ideas.
The long subtitle of Physics and Politics—“Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society”—certainly suggests that it belongs to that unpromising genre of muscular Darwinism. As always with Bagehot, however, things are not as straightforward as they at first seem. To be sure, by “physics” Bagehot meant “science,” more particularly “Darwinism.” He approvingly quoted various works by Spencer and Huxley, and indeed, such passages are among the most dated in the book. He referred on and off to the “transmitted nerve element” and other Lamarckian museum pieces (Gregor Mendel’s recent discoveries in what we have come to call genetics were unknown to Bagehot and Darwin alike). But Bagehot early on made it clear that in invoking the idea of natural selection, he was merely “searching out and following up an analogy.” As he put it at the end of his last chapter, the great theme of Physics and Politics concerns “the political prerequisites of progress, and especially of early progress.” How far Bagehot’s use of the term “natural selection” is from Darwin’s is shown by the way he links its operation to the operation of Providence—an agency conspicuously missing from any orthodox Darwinian account of evolution.
“By a law of which we know no reason,” Bagehot wrote, “but which is among the first by which Providence guides and governs the world, there is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to differ from their progenitors. The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork—part resemblance, part contrast.”
Bagehot puts forward two main ideas. The first concerns the enormous difficulty our forefathers must have faced in establishing any political order or rule of law whatsoever. “What this rule is,” Bagehot remarks, “does not matter so much. A good rule is better than a bad one, but any rule is better than none.” His second idea concerns the similarly difficult task that later ages always face in advancing beyond the order that made their own existence possible.
The first step—inaugurating law, custom, and habit—is the hardest, but history proper begins with the next step: “What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting fixed law, but of getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing . . . a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.”
In his second chapter, “The Use of Conflict,” Bagehot sums up “the strict dilemma of early society.”
Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not. And then they themselves were caught in their own yoke. The customary discipline, which could only be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation which are the principle of progress.
Bagehot traces the vicissitudes of this dialectic through various stages from “The Preliminary Age”—that is, the rude time of prehistory when “the strongest killed the weakest as they could”—to modern times and “The Age of Discussion,” the age to which Donald Trump is beckoning the warring tribes of the Middle East. Along the way, Bagehot discusses the civilizing—or at least order-inducing—effects of violence (“The Use of Conflict”) and the hard road any population faces in forging a national identity (“Nation-Making”). The perennial problem—and the admonitory theme of Physics and Politics—is that man, the strongest and smartest of the animals, “was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself.” Consequently, “history is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
There is a great deal in Physics and Politics to shock readers inclined to a pacific view of human development or a politically correct understanding of life. About philanthropy in general, Bagehot shared the suspicions of many nineteenth-century conservatives:
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do much by rapid action—that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings.
Bagehot was even more controversial in other areas. “Let us consider,” he writes in an infamous passage toward the end of Physics and Politics,
in what sense a village of English colonists is superior to a tribe of Australian natives who roam about them. Indisputably in one, and that a main sense, they are superior. They can beat the Australians in war when they like; they can take from them anything they like, and kill any of them they choose. As a rule, in all the outlying and uncontested districts of the world, the aboriginal native lies at the mercy of the intruding European. Nor is this all. Indisputably in the English village there are more means of happiness, a greater accumulation of the instruments of enjoyment, than in the Australian tribe. The English have all manner of books, utensils, and machines which the others do not use, value, or understand.
In fact, the importance of military prowess in binding a population into a society is a leitmotif in Physics and Politics. In “The Use of Conflict,” Bagehot notes that the progress of the military art is the “most conspicuous, I was about to say the most showy,” fact in human history. “Civilization begins,” he writes, “because the beginning of civilization is a military advantage.” Moreover, Bagehot is undeceived about the exigencies that face a nation at war. “So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism—despotism during the campaign—is indispensable. Macaulay justly said that many an army has prospered under a bad commander, but no army has ever prospered under a ‘debating society.’”
The point is, Bagehot argues, that “war both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, and the habit of discipline.” In other words, war and the marital virtues it requires make certain valuable things possible—an idea that many will find shocking. Even more shocking is that Bagehot makes a similar argument about slavery. “Refinement,” he writes, “is only possible when leisure is possible; and slavery first makes it possible.” “Slavery, too, has a bad name in the later world, and very justly. We connect it with gangs in chains, with laws that keep men ignorant, and with laws that hinder families. But the evils that we have endured from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to, or make us forget, the great services that slavery rendered in early ages.” Perhaps the only thing more difficult than accepting this contention is coming up with convincing arguments against it.
All such “hard” observations constitute, as it were, the strophe of Bagehot’s argument. The antistrophe, the opposite movement—the movement toward which Physics and Politics as a whole tends—is that “the whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards.” Slavery is one such institution. Might the martial sensibility be one as well?
Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings. The mistake of military ethics is to exaggerate the conception of discipline, and so to present the moral force of the will in a barer form than it ever ought to take. Military morals can direct the axe to cut down the tree, but it knows nothing of the quiet force by which the forest grows.
Savages, Bagehot writes with cool dispatch, prefer “short spasms of greedy pleasure to mild and equable enjoyment.” Thus it is that progress in civilization is measured by increasing deliberateness. Government—the institutional distillate of progress in civilization—is valuable not only because it facilitates action but also, and increasingly, because it retards it:
If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it, and have agreed on it. If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.
It is naturally “the age of discussion”—the age of “slow” government and political liberty—that Bagehot ultimately extols in Physics and Politics. But he is ever at pains to remind his readers of the harsh prerequisites of civilization, which include war, slavery, and gross inequity. Government by discussion, Bagehot is quick to acknowledge, is “a principal organ for improving mankind.” At the same time, he insists that “it is a plant of singular delicacy.”
The question of how best to nurture this delicate plant is Bagehot’s final problem. Part of the answer is in facing up to the unpalatable realities about power that make civilization possible. The other part lies in embracing what Bagehot calls “animated moderation,” that “union of life with measure, of spirit with reasonableness,” which assures that discussion will continue without descending into violence or anarchy. It seems like a small thing. But then, achieved order always does—until it is lost.
I rather doubt that Donald Trump has Physics and Politics on his bedside table. But it pleases me to think that he would agree with Bagehot that “government by discussion” is a noble goal worth striving for. It is, at any rate, the goal towards which his long and painstaking labors on behalf of peace have tended.