Fall of A Titan of Literature

Max Yalden yesterday in the National Post accused the British of John Stuart Mill's time of being "openly racist, sexist and anti-Semitic." He was ably answered in the Letters section today by Robert Martin of Orleans who pointed out the British of the time ended slavery, gave full rights to non-conformists, had a Jewish Prime Minister and woman Head of State. It reminded me of one of my articles from earlier in the year, which I am reprinting below.

One never wants to discover that an icon of contemporary literature, a role model in compassion, erudition and characterization, has feet of clay. This is especially so when the icon in question is the much loved author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith.

His principle character, Mma Precious Ramotsw, has more common sense and a better understanding of human nature than any English heroine since Elizabeth Bennett. Likewise, in his new series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, his Scottish heroine, Isabel Dalhousie, is the epitome of human understanding and learning, as indeed she should be as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics in Edinburgh.

Before I go on, let me clear up one thing, the relationship between the author and his subject. In some fiction the author provides his principal characters with complete and varied personae quite different from his own. There are evil men with twisted histories, featherbrained women who learn lessons from harsh reality, wise sages, and innocent youth; in short, a real rag bag of human characters. Take Charles Dickens, or for that matter Shakespeare. You would have a fine time divining either author from their characters. This is not the case with Jane Austin or Alexander McCall Smith.

These two authors live through their principal characters; they express themselves with charm, wit and wisdom in the words and thoughts of the women they are clearly using as avatars for themselves. What I am saying is that when we hear Isabel Dalhousie declaim on Scottish poetry, architecture or history, we are actually hearing McCall Smith. Of this there can be no doubt.

What gives Isabel the necessary gravitas is our knowledge, obtained from the flyleaf of the book and his website, that McCall Smith is currently Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, vice-chairman of the Human Genetics Commission of the UK, the chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee, and a member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO. In short, he’s no dummy, and neither then is Isabel Dalhousie.

It was thus in a haze of admiration that I began wafting through Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, confident that new vistas would be revealed, characters developed and issues resolved, safe, as it were, in the hands of a master. This happy mood ended promptly on page 32. Isabel is talking with her niece Cat about a present for an Italian wedding Cat is planning to attend. Here’s the exchange:

“I was thinking about a wedding present,” said Cat. “I suppose that they have everything they need, as everybody does these days.”

Much of it ill-gotten Isabel said to herself, remembering the conversation about the gangster father. Though so much was ill-gotten, when one came to think about it. How did anybody become rich other than by exploiting others? And even those who did not exploit could enjoy the fruits of exploitation. Rich Western societies were wealthy because of imperialism, which had been a form of theft, and now the poor in those rich societies strove to obtain more generous payments from the state which could only pay them because of the position of relative economic advantage which past plunder had set up. Living just living, it seemed, meant that one had to participate in a crime.

I was awake to the skunk in this particular woodpile because of an essay I’d read the previous day by Bruce Bawer called ‘The Peace Racket’ in the Summer 2007 edition of City Journal. The essay rips into the so-called ‘peace centres’ and ‘peace studies’ in Western universities which he says are “opposed to every value that the West stands for – liberty, free markets, individualism – and despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values”.

What these people teach remains faithful to (Norwegian professor Johan) Galtung’s anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. The account of capitalism in David Barash and Charles Webel’s widely used 2002 textbook Peace and Conflict Studies leans heavily on Lenin, who “maintained that only revolution –not reform—could undo capitalism’s tendency towards imperialism and thence to war,” and on Galtung, who helpfully revised Lenin’s theories to account for America’s “indirect” imperialism. Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it’s because others are rich. They are taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly are responsible for world poverty.

As you can see, the argument McCall Smith has Isabel state is pure Marxist-Leninism which has at its core the belief that the world economy is a zero-sum game; I win, you lose. That argument is demonstrably false. Perhaps the easiest examples are the enormous economic gains of the ‘Asian Tigers’ of South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. All these countries, employing capitalist theory, have seen a tremendous improvement in their productivity and lifestyle with no diminution of anyone else’s economy.

Even larger have been the advances of China and India, again based on capitalist theory and participation in the world economy. Their incredible economic achievements in the past two decades, felt by over two Billion of the world’s inhabitants, have not been at anyone else’s expense. Rather, they and the other Asian countries mentioned, have vastly expanded the total economic pie for the world population. This proven value of capitalism is why Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union overthrew communism. They tried it and it failed. The Chinese tried it and it failed. Now they’re trying capitalism and it’s succeeding.

This good news has apparently not reached the University of Edinburgh, the mind of Alexander McCall Smith, or the thoughts of his principal character, Isabel Dalhousie.

Economics aside, there is a larger, even more obvious, error on page 43 when Isobel launches into a diatribe against Britain.

And then there were the British who behaved extremely badly in so many parts of the world. There was the woeful story of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginals and so many other instances of cruelty and theft under the bright protection of the Union Jack. When would British history books face up to the appalling British contribution to slavery, which involved the Arabs, too, and numerous Africans (who were not just on the receiving end)? We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it.

‘Appalling British contribution to slavery?’ Wait a minute. It was Britain, under the leadership of William Wilberforce, which abolished slavery with the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and then proceeded to enforce the ban around the world using the might of the Royal Navy. It was Britain that ended piracy on the high seas. It was Britain that ended the appalling Hindu practice of suttee, where a widow cast herself (or was thrown against her will) on the funeral pyre of her husband. It was Britain that ended cannibalism in the South Pacific. It was Britain that brought peace to the Indian subcontinent, previously a hornet’s nest of sectarian strife. The British record in extending human rights and ending dreadful and horrific religious and superstitious crimes is second to none. To argue otherwise, to suggest that ‘we are all as bad as one another,’ is nothing more than the worst form of moral relativism.

The irony here is that only a few pages earlier, on page seven; Isabel is described as someone who knows how to make moral distinctions.

This made her profoundly egalitarian, though not in the non-discriminating sense of many contemporary egalitarians, who sometimes ignore the real moral differences between people (good and evil are not the same, Isabel would say). She felt uncomfortable with moral relativists and their penchant for non-judgmentalism. But of course we must be judgmental, she said, when there is something to be judged.

So on page seven there are moral differences between people and on page 43 we are all as bad as one another. This would be a deplorable position for anyone to take, in that it shows a major error in logic, a profound misunderstanding of the facts and an inability to make moral distinctions, however it’s absolutely unacceptable coming from a law professor (McCall Smith) or his character (editor of a professional journal on applied ethics).

Let me conclude with a delicious irony; one quite as sweet as the chocolate in the book’s title. We learn, early on, the real source of Isabel’s wealth is a bequest left to her by her mother, a share (one presumes a large one) in an American enterprise, the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company. In short, she’s rich through some aspect of American capitalism.

And so too is Alexander McCall Smith, who, one presumes, will receive a handsome dividend himself from the sale of his books to an adoring and admiring American public.

Bravo sir; you have attacked the system that feeds you, you have insulted your countrymen, you are guilty of moral relativism, you are illogical in your arguments, you are unaware of world economics and you have failed in a simple matter of facts.

As I said at the beginning, one never wants to discover that an icon of contemporary literature, a role model in compassion, erudition and characterization, has feet of clay.