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At the moment a number of my proteges are writing papers on John Stuart Mill, which prompted me to have another look at this philosopher, not having read anything by him since I speed-read On Liberty about fifteen years ago (as an English teacher, I'm not obliged, in theory, to know anything about the subjects of my student's papers, but in practice you can't do without it).
When I'm forced to put a label to my political ideas, I usually describe myself as a Libertarian Socialist, which should put me way to the left of a liberal wuss like Mill, but when it comes down to it, I find we're usually on the same wavelength. For those who haven't read Mill (which these days means almost everyone) I should explain that he was a 19th century English philosopher, and one of the two great champions of Utilitarianism (the other being Jeremy Bentham, a weirdo who had a pig as a pet and got his corpse embalmed).
Utilitarianism (not to be confused with Unitarianism, which I nearly typed by accident) is the principle that "good" consists of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." This sounds like a nice idea, but in practice creates some awkward problems. For example, if it would make the vast majority of people happier to deny civil liberties to Catholics or put the poor in workhouses (which in the 19th century it certainly did), then that would be good.
Mill, of course, was not such a simplistic Utilitarian. In the long term, he says, people's happiness can only be achieved through granting equal rights to all. But this is where the problems start, and where, in my middle-class Guardian-reading soul, I start to identify with him. On the one hand you believe, as any decent person does, that people should be as free as possible. Then you look around at the majority of people who are, let's face it, ignorant, stupid and ugly, and wonder in horror what they would do with this freedom. Then you feel guilty for being elitist ... and so on.
Freedom for many people means the freedom to have ten children, not feed them properly and beat the bejesus out of them. It means the freedom to vegetate in front of the TV then talk loudly in the pub about how "those Black bastards should get on the first banana boat back to Africa". It means the freedom to yell "Tits out for the lads!" at any passing woman, or practice female circumcision. It means the freedom to convert children to religious cults advocating mass suicide, or shoot the first Injun that sets foot on "your" land. Of course these freedoms reduce other people's freedom, but try telling that to them.
As a consequence, it was a comfort to find John Stuart Mill, the champion of freedom, equality and women's rights, endorsing policies I only entertain in my worst eco-techno-fascist moods. For example, Mill states that if the economy slumps to the extent that workers cannot support their families, the State has the right to temporarily outlaw all marriages (in those days it would not have occurred to many people that marriage is by no means necessary for reproduction). The Turks have a nice saying: "My freedom ends where yours begins," but who is to decide where that line should be drawn? To me, it seems obvious that anyone who has more than two children is, very indirectly, killing people, since overpopulation causes starvation, and it's no excuse to say that since in your part of the world there is enough food to feed your children, because your children are being fed by cash crops produced by Third World peasants who can't feed their own families. Unfortunately, this argument only seems to have an effect on people who have less than three children (Eco-techno-fascist note: has anyone else noticed the hypocrisy of those parents-of-ten who say that people who choose not to have children are being "selfish", while ignoring the fact that our taxes pay for the health care and education of their offspring?).
Mill also has a few peculiarities for which he can be forgiven. For example, he assumed that while women should in theory have the right to go out and work, in practice the vast majority would prefer to stay at home and look after their husbands and children. These days we know that this is not the case, but it would have been hard to predict for a man living amongst 19th century upper-class bimbos. You have to take people's ideas in the context of their time. As an extreme example, I remember some Greek philosopher (I think it was Epictetus) saying in defence of the simple life that a few acres of land and a few slaves was enough for happiness. In those days, questioning slavery was like questioning the free market in the 1990's - a few people did it, but everyone else thought they were loopy.
So where do I stand on the divide between those who cry "Liberty or death!" and those who say, to quote Judge Dredd, "Democracy is too important to be left to the people"? I really don't know, but, bringing in one of my other contradictions, while I don't usually believe that God will judge us, I can't help feeling that if God judges me, He/She will judge me more kindly for allowing people too much freedom than too little.
I therefore feel a little hypocritical to have responded to the accusation that Bill Clinton had raped a campaign worker while he was governor of Arkansas by laughing my head off (in my defence I should say that it was my female boss who set me off). Obviously, rape is about as serious a crime as you can get - often worse than murder, since I can think of good reasons to murder someone, but not to rape anyone. Nevertheless, I had to laugh, despite my feminist conscience.
Somehow it seems just a little fishy that this person was supposedly raped by Bill Clinton, then only remembers it after he has been through an impeachment hearing. Maybe I'm being unduly cynical, but I can't help wondering if this is a last-ditch attempt by the American Right to do what even Congress, the Senate and Kenneth Starr failed to do. Maybe the idea is that the American public might be able to forgive a president with a teensy trouser problem, but they won't stomach rape. Maybe there is no right-wing conspiracy, and Ms. Broaddrick is only after publicity and the possibility of an out-of-court settlement. Maybe Clinton really did rape her and should rot in Hell - I don't know.
The happy days when I used to be able to judge who was right and who was wrong on the basis of their gender and political opinion have long gone. I find myself in the unenviable position of defending Bill Clinton, who I find only slightly less slimy than Tony Blair, against those who are honestly evil. As some 1930's poet (W.H. Auden?) said:
'Tis ours, and civilisation's curse,
To defend the bad against the worse.
The difficult thing is deciding who's bad, and who's worse. Identifying good peple is easy - my wife, my parents, my friends, and most of my students. Unfortunately, these aren't the people in the headlines. Alex Comfort (who is better known for writing The Joy of Sex) once wrote a brilliant book called Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State. This claims that in any hierarchy, the people who get to the top are usually the people with the ability and the desire to get to the top, and these are exactly the kind of people you don't want to have running your lives. If you have to have someone in authority over you, would you really want that person to be someone who wanted to have authority over you? Obviously not, but our "democratic" system ensures this. Clinton is an Alpha-male, the same kind of guy who amongst our hominid ancestors would have been thumping his chest and humping every female in sight. Not much has changed.