Straight to the point

Just like a Shakespearean villain, Trump seems ready to break all bonds, violate all constraints and transgress all boundaries. He is a rogue on the rampage, tearing up contracts and faithless to all around him, appearing to acknowledge no restraint on the pursuit of self-interest, whether his own or what he takes to be that of his nation. What drives him is what drives a hyena: appetite. The word used of him, half-admiringly, is disruptor — half-admiringly because we’re supposed to welcome things being shaken up, if not being shaken into little pieces. For hordes of Americans with a strain of the wild West in their genes, disruption is a positive term, rather as the United States is the only English-speaking nation to use the word “aggressive” approvingly.

Libertarians are those who can only see laws and regulations as restrictive. For them, human life comes down to a simple opposition between will and energy, which are inside you and unequivocally good, and prohibitions, which are out there and unambiguously bad. It may be that we need laws and codes of conduct because we are sinful creatures, but it would be better if we didn’t, just as it would be better if we didn’t need hospitals or graveyards. People like this don’t see laws as helping us to flourish. They overlook the fact that not being mugged or murdered is a pre-condition of living well, as well as the fact that creativity means suppressing certain capacities as well as realising certain others. Those who believe that they should realise a desire simply because it’s authentically theirs are known either as existentialists or adolescents.

When the poet William Blake wrote that it is better to strangle a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, he didn’t mean that we should act out all our instincts, but that those instincts that we shouldn’t act out should be discarded in case they begin to fester. This is one reason why Blake wasn’t a libertarian. Another is that he rejected a simplistic opposition of law and desire because he saw that the law, or power in general, reaches right inside us and shapes what we want. If laws were just external, it wouldn’t be much of a problem to break through them. It’s the fact that we internalise them that makes them so compelling. The most stable societies are those whose citizens discipline themselves.

Praise for the transgressor has a long history. Balzac’s Vautrin is a banker, genius, gay and master criminal. As the 19th century unfolds, we witness a fusion between the businessman, the criminal and the aristocrat. Aristocrats are like criminals because they have a cavalier way with laws and conventions. Those who set the rules of the game see no reason to be bound by them. But they also resemble criminals because there’s something perversely appealing about their devil-may-careness. They allow us timid, law-abiding types to kick vicariously over the traces, which is one reason why Boris Johnson was so popular. Everyone loves a lord, and everyone loves a rogue. Both figures add a touch of glamour to an otherwise lacklustre social order. Walter Scott was a modern-minded, highly civilised Scottish Lowlander, but in his novels he exploits the romance of the pre-modern Highlands, with its hereditary chieftains and heroic battles. For Thomas Carlyle and the young Benjamin Disraeli, middle-class industrial England is a drab, spiritless place dominated by the tedious bourgeois virtues of thrift, prudence, diligence, chastity and the like. It lacks the verve and panache of the traditional aristocracy; so if those qualities are beyond reviving (though there’s a late flowering of them in that Irish mimic of the English nobility, Oscar Wilde), the plan is to construct a new spiritual aristocracy out of the hard-working captains of industry.

The new hero, then, is the entrepreneur. It’s he who has the vision, drive and ambition which were once associated with Hector or Ulysses. In fact, he’s not only a hero but a criminal, since the supreme businessman exhibits all the reckless, lawless behaviour of an anarchist or people trafficker. Vautrin may be a banker, but he is a banker to the Parisian criminal underworld. Innovators and inventors travel into unknown territory where existing laws don’t apply, making up their own rules as they go along. Capitalism, as Marx reminds us, is an inherently transgressive force, perpetually agitating, unmasking, disrupting and dissolving.

It’s an extraordinary paradox. Anarchy is installed at the very heart of middle-class society, which wouldn’t work without it. It’s the bosses who are the true subversives. In a social order which must keep revolutionising itself or die, cops and criminals are part of the same game, as they are in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. This is one reason why by the end of the 19th century writers are fascinated by figures who seem to combine authority and revolt, bourgeois respectability and demonic destructiveness. We are in the age of Jekyll and Hyde, Holmes and Moriarty, or the two clashing personalities within Wilde’s Dorian Gray. From the Romantic poets onwards, the artist himself is increasingly seen as a semi-criminal outcast and outsider, an enemy of middle-class convention who scorns its prudish morals and is doomed by some frightful curse. Nobody had ever thought of Shakespeare or Milton as spiritual dissidents starving in garrets, but from Baudelaire onwards the stereotype became increasingly familiar.

The fiction of Charles Dickens is interesting in this respect. In an early novel like Oliver Twist, there are two antithetical worlds, that of polite society and the criminal underworld of Fagin. The aim of the narrative is to rescue Oliver from the latter sphere and install him in the former, a transition made easier by the fact that though he grows up in a workhouse he speaks impeccable Standard English. The question the novel implicitly poses is which of these worlds is more real. The formal answer is the realm of middle-class respectability; but the artistry of the novel is at odds with its ideology, since there’s no doubt that Fagin’s den, however illicit, has all the life. Nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver if they could have a whisky with Fagin. (The same applies to Milton’s God and his Satan.) Just as the profligate aristocracy is more fun than the pen-pushing clerks and straitlaced solicitors, so the lower classes outdo them in sheer vitality. The problem of the middle-class novel is how to make the middle classes appealing, a peculiarly thankless task.

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Contrast Oliver Twist, however, with Dickens’s later novel, Little Dorrit, which centres on the Marshalsea prison. It’s clear enough that this is what the novel regards as real, in contrast to the two-dimensional world of polite Victorian society. (Dickens lived for a while in a debtors’ prison as a child.) The everyday social world is rooted in crime and exploitation. Merdle, the novel’s mega-businessman, turns out to be a common-or-garden fraudster. (His name reflects the Freudian association between money and merde, just as “Trump” is a quintessentially Dickensian name, its crude monosyllable suggesting not only trumpeting or boasting but trumping in the sense of winning, as well as trumping something up in the sense of inventing falsehoods.) In Great Expectations, crime turns out to lie at the source of wealth, as the hero discovers to his horror that his benefactor is a convict.

If it’s not hard to be an anarchist, it’s partly because no law can be absolute. The claim that it can be — “The law is the law” — is a hollow tautology. Laws can of course be criminal. A soldier who is ordered to shoot up a whole village of innocent civilians is not only allowed to disobey, but is obliged to. Laws aren’t absolute because there’s something which is in a way more fundamental than they are, namely the reasons for which we obey them. It’s also clear that there are whole stretches of social life which aren’t law-bound. As Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, tennis is a game, and like all games has rules, but there’s no rule about how high you should bounce the ball.

Besides, all laws or rules need interpreting. They don’t carry their meaning on their faces. To imagine that any piece of writing can do this is the mistake of Christian fundamentalism. Some of these interpretations are vastly implausible, as when Portia rescues Antonio from death in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by pointing out to the court that Shylock’s contract allows him to take a pound of Antonio’s flesh but says nothing about spilling his blood. This is just a cheap trick by the Venetian ruling class to get one of its members off the legal hook. Portia is simply pulling a fast one over a contemptible Jew. There is indeed no mention of blood in Shylock’s contract, but neither is there any mention of how long the knife should be, or whether Antonio should be dressed in frilly knickerbockers when Shylock wields it against him. All language works by inference and implication, tacit agreements and taken-for-granted understandings, and legal language is no exception. No text can spell out all its conceivable meanings, which will change in any case depending on what context you read it in.

The entrepreneur as hero, genius, transgressor, disruptor: one name for this in our own time is Elon Musk, but for all his fetishism of the new he is the fruit of a heritage which goes a long way back. One reason why that tradition has reappeared today is the media. In the society of the screen, politicians and businessmen need something of the glamour and charisma which was once the mark of the aristocracy. If, like Trump, they aren’t quite up to that, then they can always try making a similar impact by being their mean, brutal, foul-mouthed selves. It’s no accident that the President’s political career began on television. Let’s hope it ends somewhere like the Marshalsea.

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