Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

The second important thing was that she must survive to continue a new work begun. I am sure it was the novel she wanted to write — the novel that was still to come from her. I hope that her adored son, David Reiff, himself a fine writer, will find what she had already written and we shall hold, published, the proof of a marvel of creative force that was Sontag, until the end. We shall not see her like again. But her unique writings exist, as her being.

2005

Signposts to the human condition lie toppled down all over the past, from the stele marking Roman military bases to the rubble of what were once homes, relic of the latest conflict in — you name which country comes to mind.

It’s a given cliché that we have only the past to learn from. At least, the opposition of great thinkers who took boldly contending different directions may have relevance to our human condition in the brave new millennium. For example, Machiavelli or Erasmus, who has most to say to us in the twenty-first century? Each was committed to the situation between the ruler and the ruled; the empowered (to use contemporary jargon) and the disempowerable (to invent my own), which term carries a present condition of powerlessness further.

Machiavelli and Erasmus — are they really dead? In speaking of the perceptions of their own shared era, they could be speaking of ours. The century we’ve only just left behind and the one we’ve only recently begun. No reminder needed of the bloodstains of the twentieth which are appearing afresh on the twenty-first, from Iraq to the Sudan. And every week, new bloodshed elsewhere. The world is as beautiful and as ugly as it was nearly six centuries ago, albeit transformed in many ways by scientific achievements.

I turn first to Machiavelli because he seems to have had no less than prescience of our time when he was analysing human aspirations in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Italy. His title The Prince is simply another nomenclature for the presidents and prime ministers, the dictators, fanatical religious leaders, the families ennobled by ownership of corporations — our cast on the globalised stage. Machiavelli’s premise that ‘the end which every man keeps before him is glory and riches’ is as evident today as it was in his day. His most famous work The Prince is a manual for politicians that proves to have six centuries of shelf-life. His ‘principalities’ stand for the national states of this, our era spanning the twentieth century and its heritage in the twenty-first. He advocates the absolute necessity of war to defend principalities and provides the methodology to gain support of the people who lose their lives in war. The prince, he says, must himself have a warrior image. He must uphold that if the principality is not fully armed it will be despised by other principalities. Machiavelli certainly would have been Bush’s ally in the invasion of Iraq. He would have appreciated the phrase ‘axis of evil’. What would he have thought of nuclear capability? Welcomed it as the ultimate in arms, refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty? With grim subtlety accepted nuclear power as the end of power, in its power of annihilation?

As for the pandemic wars largely fought by mercenaries, going on around us fired by religious differences and fuelled by the resources of oil fields rival principalities want to secure for themselves — he gives timely warning: the prince who relies on mercenaries to shore up his power must know ‘they are ambitious and unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowards before enemies’.

The Machiavellian rules for a prince’s conduct if he is to keep himself in power domestically as well as at war are practised in some of our principalities at present. It is recognised, as he says ‘that how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live’. Yes, but let’s be practical. For a prince to hold his own it is ‘necessary for him to know how to do wrong … for if everything is considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed brings him security and prosperity’.

Machiavelli’s concept of liberalism is not as we understand liberalism politically in terms of freedom of expression and tolerance. His liberalism refers to material possessions, land grants and money buying loyalty to the prince; and surely this concept is followed today while liberal bribes are the recognised process of arms deals brokered by government ministers?

As for statecraft, tackling whether it is better to be loved than feared by the people, he advises ‘every prince ought to be considered clement and not cruel’, but because it is difficult to unite ferocity and love in one prince: ‘it is much safer to be feared than loved when one of either must be dispensed with’.

He was wrong about the either/or: think of the adoring crowds worshipping Hitler at the same time that he was murdering Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Saddam Hussein had his share of adulation. We have new principalities that have hard-won their freedom from colonialist princes in the twentieth century; some now have their Idi Amins both loved and feared at once.

Should we accept for the new princes Machiavelli’s dictum that it is impossible for them to avoid imputation of cruelty, owing to the new states, wherever in our world, being full of dangers threatening their power? This posits that if the world’s tolerance of oppression is immoral, it is also realistic. That’s Machiavelli. What of the prince’s fear of the people who have experienced his salutary cruelty? There’s a precept for that eventuality: ‘Men ought to be well treated or crushed, because they can revenge themselves for lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.’

Seize the people’s incipient revolt by the jugular, with all the powers of decimation in forced population removals, indefinite detention and torture, whose practice the new millennium’s princes have inherited from the twentieth century when they themselves suffered these methods.

Machiavelli still shocks, six centuries later. But when he is at his most machiavellian his unsparing vision of humankind pokes a forefinger into one’s own probable moral ambiguity. It’s not easy to feel innocent of this in relation to public life and the princes one votes for, as one reads: ‘It is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities … but it is very necessary to appear to have them … to appear to have them is useful.’

God’s principality — in Machiavelli’s dealings with his time — is approached much as the secular principalities are. He details the historical machinations of the popes and those who made use of the power of religious authority in worldly struggles for power and wealth. He comments almost jealously, as a statesman in and out of favour of princes, that ‘religious leaders alone have states and do not defend them … subjects and do not rule them … such principalities are secure and happy … being exalted and maintained by God’.

So God is not invoked in Machiavelli’s morality. Only when this may be — Machiavelli’s prime criterion — useful. As when writing of Pope Leo he manages to link the Pope’s power to the secular might of armaments: ‘Pope Leo found the pontificate most powerful and it is to be hoped that if others made it great in arms, he will make it still greater … by his goodness and other virtues.’ A papal post-blessing on the arms trade. We certainly do not have that, but we still have with us protagonists of war who claim God’s or Allah’s blessing for their sides in conflict. God is useful.