Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on ‘The Illusion of Strong Men and Nations’)

“It is the illusion of strong men and nations that power is the basis of security. There is some justification for the illusion, for, in so far as human society is governed by physical force, obvious strength, whether it be military or economic, may be counted upon not only to defeat the actual foe, but to reduce the potential foe to the impotence of fear. The strongest bully in a gang is rarely challenged to prove his prowess, and a nation which possesses obvious economic or military advantages may indulge in idiosyncrasies and commit errors which would prove fatal to less favored nations…..Power is dangerous both to those who wield it and to those who are affected by it. It gives those who wield it a false sense of security which absolves them of the necessity of thinking carefully upon the issues involved in their action.”— American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Perils of American Power,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1932, reprinted in The American Idea: The Best of “The Atlantic Monthly” (2007)

Niebuhr wrote this passage not long into the Age of Dictators that ensued in Europe after the bloodshed of World War I and the resulting socioeconomic collapse. The truth he propounded is emerging ever more strongly now, in another period when strongmen learn that the omnipotence of mortals, even those with seemingly absolute power, is an illusion.

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Power and Politics)

“All kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good energy and bad; power of mind with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion with the exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day background;—what was surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis. The longer the drought lasts the more is the atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented. And in morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism in the father is a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On the other hand, conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.” — American essayist-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Power,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas More, With Advice on Dealing With Leaders)

“You are now entered into the service of a most noble, wise, and liberal prince. If you will follow my poor advice, you shall, in your counsel giving unto his Grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do. For if the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him."—English statesman, lawyer, author, and Roman Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), with advice to Henry VIII’s new adviser Thomas Cromwell, quoted by William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More (1626)

An initial instinct of a historian, let alone an inveterate skeptic, would be to question possible bias in the source of this quote: a biography of Sir Thomas More by son-in-law William Roper.

But this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that More would say, demonstrating loyalty to King Henry VIII while increasingly conscious that the monarch, in his single-minded pursuit of a divorce from Catherine of Aragon to wed Anne Boleyn, was anything but a “most noble, wise, and liberal prince.”

It was also carefully phrased wisdom for Thomas Cromwell, the rising power in the nation because of his support of the king in Parliament. It reflected how More—resigning as Lord Chancellor and desiring to be left alone in retirement—knew that anything negative he said would be reported immediately to Henry—more likely than not, by Cromwell himself.

With Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novel trilogy and its PBS adaptation, Cromwell has emerged as a revisionist hero of sorts, with More depicted as a religious fanatic bent on persecuting heretics.

To be sure, More did prosecute heretics. But, for all his energy, intelligence, and administrative ability, Cromwell was not only no improvement but worse than More, torturing and putting to death Catholics who opposed Henry’s break from Rome (a rupture motivated by dynastic and libidinal reasons rather than by theology). 

In transforming this ruthless minister into a sympathetic figure, Mantel engineered one of the more successful historical hijackings in recent memory.

(See my prior post on how Simon Schama, Eamon Duffy, and other historians persuasively argue that, despite Mantel’s considerable skill as a novelist, “Just because More hardly qualifies as a perfect man does not make Cromwell a remotely good one.”)

Moreover, while More abstained from the perks of power, Cromwell relished them—not just from all the offices and titles that Henry bestowed on him (for a time), but also from confiscations related to the dissolution of Roman Catholic monasteries. Self-interest—the acquisition of power and wealth—guided his actions.

In the end, did it really profit him? More’s warning proved prophetic. In his anxiety to do the king’s bidding, Cromwell met with disaster, as—a couple of the king’s wives later—he arranged a match with Anne of Cleves, a woman the monarch found so homely that he had his counselor beheaded.

Current events should make those who look kindly on Cromwell think again on this Machiavellian counselor who pioneered the modern police state. Appeasing a capricious leader with a voracious appetite for power (“I run the country and the world”) offers only initial benefits.

Conscience may or may not be dead among his enablers. But they will continually dread the possibility that, as More warned, it may no longer be possible to persuade or “rule” their mad leader about what constitutes his real interest anymore—and he may even turn on them in the end.

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on ‘Abuse of Greatness’)

Brutus: “Th' abuse of greatness is when it disjoins/Remorse from power.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar (1599)

The image accompanying this post shows James Mason as Brutus in the 1953 film adaptation of Julius Caesar.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Man Who Would Be King,’ on What a Whiff of Power Can Do)

[Two soldiers, dismissed from Her Majesty’s service in India, have traveled to remote Kafiristan, where they conquer opposition and set themselves up as overlords. One, Danny, has not only had himself crowned king and masqueraded as a god, but now also desires to take a wife so he can establish a dynasty, breaking an agreement with friend Peachy that they would abstain from sex and alcohol.)

Peachy Carnehan [played by Michael Caine]: “What about the contract?”

Danny Dravot [played by Sean Connery]: “The contract only lasted until such time as we was kings, and king I've been these months past! The first king here since Alexander, the first to wear his crown in twenty-two hundred and...”

Peachy: “Fourteen.”

Danny: “Fourteen years! Him... and now me! They call me his son and I am... in spirit anyway. It's a hugeous responsibility. The bridge we're building, it's only the first of many. They'll tie the country together. A nation I shall make of it, with an anthem and a flag. I shall treat on equal terms the viceroy and other kings and princes. When I've accomplished what I set out to do, I'll stand one day before the queen. Not kneel, mind you, but stand like an equal. And she'll say: ‘I'd like you to accept the Order of the Garter as a mark of my esteem, cousin.’ She'll pin it on me herself. It's big. I tell you, it's big!”

Peachy: “And I tell you, you need a physic!”— The Man Who Would Be King (1975), screenplay by John Huston and Gladys Hill, based on the short story by Rudyard Kipling, directed by John Huston

Decades after seeing the film for the first time, I caught up again with this great adventure tale early last night on TCM. Once again, it did not disappoint.

The tales and poetry of Rudyard Kipling have rightfully been criticized for their racism, but in this story he warned of the dangers facing the greatest empire in the world in the Victorian Era: power and the loss of moral authority over distant subjects (what political scientist Joseph Nye calls “soft power”).

I don’t know how many Americans watching this magnificent buddy-movie adaptation by John Huston applied these themes to their own country in 1975, the year they lost Vietnam. But Kipling’s cautionary horror story should resound even more loudly in our contemporary moment.

If power can intoxicate the likes of Danny Dravot—a vagabond still trying to live up to the moral code of a soldier—think how much more it can affect the judgment of a leader with a lifetime of defying laws and mores, but now with increasingly fewer institutional checks on his authority and ambition to expand his imperial reach.

And how much greater will be the downfall of the current successors to Danny and Peachy, the comrade-in-arms who realizes too late the madness of the man he had unstintingly supported?

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Margery Kempe, Speaking Truth to Clerical and Temporal Power)

“Sir, I also hear it said that you are a wicked man. And if you are as wicked as people say, you will never get to heaven, unless you amend while you are here.”—English medieval housewife, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438), answering the Archbishop of York (who had just told her “I hear it said that you are a very wicked woman”), in The Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1436), translated by B. A. Windeatt (1985)

The climax of the Oscar-nominated movie Conclave occurs when Sister Agnes (played by Isabella Rossellini) makes a crucial revelation before the College of Cardinals. “Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears,” she says.

The scene, like the larger movie, is a challenge to the patriarchy that has dominated the Roman Catholic Church for centuries—and, in its way, an echo of the above earlier pointed rebuke by Margery Kempe, who wrote (in the third person) what is believed to be the earliest surviving autobiography in English.

The current century has found the Church in a rolling crisis, its most tumultuous since the Reformation—its religious orders depopulating, its churches emptying, its coffers drained by clerical abuse settlements, and its counsels often unheeded. 

Even aside from a failure to take women into its hierarchy, the Church is finally paying the price for the alternating carping and obliviousness that its worst male leaders have displayed toward the females in their pews, even as they covered up the worst offenses of each other.

At the next papal conclave, however soon that occurs, the assembled cardinals will do far more than pick their next leader. They will also choose the fundamental direction of the Church, which, for its own survival, must be a belated attempt to do what Margery Kempe urged centuries ago: “amend while you are here.”

More widely, Kempe's rejoinder applies to the patriarchy that exists in governments around the world. Substitute "nasty woman" for "wicked woman" and the archbishop's fit of pique will sound all too familiar to citizens of the United States these last eight years.

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Will, Power, and Appetite)

“Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Troilus and Cressida (1609)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on How Envy and Fear Produce Hatred)

“The irresponsibility which power creates corrupts judgment and accentuates the natural tendency toward selfish conduct. Meanwhile the special privileges which the powerful always claim for themselves excite the envy, as their power prompts the fear, of those who deal with them. When envy and fear are compounded they produce hatred. If this hatred in the hearts of the weak is frustrated for a time by their impotence, it usually united them into a confederacy of power in the end.”—American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Perils of American Power,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1932, reprinted in The American Idea: The Best of “The Atlantic Monthly” (2007)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Game of Thrones,’ on Power, ‘A Shadow on the Wall’)

“Power is a curious thing, my lord…Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick, a shadow on the wall. And, a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” —Lord Varys (played by Conleth Hill), in Game of Thrones, Season 2, Episode 3, “What Is Dead May Never Die,” original air date Apr. 15, 2012, teleplay by Bryan Cogman, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire," directed by Alik Sakharov

Quote of the Day (Adam McKay, on Why ‘Politics’ Is a Misused Word)

“I think ‘politics’ is a misused word. Like the language that Wall Street used around subprime, there's an agenda to convince people this stuff is boring, they don't need to pay attention. We should call it ‘power.’” —Screenwriter-director Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice), quoted in Danny Leigh, “Without President,” The Financial Times, Jan. 12-13, 2019

The image accompanying this post shows Adam McKay at the 2019 Berlinale (i.e., the Berlin International Film Festival), was taken Feb. 11, 2019, by Harald Krichel.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Game of Thrones,’ on How Olenna Survived ‘A Great Many Clever Men’)

"I’ve known a great many clever men. I’ve outlived them all. You know why? I ignored them."— Queen of Thorns Olenna Tyrell (played by Diana Rigg), in Game of Thrones, Season 7, Episode 2, “Stormborn,” original air date July 23, 2017, teleplay by Bryan Cogman, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire," directed by Mark Mylod

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, Praying for ‘Prudence in Proportion to Our Power’)

“Grant us prudence in proportion to our power,
Wisdom in proportion to our science,
Humaneness in proportion to our wealth and might.
And bless our earnest will to help all races and peoples
to travel, in friendship with us,
Along the road to justice, liberty and lasting peace.” —American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), “Praying for Peace,” in A Thomas Merton Reader, edited by Thomas P. McDonnell (1996)

Quote of the Day (Sarah Gordon, on the ‘Overweening Power’ Behind the Last Recession)

“The failures which led to the [2008 financial] crisis were more of behaviour and character than of financial instruments or processes. The tales of casual greed and of ordinary people misled and deceived by irresponsible bankers are familiar. But there was one element to the crisis that I have seen repeated in many different forms: overweening power. In the business world this breeds all sorts of crises, from the personal to the systemic.”— Impact Investing Institute Chief Executive—and former business journalist—Sarah Gordon, “Making Sense of the City,” Financial Times, March 9-10, 2019

As it was a dozen years ago, as outlined by Ms. Gordon, so it is now—except that the “overweening power” was exercised not by a group of “irresponsible bankers” but by one individual, placed far higher.

In August 2019, Alex Shephard of The New Republic accurately predicted what might happen if a recession arrived during the last year of the President’s first term (though he missed the particular circumstance—COVID-19): “Not a disciplined, unified response to a crisis from this White House; instead, an unhinged president issuing feeble edicts from his bed, many of which could cause a sputtering economy to spiral.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘To Play the King,’ on Power and Loyalty)

[Prime Minister Francis Urquhart has just asked pollster Sarah Harding to become his “slave”—i.e., a political adviser whose brain he can “plunder” when needed, at his constant beck and call.]

Sarah [played by Kitty Aldridge]: “I’m interested in looking at power close-up. I want to understand the way it works.”

Francis [played by Ian Richardson]: “You know how it works, Sarah. It tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Sarah [disturbed by what she’s just heard, but trying to shake it off]: “There’s no such thing as absolute power.”

Francis [slowly, with emphasis]: “If you work for me, you’ll give me your absolute allegiance.”— To Play the King (Part 2 of the BBC House of Cards trilogy), Episode 1, original air date Nov. 21, 1993, teleplay by Andrew Davies, based on the novel by Michael Dobbs, directed by Paul Seed

While going back to the original British House of Cards from the 1990s, I have been struck by similarities with events on this side of the Atlantic in the last several years: notably, the divisions between rich and poor, the creation of scapegoats for unrest, and the lengths to which leaders will go to secure the highest office in the land.

But, given the repeated news reports during this time of a leader who demands loyalty to him personally rather than to country, this particular exchange brought me up short.

Quote of the Day (John F. Kennedy, on the Contribution of ‘The Men Who Question Power’)

“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35^th President of the United States (1917-1963), in his last delivered speech, “Remarks at Amherst College,” Oct. 26, 1963

Quote of the Day (Producer Peter Guber, on ‘Power and Sex’ in Movies)

“This business, movies, is all about two things—power and sex. And guess what, they're the same thing.”—Producer Peter Guber (Batman, Rain Man), quoted in Tina Brown, diary entry for June 6, 1989, in The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 (2017)

For decades, Hollywood execs pushed Guber’s neat equation to its natural limit. While most of America came to see rape as less an act of sex than an assertion of power, Hollywood continued to operate under a different set of rules, as old as the proverbial “casting couch.”

We’re about to see if the guilty verdict this week against Harvey Weinstein (pictured when he was riding high) is going to alter matters—if it actually represents “the biggest seismic change that we have ever had” that Oscar winner Julianne Moore thought she had witnessed last October. 

Don’t bet the ranch on it; the forces of reaction are awfully powerful. But maybe, after all this time, something fundamental has changed.

Bully baby that he is, Weinstein complained about the injustice of his indictment, saying his “work had been forgotten” after he had done so much for women. These last several days, that ludicrous statement may have turned out to be true after all—but only because it required a monster as repulsive as Weinstein to bring Americans face to face with the consequences of what they had excused for far decades.     

   

(The photo accompanying this post was taken by David Shankbone of Harvey Weinstein attending the 2010 Time 100 Gala. Seven years later, the magazine would feature Weinstein on its cover, in far darker hues, with the tag line, “Producer. Predator. Pariah.”)                               

Quote of the Day (Shakespeare’s Richard III, on Political Ambition)

“Why then I do but dream on sovereignty,

Like one that stands upon a promontory

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,

Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way:

So do I wish the crown, being so far off,

And so I chide the means that keeps me from it,

And so, I say, I'll cut the causes off,

Flattering me with impossibilities,

My eye's too quick, my heart o'erweens too much,

Unless my hand and strength could equal them.”—Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III), in English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI, Part 3 (1591)

Several months ago, bored during a TV commercial break, I switched channels and came across, on a PBS station, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses. I watched transfixed for about a half hour. Nearly 40 years after first encountering this multitude of characters on the printed page, the pitch-dark political vision of William Shakespeare began to make sense to me. I resolved to watch the whole thing on DVD as soon as I had the chance. This past week, I finally did.

If you want to understand much of the creative inspiration for Game of Thrones, with its rival houses plunging entire kingdoms into division, chaos and violence, you can start here. (GOT novelist George R.R. Martin admitted as much in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine’s Mikal Gilmore.)

At the same time, I can’t help but think that this nine-hour BBC miniseries, combining Richard III with its less well-known predecessors, the three parts of Henry VI, took much of its look—notably, its stress on location shooting and bloody battle scenes—from the long-running HBO series. (And this was only the second half of this TV treatment of Shakespeare’s English history plays—the first half covered Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V.)

In any case, Dominic Cook and Sam Mendes—director and executive producer, respectively, of The Hollow Crown—have made me look at Shakespeare’s “Wars of the Roses” tetralogy in a way I never imagined when I took a college course on The Bard nearly 40 years ago. The course was an academic sprint that felt like a marathon: all of the playwright’s 37 plays, plus his poetry, compressed into two semesters. Some plays received extensive treatment; others, barely a mention. I only took the first semester, on Shakespeare’s early career. I can’t say I missed taking the other semester.

Among the works shortchanged in all of this were the Henry VI plays. I didn’t appreciate either their rich language or their complex, compelling characters until I saw the magic that Cook conjured with the help of his all-star British cast, which included Hugh Bonneville, Sophie Okonedo, Judi Dench and Tom Sturridge.

Oh, yes: and Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III (in the image accompanying this post). Though Shakespeare named this early portion of his play cycle after Henry VI, this last of the Lancaster monarchs increasingly is overshadowed by the hunchbacked villain.

From the moment he first appears onscreen, with his character’s misshapen form blocking out the sun as he lurches through a doorway, Cumberbatch (beloved by thousands of mystery fans as Sherlock) convincingly depicts Richard as a demon of the dark, desperate to fill his psychic void with increasingly bold grasps for power.

In the passage quoted here, Richard is all too aware of the obstacles blocking him from the English throne, which at this point appears “so far off” (including, at this point, the possibility that his brother, King Edward IV, and his wife Lady Anne Grey might produce heirs). Previously ruthless but at least indefatigable and brave in battle fighting on behalf of his family, the House of York, he now reveals that he hopes to seize the throne himself—even if that involves the removal of his brothers and Edward’s young children.

Energy and audacity, channeled constructively, can lead to accomplishment and fame. But through Richard (whose soliloquys continually invite us into his schemes), Shakespeare shows how those qualities can be warped by the unscrupulous pursuit and retention of power.

Along with being a master psychologist, Shakespeare also unravels the conditions that set the table for authoritarians: vacillating and/or innocent current leaders (such as King Henry), people in the orbit of a usurper who are gulled by his brazen lies, despite themselves (Anne Neville, who agrees to wed Richard), and the enablers (Hastings, Catesby, and Buckingham) who mistakenly believe they can aid his rise without falling victim to his machinations themselves.

What stands between Richard and his current counterparts around the world are a series of restraints on power, which can indeed, as he notes, look as formidable as a sea. That makes all the more astonishing his resolve to “lade [i.e., drain] it dry to have his way.” It’s a frightening metaphor for a process that leaves the security and liberty of a nation as void as its would-be authoritarian’s own emotional and spiritual resources.

As Abraham Lincoln scholar Douglas L. Wilson’s Winter 2012 article in The American Scholar noted, America’s 16^th President was a fan of Richard III. He thoroughly absorbed its lesson that a leader’s energy had to be tempered by integrity and compassion in using power. If he ever got around to seeing or watching Shakespeare (itself a doubtful proposition), Lincoln’s current GOP successor in the White House long since forgot that message.