Giving the devil his due
I’ve been reading Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (2011), by John A. Farrell. Here’s a couple excerpts from the first few chapters which particularly spoke to me.
From Chapter 2 (“Chicago”):
George Schilling was a prominent trade unionist when he encountered Darrow at a gathering of freethinkers. The other speakers had gone too far in mocking the ministry of Jesus Christ, and Darrow “jumped in, and with a ten-minute speech defended the carpenter’s son of Judea with such a sympathetic, persuasive voice that I fell in love with him,” Schilling recalled. “We became fast friends.”
Though Darrow admired Christ’s teachings, he doubted his divinity, and was a regular with Schilling at the Secular Union. . . .
Here, Darrow expressed the deterministic philosophy that would guide him all his life. “The worst of all cruel creeds and of all the bloody wrongs inflicted by the past can be found in the barbarous belief that man is a free moral agent,” he said.
. . .
In August 1887, he wrote a letter to his friends at the Democratic Standard in Ashtabula, recounting a visit with the anarchists in jail.
“They are a good looking intelligent lot of men. At first they were not inclined to talk, but after assuring them that I was something of a crank myself . . . they entered freely into conversation,” Darrow reported. “They imagine that wealth is so strong that it controls legislation and elections and that we can only abolish present evils by wiping out capital and starting over new.
“It is very hard for one who, like me, believes that the injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system, to understand how intelligent men can believe that the repeal of all laws can better the world; but this is their doctrine.”
. . . “I hope you will not conclude that I am an Anarchist,” he wrote. “I think their doctrines are wild if their eyes are not.”
At the time, Darrow was a member of a single-tax group inspired by author Henry George, who had initially supported the Haymarket defendants but now was running for political office in New York, and modulating his beliefs. He infuriated Darrow and the others by declining to publish the club’s resolution asking for clemency in his organization’s newspaper. Darrow wrote a stinging letter to The Solidarity, a labor publication in New York, accusing George of cowardice.
From Chapter 4 (“Populist”):
Darrow had been shaken by the state’s relentless insistence on killing Prendergast. Now he watched its army and its judges, deployed at the behest of corporations, quell the collective action of American workingmen. The experience left him angry and alienated. The idealist who had said, when he arrived in Chicago, that the “injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system” began to reconsider.
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Darrow was a determinist. he did not believe in free will, nor good and evil, nor choice. There were no moral absolutes, no truth, and no justice. There was only mercy. “We are all poor, blind creatures bound hand and foot by the invisible chains of heredity and environment, doing pretty much what we have to do in a barbarous and cruel world.”
p. 9.
Darrow was not an anarchist. In the Hobbesian world he saw, something was necessary to ameliorate the cruelty that the powerful would inflict on the powerless. He didn’t much like government because it was too often a vehicle for that cruelty, but it was also the only barrier against it.
1I actually see the logic in determinism, and recognize its arguable connection to a more humane and merciful way of treating others. I did my undergrad philosophy thesis on “the metaphysical nature and cause of moral evil,” from a Thomist perspective, and after all my study, reading and reflection was left with the impression that true moral evil is arguably a logical impossibility. But if by determinism we can’t “blame” the Leopolds and the Loebs we also can’t “blame” the Kids-for-Cash judges and their ilk. More important to me than the debate between determinism and free-will is the issue of the existence of “God,” without whom I believe life is meaningless. It seems to me that determinism is not completely and necessarily incompatible with the existence of “God.”
It’s interesting that Darrow, who at times asserted there are no moral absolutes and no “justice,” also wrote “It is very hard for one who, like me, believes that the injustice of the world can only be remedied through law,” etc.
Although I haven’t gotten very far in the biography, I agree from what I’ve read so far that Darrow did not consciously conceive of himself as an “anarchist.”
2He also didn’t believe in god (at least, not in an upper case version).
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