Weakness of Will

 A friend of mine a few months back was taking me on a FaceTime tour of his room. He showed me all the library books piled up on a shelf that he had not returned in years.

"If you add up all those late fees," I said, "it must be in the thousands of dollars!"

My friend explained that San Francisco had abolished overdue penalties at libraries. 

I—a good progressive soldier—immediately pivoted into defending this. "Well," I said, "that's better than people going into debt to the city for years-old penalty fees—or worse, having bench warrants out for your arrest for an unpaid fine." 

I started in on my usual spiel about the coercive arm of the state. Of the "gore-dripping robes of authority" (Godwin). About how—as Anatole France put it—"whatever is written on the tables of the Law, is written in letters of blood."

My friend was having none of it. "Maybe if they had actually fined me, it would have made me a better person," he said. "There would be real consequences for my actions. Maybe it would have done justice to my spiritual nature and capacity for moral choice."

My friend was half-joking. But Charles Baudelaire appears to have embraced the same principle in complete earnestness. 

"If," he writes in the Intimate Journals (Isherwood trans.), "when a man has fallen into habits of idleness, of day-dreaming and of sloth, of putting off his most important duties continually until the morrow, another man were to wake him up one morning with heavy blows of a whip and were to whip him unmercifully, until he who was unable to work for pleasure worked now for fear—would not that man, the chastiser, be his benefactor and truest friend?"

Baudelaire in this passage plainly saw himself as the idle man in need of an external motivator. He complains unceasingly in the Journals of being unable to complete any of his projects; of procrastination; of that ailment he calls the "monk's disease—weakness of will." 

"I have never yet tasted the pleasure of an accomplished design," he whines. 

And his final entry is a prayer to various intercessors "that they may give me the necessary strength to fulfil all my appointed tasks and that they may grant my mother a sufficient span of life in which to enjoy my transformation."

Baudelaire, then, yearns for the whip that will rouse him from his own lethargy and win him long-withheld parental approval. But he does not hesitate to draw political generalizations from his own weakness. 

"[I]n politics," he writes, "the real saint is he who chastises and massacres the People, for the good of the People."

One is familiar from the pages of history and one's own life with the character type Baudelaire embodies. He is that person that Hazlitt so well diagnosed and despised in one of his essays: the one whose character "consists in a want of fortitude to bear pain or to undergo fatigue, however urgent the occasion [...] who cannot lift up a little finger to save themselves from ruin, nor give up the smallest indulgence for the sake of any other person."

It is the same personality archetype Philip Larkin attributed to Francis Thompson—in a deliciously witty review essay on the poet—who could not will himself out of bed. 

Larkin notes that Thompson's parents were actually even willing to support his indolence with a regular allowance. "But to collect it," Larkin notes, "would have required conscious exercise of the will, a recognition of reality, a degree of self-discipline. Thompson preferred to starve." 

Larkin adds—in words that would have applied equally well to Baudelaire—"He just wanted to escape crushing responsibilities like getting up in the morning." 

We have all met or read about such people, I say—but it wasn't until Baudelaire's journal that I realized how close the connection is between this personality structure and the temptation of reactionary politics and obscurantist religion. 

Coleridge too suffered from the same weakness of will and tendency to delay projects; and we see how his political and religious views moved in the same direction that Baudelaire's later would.

Francis Thompson too fought his procrastination by retreating into religious mysticism. "It was Thompson's attempt to get himself out of bed," as Larkin mordantly wrote; "It did not work."

It is sometimes assumed that Baudelaire's right-wing politics were intended as a paradox or a final act of irony. How could this diabolist—this invoker of Satan and sin—claim simultaneously to be a Catholic and monarchist? 

Must not his tongue have been in his cheek when he wrote things like: "Revolutionary maxim: the throne and the altar"?

Hardly. If Baudelaire was indeed being paradoxical, after all—it was no more so than his master, De Maistre, whom Baudelaire quotes as a decisive influence on his worldview. 

Like De Maistre, Baudelaire defends the death penalty as a mystical sacrifice. He objects (rightly) to torture as a means of getting the truth out of unwilling witnesses—but he seems to approve of it if practiced for its own sake (for "spiritual ends," as he puts it). 

True, Baudelaire, despite his professed Catholicism, entertains the possibility that God is a fiction. "Even though God did not exist," he writes, "Religion would be none the less holy and divine."

But this too has its precedent in De Maistre. Referring to the dogmas of religion, the latter writes: "If they are not true, they are good[.]" (Lebrun trans.)

And Charles Maurras—the later ultra-nationalist persecutor of Dreyfus and architect of the French extreme right—would go on to provide another example of the non-believing Catholic—the atheist who saw in religion a worthy Noble Lie for the masses. 

But why exactly should this dithering and dilatory character type that William Hazlitt described, and that Baudelaire or Coleridge embodied, tend so often to find their way to far-right politics? 

The passage we already quoted from Baudelaire above gives our best explanation. Experiencing weakness and sloth themselves, they project it onto humanity—and most especially, on the working class. They long for the whip-hand of authority to rain blows on themselves, in order to get them into motion—and so they assume that's what's best for all humanity. 

"The rest [of humanity] are born for the whip," Baudelaire writes. They "may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable [...]" 

Far from fearing those "gore-dripping robes of authority," as the rest of us rightly would—people of this character type have a profound nostalgia for them. 

They want "daddy" to come home and give them a good "spanking," as Tucker Carlson notoriously put it shortly before the 2024 election. 

They want the city to keep imposing more and more fines on them, to rouse them from their lethargy. They want that whip, that "chastiser," to drive them out of the bed each morning—and so they have no reluctance to impose the whip on their neighbors too.

We have experienced plenty, lord knows, of the tyranny of the strong. But God save us from what Oscar Wilde called the "tyranny of the weak"!