Our next contribution to the Go Set a Watchman blog symposium is by Matthew Crow, who is a history professor at Hobart and William Smith College, where he writes and teaches on the history of political thought:
"You balanced the equities, didn't you? I remember the rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down by item on a brief--nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder...
Why didn't you tell me the difference between justice and justice, and right and right? Why didn't you?" - Jean Louise Finch of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman
One of the things I appreciated the most about the first season of the TV show Wolf Hall was the portrayal of Thomas More. For a lapsed Episcopalian who won the Thomas More award at his Catholic high school, a realistic picture of the powerful Chancellor was a necessary corrective to the sanctimonious A Man for All Seasons. And yet, there More sits, telling Cromwell he could not surrender, to do so would be to give up the ground he stood on, and that ground itself was Thomas More, and if they wanted to get that they were going to have to take it. Despite his elaborately casuistic moral reasoning with himself and Parliament, in the end the law and its nominal protections lie prostrate, and judgment would be based on and delivered onto nothing but the discretion of conscience.
Harper Lee's two books dramatize something similar about the trouble legalism has with the inscrutability of motive, conscience, and judgment, and how the history of the law intersects, if it does, with what we might call the history of justice. In this post, I want to explore these distinct dramatizations and suggest a reading of them that might be useful for thinking about law and literature and history in the present.
I am in the process of imagining a future book project on the idea of equity in political thought, and it seems to be a scholarly consensus that the meaning of equity shifts fundamentally from a developed jurisprudence of private law to a constitutional principle, and does so as a result of the Civil Rights revolution. Brown v. Board of Education made private law principles into public law, so the argument goes: many of the advocates and judges involved in the decision were confused about the distinction, and in turn so are we. I am not sure this shift is as radical as it is taken to be; in high legal and political theory, at least, as the work of Ernest Weinrib demonstrates, the idea of corrective justice has always had profound implications for the legitimacy of law and the political order. Aristotle understood this, and so did Thomas Hobbes, who is unique (I am confirmed in thinking after a wonderful conversation at the recent British Legal History Conference) in explicitly not observing a distinction between private and public law at all. If sovereignty is really sovereignty, the power of judgment in one cannot be separated from the power of judgment in the other. At a level we don't like to talk about at parties, Hobbes says, judicial power is executive power, or better yet, the core of what it means to be a sovereign is the exercise of legal judgment, or what gets configured in early modern equity as the conscience of the crown. This is the power that More exercised, and in a sense it is the power that gets exercised on him.
Atticus Finch, his daughter, and his colleagues of the Maycomb citizen's council are wrestling with the Leviathan of the modern state and the dictates of its conscience, the Warren court. The moral weight of history itself is brought to bear on the lives of the characters, and in setting the story up the way that she does Harper Lee constructs a stage, or better yet, a case, or series of cases, where matters of state and history get played out in daily life. The link between the daily lives of individuals and supposedly abstract matters of constitutional thought is explicit, and considerations of equity are everywhere in the book. Racial justice in Jean Louise's own troubled reasoning over the course of the narrative is an obvious example, and her indictment of her father's activities and his failure to square justice with justice another. In several instances, punishments and reactions are discussed in consideration of motive, conscience, or circumstance, illustrating equitable discretion's presence at any point of any particular event (think of the grave robber who is let off, or even Jean Louise's consideration of Calpurnia's grandson's accident). The storyline of To Kill a Mockingbird centers around this conscientious exercise of discretion, too, in the games of position and fairness played by the children as much as in the decision of Atticus to take Tom Robinson's case, how he explains that decision to his children, as a matter of conscience, and in the completely extralegal decision he makes with Mr. Tate to hide the circumstances of the death of Bob Ewell. As in the Robinson case itself in Mockingbird, nowhere is law working as it should. Everything that happens around the law happens around people's differing senses of what is right, what is necessary, what they fear and hate, what they love, and what their conscience tells them.
The ultimate symbol of this in Watchman is Dr. Finch, Uncle Jack, who is a medical doctor but in the symbolic universe of the story is a doctor of the church, ironically so, given his mild anti-Catholicism. His discussions with Jean Louise anchor the story much more so than her discussion with her father, and what her uncle delivers is a moral defense of participating in something he and she both know is unjust. In a real sense, he offers a casuistic narrative of Atticus and of Southern identity, a narrative he expects the judge, his niece, to acknowledge as a moral and historical reality. Whatever we might think of his version of history, the goal, he later says, is to free Jean Louise's own conscience from its total investment in that of her father. Justice, he suggests, is way too important to let someone else define and decide for you. And just as the South experiences its growing pains of coming into modernity, needing to find its own way to justice, it is unhealthy for Jean Louise as much as it is for Alabama to have to rely on a father figure to direct that process from above. Jean Louise does not fully accept this narrative, nor should she, but she finds herself acting in its logic all the same. The book dramatizes the limits as much as the agency of individual conscience and action. That justice is in the balance of these closings and openings, and that in the course of human events their conscience takes people in all sorts of directions is the nature of the beast.
I have found much of the commentary on the publication of the book ridiculous. It is not a sequel, and the attempt to turn it into one as a way of humbling Atticus, or Lee for that matter, strikes me as entirely missing the point of what it is we are to do with this book in our hands. Certainly, the new book paints an illustrative portrait of the dark side of gradualist liberalism and its paternalist engines, of the very idea of being "colorblind," and I think that is all for the good. We get a different perspective, that of the story of an adult woman thinking about history and justice and identity, and not that of the heart and mind of a little girl watching her father living a life that she comes to understand as the same at home as it is in public: good, right, and honest. Its the shattering of that perception that gets dramatized in Watchman, and its the best argument the adult Jean Louise has in response to her uncle and father: you would never treat someone this way, how has it become conceptually possible to treat people this way? On this readjusted, face-to-face link between private and public, Jean Louise goes on to take her stand. As for Atticus, as much as for any other character, we are dealing again with different perceptions of different histories. In Watchman, Atticus gets Tom acquitted, and that seems crucial to me. This is a different trajectory, almost a different direction of time. Like in the movie Interstellar, a father and a daughter interact with each other through cracks and half-seen images of different outcomes and possibilities, different instantiations, and where we get deposited in these intersecting lines of history is not entirely up to us, but what judgments and actions we make when we land is. That we must think, and judge, and act in such uncertain circumstances is, as Hannah Arendt has it, the human condition. It may in fact be the case that we only want there to be a tension between Atticus the advocate and Atticus the segregationist, because that saves something, but all the same here we have Atticus, in Mockingbird, putting his body between Tom Robinson and a lynch mob, and saying this far have you come, but no farther. If you want more from me, you will have to take it.
In a world where the father can no longer be your watchman, where god is dead and so is the king, in the "fatherless world" that historian Emma Rothschild describes as the condition of Enlightenment thinking about society, in this world, where Ta-Nehisi Coates must tell his son and everyone else that it has not been given to him to make everything okay, responsibility for justice falls not on him or you or me alone but on us. This problem of who is responsible, of who is watching, of taking the broken inheritances of our politics and history up as the responsibility of living and watching with and for each other, will not go away anytime soon. It will be there all night, and it will be there when we wake up in the morning.
-- Matthew Crow
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