The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 21
I discovered it was much more insidious. It seemed that there was a certain problem that had once worried thinkers about the principle of utility. How, critics asked, does one keep utilitarianism from becoming simply self-love? The utilitarians proposed in defense what they called “generalized benevolence,” which is a way of thinking that tends to keep a person’s pleasure in proportion to others’ pleasure. The utilitarians added that if a person’s self-love conflicted with another’s, then the larger the model—the more agents involved in a conflict—the more likely each person was to shape his or her need to conform to the group’s. This was not self-sacrifice. It was cunning self-promotion. Pleasure yourself but do not overdo it, or, as the Greeks said, moderation in all things. The happier everyone is, the happier each will be.
Charity Bentham adapted generalized benevolence into her theory of New Benthamism. At that time I thought her adaptation to be a supplement to the system. I have since learned that it was in fact the linchpin, the absolute center, of New Benthamism. She called her version the Charity Factor. A State should first identify its best interest in a conflict, she said. But then that State should consider other States’ concerns. It was the wise State, the powerful State, that sought its goals with charity toward other States.
Charity Bentham wrote that the Charity Factor has many names: the communist countries called it “friendship gifts”; the capitalist countries called it “foreign aid”; the nonaligned countries called it “mutual assistance”; international treaty organizations such as the United Nations called it “emergency relief.” What I did not understand then, and what makes the Charity Factor so crucial to the whole, is that it is, over the sweep of time, usually more applicable to international conflict than military war, trade war, disarmament, and peace treaties. The Charity Factor is what wise and powerful States do to foolish and weak States. It is foreign policy during the state of affairs called peacetime, when small wars, civil wars, and blood feuds smolder, when the larger wars are said to be mutual suicide. What I understand now is that the Charity Factor is as militant as a battleship; it is as useful to national aggrandizement as conquest and occupation. For the beaten, the lost, the diseased, the exiled, the undone, the Charity Factor is the only hope and the only enemy. I mean to stress the paradox. I have much more to say, in time.
In the Vietnam war, Charity Bentham explained, Washington’s self-love was to maintain Saigon and to defeat Hanoi. When this position was abandoned, Washington acted with charity. It bribed Hanoi, dispatched conciliatory diplomats to Peking and Moscow, dismembered its armed forces, and offered refuge—of sorts—to the defeated Saigon. Washington’s real strength was said by Charity Bentham to lie in its ability to act with charity and to encourage commensurate charity by Hanoi (which failed to offer it rigorously, degrading Saigon, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, alienating all Indochina, blundering into confrontation with Peking and subservience to Moscow) and by Peking and Moscow. Deontological critics of Washington afterward condemned this charity as concessions. They were not that, Charity Bentham argued, rather they were efficient power plays. The wise State understood that the happier other States were, the happier it would be.
Not surprisingly, Charity Bentham criticized traditional worldscale cliques, like the Free World, the Communist Bloc, the Third World, the Arab League, and the numerous subordinate defense organizations, as distorted versions of deontological systems already discredited as prejudicial because they depended upon habit, custom, religion, feelings. More, she said, the politics of confrontation (sometimes called “firearms races”) would always fail to achieve its goal because it did not act with either the principle of utility or the Charity Factor. It was best, she said, for a State to stand alone, to keep its own counsel, and to depend upon the world-scale equivalent of common sense, called “the balance of power.” Charity Bentham concluded that if each State conducted itself with the principle of utility, then the give-and-take of diplomacy would dispose all parties in a conflict to cooperate. There were no genuine allies or foes. There were only States with needs that simply had to promote the Good, with an a priori belief in charity, in order to achieve “the greatest Good.”
I admit I have conflated Charity Bentham’s work, avoiding her biographical essays on the ancient Epicurus, the Enlightenment’s Locke, Voltaire, Hobbes, and Hume, and on the nineteenth century’s Hegel, Comte, and Marx. I have also bypassed her analysis of the New Benthamism inherent in the foreign policy of the twentieth century’s Theodore Roosevelt, Lenin, Neville Chamberlain, Mao, and Charity Bentham’s favorite statesman, Henry Kissinger (who wrote the introduction to The Greatest Good). I have ignored the economic models for her arguments, and her papers discussing the legitimacy of enormous corporations functioning as quasi states, and the need to repeatedly resubmit what at first appear inequitable (painful) situations to ever larger models of utility (e.g., the territorial wars in the Middle East were regionally harmonizing). I give her great due here, though, for her prose was always tactful, cautious, temperate.
Still, with regard to her economic science, which was why she had won her Nobel Prize, I admit I did not then comprehend its worth and cannot now say that there ever was, or is, anything to such wind but smoother ways of rationalizing historically disproportionate ownership of property—why some work too hard and eat too little, why others own children and their future.
For this disinclination, I plead ill education and impatience. After what I have seen and done, it is a matter of merit to