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Transcript: Dr. Xine Yao – Queer Aesthetics and the Panoptic Gaze

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Hello and welcome to The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. Jeremy Bentham, the 18^th and 19^th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London, the first institution in England to admit students without imposing a religious test. Bentham is widely credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces. He put it simply in his advice: create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant to the ethical problems of the 21^st century. Today I’m talking to Dr. Xine Yao, an award-winning author and academic, to talk about queer aesthetics and the idea of the panoptic gaze.

XINE YAO:

Hello! I’m Dr. Xine Yao, and I’m Associate Professor in American Literature to 1900 at UCL, where I’m also the co-Director of qUCL, the Queer Studies network. I also happen to be here dressed fabulously today, and that is actually related to my work because as someone who works in literary studies I believe that aesthetics are incredibly important; that meaning is bound up in the literary, the aesthetic, the cultural, and the political – that these are not separate from each other.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I mean I’m quite interested in that from a Benthamic point of view, because Bentham thought there was no separate realm for aesthetics – that it just comes down to pleasure. So the people who claim that, “Oh, you know, I have good taste and therefore I can recognise that this is an excellent painting, whereas the plebeians don’t have that sense of taste”. Bentham said what matters is whether it gives you pleasure or not, and there’s no special realm of aesthetics which certain people are connected to and others aren’t. That’s Bentham’s take on it, so I’d be interested to hear what your view is and how it links into the research you’re doing on feeling.

XINE YAO:

It’s something I feel very strongly about, because when I teach it’s not just about preparing my hand outs, preparing my PowerPoints – I also try to choose a fantastic outfit, I try to choose a fantastic makeup look. Because I see this all as important – that I understand the aesthetic dimensions of how I’m presenting myself pedagogically as actually being part of my students’ learning experience and how receptive they are, and to help them think that the sort of close reading that they have about literary detail, about rhyme, about the narrator – it is also the sort of attention that everything in everyday life also warrants, in terms of careful attention and the way that things are brought together and constructed. And this is something that I’m generally really interested in my work in navigating, for instance, I do some work thinking about the way that gender expression and fashion serve to legitimate, but also sometimes to delegitimate, people’s sexual identity, gender identity.

I look at a particular cluster of novels that were published in the 1880s, that were specifically the sub-genre of the Woman Doctor novel. Now, the Woman Doctor novel was sort of this combination of the Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age story, with the traditional marriage plot and it becomes like: will the woman doctor either come of age and choose a profession, or will she choose marriage and heterosexuality. And this is where we have so many queer possibilities, and indeed in the historical record we have people like, say, James Berry or many other gender non-conforming, sexually non-conforming people. And in the novels, in particular, so many of these novels do depict characters that people do read as being queer in different ways.  But there’s this sort of funny thing about, because of the expectations of how you’re supposed to present yourself and express yourself, there’s always this sort of feeling of like, well, if you’re not properly womanly, then you’re more likely to be queer, but also then you’re more likely to be a better woman doctor. And so there’s essentially this weird inverse relationship in these novels that, OK, if you’re more feminine, that means you’re not gonna be a good doctor, but then you’ll be more womanly and therefore more straight-acting, so to speak.

Now, in this sort of binary, where you’re sort of damned if you do one thing and damned if you don’t do the other, there is this one novel that I’m really fascinated by, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, called Dr Zay. You may have never heard of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps before, but this is the reason why you should. She actually wrote the second best-selling novel in America in the nineteenth century, after ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. Now famously of course when we think about nineteenth century American literature, we think of Whitman, we think of Hawthorne, and we think of Melville – now, Hawthorne famously complained that there was this (quote) “damned mob of scribbling women” because there were so many women that we don’t know today that way outsold all these guys. And so Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was one such woman. Her book, ‘The Gates Ajar’, after the Civil War, was again one of the best-sellers of the nineteenth century, and she was both critically acclaimed, as well as incredibly popular. And one of her novels, ‘Dr Zay’, has a woman doctor, who dresses fabulously – she has all of these wonderful descriptions about her dresses – and she’s an amazing doctor, but her hapless patient, this unemployed lawyer, is in love with her and keeps on trying to persuade her that she should actually be in love with him, when she’s just like taking care of him, and it leads to all of these hilarious scenarios where she’s like, “No, I’m just, you know, I’m just your doctor, I’m looking after you, it’s not because I love you” and he’s like, “No but I do love you, and also you’re so beautiful, you’re so beautifully dressed, how can you not love me?” Um, and it sort of goes back and forth and it’s so interesting that there’s so many ways that they talk about Zay for instance, she likes being called “Doctor” because then she doesn’t have to choose a gendered title. Like, she doesn’t have to choose “Miss”, “Mrs”, “Ms” – and indeed, that’s why he initially, the character, thinks that his doctor is a man, and then when he wakes up he’s like, oh, my doctor is a woman, what! And she’s like, actually I like that, that way that you don’t know what my gender is up until that point. And the narrator gives us all these things about how, you know, she acts more like a man, she seems so unwomanly, and et cetera et cetera, she even like alludes at one point to the fact that when he says he would love to have her as his wife, she says, well, I would love to have a wife too, and indeed one time I had a woman who wanted to be part of my life that way, but I felt like I couldn’t let her even though I would have wanted to. But at the end, she still ends up with him! Now, why that really interests me is precisely, like, it shows all of these sort of queer possibilities, possibly non-binary possibilities for this character, and also that she’s incredibly feminine at the same time. But there’s this way that her femininity is seen as undermining her potential bisexuality or potential queerness. And I think this a thing that, well, personally I feel very strongly about today, as someone who is very feminine but who also identifies as queer, that there’s this expectation of the way that you’re supposed to subvert patriarchy in the right way, so to speak. And of course, those of us who are gender non-conforming in other ways, will face different forms of punishment but at the same time I’d say that being a feminine person, as a woman, is then also not a capitulation to patriarchy. Just because I love to wear glitter, because I love to wear dresses, doesn’t mean I’m less feminist or less queer. There’s ways of occupying even what seems to be traditional femininity in ways that can be subversive and can be political – and so that’s a way that for me the political and the aesthetic come together in everyday life.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

We’ll be right back after the break.

VOICE OVER:

[The Greatest Good’s first documentary is out on YouTube now. Learn more about Bentham, and discover the hidden history of the Vere Street Coterie from leading academics at UCL. Click the link in our podcast description or search YouTube for “The Greatest Good: Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty.”]

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I think you’ve done some work on the gaze?

XINE YAO:

Yes

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

The Panoptic Gaze. How do you feel about that in relation to what you’ve just said about you, your femininity, your queerness? Do you feel like you’re being gazed at much of the time, and if so, does that influence your research?

XINE YAO:

Oh, definitely. I mean, when I started at UCL at the end of 2018, I was the first person of colour in my department so out of necessity I knew that I occupy visual space differently, so to speak. And I think that there’s this type of hyper-awareness that one has moving in the world when you can be the only one in the room, or one of very few in the room…The privilege of feeling un-self-conscious in the public eye is one that’s very unevenly distributed, I guess. Um, and so some of my work looks at the construction of the Panoptic racial gaze in the nineteenth century, and so I do see that Bentham is so useful for giving us a way of thinking about the construction of the gaze. I’m particularly interested in the way that pseudo sciences – well, now called pseudo sciences, race sciences – help to train the everyday gaze and thinking that everyone has access to seemingly universal knowledge of understanding other people’s traits, which also meant forms of racial difference, and the way that becomes naturalised as somehow being common sense, and as natural as sight itself. And at the same time, ways of pushing back against that, and how does one have to navigate the gaze, manipulate the gaze: when you know people are gonna look at you, how do you use that to your advantage? Or like try to subvert it in various ways? Or remove yourself, also, from it?

And so one way that I explore this in my research is in my recent book, where I theorise the racial and sexual politics of what I call “unfeeling” in the nineteenth century. And my archive is particularly nineteenth century American literature, and I look at writings having to do with some of the really big issues of the day, like abolition, decolonisation, women’s rights, immigration – not in the usual way that we think about compelling the right type of feelings compelled by literature towards the right type of politics, but also the type of radical refusals to give into the normative demands for how people were supposed to express themselves, and also to receive the feelings of others. And I do so not in the usual way that we think about the power imbalance of who gets to be feeling and who is unfeeling – so often when we think about, thinking about justice, we think about those in power as the ones who are unfeeling; that those who are marginalised, who are minoritised, who are oppressed, they’re the ones who have to express themselves to have their pain heard and felt.

But, actually, I’m interested in the reverse. What does it mean to have unfeeling from below? Because there’s been this unspoken expectation that those who are minoritised are always in the position of having to prove their feelings to others. But what actually does it mean to renege, so to speak, on that social contract—and risk being seen as unfeeling?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

So when you talk about feeling and unfeeling, are you saying that the oppressed are supposed to feel in a certain way, and this is imposed on them as part of that oppression?

XINE YAO:

Yes. So, I guess one way to think about it, is say turning to texts on abolition, the usual line on that is of course the way that enslaved Black people are characterised as being, like, dehumanised and that their feelings don’t matter. And so the work of abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, is seen as showing the importance of paying attention to Black suffering and Black pain. Now, only looking at that dimension of it sort of eludes the fact that, that can often be a parasitic relationship where Black pain is something that’s continually having to be performed and exploited, and we can sort of think, probably, in the conversations reignited around the 2020 Black Lives Matter as drawing attention to the way that simply the expression of the pain and anger is insufficient in and of itself. And some people still won’t be persuaded.

And so, for instance I look at the nineteenth century, at Black writers who refuse to share that pain with white audiences, because they didn’t think that that was the best political strategy.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

So a bit like saying: this is your game, and I’m not playing it?

XINE YAO:

Yes. Yes, sort of this expectation of, like, you expect us to perform anger, perform all our feelings, prove our humanity, but actually saying, like, that in itself is a kind of trap. That you’re having to prove humanity according to someone else’s standards. Indeed, the great writer Toni Morrisson famously says that the very function of racism is distraction. There’s always one more thing after you prove something. There’s always gonna be another hurdle to go over.

And so, thinking about feeling and the way that it’s presumed to be universal, is something that I’m interested in looking at: precisely the ways that it’s actually not universal, and the allegation of universality often becomes a way to erase or dismiss, and for instance some of the ways I look at it are, say, Oriental “inscrutability”. It’s probably a very recognisable stereotype of a type of Asian unfeeling inscrutability, that’s sort of named as a stereotype. And now, so that’s often seen as, like,  you know, a very ready negative stereotype but I’m also interested in looking at the other side. Why might it be a negative stereotype? Because there’s something subversive that is being demonised. Perhaps there’s actually something going on, that is like a kind of refusal, a kind of dissent, a type of dissatisfaction…

And so, for instance, I look at the work of Sui Sin Far, who’s considered one of the first Asian North American writers in the Anglophone language. She was born in England, she worked variously in Canada, in Jamaica, and the US. And for instance, she advocates for Chinese migrants at a time of anti-Chinese sentiment in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And during this time, she particularly talks about this stereotype of Oriental inscrutability, pointing out, like: well, why would Chinese migrants want to share their pain in a racist environment? Maybe they don’t show their feelings because, for instance, people literally have their hearts, their families, overseas back home in China which is where they’re sending money to. The sheer obligation to perform their humanness to go against allegations of being alien is a type of bind that the migrant is expected to participate in, that we could think of now today the way that immigrants, migrants, are expected to be grateful to be legible, to be understood, to want to assimilate. But actually to refuse, to hold back, to, say, not give, in an environment which is hostile – and then to misrecognise that as a failing of the individual who is trying to survive, is something that I’m trying to draw attention to.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah, I mean I suppose on a personal level we perhaps do that quite often: I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of showing you that I’m angry.

XINE YAO:

Yes, yes!

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

So is there evidence that this was a self-conscious attitude? That it was a strategy they really adopted?

XINE YAO:

So this is a good question because definitely people who work on affect and emotion, this is always the question: to what extent is it conscious or unconscious? And I’d say it’s a combination of both. For instance I look at the work of the philosopher Adam Smith, of course famous for economics – Wealth of Nations – but also for the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And when he’s talking about sympathy, he starts talking about the sort of abstracted individual but later on in Theory of Moral Sentiments he starts talking on the level of civilisations and there I remember coming across this phrase for the first time. He complains individuals in Asia, Africa and the Americas are notoriously deceptive about hiding their feelings, for instance. And then he alleges that that is one way that they’re part of “uncivilised” peoples, savage nations, as opposed to civilised Europeans. And yet, reading against the grain of that, we could say – wait a second – if it’s literally all these people across Asia, Africa and the Americas, that’s actually what we’d call nowadays “the global majority”. Maybe the problem is not with them, Adam Smith, but with you and the sort of misrecognition that’s happening, of what we could almost see, in nascent form – even if it’s not named as such – a type of anticolonial sentiment, a type of refusal to engage.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Right, right. I mean I’m thinking what angle Bentham might’ve taken on this sort of approach… He had a universalist approach in terms of: what counts is the people’s happiness, and it doesn’t matter who you are. Everyone, he says, is to count for one and no one for more than one. I mean I wouldn’t exonerate Bentham from not being, not having a Eurocentric attitude, but he was perhaps more open than most people of his time to what we now call, somewhat glibly, “the other”. And he, you know, thought about Muslims, about Jews, about women, about the poor, and said, you know, all the people’s interests have got to be taken into account. There’s an interesting essay he wrote in, round about 1780 – so Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776, so about the same time – and it was a comparison of laws in Bengal, or “British India”, and back in England. And he says there, if you were to choose whether you should transplant the English law onto India or transplant the Indian law onto Britain, the English common law is so bad that you’d be better off having the Bengal law, the Indian law, in Britain. So there was a sense in which, I mean, he struggled but he did try and see things from another perspective. But, um, he would’ve looked at it in terms of suffering and, you know, how do you know if someone’s not suffering unless they’re articulating it? I mean, does Adam Smith have that excuse that actually if people are being, or appear to be, inscrutable, you know, what reason do I have for not thinking they’re inscrutable…?

XINE YAO:

Mm, well that’s a very good question, because of course you could think about of course the famous English stiff upper lip, which of course is a very racialised and class phenomenon. And so he does talk about, for instance, you know, he valorises a sort of version of stoicism that, you know, the really civilised man is able to control himself. But here’s the interesting thing that goes back to the distinction that we’re making about, you know, is it conscious versus unconscious – and who gets to be the wilful one who has control versus the one who doesn’t? And again, it becomes interesting that when he starts talking about, quote unquote “savages”, indigenous peoples, like he’ll say that, oh, they don’t respond to pain because they are just savage, as opposed to understanding that as perhaps being more akin to the sort of volitional, conscious, um, control that he alleges is the property of, you know, civilised man, quote unquote. And so it sort of seems like this sort of, funny, deceptive sort of sleight of hand in terms of who gets to be the one that is alleged to have control over these things, versus those who are merely responding physiologically in a brutish way, so to speak.

I guess for our audiences, you’re saying about the example of not showing people that you’re angry – I feel like another good example is a particularly gendered one for those listening, which is like: what if a strange man comes up to you and tells you to smile? If you’re a woman or, like me, I guess a young woman of some sort, and it’s basically this sort of obligation, a very gendered obligation that you owe someone the performance of happiness. And then, do you do it? Do you refuse? Or even just like the category of the cat call, um, of the casual microaggression which can often be gendered, sexist, sometimes homophobic, transphobic, and the way that there’s an expectation of the way that you’re supposed to respond and express in that very moment. And that often we don’t have the catharsis of being able to react in a way that’s satisfying because it’s dangerous. And so, the concealment in that moment of your emotion is both a form of resistance and also of necessary survival, so you don’t bait someone. And I suppose perhaps that’s an understandable way of seeing how it navigates in everyday life.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

We’ll be right back after the break.

We’re just doing some work at the moment on an essay Bentham wrote called ‘A Picture of the Treasury’ and it’s about the way in which Panopticon didn’t get built. And um what’s sort of interesting is – at least from my point of view – is if you take the Foucault line, you know, Bentham pointed out this wonderful new mechanism of power, yet the British government at the time decided not to build the Panopticon prison. Rather than having the prisoners at home where they could see them, they wanted to send them off to Australia so they’re out of sight. So, you know, maybe that’s another way of responding to people you don’t like is to, not to look at them so that they behave better, which was the principle of the Panopticon, but to remove them – send them to Siberia, in the Russian context. Does that chime in any way with your research, you know that people were not just gazed at, but also ignored?

XINE YAO:

Mm…I look at Herman Melville’s work – and I’m not talking about the famous Moby Dick unfortunately, this is not the whale stuff, um, but his novella Benito Cereno, which is about a mutiny aboard a slave ship. A white American captain goes on board a beleaguered Spanish enslaving ship, and he thinks he’s helping the Spanish enslavers. But then it turns out that, actually, there’s whole masquerade going on that the Africans managed to successfully mutiny, and they’re actually having to pretend that they’re still enslaved while the Americans are on board. And so, for instance, in that case, the Africans are deliberately manipulating the way that they know they’ll be ignored by trying to, like, perform the type of civility that’s expected of them, which also means a type of care, a type of solicitousness. Babo, who is said to be, like, the mastermind of the operation later on, he seems to be really solicitous of the Spanish captain, because he seems so servile, looking up to his master, and so kind and loving to him. And what’s funny is, the American captain, he thinks, oh Babo’s so lovely, he’s such a good slave, I wish I could buy him myself. But as soon as he realises that Babo is actually not enslaved, but free, then he can only see him as a villain. And so this sort of weird sympathy that he had was precisely through, triangulated through, the fact that he was being so seemingly submissive to the Spanish enslaver. Once that bond was broken, that expected performance of deference was shown to be false, that undoes the entire emotional hierarchy, the racial hierarchy, and they must be stopped. They must be killed. And indeed, Babo is executed by the end.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I mean, well, yeah, that reminds me, obviously, of such countries like Liberia, where you freed slaves in America, but you don’t want them – in a sense, do we want them here? No, we’ll send them back to Africa and let them set up their own community there. Or, I think New Harmony was established by a friend of Bentham’s, Francis Wright in – was it Louisiana? The place collapsed.  But it was like, you know, we don’t want these people amongst us as free which sort of chimes with what you were saying there about –

XINE YAO:

Yes, like this very conditional, very conditional sympathy. And indeed that Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous abolitionist writer, she was a strong proponent of sending black people back to Africa. That being said, I also pay attention to the work of Martin Delaney, who was another really important black leader in the 19th century. And he was, is, often seen as one of the first thinkers for, of black nationalism. And he thought that there was really important to, to reconnect black people in the diaspora who have been severed from African slavery back to the communities in West Africa that they’re part of. So he actually led an expedition back in the place that’s now called Liberia and so forth. And he expresses this Pan African vision between the US, Canada, the Caribbean and West Africa. And he wrote this brilliant, unfinished novel that imagines this uprising against slavery, again, connecting black people across the diaspora and all these different geographies, even also connecting to different indigenous peoples in the region, and ending up in Cuba, where even he says, in his words, quote, even Chinamen can be seen among the black and indigenous people thinking about revolution. Because, of course, it’s also the period where emancipation happened in the British colonies, but then that became the indentured servitude of Indian and Chinese laborers. And unfortunately, though, at this point, this really exciting moment, the novel, as far as we know, is unfinished because it was published serially, and we don’t have any of those issues left. And so sort of left at this cusp of, like this transnational revolution, trying to undo the order of global white supremacy in this really provocative way, but it just sort of leaves us.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I mean, was it never finished?

XINE YAO:

Or like rather, because none of the magazine, rest of the magazine is extant, we don’t know.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Right, so it might have been published?

XINE YAO:

It may have been, but we don’t have anything so and so that’s sort of one of those puzzles that’s continued to frustrate scholars ever since. I had a question actually for you about Bentham and the panopticon. I don’t know if you’ve come across the work of this black feminist scholar, Simone Browne, ‘Dark Matters’? It’s about surveillance. But particularly, she has this provocative argument that’s thinking that she thinks together the Bentham’s design of the Panopticon alongside the construction of the slave ship. And particularly if she analyses diagrams of slave ships and the Panopticon next to each other, shows like that so much of it has to do with like, you know, surveillance and obviously the cluster of bodies. And she sort of says that, actually, in this way, she sees the slave ship as a model that that Bentham is perhaps drawing upon in some way for the panopticon, and then for her, then it, it is a way of also thinking right now, of course, the sort of pipeline from enslavement through chattel slavery through to mass incarceration of black people generally. I was wondering if you’ve come across that.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I’ve not seen any evidence that Bentham drew on any diagrams of slave ships. I mean, I mean, the traditional story is that it was his brother Samuel who had the idea. Samuel went to Russia and worked in Russia, was in Russia for about 12 years. In the 1780s he set up some industrial establishments for Prince Potemkin in the south of Russia – what’s now Ukraine. In order to supervise the workmen under his control, he organized them in a circle so he could sit in the middle of the workshop and keep an eye on what everyone else was doing. And Bentham went out there and saw this. Stayed for two years in Russia, and at the time, late 1780s, the British state had this problem of what to do with its convicts, because they could no longer transport them to the North American colonies, which had become independent, so they eventually hit on the idea of sending them to New South Wales. But in the meantime, an Act of Parliament had been passed to build a penitentiary – or two penitentiaries, one for men, one for women.  So, Bentham, when he saw Samuel’s workshop and thought, well, we need a plan for a penitentiary so to put two and two together and devised the idea of the panopticon. And it was, you know, he thought that the Panopticon idea could be applied to all sorts of purposes. You know, hospitals, schools, wherever supervision or in central inspection was useful. So of course, that could be put to good purposes or to bad purposes. It depends upon the point of the institution. And for Bentham, the key issue was, well, if you’re being watched, then you’re more likely to behave better, at least in the way that the watcher wants you to behave. I mean, the diagrams of slave ships seem totally antithetical to the sort of the panopticon prison in the sense that, you know, in the panopticon, there would be sufficient living space for people, they would have an ambient temperature, they would have proper sanitation, they would be properly fed. So it doesn’t seem to me like a valid argument in relation to Bentham, but there’s the wider question of you know, the whole philosophical idea that Foucault puts forward, that what you have in the Panopticon is the paradigm, if you like, for the modern state. These two questions should be, in the sense, kept separate, whether, whether the modern state runs on panoptic lines, and what Bentham actually meant to do with panopticon, and from Bentham’s point of view. What’s more important is what we might think of as a reverse panopticon, because what we needed, in his view, was open government. And so he later designed a minister’s audience chamber where the top functioners in government would be themselves in the centre of a panoptic structure, where the people who are business to do would be sitting around and could watch the minister and the officials and make sure they behaved well. And so that was his sort of in his paradigm for government was rather the gaze, was the people making sure that officials were doing their job properly and promoting the greatest happiness. Sorry, that’s, that’s a long, a long answer to the to the to the question. But I have not seen the article but it, or the work with it. I mean, my impression of diagrams of slave ships is that you don’t actually see anything. I don’t know, because people are just crammed in such narrow spaces…

XINE YAO:

Yeah, so the diagram in particular that she’s talking about is this really infamous one, it was used a lot by British abolitionists in particular because all the people are so arranged, like, around. And I guess, like maybe – I think maybe even if there’s no direct link, it’s something that is useful – like, if the Panopticon for Bentham was about the possibility of arranging things to more efficient but better ends, like the reality of the slave ship – the thing that actually got made, whereas his never got made – is perhaps sadly the way that some forms of government and surveillance actually end up happening, right, in terms of the subjugation of other peoples and the crowding… Like the ideal, it’s almost notable, yes, the Panopticon could not exist yet the concept that survives, and yet the slave ship was a reality and was an immensely successful one, and also has this particular legacy…

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah, and I mean, what Bentham did recognise was the gaze was powerful. And it depends how you use it.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and tune in to next week’s episode.

• Journal of Bentham Studies
• Bentham and the Arts

Transcript: Dr Jonathan Galton – Queerness, Islam and the Left

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Hello and welcome to The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. Jeremy Bentham, the 18^th and 19^th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London, the first institution in England to admit students without imposing a religious test. Bentham is widely credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces. He put it simply in his advice: create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant to the ethical problems of the 21^st century. Today’s episode looks at the political tension on the progressive left between queerness and Islam. I’m talking to Dr Jonathan Galton, a Leverhulme Early Careers Fellow, whose research asks if the left has a Muslim problem.

JONATHAN GALTON:

My name is Jonathan Galton, I’m a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow here at UCL. I’m in the third year of a three-year project. I’ll tell you the title of the book that I’m currently writing and pitching to editors. So, the book’s called ‘Does the Left have a [quote] “Muslim Problem” and Seven Other Uncomfortable Questions’. It’s a sort of response to the narrative that you often hear from the political right – not exclusively the right, but often the right – the narrative that the left has a problematic relationship with Muslim communities and Islam. And when I say problematic, I mean in this case, problematically close, problematically favourable. And this narrative takes two main forms. One I call the Unholy Alliance narrative, the other I call the Blind Eye narrative. So, the Unholy Alliance narrative posits that leftists have kind of got into bed with Islamists in a sort of political alliance that’s tearing apart the fabric of western civilisation. The Blind Eye narrative goes something like this: that the left is very diligent and committed to calling out homophobia, misogyny, maybe anti-Semitism, when it comes from the Far Right or from conservatives or from evangelical Christians, but they’re strangely reluctant to criticise these, these phenomena, when they occur in Muslim communities.

And again, this is an accusation that’s launched across the political spectrum, actually, but I’ve heard it particularly from right wing politicians and right-wing thinkers, and also quite often from queer ex Muslims.

So, my research basically is trying to sort of work out what this narrative is, where it comes from, who’s using it, what it does – but also how it’s experienced, and particularly how it’s experienced by those groups who are sort of on the receiving end, or caught in the kind of crossfire, of this discourse. So, I’ve conducted a range of interviews, but I’ve been particularly keen to centre the experiences of left-leaning Muslims and also queer Muslims around that. I’ve done a fair bit of sort of textual and media analysis, but it’s really trying to kind of strip behind this, this caricature, if you like, and see sort of what, how this corresponds to any underlying reality.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Is there an underlying reality?

JONATHAN GALTON:

So I think just one thing to be really clear about, is there are lots, there are many, many Muslims – it’s not a homogenous group. Er… So, on one level, it’s sort of, it’s a rather grotesque caricature that’s weaponised to delegitimise left wing politics, to demonise particular left-wing politicians, and also to demonise Muslims. But caricatures don’t come from nowhere. So I’m trying to, kind of trying to characterise the sort of left wing, the wider left wing Muslim engagement. And it’s really important to acknowledge at this point that those are not two separate categories. There are many left-wing Muslims.

And I’ve been thinking of this along four lines: compassion, discomfort, attraction and strategy. So just very briefly – by compassion, I mean compassion for marginalised communities. And there’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that, in the UK, Muslims are one of the most socioeconomically marginalised and demonised groups. So a sort of natural candidate for left wing compassion.

I think there’s also a great deal of discomfort, particularly when conversations turn to some of these tropes of homophobia. A lot of my friends and colleagues on the left, I think, are just unwilling to enter into a discussion that might be seen to be demonising an already marginalised group, so they tend to shy away from these conversations – I would absolutely plead guilty myself on that front.

Attraction, I think goes alongside this compassion, this discomfort, which I think often go hand in hand. I think there is, it’s also important to understand that there are people, not just on the left, who might be attracted to Islam on a theological level, or attracted to what we’d call Islamicate culture, or sometimes Islamicate culture, so the cultural formations around Islam.

And then finally, strategy. It is true that the Labour Party, in particular, over the last several decades at least, have routinely courted the Muslim vote and seen Muslims as vote banks. So there are lots of different things going on, and I think it’s sort of quite easy to see that, looked at from a slightly fuzzy distance, this can appear to be some really coordinated Left Muslim problematic relationship, but I would say actually it’s far more diffuse than that.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Just digging down a little bit, I can see that homophobia could be regarded as one of the critical issues here, because we have, like Middle Eastern Islamic States criticised for their policies towards homosexuals. I mean, what reasons would Muslims give for being opposed to homosexuality?

JONATHAN GALTON:

That’s a really good question. One of the chapters in the book I’m writing, I’m sort of framing this as a response to an article by a man called Jimmy Bangash, who I’ve met. He’s a queer ex Muslim, and one of the reasons why he left Islam was really sort of struggling to reconcile his sexuality and his religion, and his article is really a sort of frustrated address to the left, saying: why is the left betraying queer Muslims? Why is the left not being more robust in calling out homophobia from Muslims? And I think if you wanted to make the case that Islam was exceptionally homophobic, or that Muslims as a community, particularly in the UK, are particularly homophobic, there is plenty of material you can draw on, and that’s not a caricature. You could look at Scripture, the Quran, and also the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. You could look at statistics of attitudes based on different religious groups towards homosexuality, you could look at real events and experiences. And then, of course, you could kind of look further afield – at policies in Muslim-majority countries. It’s an interesting and quite complex picture, though, if you look, if you take that last example, the fact that many of the countries in the world that still criminalise same sex activity are Islamic countries. They also happen to be, in many cases, former British colonies. So in a lot of cases, the actual legal mechanisms by which homosexuality, or at least same sex activity, is criminalised, is through British-era penal codes. So famously, in South Asia section 377, which has been repealed in India now but still remains in force in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

None of that is to say that prior to the arrival of British colonisers any of these places were necessarily sexual free-for-alls, or queer utopias – it’s more that British lawmaking, in that case, sort of fundamentally restructured the way that sexuality was managed, and understandings of public and private. So I think that there is an important legacy there, the British colonial era laws. But currently Sharia law is also, Sharia is also invoked in criminalising sexuality, and particularly in some of the countries where the death penalty is applied. So, in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brunei, various others, the legal mechanism there is normally Islamic law, and that is drawing specifically on certain verses in the Quran which are very closely parallelled to verses that we have in the Old Testament. So, verses around the Prophet Lot, and they’re sort of normatively understood to proscribe same sex acts.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

No, that’s really interesting, because that was a point that Bentham picked up on, was the example of Sodom and Gomorrah. And if we look at Bentham’s great legal rival, William Blackstone, Blackstone makes the point that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah showed that the injunction or the prohibition of homosexuality was a universal precept: it applied to all places, all peoples and all times. And Bentham looked at the story and he said: no, this story is not condemning homosexuality, it’s condemning gang rape. Because that’s what he thought the story was about. And if you looked at the teachings of Jesus, Jesus does never condemn homosexuality on the basis of Sodom and Gomorrah. And in fact, Bentham goes on to say that Christians actually might have reason to think that from the Biblical account, that Jesus was involved himself in homosexual relationships. I mean, is there anything in the Muslim tradition that, you know, you could use to give a more positive view?

JONATHAN GALTON:

Now, actually, that’s very interesting, I didn’t know that about Bentham. I shall certainly be looking more into that because that’s actually strikingly similar to some of the theological work that’s being done really quite kind of currently, in the last few decades, to reinterpret some of these verses. So there’s an American scholar, a Muslim convert called Scott Kugle, who’s written a book called ‘Homosexuality in Islam’. And yeah, he very much regards the verses about the Prophet Lot as pertaining to rape, to sexual coercion, and not to consensual same sex activity. He also kind of then zooms out and says, if you look at where these verses occur, and they occur in different Quranic surah, different Quranic chapters, they’re all embedded alongside other stories about the perils of ignoring prophets. So in some ways, actually, he argues that this is more about, ‘no, listen to prophets, guys’. This is, and this just so happens that those cases are about sexual activity. He’s not alone in revisiting those verses. There are other scholars that have looked at this, some from a more legalistic perspective, some from a historical perspective; some have connected this to kind of Roman understandings of male-male sexual activity, in particular that, of course, then gets lots of pushback from some more conservative scholars. So there’s a particular scholar, Yasir Qadhi, who’s written some real polemics in response to Scott Kugle, and that has real, real world impacts on young queer Muslims or young Muslims growing up and struggling with their sexuality. I’ve met so many people who’ve told me that they’ve read Kugle’s work – they weren’t sure whether to order the book at home if they lived with their parents, but actually reading those books and kind of reading wider resources around that topic have really helped them.

I suppose one other way of looking at that is around gender identity, and a lot of…let’s call them Muslim-majority countries, or what are now Muslim-majority countries, have rich traditions of what you might think of as third-gender cultures. So, in Pakistan for example, there is a community called the Khawaja Sara, and you could loosely consider that to be a trans people, a non-binary people, if we apply labels from here, but it has a very long, long history of a community that has been marginalised. People have kind of left their homes to join sort of groups, they’re called Dera, of Khawaja Sara, but they also play quite sort of important roles and social functions. Khawaja Sara are often regarded as auspicious presences at weddings – similarly in India actually, where they’re called Hijra – and there are many, many other parallel examples in the Arab world and Southeast Asia. So historically, at least, with some legacy that lives on, it would be inaccurate to characterise Islamic gender relations as very strictly falling along a kind of male/female binary.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

That’s really interesting.

We’ll be right back after the break.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

So, taking a step back to the right-wing criticism –

JONATHAN GALTON:

Sure –

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Who are the right wing appealing to?

JONATHAN GALTON:

The way I tend to look at it is, it’s playing to a whole range of anxieties about migration, about social cohesion, about terrorism, about foreign intervention, and so all of these you might think of as very loosely Muslim, or Muslim-related, issues. I think that’s where the political capital is to be gained. And I actually think there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in right wing critics smearing Muslims as homophobic and the left as enablers of homophobia, let’s say, when it’s been incredibly recently that anyone on the right had any concern about homophobia and homosexuality.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I mean, the other way of looking at it is, you know, the right want the votes of Muslims – and so is this a way of them rather demonising the left by saying, sort of saying to Muslims, you know, you should be voting for us, not for them?

JONATHAN GALTON:

I don’t think there’s been any concerted effort, really, of the right courting the Muslim vote. You get that a bit in the US, actually, where there’s, again, similar sort of debates going on, and a number of quite high profile Muslim clerics have specifically said that we shouldn’t be aligning ourselves to the left. There’s a guy called Yasir Qadhi who put out a sort of statement to that effect, saying, because the left are the ones that are sort of telling your kids that they can be any gender they want and that homosexuality is all fine. I’m not sure that’s actually translated into any great support for the Republicans, although now, because of Biden’s perceived support for Israel, at the moment, there’s an, even more of a kind of withdrawing in the US of Muslim support for the Democrats. That’s the US. Here, yes, there is a very strong, or has been a very strong tendency for the last 20 years or more, for Muslim voters to vote for Labour. It’s gone up and down, a bit of a dip after the Iraq war – but actually, surprisingly, not that much – a huge surge of support when Corbyn was in place because he was seen as sympathetic to Muslim communities and, quote unquote, Muslim causes. I’m not sure that sexuality is going to be a massive electoral issue. There are concerns about, for example, plans to ban conversion therapy, or plans to, kind of, increasingly roll out sort of LGBTQ-inclusive education in schools. And so I know there are certain Muslim educational groups that are very critical, actually, of the Conservative government, because they’re the ones who are in power and doing these things – there’s perhaps a perception that Labour would be even worse. From that perspective, I think a much bigger issue at the moment, in terms of the Muslim vote bank, is Gaza. There’s an organisation, quite recently formed, a group called The Muslim Vote, who are very much trying to mobilise along the lines of supporting candidates who have been seen to be more pro Palestine, I think. And I can’t tell you this with any certainty, because it’s quite a new group, but they do talk about wanting to endorse candidates who are supportive of other so-called Muslim issues, and I think LGBTQ education might be a part of that. So that would be quite interesting, to see whether that has any impact.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

And from the progressive left’s point of view, either the attempt to appeal to Muslims or the fact that Muslims are becoming part of the left – is there any discernible effect on the left’s attitude, from Muslim influence?

JONATHAN GALTON:

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, it’s certainly true. I mean, more generally, sort of big picture, I think the Left have… There have been sort of shifts in left-wing approaches to all sorts of things over the last sort of 50, 100 years. So, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, Israel was seen as a very left wing cause, for example, and the rights of racial minorities were not necessarily seen as particularly left wing causes. And a lot of trade unions, for example, were extremely racist and didn’t support South Asian migrant workers who were mobilizing and organizing. Things have really changed, particularly after the sort of 1960s campus movements, when sort of, there was… It’s been seen as a sort of gradual shift away from sort of main Marxist trade unionism, and more to a much wider range of social justice concerns that left wing politicians and parties endorse. There are certain sort of political scientists who do study this idea of how does the Left appeal to, on the one hand, a probably very secular kind of cohort who are very quote, unquote progressive when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender and whatever else, and many more conservative voters, for example, from Muslim communities. And I think the answer is that’s potentially quite an uneasy alliance. But even then, I think that’s perhaps making assumptions about these being two completely different groups of people and ignoring the intersections between those groups and the queer Muslim activists, for example.

So I think just one thing to be really clear about is I’ve while it’s really important to me in the research I’m doing to centre queer Muslim voices, I also don’t want to make this a sort of an ethnography of queer Muslim lives, partly because I just think there are a lot of people who would be much better placed than me to do that. I don’t think it’s necessarily my story to tell but inevitably, you know, I’ve spoken to a lot of queer Muslims.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Sorry, on that – do queer Muslims engage with the queer community generally?

JONATHAN GALTON:

Well, I think there’s no, there’s no ‘them’ there. It’s not a homogenous group. There was a more of an emphasis maybe 20 years ago or so of you know, for those Muslims who did come out, it was very much under the guise of rejecting religion and being very ‘out, loud and proud’ and often, or in some cases, at least positioning themselves as ex-Muslims, and yes, in that case, getting very involved in what you would call the mainstream queer scene, or LGBTQ scene. That didn’t stop them facing quite a lot of racism and exclusion there, but that was perhaps the main sort of…you either did that or you were quite closeted. What there have been really have emerged since the late 90s are a range of different queer Muslim organizations. They wouldn’t all necessarily use that label. Al-Fatiha was formed in the in, I think 1990, late 90s let’s say. More recently, there’s been Iman Hidayah, a group called the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, mostly London-based, some based elsewhere, and they’ve taken a range of different approaches. Some are very much, they’re sort of safe places for queer Muslims to meet each other and to discuss the difficulties they face, in some cases, in their own communities and families, but also when trying to engage with the sort of more mainstream queer scene. Others have taken a more theological approach. So the Inclusive Mosque Initiative is not primarily a queer Muslim organisation, it’s an organisation that’s trying to make worship more inclusive. So they have an emphasis on female Imams training, female Imams, championing disabled access. But as part of that, they’re a welcoming space for queer Muslims and trans Muslims, and they’ve hosted, I think, a range of discussions about theology, about the scripture we talked about. And they’re quite interesting because they very explicitly, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, reject the idea that because they are this sort of inclusive group, that they’re somehow aligned to British liberal values and that they’re somehow distancing themselves from the wider British Muslim landscape. And they say, well no, actually, no, we are first and foremost Muslims; we don’t sort of reject more conservative mosques, we try to find a way in between these paths.

There is a risk, I think, that a number of queer Muslims have told me this – that if they start talking about their experiences, particularly maybe traumatic experiences of homophobia within their families and communities, that can immediately get coopted by people who want to demonise Muslim communities as a whole, and they’re not necessarily interested in giving that ammunition to, for example, right-wing politicians.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

We’ll be right back after the break.

VOICE OVER:

[The Greatest Good’s first documentary is out on YouTube now. Learn more about Bentham and discover the hidden history of the Vere Street Coterie from leading academics at UCL. Click the link in our podcast description, or search YouTube for ‘The Greatest Good: Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’.]

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Bentham was very anti religion, generally. His main target was Christianity, and he believed in not only sexual freedom, but also religious freedom, and so anyone can worship in any way they want, providing it’s not causing harm. But he also thought that in morals and politics, religion should play no role whatsoever, and spent a lot of time undermining Christianity, both as a natural religion and as a revealed religion. He knew he knew the Quran, but didn’t comment on it in particular. So I think he would, well, he would be critical of Islam because it’s a religion, and also critical of its homophobic attitudes, and would perhaps see sexual liberty as one of the battles that had to be fought?

JONATHAN GALTON:

Yeah, I think that a lot of the queer Muslims I speak to would certainly agree that sexual liberty is a battle that needs to be fought. The question they might ask, and there’s a range of different opinions I’ve encountered, is, well, whose conversation is that to have? Is that an internal conversation to be had within Muslim communities, or should that be more widely? And I think there’s advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, but I think it is… Once these things become very public, messages can get distorted so easily. Narratives can get coopted. It can actually kind of polarise people more, rather than kind of bringing people together. And so, a lot of people I know are, I think, very slowly and patiently having these sorts of conversations. And I think we have seen some changes over the last sort of 10, 20 years. One interesting thing, actually, quite a few people I’ve met and spoken to – this seems quite, quite a striking kind of parallel between them, young, queer Muslims on sort of realizing their sexuality. A lot of them went through a phase of really rejecting religion and distancing themselves from religion, maybe sort of in their late teens, early 20s, and went through a sort of atheist or ex Muslim phase. But as they got older, not true of all cases, but in some cases, they realized they missed that. They missed the role that faith played in their lives, and so really tried to find a way of reconciling faith and sexuality through, for example, some of the sort of scholarly literature we’ve talked about, but also through interacting with some of these organizations that have helped them navigate a path.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Thank you very much indeed, Jonathan, that’s absolutely fascinating, and best wishes for your research and in particular, your book.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to subscribe and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please also make sure to tune in to next week’s episode, where I talk to Dr Xine Yao to delve into queer aesthetics and discuss the idea of a panoptic gaze.

• Journal of Bentham Studies
• Bentham and the Arts

Transcript: Professor Gregory Dart – Bentham, Romanticism and the ‘Cockney College’

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Hello and welcome to The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. Jeremy Bentham, the 18^th and 19^th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London, the first institution in England to admit students without imposing a religious test. Bentham is widely credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces. He put it simply in his advice: create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant to the ethical problems of the 21^st century. Today’s is a very special episode, where Professor Gregory Dart and I hash out the similarities and differences between Romantic and Utilitarian thought.

GREGORY DART:

OK, well, my name is Greg Dart from the English Department, and this is Philip Schofield from…

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

the Bentham Project in the Faculty of Laws.

GREGORY DART:

Fantastic. Today, we’re going to talk a bit about Bentham and the Romantics and issues around that and in relation to the formation of UCL. What interests me about this subject, at both ends historically, is the way in which the Benthamites and the Romantics are on the same side politically in the 1780s and 1790s with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and they’re all part of the left, broadly speaking, and indeed, in the 1820s, mid 1820s, when founding UCL, I think they’re all in favour of the setting up of this new godless institution. But apart from that, they seem to have very little in common, or at least they get pulled apart by history, and it’s always interested me what that’s about, what those issues are, what divides them—not least because there’s a possibility there’s still a division within the left, if you like, or within progressivism, along similar lines, around perhaps, around technology. I suppose what happens in the course of the 1790s with writers like Hazlitt and Coleridge and Wordsworth is that they begin to experience a sort of seam or a tear in the left. It’s around pauper management, but it’s also around the kind of, the philosophic calculus, the idea that trying to work out what’s best to do can be worked out through this calculation of consequences, and they, in different ways, are still bound up with what you might call a morality of intentions, of the conscience—that there are some things that are just absolutely wrong. Murder is absolutely wrong, whereas Utilitarianism says there’s no such thing.

 PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yes, yeah, everything’s up for assessment. And the Utilitarians are always very averse to intuitionism. That was their, philosophically, their target: this idea that we have a sense, that we know what’s right and wrong, an inherent sense.

GREGORY DART:

I mean Hazlitt’s essay, ‘On Reason and Imagination’, is one of the ones where he actually, sort of, I mean, the problems for him with utilitarian ethics, as he puts it, is that it’s got no good argument against slavery. For example. I mean, Bentham was against slavery. You know, most utilitarians were so in it wasn’t. It’s not a practical argument about their politics. It’s an argument about their philosophy that, you know, from a from a greatest happiness of the greatest number principle, you could Because more, but more people benefit from it than don’t benefit from it. And, you know, so Hazlitt gets fantastically impassioned in this essay, trying to argue for what he calls, in a way, politics of the imagination, as against the reason because of that. And of course, the passion is important because it’s part of what he’s arguing for that our moral response to things, our conscience, our imagining of what it’s like to be somebody else is really important to the social idea. What does he say? Here – he says, Thus, for example, an infinite number of lumps of sugar put into Mr. Bentham’s artificial ethical scales would never weigh against the pounds of human flesh or drops of human blood that are sacrificed to produce them. In other words, you can’t. There’s no amount of measurement that will destroy the fact that slavery is just simply wrong. It’s partly an intellectual debate about moral faculties, as it were, but it’s also partly the experience of history, in a way. Okay, that if, if the French Revolution, which is such a catastrophe, in a way, you know, promised so much, was such a catastrophe, where does it leave? Where does it leave people, in terms of their, you know, free will, political action, trying to pick up the debris of the past. For me, at least one of the big breaks, one of the moments where it seems like a lot of romantics feel, oh, gosh, we’ve got a problem here is when Malthus publishes his essay on population because he, in effect, says there are mathematical reasons why you’ll never get rid of poverty, because poverty, vice and misery, says is kind of necessary to keep population down. And this is quite devastating to a lot of romantics, because they see that as a betrayal. Because suddenly, a discourse which had appeared to be quite progressive and to be looking for the, you know, towards the improvement of people, especially the poor, has now put a lid on that and said, no, you’ll never have a free and equal society, because it will overpopulate itself. Vice and misery, disease and death are absolutely necessary to the system. You know, my maths tell me this. And so, a lot of the energy in Godwin, but also Hazlitt goes into these replies to Malthus that are, you know, sort of desperate attempts in some way, you know, quite eloquent, but also desperate attempts, in some ways, to argue against that principle. And what they can see is that social science, you know, with its very firm intellectual grounding, is kind of moving away from them and taking the left, if you like, in a direction that they can’t, they can’t follow.

So, they’re left, they feel, in a kind of no man’s, political no man’s land in the middle. They’re not conservatives, but at the same time, they feel like the left has given up on its project of liberty, equality and fraternity, they feel and it’s now just become about lecturing to the poor and what Hazlitt calls petty, piecemeal improvement. So, one of the objections they have to Bentham is not that he’s not a reformer, but that his project of reform has and those of his followers is whittled down to smaller scale projects that can still be pursued by a Tory government and will sort of twiddle with the system rather than improving it wholesale, you know. And that may not be fair, but that’s how they feel. So, things like workhouse projects or new prisons and so on, they would just feel that this is state management, rather than radical reform.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

That’s really interesting and quite right, the new Poor Law of 1834 was a Benthamite response to a particular social problem. From the Utilitarian perspective, it’s better to do a little than nothing at all. And, you know, let’s do what we can, when we can, while we can. But, I mean, Bentham was probably the most radical of the Utilitarians, and his, maybe not all his circle would go as far as him in a lot of his prescriptions.

GREGORY DART:

But you can see immediately why he might be really useful for government, might be really useful for certain kinds of political decisions where you’re weighting up the least bad thing to do. But it’s not easy from Utilitarianism to get to a kind of positive ethos of how to live. All you can get is a series of indications of what not to do.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

No, I think that, I think that’s true. Well, I think Bentham’s view is very much: you leave it to people themselves to make up their own minds. So, yeah, there is no catalogue of good things which we ought to pursue.

GREGORY DART:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Lamb writes about in his city essays, but also Wordsworth in his Rural Lyrical Ballads, is about, around beggars. You know, the notion that beggars should be swept off the streets and put into workhouses, to be reprogrammed or to be, you know, to be improved, as it were, is one of the things they want to resist. But again, it’s a bizarre, paradoxical but also strangely powerful argument. They say, No, beggars are good for us because they remind us of our common humanity. And you know that we shouldn’t wipe beggars off the streets, because in some ways they are… they’re doing us some good, and they allow us to perform our own charity. You’re a better person after having given to a beggar, and you’ve reconnected with your common neighbour. The other thing that Lamb says, going quite counterintuitively, especially in the city, doesn’t matter if they’re pretending. You know, you pay your money to see these things on the stage. Why are you not prepared to pay your money to this guy, regardless of whether he’s got the seven, as it were, hungry children he pretends to have.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I mean, that’s great, because Bentham, who said that beggars should be placed in workhouses, thinks that begging should be stopped, and on the grounds that the best actors get the most money.

We’ll be right back after the break.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah. I mean, can I just go back to the 1780s and 1790s in that there were no Benthamites. Then Bentham was an obscure individual who was involved with the Earl of Shelburne, who was Prime Minister 1782-3, but was at the centre of a sort of a coterie of thinkers. Shelburne sought out Bentham and took him under his wing, and Bentham, at the early part of the French Revolution, wrote a series of tracts which were aimed to help the French move from their despotic monarchy to some sort of constitutional monarchy or a parliamentary system. And then from the British perspective, it all went wrong with the Terror.

GREGORY DART:

When you say, help the French. Did they, did they ask for his help? Or did he give it anyway?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

He gave it anyway. But he, he was close to Brissot—

GREGORY DART:

Who’s a kind of moderate republican at the time?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah. He’d known Brissot when Brissot was in London as a journalist in the early 1780s and in fact they formed a sort of discussion group, which Bentham says the only people who ever attended it were himself, Brissot and Brissot’s wife, just the three of them. But he also had an entrée to Mirabeau as well. And the person who became Bentham’s translator and redactor was a Genevan called Étienne Dumont, and he was part of the Mirabeau circle. So Bentham had a way in to some of the leading figures in the French Revolution, and in 1792, he was made a French citizen by the National Assembly as an appreciation for his efforts. But with the September massacres in 1792 in Paris, when one of his contacts, who was a liberal aristocrat, was stoned to death, Bentham like the rest, like many other people in Britain, became very worried by the French Revolution, and if anything, the French Revolution turned Bentham into a conservative saying, you know, we don’t want reform at the moment, it’s too dangerous.

GREGORY DART:

But at what point does he say that Rights of Man are nonsense upon stilts?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

That’s in in a essay called nonsense upon stilts, which he wrote in 1795, it only came out after his death, but had he published it, it would have been a really major contribution to the debate on natural rights, and it’s regarded as one of the most significant attacks on, on the notion of natural or even human rights.

GREGORY DART:

Obviously, he’s very liberal, progressive, interested in a more democratic society in many ways, but he doesn’t believe in a kind of metaphysic of rights?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

That’s right. That’s right. So, you know… legal rights founded on the principle of utility, you know, he supported, but the idea of natural rights, I mean, his objection was, well, where did they come from?

GREGORY DART:

So, about the right to subsistence, the right to food or something? He would say, you’ve got the right to food if you can find it?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

No, no, what he did is, he said… Let’s take the principle of utility. If we’re promoting utility, there are four main sub ends to promote, and one is subsistence. So, everyone should be given the legal right to subsistence.

GREGORY DART:

 Right, but this is a legal right, not a natural right?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah, yeah, but that’s what legislators ought to do. So, you can’t just assume that a right exists because you want it to. As he says, hunger is not bread, want is not supply. And he came up, you know, with the famous phrase: natural rights is nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights is nonsense upon stilts. So, there’s another story has to be told. How is it that Bentham became a very radical Republican, and his, what is sometimes called, his conversion to political radicalism is dated to 1809 when he started writing on parliamentary reform, but he’d been moving towards that position for, for several years.

GREGORY DART:

And is he quite vocal about that? Because that’s still quite dangerous to say, isn’t it, in your sort of post-war Napoleonic period in Britain. Of course, nobody’s an avowed republican because you were just identified with Robespierre.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

It was 1817 before he published his Plan of Parliamentary Reform.  Part of it written in 1809-10, bulk of in 1816-17. And that was the first Utilitarian defence of democracy. So, in a sense, that’s when he came out of that particular political closet, to the acclaim of radicals. And by 1818, not only was he supporting parliamentary reform, which he called democratic ascendancy, but by 1818, he moved to republicanism. And so, it’s that later Bentham of the 1810s, 1820s, that we think about as the radical political Bentham.

GREGORY DART:

Right – so he gets more radical as he gets older?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah.

GREGORY DART:

He’s quite old by the 1820s?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah, yeah, he was born in 1748, so by 1809, he was just over 60.

GREGORY DART:

Would I be right to kind of characterise him as, you know, he’s a man of independent means; he writes what he wants; he doesn’t have to publish it; he can move from one idea to the other. And he’s not political, in a way. He’s not trying to develop a party or a group of followers; people are attracted to him and, you know, come to the house and talk to him, and so on, but he’s not, he’s not trying to engage with politics. He’s not actively trying to influence opinion himself.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I think that’s true until this later stage. In a sense, in the period of the Enlightenment, let’s say up to 1790, the reforming states seemed to be those which were governed by absolute monarchs, like Catherine the Great and maybe Frederick the Great in Prussia.

GREGORY DART:

Enlightened despots?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah. So, one of his plans was that he would present a penal code to Catherine the Great, which made more sense in that his brother was in the Russian service, and being introduced to Catherine the Great, and was something of a favourite of hers, and worked for Prince Potemkin, who was her favourite, who was Catherine the Great’s lover. So, Jeremy went out to Russia with a view to present his penal code to Catherine the Great. He never did. He chickened out. But the point for him was that any regime could introduce a utilitarian code of laws, and even in the 1810s he approached the President of the United States at the same time as he approached the Emperor of Russia, with a view to them introducing or commissioning him to produce codes of penal law and civil law. By 1818, he’d come to the conclusion that it was only a democratic regime which would be motivated to introduce penal and civil codes, so that’s when we get the really radical Bentham. He sees the community divided between oppressors and oppressed, so a binary distinction. And you know, the oppressors of the church, the lawyers, the aristocrat, the whole monarchical, aristocratical despotism. And he sees the mixed constitution so lauded by British commentators as unstable, either it’s going to become a despotism, and absolute despotism, or it’s going to move to representative democracy. And so, in the 1820s for instance, he got very involved in politics and trying to influence political opinion. I mean, he corresponded with Robert Peel, Duke of Wellington. But perhaps more striking is his alliance with Daniel O’Connell, the Irish liberator, with a view to introducing law reform. So, he was hoping that O’Connell would bring petitions from the Irish Catholics that would be combined with petitions from the radicals in London and elsewhere in Britain and put pressure on parliament to introduce law reform. So, it was an important step in his view to the utilitarian codification of the law, which had been sort of his lifelong ambition, because he, you know, he saw law as crucial, you know, get the law right, then you can give people the framework in which they can pursue their own pleasures.

We’ll be right back after the break.

VOICE OVER:

[The Greatest Good’s first documentary is out on YouTube now. Learn more about Bentham and discover the hidden history of the Vere Street Coterie from leading academics at UCL. Click the link in our podcast description or search YouTube for ‘The Greatest Good: Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’.]

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

I mean, one of Bentham’s formative experiences, most formative experiences, was being forced to swear to the 39 Articles of the Church of England in order to take his degree at Oxford. And in 1818, he published ‘Church-of-Englandism and its Catechism Examined’, which he said, this is an expiation, a pudding rite, of the fact that I compromised myself by swearing to the 39 Articles. And his main argument there was that education should not be linked to a religious test. Teach religion by all means, but teach the religion of Jesus, not the religion of the Church of England, which he saw as different.

GREGORY DART:

He’s a bit John Lennon then, in that sense.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

And in the mid-1810s, Bentham had written a tract called ‘Chrestomathia’, which he took from the Greek to mean useful learning – in opposition to his own education at Oxford, which had been theology and dead languages. And so the idea was you taught useful subjects on the grounds that, what’s education for? Well, two things, one is for the happiness of the individual who is being educated, and the other is for the happiness of the society to which that individual will contribute. And that seems to be the inspiration for the establishment of University of London, which became University College London, soon afterwards. The official foundation was in 1826. Professors were appointed, I think, in 1827. Teaching started in 1828. It seems that the two main movers and shakers, if you like, were James Mill for the Utilitarians and Radicals, and Henry Brougham on the part of the Whigs.

GREGORY DART:

The Whig lawyer?

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Yeah. And very soon afterwards, the Church of England responded with the establishment of King’s College.

GREGORY DART:

I think, I mean, I think there’s an acknowledgement, isn’t there, in the Anglican establishment generally, that it’s an amazing thing, University College, but it’s also got nothing to beat, because you don’t, you just don’t get a good education at Oxford and Cambridge at the time, you know, you get classics and a bit of maths. And so the idea, I mean, a lot of the younger Romantics go to Hackney College in the 1790s, which is already a kind of proto University College, in some ways, because you get taught useful things.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

These are dissenting academies, which had quite a high reputation. Or Haileybury, where the East India Company taught people who were going out to serve in India. I know there was some sort of serious economics taught there, but what else, I don’t know?

GREGORY DART:

You know, in 1825, you know, there’s an article here I’ve got, on the London University and the Smutty Gazette, and it’s all about really trying to repudiate the establishment charge against this new, this new university, which had all kinds of mud slung at it from, you know, well, from the Anglican establishment that didn’t think such a place should exist, not least because it should have a religious foundation to it. And it’s a rather wonderful defence of, you know, the Cockney College, as it’s being called, and the kind of things that it’s going to teach and the kind of people it’s going to teach, because part of the argument against UCL is that it’s going to take its student population from what it calls, yeah, the ‘under-bred Cockneys’, the lower middle class, and that this is clearly a bad thing, as it were, because it’s going to dilute the ruling class or the professional classes in in in the wrong way. And there’s also a wonderful argument against, or, I should say rather, defense of the non religious foundation of the college, because it says just because people aren’t going to get religious instruction at the college doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to get it from elsewhere. It’s not, in other words, this is not an atheist institution. It’s just an institution that’s not going to be teaching a particular line of, or particular kind of, Christianity, i.e. Anglicanism, so don’t think of it as being anti-religious or atheistical. Just think of it as being secular. And in fact, a lot of the people who were involved early on, weren’t they, with the setting up of UCL were not atheists, they were dissenters – very religious in many ways – you know, who had, you know, a say behind the setting up of the University Church, which is right by our buildings. People like William Crabbe Robinson, actually, is a good connective figure, because he knew all the Romantics. He was a kind of diarist of the Romantics. He’s one of the only people who’s read Kant apart from Coleridge. But he also hangs around an enormously long time and is really useful for, he’s a kind of facilitator for University College for many a time, and he definitely believes in God. But he’s also a, you know, he’s one of he’s one of the good guys. He believes in progress. He believes in this sort of broad church, really, a kind of reforming institution.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

In fact, a lot of the Utilitarians were various shades of non-conformists. And of course, there seems to have been a lot of Jewish money put into the College. I think Isaac Goldsmith, a Jewish financier… We sort of don’t know enough about where the money came from. But again, that was a, you know, showed a commitment to College not being anti-religious, to the University not being anti-religious as such, but rather embracing freedom of religion.

GREGORY DART:

My sense of it is that when people move together to set up UCL, it’s a mixture of Romantics and Utilitarians. People like Thomas Campbell, Scottish poet and, you know, sort of educationist lecturer around London. And John Flaxman, the sculptor, is obviously, you know, he’s a friend of Blake. So there are people around who are very definitely on the arts, art scene really, who are cultural movers and shakers, and not that they’re not anti-utilitarian, but that they’re not associated necessarily with that, with the new social science, as it were, as well as there being lawyers and, you know, kind of Benthamite followers and so on. So interestingly, it seems as if, actually, when a project arrived that would allow for all of these variously non established or anti-establishment or non-establishment people to come together around this new university, they were quite happy to collaborate.

PHILIP SCHOFIELD:

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts – and tune in for next week’s episode.

• Happiness and Utility
• Bentham and the Arts
• Journal of Bentham Studies