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The majority of revolutionaries — at least those of bourgeois origin — object not so much to the injustice of the social arrangements into which they were born, as to the fact that they did not themselves make them. This is an affront to their self-importance, a kind of lèse-ego, which explains why in most cases (if they are successful) they establish regimes that are infinitely more oppressive than those they have replaced.

 
The essence of liberty is not that my interests should be tolerated, but that I should tolerate yours; and if this truism is to be saved from seeming to be no more than a pious utterance for form’s sake, it may not be enough to keep a sharp look-out for what is close and threatening. We may need to look backwards through a long lens at the relations between individuals and between the individual and the state. The foundational question: “Why should anyone obey anyone else?” has a foundational answer: “Because human beings are social animals.” This is not merely to say that “society” would be chaotic and unworkable without some common beliefs, customs, values, rules and so on. It is, rather, that this is what society means: it entails a common subscription to the whole. Between the birth of democracy in a city small enough to equate political freedom with personal direct participation in the government, and where the value-system of the citizen and of the city was indivisible not just in fact but in conception — between all that and the idea of the individual as a kind of tiny country of his own, with his own flag, with his own borders to which recognition is due — between the one idea and the other, there is only one fundamental mutation. That is the revolution in thought that, roughly from the last third of the 18th century, first in Germany and very quickly in the whole of Europe, seized the imagination of that generation and is with us yet.

 
Shariah, in Qutb’s view, meant “the abolition of man-made laws.” In the resurrected caliphate, every person was going to be “free from servitude to others.” The true Islamic system meant “the complete and true freedom of every person and the full dignity of every individual of the society. On the other hand, in a society in which some people are lords who legislate and some others are slaves who obey, then there is no freedom in the real sense, nor dignity for each and every individual.” He insisted that shariah meant freedom of conscience — though freedom of conscience, in his interpretation, meant freedom from false doctrines that failed to recognize God, freedom from the modern schizophrenia. Shariah, in a word, was utopia for Sayyid Qutb. It was perfection. It was the natural order in the universal. It was freedom, justice, humanity and divinity in a single system. It was a vision as grand or grander than Communism or any of the other totalitarian doctrines of the 20th century. It was, in his words, “the total liberation of man from enslavement by others.” It was an impossible vision — a vision that was plainly going to require a total dictatorship in order to enforce: a vision that, by claiming not to rely on man-made laws, was going to have to rely, instead, on theocrats, who would interpret God’s laws to the masses.

 
In other words, ordinary people do extraordinarily horrible things when their constitution compels them to do so; and while the moralists and the relativists may differ in the terms that they use, they share an unwillingness to address the role of individual choice, no matter how constrained or limited that choice might be. Evil — if applied to that dark space between necessity and excess — can only reside within the boundaries of the self. Its source lies in the very thing that makes us human: the impulse to transcend the reality that surrounds us, to abstract from our concrete experience and to free ourselves from necessity. As such, the human capacity for good is inevitably tied to the human capacity for evil: both account for those actions that lie beyond the necessary requirements of everyday survival. We like to construct stories behind our choices, drawing relationships between events as we search for the elusive “because.” Even Hitler managed to convince himself of the inevitable logic behind his actions: “I would prefer not to see anyone suffer, not to harm anyone. But when I realise the species is in danger, then, in my case, sentiment gives way to the coldest reason.” Attempting to understand more recent atrocities, we can propose theories, offer formulae and draw logic trees, but we come to a point where the “because” lies with human beings themselves, who decided that the right response to their situation entailed treating other human beings as candidates for annihilation.


“Tell them to put the gun back,” Kathy said to one of the officers who had begun to question them, and so they did. Unarmed, he and his colleague were sitting ducks for the bank robbers in the back of the van, who jumped out shooting. Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown was killed immediately. Sergeant Edward O’Grady was killed while trying to reload his gun. Kathy started to run, but she was caught by an off-duty parole officer. In the confusion, David managed to drive away, but he was apprehended in Nyack along with the driver of the other vehicle. Chesa was still at his babysitter’s apartment; his planned pick-up time was almost precisely the moment when his parents were apprehended. Nine hours later, at around 2 a.m., Kathy was allowed to make a phone call from jail. She rang the home of William Kunstler, the radical lawyer, not the home of Ana Vasquez, the babysitter. Kathy had not forgotten about her son; the next day she finally reached Kunstler, who then called Kathy’s father, and, together with their wives, they immediately drove to Nyack. Meeting them in her cell, Kathy asked them to pick up Chesa. It was now almost two full days after the bloody events. We do not know from Susan Braudy’s terse, tough-minded, honest, and thoroughly absorbing book when and how Ana Vasquez was relieved of her charge. But we do know that Kathy’s parents, understanding that their daughter was likely to be behind bars for some time, considered themselves too old to adopt her child. “We’d never heard of Pampers,” Kathy’s mother said. “We didn’t know how to undo the stickum. The baby was crying.” Kathy’s fellow revolutionaries Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers decided to adopt Chesa on the spot. Kathy, to her dismay, learned that as a prisoner she had no right to see Chesa, and it was not until January 1983, when he would have been twenty-nine months old, that Kathy, recently transferred to a new prison, was finally allowed to touch her baby. The events in which Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert participated left many painful questions. How did a group of high-achieving kids find themselves in the midst of such violence? By what processes of reasoning could intelligent people conclude that criminals were revolutionaries? How could individuals who claimed to be on the side of the working class participate in the murder of a local policeman? In what ways is the search for racial equality advanced by removing the only African American policeman in a town from his job, let alone from his life? And to all these can be added the question that I have the hardest time understanding: how could the parents of a baby drop the bundle of happiness off with a stranger in order to choose death over life?

 
They think and act as though it’s an extremely late hour in the day, and nothing much matters anymore. A lot of them are suicidal. Most of them see themselves as frustrated travelers. Solitary wayfarers. They’ve done things that have broken them off from their past and set off on the open road. Eventually they got arrested. This may be hard for some people to swallow, I guess, but they talk about their crimes almost as if they were acts of faith. Maybe these kids themselves wouldn’t use those words. But the things they’ve done, on some level, strike me as almost ecstatic attempts to vault over the shabby facts of their everyday lives. They haven’t read much. But some of them, the more down-and-out ones especially, read the Book of Revelation a lot.


His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul. What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him. And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors.

 
Strange that this literary theorist has not considered the basic problem of the literary grotesque: where everything is absurdly caricatured, the nature of the underlying reality becomes completely hidden, and the reader then has no way of telling what justification the caricature might have (if any). The result is not a satire saying shrewd things about the world but a crude morality play spun out of the writer’s imagination and informing us only of his prejudices.


Mistress Quickly’s speech enlarges and contracts like a fan, moving between apparently relevant detail (“upon Wednesday”) and irrelevant detail (“by a sea-coal fire”), and thus between different temporalities, the private and the universal. Of course, what seems irrelevant to us is terribly relevant to Mistress Quickly, for she is engaged upon a project of massive definition: she is reminding Falstaff that he loves her, and thus, in a way, that she exists.