John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart came together in 1962 to make with John Ford, the Man who shot Liberty Valance. The posters advertised the fact that the two great actors of the Western had been united together in one film- what they didn't say was that here we see the two actors as opposites, opposites that reflect the earlier histories of their careers and the history of the United States. Ford showed in the film how America had in the course of the early twentieth century chosen a future and a way forwards and had neglected and destroyed its past. In that sense the Man who shot Liberty Valance, a flawed film because in part it is too didactic (and in part because of the age of its stars- both Stewart and Wayne were in their late fifties when the film was made and don't quite come off as fresh faced heroes) is an extended meditation on the American frontier and its place within America. Far from being the society of the frontier, America, Ford implied, was the society that had turned its back on the frontier and the West and its future was the East coast.
The situation in Ford's film is not difficult to understand. On a windswept night, before the coming of the railway, a young lawyer, played by Stewart, called Ransom Stoddard comes into down on a stagecoach. The coach is held up by a gang of desperadoes, led by Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin) and Stewart's naive insistance that Valance live by his coscience ends with him getting beaten up. He arrives at town a couple of days later and settles down in the town cafe. The family there care for him. In town he meets a couple of key characters- a cowardly marshall (Andy Devine doing what Andy Devine was great at doing), a drunken, unstable and yet brilliant journalist, a girl called Hallie and her lover Tom Doniphon. Doniphon is the only one who can physically stand up to Liberty Valance, the outlaw, and protects Stoddard on various occasions. Stoddard arrives at the very moment that Valance is being used by the neighbouring big farmers to stop the territory applying to join the United States (which would dilute their powers). By educating the people of the town, Stoddard persuades them to vote for statehood against the farmers and eventually that leads directly to a confrontation between Stoddard and Valance and the revelation of the man who really did shoot Liberty Valance. Stoddard gets the girl (Hallie) and ends up a senator. Doniphon tries to kill himself and almost succeeds and his life after that moment is wasted and consumed in dissapation.
Stewart and Wayne are here playing roles that they had constructed over the previous thirty years of their careers. Stewart had been playing naive democrats who triumphed over circumstances since the 1930s- he had diversified in the late 40s and 50s working for Alfred Hitchcock and making Westerns- but those earlier parts in films such as Mr Smith goes to Washington still resonated. Wayne too had monopolised the tough westerner, grim and complicated. His earlier work in the Searchers is a great example of this aspect of Wayne. For Ford, placing them together, enabled him to balance two perceptions of America's past: the democratic and civic and the wild frontiersman. But the film represents less an examination of those two ideas than the examination of the decline of the second and the rise of the first. There is no sense that Doniphon would ever move East, but its significant that Stewart's character follows the advice of Horace Greeley to 'go west, young man' and conquers the minds of the people of the town.
Conquest and violence are motifs running through the film. When Stoddard arrives in town, Doniphon tells him he has to get a gun to resist Liberty Valance. That advice is repeated again and again. But the real conquest here is the conquest of Doniphon's territory by Stoddard. Through education, the townsmen seek to exclude Valance by election and law, not self defence. Stoddard offers Hallie the gift of reading, Doniphon offers her a house that he built himself, and Hallie chooses the teacher over the practical man. Through publicity, Stoddard's reputation conquers and effaces Doniphon's. After the progress of several years, noone can remember the great Doniphon, whereas everyone from the moment he arrives recognises and remembers Stoddard. The pen triumphs in this film over the sword (despite the fact that the only resolution that can work with Valance relies on a quick and calm hand on a gun). The pen though obliterates those that use the sword: Doniphon's virtue is forgotten and Stoddard's is remembered.
America has changed. Doniphon of course is independent of anyone else. He constructs and destroys himself. Stoddard is dependent on others for his own safety and his own approval. The one is a product of lonely virtuous pride- a Cincinnatus who denies any civic office. The second though is a product of the modern age- social and sociable. By the time Stoddard returns the town has become his and Doniphon's funeral is a lonely one. But Stoddard feels a regret of sorts. He feels a regret that the memory of Doniphon has faded. A regret that the honourable man he knew has lost his reputation in the wastes of time and a regret as well that he has migrated from a town that loves him, to the cities which don't. There is a strong sense in the film of community: community that may be under threat in the early days but that is looked back at with nostalgia by those that have left it. One wonders if Stoddard when he moves back to Shinbone feels that loss of community and regrets the way it has departed. He seems to want to have that lifestyle again: setting up his own law practise in a small town but he can never reach the self sufficiency of Doniphon.
The world was changing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the frontier. The change was inevitable: this film reinforces that, without Stoddard's educational work the town wouldn't have known about the plots to subvert its rights. But equally something is lost: what is lost is the magnificent personality of Doniphon. Wayne's performance is the most charismatic in the film, Ford allows it, and he allows it in order to demonstrate how the independence of the hero is lost in the rush to modernity. Stewart's character is the future for America, but its a future that leaves behind the pioneers that made America. A future for democracy and liberalism but not for classical republicanism: no matter whether you think the world America lost (of independent farmers) was worth retreiving, it is undeniable that Ford's historical analysis was right. And there is something in the emotional appeal that Doniphon has over the modern citizen Stoddard.
But in a tough minded film, its demonstrated that the emotional appeal isn't enough: with modernity comes inevitable loss and rightly the democratic character triumphs.
I have heard Rowan Williams speak and unlike some am fairly well disposed to him- he gave a fascinating talk on art and philosophy at Cambridge in 2005. I suppose that makes me a perfect advocate of the argument that today the Archbishop has made a complete idiot of himself. Partly he has made an idiot of himself through the fact that whatever Rowan Williams does understand, the media isn’t one of the things that he gets. Partly though he has made an idiot of himself because he has advocated a concept of law which I think is dangerous and creates a special privilege for established Churches in this country which they should not have.
Williams’s speech has usefully been put up on the Guardian website. Reading it one notices a couple of things. Williams is not really talking about Sharia- the discussion of Sharia is just a bridge into a much more important theoretical issue which is the attitude of the law to the citizens who live under it. What Williams wants the law to do is to distinguish between citizens based on what they believe: he tells us that
there is a risk of assuming that ‘mainstream’ jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in.
Williams of course over emphasizes the communal (and Matt Sinclair has criticised the Archbishop adequately on those grounds here): but he also mistakes what the law is about.
The law is the instrument by which we maintain peace and mark out civil goods and bads: it delineates that which the country considers private and inoffensive and that which the country considers public and dangerous. The law insofar as it does that cannot respect the will of the particular agents who operate under it, even if they have a sense of ‘communal belonging’ which say excuses murder: the question before lawyers is what did they do and what is the punishment. In some situations the law also arbitrates and here you could argue that the intentions of the agents matter- but that is only in the sense that the law intends to respect both of the agents. The sense of the agents is not what governs the process of arbitration but its a factor in it. For example, say I am someone who believes that animals are equivalent to children: the fact that I believe that is a factor in the decisions the court might make, but it does not govern those decisions. Williams is right that the law should not be blind to the intentions of agents as factors in any decision, but it should not be governed by those intentions (and he knows it shouldn’t- at one key moment he qualifies his own position to exclude the religious courts ever destroying someone’s rights- quite how he would do that when almost all law concerns questions of right is a different and interesting matter). Ultimately the standerd to which the law aspires is not Muslim, Christian or Jewish justice or Mormon or Scientologist justice but its justice as defined by statute and precedent within Parliament- justice as it applies to everyone who is any of those five religions and to anyone who isn’t from the Sikh to the Satanist, from the atheist to the polytheist.
The problem with Rowan Williams is in part that he is deceived by his own subtlety- go and read the lecture it is an example of encasing yourself in sentences like a mummy in wallpaper and then trying to walk through a crowded tube platform. But its more than that. As a theologian Williams wants us to think about revelation all the time: but revelation doesn’t have that much to do with politics. In a democratic secular state, revelation is a factor in any decision but it doesn’t govern what the government should or shouldn’t do. Ultimately people who believe owe just as much as people who don’t to the state because the state is not a religious formation- it is on its Western model a secular foundation which exists to perpetuate the well being of its members. The point isn’t that religious people can’t be religious, or can’t be members of society, but that the state isn’t interested in their religion. They can use religious justifications for their political actions if they like- but those justifications will only appeal to those that share the same religion and will irritate those that don’t- they will produce communities struggling against each other. The state is a minimalistic project in the sense that it talks a minimalistic language of politics- the problem with Dr Williams is that for him that just isn’t enough.
Its a common problem that you can see here and across the Atlantic- the current Pope is another person guilty of demanding accomodation on his own terms alone. But what people need to realise is that as soon as you create a legally privileged religion or argue that all argument has to take place in religious terms: you do abandon the whole idea of a secular state- a meeting place between people of different religions and none which does not proscribe any faith but tolerates almost all. There is a lot of modern work been done on these questions- Mark Lilla has just published an interesting book I mean to write about here in the future on the philosophy of this area. But ultimately it all comes down to the reasoning of the earliest modern philosopher of secularism, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes had a dark vision of where arguments like the Archbishop’s could lead us: towards a hell of civil strife and communal violence, towards religious tyranny and massive unhappiness.
Despite my admiration for Rowan Williams, who is a very intelligent and thoughtful person, this time I’m with Thomas Hobbes.
