Cunning.

• Author: Goldberg, John C.P.
• Position: Book review

CUNNING. By Don Herzog. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 192. $24.95.

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I A. Tales from the Gallows Pole B. No One Is Nobody, but Some People Sure Act Like Him: Does Everybody Know? C. Knave-Spotting; What a Fool Believes D. If You Outsmart Yourself Who Are You? II A. Hobbes's Gambit B. Be Careful What You Think C. What's In It for Us? D. A Quibble CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

By meditating on displays of cunning in literature, history, and current events, Don Herzog (1) in his new book isolates and probes difficult puzzles concerning how to understand and evaluate human conduct. The point of the exercise is not to offer a system or framework for resolving these puzzles. Quite the opposite, Cunning aims to discomfit its academic audience in two ways. First, it sets out to show that some of the central dichotomies of modern thought--those between means and ends, reason and desire, self-interest and morality, fact and value, virtue and vice, knowledge and politics, authenticity and artifice, and appearance and reality--tend not to function as useful analytic constructs, but instead operate as blinders that prevent us from accurately grasping the wellsprings, stratagems, and character of human action. Second, it asks us to confront related and daunting questions of what and whom one can justifiably believe, and how one ought to behave in a world that, at every turn, seems to invite and reward artifice and deception.

In addressing these topics, Herzog eschews road maps and linear exposition for casuistry and jazzy riffs. The result might profitably be described as Wonka for professors--a fantastic, vertiginous, somewhat menacing tour of a rogue's gallery, led by a guide with roguish sensibilities of his own. (2) Painstakingly crafted, darkly witty, honestly observed, and hyper-literate, (3) the book delivers on its promise to unsettle. It also demonstrates the edifying power of a style of analysis that is historical, philosophical, humane, and resolutely anti-reductionist but not ethereal, arcane, grandiose, or soft-minded. In short, Cunning's mind-bending inquiry teaches us as much about the possibilities for humanism as it does about humans.

I

1. Tales from the Gallows Pole

   The body of Cunning's argument is elegantly packaged between an introduction and an afterword recounting parallel tales of murder most foul. The introduction describes events portrayed in the gallows confession of John Kello, a sixteenth century Scotsman (pp. 3-7). Kello, we learn, murdered his wife. Why? Because he had an offer of a better job that she didn't want him to take. We also learn that he went about his grim task conscientiously. After an unsuccessful poisoning, Kello strangled her and then hung her corpse so as to suggest a suicide.

   So what sort of monster was this Kello? And how was his crime exposed? Here's a twist. Kello was a minister. And he seems to have tended to his flock faithfully even as he went about this sinful business. Yet, even before he reached the gallows, he confessed. Why? Here's another twist. Some time after committing the murder, Kello asked a fellow minister to interpret a dream of his, and the interpretation so staggered him that he persuaded himself that God had ordered him to confess (p. 4).

   Now leap ahead to Cunning's concluding vignette (pp. 187-92). Master James, an elderly minister, hired Master Lowe as an assistant, welcoming him into his home. Lowe soon took up with James's wife, a fact that James somehow missed or ignored. Not content, Lowe resolved to murder James. After several failed attempts, Lowe one night entered James's bedroom and, over the victim's incredulous protestations, suffocated him in plain view of his young daughter, and in earshot of a servant.

   When the corpse was discovered by the servant the next morning, James's widow dismissed his attestations (and those of her daughter) that Lowe was the murderer, and she later had the body bound up so as to cover its wounds. Lowe, meanwhile, sent the accusing servant on an out-of-town errand with the idea of using the servant's "flight" as grounds for incriminating him. Fortuitously, the servant was intercepted by a neighbor of unusual acumen who arranged for the servant to tell his story to a justice of the peace.

   Lowe later appeared before the justice and tried to make his charge against the servant stick. Wise to the situation, the justice asked Lowe to stay around while the matter was cleared up. There, the resourceful neighbor ingratiated himself with Lowe, letting on that he was sufficiently well-connected that, if Lowe confessed, he could arrange for a royal pardon. (Of course he'd need the confession in writing, accompanied by a payment.) Lowe expressed misgivings, but the neighbor won him over. Lowe confessed and indicated that James's widow was good for the money. (Did this mean, asked the neighbor, that she was in on the crime? No, insisted Lowe.)

   The neighbor later brought Lowe's confession to the justice. Stunned, Lowe bitterly denounced his betrayal. The relentless neighbor also interrogated the widow, but she insisted that, should Lowe prove to be a murderer, she would gladly see him hanged. Yet Lowe continued to insist on her innocence. He was hanged, she burnt alive. Before her execution, she confessed to helping conceal the killing, but continued to claim that she played no role in planning or performing it. On the gallows, Lowe confessed not only to this crime but to another--that of killing a daughter conceived out of wedlock. Our pamphleteer reports that Lowe asked those convened to pray for him and that he embraced his death.

   Why does Cunning start with Kello's tale and end with that of Lowe's? In part, because of their darkness. Explorations of cunning perhaps need not take on sinister tones. Think of How to Win Friends and Influence People, that oddly ethical ode to manipulation in the service of can-do capitalism. (4) Herzog is himself an admirer of human ingenuity and even on occasion an advocate for cunning tactics. But he is also alive to, and at times near despair over, the "sheer nasty cleverness" of human cunning (p. 9).

   More to the point, these tales contain characters that are complicated. True, Kello is easily denounced. In any relevant sense of the word, we know that it is wrong to kill your spouse just because she doesn't want you to take a more attractive job. (So much for the notion that the world is divided into knowable facts and unknowable values.) But he was also a minister, and apparently a conscientious one. (5) Similarly, Kello was rational and irrational. If you want a better job, isn't it instrumentally rational to remove an obstacle to getting it in a manner that permits you to obtain it? (p. 6). Kello was rational in just this way. He staged the suicide, quietly spread rumors that his wife was depressed, arranged for discovery of the body, and expressed bereavement, perhaps even sincerely. And yet this methodical murderer suddenly heeded the call of the divine teachings he had flouted, and convinced himself to confess, thereby laying waste to his careful efforts--hardly the stuff of hardheaded instrumentalism. That is, unless one supposes that Kello came to doubt that wealth and professional status were the only ends that he ought rationally to be pursuing, or that rationality is fully captured by the unconstrained pursuit of such ends.

   Would it be accurate to describe Kello as cunning? Maybe not. He did manage to get himself hanged. On the other hand, he almost got away with murder. And, again, who says that the idea of cunning has to be tied to material success? Perhaps part of what it means to be cunning is to be cleverer than one should be; to be willing to navigate obstacles that, if one's life is to go well, one never should have sought to avoid in the first place. (6)

   Now consider the characters in Lowe's story. One might offer three cheers for Master James, the righteous minister. Yet this was also a man too innocent, complacent, or self-deluding to notice that his lodger was sleeping with his wife and trying to murder him. Do guileless or willfully blind victims deserve praise? If not, does that complicate our views on whether cunning is a virtue or a vice? This same line of inquiry leads us directly to the crafty neighbor, who is in some ways the mirror image of the naif James. An excellent detective, it would seem. But who put him in charge? And should we have any qualms about his willingness to deploy manipulative tactics? Did he ever worry that his own scheming might send an undeserving person to her death?

   Master Lowe, like Kello, is a perplexing figure. It's hard to find anything redeeming about a double-murderer, but Lowe does earn a bit of respect, if not for his display of honor-among-thieves sentiments in his dealings with the squirrelly neighbor, then for remaining loyal to his lover even after there was nothing material to be gained by doing so. The widow, meanwhile, remains enigmatic. Was she burned alive for murder, acting as an accessory after-the-fact, committing adultery, or being a victim?

   Implicit in the foregoing description of the characters in Lowe's tale is a third dimension--the complexity of their interactions with one another. For example, Lowe is in some ways a darkly effective character in James's household. Yet he soon meets his match in dealing with the neighbor. And he remains a steadfast lover to James's wife. The suggestion is--as it was in the case of Kello--that the multiplicity of contexts in which one acts provides occasions for a multiplicity of one's characteristics to come to the fore.

   A fourth dimension to each of these tales that is relevant to the larger aspirations of Cunning can be identified by asking how we know of these sordid events from long ago. I said above that Kello's story comes to us by way of his confession. But confessions of this sort, Herzog tells us, were...