'We Are All Potential Recruits for Anarchy'

It’s an honor to be published in The New Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years after it was founded by the late Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman. To share pages in the June issue with Gary Saul Morson, Victor Davis Hanson and other gifted writers is humbling. A nice surprise in the new issue is a “Reconsiderations” feature by Mark Falcoff devoted to Evelyn Waugh’s 1939 volume Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939). I first became aware of Falcoff almost twenty years ago when he published a “Reconsiderations” piece on the greatest of all Latin American novels, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904). 

I’ve always enjoyed reading Waugh’s travel books – for their prose, of course, and for the mingling of comedy and tart observation that mirrors Waugh’s sensibility. Falcoff rightly recommends the Everyman’s Library edition of Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing (2003), which brings together for the first time all seven of the travel books published by Waugh. Strictly speaking, we can’t describe Robbery Under Law as “travel writing,” though it’s based on Waugh’s visit to Mexico. If by that genre we mean the work of such British writers as Charles Doughty, Rebecca West and Patrick Leigh Fermor, Waugh’s book doesn’t make the cut, though his first travel book, Labels (1930), and second, Remote People (1931), certainly do.

 

Robbery Under Law is no travel guide for tourists. Waugh is less concerned with seeing the sights than with the politics of a country ruled by a corrupt, authoritarian regime. Army Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas del Río came to power in 1934 and seized control of the nation’s oil industry. “The Government’s campaign is against property as such,” Waugh writes – hardly a unique development around the world in the late 1930s. Global terror was simmering in Europe and Asia. Waugh’s book concludes with a stirring paean to civilization that seems more pertinent than ever:

 

“Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilised man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come from merely habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”