An Eternal Question

     According to Wikipedia, Sherlock Holmes is the “most portrayed literary human character” of all time, having appeared in 254 separate productions for radio, stage, film, and television. It’s eloquent testimony to the power of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective to enthrall an audience. Indeed, Holmes was so magnetic a character that Conan Doyle’s readers compelled him to bring Holmes back from the dead, after his seemingly fatal confrontation with Professor Moriarty in The Final Problem.

     Many and variously capable have been the actors who have portrayed Holmes, but for me there can be only one: the late Jeremy Brett.

     Brett gave Holmes a manner and character truer to Conan Doyle’s fictions than anyone who has played the detective before or since. His ownership of the role was so complete that even in 1994, when he was desperately ill and would occasionally collapse during filming, he was considered indispensable to the BBC / Granada production. Notably, one of the final series’ episodes, The Mazarin Stone, was filmed almost entirely without Brett / Holmes, as he was too ill to participate. The central role was given to Charles Gray, who plays Holmes’s equally brilliant brother Mycroft.

     Brett’s portrayal of the great detective grew ever darker as the productions went on. In the very last of them, The Cardboard Box, he concludes the teleplay with a line that could have served for Holmes’s epitaph:

     “What is the meaning of it, Watson? What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must have a purpose. Or our universe has no meaning and that is unthinkable. But what purpose?...That...is humanity's great problem to which reason, so far, has no answer.”

     Reason must find an answer, and swiftly.

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     I don’t talk about it, in the main, but I get a fair amount of hate mail. All of it is emitted by...persons on the political Left. Some of it goes beyond vitriolic. I shan’t bruise your eyes by exposing it to you. Let it suffice to say that my hate correspondents have wished the greatest tragedies imaginable upon me.

     “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” Why do so many Leftists hate their political opponents and wish them to come to harm? There are no few such, if my mailbag is representative – and remember, I’m a very minor voice. Could millions of people be so characterologically deficient as to imagine that hatred is the route to the supposedly better society they claim to seek?

     I can’t call that attitude anything but deranged. If it were personalized – i.e., if Smith were consumed with hatred for Jones, but was otherwise unafflicted by the emotion – it would be deemed a mental illness, no matter what Jones might have done to “deserve it.” But the haters of the Left hate impersonally: without any knowledge of those they hate except for our political opinions.

     Christians are forbidden to hate:

     “No matter where we stand in our lives, whatever our circumstances,” Father Ray had said to her, “only three paths are open to us. We can break, we can stand idle, or we can build. The Christian course is to strive to build, to improve, to contribute whatever mortal power can add to God’s edifice. If that necessitates some demolition, the tearing down of an impassable obstacle, the Christian is commanded to do so in a spirit of understanding and forgiveness. He must not condemn. He must not hate.”

     As I’ve written before, hatred is considered a capital sin because it’s a machine that produces other sins: false witness, fraud, theft, violence, and others. Its intimate connection to envy — another capital sin – makes it uniquely deadly to social relations.

     No nation, whatever its political system, can survive a condition in which millions of people hate millions of others. Yet that is the condition in which America stands today.

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     Don’t look to me for an answer to the problem. I may be a genius, but I’m not omniscient. I can diagnose the malady; I have no idea how to cure it. I can’t even think of a way to palliate it.

     Were America to fission into independent “red” and “blue” sectors, the problem would persist. Indeed, it might grow infinitely worse. Imagine a state of affairs in which a free and prosperous “red” nation directly abuts a socialism-afflicted “blue” nation. You don’t have to strain for a historical example; just about any incidence of socialism anywhere in time or space will serve. What does the socialist state invariably pursue as an “answer” to its troubles?

     No, I haven’t written all of this just to sour your morning. I’m struggling for some approach to the thing that doesn’t involve millions of deaths. And I can’t produce one.

     Holmes asked “What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear?” He asked for its purpose — but could mass hatred, and mass malevolence, have a purpose? “It must have a purpose,” he said, “Or our universe has no meaning and that is unthinkable. But what purpose?”

     “That...is humanity's great problem to which reason, so far, has no answer.” That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, inarguably the possessor of a great mind, was baffled by the question relieves me somewhat. I’ll keep working on it, but I wouldn’t expect an answer before lunchtime.