How Juvenal! – The Fourth Estate

The poet known as Juvenal – his full name was Decimus Junius Juvenalis - was born in the Volscian town of Aquinum (1) in central Italy around the middle of the first century Anno Domini. He studied rhetoric and law under Quintillian and served in the Roman military before obtaining a low level position in the Roman bureaucracy. A few decades later, still in the same position, and having grown very bitter about it, he picked up his stylus and turned to satire. Satire in those days was a more specific genre of writing than it is today. Then as now it was social commentary full of biting attacks on public personalities, but then in ancient Rome it had to be set in verse and composed in hexameter. Juvenal’s first attempts at satire landed him in hot water. He insulted the court of Caesar, and especially Domitian’s favourite, the actor Paris – presumably in the lines found in his seventh Satire although the book in which this has come down to us was not published until much later - and Domitian, not being known for his appreciation of this sort of thing, furiously sent him away to exile in Egypt. The exile was not long – it ended when Domitian was assassinated and Nerva became Caesar – but, having lost his estate and his position, he returned impoverished to Rome, where he became more bitter than ever as is plain to be seen in his extent writings – five books, containing sixteen Satires, published in the first four decades of the second century.

In the days when Juvenal was more commonly read than today the third and the tenth were the Satires which were general favourites. The third, which can be found in Book I of the Satires, depicts Rome as a city that has grown too big and hopelessly corrupt by acting as a sewer into which all the dregs of the known world drained, leaving no room for an honest but poor Roman. This Satire was imitated countless times in the period between the Renaissance and the death of classical education. One of the better known imitations was London, the first major work published by Samuel Johnson shortly after he moved to that city from his native Lichfield. It was a not-so-subtle attack on the Whig government of Robert Walpole and earned Dr. Johnson his first critical acclaim, from none other than Alexander Pope.

If Juvenal’s Satires themselves are less known today than they used to be, phrases from them are still universally recognizable. It is a rare bird (“rara avis”, Satire VI, line 165) who has never heard the expression “bread and circuses” (“panem et circenses”, Satire X, line 81) used to describe the means by which politicians bribe the masses into complacency. As familiar as these are is the famous question posed in the sixth Satire, which is by far the longest of them all, comprising in itself the entirety of Book II.

This Satire is addressed to someone named Postumus who is on the verge of marriage. Juvenal attempts to dissuade him by arguing that the last time female chastity could be found on earth was in the mythical, primordial, Golden Age before the Olympians overthrew the Titans and that Roman woman in particular had become so depraved that a man would have to be insane to marry one of them when he could opt for suicide or sodomy instead. That summarizes the first thirty-seven verses alone. From this point on Juvenal’s esteem for women enters into a downward slide as the poem continues for another six hundred and six lines, not including the thirty-four lines which in the manuscript discovered by E. O. Winsted in the Oxford library are inserted between lines 365 and 366. (2) Reading him today, one would almost think he had the #Me Too Movement in mind. Truly, he was a man ahead of his time.

The famous question actually occurs twice in the Satire, the first time in lines 346-347, the second time in lines 31-32 of the “Oxford fragment.” In both contexts, Juvenal begins by saying that he hears from his old friends all the time the advice to lock up your wife and keep her indoors. It is in response to this that he asks:

sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (3)

This can be translated “but who will guard the guardians themselves” or “but who will watch the watchmen themselves” or even “but who will police the police themselves.”

The last of these translations would sound extremely odd in the context of what Juvenal is discussing but it fits well with the broader application that has often been assigned to the question. This pertains to the state in its role of administering and enforcing the law. This role has often been compared to that of a watchman. The word Plato used for the governing class of his hypothetical ideal city could be rendered custodes in Latin, just as both words are conventionally rendered “guardians” in English. Minarchists, that is to say, those who argue that the state should be as small and limited as is consistent with law and order, (4) frequently use the metaphor of the night-watchman to illustrate what they see the role of the state to be. Transferred from its original reference and applied to the state in this capacity, Juvenal’s question becomes the question of who keeps tabs on the civil authorities and holds them accountable for how they use and abuse their power.

Ideological democrats would answer “the people”, but this is extremely naïve. It has been recognized since ancient times that it is the leaders who are able to sway the masses into supporting them who are the most likely to severely abuse civil authority. A much better answer is the old Tory answer of “God.” The Whigs, and all the liberals who have come after them, regarded the “divine right of kings” as a license for the abuse of power. If the king gets his authority from God, they reasoned, he can do whatever he wants. This is totally fallacious, of course, because if regal authority comes from God, this means that the king is accountable to a Power that is both absolute and incorruptible, for how he uses that authority. A king who believes in God, and recognizes God as the source of his authority, is far less likely to abuse that power, than some demagogue who climbs to power through the support of the people and who in his heart recognizes no power greater than himself.

For the sake of making a point however, I am going to take the Tory answer, which is how I myself would answer the question, off of the table. If we answer “God” and by “God” mean God as He is conceived of in Christianity – the Omnipotent, Eternal, Unchanging Being Who is Perfect in His Justice, Righteousness, Mercy and Love – then we have a final answer to the question. If, however, we restrict the answers to those involving some sort of human agency, then we find that the question keeps repeating itself. Remember that the question is “who guards the guardians” or “who watches the watchers.” Any time you answer that question by naming some individual person, group of individuals, or human institution, these become the new “guardians” or “watchers” and the question must be repeated with regards to them. As long as you keep answering the question in this way, the question keeps repeating itself.

There is an institution that has long regarded itself as being the answer to the question at least insofar as it is asked in regards to the civil authority. I refer to the news media. In the eighteenth century, the news media - which at the time was synonymous with the press because there was no other medium - was dubbed "the fourth estate" (5), an allusion to the three estates of the realm – the clergy, nobility, and common people – and their representatives in Parliament. The expression suggested that the press was a more powerful estate than all of the others combined because it held them all accountable by reporting everything they did. Obviously, only a privately owned, independent press could fulfil this role with regards to the state. A publicly owned press would have the same power to shape and mold public opinion, but it would do so in the service of state interests rather than in the interest of holding the state accountable. Think Pravda and the rest of the controlled press in the former Soviet Union.

The mere existence of a public news medium, like the BBC or the CBC, is not enough to negate the news media's role as the watchers of the state, when it is a single voice among many, competing in a marketplace of information that is still a reasonably free forum. That can hardly be said to describe the unhealthy situation in Canada today. The Crown broadcaster has long been staffed primarily by adherents of the Liberal Party, and for this reason the CBC only subjects the government of the day to intense, adversarial, scrutiny, when the Conservatives are in power. The government agency responsible for regulating the electronic communications media, the CRTC, is also staffed mostly by Liberal-sympathetic civil servants. To make matters much worse, in the period since the Liberals returned to power in 2015, they have bailed out to the tune of billions, much of the private sector of the news media. Ironically, the Liberals justified the bailout of the media by pointing to how essential the media is in a free and democratic country, even though the bailout compromised the very independence that allows the media to function in this role.

The result can be seen everywhere today. For months Parliament has not been able to properly hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable. It adjourned at the beginning of the ill-advised pandemic lockdown, and when it resumed in April, it was at a much reduced capacity as the Liberals wanted and obtained with the help of the socialists and environmentalists. The Liberals have now succeeded, with the same backers, in sending Parliament into recess until the fall. When the previous Conservative government had Parliament prorogued for a much shorter period than this, the outcry from the media was deafening. They regarded this to be a mortal threat to democracy. Now there is mostly silence. Meanwhile, throughout this entire period, the Prime Minister has been giving brief updates almost every morning, in small press conferences admission to which has been tightly controlled to exclude unsympathetic and hostile questioners. There has been little objection to this with the exception of that which came from the small, private, online news companies that have been so excluded. Until earlier this week when a CBC reporter actually dared to put him on the spot with regards to the racial situation in the United States he had faced only Mickey Mouse questions tailored to fit his own agenda. The Canadian media has largely abdicated its role as watcher of the state.

A much worse problem exists, however, when the fourth estate fails to realize that quis custodiet can be asked of itself as well. Its power, let us never forget, comes from the same source as that of the archetypical populist demagogue, namely the ability to sway the masses and shape public opinion. This is a power that is no less dangerous in the hands of a press that does not regard itself as being accountable to anyone other than itself than it is in the hands of a would-be tyrant. Indeed, it is even more so.

Consider what has been happening south of the border for the last week. Race riots, with the looting, arson, destruction and mayhem that these entail, have sprung up in cities across the United States. The media bears the lion’s share of the culpability for this. For decades they have been deliberately distorting the facts about issues pertaining to race in the United States. Through over-reporting and hyper-editorializing every incident in which an unarmed black man is shot by a white policeman, and under-reporting all other police shootings that don't fit this pattern they have created the contra-factual impression in the general public that cops, especially white cops, use unarmed blacks for target practice. In reality, and the data clearly shows this, more whites are killed by the police than blacks every year. This fact is all the more significant in that the data also consistently shows that blacks commit a much larger percentage of the violent crime in the United States than their percentage of the American population, and that their percentage among the victims of police shootings is smaller than their percentage among violent crime perpetrators. The data also shows that police, white and black, are far more likely to shoot members of their own race than the other. The media does not widely report the studies and statistics that document this data, they instead make the specific incidents that fit the pattern they are looking for into their highlighted and headlined story for days, weeks, months on end. They trot out all of the victim’s family and friends, to eulogize and emote, in what is a cynical exploitation of these people’s pain, loss, and suffering in order to bully into silence anybody who tries to counter their narrative spin by pointing to the data. “How can you be so cold as to be talking about facts and statistics when these people are suffering?” is what their non-argument boils down to. Then they get pop singers, movie and television actors, and every other celebrity they can find to weigh in on the matter with their own uninformed and irrelevant opinion. This latter point should be sufficient to clue people in to the fact that they are seeing actors putting on a show instead of honest, truth-seeking, journalism. It is possible, of course, that they think of what they are doing as some sort of a "noble lie" justified by the need to raise “awareness” of white “racism” or some such rot. To someone who does not share their activist outlook, however, it appears more like they are trying to incite a race war, and their behaviour over the last couple of weeks would bear out that interpretation. Apart from giving the death of George Floyd the same treatment described above, they have encouraged and promoted what they persist in describing as peaceful protests, despite the looting and burning. Evidence abounds that these riots are not spontaneous uprisings in response to Floyd’s death but highly organized affairs, well supplied with transportation, bricks, etc., indicating that they were planned well in advance. The mainstream progressive media has for years been whitewashing the Blackshirt actions of the growing Antifa movement which is undoubtedly providing the organization here, suggesting a high degree of media complicity in producing this anarchy.

It is imperative, therefore, today, that we turn our serious attention to the question of who watches the watchers, with regards to the self-appointed watchers of the state themselves, the fourth estate.

(1) Now called Aquino.

(2) The same manuscript inserts a much shorter fragment after line 373.

(3) In the Oxford fragment this does not end with a question mark but a comma because it is followed by the relative clause “qui nunc lasciuae furta puellae hac mercede silent?” which basically says that the guardians take payment to keep silent about the girl’s mischief. The larger context in the fragment is interesting in itself. It begins with an attack on effeminate males which, if had been written today, would have landed the poet in exile again for some phobia or another, even if he had not already been driven out by the feminists over what he said in the larger body of the poem. Juvenal complains that theses have way too much influence over the minds of women and from this launches into a warning to husbands who rely upon eunuch servants to guard their wives’ fidelity. The gist of the warning is that there are plenty of Lotharios willing to masquerade as pansies in order to trick husbands into becoming parties to their own cuckolding and so the husbands need to make sure that the eunuchs are eunuchs indeed. This leads in to where the earlier discussion is repeated.

(4) This view is often ascribed to libertarians, who do indeed hold it, but libertarianism is more properly a specific set of arguments for minarchism rather than minarchism itself.

(5) Thomas Carlyle attributed it to speech given by Edmund Burke in 1787.