I recently ordered a copy of The Documents in the Case and it arrived today. It’s going directly onto the bookshelf as I have no immediate interest in reading it. This is for several reasons. The main reason is that it is written in the form of a series of letters. That’s not necessarily bad, but it takes the right frame of mind to deal with as it has at best a resemblance to a narrative flow. It was done fairly well in the beginning of Busman’s Honeymoon, but that section was mercifully short.

The Documents in the Case was published in 1930, putting it between Strong Poison and Five Red Herrings. It was a collaboration with Robert Eustace, who provided the scientific knowledge, and is quite a departure from Lord Peter. Interestingly, Sayers had intended to kill off Lord Peter in Strong Poison, or rather to retire him and cease writing about him. She proved unable to do so, as she couldn’t get Harriet to agree to marry Lord Peter and when she humanized him for Harriet’s sake she found she made him interesting to her. She probably did not know that at the time that she wrote The Documents in the Case, though, which makes me wonder whether it was originally intended as a new direction, rather than a one-off experiment.

The Five Red Herrings was published the next year, in 1931, and is far and away my least favorite of the Lord Peter stories. Far from humanizing Lord Peter none of the characters in the book were human beings. Have His Carcase came the next year, 1932, and brings a far more human Lord Peter Wimsey, so this was not far off. I’d wonder if The Documents in the Case marked the beginning of Sayers considering a turn toward a more strictly puzzle-oriented type of mystery, except that she actually referred to it in her essay in Titles To Fame as a step in the right direction of making her detective novels more novels than detection.

I did read a page or two, out of curiosity, and came across something very interesting. The woman writing the first letter (after a brief cover letter to the attached documents giving us the barest sense of what’s going on) mentions that in England at the time (the letter is dated 9 September 1928) there were two million women more than men. Presumably this is related to World War 1, though looking it up only about a million men from the British Empire died in World War 1 (I say “only” in regard to the supposed surplus of women). If true, this would certainly go decent way to explaining the loosening of sexual morality at the time, though it had certainly been happening prior to the start of World War 1. I’ll have to look into this more to see whether it really was the case.

As Edward Feser has observed, classical liberalism is all about toleration, but in the end, the only thing it will tolerate is itself. It is a bit of a long argument, but the short version is that the Paradox of Tolerance means that liberalism needs to be intolerant of whatever will threaten its toleration, and that turns out to be, approximately, everything else.

Classical liberalism, as it morphed into contemporary liberalism—more often called “progressivism” or “woke”, though none of these are well-defined terms—has increasingly discovered what it can tolerate and what it can’t. It can tolerate fornication, divorce, adultery (with a few qualifications), drug abuse, all manner of sex-like acts which have no relationship of any kind to procreation, and quite a few other things, though it cannot tolerate slavery, rape, or murder (if the victim has been born more than a few minutes ago). It can tolerate telling other people how to be happy as long as they have asked and the answer is a generally acceptable one.

If one casts one’s eye over the things that modern liberalism will tolerate, there are clearly no principles involved. People occasionally make an attempt at “as long as it doesn’t harm anyone” but abortion clearly harms people. (It’s no answer to say “but we define the victims as not people” since the victims of slavery were defined as not-people too, and liberals don’t excuse that for a second.) Divorce harms people, though some liberals do try to get around this via pretending that it doesn’t. Adultery obviously harms people. For that matter drug abuse clearly harms the one abusing the drugs, but the principle is generally “so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone but the person doing it”. Something that points in the right direction, I think, is that liberals who live in low-crime areas are often tolerant of crime, even including violent crime. This is especially true of white liberals and black-on-black crime. And that last part, I think, gives it away.

Modern liberalism tolerates whatever does not inconvenience the liberal. I don’t mean that liberals are inconsistent and suspend their principles whenever they are personally inconvenienced. I mean that this is their principle, to the degree that they have a principle. Many of them do not even pretend to have principles anymore; at best they have slogans which everyone recognizes that they don’t mean literally or figuratively. They do not pretend to aim for a common good; rather their entire criteria for what can be tolerated is “what does it matter if it doesn’t hurt you?” These purely selfish individuals do need to negotiate with each other because no man is an island, so they must cooperate in banning things that the people they need demand be banned; they are particularly willing to do this if they have no interest in doing the things their allies want banned. All of this makes sense as long as you realize that their principle is unenlightened short-term self interest.

I can’t stress enough that I am not accusing contemporary liberals of being hypocrites. My whole point is that they are not hypocrites.