The Shame in Shaming Andrew

I was glad to see David Starkey telling Alexander Larman, the royal writer for the Spectator, that all the fuss about the former Prince Andrew, former Duke of York, former Earl of Inverness, former Baron Killyleagh, former HRH, was just an exhibition of what Macaulay called a “periodic fit of morality” on the part of the British public. Not only because he knew his Macaulay tag, but also because he was right.

I still cannot exactly see what Andrew’s offence is. Even if the worst that has been said about him is true (and until worse comes out), all he did was act in an incautious manner: instead of keeping his infidelities close to Windsor, Buckinghamshire and Mayfair, he got a bit international and allowed himself to be fawned over by the mixed dubious pair of Epstein and Maxwell. Even if he slept with the unfortunate Giuffre, they paid her, he did not. And, even if he knew about the arrangement: well! Have not men throughout the centuries paid, and women throughout the centuries accepted payment?

Here comes Peter Jones, the classicist: one of those interesting figures who continues to write for the Spectator, no matter what. Every week he trots out some fairly anodyne reflection on the present by wielding bits of erudition about the classics. This week was no different: but for once the headline forced me to read it, and, though I am no classicist, it so happened that for a week or I have been informing myself about the very thing, aidos, that Peter Jones decided to tell us about.

The most extraordinary thing about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is that he seems to have no sense of shame. That word in Greek was aidos, which covered everything from a sense of shame, inhibiting one’s own behaviour, to respect, i.e., sensitivity to the feelings, status and claims of others.

Jones rattles through a few examples of stern antique figures pontificating about aidos before saying: “One might have hoped Mr Mountbatten Windsor had absorbed something of that.”

Beta minus, Jones. As I say, I am no classicist, and I have no Latin, less Greek, etc., but I am interested in words, and sometimes in Greek words, and he entirely misses the point about aidos. So let me answer Jones with some more erudition. (I don’t have any animus against Jones, by the way: I like his little book about the classics.)

The great figure of aidos in Greek myth is Maia. In the Homeric Hymns, Maia is called the modest one, and though I cannot conjugate the word, that word is aidoin. Maia is the mother of Hermes, and gives birth to him in a cave, away from the eyes of the other gods. Indeed, Zeus seduces her far away from the sight of any of the gods. And so Hermes, the God whom Homer says in the Iliad is the friendliest of gods to man, is born in the shadow of aidos. And what is aidos? It means shame, reverence, respect: it means many things, but it always implies a lowering of the eyes, a reluctance to see or be seen, to cast one’s eyes on others, or have others’ eyes cast on oneself: both a sense of shame because something shameful has happened and a sense of shame acting as protection that anything shameful shall ever be found.

That’s the Homeric Hymns. If we leap from the Hymn to Hermes to a writing of a few centuries later, Plato’s Protagoras, we find Hermes playing a very important role in one of the most remarkable stories ever told. This story: you might have heard it. Prometheus and his backward brother Epimetheus are given the task of giving dynamic capacities to all the animals – horns, claws, teeth, hide and so on – but Epimetheus runs out of capacities before he gets to man. And so man is unclothed, unshod, unsheltered, unarmed. What is to be done? Prometheus, as we all know, steals fire from Hephaestus. He also steals technical wisdom from Athena: what we would nowadays call ‘skills’. But these alone are not sufficient to save man from himself. And so Zeus, looking down on man, tells his son Hermes to take aidos and dike to man. This is remarkable.

aidos = shame

dike = justice

and (we are told)

aidos + dike = politike techne

where politike techne = politics, the capacity for politics. That is it. Zeus, through Hermes – the messenger, the trickster, the traveller – gives man politics, and Protagoras tells us that politics is shame plus justice.

This is an extremely powerful myth. And aidos and dike are well balanced: for shame is, as Jones suggests, a limit, a restraint on self. It limits our actions in relation to others. While justice is consideration, the taking of others into account, so one gives everyone whatever is owed to them. And both of these together give us our ability to relate to each other.

Well, there’s the ideal. But do not expect the ideal from a prince, especially an unpolitical prince.

The next thing to say is that Hermes, though responsible for conveying these great gifts to man, and though himself the son of ‘the modest one’, is, as far as we know, extremely shameless in his behaviour. Wikipedia seems to count 40 children by 40 goddesses, nymphs, dryads etc. He is associated with the erect phallos; his name was associated with those strange phallic busts called ‘herms’ found all over Greece; and he bedded almost every lady he could find, and possibly some lads too. He was, in short, something of an Epstein. Why was he so shameless? Well, partly because he was a god: he could get away with it. Partly because he was liked – like Epstein. And partly because he was the epitome of deceit. Indeed, he is the god of ambiguity and deception.

Apollo, by comparison, even though armed with magnificent powers of insight into everything in the past, and everything in the present that he could see, was easily confounded by Hermes, who had the additional power of being able to invent 1) new things that 2) could not be seen. Hermes was a contriver, Mekhaniotes in Greek. And, above all, Hermes was the master of words. He operated in words. Words, logoi. Word, logos. And the word logos itself is one of the most marvellously paradoxical words of all history. For the logos is the ‘word’ that expresses the absolute truth of the universe – remember that in the Bible Jesus is the logos – but also the word by which we, all of us, can say that something is the case when it is not the case. If man was a deceiver without words, before words existed, he couldn’t be that much of a deceiver until he had words. As soon as he, we, had words, he, we, could say that black was white, that empire was republic, that tyranny was democracy, that man was woman, that virus was vaccine, that every bit of evidence available to us pointed to the reality climate crisis.

Now, doubtless, Epstein – though we still lack the story of him (because he was an expert in hermetic aidos) – was liar, a trickster, a deceiver. Is there not something attractive about him, even in his criminality? I am sure it was tawdry, but wasn’t it also magnificent, licentious, luxurious? Are we not fascinated as well as appalled? He seems to have appealed, at various points, to various Trumps and Mandelsons, as well as many others: and played them with an all but hermetic brilliance. But because he was not a god, and certainly because he lacked some of Hermes’s final intelligence, he was caught up in his own eventual downfall. He was exposed. In relation to Epstein’s story, Andrew’s is relatively insignificant. If he were not a prince, or former prince, his part in the story would have been ignored. I’d say that he is the victim of the envy felt for him, although he, too, has benefited, at times, from that very envy: since is not friendship, of the rich for the rich, of the famous for the famous, a sort of envy and reflected glory?

When all this settles down, it will seem to be a story in need of explanation. No one will be able to explain why a prince was brought down over something so insignificant. Was treason involved? No. Andrew was no Montfort, or Monmouth, or Despenser. He was just a royal with the usual Plantagenet or Saxe-Coburg and Gotha lusts. His only mistake was to fraternise with a dubious foreigner. And outside his own country, the conventions were not sufficient to protect him, and perhaps the British public feels a bit offended that he sowed his oats on foreign soil and with money involved and in a situation in which almost no one, except he, wants aidos to matter.

He doubtless does feel shame. But what is offensive is how we suppose he does not ­– how do we know? – and then try to impose shame on him, indeed, shame him.

It is shameful to impose shame on someone else. Let’s face it, it is shameless to impose shame on someone else. Shame, if anything, is a flower that only flowers in the dark: it is only real if it exists when one is alone, hidden.

So our word for this is wrong. I don’t think ‘shame’ is the word for all this public ritual. It is, in fact, ‘humiliation’.

On the other hand, our interest in this story is shameless. I have to be somewhat shameless even to go over it. Peter Jones is shameless. Virginia Guiffre, alas, was shameless. I think the gods are looking down on Andrew with something like pity, and that there will be dark consequences for those of us who have cheered at the fall of the prince. Aidos is meant to be felt, and is, at root, a highly hidden sentiment, a sense of self-imposed limit, a discovery. We were never meant to impose shame on others. If we do, that shame is on us.

I’d like to leave it there, but there is a final thought. In Latin aidos became pudor, which gives us the word pudenda ‘[things] to be ashamed of’. This adapted word for a long time was associated with the female genitals: as something hidden, something to be ashamed of. I recall reading a book by Raymond Geuss (Public Virtues, Private Vices) in which he engaged in a bit of amateur etymology about the word ‘public’. He suggested that it was at first related to the word ‘pubic’: indicating that the male genitals were never something to be ashamed of, but, on the contrary, public. (Perhaps the res publica, the ‘public thing’, i.e., the city, was originally something about cock and balls.) O tempora, O mores! But time has passed, and I suppose the Guiffre/Epstein tale is partly one about our shifting mores. We are no longer Romans. Epstein, we are meant to assume, who would have been a contented Roman, instead died out of time, 2,000 years later, a shamed man, while Guiffre turned out to be vindicated by making herself public, by that famous cheap photo, by court case, by suicide, and by book. She turned her shame inside out: and perhaps at some tragic cost. But Andrew has now – as the demand of our time – had to turn his behaviour and his status outside in. He is now in disgrace, and in exile, and in retreat, and I suppose that we should consider him to have been chosen as a scapegoat for this particular zeitgeist.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.