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Jonathan Haidt’s talk examines the political divide and ways to heal it from The Righteous Mind. His discussion of the problems free riders pose is often discussed here in terms of vaccinations. Haidt discusses group adaptations posited by Darwin and central to Edward O. Wilson’s 2012 The Social Conquest of Earth. Chicagoboyz might also find interesting his TED presentation “Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence.” He concludes with Donne, a man of deep passions both religious and secular, whose meditation “No man is an island” was a favorite of my father, repeated often as I grew up, integral to our fly-over village. But, of course, it is always and everywhere, our experience.

Another TED discussion summarizes the Liberal/Conservative split section of the longer (and aimed at a different audience) talk. (Haidt knows his pedagogy – interesting, visual, reinforcing.)

His liberal vision tempered by research, Haidt’s is a reasonable voice. I liked it; unfortunately, my thoughts wander on a less charitable path. But my criticism began at home: struck by how narrow my horizons were – mired in the long work weeks, bearing three children – when I rather thoughtlessly subscribed to a liberal agenda. He notes a more complex (perhaps more proportional, certainly more long range) set of values on the right. These take energy and vision. We’d like to alleviate the particular misery of an unhappy marriage, an unmarried mother, a child who is having trouble fitting in to the classroom, an accident victim in pain – these tug the heartstrings. And society in 1965 could be cold – I remember. Nonetheless, when immediate solutions based on the great value of caring but without the values of justice and sanctity (in traditions sometimes harsh but responsive to past experience), we have found, unfortunately, some unhappy experience repeated.

So, as rich as Haidt’s insights were, I was struck by a memory his audience was less likely to consider: the ability of Sarah Palin to evoke disproportionate and visceral passions and, let’s face it, just plain stupid comments. We hear many observations posited – the elite exclusivity countering fly-over egalitarianism, spunky womanhood both independent and conservative, her religious views that they fear, an Alinsky personalizing and ad homineming of the opposition. We note passions engendered by (distracting from) cognitive dissonance in similar disproportionate attacks on Clarence Thomas and Condoleeza Rice. Perhaps the image of a clearly pre-menopausal woman, holding a baby as she accepts the nomination, was part of it. The baby, well, deeply bothers. There is the obsession by Sullivan – she can’t have had the baby, he thinks. Why? Well, what need does such bizarre theorizing fulfill. Yes, I’ve always thought womb-envy was a powerful force. But Trig, well, Trig represents caring.

To liberals, Haidt argues, caring is so far a dominant value that others fade. Stossel notes one sure way to increase an endangered species is to hunt or eat it. Our sympathy for the whole of the herd requires more sense of the future but it, in the long run, saves. It isn’t the hardening of the heart as much as the broadening of experience (and the diminution of immediate sympathies by enlargement of head-led ones) that moves us. My irritation with Franks’ What’s Wrong with Kansas came from anger: he implies he “cares” about mid-western farmers; prose dripping with condescension, the reader wonders if the failure was of intelligence or motive – but hadn’t the twentieth century history demonstrated the seductive sirens of policies he advocated led to bloodshed, a century littered with the starved and broken bodies of farmers? My colleagues assert their sympathy – they “care” for children and therefore want national health care; my minister contends he – and his congregation – care about the poor by extending unemployment compensation; Gore cares about the environment.

Caring is embodied in selfless action. But who “cares”? Those who identify with the victim or those who identify with the caregiver, the adult in the room? Soldiers, who risk their lives; firemen who rush into buildings afire. And there is the choice to raise – to acknowledge and love – a special needs child. Accepting this restraint on action – one Santorum did as well as Palin – is an example of living the value of care. I’ll admit that I’m not sure that is the choice I would make – I’m restless, less generous, less willing to subsume my ego in that daily effort. Maybe I would. We know Arthur Miller did not make Palin’s choice. Of course, in many ways Palin’s choices were different than his. She showed time after time that she knew history, the constitution, energy policy and pipeline politics better than her opponents (not just Obama and Biden but her real opponents in the media). But she also knew them from a different perspective than the media’s (or Miller’s). But they spun that – they were used to spinning that. And they could ignore the fact that a lesbian couple was part of Bush’s White House. But they could not ignore Trig; they tried (complained because they were forced to see him); but, isn’t that because he posed a problem? They might have to acknowledge that no, they didn’t care. Their desire for autonomy, so often voiced as “caring”, was self-aggrandizing, not self-subsuming.

How such pressure can go dramatically wrong and encourage at once free riders and malignant envy, transform the healthy life force into a suicidal loss of self and abuse our desire for transcendence is described in another lecture, one Instapundit linked.

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I’m an amateur at technology – one of those stand at the front and yell at them, one of those “put-two-marks on the board to describe all of – well everything” teachers. “Potted lectures,” tests over the readings – that’s me. (My favorite pattern – that of the autobiographical or first person narrator taking us to the past, showing us the trail and trials to become the person speaking had a certain simplicity. But laughter began as I started, one semester, to put it up for the fifth or sixth time. Ah, I said, but doesn’t this make sense? Well, maybe, they said. It also looks like a rather flaccid penis. Perhaps simplicity leaves too much to the imagination.)

But, in an on-line American lit class, I want them to follow passages closely; the lectures use powerpoints – not bulleted points but sections of works we look at together. So I learned a beginner’s technology. For the freshman, well, plays need to be seen to be felt. Whole versions take up a lot of class time, so, this semester, I put up speeches and dissected them. This worked with Oedipus – the production I’d long used has been cut up in parts (10 and 11 are reversed). Pennington, Gielgud, Bloom make a speech live as I cannot. The magisterial pace demonstrates Aristotle. Evoking their sympathy, they understand dramatic irony and the mythic, the tragic and purgation.

Okay, long preamble.

So combing Youtubes for Othello’s speeches, I was frustrated by the lack of system. And quantity: beside Fishburne and Branagh, Olivier, Hopkins and Hoskins, clips from high schools and passionate amateurs, from Liverpool to California to . . . well, everywhere appear. Some are satiric and some playful, and some just love the words. A thought crossed my mind – what if Shakespeare could materialize beside me, looking at these interpretations – their breadth of quality and intensity, but always his words. He would be pleased, perhaps, but not surprised. His sonnet sequence so often, as in 54 and 81 describes the immortality of verse: it distills the essence of love and the beloved in words that last as monuments don’t. The thought has taken pleasant life in my mind this weekend. It made me smile – as I hope it does you.

In the great scheme of things the 2500 years that separate us from Sophocles or 400 from Shakespeare may not be big. Still, it teaches humility – makes us wary of using rather than appreciating them. It reinforces our sense of the universality, the nature of the human. And, well, we may have technology, but do we have a Sophocles or a Shakespeare among us?

I’d like to say that that opening of our minds and hearts is why more literature courses should be required. I’m not sure. But reading the old stuff – that, that would help this generation as it did ours and many before.

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I’m coming late to Stephen G. Bloom’s “Observations from 20 Years of Iowa Life,” in the December Atlantic Monthly. (Thanks to Iowahawk – and for being Iowahawk.) A fly-over person, I remain surprised (so repeated rants here) by the insularity of people who after twenty years don’t enjoy the eccentricities of whatever culture they’ve been dropped in. Sometimes true of immigrants, it’s as often the experience of coastal people in the midwest.

I’m not from Iowa and Iowans can defend themselves. Some people do not view other’s religious beliefs as affronts to their own, for instance. I would like, however, to make two minor points. The first is what kind of journalism professor (and one with visiting gigs to more impressive schools) writes articles requiring the closely packed concluding two paragraphs of “Corrections” either he or the Atlantic Monthly felt the need to add. Those of us who dabble in personal narratives often make mistakes – I’m as prone as the next. But, this was not a casual blog post, rather it’s a lengthy essay on an edited site. (For instance, he was probably paid.) And those corrections are an interesting window into Bloom’s mind – of what he is sure he knows, of how he teaches.

The second is his argument that the mid-west has always been homogeneous. Of course, Iowans import Chinese students:

Few speak passable English, almost all congregate in majors that require little English (math, biology and actuarial science), and many drive around town in brand-new sports cars. It’s a strange sight to see in Flyover County — dozens of Chinese students moving together en masse, the girls chattering away in Mandarin, always holding each others’ hands. These wealthy, ill-prepared bonus babies are seen as the future of the University. If Iowa has fewer and fewer young people each year to fill the University’s cavernous lecture halls, and the state is still a tough sell to coastal American kids, then it’s China that’s the next frontier as state support for higher education dwindles.

I can sympathize – grading papers by non-native speaking students is seldom easy. My husband (a fly-over boy if there ever was one) has spent the last dozen years editing a scholarly journal in which many contributors are not native speakers. He has felt exhilarated about the communication across international lines as much as frustrated by the problems such work entails. But it is work. Again, Bloom hardly embraces his responsibilities, as journalist or teacher.

Difficulty in understanding the “other” is human nature. Still, he seems unaware that fly-over country accepted and assimilated large groups of immigrants for well over a century. In 1870, for instance, 25% of Nebraskans (a neighboring state) had been born in another country, although the large waves of groups coming to homestead on the plains was during the 50 years that followed. I grew up in a town of 500; my father said you could hear 3 or 4 languages being spoken on main street in the thirties. Fly-over country assimilated polyglot immigrant groups at the beginning of the century so well it was snarked at as too homogeneous by its end. Now, of course, the groups are different – the Hmong, the Somali, the Bosnians.

One of my brother’s roommates was from Pakistan. A sophisticated urban colleague chose to raise her children in a small north Texas town; her anecdotes describe the pleasure she got from its customs. She now finds herself with a jet-setting German Syrian son-in-law, whose grandfather had been killed by the late and unlamented Assad, senior. My husband and his cousins grew up in a town of 3000; one married a Chinese girl he met in dental college and another a Vietnamese girl he met in film school. Our daughter married a German, another is dating a Nebraskan/Thai from another American village. In fly-over country, work is important and ethnicity interesting, something to celebrate and enjoy. No, we don’t live isolated lives.

I wouldn’t mind the average academic’s xenophobia if proof of it weren’t almost immediately followed by remarks on other’s parochialism. My husband’s colleague, who clearly felt this cow college beneath him, was surprised at an opened book on my husband’s desk – it wasn’t in English. (And my children, my friend’s daughter, others who grew up in this great wasteland can handle several languages each.) Later, he mentioned how sad must be the lives of those in my husband’s (and his cousins’) home town. A renter who didn’t believe in paying rent proudly announced he was from Manhattan. Generally fed up, I asked if he meant New York or Kansas. My point, of course, was his parochialism, but I’m pretty sure it was lost on him.

Or was it? We all indulge in projection and often it is defensive; I find myself doing it, why should I blame others? But a sense of humor, a little more curiosity might make those like Bloom not only more knowledgeable but happier. A stronger sense of what motivates and brings pleasure to the people around you – after twenty years for God’s sake – might perfect a different tone but also develop sympathies. Bloom believes Obama’s statement about fly-over country was truthful, but surely he could understand why some might not see it that way. And he might give them credit for a deeper theology than some who dismiss others so easily. Certainly, the attitude toward religion of some of my husband’s colleagues borders on the bizarre (one said my husband was different from other believers – they thought, he said, that God was a bearded guy in the sky). Bloom apparently sees a “white” blob – even if his understanding is not statistically accurate. The state that (it would seem to me to its everlasting shame) catapulted the first African-American president to the front of the primaries might be given props for its choice not to see the world through a racial prism. That the man they voted for (as well as one they hired to teach their children) does is not a sign of their narrowness but rather his.

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Instapundit linked to Remembering Earl Scruggs. I forwarded it to a friend who is a huge Scruggs fan and she returned the links she’s been listening to today. Thought I’d share: A handsome young Earl Scruggs. The elderly Scruggs picking with the brilliant Bela Fleck on the classic “Salty Dog”. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Earl Scruggs is featured at 1:37. Finally, 7-year old Ricky backed by Scruggs and Flatt.

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Post-modernism shaped academic thinking for the last decades, providing the rationale for two, not unrelated, modes of thought that led to but may not survive this year’s crises. It won’t disappear – its methods are millennia old: intense skepticism and an argument words are but references to words reappear regularly. But, for a while, such evasions may go underground. Accepting its premises means budgets like Paul Ryan’s no more describe reality than does Obama’s “budget.” Free lunches, then, are possible & the debt is only a word. And voters – well, the post-modernist sees identity as category – no self-made post-modernists. However, the reality remains and it is the rational founders who accept the nature of man and post-modernists who distort it. I’m betting on the old guys – perhaps in new suits. I’m not betting on the illusionists.

For, surely this is twilight for post-modernism. Franklin’s thrift is rational & enlightened; five-year plans and Obama’s solar subsidies are post-modernist. In Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Stephen Hicks argues such skepticism solves the academic’s dilemma: “the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” Accepting socialism, let alone Marxism, means ignoring evidence in the predictable pattern from Russia to China to Cuba to Cambodia to Venezuela. But it also means life in the west is bad, its agriculture and innovations not life-giving. The post-modernist solves the problem – all is illusory. Longevity, which we might think would trump all, is less important to the less rational post-modernist – we understand longevity objectively. But we experience death subjectively – each of us feels our death, feels our loved one’s death. So, if India after the green revolution has dramatic increases in life expectancy, NPR bemoans the greater incidence of cancer. American women live longer, their later years filled with relative wealth, but by postmodern alchemy they nurse their “feeling” of oppression. The Marxist world has failed – but, surely, they argue, that is only an illusion. The founders’ open market of ideas and commerce brings goods, encourage autonomy. In theory, this may be good, but post-modernists explain, it is all illusory. Of course, absences so striking in a communist state, are no great loss. Presence or absence – of goods, of rights, of plenty or freedom – has no importance if all are illusions.

If public life is illusory, so, too, is the private self. Indeed, how large can that private sphere be when we are but category. Hicks contends for the post modernist the education that helped Frederick Douglass define his own autonomy “is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.” We become our category – gender, race, ethnicity, age.

Then, the trick is to gain the power of an aggrieved category. And what are the consequences of encouraging bitterness, of devaluing strength? In 1620, Bradford understood. Robinson warned the Pilgrims: bitterness and pride eat away solidarity and respect; the small colony would be tested (50% of them die that awful first winter). Their duty, he says, lies not only in not giving offense, but, as importantly, in not taking it. Centuries later, Hicks describes “ressentiment postmodernism” – instead of encouraging sympathy and loving kindness, post-modernism encourages a soulless solidarity of category.

We are not, then, surprised by the bile of comments on Cheney’s heart transplant or Tony Snow’s cancer or . . . . These seem to come from obdurate hearts – made so by such theories. If real love intrudes then a theorist like Andrea Dworkin stands by with a systematic categorization – sex is really rape; if moments of racial understanding happen, a critic such as Bell brings forward Critical Race Theory. We might think a relationship is real and not a power struggle, but, well, do you want to believe your lying eyes or theory? The stunting of sympathy is a horrible thing; the sense that all is illusory is as well. Eventually, as the communists of the thirties and forties defended the indefensible (their loyalties to Russia, what Russia was), the post-modernist defends a new indefensible – perhaps because it is the opposite of Enlightenment thought or perhaps out of this very ressentiment. So arguments arise that defend or see little difference between Western life and the misogyny, homophobia and genocide of the jihadists.

Indeed, this thinking produced an American Secretary of State who could argue categories reign – that women’s free access to contraception trumps all. Of course, such thinking narrows the mind as well as the heart. Hicks contends the theorists “put Nietzschean power struggles at the core of our being. And especially in the cases of Foucault and Derrida, most major postmodernists will abandon Nietzsche’s sense of the exalted potential of man and embrace Heidegger’s anti-humanism.” Clinton’s trials and beliefs have had public platforms, we see her categorize and we see how she constructs these as illusions and as ways to stake out power: from her choice of Lani Guinier to her latest speeches on women’s rights. And we see how she need not consider the humanity of those outside her limits. She has clearly subtracted from that privileged category “woman” others – women with certain religious beliefs or ones whose politics is conservative, or, indeed, women who sleep with her husband. She has taken naturally to beliefs that value power and devalue truth, that have little sense of exaltation.

And as the campaign begins, we listen to the budgets offered, the categories to which politicians consign us. We would seem to have a post-modernist president; I hope we don’t have a post-modernist country.

Lex & Post-Modernism

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ALDaily has a questionnaire up. If you don’t check it out regularly, give it a look. We’re on their blog roll, so keep us in mind. Just saying. And don’t be put off by Chronicle ownership – this may indicate changes to come, but under the late Dutton, it was remarkably open to all viewpoints, though reflecting his interests in evolutionary art criticism (examples too rare to notice unless you knew Dutton’s work).

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Americans in the nineteenth century mapped the wilderness without – from 1803’s Louisiana Purchase to 1848, the continental United States was filled in. But they were as interested in the voice within, defining the self. The most requested lecture by Frederick Douglass was “Self Made Men”. In his Making the American Self, David Walker Howe contends that “Frederick Douglass was arguably the most thoroughly self-constructed person in the whole nineteenth century. He not only made his own identity, he made his own legend. . . Self-definition was a life-long process” (149). That process is the subject of his Narrative (Monadnock version) (Narrative), which is structured both in style and content by his early reading.

I’ve long wondered how welcome his vision would be in some school rooms – a sturdy self-reliance that has more echoes of Victoria than of Emerson. I love teaching its round sentences, noting its tight arguments, its specific details of slave life. Most of all, though, I teach it as an explicit and powerful “coming to consciousness.” He traces a path many autobiographers take but few as introspectively. And I find his values attractive – consciousness reached through reading, culture as aid. His growth is classic – a youth finds himself (and his relation to certain traditional values) in the city; he has much more in common with Franklin than Rousseau.

Well, Kevin Williamson describes what happened in one school: Jada Williams, an eighth grader at a public school in Rochester, New York read Douglass. He apparently had some of the same effect on her that Sheridan’s speeches had well over a century before on the young Douglass:

Coming across the famous passage in which Douglass quotes the slavemaster Auld, Miss Williams was startled by the words: “If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” The situation seemed to her familiar, and[she then wrote] her essay . . . a blistering indictment of the failures of the largely white faculty of her school: ‘When I find myself sitting in a crowded classroom where no real instruction is taking place I can say history does repeat itself.’

The essay lands her in trouble – her teacher shares it with other teachers; they (and their union) support one another, turning on Ms. Williams. Well, tar and feathers, Williamson says. To appreciate how well Ms. Williams understood Douglass, let’s look at the Narrative. Human nature – his and others, its universality – is Douglass’s topic. And that slavery stunts. Influenced by the great liberal thinkers of the 18th century, his way is reasoned as often as felt. As Howe observes, “What he wanted was to develop his own potential to the fullest, demonstrating thereby the falsehood of racism” (150) Douglass’s “Narrative”, published in 1845, is aimed at the north – I, having entered the gate of hell into slavery, have now come to stand before you as witness to the obdurate heart and bloody fields, where pain and privation of the body are matched by smothering of the consciousness.

Teaching himself to read, he happened on The Columbian Orator. Published in 1797, this anthology of speeches and poems has the sonorous and balanced style of that period – rich in tropes and magisterial in voice. That reasoned style conveyed a reasoned argument, both of which he made his own. And those were the arguments of our founders, of late eighteenth century principles.

Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. . . . I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. . . . the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master — things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.

He also “met with one of Sheridan’s mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.” And he drew from them conclusions that would govern his life: “the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder” and “a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.” Douglass analyzes his youthful response: “The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.”

Of course, restlessness accompanies learning. Our sense of our separate self is bought by a knowledge of our inevitable isolation. In his first paragraphs, Douglass contrasts the individuality with which we know our birthdate (a date that he, as a slave, was never to know) and the union with nature that comes from no more specific sense of the self’s entrance than it was at planting time or reaping time. Unconsciousness requires illiteracy – that is an old story. We exchange comfort for insight. Douglass carefully analyzes how: what he felt, what he did. His growing sense of the tragic nature of man intensifies and Douglas despairs: “In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Perhaps the remarkable punishments of the Rochester school may arise from the uneasy identification with Sophia Auld, Douglass’s mistress, who had first taught him his letters. Slave owning turns her from angelic to demonic. But she had opened Pandora’s box: as she becomes more demonic, his desire to read intensifies:

Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.

So the intellectual milieu that produced the founders did its work, again, fifty years later, as Douglass read. And, Douglass did his work, a hundred and fifty years later, as Jada Williams read. She, too, sees reading as liberating; she sees we become ourselves sustained by an understanding of those ideas that were clothed in the rhetoric of 1797 for Douglass and of 1845 for her; these words strengthen the individual, the at-once-unique-but-also-representative I, reinforcing the sound of the voice within.

But it is not only that they did, indeed, read. It was what they read. That thinking – that late eighteenth century, liberal, open marketplace thinking – that was important, too. It wasn’t just that Douglass read but that he read about individual rights and saw such discussions in the form of arguments before the Romans and in British Parliament, on “the dignity of human nature” and the manumission of slaves. And it wasn’t just that Williams read, but that she read of the growth in self-awareness.

Most poignant is the fact Douglass, himself, after escaping north via the Underground Railroad, lived in Rochester for 25 years. This is proudly noted by the website for the Underground Railroad – Heritage Trail.

Notes:
Ms. Williams reads her essay. (Of course, it would be helpful if she had been taught to distinguish between an autobiography and a novel – but her conclusions are those we would like any eighth grader to reach.) She was then given “The Spirit of Freedom Award” from the Frederick Douglass Foundation of New York.

Further: here, here, and here

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Two experiences converged lately to remind me we’ve lost faith in what works. First, in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Murray argues the institutions that encourage and embody the primary values of our culture are purposeful work, a trust community, a strong family, and felt faith. Belonging to these and building the virtues they demand, we consider ourselves “happy.” That’s not new. Franklin describes “felicity” as fulfillment of our nature in productive work, the pleasure of self-respect and the respect of others. That such commitments bring peace doesn’t surprise, but is seldom considered in our cultural conversation. Ignoring these virtues – even as we find the consequences of our cavalier treatment of the old standards – indicates we no longer accept the centrality of human nature. Shucking off millennia of traditions may be our nature – especially our adolescent nature, but history has lessons, voiced by family and faith, the discipline of work and community. It warns that willful pride may lead us to adolescence, but seldom leads us out.

The famously diverse founders got a lot right. So, I welcomed a second intrusion upon my little world: a talk by the charming Os Guinness, brought by our local Christian faculty group (friends who have given me community as well as collegiality). They discussed his The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It. He delights (as perhaps only an immigrant can) in discovering how our founders at once encouraged and dis-established religion. Their genius was the belief man reasons his way to truths; more importantly, perhaps, that convinced belief was stronger than coerced.

Nonetheless, Guinness’ argument seemed plaintive – can’t we all get along. And banal. He defined the “in-between” – above our deepest held (differing) religious beliefs, a meeting ground for civil exchange. His is a politically correct vision (Fred Phelps represents his “religious right”, for instance). But seeking such ground is important. And Guinness is right; for religious thinkers, faith and its tenets are foundational as temporal society is not. Conversation, however, requires a shared vocabulary.

A vague wish for civility just kicks the can down the street. Our context is more freighted than Guinness acknowledged. True, our founders derived peace from centuries of bloody fighting: they forged tools from the bloody spears of long wars. For this group, compromises were influenced by both the Scottish combative spirit of the borderlands and its open marketplaces of the ports. But they shared an understanding. The best mouse trap, the truth about any conspiracy, the facts of science – all, eventually, triumph. Of course, this leads to an unsettling tradition which is always rejecting tradition, institutions. Recognizing the process is endless even if not futile, these men accepted flux, rejected the static. We never arrive but are always headed toward that city on a hill.

Sure, we should all get along. And shared secular assumptions, as the Founders demonstrated, let quite different belief systems speak to each other. But if we do not believe truth can be found (not quickly nor easily, perhaps, but that it exists) nor that man’s reason is capable of evaluating and understanding that truth, what is our purpose in assembling “inbetween”? The ideologically committed who shout down a political speaker or those inspired by their religion to fight over words – theirs are not vocabularies that mediate. Those who believe there is no truth to be known or those who believe there is no more truth to be known don’t welcome discussion. They ask “What’s the point?” and mean it. Whether a post-modernist or a suicide bomber (or, in Solzhenitsyn’s dichotomy, a communist or a fascist), discussion will be an empty exercise, not entered authentically but only to exercise power.

When Guinness arrived, the controversy over Obamacare, its mandate, & religious convictions had just begun. This was not discussed. If our assumptions (about human nature and natural law, the rights of man and those of government) differ greatly, such a debate wanders about in a feckless, if occasionally bombastic, way. But few controversies bring out the banality of the “let’s all get along” meme more than the current one. Perhaps the government will “let” the church “out” of its obligation to provide a service it finds not just distasteful but sinful. This can be spun as those for and against birth control, but we slowly realized that was not the point. Power is implicit in Obama’s arguments (in our grand plan, he says, smoke and mirrors will “allow” the church its exception). Suddenly, those of us with no dog in the fight realized we have one – that is, if we want still think in terms of freedom of conscience. The plane Sibelius described was neither religious nor civil, but an intersection – cramped and hierarchical. Political power “allows” space, but, we argue, that misses the founders’ assumption that that very space was pre-existing.

Edwards and Franklin agree often. Fundamentally they disagreed – one believed in the revealed word of God and the other didn’t, one believed we sinned and the other that we were prone to mistakes, one wanted to lead souls to salvation and the other bodies to political freedom. But, they agreed human nature existed and both believed in natural law; both believed in the importance of work, of community, of family, and of church. If Franklin was famously not spiritual, he gave the church, repeatedly, its due. And if Edwards was less active in the world, he understood well the call of community and practical action (worrying his congregation lost its sense of proportion in slighting daily duties enthralled by the passions of the “awakening”). Consequences happen when we violate our nature. Mere theory? Well, it is not ineffectual because it hasn’t sheriffs The consequences are no less real because we don’t acknowledge them. And we don’t. Murray’s “Belmont,” from an instinct toward felicity (or, we suspect, self-preservation) returned to the fifties, having seen the consequences of the sixties’ upheaval. But if they recognize the consequences, it remains impolitic to acknowledge causes. Murray’s statistics remind us of what Guinness’s generalities obscure. The Founders weren’t just tolerant – they also shared and valued certain traditions.

That children are best brought up in a home with both biological parents and likely to do better if those parents have committed themselves to each other and their community may be obvious. But it is not reinforced by our institutions – entertainment, news, or government. Often, indeed, not by our churches. That meaningful work gives a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment is a fact – underreported perhaps, but real; the softness of our institutions doesn’t acknowledge the virtue of self-discipline, of the discipline that comes from acknowledged consequences. We forget (at our and society’s peril) that faith that requires much of us and that work that challenges us are not only good for society, but for us. Our founders took lessons from history. Forgetting the nature of our nature squanders a great and useful heritage. Ever surprised, we rediscover the wheel.

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As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it. Havel

At 75, having lived a remarkably full and generous life, Vaclav Havel has died. (Other comments today.)
Instapundit links to Welch’s 2003 profile which ironically begins by discussing Havel’s sense of the moral rot of dishonesty within communism by referring to Orwell and Hitchens.

The richness of his vision comes through in one of the more superficial but certainly evocative sites, where this man of action demonstrates the power of the epigrammatic as well. But, while writing well, he also acted well: words of commitment amd acts of commitment.

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Our government department always celebrates Constitution Day and today (a bit late) they brought back one of their favorites, H. W. Brands. His talk was aimed at our students; he walked a quite straight line describing constitutional interpretations. I felt that noting the founders knew nothing of airplanes might be interesting, but is a straw man. Still, he kept his poise on that tightrope. He could aim a little higher, it seems to me, but no one can fault his passion and enthusiasm.

And I’m grateful, finding pleasure in “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Constitution” which noted that 1776 was the date of both “manifestos” – the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. Each semester I yoke these (with religion and speech and the press) as part of the “open marketplace” with its confidence in the eventual and incremental wisdom of our nation. (Perhaps someone who puts on his biography that he spent some time traveling in the West selling cutlery is likely to see this juxtaposition in a way few others nominated for Pulitzers do.)

The Tea Party seems to signal, more than anything else, that old confidence in our nation’s ability, over the long term and given sufficient openness to experience, to find what works, what is, what is true.

The greatest problem with our popular culture is not that it is superficial – why wouldn’t it be? Nor that it is leftist – as irritating as that may be. It is because so much about it is designed to reduce that optimism, that strength, that willingness to test out experience, to be resolute. Our popular culture too often whines. I am slowly wending my way through The Federalist Papers (each year I start again, it seems to me); their attempt to understand human nature is a model of not only wisdom but far sightedness. However if our emphasis is not on the human nature we share but the factors we don’t, then such wisdom has less importance.

My husband argues that the Victorians did much to restrain man’s natural tendency toward violence and constrained it (and I suspect a good deal of sexual impulse) toward more productive ends. (I’ve long felt that such an approach to The Federalist Papers would be a worthy project; but then, I’ve also spent years arguing that someone should study Korbel and his diverse influence on his daughter and Condoleezza Rice. We all have our pet projects; mine, apparently, are ones neither I nor anyone else wants to domesticate.)

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An entertaining aspect of Perry’s entry has been commentary explaining Aggies (even in Texas, one says, Aggies are considered hicks;yuh think). As the t-sips describe the yell leaders and Aggies boast of National Merit scholars, true outsiders may not realize the Corps was compulsory for much of its first century. Today Perry was ably (or at least energetically) commended by a t-sipper (Plan 2) and poliltical rival. Perry’s a mensch Kinky Friedman concludes. Friedman’s style is discursive; he never edits a good one-liner. And he acknowledges that at this point he’d choose Charlie Sheen over Obama. Still the piece is affectionate and, in the end, forceful: “A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.” (With Kinky irony & sentiment are often paired.)

Mark Steyn, too, is a nail that hasn’t been hammered down – he, too, argues “that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.” (It’s about an hour.) He, too, sometimes sacrifices coherence for humor. But, in the end, his arguments for human rights and self-reliance, the core of After America, have a steady aim. His historical context is not the southwest but northeast; he chose the granite state and citizenship. And Steyn reminds us why someone – someone who thinks and someone who is a nail too stubborn to be hammered down – would choose what we too long took for granted.

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Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World , in his description of Watts (“Practical Matters: Scots & Industry”) reminds us of that great industrial moment. In the “modern consciousness” was firmly “the idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before” (278). To create something new.

We might oppose that to the stimulus; Fitzgerald summed up the end of that old bubble in “Babylon Revisited”: “the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word dissipate – to dissipate into thin air; to make something of nothing.” But wasn’t the desire, always, of this politics to control others, not to create nor to make. And how many Middle Eastern palaces are likely to fall into ruin by the end of the next century. The self-indulgent life is often described as dissipated – but how much worse a dissipated culture.

Roy Lofquist’s point that space meant clans didn’t bump against each other may well be first cause of respect for others here; the building of the west by both north and south surely was helpful in healing those raw mid-nineteenth century wounds. But in the end, we were founded in the mercantile era and capitalism – which turns us to look at what we can do to please and entice another. Frances Hutcheson would argue as my more religious friends do – we serve ourselves by serving others. That felicity is enlarging. Our natural desire to extend our self – to create, to leave a mark – can come from good works and procreation and art. But it can also come from creating a business, creating a product. Ford’s desire to make a product all could buy was capitalist, creative, and productive. Building a bigger oven and planting more wheat is better than fighting over the pieces of one pie.

But that larger oven requires energy. The great truth is that materialism can destroy our spirit, but capitalism with its emphasis upon creativity derives from a vision that is a good deal less materialist than socialism. It encourages us to think of others. Those like Obama not only lead their countries into economic but also spiritual misery, offer a false “felicity” of security for the true “felicity” our founders described.

I finally read Witness. It has moments of real beauty and takes us into the mind of a man who found himself in that pietistic culture Hackett describes as characteristic of the middle states. Chambers doesn’t seem drawn to the exceptionalism of America as much as to a soulfulness he finds in religion, in farming, in honest and open communication with those he loves that he comes to see as characteristic of his native land – and not of his adopted and then rejected faith. It is the individual family, the love for his children that help him break with that ugly, false and materialistic religion.

But our modern Hisses would deny the good that came from men like Watts. Sometimes, one thinks, they would prefer the oppressive, short-lived, painful lives of 1000 to those of 2011. It is not materialism that they reject but creativity, pride, familial love. Certainly if we are starved for energy we will have been taken over by Luddites. And while the difference between the rich and poor in a desperate world may not be as monetarily great, this is a sad comment on what the best of lives in such circumstances would be.

After forty years, I have adopted the Texas vision – and it is drill, baby, drill. And hope commercial sources for other ways of energy can be energized and created as that drilling continues. Those Scotsmen had a hell of a lot right. And political freedom, spiritual freedom and market freedom are intertwined – when one is destroyed the others will be as well. In a free market, the oil drilled today will pay for the research needed tomorrow.

P.S.
So I continue and am struck by this description by the poet Robert Southey of Ellesmere Telford: “Telford’s is a happy life: everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbours – works of sure, solid, permanent utility. . . ” Herman goes on: “Permanent was right. More than 75 percent of Telford’s projects are still in operation to this day. it was a life’s work that flowed from a bottomless reservoir of creativity and self-confident energy.” (283) Herman’s joy and passion, generalization and detail, give someone like me, who teaches literature, a sense of context that explains (and celebrates) so much that led to our nation’s vision as much as characterized theirs. But the last chapters, that I tend to skim, describe the inventions that came because of the atmosphere those ideas created.

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Looking at the bridges from the Puritans to the American Enlightenment, I came upon this (probably read long ago by other Chicagoboyz). Internalizing (as much as universalizing) means a country of multiple religious beliefs can be tolerant without its citizens feeling that their souls are risked if this is the assumption. And proselytizing to save others’ souls will also be ones of arguments, examples, words rather than of intolerance. Of course, implicitly a religion with an external locus is less likely to be tolerant – nor feel toleration is good.

In the second place. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.

Locke

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Women in the Republic of Virtue -
In revolutions, women tale up the flag and even the sceptre: every arm and voice is needed. So among the revolutionaries were the voices of women like Mercy Otis Warren. During the following years, women’s roles in the home as educators and molders was emphasized: a “republic of virtue” required both a knowledgeable and a moral public. Perhaps the most telling invasions of twentieth century tyrants were private – as the private became the public. That insertion appalls us, as the communist regime “becomes” family and church; the patriarch’s voice, visage enters the public’s mind, casting a weighty shadow. We think of the one-child rule of China, but the valuation was little different in the Communist underground in the west, encouraging promiscuity and devaluing marriage, denigrating child-bearing and emphasizing abortion.

Women and men both understand the public; both understand the private. But the private has long been women’s domain. When, as our current government does, a power demonstrates arrogance and pride that signals danger to the independence of that world, women may well feel it first. This may explain the large percentage of women in the tea party movement today. We appreciate the rule of law in setting boundaries, but also appreciate the role of boundaries in keeping out the public, the government.

Susan Ridley Sedgewick, writing almost two hundred years ago, would appreciate much. She had seen that limiting women’s roles to the private & domestic was costly in both personal, psychological ways and public, pragmatic ones. She could appreciate our roles today. But she also sees women in her time, centers of domesticity, as resting, not resigned. Linda K. Kerber, in Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America, quotes her “It has indeed been observed by foreigners, with some surprise, that females here are remarkably exempt from the care of the public weal; that they either know nothing or care little about subjects connected with it.’ . . . Visitors usually accounted for this lack of involvement by commenting that American women were straitened by domesticity.” A century later, a popular work would be The Servantless House – American women, from the beginning, were likely to be neither servants nor have them. Still, Sedgwick argues: “But there is a better reason. . . . Government here, though extending over all its protection and vigilance, is a guardian, not a spy. It does not rudely enter our houses, hearts, and consciences, . . . in codes of conscription, disabilities, and test-acts. . . [women] conceive themselves to have the best government in the world, because, in the main, – to use a female figure of speech – like a well made garment, it fits perfectly, and presses nowhere. But let this same garment give token of fracture, decay, or uneasy alteration, we should find their tongues move as quickly as their needles.” Kerber notes that “so long as the male political order refrained from direct pressure on the family, her argument implies,” (276) women will “masquerade” as weak; in times of need they will “take political positions, make their own judgment of the contending sides, risk their lives–emerge stronger and in control.”

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It is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.

Of course, this week, the phrase “It’s not going to happen” clarified.

Jethro Gibbs’ laconic “Yah think.” (Foreign policy, domestic policy, life) works, too.

But the obvious may need saying – before it’s swamped by the irrelevant.

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I’d like to note some minor irritations. Few lead as voyeuristic a life as I do, often using pop culture as a gauge to my reality. I know that betokens superficiality. Well, so be it. I’ve wasted much life in front of television sets and reading murder mysteries. And Humphrey Bogart’s image moved through that life.

So I followed ALDaily’s link to an LRB review of Stefan Kanfer’s Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart. Apparently, for Jenny Diski, as for many of us, Humphrey Bogart was bigger than life. He died before I became a teen, but his old movies reran constantly on fifties’ television; when I started college, French directors, as Diski notes, led us back to him. I watched many yet again at Chicago’s Clark in the late sixties. Bogart merged with the heroes of hard boiled thrillers and then Camus as we started to take our intellectual lives more seriously.

Those movies, bigger than life, remain true in many ways. But that world tended, like the news of the eighties, to be partial. And part of me kept back. Growing up in fly-over territory and being patronized did that. Knowing Cuban, Latvian and Czech refugees did, too. In the Platte Valley, a respect for internationalism was interwoven with my parents’ strong allegiance to American exceptionalism. Rebellious and irritating as daughter, I never doubted my parents’ vision. It wasn’t that that drove me crazy.

So, I immersed myself in and enjoyed one world – The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books were joys, NPR’s morning and evening themes were welcomed. But I retained a sense of another place, another culture. Pat Schroeder’s willingness to destroy reputations after Tail Hook bothered me. I’d known male predators and Clarence Thomas in no way resembled them. Nina Totenberg lost credibility – as plagiarist, as victim of harassment, as objective reporter. And, then, Clinton looked into the camera and lied. Lying is human nature. But I don’t like it. And allegiance to “the women’s rights movement” disappeared when those who condemned Thomas cheered Clinton and Teddy Kennedy. Then came 9/11. This is a long way around, perhaps, but I wanted to try to explain why some of us were immersed in a world that referred to the Red Scare as an immense evil and we didn’t argue. We knew better. But no one wanted to defend McCarthy and our sympathies were stretched & theoretical when it came to the gulags. They wouldn’t touch the strongest, most luxurious, most free nation – we felt secure. And, we lived in a fog.

Reading Diski, though, I had a moment of irritation at myself as well as at her. Her experience was not exactly mine. She sees Casablanca as an example of nostalgia but I’ve always seen it as fitting well in 1943. Kanfer’s is perhaps more so. I, too, am constantly surprised by what passes for a leading man in modern movies – indeed, what passes for a man. Mark Harmon, now there’s a man. The small screen seems to me to “grow” men in a way that few modern movies do. But, fun as this kind of talk can be, that isn’t where I want to direct our attention – though it shows how distracting pop culture can be. Here is a paragraph that bothers her from Kanfer:

To be sure, if Humphrey and other First Amendment Committee members, and the studio heads, and the principal Wall Street investors in those studios had stood together in opposition to the so-called Inquisition in Eden, there might have been a chance to save the industry from the predators. That coalition never developed, however, and it is folly to assume that Humphrey Bogart should have sacrificed his reputation, standing mutely and obediently by as the Nineteen manipulated him for their own purposes.

Bogart took a stand – in many ways attractive, in many ways naïve. Diski quotes Kanfer (quoting Alistair Cooke – this is a pop culture rave, not scholarship): “Bogart was aghast to discover [that many of the protestors] were down-the-line communists coolly exploiting the protection of the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution. He had thought they were just freewheeling anarchists like himself.” Diski observes that that was where he differed from a character such as Harry Morgan, who would never have been “aghast” and that his later Photoplay article “I’m No Communist” tells us much that is not good about the period and the man. But why was such repulsion on his part wrong – should he have found that dishonesty attractive? She observes, “What is very strange is that Kanfer shrugs off one of the darkest and most disturbing episodes in American history.” She implies that Bogart blinked, but did he or does she today?

With historical perspective, the stranger attitude might be that that time of carefully vetted scripts, of dishonesty with one another and before those committees, of subtle and not so subtle propaganda was dark in a way (post Venona for instance) we now understand. A sense of the truth – who was using it and who abusing it – appears to be understood better by Bogart then than Diski now. It is no defense of McCarthy to note many lied and continued to lie, even while setting hounds on Elia Kazan until he died. And Hollywood, given to the grandiose gesture and inflated ego, argued they were for the “little people” with a narcissism that bleeds into hubris. This hubris, of course, undercuts the universalization and internalization, intrinsic to the beliefs that define the American experience. Our founders were more humble – a humility hard to find in those that mock them for the more particular characteristics then of their class and now of their race & sex. (Sentimentality may appear as sympathy, but it isn’t. And, indeed, it is often patronizing.)

And Diski, well, that’s the norm. Nora Ephron’s work is light, but who am I to belittle that? I may prefer the lightness of a different genre, but light has its virtues. And Ephron entertains. A few months ago, one of my husband’s colleagues, distressed at my cavalier dismissal of McCarthyism (in his world, that may well signal the loss of my soul), recommended Julie and Julia. That charming movie, he said, demonstrates how deeply McCarthyism reached into America: someone as benign as Paul Child was suspect. I dvred it and was not sorry. Julia Child was also larger than life – full of adventure and zest, as cook and as spy. And Julie – well, she too is beguiling. The movie demonstrates, as a friend observed, that the good-humored way to a man’s heart is through his stomach – two happy couples. Cooking and eating together – Child might be of more aid to marriage counselors than Freud.

Yes, Paul was hauled back to America for an ugly interrogation. We sympathize. How could we not? But I also dvred Jennet Conant on C-Span. Her talk, A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS, was overwhelmed by Jane Foster – who brought the Childs together. She had neither the competence nor discretion of the Childs, but she was attractive, and if not as intelligent as they, fluent in multiple languages and adventurous. Imaginative and a risk-taker, she was scandalous but sometimes effective. Conant is coy (buy the book, she tells us). A reviewer notes Foster was likely to take over any narration of those early years – entertaining then and on the page today. Both Childs liked her; indeed, only later when they were sent to China and she wasn’t, did they turn full gaze on one another, Julia early seeig Paul as the man she wanted and they became a great love match. They only relinked with Foster seven years later, in Paris in 1952, where she was married to a Russian (a marriage that may have begun much earlier, but the Childs hadn’t known).

Conant argues Foster’s disaffection after the war had to do with the way the American state department treated post-war Asia (and accepted our Allies’ mistreatment of these countries). Still, Haynes and Klehr note that the Venona documents place her as a Party member and conduit of information from the Dutch bureau in 1942 and 1943.

The Childs’ affection for this vivacious young woman, who served as a model for Julia as she broke through the shell of her conventional past and attracted Paul, was understandable and real. That they were not implicated but were accused is quite likely true as well. Nonetheless, such suspicion was not the result of McCarthyism run amuck. Her presence would have altered the focus the movie has on Julia as wife and as cook; it complicates if not undercuts the central love story. Aesthetically such editing was probably a wise choice. But it also, conveniently, slants the “witchhunt” in much simpler terms: ones our friend too easily accepted as ‘truth.” And it is not surprising that the daughter of two screenwriters, the wife of Carl Bernstein, would prefer history (and thus Hollywood) was seen as victim rather than enforcer.

These moments in pop culture seem distant from an acceptance of the science of Lysenko and the killing fields of Pol Pot and the Cultural Revolution of Mao. But it isn’t just the hundred million or so dead. It is life as well. One of my friends, an avid bridge player, noted that Stalin outlawed bridge. Ignoring that vision – the politicization on a scale we can’t imagine – accepts with insufficient sympathy wasted lives and minds, but may also lead to such policies here. That these unquestioned assumptions softened us for weak arguments has slowly come home to me.

Ignoring evil, real evil, leads to disproportion. Our inheritance is in danger. That, as much as the money gone that may bankrupt our country and burden our children, has been squandered. To appreciate the gift we have to understand the importance of universalization – the belief that all men possess inalienable rights, given by God, and intrinsic in our nature. We have to accept the freedom and burden of internalization – responsibility is a matter of guilt and not shame, of individual choice and not the pressures of others or of our society.

This summer I will try to make arguments that these values can be best preached in and absorbed by entering the wolds of the great English realists with their mundane communities in which individual choice looms large even when the choices themselves are small. And these values are argued and explained and considered in our own great and greatly self-conscious literature of that period.

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(Ramblings with no links)

Some definitions of the “American Dream” don’t comport with human nature but then fault America for not achieving a fantasy no one (no sane man would have) ever posited. But the essential American dream is of a society freely joined, each respectful of others but autonomous and fulfilled.

That society tests the workability of our theories of the good life. We, if often unconsciously, value natural law: the primacy of moral fulfillment of our nature. The thinkers who defined our culture and then our government often spoke of the great irony of power through submission, becoming our best selves by acknowledging larger powers. That is most efficient not when we are clapped in a theoretical or real prison, but by enlarging horizons and testing ideas – we learn humility through perspective & experience, we learn what works. The Puritans, not surprisingly, saw this in religious terms. Winthrop argues the test of their religious love for one another and their God: could they demonstrate a community bound by the ligaments of that love succeeds? If so, others might be persuaded; if they failed, certainly others would not choose their path.

Does it work? A century later, this guided Franklin’s experiments with bifocals and a government constrained by the Constitution. What works may be humbling – Lysenko was surely humbled when he found his ideas replaced. But it is also bracing.

Schiller of NPR speaks of American anti-intellectualism. But we were founded by the Puritans and our government structured by founders immersed in a uniquely American version of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin distrusted pure Deism, the Founders believed in checks and balances, even the vague thinkers of Transcendentalism abandoned Brook Farm quickly. Looking at results isn’t anti-intellectual. It demonstrates respect for the power of an idea.

For instance, experience tells us our self-interest needs restraint but it has its uses. Our resilience, our responsibility for our own, our self-reliance–and yes, I’ve come to understand, our guns–would make a government-caused famine as in the Ukraine in the thirties or China from 1958-1962 difficult to enact. We’d refuse. Out of self interest, of course. But, first, because those ideas failed the great test – do they work? Even those of us remarkably stupid about science as a broader discipline have thoroughly integrated the scientific method into our thinking: what works its test. And the good life, we’ve found, values others’ lives & others’ autonomy, it builds our self-respect on our respect for others. Clearly neither factored in the great leaps of Russia and China, the programs of Germany and Cambodia. In general, statist governments don’t “work”. Still, Chavez listens and some closer to home are drawn to those old Sirens. But they aren’t seductive if we value what “works”. Then, their music is shrill and tinny.

Our current economic straits bring focus. Budgeting time or money clarifies priorities. We’ve known schools were failing – in minor and spectacular ways. As we listen to the litany of government mismanagement and replication on the nightly news, we are less surprised than awakened. We dozed, our attention elsewhere: we had life to do. In the early sixties my mother renewed her certificate to put me through college; every night she railed about her education classes. A couple of years later, in my first Kelly Girl jobs, I saw the difference between a government office & a private one. We all knew. Job security and job benefits were increasing exponentially in a Ponzi scheme right before us. We knew union deals were defensible in one-company towns where the factory-owner had all the cards and any increase in wages would limit his profits. But when the negotiators are a politician who gets votes and campaign contributions from employees who reap benefits and money, contracts entered with no one having the role of manufacturer – the ultimate source of income – the system corrupts.

Human engineers demonstrate a lack of moral imagination and ferocious inflexibility when faced with practical failures. People with theories are seldom immune to temptation: they want to mold rather than be molded. But power corrupts and an idealist with power becomes a tyrant. He fails to accept reality: the “otherness” of the other, an unmalleable world. Our social engineers are not unlike Lysenko. And not unlike him, they are dangerous when a government enforces their theories. Often, a theory fails because it can’t distinguish between truths that can’t budge and archaic understandings that can. The twentieth century denial of biology, of botany, of human nature led to democide of unimaginable dimensions but also to corruption. The belief that the real world & real people are constructions isn’t helpful.

Policies that ignore human nature fail. Unions began including their insurance companies as part of the deal. That doesn’t surprise. All of us have a bit of the grifter in us – when someone else is paying, we are all too likely to stay at a nicer hotel, eat a more expensive dinner. The vulgarity on display in Wisconsin and its arguments come from pride – self-righteous, certain they aren’t tainted by man’s nature. The radical & honest egalitarianism of our founders assumes none are immune. (Academics emphasize Washington’s flaws while ignoring his heroism in rising above the temptations of power; they don’t recognize that virtue so important in a republic.)

If traditionally we haven’t had much patience with theories unmoored from reality, we’ve loved innovation – in ideas and things, theories and techniques. Our experience and others’ – whether recorded in literature or history or even the daily news reports – give lessons. What worked and what didn’t helps us predict what will and won’t. That isn’t anti-intellectual, it just asks the intellectual for his bona fides.

I’m optimistic. Those sleepy students in my classes have potential. We may have been sleeping, but we are a giant. And a giant armed with that great criterion – does it work? – can always find a way.

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The Puritans begin each semester. Their beliefs and modes of thought foreshadow much that comes after. Their emphasis upon the word – understood, translated, interpreted – leads to reasoned argument; they do personal interpretation and respect biblical authority, they do introspection and encourage humility. These naturally lead to experimentation, scientific skepticism. How a Puritan – Cotton Mather – and a figure now seen as personifying the scientific method and American Enlightenment – Benjamin Franklin – reacted to the 1721 small pox epidemic in Boston is the subject of the short, quite readable The Pox and the Covenant by Tony Williams. The controversy over inoculation split the town, undercut the old traditions, and show us the universals that moved them and now move us. Reason, pride, passion, feeling for our fellows entered into a controvrsy which also challenges our assumptions, our sense of who Cotton Mather was and who Benjamin Franklin was.

The battle set authorities – scientific and religious – against one another. William Douglass, the most credentialed Boston doctor, countered Boylston, one of the most innovative of the American-trained practitioners. More important to our understanding of the period, perhaps, and to my lit class, it also set Cotton Mather (with his father Increase), the leading Puritan ministers, scholars and authorities of their day, against the Franklin brothers. The brilliant Benjamin was a mere apprentice but already the witty author of the Dogood letters. His brother, James, found that encouraging and exacerbating the controversy increased the popularity of the New England Courant, their new paper: what the Iran hostage crisis was for ABC’s nightly report, this battle was for the Frankllins.

Small pox – what it did to the indigenous people, how patients were treated, its effect on society – altered American history as much as any war. A book that discusses in mind-numbing detail small pox as scourge is Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn. The devastation that preceded the early English migration wiped out large percentages of the native population; it was less deadly to first generation Puritans because many came with immunity. It remained deadly to Indians and became deadly to those separated from Europe for a generation or more, who had not experienced its ravages – and thus become immunized.

Williams’ background is American Studies; mine is lit. I am somewhat curious what the real scientists on this blog think of the book (if they have read it). It certainly seems popularized, but it lays out the controversy clearly. And it gives us insight into that period – as the seventeenth century became the eighteenth and Enlightenment thinking permeated religious as well as political and economic theories.

Cotton Mather first learned of the efficacy of inoculation from an African slave. (Williams notes that Mather’s insistence upon the education and conversion of slaves, as well as their equality before God, led him to treat Onesimus’s description with respect.) Mather surveyed other Africans and heard similar stories. He was further convinced by an article in Philosophical Transactions (loaned him by the very William Douglass, a cosmopolitan Boston physician, who became his adversary). Dr. Emanuel Timonius, a fellow of the Royal Society in Constantinople, described the practice in Turkey. Soliciting and printing studies from far flung correspondents, the London Royal Society richly nourished an enlarging scientific community. These descriptions reinforced Mather’s belief disease was spread by “animalcules” – an embryonic germ theory. He convinced one of the most accomplished of the American-trained physicians of the time, Zabdiel Boylston, that the process might work. This was amidst the chaos of the 1721 epidemic. Bostonians, seeing so many among them dying, felt panic. This is not always the most receptive of mind sets. And inoculaton is a scary (and dangerous) procedure.

Douglass was a solid (and as he was quite proudly aware) credentialed scientist; his training was European and challenging. However, he was adamantly opposed to inoculation (apparently neither looking into the experience of Boylston’s patients nor the literature). Decades later, he would change his mind and become a practitioner himself. In 1721, however, he argued that insufficient care was being taken by a doctor he disparaged. And, further, that the process should not be considered seriously since it had been discovered and promoted by Africans and Muslims. His religious argument was fatalistic – obviously this scourge was God’s judgment. Indeed, he had many arguments. Mather and Boylston countered that God gave man reason to use and saving others’ lives was certainly God’s intention. And of course the great argument: it worked. The Franklins took delight in harassing those with power and encouraged controversy; soliciting papers that opposed inoculation, they found sarcasm & satire sold, as did hyperbole. Stoking the fire and encouraging opponents like Douglass developed a market for their fledgling newspaper.

Those of us familiar with contemporary debates on vaccinations, global warming, and various other controversies are struck again by the continuity of human nature. Douglass may have loaned Mather the journal earlier, but his arguments while partially over method, were assertions of authority. Boylston was a provincial; he was not. Turf protection can be the aim of authority. Mather demanded and generally was given the respect due one of the most intellectual and thoughtful ministers of the time; he was also, of course, a Mather. Pride (apportioned in varying amounts to Douglass, Boylston, Mather, the Franklin brothers) blurred reasoning. So did prejudice: Mather believed that he should be given more due as an authority & he was given to self-dramatization. However, the arguments from Douglass & the Franklins were often ad hominem and racist.

The Puritans prepared the ground for individualism, independent thinking, and the use of the scientific method. Some of them were scientists, by any definition of their time or ours. I am not. But I’ve come to respect their rigorous pursuit of knowledge and find their sense of the unity of experience and faith, analysis and observation powerful. Their respect for the truth ruled out ad hominem arguments – a rigor we seldom see today. Certainly, our celebrity-fed objections to vaccination today means we haven’t learned what Cotton Mather knew and Benjamin Franklin came to know – we need habitual patterns of thinking that encourage rationality. Our passion & pride are obstacles. Cotton Mather, willing to take on the anger directed at a process he firmly believed could save lives, appears as a man who risked status (and lost the core consensus regarding his authority). He was a hero; Douglass, the other physicians in town, the Franklins, all won – inoculations were forbidden. But Mather housed and Boylston inoculated those who chose that path – and these were saved when a large percentage of those who got small pox “the natural way” did not. Mather went against man’s law, firmly believing that saving lives was God’s law. And the risks were real: as Bostonians were whipped up by the pontifications of Douglass and the wit of the Franklins, the responses turned nasty. In the second year of the outbreak, an ineffectual bomb was thrown through a window in Mather’s home late at night. Death was averted when the fuse was knocked from the explosive as it hit the window.

Williams argues that the great loser in the controversy was the power of the covenant and respect for the church. Mather had risked his prestige on the importance of these inoculations in a controversy that moved out of his sphere of respect (not of knowledge, for Mather’s understanding of science put him at the forefront of his time.) On the other hand, the process itself won. Both Douglass and Benjamin Franklin came around to be eloquent advocates. They must also have realized their initial positions had consequences. Mather battled with himself, worried when it came close to home. But his son, reading his father’s arguments and fearing small pox, wanted the procedure. Mather thought about it, consulted his father, but chose to have it performed on the two children born too late to have been immunized by the last great outbreak. They lived. Franklin, on the other hand, poignantly, notes in his Autobiography that one of the great errata of his life was not inoculating his son, who died at 5 from small pox. These consequences are likely to have given Mather more comfort – and Franklin less – than the battle waged in public. In the public arena, certainly many lived because of inoculations and many died who might have been saved if the inoculations had been broadly instituted (or at least legal).

Shannon’s much more expert arguments for vaccinations have sometimes stirred the comments on this blog. And I’d like to note some interesting contemporary works that buttress his position: Seth Mnookin’s The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine. Another is Paul Offit’s Deadly Choices. Both demonstrate our quite understandable fear of and the strength of the argument for vaccines.

Here is a passage from the conclusion of Williams’ text that summarizes:

It was a Puritan minister and one lone doctor who stood up to the medical establishment and boldly continued the practice in the face of vehement medical and popular opposition. They defended their experiments with religious arguments steeped in the eighteenth-century natural law consistent with Puritan belief. But their arguments were primarily that inoculation was a sound and efficacious medical practice, and they followed the scientific method to test their theory.
 
It was the hidebound and haughty Dr. William Douglass who fought the practice tooth and nail, and a man of God who bravely proved that inoculation worked and saved many lives. Cotton Mather scorned those who clung tenaciously to their scientific presuppositions and refused to examine new views. He once criticized a Florentine scientist who declined to look through Galileo’s telescope because “he was afraid that then his eyes would from ocular demonstrations, make him stagger concerning the truth of Aristotle’s principles, which he was resolved he would never call in question.”
 
Indeed, we cannot escape the overwhelming evidence from this dramatic story that Douglass and most of Boston’s physicians acted unscientifically throughout the entire contest. They refused to examine evidence, withheld scientific literature that contradicted their arguments, manufactured testimony that they probably knew was false, argued from racist premises, and used personal attacks to defeat their opponents. Contrarily, Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston examined the findings in scientific journals, confirmed them with those who knew about the procedure and tested the procedure repeatedly and successfully through experiments that proved their hypothesis. (208-209)

P.S.
Admittedly, I have little scientific background but I wander into this area to better understand the literature I teach. 1) The writers of 1850 can only be fully understood in the context of what went before – just as they help us see patterns as we look back. The writers of 1721 can only be understood by understanding their times better. 2) I like the Puritans. I think they were remarkable. And this incident, like so many others, shows that we have more to learn than condemn in their views and practices. 3) Most of my students are convinced that Europeans arrived, practiced germ warfare in a horrendous pattern, and decimated the Indian population. I don’t want to think that is true, but, then, I suspect that some do. The tales of infected blankets are legion. Fenn puts much of that argument to rest. Williams is more narrowly focused, but appears to do so as well. He does note Franklin’s satiric jab at the Mathers – perhaps inoculated soldiers could be sent to infect the Indians. I hope reading satire literally is not the basis of this prevalent belief – if so it is yet more proof that we are failing to teach close reading – and many are failing to do it. 4) Most of my students think that religion and science have always been at odds. This prevents them from understanding and appreciating a good many of these early writers.

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The Tea Parties were not violent. Mobs didn’t go after bankers with pitchforks. Instead of sending American Muslims off to interment camps, we tred so softly that 13 people lay dead at Fort Hood. When white slavery appeared encouraged at Acorn and Planned Parenthood, we did not shut our eyes. We wanted both closed down. We recognized the clear lack of justice in the principle of public sector unions; we cited human nature & the inevitable bloat. We saw as farce politicians/bureaucrats negotiating with unions to set deals that other parties – mainly the taxpayers – would have to pay. We understand the importance of the rule of law, of restraining our desire for money & power & sex.

Shortly after 9/11, I remember a discussion of the suspicion directed at Muslims; I believe it was on WSJ; the reports were of people who feared American xenophobia. And I remember the pleasure I took in Dorothy Rabinowitz’s strong statement – we don’t riot in the streets and go after “foreigners.” she said. Then, firmly, she said, “That’s not the way we act. We are Americans.” Much as history has proved Duranty’s assessment of communism and its citizens was bizarrely wrong, Howard Zinn’s (and I fear Obama’s) America is as much a fantasy as Duranty’s picture of Russia was. Those modern intellectuals are clearly projecting their own lust for power on others. They (like so many revolutionaries in the past) see themselves with clean hands & virtuous hearts, see themselves as answer. But their answers are not to rational questions nor do they arise from experience. We – the voting majority I expect – are not under any illusions that we (or any “they”) should be trusted with unchecked power – they understand man’s fallible nature. The radicals have little self-consciousness, little irony, and fewer doubts. But the majority have learned from experience and from history. And they demonstrate it day after day, beguiled occasionally by Ponzi schemes, but returning to common sense, self reliance, & affection for the other as well as for others. We understand class warfare and we feel disdain.