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The relevance of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Today. A History of Hostility and Hysteria Toward Immigrants. Is culture a Smelting Pot, Melting Pot or Stew Pot? We have much to Fear from the Fear of Fear Itself.

The relevance of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Today. A History of Hostility and Hysteria Toward Immigrants. Is culture a Smelting Pot, Melting Pot or Stew Pot? We have much to Fear from the Fear of Fear Itself.

Burton Weltman

“Well, you and me got sense.  Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling.  They ain’t human.  A human being wouldn’t live like they do.  A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.  They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas.” 

A gas station attendant in The Grapes of Wrath to his colleague, commenting on the nature of Dust Bowl migrants.

Precis: A Fear of Heterogeneity – Difference as Potentially Dangerous.

How is it that in a nation of immigrants – except for Native Americans, everyone or their ancestors came here from somewhere else – so many people are so susceptible to anti-immigrant sentiment?  I think that an expectation of cultural homogeneity is a big part of the answer.  The belief that the mantra e pluribus unum, our national motto for most of American history, means that diversity will give way to uniformity and differences will be swallowed up in conformity.  I think that belief is wrong, both as an interpretation of the motto and as social policy.  I think the motto means that we can be both one and many, unified and diverse, at the same time, what could be called a stew pot culture.  And I think that an insistence on cultural homogeneity is a big part of our current political problems.

As I am writing this in April, 2024, the country is in an uproar over immigrants coming from Central America, with xenophobes and racists like Donald Trump and his MAGA followers howling about an invasion of murderous aliens.  Vile as this anti-immigrant bigotry is, it is not really new.  Hostility to immigrants and fear of alien influences have been recurrent themes in American history.  This seems strange for a nation of immigrants but it is, nonetheless, true. 

Conventional explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment focus on competition for jobs and cultural conflicts.  Historically, businesses have imported low-wage workers from other parts of the world to replace native-born workers and thereby lower their costs.  And historically, there have been cultural conflicts between newcomers and native-born Americans, often revolving around religious differences. 

But these factors cannot explain anti-immigrant hostility when jobs and religion are not at issue, which has often been the case, and they are not at issue in the present-day case.  Central American immigrants today are taking jobs that native-born Americans aren’t filling.  We have a labor shortage in this country.  In addition, like most Americans, they are mostly Christians.  As such, they do not represent any clear and present threat to native-born Americans or American culture.  To the contrary, they are needed to fill empty jobs and for the economy to function. 

But immigration anxiety persists among many Americans, and it presents an opportunity for Trump and his MAGA gang to stir things up, to make something big out of virtually nothing.  What is to be done?  The key problem, in my opinion, is not the existence of MAGA bigots.  Bigots there have always been and probably always will be.  The key problem is the anxiety that persists among ordinary people who are not for the most part bigots but whose anxiety can be played upon by Trump and his cohort.

There is a susceptibility to anti-immigrant sentiment among Americans that exists even without conflicts over jobs or culture.  It is seemingly a hostility to newcomers based mainly on their newness.  Newness is threatening because it raises the possibility that the new people may turn out to be different, and difference is deemed dangerous if you think that we all must be the same in order to be safe.  It is a preemptive fear that immigrants may turn out to be fearful.     

The Grapes of Wrath is a story that can both help us understand anti-immigrant hostility and point a way to overcoming it.  It is a story of WASP American migrants from Oklahoma being rejected during the 1930’s by the WASP inhabitants of California.  WASPs rejecting WASPs.  And jobs were not at issue.  The Grapes of Wrath is a demonstration, fictional but based on reality, that the mere newness of newcomers may trigger anxiety and hostility.

The United States is currently in the throes of high anxiety about immigrants and immigration.  Much of this anxiety is the result of an unreasonable expectation that everyone should be culturally homogeneous, something that has never appertained in the country and never reasonably could.  Given this expectation of cultural uniformity, people become anxious any time anyone new comes into the country, even if the newcomers pose no threat to the existing population.  It is nuts, but it has happened over and over again in the course of American history.

High Anxiety: Fear of Fear itself.

President Franklin Roosevelt famously said of the Great Depression during the 1930’s that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  A corollary to that adage is that we need to be afraid of fear.  Fear can lead to distorted decision-making and debilitating defeatism.  But it also follows that we have much to fear from the fear of fear.  Trying to rid yourself of fear can itself lead to fearful consequences, including unhinged hostility toward the supposed source of your fear.  

Fear is a fearsome thing.  It can tinge your life with anxiety.  Fear of fear can be even worse.  It can envelope your life with what could be called high anxiety.  Being afraid of being afraid.  And high anxiety can leave you susceptible to all sorts of angry feelings, ugly ideas and inhumane influences.  We live in an era which is rife with high anxiety, especially with regard to immigrants.  We are bombarded with a fear of the fear that immigrants might be fearful.

High anxiety is a contorted but powerful feeling.  Fear times fear – irrationality squared – equals high anxiety.  As applied to immigrants, it has left many otherwise decent people susceptible to the fearmongering of demagogues like Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters who try to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment for political and financial purposes.  How can this be? 

I think that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath can help us understand what may seem like an unfathomable phenomenon.  It is a novel about the high anxiety that Californians felt during the 1930’s when an influx of Dust Bowl refugees moved there from Oklahoma.  It was not fear of the immigrants per se, but fear of the fear that the immigrants might become fearful.  They were afraid they would find cause to become afraid of the immigrants.  It was a case of high anxiety. 

Like Californians in the 1930’s, we live at a time in which many Americans are not merely afraid of people who are harmful, they are also afraid of people they think might become harmful.  It is a preemptive and presumably preventive fear.  If you are not one of us, you might be against us.  If you are unfamiliar, you might become fearful.  It is an expectation of cultural conformity and ethnic homogenization as opposed to an expectation of the diversity that actually pertains in American society. 

It is a formula for fear that applies to many sorts of people.   Americans are afraid of almost anyone who is different than they are, including most fellow Americans – but since immigrants are inherently unfamiliar, it leads to a presumption of fearfulness about them.  Rooted in a fear of difference as dangerous and diversity as divisive, high anxiety is aimed today at immigrants.  But it affects and harms us all.  We have much to fear from the fear of fear itself.       

High Anxiety and The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is a story about immigrants being viciously vilified and rejected by the residents of an area in which they seek to settle.  This is an all-too-common situation in the world today and a recurrent scenario in American history.  Native-born Americans have repeatedly been opposed to the immigration of new people, even when their own families came from elsewhere.  The present-day hysteria about Central American immigrants is reminiscent of similar anti-immigrant outbursts in the past.  Only this one threatens to upend and undermine our democratic system.  That makes it a particularly serious state of affairs.

The Grapes of Wrath was written in 1939 in the midst of the migration of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma to California.  It is a historical novel.  A movie of the book was made in 1940.  The novel is widely regarded as one of the best in American history.  The movie is similarly regarded.  What makes the story and the history in the novelparticularly interesting is that the immigrants in the book are not from a foreign country.  And their treatment, or rather mistreatment, flies in the face of most explanations of anti-immigrant hostility. 

The conventional explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment generally stress economic factors, such as competition for jobs, and cultural factors, such as racism, chauvinism, nationalism and other cultural differences between the newcomers and their persecutors.  But the immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath were not taking jobs away from the residents of California, and they were not ethnically, linguistically, religiously or otherwise culturally different in significant ways from the Californians who were reviling and rejecting them. 

The immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath were moving to California to take vacant jobs that Californians weren’t occupying and to do farm work that Californians weren’t doing.  They were white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, native-born Americans, that is WASPs, just like most of the Californians.  Nonetheless, the newcomers were repulsed by the inhabitants.  WASPs being rejected by WASPs.  Without jobs at issue. That doesn’t fit the usual matrix.  So, why all the hostility?  There must be something involved here that doesn’t fit the usual explanations but that may, in fact, underlie the usual explanations.   

I think that something may be high anxiety, the fear of fear itself.  As it is portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath, anti-immigrant hostility seems largely to be a product of the fear of newcomers just because they were new.  The Okie immigrants were unfamiliar, literally not part of the family, and that made them a potential source of fear.  A high anxiety.

The Grapes of Wrath: The Story.

The Grapes of Wrath is a heartrending story of Americans brutalizing Americans because they were from a different part of the United States.  It is in its essentials a true story.  Steinbeck traveled and lived with Okie immigrants.  He portrayed what he saw.  Migrants traveling some fifteen hundred miles on short rations in ramshackle vehicles, taking with them all they could pack into a car or pickup truck.  

As such, the book is first and foremost a brilliant and moving account of the migration, looking at events from the Okies’ point of view.  It is dramatic without being melodramatic, and detailed without being boring.  The descriptions of how the migrants maintained their rickety motor vehicles and sustained themselves physically and emotionally are captivating.  As readers, we feel as though we are undertaking the migration ourselves.

The storyfollows the Joad family as they lose their farm in Oklahoma and move to California to try to find work and land.  As the story begins, the family consists of twelve people, with a thirteenth on the way.  Three generations with a fourth in embryo.  In addition, an ex-preacher joins the family in their migration.  They lose two aged grandparents to death on the way and two adult males to desertion.  And the baby is born but then dies. 

Ma Joad is the emotional center of the family and the story.  She keeps the family together and keeps their hopes alive, and ours as well.  The ex-preacher Casy is the moral center of the book and personally lives the “one for all and all for one” ethic that he conceives to be a universal rule and that is the main message of Steinbeck’s novel.  Tom Joad is the center of the action in the story and represents a model of pragmatic strength through humility. 

The story of the Joads is interwoven with chapters that describe the social and economic situation in the United States during the 1930’s, and especially in Oklahoma and California.  The book proceeds in a hopscotch pattern with chapters that describe the social and economic conditions of the time alternating with chapters that portray the doings of the Joad family as they make their way through those conditions.

The book is usually read as a harsh critique of the capitalist economy of the times and as a testament to the courage and strength of people who suffered under it.  Which it is. But it is also a book about immigration and Americans’ reactions to immigrants.  It illustrates the hostility with which many Americans have responded to newcomers just because they were new.  The book portrays what it was like for local people to have immigrants move into their midst.  It speaks to us as local people faced with immigrants today. 

Immigration History and Hysteria: Déjà vu all over again.

A typical riff on immigrants: They are indigent, indolent, illiterate, ignorant and, worst of all, violent.  They are an invasion that threatens public safety, undermines workers’ wages, and degrades American culture.  Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, it does.  It is the sort of hysterical rant against immigrants, and especially Latin American immigrants, that you hear these days from Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.  Trump has recently (I am writing this in early April, 2024) even used near genocidal rhetoric while viciously haranguing against immigrants.  Given that the United States is a land of immigrants – everyone except for Native Americans has their roots somewhere else – it might seem strange, even perverse, that this sort of anti-immigrant virulence would be so widespread

It is perverse, but not strange.  Complaints that immigrants constitute a blight on the United States have historically been common, even if Trump’s rhetoric today is especially vicious and vile.  It was a complaint that native-born colonial Americans made in the eighteenth century against the immigration of Germans to the colonies.  It was the same complaint that native-born Americans, including the descendants of those now integrated German immigrants, made against Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. 

The same complaint was made by native-born Americans, including the descendants of those Irish immigrants, against Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the late-nineteenth century.  The same complaint was made by northern Whites against Blacks migrating from the South during the early twentieth century. 

And in The Grapes of Wrath, we see the same complaint being made against migrants moving from Oklahoma to California during the 1930’s.  Several hundred thousand Okies sought jobs and land in California after having been evicted from their homes and farms in Oklahoma.  And then they were rejected in California by people most of whose families had immigrated there since the mid-nineteenth century, who were relative newcomers themselves.

The United States has from the start been a country of immigrants and anti-immigrants.  In almost every generation, there has been a major immigration of people to America or across America from somewhere else.  And each of those cohorts of immigrants has been met with widespread scorn and opposition, even from the previous generation of immigrants now integrated as native-born citizens.

Invading Hordes of Indigent Immigrants?  Some facts might help.

We are surrounded today with hysterical fears of invading hordes of immigrants.  These fears have repeatedly echoed down the halls of American history to the present day.  They are nonsense.  In fact, there has never been an invasion of immigrants either in the past or in the present day, and despite the frenzied rhetoric of the anti-immigrants today, the United States is not currently overwhelmed with immigrants. 

What is overwhelmed is the inadequate governmental systems for processing immigrants.  Understaffed and underfunded, they are badly malfunctioning, albeit not much worse than many times in the past.  In any case, the immigrant population today is not particularly large.  Immigrants currently make up around 14% of the population of the United States, which is pretty much what it has been for the last one hundred years and considerably less than in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hysterical fears of immigrants failing to fit in as Americans and wrecking American society have also invariably been false.  Each of the maligned immigrant cohorts has eventually been integrated into American society, and the newcomers have made major contributions to the economy and the culture of the country.[1]  And that has continued to the present day. 

Hysterical fears of immigrants ending up on welfare are also false. Immigrants are not indolent and are, instead, a boon to our economy, not a drag.[2]  They come for jobs, not handouts.  There is good reason for this.  Emigrants from elsewhere are generally among the most active people in their native populations, which is generally why and how they left their homelands.  Emigrating has never been easy, and it is usually easier to stay put and endure difficult existing conditions than to strike out to someplace new to start over with your life.  Emigrants are literally movers and shakers.  Their energy and ambition are reasons that the United States has historically been so successful. 

Immigrants to the United States are also generally enthusiastic about democracy.  It is one of the attractions of the country.  They are often more enthusiastic than native-born Americans who tend to take democracy for granted or even reject democratic principles, as we seem to be seeing in Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.

Contrary to the fearmongering of Trump and the MAGA movement, crime rates for immigrants, particularly for violent crimes, are lower than for native-born Americans, and employment rates among immigrants are higher.  Unemployment in the United States is currently at near record lows.  American farms and businesses want more workers.  They need immigrants. 

In turn, immigrants do not require more social services than native-born Americans and they pay their fair share of taxes.  Historically, immigrants who have not succeeded here have generally returned to their original countries, about one-third of all immigrants.  They have not become an indigent burden on American society. 

Logically, Americans should be welcoming immigrants.  But as we see in The Grapes of Wrath, logic can fail in the face of high anxiety.[3]

The Grapes of Wrath and the Oklahoma to California Migration System.

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family caught up in what could be characterized as an Oklahoma to California immigration system.  It was a system that provided large-scale corporate farms in California with cheap and submissive labor during the 1930’s.  It was very similar to the systems organized by American manufacturers for recruiting Irish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The goal was abundant cheap and submissive labor.  It can also be compared to the immigration system that funnels Latin American immigrants to the Southwestern United States today. 

As described in The Grapes of Wrath, the system during the 1930’s began with the eviction of small farmers from their lands and homes in Oklahoma and ended with the former farmers desperately looking for work as fruit and cotton pickers on large corporate farms in California.  Not a happy ending for the hardworking and formerly independent farmers.

Oklahoma was settled by small farmers in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  In retrospect, it was probably an economic and environmental mistake.  Much of the land was only marginally fertile, better suited to bison than farmers, and when rainfall began to decrease, the soil became depleted and crop yields fell short.  Eventually the dry soil erupted into huge dust storms that gave the area the name of Dust Bowl.  Farmers weren’t able to grow enough to pay their mortgages or sharecropping fees.  As a result, they were evicted from their lands and homes.  The lands were subsequently combined into large-scale corporate farms that were mechanized and needed few workers, which left the displaced farmers without land or jobs.  The fictional Joads among them.

Meanwhile, large corporate farms in California needed workers to pick and plant crops.  So, as detailed in The Grapes of Wrath, they advertised that need throughout the Midwest, attracting to California hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers like the Joads looking for work.  The corporate farm owners deliberately lured many more workers to California than they needed so that the workers would compete with each other for work and would accept ever lower wages.

The corporate farm owners conspired to keep the workers submissive by denying them any sort of job security, and pitting them against each other so that they wouldn’t organize labor unions.  Steinbeck describes heartrending situations in which hungry striking workers are pitted against starving strike breakers so that the owners can lower workers’ wages.  The owners also stirred up hostility to the Okie immigrants among local Californians so that the immigrants could not join with local people to improve wages and conditions for the workers which would result in more sales in town stores and redound to the economic benefit of town folks.

Being denied long-term employment contracts and long-term housing, the Okies had to move around the state every few weeks looking for work, essentially becoming permanent migrant workers.  It was a desperate situation for most of the immigrants.  The Joads, for example, were repeatedly faced with the choice of spending their meagre earnings on food or on gas to get to the next place where they hoped to find work.  It was a vicious cycle and a lose/lose situation.

As a consequence of making so little money, the workers could not afford regular housing and had to set up temporary homeless camps on the outskirts of towns, living in tents, makeshift shelters, cardboard boxes, and their cars.  Keeping the workers homeless was encouraged by the corporate farm owners.  They did not want workers to settle together in permanent housing because that might facilitate their organizing labor unions and otherwise demanding higher wages and better working and living conditions.     

Logically, local citizens might have welcomed the immigrants if the workers had been paid decent wages, because that would mean more shoppers with more money to spend at local stores.  But local citizens were encouraged to fear the immigrants by the mass media and demagogic politicians who were controlled by the corporate farm owners.  Steinbeck describes how the media and politicians spread false rumors that immigrants were going to compete for work with native Californians so that wages would drop and the newcomers would eventually replace the natives, leaving them as homeless migrants in their own state.  This scenario was a 1930’s version of what is today called “Replacement Theory” when applied by MAGA demagogues to Latin Americans.

Meanwhile, local townspeople resented having their nice neighborhoods invaded by homeless and penniless immigrants.  The net result was that fearful and angry local people, egged on by agents of the corporate farm owners, physically attacked the immigrants and wrecked and burned down their migrant camps.  That happened repeatedly to the Joads in the book.

Constantly on the move, camping in unsanitary quarters and living on below-starvation wages, immigrant workers and their families were often chronically hungry and sick.  Many did not survive, dying from malnutrition and illnesses brought on or exacerbated by malnutrition.  But there were always more immigrants where the dying workers came from.  

This was the system of immigration and immiseration, exploitation and brutalization in which the fictional Joads and their fellow real-life Okies were trapped and in which they seemed to be doomed to die.  Not too different from the immigration system of today?

The Grapes of Wrath: A Migration of People but also Ideas. 

Immigrants like the Joads were recruited for their bodies – they were going to be hired hands – but they also brought their ideas.  Fear of the ideas that immigrants might bring with them has been a consistent theme in the history of anti-immigrant hostility.  In the early nineteenth century, there was widespread fear of the Catholicism of Irish immigrants among the predominantly Protestant Americans.  In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was fear among capitalistic conservatives of the socialistic ideas that European immigrants carried with them. 

In the present-day, it is clear that one of the main reasons that Donald Trump and his MAGA colleagues are so opposed to Latin American immigrants is their fear that the immigrants will support the Democratic Party if they become citizens.  It is a source of high anxiety for political right-wingers.

The Grapes of Wrath takes place at a time that in retrospect we can see was a changing of political orientations in Oklahoma and California, a change that was helped along by the migration of the Okies.  Oklahoma was going from politically progressive to regressive.  California was going from conservative to progressive. 

During the early twentieth century, Oklahoma was home to the largest percentage of Socialist Party members and voters of any state in the country.  Large numbers of hard-up small farmers favored the socialists’ theories and practices of cooperative farming, banking and marketing, along with government control of banks, constraints on foreclosure, and regulation of railroad shipping rates.  The Dust Bowl emigrants carried these progressive ideas and a generally progressive ethos with them. 

You can see these ideas and ethos in practice in The Grapes of Wrath as the migrants form cooperative associations in the camps they set up along their way to California and as they traveled around looking for work in the state.  Most of the migrants in the book seemed to adopt a cooperative attitude toward their emigration, an ethos of “we are all in this together.” 

It is an attitude that could be described as socialism of the heart, a cooperative sentiment, which the immigrants in the book carried with them even if they did not all identify as card-carrying Socialists.  Hard-up migrants frequentlyhelped each other on the road west, sharing scarce food and other resources, and fixing each other’s cars. 

This sort of activity worried the corporate farm owners and the book depicts how they sought to counter the cooperative efforts of the immigrants by keeping them constantly on the move and stirring up the local population against them.  With red-baiting and black-listing immigrant leaders, and even murdering the progressive preacher Casey who was traveling with the Joads, the corporate farm owners denounced cooperation as un-American.      

But despite the best and worst efforts of defenders of the status quo, emigration and immigration have almost invariably had political effects.  In this respect, the migration of Okies during the 1930’s seemingly had a long-term political effect on both Oklahoma and California. Some 500,000 emigrants left Oklahoma, which soon became the economic backwater and politically regressive state that it largely remains today.  Meanwhile, Okie immigrants soon made up some 15% of California’s population, and the state’s political orientation went from conservative to progressive, as it remains today.

Demonizing Immigrants: Exclusion and Segregation.

Facts don’t faze fanatics.  That immigrants are in fact a win-win proposition for the country can’t alleviate the high anxiety of hard-core haters.  They still insist on segregating and excluding immigrants so that they won’t infect our society with baleful influences. 

Infection is a key word among anti-immigrants.  Speaking of immigrants as though they are diseased or are vermin is common.  Donald Trump has recently said that at least some of the immigrants aren’t even human.  This is extremely irresponsible and dangerously ominous rhetoric.  It sounds as though not merely the exclusion of immigrants but their extermination could be on Trump’s mind, or could be taken as such by some of his violent followers.

Immigrants were subject to exclusion and segregation at various times in American history.  Chinese laborers during the mid-nineteenth century, for example, were recruited to work on building railroads in the West, segregated into camps while they were here, and then shipped back to China when the work was done.  Likewise, Mexican laborers were recruited during the mid-twentieth century to work on farms and railroad construction, were segregated into camps, and then sent back to Mexico when their work ended.

We can see both the exclusion and segregation of immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath.  Okie immigrants were stopped at the California border by state troopers and turned back if they looked too needy or unable to work.  California did not want newcomers who might end up as public charges.  This was a form of selective exclusion.  In turn, those immigrants who were allowed across the border were channeled into migrant labor camps and kept from settling with the native population in the cities, which is a form of segregation. 

Excluding and segregating immigrants are literally inhumane practices as they deny our common humanity.  They are also costly practices in lives and liberty and are ultimately unsuccessful. The United States is a big country with a border of some four thousand miles, much of it in uninhabited areas.  Trying to completely stop immigrants from getting in to the country m would entail enormous resources and require militarizing the country.  The same is true of segregation, as we have regrettably seen in American history.  That sort of repressive regime is seemingly what Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters want, but it is not what the Founders of the United States wanted or what the Constitution envisions.  It is flatly un-American.

Racism and chauvinism from Trump and his MAGA followers are reprehensible but predictable.  Bigots are bigots.  It is also reprehensible but predictable that demagogic politicians, sensation-seeking mass media and greedy business people might want to stir up and take advantage of anti-immigrant hostility.  There are voters, viewers and profits in bigotry.   But I don’t think that it is the inveterate haters and their facilitators who are the real danger to this country.  The real danger is the otherwise decent people who the demagogues can influence.

The real danger is the people, including many who are not otherwise racists or chauvinists, who may even sympathize with the plight of immigrants escaping from troubled lands, and who may have initially been in favor of integrating immigrants, who end up supporting the anti-immigrant bigotry of Trump and his supporters.  How can this be and what can we do about it?

Integrating Immigrants: Smelting Pot, Melting Pot, Stew Pot.

I think that the underlying problem, the root of most high anxiety about immigrants in this country, is an expectation, even an insistence, that the integration of immigrants should lead to homogenization.  Different people have different ideas as to what the standardized American should be like, largely a function of their political orientation.  At the extreme end of the spectrum, there is the MAGA crowd who exude paranoia that people like them – white, Christian, English-speaking – will be wiped out and replaced by aliens.  Their goal is to make America safe for gun-toting archconservative Christians.  Freedom, in their view, means the right to carry assault weapons and worship Evangelical Christianity in public schools, and that means anyone who doesn’t fit or support that goal is unfit to be an American. 

More liberal groups have more liberal ideas about what is an American, but most Americans still have an idea that we should all be basically the same, irrespective of our backgrounds.  Most Americans feel – and it seems to be more of a feeling than a rational belief – that everyone should end up the same, and that no ethnic groups or ethnicities should stand out.  As the history and sociology of America show, this is ultimately an unreasonable and unreachable expectation.  The problem is that the failure of that expectation can lead to antagonism toward immigrants and high anxiety about immigration.  And it leaves people susceptible to the rantings of the extremists.   

Even as successive cohorts of immigrants have been acculturated, remnants of ancestral cultures invariably remain.  Most Americans still identify with the cultures of their ancestral homelands and adhere to at least some ancestral ideas and customs.  Some of these ideas and customs stand out and raise the perennial question of whether the members of a given ethnic group owe more loyalty to their ancestral homeland than to the United States.  As a result, many otherwise well-intentioned people founder on an expectation of cultural homogeneity, and end up turning against immigrants when the immigrants don’t just completely blend in with everyone else. 

The rantings of xenophobes, racists and chauvinists notwithstanding, cultural homogeneity is not feasible now and never has been.  And the ravings of Donald Trump and his MAGA gang notwithstanding, the United States did not begin as a so-called Christian nation or with a homogeneous population.  Chauvinists have historically opposed each wave of immigrants on the grounds that the original purity of our society was being polluted, just as Trump and his supporters are doing today with respect to Central American immigrants. 

Their claims are false in every respect.  America has been a conglomeration of cultures from the landing of the Mayflower – which carried a diverse population and not just Pilgrims – to the present day.  It is, however, an unfortunate fact of public life that when demagogues say something loud enough and long enough, their lies can sink into the public consciousness and, even more important, into the public’s unconsciousness. 

People end up with preconceptions they aren’t even aware of.  And a failure to arrive at cultural homogeneity may lead some people to think that the resulting heterogeneity is a problem, that integration has been a failure, then blame immigrants for that supposed problem, and turn against immigration and integration.  This is something we have to get past.  The expectation of homogenization has got to be overcome. Our models of integration have to include diversity. 

Integration with diversity is not a contradiction in terms.  Among the different models of integration, three types can be characterized by the three metaphors of “smelting pot,” “melting pot” and “stew pot.”  The first two have cultural homogenization as their goal, and they cannot ultimately succeed.  The third aims at pluralism and diversity, and it can work. 

“Smelting pot” integration is premised on the idea that the cultural differences and the distinctive characteristics that immigrants bring with them are disruptive.  They should for the most part be eliminated so that the newcomers end up becoming the same as the existing population.  Intense pressure should be placed on them – turning up the heat so to speak – so that their differences from the existing population will be smelted away.

For most of the period from the founding of the first European colonies in the 1600’s through the early 1900’s, the predominant approach to cultural integration in this country was the smelting pot view.  Harkening back to the English origins of the first colonies, this view has generally portrayed White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs, as the ideal Americans.  Immigrants are welcome, but they have to give up their ancestral cultures and adopt, whole cloth, a WASP culture.  

Smelting pot integration was official policy in many places in this country up through the first half of the twentieth century.  It was considered a compliment to immigrants that they were deemed capable of adopting all-American ways.  But it was a coercive compliment.  Early twentieth century immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and their American-born children, my father and his father included, were, for example, prohibited from speaking their native languages in school or on the job.  Only English was allowed.  And immigrants like my grandfather were repeatedly exhorted to Americanize themselves.

There is an oppressive chauvinism built into the smelting pot approach to integration.  The expectation of conformity is stifling and prone to provoke violence against recalcitrant immigrants.  It was expected of the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath who, despite being WASPs moving in among WASPs, were taunted for their Midwestern accent, clothing and manners.

This smelting pot view is still widely held by people who consider themselves politically and socially conservative.  It is not as extreme as the right-wing, hate-filled approach of Donald Trump and his followers, but in its emphasis on cultural homogeneity, it is a view that can warp into anti-immigrant sentiment and spiral into high anxiety if its goals are not met.  Which, almost inevitably, they won’t be. 

“Melting pot” integration is premised on the idea that most of the distinctive characteristics of immigrants are either helpful or harmless and, in any case, should be mixed in with the mainstream culture of the existing population to make for a new and better homogenized culture.  It is a metaphor that was seemingly first used in 1782 by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur to describe the United States.  The melting pot view was later popularized during the 1910’s in a play called “The Melting Pot” by Israel Zangweel, a Russian Jewish immigrant. 

Melting pot integration is a more tolerant approach to the differences that immigrants bring with them.  In this view, most cultural differences don’t make a difference.  And they should be either ignored or blended into the existing cultural mix to make a slightly new and better culture.  It is a progressive view of differences among people in which social evolution is seen as a good thing.  Melting pot integration gradually became the predominant view of self-styled liberals during the course of the twentieth century and especially after World War II.

But it is an approach that is more superficial than substantive.  It mainly deals in celebrations rather than ideas and practices of cultural significance. It is the approach that was taken by most schools when I was young.  We had, for example, “International Days” in which we would dress in quaint clothes and bring in foods that were characteristic of our ancestral homelands.  There were similar community-wide celebrations of people’s ancestral homelands that were open to everyone to join in the fun.  In this view, difference was fun for all to enjoy.  Everyone, for example, was expected to identify as Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.  And Christmas became more of a national celebration than a religious holy day. 

But the only acceptable differences were those in which everyone could share and which were fun for everyone.  And these differences did not make much of a difference.  Bagels versus baguettes was a big competition in my school.  The problem with melting pot acculturation is that every time some new peoples show up, you cannot be sure that their differences will be superficial and that they will blend in.  Their differences may be too great or too significant.

Given that the melting pot model starts with an expectation of homogenization, there is almost inevitably going to be anxiety about new people.  Even if every previous cohort of immigrants fitted in, maybe this new group won’t.  Natives will almost inevitably feel anxiety about the anxiety generated by the newcomers.  And with anti-immigrant demagogues stirring the pot, tolerance among ordinary people could spiral into high anxiety and anti-immigrant intolerance.  This is the situation we are seemingly witnessing today in this country.         

What could be called the “stew pot” model of integration was promulgated in the early twentieth century by Horace Kallen, another Russian Jewish immigrant.  Stew pot integration is premised on the idea that many important cultural differences among people should not, and in any case cannot, be completely eliminated.  Different groups should be expected to retain some of their distinctive ways, blending together enough with the general population and sharing enough important things in common – most importantly a commitment to democracy and the Constitution – so that they can participate in a pluralistic culture. 

In the stew pot model, there is an expectation of diversity so that newcomers don’t automatically trigger an anxiety reaction.  The expectation of cultural homogeneity that underlies both the smelting pot and melting pot approaches to integration leads them to the brink of anti-immigrant sentiment and high anxiety.  The stew pot approach avoids this problem.  In this view, a commitment to democracy and the Constitution are the chief commonalities that make all of us Americans.  Given that a desire for democracy is one of the things that motivates most immigrants, we have good reason to presume good things from them rather than fearfulness.   

A respect for diversity is, in fact, one of the key underpinnings of democracy and our Constitutional system.  Democracy can be defined as majority rule with minority rights, the most important of which is the right of a minority to become a majority.  It’s the welcoming of diversity that makes democracy.  Democracy thus entails tolerance toward the tolerant and intolerance for intolerance.  A presumption of heterogeneity, rather than a presumption of homogeneity, is a basic principle of a democratic culture.

Diversity also should be recognized as not only fair but efficient.  It provides a variety of resources and perspectives to help solve the social problems we all face together.   It derives from a world view in which people are seen as able to recognize and negotiate their differences.  The stew pot model has become the view of the multicultural and diversity movement among liberals in recent decades.  Respect for diversity was represented by the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath and promoted by Steinbeck in the book.

Finally, diversity should be recognized as not only fair and efficient but inevitable.  The stew pot model is not merely an ideal, it is a reality.  Despite the best and worst efforts of the proponents of cultural homogeneity, historically the United States has been a cultural stew pot.  The country has never even approximated the homogeneity that the smelting pot and melting pot approaches to integration seek to achieve.  And yet the country has survived and thrived.  Homogeneity is clearly not necessary for the country to flourish. 

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, at least a score of different languages were spoken in the country.  Within whole neighborhoods of big cities, whole towns and agricultural areas, people would speak only some language other than English.  Not merely immigrants just off the boat, but their children and grandchildren for several subsequent generations.  And the same went for other customs and practices that immigrants brought with them.  Where diversity flourished within the democratic and Constitutional system, the country thrived.  Where diversity was stifled or enslavement was practiced, those areas degenerated.  There never was anything to fear from diversity and no good reason for high anxiety.

The United States is less diverse today.  English is almost universal.  The mass media and the internet have broadcast a common culture.  The educational system has propagated a core cultural curriculum.  But for better and for worse, cultural differences exist in different parts of the country.  And the worst differences, battles over race and religion, stem mainly from conflicts between WASPs in the North and WASPs in the South.  Immigrants are not the problem.

Immigrants are, instead, responsible for most of the best cultural developments over the last century.  Blacks migrating from the South have been the major source of jazz, blues and other musical forms that define American music.  Jews from Eastern Europe are largely responsible for developing the movie industry and distinctly American comedy.  American food tastes are largely a result of Italian influences.  And so forth.  Cultural diversity is a fact and not a fault in the country.  It is probably about time that we Americans learned to live with the situation.  And to accept the diversity that already exists and that new immigrants will bring to us.

Based on statistics and my own experience as a professor of young people since the 1960’s, it seems to me that every generation of young people, at least since the 1960’s, has become more open-minded than the last.  And not merely more tolerant but more welcoming of diversity.  That may be one of the reasons that Donald Trump and his MAGA gang of mainly older people have become so vile and violent in what we can only hope is a spasm of their last gasp desperation.  If we survive this wave of old timers’ hate and high anxiety, the country’s future may be brighter.

The title of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath comes from the Biblical Book of Revelations, Chapter 14, Verse 19 through Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Both the Bible and the song refer to God crushing grapes, a symbol of the luxury of the rich, in the course of making people free.  In the novel, a senile Grandpa Joad fantasizes about crushing grapes all over his body when they get to California, which he imagines as a Promised Land.  Grandpa dies before they get to California, which turns out to be anything but a Promised Land for the Joads and the other Dust Bowl immigrants.  No grapes for them.

At the end of the story, as all seems lost, Tom is having to light out to escape arrest, and the rest of his family are literally starving, Ma Joad gives Tom a pep talk to try keep hope in him alive, and not let their persecutors get him down.  It’s a pep talk that Steinbeck seemed to want give to us readers to help us carry on in whatever may be our desperate times.  “Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone.  Why, Tom, we are the people that live.  They ain’t gonna wipe us out.  Why, we’re the people – we go on.”

                                                                                                                                    BW 4/24

[1] The Uprooted. Oscar Handlin. Grosset & Dunlap Publishers: New York, 1951.

[2] “The Economy is roaring.  Immigration is a key reason.”  Rachel Siegel, Lauren Kaori Gurley & Meryl Kornfield. The Washington Post. 2/27/24.

“The U.S. Economy Is Surpassing Expectations. Immigration Is One Reason.” Lydia DePillis. The New York Times, 2/27/24.

[3] Keys to Successful Immigration. Thomas Espenshade, ed.  The Urban Institute Press: Washington, D.C. 1997.

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James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. MAGA Myths Versus the Reality of Early America. Natty Bumppo Makes a Mockery of the MAGA View of History.

       James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers.

MAGA Myths Versus the Reality of Early America.

Natty Bumppo Makes a Mockery of the MAGA View of History.

Burton Weltman

The Pioneers: The Point.

I am writing this essay in early January, 2024.  We are living through terrible times in much of the world.  Environmental disasters and global climate change.  Wars, terrorist threats and massacres.  Rampant gun violence.  Racial, religious and ethnic bigotry.  Famine and homelessness.  Fascist movements and authoritarian rulers.  Just to name a few of the horrors.

Among the rightwing movements besetting the world and begetting many of its horrors is the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the United States.  The underlying theme of the MAGA movement is a claim that things were better in the past when white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men ruled the roost in America.  The Good Old Boys in the Good Old Days. 

MAGA supporters look in particular to the 1780’s and 1790’s, when the United States Constitution was adopted, as the high point in American history from which we have mostly been falling away ever since.  Central to the MAGA complaint is that the old WASP male hierarchy has been undermined and that inferior groups which were previously subordinate have risen in the ranks.  As a consequence, they claim, the country has declined and continues to fall.

The MAGA movement is, thus, founded on an interpretation of American history.  Getting back to an Edenic American past that has been frittered away is the purpose of the movement.  The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how ridiculous is the MAGA view of American history.  So ridiculous that it is largely discredited by James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers, a two-hundred-year-old story that is read mainly by young people.  A kid’s book whose main character is a backwoodsman named Natty Bumppo who makes a mockery of MAGA. 

Written in 1823, The Pioneers is set in 1793 on what was then the frontier in New York State. +

In MAGA imagery this was an ideal time and place in which men were men, women were womanly, and the lower orders stayed in their places.  The significance of The Pioneers is that its description of America in 1793 does not fit with MAGA imagery and that it gives the lie to many of the rightwing myths that feed the MAGA movement.

Among these MAGA myths are historically baseless claims that governments in early America were strictly minimalist, that laissez-faire economics prevailed, that gun ownership was widespread, that Christianity, Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and individualistic ethics were universal, and that blacks were contented slaves while women were happy helpmeets to their patriarchal husbands.  The Pioneers contradicts all of these myths.  None of them is true.  And Cooper was there, so he should know.  Cooper grew up and lived as a young man in the time and place in which the story takes place.  His book merely tells it like it was.  Cooper was, in addition, a self-styled conservative, so he can be trusted with the seemingly liberal conclusions of his book. 

The thesis of this essay is that if the rationale for your movement can be discredited by a two-hundred-year-old contemporaneous novel directed at young people, your movement must be pretty pathetic. Dangerous, but pathetic.[1]  

The Pioneers: The Plot.

The Pioneers is a combination mystery story, romance, and clash of ideologies.  It is set in in a region of New York State that in 1793 had recently been settled by a colony of white people. The settlement was led by the owner of the land, Marmaduke Temple, who is also a judge in administrative charge of the area. 

The mystery centers on two questions.  First, who and what is Oliver Edwards, a young man of genteel manners incongruously living in a rustic shack in the forest with a backwoodsman, Natty Bumppo, and Natty’s indigenous friend Chingachgook?  Second, what is Natty hiding in his cabin that he won’t let anyone other than Oliver and Chingachgook see?  The romance centers on whether Oliver Edwards and Elizabeth Temple, the Judge’s daughter, will recognize and realize their budding mutual love? 

Embedded in the mysteries and the romance is a clash of ideologies which is the main point of the novel.  This clash pits the communitarian conservationism of Judge Temple against the laissez-faire exploitationism of Sheriff Richard Jones and both of them against the isolationist preservationism of the hunter Natty Bumppo. 

 Judge Temple is a disciple of the Quaker William Penn.  His portrait is based largely on Cooper’s father who was a judge, a Quaker and a large landowner after whom Cooperstown is named.  Judge Temple wants his settlement to develop peacefully and productively in harmony with the Indians and the natural environment.  He insists, for example, on cutting down only so many trees as are needed for use.  And he believes in sharing the work and the fruits of the common labor.   He is a stickler for the law, especially conservation laws as to hunting and land use.  His goal is a well and fully regulated community.

Sheriff Jones is a Hobbesian predator who believes Indians are to be ruthlessly conquered and nature destructively exploited.  As an example, he clear-cuts all of the trees in a forest, for the sake of convenience, even though most of the wood isn’t needed, and he uses explosives to catch huge quantities of fish even though most of them will rot and be wasted.  His goal is to exercise power and accumulate personal wealth. 

Natty Bumppo is what we today might call a survivalist.  He wants to leave nature alone, and most of his fellow humans as well.  He wants to coexist with the forest animals and plants, killing and harvesting only what he needs at the moment, living like the proverbial lilies of the field.  He is a hermit who will help others in a crisis but is otherwise mostly a loner.

The story in The Pioneers is slow to develop and is full of lengthy descriptions of conditions on the frontier during the 1790’s.  Cooper’s descriptions of flora and fauna, hunting and fishing, panthers and deer, mountains and lakes, as well as social classes, governmental practices, ethics and ethnicities, make for more of a guidebook than a storybook.  He clearly wanted his audience in the nineteenth century to know what things were like in the late eighteenth century.  And the country he describes was not the place imagined and demanded today by MAGA supporters. 

The plot is convoluted but after many trials, tribulations, and misidentifications, the two mysteries are solved and the romance is resolved.  It turns out that both mysteries revolve around one man, an exiled Tory grandee named Edward Effingham.  Effingham had been one of the original co-owners of the land currently held by Judge Temple.  Unlike Temple, who stood with the Patriots in the American Revolution, Effingham had been a pro-British Loyalist.  At the end of the war, he had fled from the United States as a traitor, and his interest in the land had been confiscated and turned over to his Patriot partner, Judge Temple. 

As the story unfolds, it is revealed that Oliver Edwards is the grandson of Effingham and he has secretly accompanied his mortally ill grandfather back to New York so that Effingham can die on his homeland.  Natty Bumppo, who it turns out was a former retainer of Effingham, has been hiding the dying man in his cabin.  As these mysteries are unraveled, Oliver Edwards and Elizabeth Temple duly realize their affection for each other. 

Mysteries solved and romance resolved, Effingham is welcomed back into the community.  The Judge generously gives a half interest in his estate to his long-lost partner, which Oliver will seemingly soon inherit.  That will make Oliver a rich man and a suitable suitor for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.  A happy ending so far.  But not everything ends happily. 

Natty’s colleague Chingachgook, who is the last member of his decimated Mohican tribe, dies as the result of a gunpowder explosion.  It is a symbolic but significant loss to the diversity of the human species in America.  It is also an example of the unfortunate but inevitable consequences of introducing guns to America, a weapon that is dangerous to friend as well as foe.  Meanwhile, Natty recognizes that he is a misfit in the community as it is developing.  Much to the chagrin of all the characters in the story except for Sheriff Jones, Natty rejects an offer of land and income from the Judge and leaves for western lands that are for the time being still uninhabited and unravaged by white pioneers. 

As the book ends, the ideological battle remains unresolved and, writing this story in 1823, Cooper seemed to fear that the Richard Joneses were winning.  The middle ground of controlled, cooperative and conservationist development, that was represented in the story by Judge Temple and in real life by Cooper’s father, was being lost to selfish laissez-faire individualists and chauvinists. The exploiters and destroyers, the MAGA movement of that day, were winning.

Making American Great Again for Natty Bumppo.

MAGA is a movement that aspires to Make America Great Again by having the United States return to the way MAGA supporters conceive the country originally was.  The movement’s aims are articulated mainly in terms of what its supporters oppose and whom they hate – mainly liberals, feminists, immigrants, and ethnic minorities of all sorts.  What and whom MAGA supporters are against is clear, what they are in favor of is not. 

MAGA is essentially an emotional movement.  It is based largely on its supporters’ feelings of grievance, their gut reactions that they are getting a raw deal out of the social and economic changes of the past century or so.  They claim to be fed up and are not going to take it anymore.  So, they want to restore what they claim were the original social, economic and political relationships established by the Founders.    

In MAGA historiography, the country was founded as a haven for he-men WASPs.  It was a sanctum of small government and a sanctuary for self-made individualists.  It was a hierarchy in which the best people, generally defined by MAGA supporters as white, Anglo-Saxon male Protestants, had a hold on the top positions.  In their view, the country has progressively fallen away from that ideal, especially in recent years, as upstart groups and government regulations have decimated the original hierarchy and supposedly destroyed people’s freedoms.

Natty Bumppo, the hero of The Pioneers, would seem to be an ideal candidate for a MAGA hero, only he won’t cooperate.  Natty is a rugged individualist who has no use for government or for the rules that constrain a self-made man like himself.  He is a gun-toting, sharp-shooting hunter who could wrestle a bear, and is the sort of he-man that MAGA supporters like to idealize and imagine themselves being.  Making America safe again for the Natty Bumppos among us is their vision of remaking America great.  Natty, however, would not agree.  He sees himself as an obsolescent oddity, and he accepts that he must make way for the advance of civilization. 

The irony of Natty Bumppo is that he can’t help being used for purposes he rejects.  He is a self-styled backwoodsman who scorns society and wants to stay away from human communities, and especially the destructive communities spawned by the likes of Sheriff Jones.  But he unwittingly functions as a frontiersman, that is, as someone who opens up the backwoods and pushes outward the boundaries of the frontier.  As such, he paves the way for pioneers who will set up the very sort of society that he is perpetually trying to escape, but which is continually catching up to him.

Natty struggles to remain an outsider, a social outcaste.  He does not want to be seen as a model citizen and realizes that a society full of Natty Bumppos could not function.  In the person of Natty Bumppo, Cooper has, in effect, portrayed a model MAGA hero as someone who rejects MAGA goals.  That is not good for the MAGA theory of American history.

The Pioneers is a test case for MAGA historiography.  The story presents a realistic picture of early America painted by someone who was there.  Although the plots are romanticized, the situation and circumstances are faithful to reality.  And the moral of this essay is that MAGA historiography fails the test represented by The Pioneers. In fact, it is essentially a fraud, and a vicious trick being played on MAGA supporters as well as their opponents.  

MAGA Myths of American History.

MAGA ideology is rooted in a theory of American history, a venomous theory that has liberal reformers as the enemy of all that is decent and true. The theory is founded on a claim that things were better in the bygone days before liberal reformers got going.  The theory provides a way of denouncing present-day liberals and the supposedly degenerate state of present-day society by comparing America today with an idealized version of early America.  And it provides a rationale for insisting that the way things ostensibly were is the way they should still be and shall be again.

In MAGA imaginary, when the United States was founded during the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras of the late eighteenth century, the country enjoyed the blessings of a small unobtrusive government, a laissez-faire free enterprise economic system, almost universal evangelical Christianity, a modest immigration of hard-working European settlers, a patriarchy of strong men with their happy female helpmeets and happy-go-lucky African slaves, and a widespread gun culture.  In MAGA historiography, all of these things began to fall apart in the late nineteenth century and continue to do so to the present day.  And it is the goal of MAGA supporters and other right-wingers to restore these things to their original form. 

This story of a fall from Eden, with liberals playing the role of serpent, is a very attractive view of history for right-wingers battling liberals today. The problem with this view is that it is false, almost universally rejected by historians, and even given the lie by a two-hundred-year-old kids’ book, The Pioneers.  None of the things that MAGA supporters say existed at the time of the Revolution and the Constitution existed at that time. In fact, the MAGA view of history has things exactly backward. 

At the time of the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, local governments were almost ubiquitous in the lives and doings of Americans.  Economic regulations were the norm and there was very little free about enterprise.  Communalism was the predominant ethos.  Slavery was widely considered by the Founders to be an unfortunately necessary evil in the settlement of the country that was expected to die out soon.   Women’s role in the family and status in society was greater than it would be again until the twentieth century.  Few people owned guns and guns were considered useful only to hunters and soldiers.  Religion played at most a perfunctory role in most people’s lives and in society, it being the least religious generation in American history.  Despite MAGA mythmaking to the contrary, these things have been well-documented by historians.  And we can see them in The Pioneers.   

The things that right-wingers claim existed in the late eighteenth century did not, in fact, come to the fore until well into the nineteenth century, and they came as deviations from the theories and practices of the Founders.  It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that right-wingers of that time began to successfully promote ideas of small government, laissez-faire economics, evangelical religion, strictly domesticated women, happy slaves, and a gun culture.  These were all developments that most of the remaining Founders opposed, and for good reason.

Most people in the course of history have been poor.  Most lived below what could be considered the poverty level for their place and time.  This was not the case in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when most white Americans lived at a comfortable level.  But it became so during the course of the nineteenth century when the things the MAGA supporters mistakenly ascribe to the generation of the Founders actually came to pass and made things worse for most Americans.  MAGA supporters are actually clamoring to make America worse again.  And most of this is evident in The Pioneers.

 It was, in turn, largely the actions of right-wingers that prompted liberals to try to thwart movements toward minimalist government, laissez-faire economics, guns galore, biologically-based racism, domestication of women, and other oppressive developments.  Liberals were significantly successful during the twentieth century in growing government to solve social problems; enacting economic regulations in the public interest; promoting ethnic, religious, racial and gender diversity and equality; trying to reign in gun violence; and, welcoming the immigrants who have largely built the economy. All of these developments have moved the country closer to the society originally envisioned by the Founders than the things promoted by MAGA.  And it is the success of these liberal developments that so enrages MAGA supporters.   

MAGA Misconceptions of Early American Government and Economics.

Right-wingers regularly claim and complain that big government is the product of liberal Presidents and Congresses who have run rough-shod over the Constitution during the twentieth century, first by President Wilson’s “New Freedom,” then most significantly by President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” and then even further by the “Great Society” of President Johnson and other Democrat liberals since.  The result, right-wingers complain, has been a government-dominated society very different from that created by the Founders.  But that isn’t so.

 Invasive government was an assumption of the Founders of the country.  And laissez-faire economics was a novel idea but not on their agenda.  People in most areas of the country during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries expected government to regulate almost everything, especially on the frontier where Europeans were first settling. The question that divided people was whether big government should be local or national.  This was a key difference between those colonists who supported the Revolution and those who supported England.  It was also key to the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton during the 1790’s.  Jefferson promoted the sort of local government arrangements that big planters had established in the South.  Hamilton wanted a strong national government that could promote commercial and industrial development.  But neither wanted the sort of small and weak governments that right-wingers have been promoting since the early nineteenth century and that MAGA supporters clamor for today.   

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States, you had to get local government permission and some sort of license or permit to do almost anything.  MAGA supporters fantasize that in early America a man could just go out onto the frontier, claim a piece of land for himself, and then do whatever he wanted.  This was not the case.  There were indigenous settlements on much of the land and white owners of the rest.  You generally had to become part of a community and submit to its regulations before you could settle on its land. And settlements were generally made by groups of people who came to the frontier together, and who often knew each other and came from the same places.  This is the case in the The Pioneers where the Judge initially owned all of the land and recruited a community of settlers.     

The first thing new settlers invariably did was to set up a town government that had the authority to regulate an orderly settlement of the area.  Town governments often had the power to equitably divide up the adjacent farmland so that every settler had a decent quantity and quality of land.  Sometimes land allotments were rotated from year to year to make it even more fair.  There was an egalitarian theme in most new settlements even if it wasn’t always practiced.

Eighteenth and early nineteenth century pioneers were not free to do whatever they wanted.  Most social and economic activities were regulated by local government, often including the prices of goods and services, the wages of workers, and the quality of goods and services offered for sale.  If you wanted to start a new business you had to get local government permission that defined what you could do.  And you might be denied a permit if there were already enough businesses of your kind in the locality, so that another one of the same kind was not necessary for the public good and might work unfair injury on the businesses already operating. 

All in all, there was a strong communal element in eighteenth century America., especially on the frontier that MAGA supporters fantasize was a time and place for unbridled individualism.  Among the European settlers there was generally a sentiment of everyone being in this venture together.  People regularly helped each other with the planting and harvesting of crops and the raising of farm animals.  We can see this in The Pioneers where people routinely help each other with farming, fishing and tree cutting, and share the produce. The communal emphasis was also evident in sumptuary laws that prohibited the rich from flaunting their wealth in conspicuous consumption that would exacerbate class differences and generate envy among ordinary people.

Contrary to the claims of MAGA supporters, cooperation not competition, government regulation not laissez-faire free enterprise, and communalism not individualism, were prevailing themes of early American history.  And we see this demonstrated in The Pioneers.

MAGA Misconceptions of the Civil War and Slavery.

As I am writing this essay in early January, 2024, three would-be MAGA candidates for the Republican nomination for President have offered comments about the Civil War and slavery that have ignited furious backlash in the press as being out of line with what historians consider to be the consensus view of the Civil War and slavery. 

First, the former governor of South Carolina claimed that the Civil War was about states’ rights and not about slavery.  Then the current governor of Florida opined that slavery wasn’t all bad and had helped to civilize African slaves.  Finally, the former President of the United States and current MAGA-in-Chief claimed that the Civil War should have been avoided through negotiation and that President Lincoln screwed up in the way he conducted the matter.  As a result of the backlash, the two governors have both half-heartedly and half-bakedly revised their statements but have not as of this writing completely rejected them.  The former President has not retracted anything to this point. 

The political dog-whistling behind these statements is appalling.  The racism is blatant.  But what is more appalling is that these statements represent the actual beliefs today of many Americans and perhaps most white southerners.  And it is no accident that this is the case because these statements reflect the view that was contained in almost every history textbook from the early 1900’s until the 1960’s.  It was the historical consensus of those times, albeit a racist and reactionary consensus, and it was the view that I was taught in school in Chicago.

It is a truism that the winners get to write the history of a war.  But it did not happen in the case of the Civil War.  It was southerners who, starting in the early 1900’s, dominated the writing of the history of slavery and the Civil War.  And their “Gone with the Wind” story, based largely on evidence and testimonies from slaveowners, made it into the textbooks and stuck there until the 1960’s.  At that point the story changed, based in large part on newly discovered evidence gleaned from enslaved people and from ante bellum northern and European travelers to the South. This new view, that slavery was an unadulterated evil and the Civil War was about slavery, became the new consensus among historians.       

But “Lost Cause” holdouts among southerners and, more recently, MAGA supporters have not accepted this view.  Their benevolent view of slavery and heroic view of southern resistance to federal oppression fit well with the imaginary MAGA Eden of the late eighteenth century.  After all, if slavery was good enough for the Founders, then it could not have been all bad.  And if slavery wasn’t all bad, then the Civil War couldn’t have been about slavery and should have been avoided.  But that isn’t the way it was.   

The fact of the matter is that most of the Founders – including Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison and Franklin – were either opposed to slavery or at least uncomfortable with it and hoped to see it ended in the near future.  The general opinion of the time was that slavery was an evil expedient that had been necessary for the initial settlement of the country, but no longer.  Slaves had been particularly useful in tobacco production that had been a major colonial export, but growing tobacco had ruined the soil in the border states where it had thrived. 

Since there was little use at that time for slaves in other fields, it was opined that slavery would soon die out.  And consistent with this opinion, the Founders prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories in 1787.  Unfortunately, Eli Whitney, ironically an anti-slavery Quaker, invented the cotton gin in 1793 which made possible and profitable the use of slave labor to produce cotton in the deep South, and his invention gave a whole new lease on life to slavery. 

Thereafter, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, white southerners developed the ideology that is reflected in the MAGA supporters’ recent statements about slavery and the Civil War.  They claimed that Africans were biologically as well as culturally inferior, and that slavery was a good thing because it Christianized and civilized savage blacks and made productive use of their labor.  In this view, which is still the MAGA view, slavery saved the souls of black folks.  In turn, the Civil War was a defense of states’ rights against an oppressive federal government.  It is this slaveholders’ ideology that was adapted and adopted in early to mid-twentieth century textbooks. 

The consensus view of slavery changed dramatically starting in the 1950’s and accelerating during the 1960’s.  Based on a wealth of new evidence that previous historians had neglected or refused to use, historians reached a new consensus that slavery was not civilizing and that the Civil War was not about states’ rights.  Africans were not uncivilized and the Civil War was about keeping them enslaved.

The reality is that most enslaved Africans were skilled agriculturalists, more so than most European settlers, which was one reason they were sought after.  Most also came from complex and sophisticated cultures.  Slaveowners, rather than civilizing their slaves, worked to strip them of their cultures.  And slaves did not see their situation as beneficial.  The myth of the happy plantation is given the lie by the facts that so many slaves were escaping and that most white southerners lived in fear of slave uprisings. To deal with runaway slaves and potential slave uprisings, white southerners organized militias, which were ubiquitous in much of the South.  This was the meaning of the Second Amendment.  Southern whites wanted assurance that in the case of slave uprisings they could rely on their own militias and not have to rely on the federal army to put them down.

That slavery was not a happy institution for enslaved people can be seen in The Pioneers.  Slavery was still legal in New York State in 1793, the year in which the story takes place.  Sheriff Jones owns a slave, Aggy, and treats him with disrespect.  The Judge, raised as Quaker, is clearly opposed to slavery and uses his influence to protect Aggy from Jones’ anger.  Aggy is an intelligent character who is working toward his freedom.  He respects the Judge and secretly makes fun of and occasionally sabotages the Sheriff.  All were not happy in the slave system.  It was obvious enough in 1823 when The Pioneers was written, but the fact was historically buried for some one hundred fifty years until a new and more accurate consensus on slavery developed.

The consensus view of the Civil War also changed during the 1960’s.  Southern secession was absolutely not about states’ rights and freedom from federal government oppression.  To the contrary.  In the secession statement issued by South Carolina, the first state to leave the union, the first and foremost reason given for seceding was the failure of the federal government to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act against northern states.  That is, South Carolina’s secession was not for states’ rights but against states’ rights, against the right of northern states to refuse to cooperate with federal authorities in capturing escaped slaves. 

The Fugitive Slave Act was an attempt by southern slaveholders to get anti-slavery northerners to participate in the slave system.  Most northern states refused to cooperate and southern states were furious that the federal government seemed unwilling to consistently force the issue.  Other secessionist states followed South Carolina in this rationale.  The Civil War was not fought in favor of southern states’ rights but against northern states’ rights, and in favor of more federal government interference in those states.

MAGA supporters frequently idealize and romanticize the South of the 1850’s, when slavery was legal and black people, both free and enslaved, were not entitled to civil rights.  Based on the myth that Africans were savages and that slavery had a civilizing effect on them, slavery is often claimed to have been a beneficial institution for masters and slaves alike.  In their nostalgia for the lost Confederate cause and their insistence on celebrating Confederate war heroes – who after all were treasonous traitors – many MAGA supporters seem to believe that the Civil War was won by the wrong side. 

Secession was, however, a foolish, self-defeating move on the part of the slave states because it is likely that slavery would not have been abolished but for their secession.  Slavery was abolished during the Civil War by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  It takes the approval of three-quarters of the states in the union to adopt a Constitutional amendment.  It was only because of the secession of the slave states from the union that abolitionists were able to get enough of the remaining states to make up a three-quarters total of the states still in the union so that the Thirteenth Amendment could be adopted. 

That leaves as a key question what might have happened with slavery if most of the slave states hadn’t seceded from the union in 1860-1861?  The answer, I think, is that we would likely still have racial slavery today.  

Slave states constituted more than a quarter of the states in 1860, enough to stymie the Thirteenth Amendment if they had not left the union.  And their descendant states still make up more than a quarter of the states.  If the slave states had not seceded in 1860-1861, the Thirteenth Amendment could not have been adopted during the 1860’s.  And given the hostile attitude toward black people that has continued from that time to the present, especially among MAGA supporters and white southerners, if slavery had not been abolished in the 1860’s, it would have continued to be the law of the land, probably to the present day and beyond.  Because there would likely still not be enough states to enact the Thirteenth Amendment.  When MAGA supporters celebrate the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the glory that was the Ante-Bellum South, the implication is that they would not mind that at all.

The past is not past for too many southern white people.  And the continuing sense of grievance that has been so pervasive among them since losing the Civil War is in sharp contrast to the reaction of most Tories in this country after they lost the American Revolution.  While many thousands of Tories fled, mainly to Canada, the overwhelming majority of them stayed in the United States and many who had fled eventually returned.  While there was some animosity and retribution against Tories, they were for the most part accepted as Americans.  We can see this in The Pioneers.  Effingham, the Tory, fled after the war but then returned and was welcomed home.

Most significantly, in contrast to the continuing resentment of white southerners who still cannot accept that the South lost the Civil War, most Tories accepted their defeat and moved on as Americans.  Unlike white southerners who still want to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, you don’t hear much today about aggrieved descendants of Tories trying to reverse the Revolution.  The Civil War was a blow to white supremacy that many white southerners and even white northerners still can’t get over.  The MAGA movement tries to keep that sense of grievance alive with myths and lies.

MAGA Gun Myths.

The MAGA movement is based on fear – fear of blacks, immigrants and the government.  To protect themselves against these enemies, MAGA supporters promote gun ownership.  No matter that crime has overall trended down over the last one hundred years and in recent years since the pandemic.  Nor that the likelihood of a person’s gun being used to thwart a criminal are almost nil and that the most likely people to be shot with a person’s gun are the gunowner and the gunowner’s family.  Facts can’t trump fear.

MAGA supporters attribute their right to gun ownership to the Founders.  It is a claim without facts.  If you listen to MAGA supporters and to the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, you would think that gun ownership was widespread in the late eighteenth century.  And, completely bypassing the clear intention of the Second Amendment to apply to militias and not individual people, it is on this basis they contend that the Constitution guarantees the right of a person to protect himself by carrying a gun.  Since the Founders carried guns, the Second Amendment must protect the right to carry guns.  But it wasn’t so. 

Few of the Founders carried guns.  And people in eighteenth century America did not carry guns for self-protection.  Guns at that time were a particularly poor choice as a means of self-protection.  They were cumbersome, inaccurate, and dangerous to their owners.  A spear, hatchet, knife or club was a much better choice.  It was mainly hunters who owned their own guns as a tool of their trade.  Soldiers and militia men had access to guns as needed to perform their duties but generally did not own them. 

Most guns at that time were muskets.  Muskets were heavy and clumsy to carry and to shoot.  They often misfired and were notoriously unreliable.  They also required the bearer to carry a heavy bag of shot and gunpowder.  These were not things a person would want to carry around on a regular basis.  Especially the gunpowder which was not only heavy but volatile.  It could explode with a change of the barometer.  Not something you would want in your pocket or in your own home.  Something you would, instead, want to store in a militia armory.

Guns of that day were cumbersome to use.  They shot only one bullet and then had to be reloaded.  They were front-loading, meaning that you had to pour gun powder down the barrel and then force a bullet down the barrel each time you shot it.  This was a time-consuming process that made guns impractical for personal protection.  If you missed your attacker with your first shot, you could be rushed by your enemy.  That is a reason why a spear or an axe was more practical and was generally preferred for self-protection. 

Most guns were muskets that were woefully inaccurate.  They had smooth barrels.  When fired, a bullet would wobble down the barrel, flying out in unpredictable directions.  Muskets could not be successfully aimed at anything smaller than the broad side of a barn.  That is why soldiers generally stood shoulder to shoulder in a broad line and shot all at once, unleashing a wall of lead that might hit some of their enemies.  Muskets were not a good weapon if you wanted to shoot at something and actually hit it. 

Some people owned long rifles that had grooved barrels and were cumbersome to use but could be shot accurately.  They were, however, very expensive.  All guns were hand-made and long rifles took a particularly large amount of labor to make.  Pretty much only professional hunters, like Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers, would go to the expense of buying a long rifle.  For hunters, a gun was a tool of the trade.  Muskets were much less expensive and were, as a result, the weapon of choice in arming a militia. 

Militias were common all over the country and were especially important in the southern slave states where they were used to keep the enslaved people enslaved.  Arming a town’s militia was the main reason for guns.  A town’s guns would, in turn, ordinarily be stored in a militia armory.  That is why the British were keen to get to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775 at the beginning of the Revolution when Paul Revere made his famous ride.  They were aiming to seize the guns and gun powder stored in the militia armories in those towns.  

In sum, it is at best a myth and more likely a lie that guns were common among people in eighteenth century America.  We can see in The Pioneers that even on the frontier few people other than hunters had guns.  It was not until the late nineteenth century when accurate, multi-shot, mass-produced, light-weight, inexpensive guns were available that guns began to be owned by ordinary people.  And it was at that time that gun manufacturers began spreading stories about guns being commonly owned by the Founders, guns being widely used in the Wild West, and the need to own a gun for self-protection, advertising fables that are taken as fact by right-wingers and MAGA supporters

MAGA Religious Myths.

Despite the clear language of the First Amendment and repeated statements from many of the Founders, MAGA enthusiasts claim that the United States was founded in evangelical Christianity.  And there are already right-wing Supreme Court Justices who claim that the First Amendment does not require the separation of Church and State.  These Justices, along with the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is second in line to the Presidency, seem to believe that there is no Constitutional obstacle to declaring the United States to be a Christian nation.  And they base this on the supposed religious principles and practices of the Founders.  This is nonsense.

Any inquiry into the factual history of the Revolutionary and Constitutional times contradicts these MAGA myths.    Many historians consider the Revolutionary War generation to be the least religious in American history.  And most of the Founders studiously kept religion out of their deliberations and decisions.  In the wake of the mid-century turmoil of the Great Awakening, most people were tired of religious controversy and were engrossed, instead, in secular issues. 

The great men of the era – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin – were neither church goers nor conventional Christians or even Christians at all.  At most, they were deists and agnostics.  Most important, there is no mention of Christianity in the Constitution.  And, of course, there is the First Amendment.  The evangelical Christian movement to which the MAGA supporters owe their religious origins did not begin until the early to mid-nineteenth century and was itself a falling away from the theories and practices of the Founders, not a furtherance of them.

You can see the general indifference to religion of the members of the founding generation and their ecumenical approach to religious differences in The Pioneers.  A minister is among the main characters but he is portrayed as a weak character, a kindly but narrow-minded person.  He has made converting Chingachgook from the Indian’s indigenous animistic beliefs to Christianity as one of his main projects.  Chingachgook, himself a kindly and obliging soul, goes along with learning the Bible and occasionally attending church services. 

But in the end, as Chingachgook is dying, he reverts to reciting the rituals of his indigenous people, much to the horror and disappointment of the minister but with the understanding and support of the other characters.  Other than the minister’s daughter who follows her father, the main characters profess a variety of beliefs and seem mainly indifferent to religion.  The Judge, who is the community leader, was raised as a Quaker, which Cooper describes as “a mild religion,” and he is seemingly agnostic at heart.  No Christian Nation here.         

MAGA as a Social Movement.

Social movements are by their nature mixed bags of motives and motivations.  Some are pulled forward mainly by hope, others are pushed back by hate.  Some are motivated by benevolence, reason and constructive plans, others by fear and fury, resentment and grievance, gall and vengeance. The MAGA movement is an example of the latter.

Disproportionately supported by white Evangelical Christians, the MAGA deity is the wrathful God of the Old Testament who punishes severely any perceived disrespect to His eminence.  In homage to their God, MAGA is a wrathful movement, the core of which is angry white men, furious at being displaced from their dominant position in American society, and replaced in many cases by women and members of minority racial and ethnic groups.  Their goal of making America great again essentially translates into restoring white Christian men to the top of the social and political hierarchy.

The sentiments that underlie the MAGA movement are not new and they run deep in American history.  In their current form, they largely owe their renaissance to Donald Trump which, if you take seriously the Christian moralism proclaimed by the movement, seems to be a contradiction.  MAGA is a movement of self-professed moralists being led by a man who is a self-confessed immoralist.  But this seeming contradiction is resolved by the fact that Trump hates the people his supporters hate – liberals, blacks, and immigrants – and whom they fear are replacing them at the top of the heap.  Trump feeds this fear while proclaiming himself as the solution and the salvation. 

MAGA supporters generally call themselves conservatives, as does the mass media.  But this is wrongheaded.  MAGA is best described as “radical right-wing” rather than “conservative.”   The reason is simple.  MAGA adherents are not in favor of conserving anything except themselves.  Conservatives, like James Fenimore Cooper, have historically been primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of social change.  They are afraid that the good intended by a social change will be overwhelmed by evils that were unforeseen and unintended.  So, they are in favor of either no social change or go-slow change. 

MAGA supporters, in contrast, are all for radical and extensive social change.  Rather than conservative, they are, in fact, revolutionaries, albeit reactionary revolutionaries who want to overthrow most of present-day American society and return to some imagined past when the social and economic hierarchy better fit with their racist, sexist, ethnocentric and classist views.  This is radicalism and not conservatism.

MAGA is sometimes called populist, a movement of and for ordinary people, but this is also wrongheaded.  Although proponents of MAGA claim to represent the interests and ideas of ordinary people, they are, in fact, elitists who represent the ideas and interests of past ruling classes which they propose to project into the present.  And most MAGA supporters are essentially fooled by a delusionary view of history.  Oblivious to the fact that in the old days most people like themselves were likely to be members of the lower classes, degraded by the ruling elites and living in poverty, they delusively believe that if only history could be reversed, the old-time social hierarchy could rightfully be restored with themselves at the top.  Theirs is a radical and radically harmful delusion.

Natty Bumppo knew better and acted accordingly.  He knew that society could not exist without government and regulations, cooperation and mutuality, and that if he did not want to live in that way, he should clear out rather than try to wreck the place so that it might fit his individualistic ways.  If only MAGA supporters could learn from Natty Bumppo. 

Nonetheless, with an accurate picture of the Founders as a benchmark, we must hope that we can get safely through the present-day morass and genuinely resurrect the ideas and ideals of the Founders so that we can continue to move toward the goal of a more perfect democratic union.

Brief Bibliography.

The Pioneers.  James Fenimore Cooper. 

The American Democrat.  James Fenimore Cooper. 

Everyday Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke.

Beyond the Revolution. Wiliam H. Goetzmann.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.  Daniel Walker Howe.

Arming America: The Origin of a National Gun Culture. Michael A/ Bellestiles.

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.  Kenneth M. Stampp.

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[1] I have not footnoted this essay.  There is, however, a brief bibliography at the end that cites books which cover the historical facts and conclusions that are discussed herein.  There is very little in the way of historical facts and historical conclusions discussed herein that is controversial among historians.  It is only MAGA fabulists who are likely to take issue with them.

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What goes around comes around and around… The Fetish, Farce and Fraud of Constitutional Originalism.

What goes around comes around and around…

The Fetish, Farce and Fraud of Constitutional Originalism.

Burton Weltman

Braggart Big-Game Hunter: “I once shot an elephant in my shorts.”

Groucho Marx: “What was an elephant doing in your shorts?”

Apology:  There is no shortage of essays on the theory of Constitutional Originalism.  It is a silly theory that is being seriously espoused these days by several justices on the United States Supreme Court and that threatens to overthrow some two hundred years of pragmatic Constitutional interpretation.  The response by reasonable jurists and lawyers has been prolific.  My justification for adding to this plethora of responses is that I have personal experience which might be useful in making the case against the theory.  In that vein, I hope this essay might help to clarify some of the issues and amplify some of the reasons for rejecting the ideas of self-styled Constitutional Originalists, particularly their hypocritical approach to the Second Amendment.    

The Supreme Court Not-So-Merry-Go-Round.

People of my baby boom generation grew up in the midst of what was perhaps the most liberal Supreme Court in American history, the Warren Court of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  From the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s, the Supreme Court issued a host of decisions expanding the rights of minorities, women and criminal defendants, including the seminal Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954 that promoted civil rights for African Americans.  The Court also recognized a constitutional right of privacy and prepared the way for the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision in favor of women’s rights.

As a result, people of my generation generally regarded the Supreme Court as a liberal-leaning institution.  It was an orientation that was rued by conservatives who attacked the Court for its supposed left-wing political bias, even to the point of accusing Justices of being Communists.  It was an orientation that was applauded by liberals who claimed the Court was merely helping to democratize American society.  And liberals happily expected the Court to continue to be a guarantor of social reforms and civil rights for historically oppressed groups.  As, much to their chagrin, did conservatives.  Both sides were wrong.    

The Supreme Court has not historically been a liberal-leaning institution.  Historically, the Court has swung back and forth between conservative and liberal tendencies but has been conservative, and even extremely conservative, most of the time.  Protecting the perquisites of private property and capitalist businesses, and limiting the powers of government, have generally been the priorities of conservatives who have generally controlled the Court.  Theirs has been a narrow interpretation of the reach of the Constitution and the government to aid and protect people.[1] 

Liberal Courts have generally focused on government’s responsibilities toward ordinary citizens, and, toward that end, have recognized an expansive and expanding role for federal and state governments.  Theirs has been called a “Living Constitution” approach to the law, the idea being that the principles outlined in the Constitution should be broadly interpreted in consonant with the changing circumstances of the country. 

Spurts of liberalism by the Court have been preceded and followed by longer periods of conservatism.  The Court has generally lagged behind popular opinion and public officials in permitting progressive government action.   As a result, the arc of justice at the Supreme Court has most often bent toward conservatism, but not always and not always in the same ways.  Despite claiming to reflect a straight and narrow interpretation of the Constitution, judicial conservatism has taken different forms depending on the circumstances of the time. 

During the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, as the federal and state governments in the newly formed United States were developing their respective jurisdictions, the Supreme Court was concerned with adjusting the respective roles of the state and federal governments and developing appropriate protections for private property.  The Court headed by Chief Justice John Marshall during the early years allowed for a wider federal authority as against what were the more liberal state governments of the time.  The following Court headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney allowed conservative state governments wider authority as against the more liberal federal government.  Both allowed only limited governmental incursion on private property rights. 

Justice Taney spoke for most Justices of the Supreme Court during his era when he said in the case of Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) that “the rights of private property are sacred,” albeit they are not without limits.  In a conflict of priorities between private interests and public interests, Taney seemed to believe that the presumption should be in favor of the private interest unless it can be shown that the public interest clearly took precedence.  A liberal Justice might reverse that equation, insisting that the public interest should prevail unless it can be clearly shown that the private interest should take precedence.  

These efforts of the Supreme Court to protect private property and limit governmental authority culminated with the dreadful decision in the Dred Scott case. In this case, Justice Taney, speaking for the Court, held that since slaves were property and the interstate travel clause of the Constitution allowed people to take their property from one state to another, no state could prohibit slaves or slavery within its borders.  A case of the tail wagging the dog, this decision effectively put an end to the freedom in so-called free states where slavery was prohibited, and essentially forced the whole country to accept slavery because southern states considered enslaved people to be property.    

The Taney Court’s regime of favoring property rights over human rights, and of narrowly limiting the power of the federal government, came to a crashing end with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.  Using the President’s Constitutional war powers as his justification, Lincoln freed millions of slaves in one stroke even before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.  It was the longest reach of the federal government and the largest confiscation of private property in history.  Thereafter, the federal government became increasingly active in managing land and defining property rights in the country.[2]

Another turn toward judicial conservativism came during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Supreme Court, strongly influenced by the Malthusian views of Justice Stephen Field, essentially read free enterprise and laissez-faire capitalism into the Constitution.  In the name of protecting what Justices saw as the right of every individual to sell his or her labor as they wished, the Court came down on labor unions and against government regulation of wages and hours of work as infringements on the freedom of workers and business owners.  In this same vein, the Court protected the rights of capitalists by invalidating state and federal government efforts at social and economic reforms and regulations.[3]

In the case of Lochner v. New York (1905), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that limited the number of hours a person could be made to work in a bakery.  The Court held that the law was a violation of workers’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to sell their labor for as many hours as they wished.  In his dissent in this case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously complained that“The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”  Spencer was a social theorist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and whose book Social Statics was an argument for laissez-faire capitalism that was influential among late nineteenth-century conservatives, including Supreme Court Justices.

From the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930’s, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down a host of state and federal statutes and regulations that attempted to moderate the ups and downs of the capitalist business cycle, make the economic system fairer to workers and small businesses, and otherwise reform and humanize the economic system.  This trend continued into the Great Depression during the early 1930’s, when the Court struck down President Roosevelt’s first attempt at a New Deal.  

But then, seemingly under the pressure of economic disaster, the Court turned around in the mid-1930’s and upheld Roosevelt’s second New Deal, which was by far the most ambitious effort to regulate the economy in American history.  Constitutional restrictions by the Court on the federal government’s regulation of the economy have been minimal ever since.  Until now.    

Originalism and the Constitution: A Farce.

In recent years, conservative jurists and lawyers have developed a Constitutional theory they call Originalism.  In their view, the Constitution should be applied as it was originally intended and understood by the authors of it.  If the Founders did not specifically intend something, or even could not have intended it given the times in which they lived, the Constitution cannot be applied to that thing.  Originalists see the Constitution as a rigid set of rules cast in stone, or what liberals would complain is a Procrustean bed that squeezes the life out of the document. 

Liberals, in contrast, generally support a Living Constitution theory that insists the Constitution mainly consists of a broad outline of principles that can be applied in different ways as American society changes.  It is a document, liberals claim, that invites revision through amendments but also through reinterpretation and interpolation as circumstances change.  It is a charter for reform and reformers.  Originalists demur. 

Originalist theory is important because several Justices on the United States Supreme Court, possibly a majority, claim to be Originalists and have predicated their decisions about important issues upon this theory.  The spread of this doctrine could have a major effect on Constitutional interpretation.  In so doing, proponents of the theory generally call themselves conservatives, as does the mass media.  But I believe that this is a significant mischaracterization and that they and their theory are best described as “radical right-wing” rather than “conservative.”   The reason is simple.  Originalists are not in favor of conserving anything. 

Conservatives have historically been primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of social change.  They are afraid that the good intended by a social change will be overwhelmed by evils that were unforeseen and unintended.  So, they are in favor of either no social change or go-slow change.  They want to make sure that we conserve the good in the present society and don’t ruin it in the process of trying to make it better.  And this has generally been the gist of Supreme Court conservatism in the past.  Conservative justices have generally aimed to preserve the status quo and put a stop to new laws and new programs that aimed to revise and reform society 

Originalists, in contrast, are all for radical and extensive social change.  Rather than being conservative, they are, in fact, revolutionaries, albeit reactionary revolutionaries who want to overthrow most of present-day American society and return to some imagined past.  The present Supreme Court has already overturned Roe v. Wade which had been considered legally settled law for fifty years.  This reversal of Roe was essentially predicatedon Originalist grounds in which the supposed intentions of the Founders override any questions of precedents, stare decisis, past practice or judicial decorum. 

Nor do Originalists seem to consider or care about the social and political upheaval that might follow an Originalist reversal of what had been considered settled law.  And several right-wing Justices have threatened more to come.  Some have hinted that the whole regime of social and economic reforms from the New Deal onward could be ripe for reversal.  They insist that what is unconstitutional is unconstitutional, no matter how long it has been accepted law.  This is, of course, radicalism and not conservatism.

It is also nonsense and it is, frankly, hard to believe that presumably intelligent jurists and lawyers could seriously advance this theory.  The Originalist interpretation of the Constitution is a farce on its face and on the facts.  Let me count the ways.

First, Originalism places an impossible burden on judges.  The theory requires judges to plumb the minds of the various authors of the Constitution’s various provisions to discover their specific intentions.  This includes the eighteenth-century Founders of the Constitution and framers of the Bill of Rights, the nineteenth-century authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the authors of the many other Constitutional Amendments.  It requires judges to be capable of discovering the beliefs of the various authors of the Constitution and its Amendments, and to interpret those beliefs within the intellectual culture of the authors’ times.  It thereby requires judges to possess the knowledge and skills of intellectual historians, an expertise that very few judges have.    

I am an intellectual historian.  I spent three years in graduate school training to be an intellectual historian and then taught history for several decades.  I have also written extensively on intellectual history.  While I make no claims for the quality of my work, I can attest that working at intellectual history requires specialized knowledge and training.  Very few judges, who may have extensive knowledge and experience in law, have that knowledge and training in history. 

In justifying their rejection of the Living Constitution theory, Originalists claim that the theory is too loose and leaves too much room for judges to introduce political biases into their decisions.  But this is a “do as I say not as I do” double standard.  Originalist interpretations depend on how judges read history, which is a notoriously variable thing and will invariably reflect the judges’ political biases.  In addition, while the Living Constitution theory requires judges to back their decisions with detailed evidence and reasoning about the circumstances that justify their conclusions, Originalists don’t have to justify theirs other than by claiming that they are following the Founders’ intentions.  That’s a pretty loose method.

Second, the Constitution and most of the Amendments thereafter were the products of committee deliberations and compromise decisions which make it almost impossible to determine what were the authors’ specific intentions.  The Constitutional Convention was itself a big committee and the Convention was broken down into smaller committees to deal with various subjects.  The members of the Convention and the various committees had many different ideas about what should be in the Constitution.  The product was the outcome of vigorous debate and compromise.  Anyone who has any experience with committees knows that while the members may come to some agreement on the outcome, their reasons and reasonings will often be quite different. 

I have personal experience along these lines.  In addition to being a historian, I am also a lawyer and served for a time as counsel to the Judiciary, Law, Public Safety and Defense Committee of the New Jersey State Assembly.  I can personally attest to the fact that the members of the Committee frequently approved bills with various members having different ideas of what the bills did.  There was no single intention or interpretation.  And this diversity of intents and interpretations was certainly the case with the members of the Constitutional Convention.  We can see this in their sharp disagreements afterwards about what the Constitution meant.  As a result, finding a single intent for many of the Constitution’s provisions is a fool’s enterprise.

Third, there is no statement of intent for the Constitution that might explain what the Founders intended.  As a way of directing the interpretation of a constitutional provision or a statute, the framers will often include an explanatory statement of intent or a legislative history.  The statement expresses the will of the authors.  I drafted many such documents in working for the New Jersey Legislature.  The framers of the Constitution did not do this.  There is no such explanatory statement for the Constitution.  And this seems intentional.  The Founders deliberately left the document open to later interpretation and interpolation. 

Fourth, the Constitution is a relatively brief document with, for the most part, relatively broad provisions.  The constitutions of other nations are much longer and much more specific.  The United States Constitution does have some very specific provisions, such as age requirements for holding various offices.  So, it is clear that where they desired and could reach agreement, the Founders were capable of devising narrowly specific provisions.  Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that where the Constitution’s provisions are broad, and are like an outline of principles that need to be filled in with interpretations and interpolations, the Founders knew what they were doing.  If it is the Originalists’ goal to follow the Founders’ intentions, then it seems that a Living Constitution interpretation of the document is what the Founders intended.

The historian Garry Wills has well summarized the efforts of Originalists as “summoning the founders to testify against what they founded.”[4]   Which is absurd.

Originalism and the Second Amendment: A Fraud.

Interpretations of the Constitution by self-proclaimed Originalists are often nothing of the kind.  They may be original in the sense of being novel, but they have little or nothing to do with the original intentions of the Founders.  They are merely right-wing political decisions using the pretense of Originalism as a fig leaf covering.  The misinterpretation in recent years of the Second Amendment with respect to gun ownership by right-wing Justices is a clear example. 

The Second Amendment has been the law of the land since 1791 but it was not until 2008, in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, that a right-wing majority of the Supreme Court overruled previous decisions, historical evidence and common sense to proclaim that the Amendment guarantees a person’s right to carry a gun.  In the fifteen years since the Heller decision, the Court has overturned almost every kind of federal and state gun control law as violating the Second Amendment. 

Right-wing Justices have claimed that the Amendment gives individuals an almost absolute right to carry almost any kind of firearm almost anywhere they want.  And has done so on ostensibly Originalist grounds as being the intentions of the Founders.  But that conclusion just doesn’t fly.  As self-styled Originalists, the Justices ought to be sensitive to the language of the Amendment and attentive to the circumstances in which the Amendment was adopted.  They are neither.  Their Originalism is a fraud.

As to the language of the Amendment.  In order to reach their conclusion that the intent of the Framers was to guarantee the right of individuals to keep guns in their homes and carry them around in public, the Justices have to completely disregard the Amendment’s clear reference to a militia.  This is one of the places where the Founders were clear and specific.  Guns were for militias.  But the so-called Originalists on the Supreme Court just trample over the Founders’ clear intention in order to reach their politically motivated right-wing conclusion.

As to the circumstances in which the Amendment was drafted.  The right-wing Justices completely disregard the nature and extent of gun ownership in the eighteenth century.  The idea that ordinary Americans in the late eighteenth century were concerned about the right to have guns in their homes and on their persons for self-protection is just plain wrong on the facts.  Guns at that time were a particularly poor choice as a means of self-protection.  They were cumbersome, inaccurate, and dangerous to their owners.[5]

Most guns at that time were muskets that were heavy and clumsy to carry and to shoot.  They also required the bearer to carry a bag of heavy shot and gunpowder.  This was not something a person would want to carry around on a regular basis.  Muskets often misfired and were notoriously unreliable.  Because of their smooth barrels, which resulted in bullets wobbling and flying out in unpredictable directions, they could not be successfully aimed at anything smaller than the broad side of a barn.  That is why soldiers generally stood shoulder to shoulder in a broad line and shot all at once, unleashing a wall of lead that might hit some of their enemies.  Muskets were not a good weapon if you wanted to shoot at something and actually hit it. 

Professional hunters were almost the only people who could afford to own a long rifle with a grooved barrel that could be successfully aimed at a target.  Guns were hand-made individually and long rifles, with their grooved barrels, were expensive.  For hunters, a gun was a tool of the trade.  Muskets were much less expensive and were, as a result, the weapon of choice in arming a militia.  And for most ordinary citizens, a musket was merely an adjunct for militia duty.  This is something that any school kid, at least of my generation, could see in movies and TV shows about the Revolutionary era.  I remember getting that point when I was around ten years old. 

In addition, guns of that day, both long rifles and muskets, shot only one bullet and then had to be reloaded with gunpowder and another bullet.  Guns at that time were front-loading, meaning that you had to pour gun powder down the barrel and then force a bullet down the barrel each time you shot it.  This was a time-consuming process that made guns of that era impractical for personal protection.  If you missed your attacker with your first shot, you could be rushed by your enemy.  A spear or an axe was a more practical weapon and was generally preferred for self-protection.  Again, this is something any school kid could see in movies and TV shows about the Revolutionary era. 

Carrying a gun or keeping one in your home was also a dangerous thing to do because you had to store gun powder with it.  Gun powder at that time was very volatile.  A bag of gunpower could explode with a change in the barometer.  It was not something that you would ordinarily want to carry around or keep in your home.  A bag of gunpowder in your pocket could have unfortunate results.  And it could blow your home to smithereens.    

As a result, other than hunters, for whom a gun was a working tool and who were specially skilled in shooting, very few people had guns.  Despite the lies of the National Rifle Association and the hypocrisy of the so-called Originalists on the Supreme Court, there was no gun culture in early America, something any kid could see in the movies and on TV.  In turn, there was no need for a Constitutional Amendment to protect a person’s right to carry a gun that no one wanted to carry.  A militia — now, that was another thing.

Towns and states had militias.  Militias were common all over the new country but they were especially important in the southern slave states where they were used to keep the enslaved people enslaved.  One of the reasons the southern colonies supported the Revolution was that slaveowners were concerned about the English antislavery movement that had recently succeeded in getting slavery abolished in England and was aiming to get it abolished in the colonies.  Having seceded from the English empire and avoided the threat posed by English abolitionists, southern slaveowners now feared the growing anti-slavery movement in the United States that had recently succeeded in prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territories.  The Second Amendment effectively protected the militias that protected the southern slaveowners from their slaves.

Arming a militia was the main reason for guns.  Very few individuals had guns, so towns frequently provided guns or required that citizens provide the town with a gun.  The town’s guns would, in turn, ordinarily be stored in a militia armory.  That is why the British were keen to get to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775 at the beginning of the Revolution when Paul Revere made his famous ride.  They were aiming to seize the guns and gun powder stored in the militia armories in those towns.  It’s a story that any school kid, at least in my generation, could tell you, and it gives the lie to rightwing misinterpretations of the Second Amendment.

It is also the case that, contrary to the contention of the rightwing Justices on the Supreme Court, gun control was common during most of American History, starting with the early colonists and continuing to the present day[6].  Any kid, at least of my generation, could tell you from movies and TV shows about Wyatt Earp, the famous sheriff of several Western towns in the late nineteenth century, and about the famous shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ between the Earps (the good guys) and the Clantons (the bad guys). 

Most significantly, what the shootout was about was that the Clantons refused to leave their guns at a checkpoint at the border of the town.  It was common for towns in the supposed Wild West to prohibit people from entering the town carrying guns.  The rationale and justification for those regulations was made clear by the behavior of the Clantons, who began shooting up the town before they were stopped by the Earps, who were merely enforcing the town’s gun control laws.  So-called Originalists are just plain wrong when they claim that gun control violates the theory and practice of the Founders and their descendants. 

Both on its face and on the facts, the right-wing interpretation of the Second Amendment is a fraud.  I mean, if your Constitutional theory can be given the lie by adolescents watching popular movies and TV shows, how viable is your theory?

Originalism and the First Amendment: A Travesty in the Making?

If rightwing Justices can wreak havoc on the Second Amendment, what’s to stop them from doing the same to other Constitutional provision?  Despite the clear language of the First Amendment and repeated statements from many of the Founders, there are already right-wing Justices who claim that the Amendment does not require the separation of Church and State.  These Justices, along with the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is second in line to the Presidency, seem to believe that there is no constitutional obstacle to declaring the United States to be a Christian nation. 

As with the Second Amendment, you would think that self-styled Originalists would be sensitive to the language and the circumstances of the First Amendment.  As to the language, the First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  This seems to be another instance in which the Founders were quite clear in their language.  There is no ambiguity here, and for over two hundred years the Amendment has been interpreted in a way that would foreclose declaring the United States to be a Christian Nation.  Nonetheless, there are a growing number of self-styled Originalists who seem willing to trample over the words of the Founders to achieve their rightwing political objectives.

As to the circumstances surrounding the First Amendment, right-wing Originalists are on similarly weak ground.  Many historians consider the Revolutionary War generation to be the least religious in American history.  In the wake of the mid-century turmoil of the Great Awakening, most people were tired of religious controversy and were engrossed in secular issues.  The great men of the era – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin – were neither church goers nor conventional Christians. At most, they were deists and agnostics.  Most important, there is no mention of Christianity in the Constitution.  And, of course, there is the First Amendment.   

Despite the language of the First Amendment and the attendant circumstances, rightwing Christian Originalists continue to insist that the country was founded in Christianity by traditionalist Christians and should be declared a Christian nation.  This is blatant hypocrisy on the part of self-styled Originalists.   It is also a dangerous fraud and a potential disaster in the making.

Where do we go from here?  A Free Fall or a Roller Coaster Ride?

So, where does the Supreme Court go from here.  Will this reactionary Originalist con continue to wreak havoc on the United States.  Some Justices have talked about reversing Brown v. Board just as they did Roe v. Wade, and they have even talked about overturning the New Deal and almost all of the social and economic legislation since the 1930’s.  The late Justice Scalia, one the original Originalists, was apparently once asked if he thought the New Deal should be overturned on Originalist grounds.  His response was that he was an Originalist but he wasn’t crazy.  Somc of Scalia’s successors on the Court seem to be crazy.  And there is a meanness in their philosophy which seems all too common among right-wingers today. 

The bad news is that a majority of the present-day Supreme Court seems to be wallowing in revanchism, trying to claw back the liberal reforms of the past.  The good news is that it would only take two of the right-wingers to be replaced by two liberal Justices, or at least two sane Justices, and then the balance of the Court would likely shift back to sanity and maybe even to a Living Constitution approach.  The history of the Court has been something like a roller coaster ride.  When conservatives take control, the downward slide comes fast.  When liberals take control, the upward climb comes more slowly and laboriously.  But maybe we have hit bottom and are on the verge of a liberal climb.  And hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to say to the Originalists “What was an elephant doing in your shorts?”

BW 12/23

[1] James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956.

[2] “William Goetzmann.  Beyond the Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

[3] Arnold Paul. Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

[4] Garry Wills. A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. P.16.

[5] Michael Bellesiles.  Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

[6] David Freeman Hawke. Everyday Life in Early America, New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

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James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” What you don’t realize can hurt you. Humor and Moral Equivocality.

James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

What you don’t realize can hurt you.

Humor and Moral Equivocality.

Burton Weltman

The Story: A schlemiel, a schlimazel and a hero for his times.

The hero of this story is ridiculously pathetic.  A complete schlemiel and also a complete schlimazel.  A schlemiel has been defined as a guy who invariably spills the soup.  A schlimazel is the guy on whom the soup is invariably spilled.  The hero of this story is both a schlemiel and a schlimazel and more.  He invariably spills the soup and spills it on himself, but he also spills it on others around him.  That makes him a danger not merely to himself but to others as well. 

That doesn’t bother our hero.  He doesn’t care about what he is doing to others, only about himself.  Chronically feeling sorry for himself, he feels put upon by everyone and everything around him.  And he is.  But it is his own doing.  Because he is foolish, clumsy, inattentive, and incompetent at almost everything he does.  And he is not merely inept, he is almost fatally inept and fatally irresponsible. 

In this story, for example, the hero does a lot of driving around in his car.  And does it badly.  He is a terrible and reckless driver.  The story opens with him speeding dangerously too fast down a highway and not paying attention to how fast he is going.  Then, despite having a green light, he idles his car at a standstill while daydreaming in the middle of traffic.  Then he drives the wrong way against oncoming traffic up a ramp into a parking garage.  All the while, he is thinking only about himself and not about what he is doing or what the consequences of his careless driving might be to others.

His attention is focused, instead, on his daydreams.  Beset by feelings of inadequacy and oppression, the man seeks to escape his miserable reality through daydreaming about a heroic alternative life.  And so, the man goes about in a daze of daydreaming which, perforce, distracts him from what he is doing. Being distracted in this way, of course, exacerbates his ineptitude which, not surprisingly, provokes criticism from those around him.  He is henpecked by his wife, harassed by his colleagues, berated by a policeman, belittled by a garage attendant, and mocked by a woman in the street.  Needless to say, being criticized in this way increases his feelings of inadequacy and oppression which, in consequence, provokes more daydreaming.  And so on…

The man lives in a vicious cycle of misfeasance, miscommunication and misery that he tries to escape through day dreaming, which just restarts the cycle.  But the problem with our hero is not merely that he daydreams when he should be paying attention to what he is doing, it is also that the content of the daydreams and their potential consequences are highly problematical.  His daydreams are not ordinary wish-fulfilment fantasies.  This man is dreaming his life away with death-wish fantasies, all the while driving around recklessly.  

In his first daydream, he imagines that he is risking almost certain death by taking off in a hydroplane in the midst of a catastrophic storm, meanwhile he is actually driving dangerously too fast.  Then he dreams that he is on trial for his life as an assassin on a capital murder charge.  Then that he is a bomber pilot on a suicide mission.  And, finally, that he is a prisoner facing a firing squad, on which ominous note the story ends.  

In sum, what we have here is the story of a man who is feeling oppressed and depressed, dreaming about ways of killing himself, and behaving dangerously in life-threatening ways.  All in all, this seems like the plot of a pretty grim story.  Could be, maybe should be, but isn’t.

This is a basic plot summary of James Thurber’s short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (hereafter Mitty).  First published in 1939, it is one of the most celebrated comic stories in the literature and the most anthologized short story ever.  As told by Thurber, it is a roller coaster of wry humor.  A real joy to read.  But how can this be?  How can such a grim plot be so funny?  What is the secret of this story?

The Secret to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

This essay is about the underside of the humor of James Thurber and particularly Mitty.  Thurber was one of the most heralded comic writers of the mid-twentieth century, and his short stories and cartoons are still highly regarded and widely read today. 

This focus of this essay is on what I think are the underlying meanings and messages of Mitty, and the ways and means that Thurber turns what seemingly should be a grim melodrama into a comic masterpiece.  And the reasons he does this.  Mitty is masterfully crafted.  It is only some six pages long, a paragon of concision.  More laughs per paragraph than most stories have in a page.  Analyses of the story, including this one, are invariably much longer.  As in a work of poetry, there is much to think and say about almost everything in the story.

Including the message of the story.  It is a commonplace that stories have messages.  Whether they are explicit or implicit, and whether or not readers consciously recognize them, stories exude messages.  In the case of Mitty, what I see as the messages of the story do not seem to be generally recognized by readers.  Mitty is superficially very humorous and most readers seem never to get past its surface humor to what I think are its unhumorous underpinnings.  

In the mainstream view, Walter Mitty, the hero of the story, is a man “who escapes into fantasy because he is befuddled and beset by a world he neither created nor understands.”[1]  In this sympathetic and generally empathetic view, the thoughts and actions of Mitty are seen as harmless and cute.  The story is a whimsical tale of heroic escapism, with Mitty as an existential hero who refuses to conform, at least imaginatively, to dull existence in a bourgeois society.  And, in this view, readers are supposed to identify with Mitty and root for him as the hero of his obsessive daydreaming. 

Mitty is recognized in this view as a flawed hero, but a hero nonetheless.  In justifying Mitty’s daydreaming, commentators point to the oppressiveness of his social situation.  He is a loser in a competitive society, and he is repeatedly made painfully aware of it.  Some psychologically oriented commentators point to the precariousness of Mitty’s psyche and claim that he has developed a schizoid personality.  Mitty is, they say, a man so wrapped up in daydreams that he has become dissociated from real life tasks and real life relationships [2]  “Maladaptive daydreaming” one commentator calls it,[3] Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder another claims.[4]  In any case, whatever the social and psychological origins of his daydreaming, commentators almost invariably empathize with Mitty and admire his daydreaming as a means of escape from a stifling existence.

Escape can be a good thing when you are trapped, but many Mitty admirers go further than this and claim that “Mitty is up to something more than mere escapism.”  According to them, Mitty is a creative artist who is imagining new and better worlds.  “His daydreams are miniature works of art,” they contend, and “miniature masterpieces of the mind.”  Mitty, these commentators insist, is “a creative genius.”  And as an imaginative artist, Mitty represents what they see as Thurber’s main message in the story: “that imagination can be the highest form of grace” and that it is what gives meaning to life.[5]  In sum, Mitty may be a schlemiel, a shemozzle and a schizoid but, they conclude, he is living a better life in his fantasies than most people are living in reality.

I don’t agree.  I think this lighthearted interpretation of Mitty is a too shallow reading of the story and a misreading of the underlying messages that it conveys, even to unsuspecting readers, maybe especially to unsuspecting readers.  Mitty is, I think, a dark tale at which we readers laugh at our moral peril, even though we cannot help laughing because the story is so funny. 

Beneath the surface humor of Mitty, I think that the story has an amoral, antisocial, unfunny underpinning, and it is not something you would think people would or should laugh at.  Once you get past the ironic bon homie of the narrator and the inimitable wit of Thurber, and you examine the thoughts and actions of Mitty, I think you find an irresponsible, antisocial egotist who is neither harmless nor cute, and for whom we should not root. 

And this immoral, or at best amoral, underpinning has, I think, an effect on readers, whether or not they recognize it.  Even as we are laughing at the story, I think we are left with a sour and somewhat cynical feeling about the world and about ourselves.  Covering Mitty’s malfeasance with good humor has the effect of desensitizing us to Mitty’s bad behavior, and encourages in us a callousness about what he and his behavior portend.  We are morally compromised in rooting for Mitty and, moreover, I think that is what Thurber intended.  I think that Thurber was playing with his readers in Mitty, playing us for fools and making us complicit with his own misanthropy.

A Misanthrope in Genial Clothing.

James Thurber was not a nice man and he knew it.  He was widely regarded as a mean and misogynistic misanthrope.  Even by his friends.  A self-described curmudgeon, he justified his uncivil demeanor and rude behavior with the excuse that comic writers are chronically insecure and constantly under extreme pressure to be funny.  The moral, in his view, was that if you want humorous stories, you have to put up with obnoxious writers. [6]   

Thurber’s sour attitude reflected his dour life.  Thurber had a difficult childhood followed by a difficult adulthood.  He lost an eye when he was seven and gradually went blind in the other eye as an adult.  He had a dominating mother and an unhappy marriage.  He was a drinker and a notoriously mean drunk.  He was regularly taken to task and made fun of by family, friends and foes because he was hapless at almost everything, except writing and drawing.  So, he spent his life writing and drawing, and taking out his frustrations and bitterness in print. [7]  

In what seems like reality anticipating a Thurber story, Thurber was denied graduation from Ohio State University despite completing all of the academic requirements because as a half-blind person he could not take ROTC and as a male student he could not graduate without having taken ROTC.  This sort of outrage was typical of his life and contributed to his moroseness and misanthropy.  Filled with rage against the universe, Thurber translated his anger into cynicism, his cynicism into sarcasm, and his sarcasm into satirical humor.[8]

The conventional view of Thurber is to portray him as a genial satirist who conquered his own ill humor with good-humored stories.  Dealing with the funny side of everyday life, Thurber’s characters are bumblers who are incapable of dealing with the ordinary problems of the world.  They “look like they are survivors” who are barely getting by “in a world they can’t comprehend.”[9]  In fact, I think they look a lot like Thurber but without the anger.

Thurber’s work is not without controversy.  Critics complain that Thurber’s stories and cartoons are misogynistic, and that they invariably portray women as bullies and men as milquetoasts.   Thurber’s supporters counterclaim that you have to approach his work with a sense of humor that his critics apparently lack.  His supporters acknowledge that in real life Thurber did generally hate women and felt that modern women emasculated men, but these supporters insist that Thurber’s work did not reflect these prejudices.  

To the contrary, his apologists claim, Thurber “undermines sexism through comic irony.” Thurber successfully sublimated his anger into humor and dissipated it thereby.  He turned his unhappy private life into happy public comedy.  While admitting that Thurber was a sexist and a misanthrope, they claim that his work is neither sexist nor misanthropic.[10] 

I don’t agree.  In the persons of Mitty’s nagging wife, the rude woman in the street, and other minor female characters in the story, misogyny and misanthropy pervade Mitty, as they do in many of Thurber’s other works, albeit in clever comic disguise.  That Thurber was cleverly able to cover his rage with comic converse does not diminish the anger and scorn that underlay the humor.  And it is anger and scorn that are directed not only at his stories’ characters but at us readers as well.

Comedy isn’t always fun even if it’s funny.

A professor is pontificating in front of a classroom of thirty bored students.  Striding back and forth as he speaks, the professor is puffing a pipe (this is before there were “No Smoking” rules), with one hand on the bowl of the pipe and his other hand in the side pocket of his sport jacket (this is when there was still an informal dress code for professors) in which he had stored a book of matches.  In the midst of the professor’s peroration, a student in the front row of the class (this is when students still sat in rows) spots some smoke emanating from the professor’s pocket.

Oblivious to the commotion that is building in the classroom as more and more students become aware of the conflagration that is building inside his jacket pocket, the professor plods on with his lecture.  Until, suddenly, he cries out, strips off the jacket, throws it to the floor, and stomps on it until the fire is out.  Then he calmly hangs the jacket on the back of a chair, gives an embarrassed half-smile to the students, almost all of whom were laughing uproariously, and plods on with the lecture.

This scene is a prime example of humor.  Like much humor, it is based on the discomfiture of others whom we think deserve it.  In this case, it is the pompous professor who is made to look foolish.  It is a scene which I personally witnessed and in which I participated as one of the laughing students, thankful for a break in the tedium of the class.  It was also before I became a professor myself and could empathize with the pathetic professor.  

Comedy can be cruel.  It often is.  Thurber’s comedy in particular.  In much of Thurber’s comedy, someone is paying the price in discomfiture for the laughter that readers enjoy.   The key questions are at whose expense is the laughter and to what effect is the humor. 

Every story starts with a status quo situation that is disrupted by a problem.  The story then tells how people deal with the problem.  Depending on the type of story, be it, for example, melodrama, tragedy or comedy, the problem and its solutions will take on different forms. 

Melodrama generally takes the form of Good versus Evil and Good Guys versus Bad Guys.  In melodrama, the problem is generally created by the bad actions of bad people, and the solution is to defeat and/or eliminate the bad people.[11] 

Tragedy can be described as too much of a good thing leading to a bad result. In tragedy, a character generally pursues a too narrow end too far until it all falls down.  The character’s “tragic flaw” is hubris and/or a lack of perspective, failing to see things in a broader context.[12]  

Comedy can be described as a story of wisdom versus folly and wise people versus fools.[13]  In comedy, the problem is created by someone acting from stupidity or ignorance, or what has been called “the intervention of fools.”[14]  The solution is generally some sort of educational process in which the wise teach and/or gain control of the fools.  Comedy usually promotes a hierarchical view of the world in which the fools need to be wised-up by the wise people.

In understanding a comedy, it is important to identify who are the wise and who are the fools.  Authors have many different options as to whom they will elevate as the wise and whom they denigrate as the fools.  And it may sometimes be difficult for us readers to see who is what, and sometimes to the joke is on us.  Depending on the nature of the story, wisdom could come, for example, from wise characters in the story who wise-up fools in the story, or from a wise narrator of the story who shows us readers the foolishness of characters in the story, or from a wise narrator who shows us readers our own foolishness. 

In turn, the fools could be characters in the story who are wised-up or at least shown-up by other characters who are wise, or the fools could be characters in the story who are shown-up by a wise narrator, or the narrator could be a fool (a so-called unreliable narrator) who is shown-up by events in the story that we readers can see but that the narrator doesn’t comprehend, or the fools could be we readers even if we don’t know it. 

In some cases, the wise person could be the invisible author who makes fools of everyone connected to the story, including the characters in the story, the narrator of the story, and us readers of the story.  I think that Mitty is this last kind of story, as are many of Thurber’s other stories.

In Mitty, there are layers of foolishness.  There is the foolishness of Mitty that is ironically described by the narrator, who is wise to Mitty’s idiocy and makes us readers aware of it.  But there is also, I believe, the foolishness of the narrator who seems to think that Mitty’s reckless actions and death-wish fantasies are harmless and cute.  But reckless driving and suicidal thinking are not harmless or cute, and the narrator is a fool to seemingly think so. 

Finally, there is our foolishness as readers to the extent that we go along with the narrator’s misguided affection and support for the irresponsible and egotistical Mitty, and accept the narrator’s light-hearted description of Mitty’s dangerous thoughts and actions.  We are fools if we have eyes to see it, but we are caught in Thurber’s moral trap whether we see it or not.  It is hard not to laugh at Mitty and it would be hard-hearted not to feel some sympathy for him. 

So, we laugh our way headlong into the morally equivocal position that Thurber has prepared for us.  In sympathetically laughing with the narrator at the pathetic Mitty, we become complicit in Mitty’s dangerous driving and death-wish daydreams.[15]  We are, in effect, condoning and even fostering his dangerous behavior and thoughts when we should be thinking about ways to get his driver’s license suspended and get him into counseling or psychotherapy.   Thurber has manipulated us into compromising our moral values for the sake of a good laugh, and he has, thereby, essentially made fools of us.
You can’t tell a book by its cover story.

Mocking his main characters, his narrators and his readers, and manipulating us into a morally compromised misanthropy, is a Thurber stock-in-trade and is characteristic of many of his stories.  As another example, In the Catbird Seat (hereafter Catbird), which was first published in 1942, is another of Thurber’s most famous comic stories.  It is even morally more equivocal than Mitty, though you would not know it from the conventional commentary on the story.

A catbird is an aggressive bird that likes to interlope on other birds, smash their eggs, and wreck their nests.  “The catbird seat” was a phrase used by Red Barber, a well-known mid-twentieth century baseball radio announcer, to denote when a team had the other team at its mercy.  Thurber’s story describes the way an employee deals with a troublesome new boss who is threatening to play the role of a catbird.

In the story, a new manager is appointed as the head of a business bureaucracy.  The new manager is a woman, and she likes to quote Red Barber and refer to being in the catbird seat.  She also threatens to play catbird in the office by wreaking havoc on long-established practices of the bureaucracy, and upending long-time comfortable routines of the bureaucrats. 

The hero of the story is Mr. Martin, a mild-mannered middle-level bureaucrat, who cannot stand having his routines disrupted.  So, he decides to kill the new manager in order to safeguard his customary ways.  He devises a very devious plan to murder her and is in the last stages of implementing it, moments from striking her down, when he discovers that, by unlucky chance, he does not have at hand a weapon with which to clobber her. 

Thwarted and having to retreat and regroup, Mr. Martin comes up with a clever way to get the manageress fired.  He concocts a story that disparages her in the eyes of the owner of the business and, convinced by the story, the owner fires the lady.  In the end, she is removed from the scene without having to be murdered, and the hero of the story gets to plod on as usual.  To which we readers are led to applaud.

This is, I think, a very devious story.  At least as devious in its effect on us as the story that Mr. Martin invented to get the manageress fired.  In the course of the story, we readers are manipulated into disliking the new manager – she is obnoxious as well as overbearing – and sympathizing with the hero’s desire to get rid of her.  We are ambivalent about his plan to murder her, but we are brought along by the humor of the story and the ironic tone of the narrator.  In the end, we are happy for him that he has succeeded in getting rid of her and that he is able to live happily ever after.  All’s well that ends well.

But, wait a minute.  This guy was a would-be murderer who was only foiled by chance at the last minute in his murderous plans.  We readers have effectively been entrapped by Thurber into rooting for a calculating cold-blooded killer who would have killed rather than be inconvenienced.  That puts us in a morally equivocal position, to say the least, and Thurber has essentially made fools of us. 

Apologists for Thurber argue that most humor is based around the mistakes and misdeeds of sympathetic characters.  But it’s one thing to laugh at the innocent bumbling and bungling of a Charlie Chaplin or my former college professor, or at the relatively harmless shams and scams of Groucho Marx.  It’s a very different thing to laugh at the negligent manslaughter threatened by Mitty’s reckless driving or the attempted first-degree murder of Mr. Martin. 

Lawyers often make a distinction between malum prohibitum and malum in se, that is, between things that are bad because the law says they are and things that are bad in and of themselves, no matter what the law.  Malum prohibitum deals mainly with harm to property, with property rights and property wrongs.  Malum in se deals mainly with harm to persons.  In most comedies, such as those by the Marx Brothers, the misdeeds are malum prohibitum and no one is really harmed or in serious danger.  In Mitty and Catbird, the misdeeds are malum in se, and serious harm is imminent.  Yet we laugh and empathize with the miscreants.  

 The Amoral of the Story.

I don’t know if this essay has a moral or what it might be.  Other than to be aware that comedy can be cruel and that we should be mindful of what we find funny.  Much of the humor that comes our way today incorporates a lot of malum in se at which we are led by the storyteller to laugh and even sympathize.  This kind of callous comedy can possibly be more deleterious to our moral health than even the ubiquitous stories, movies, and TV programs that outright celebrate gangsters and other killers.  Bad as these stories are, comedies in which murder is played for laughs can be even morally more desensitizing. 

Given the current state of the mass media and popular culture, it is hard to avoid stories that seductively celebrate violence.  But I think it is important to try to be aware of the ways in which we are being manipulated so that we can try to guard against their deleterious effects.  It is important for us to recognize what it is that we are laughing at and why, otherwise, as the old saying has it, the last laugh might be on us.  If anyone has a better solution to this problem, it would be great to hear about it.

                                                                                                                     BW 7/23 

[1] “Thurber.” Encyclopedia Britannica.” Accessed 6/14/2023.

[2] C.M. Weaver et al.  “Behavioral, Interpersonal, and Cognitive Patterns.” Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. 2012.

[3] Kevin Dickinson. “The Secret Life of Maladaptive Daydreaming.” Big Think. 1/21/21.

[4] “Psychoanalysis of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Prezi. 10/17/2013.

[5] Danny Heitman. “James Thurber Lost Most of His Eyesight to a Tragic Childhood Accident.” Humanities. Vol 36, No 1. January/February 2015.

[6] Brian St Pierre. “James Thurber’s Comic Brilliance Masked His Dark Side.” SFGATE  12/17/1995.

[7] Danny Heitman. “James Thurber Lost Most of His Eyesight to a Tragic Childhood Accident.” Humanities. Vol 36, No 1. January/February 2015.

[8] Brian St Pierre. “James Thurber’s Comic Brilliance Masked His Dark Side.” SFGATE  12/17/1995.

[9] Peter Tonguette. “The not-so-secret life of James Thurber.”  The Christian Science Monitor.  7/11/2019.

[10] Andrew Jorgensen. “James Thurber’s Little Man and the Battle of the Sexes: The Humor of Gender and Conflict.”  Brigham Young University Scholars Archive. 8/1/2006.

[11] Kenneth Burke.  Attitudes toward History.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, 34.

[12] Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954, pp. 35, 173.

[13] Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill and Wang. 1961, p.59.

[14] Burke, 1961, p.41.

[15]  Note that in the story, Mitty is driving fifty-five miles per hour on what is seemingly an inner-city freeway of some sort.  That may not seem fast to us but the speed limit on a roadway of this sort during the 1930’s when the story was written was normally around forty-five miles per hour.  When Mitty’s wife complains that he is going too fast and that he usually goes only forty-five miles per hour, she was seemingly just telling him to obey the law.

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Atheism, Anarchism and Relativism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy “A Wizard of Earthsea.” More and less than what you might think.

Atheism, Anarchism and Relativism in

Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea.

More and less than what you might think.

Burton Weltman

Introduction: Defining Atheism, Anarchism and Relativism.

Atheist, anarchist, ethical relativist. Not what you might expect as the resume of a popular author of children’s books. But that was Ursula Le Guin.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was one of the most popular and influential authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and remains so today.  Mainly writing science fiction for adults and fantasy stories for adolescents, genres that were generally considered shallow, escapist and mere entertainment, Le Guin elevated these genres to literary status with entertaining but serious works that provoke readers, young and old, to think critically about themselves and their societies. 

Le Guin had an unconventional agenda for an author of popular children’s books. She was an avowed atheist, anarchist and relativist, and her religious, political and ethical views are embedded in her stories.  Le Guin took advantage of the imaginative leeway given to science fiction and fantasy writers in order to propose a variety of “what if” scenarios intended to get at the roots of what it means to be human and what might be better ways for us to live.   Implicitly but pervasively, Le Guin’s works incorporate a radical social and intellectual agenda.  Subversive but sensible and quietly convincing, her enduring popularity and influence testify to the success of her efforts. 

Le Guin did not conform to the conventional image of a radical.  She was a humanist at heart and she couched her views in ways that made sense to readers, very different from the nonsense that is usually attributed to atheists, anarchists and relativists.  Her views reflected the original definitions, and the literal meanings, of those ideas.  And she harked back to the promising ways that the terms were originally intended to be understood by their proponents, as opposed to the ominous meanings the words have since acquired from their opponents.  These original definitions can be summarized as follows:    

Atheism: a belief system in which the idea of a deity is considered irrelevant, as opposed to theism in which a deity is affirmed, and as opposed to anti-theism in which the possibility of a deity is denied and which has become the conventional definition of “atheism.”

Anarchism: a social system based on relative equality and voluntary cooperation among people, as opposed to statism which is based on hierarchy and a coercive central government, and as opposed to libertarianism which is an anti-social system based on self-centered individualism and which has become the conventional interpretation of “anarchism.”

Relativism: a philosophy in which the validity of something is based on the extent to which it measures up to a recognized standard, as opposed to absolutism in which things are judged definitively right or wrong, and as opposed to nihilism in which all things are subjective and anything goes and which has become the conventional interpretation of “relativism.”

This essay focuses on A Wizard of Earthsea, the first in Le Guin’s series of Earthsea books.  Intended primarily for adolescents, it is one of Le Guin’s most popular fantasy stories.  And although she never explicitly discusses atheism, anarchism or relativism in the book, I think the story implicitly promotes these ideas as the book’s underlying message, albeit with meanings different than the way the terms are conventionally understood.  The result is an unconventional message that, nonetheless, comes across as common sense.

The Setting: A Magical World.

It’s a magical world and it is baffling.  Some people can seemingly control this or that part of it but there seems to be no one in charge of the whole.  Things happen for no apparent reason and people come and go, who knows why or where or how.  People use languages that you don’t understand and speak about things you don’t comprehend.  Some can make things appear and disappear at will.  Others are so powerful that they merely have to say a word and a thing is done.  Still others have fears you cannot understand but that make you anxious.  Things sometimes work as you expect and sometimes do not, and for reasons that are beyond you.  Apparently dumb creatures and inanimate objects often seem to be alive and able choose to do or not do what they will.  And everyone tells you to be careful, not to reach too far for fear of failing and falling.

If this seems like the setting for a fantasy story, it is.  It is essentially the setting of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel A Wizard of Earthsea (hereafter Wizard).  But is it also for real?  First published in 1968, Wizard is set in a world full of wizards, dragons, demons, sentient rocks, and living natural forces, all of whom do strange and wonderous things.  It is a fantastic setting but it is also intended, I think, as an abstract of the real world as it is experienced by most people, particularly children.  Much as we try to tame the world through our thoughts and deeds, it is still, in Le Guin’s telling, a strange and untamed place at bottom.  And we feel it as such.  She has, however, things to tell us as to how we might cope with it.

The world according to Le Guin is ultimately incomprehensible, but not entirely unfathomable.  And to the extent the world can be fathomed and possibly tamed, the principles of atheism, anarchism and relativism seem to be key.  These theories and their practices are, I think, an underlying meaning and message of Wizard.  They form the parameters of people’s lives in the book, informing their beliefs and unbeliefs, regardless of what they have been taught or say they believe.  And, Le Guin seems to be saying that this goes for us in the real world as it does for characters in her fantasy universe.  Le Guin’s message seems to be that recognizing these principles and working within their parameters is a key to coping successfully with life.       

The Reality of Fantasy: Believe it or not.

Le Guin was one of the most heralded American authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  A writer of science fiction and fantasy, categories of fiction that are generally derided as shallow escapism, she elevated those genres to the status of serious, thoughtful and thought-provoking literature.  Although Le Guin won virtually every fantasy and science fiction award available, she always said that she did not want to be known as a science fiction or fantasy writer, but simply as a writer, and hopefully a good one.  And she was. Michel Chabon called her “The greatest American writer of her generation,” regardless of genre.  Her popularity among readers and influence among other writers was widespread during her life and continues to the present day.[1] 

Le Guin was a prolific author.  She published some twenty novels, one hundred short stories, thirteen children’s books, six books of poetry and four collections of essays over a sixty-year period starting in the late 1950’s.  Wizard was the first of a series of six Earthsea fantasy books intended primarily for adolescents.  Le Guin also published eight Hainish Cycle science fiction books intended primarily for adults.  But her readership overlapped all age groups and extended far beyond devotees of science fiction and fantasy.    

Le Guin was a serious writer who wrote about serious issues, albeit in a somewhat fantastical garb.  Unlike many practitioners of science fiction and fantasy, she did not write about fairy tale queens or space cowboys.  Nor did she extoll the status quo.  Science fiction and fantasy have historically had a generally conservative bias, glorifying uniquely strong heroes who dominated their enemies, predominated over everyone else, and saved the status quo.  Not Le Guin

Science fiction and fantasy have also generally featured fantastic contrivances and magical miracles.  While Le Guin’s stories include these things, culture was her metier, and she was essentially an author of social science fiction and anthropological fantasy.  “What if’s” about society were her interest.  It was an interest and orientation that she picked up from her parents. 

Le Guin was the daughter of two prominent anthropologists, Theodora and Alfred Kroeber, who helped change the face of social science in the early twentieth century.  Her father was largely responsible for a shift in the field of anthropology away from the racist and ethnocentric theories that were predominant during the nineteenth century.  Those theories had proclaimed modern Western society as the highest form of civilization, toward which all of history had been tending, and against which all other cultures should be measured to their disadvantage. 

The Kroebers promoted a multicultural perspective that respected various forms of civilization, both past and present, as valuable human creations to be considered on their own terms, and not denigrated because they differed from modern Western norms.  Le Guin reflected the interests and perspectives of her parents in her own writings, which are largely anthropological in form and multicultural in content.  Her stories present a variety of “what-if” social and psychological situations, and they invariably promote multicultural messages.

Le Guin’s stories can tell readers a lot about what they feel is real, even though they don’t believe the stories are real.  Science fiction and fantasy can resonate with our feelings about things, even if our reason tells us otherwise.  I believe that is one reason why science fiction and fantasy stories are popular.  We can feel them without having to strain our brains figuring them out.  And by dressing real life up in fantastical costume, Le Guin can get away with incorporating such unconventional themes as atheism, anarchism and relativism into her books.

Le Guin’s novel Wizard is a fantasy story that resonates with our feelings about things.  Operating largely on a subliminal level, and weaving in themes of atheism, anarchism and relativism, her story reinforces some of our feelings while redirecting others.  So that while our rational selves tell us that the magical setting is unreal and the story is only make-believe, we nonetheless feel that the story represents in disguised form the way the world really is.  And that makes for the influence of Le Guin’s atheism, anarchism and relativism.

The Story: The Coming of Age of a Wizard.

A Wizard of Earthsea is set in a fictional archipelago called Earthsea.  Earthsea is a loose conglomeration of islands with no central government either for the confederation or on most of the individual islands.  The story centers on a boy from the island of Gont, which is home to a small, loosely governed, essentially anarchic village of peasant farmers, goatherds and craftsmen.  The boy, whose birth-name is Duny and nickname is Sparrowhawk, was essentially an orphan, his mother having died shortly after his birth and his father ignoring him and letting him run free.  As a result, Duny grew up wild, unfriended, and lonely.  Until he showed signs of magical power.[2]

Gont was the birthplace of many wizards and Duny demonstrated some minor magical powers as a young boy.  A turning point in Duny’s life came when he saved his village from a murderous band of barbarians called the Kargads by conjuring a great fog in which the invaders got lost.  The Kargads were “a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns,” unlike the dark-skinned peaceful Gonians.

The Kargads were also very religious and dictatorially governed by priests and noblemen, very much unlike the unreligious and unregimented Gontians.  Having no central government or army, the Gontians were defenseless against the Kargads until Duny did his magic and they were saved.  The boy, therefrom, went in one magical stroke from the status of unwanted juvenile delinquent to the stature of local hero.[3] 

Recognizing Duny’s great natural power, the chief wizard on the island, named Ogion, took the boy under his wing and told him two most important things.  First, he told Duny that everyone and everything has a true name and that knowing someone’s or something’s true name gives one magical power over that person or thing.  Almost all magic comes from knowing the names of people and things.  Ogion then told Duny that Duny’s true name was Ged, something he must keep secret from all but his most trusted comrades.[4] 

The second thing Ogion told the boy was that natural power as great as Ged’s must not go untamed, uncontrolled and untrained.  So, Ogion took it upon himself to begin Ged’s education.  The first and foremost lesson Ogion taught Ged was the need for respect for the universe and restraint with respect to his magical powers.  Ged must learn to understand “the Balance and the Pattern [of the universe] which the true wizard knows and serves, and which keeps him from using his spells unless real need demands.”  For every action, there is inevitably a reaction, Ogion preached, and every person, but especially a person as powerful as a wizard, should understand the potential for unintended and undesirable consequences before taking an action.  “Before you speak or do, you must know the price that is to pay,” Ogion concluded.[5] 

After some initial training, Ogion sent Ged off to a wizard school on the island of Roke, the most magical place in the archipelago.  There, Ged learned much practical and powerful magic but also was repeatedly catechized in the necessity for humility in the face of the universe and restraint in the use of his powers.  Students were warned that “You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand until you know what good and evil will follow that act.  The world is in balance, in Equilibrium.”   And you must try not to upset that balance.  In turn, everything in the universe – animal, vegetable and mineral – has a being that you must respect.[6]

Ged’s instructors were most insistent that people, and especially wizards, must not act carelessly or with selfish and prideful motives.  This is a lesson that Ged found very hard to learn.  Surely, he said to himself, since he was a wizard, he must be “powerful enough to do what he pleased and balance the world as seemed best to him.”  Ged insisted to himself that even if he occasionally made a mess of things, he would be able to fix things afterwards.  Thinking and acting on this proudful basis led to Ged’s tragic mistake.[7] 

Ged did wonderfully well at the school but, nonetheless, suffered from feelings of inferiority because unlike most of the other students who came to the school from wealthy and powerful families, Ged was from a poor non-magical family on a poor obscure island.  His feelings of inferiority led him to recurring surges of boastful behavior.[8] 

In the course of a bragging duel with another student, Ged tried to resurrect a dead woman.  This was something his mentor Ogion had specifically warned him against as having potentially awful unintended consequences.  Ged’s effort failed disastrously and resulted in “a ripping open of the fabric of the world,” thereby allowing a shadow demon to escape into the living world from the world of the dead.  Ged had disrupted the balance of the universe.  He had unleashed a demon that could not only destroy him but possibly the whole world.[9] 

The rest of the story describes Ged’s efforts to defeat the shadow and restore balance to the world, in the course of which he learns lessons of humility and restraint that his mentors had been trying to teach him.

With the shadow in pursuit, Ged fled Roke and wandered around the archipelago, taking a series of humble wizarding posts.  As the shadow kept following him, he kept moving around, trying to keep one step ahead of it.  In the course of this rambling, Ged confirmed his great powers in killing several dragons that were threatening a small island and getting the chief dragon to make a binding promise to never again threaten anywhere in the archipelago.  It was an extraordinary feat that no wizard had achieved before and that had been thought impossible.[10]   

Ged concluded from this adventure that humility can lead to great deeds and that you can learn from everyone and everything.  “From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years, he strove to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”[11]

Ged also determined to stop running from the shadow and to confront it instead.  No sooner, however, did he make this resolve and turn toward the shadow than the shadow started running away from him.  Ged sailed to the ends of the earth with a fellow wizard name Vetch, chasing the shadow and trying to learn its name so that he could tame it.  “I am bound to the foul thing,” he told Vetch, “and will be so forever unless I can learn the word that masters it: its name.”[12]  

In the end, Ged confronted the shadow and grasped hold of it, vowing to die in its grasp if need be in order to rid the world of it.  In so doing, he discovered that the shadow’s name was his own name, Ged, and that the shadow was merely his other self, his dark side.  In grasping the shadow and saying his name, “Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.”  Ged was saved and so was the world.  The narrator concludes that “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death and with his own name, had made himself whole.”[13] 

The story has a semi-happy ending with a chastened Ged in some ways wiser but in some ways weaker.  He never completely recovers from the effort of conquering himself and his shadow.  He has, however, learned lessons of humility and solidarity with all things in the universe.  That “All power is one in source and end.”  That nature is all and we are all aspects of nature.  That “My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars.” [14] 

Although some important conflicts have been resolved in Ged’s life and in the universe, the struggle between the dark forces and the light, and the effort to keep the universe in balance, are still ongoing, to be described in the later Earthsea books.  And it is a struggle in which the principles and practices of atheism, anarchism and relativism seem to be keys to preserving the balance and making progress in the universe.

Atheism: It isn’t what most people think.

Le Guin was an avowed atheist and her atheism is reflected in Wizard.[15]  But with a twist.

The twist is that Le Guin’s atheism reflected the original and literal meaning of the word, which is not the way most people think of it.  When you put an “a” in front of a word, it signifies indifference to what the word represents, not opposition to it.  Apolitical, for example, means indifference to politics, not opposition to politics, which would be anti-political.  Asocial means indifference to society, not opposition to society, which would be anti-social. 

And, so, atheism literally means indifference to the idea of God, not rejection of the idea of God, which would be anti-theism.  Unfortunately for the logic of our language and our ideas about religion, religious true believers, who have no doubt that God exists and no doubts about what it is God wants us to do, have hijacked the word “atheism” and warped it in the public mind to mean anti-theism, as though anyone who is indifferent to God is actually opposed to God. 

Atheists may, in fact, feel that there is something that in some way is responsible for creating and sustaining the universe.  Something like the Force in the Star Wars sagas.  We humans seem to be hard-wired into finding causes for things.  We want to know the why of things.  If the universe exists, then it is hard for us not to feel that something caused it and keeps it going, even if there is no evidence or reason to believe it, and even if it then begs the question of what caused that something.  Our confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that the universe will not at any moment dissolve into nothingness, seemingly attests to that feeling. 

But as soon as you try to put that feeling into words and make an idea or belief out of it, atheists claim that you stumble into nonsense.  You come up with formulations that cannot be reasoned with and stories that can be sustained only with blind faith.   And when different groups of people have blind faith in competing nonsensical views of something like God, you end up with a recipe for irreconcilable conflicts.  Better to keep the idea of God out of the conversation.

The word “atheism” was coined during the sixteenth century in the midst of the bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants.  It was coined by people who themselves believed in God but who concluded that it was not right, righteous or necessary for them to try to impose their set of beliefs on others who believed otherwise.  They wanted to put an end to the religious wars, and they did not think it was necessary for everyone to believe the same religious ideas in order to live together peacefully.  

The original atheists did not intend to deny the existence of God.  They just wanted to take God out of social life and save God from being the source of social strife.  In their minds, atheism was effectively a way to honor Him by keeping people from squabbling over Him and killing each other in His name.  What they essentially wanted was to separate Church and State as the founding American fathers eventually tried to do with the First Amendment of the Constitution. 

The intent of the atheists was to leave God to people’s personal and private lives.  If some people got it wrong and there was a God who resented it, then they would go to Hell when they died.  But that was their choice.  Atheism meant that whatever you believed or disbelieved about God was irrelevant to me, and we should focus on cooperatively living together. 

Atheism was a sensible idea that was too reasonable to gain much traction at that time.  Not surprisingly, Protestants and Catholics, who had been slaughtering each other in the name of their respective versions of God, temporarily backed off from their mutual animosity in order to join forces in massacring those who proposed to end the violence in the form of atheism.  And they quickly warped “atheism” to mean anti-theism, which is how the word is commonly misused to the present day.

In Wizard, unsympathetic characters are portrayed as religious fanatics, superstitious fetishists, and aggressors against peaceful people.  Sympathetic characters are atheists in the sense that they feel that there is something in the universe, some force and sense of order that keeps things going and that must be respected if things aren’t going to fall apart.  But it is a natural order – magic included – rather than a supernatural thing or God.  The balance in Le Guin’s universe is, thus, an example of e pluribus unum, unity out of diversity and diversity out of unity.  

This diversity includes non-human beings and Wizard reflects a respect for the capabilities and sensibilities of non-human beings which requires humility from humans. Reflecting recent developments in science, humans in Le Guin’s universe aren’t so superior to other creatures as we used to think.  The universe is full of creatures who have all sorts of natural powers, which includes magic in Wizard.  The goal of life is to use your powers in a way that respects others and reinforces the balance of the universe.  It is a balance that includes death, dark shadows and evil things to balance and accentuate life, light and the good.

This lesson is exemplified in the oldest creation song in the archipelago in Wizard which includes the verse “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life.”[16]

In sum, Ged learns that having great power means also accepting great responsibility and, especially, exercising great restraint.  With these lessons comes a deep humility that makes him fit to live in the anarchic society of the archipelago.  

Anarchism: It isn’t what most people fear.

Le Guin was a self-styled anarchist and her anarchist views are reflected in Wizard[17]  But, as with her atheism, she was an anarchist with a twist.  

In conventional parlance, anarchism is scorned as nonsense at best and mayhem at worst.  Anarchists are disdained as either utopians who foolishly believe in the perfectibility of humans and society, or extreme individualists who selfishly believe in everyone for themselves, or angry nihilists who believe in blowing up the existing social order.  Le Guin was none of these things.  She believed that, with due respect to all who came before us and regard for all who will come after us, we should try to make a better world, one that is based on the original principles and literal meaning of anarchism.  

Just as the word “atheism” consists of “theism” plus the prefix “a,” the word “anarchy” is a combination of “archy” plus “a,” with an “n” thrown in to make it sound OK.  “Archy” means government and the suffix can be attached to many different prefixes to make words that reflect different approaches to government.  Monarchy, for example, adding the prefix “mon,” meaning one, to “archy” means rule by one person.  Patriarchy, adding the prefix for father to “archy,” means rule by fathers or, more generally, men.  Matriarchy means, in turn, rule by mothers or women.  Anarchy is a combination of “a” or “an,” meaning indifference or irrelevance, and “archy,” with a combined meaning of indifference to government and the irrelevance of government.

The word “anarchism” apparently made its first appearance in English during the sixteenth century during the bloody religious wars and dynastic struggles that characterized that age.  This was the era in which modern nation states developed and in which European society transitioned from a relatively decentralized feudal system of nobles to a system of absolute monarchs. 

Reflecting and reinforcing this transition, kings claimed to be the defenders of the true religion, which could be either Catholicism or Protestantism, depending on the country. Taking on this holy role ostensibly gave them God’s sanction for exercising dictatorial powers.  It also exacerbated the religious wars, with everyone fighting for their version of God’s will.

Just as the theory of atheism developed out of a desire to end the religious conflicts of that era, the theory of anarchism developed out of a desire to end the dynastic conflicts of nobles against kings and kings against each other, and to rein in the brutal dictatorships.  The word “anarchism” was derived from the Latin “anarchia” which was itself derived from the Greek “anarcho,” and it originally meant a society without a chief or ruler. 

The word “anarchism” was initially a neutral term that did not imply disorder and did not suggest approval or disapproval.  Nonetheless, for obvious reasons, nobles, kings and their respective supporters, even as they fought each other, came universally to condemn the theory and practice of anarchy.  As a result of their joint efforts, the term acquired the negative connotations that it conventionally has today.  But not without complication and contradiction.

Most dictionaries have a primary and a secondary definition for anarchism, and they aren’t consistent with each other.[18]  The primary definition invariably runs something like “A state of disorder due to the absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.”  The operative terms in this definition are disorder and the opposition to any controls.  Chaos is the implication, and the word has negative connotations.

The secondary definition of anarchism usually runs something like “A society based on voluntary cooperation and without political institutions or hierarchical government.”  The operative terms in this definition are the existence of cooperation and the absence of dominance over people.  There is no implication of disorder, let alone chaos, and no connotation of a complete absence of controls.  To the contrary, this definition could be expressed as a mirror image of the first definition, something like “A state of order due to the absence or nonrecognition of authority.”  In this definition, the word has positive connotations.

The first definition, the negative one, reflects the conventional view of anarchism.  The second definition, the more positive one, is closer to the original idea of anarchism and close to the view reflected in Le Guin’s books.  Anarchists, in this view, eschew government but not in favor of a free-for-all chaotic individualism.  The word “government” is of medieval origin and stems from a French word that is itself derived from a Latin and Greek term referencing a ship captain.  As such, it originally refers to someone, a governor, who directs and controls a society and who has arbitrary discretion to order people around.  This is what anarchists opposed. 

And this is essentially the meaning of an axiom often attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least.”  Jefferson was not opposed to people coming together to solve problems but he preferred that they do it cooperatively rather than dictatorially. He was not opposed to public works or programs.  He merely preferred public enterprises to be conducted as much as feasible at the local level, where people could operate them on a face-to-face cooperative basis.  He distrusted governors but not government.

Many eighteenth-century European-American settlements actually operated on what could be considered a semi-anarchist basis, with people sharing the land and their produce, and with most community decisions made in common council.  And most towns had large public sectors, from mills to toll roads, that were collectively controlled via town councils.  This is essentially the way most communities in Wizard seem to operate.  Anarchism does not mean laissez-faire free enterprise or libertarian individualism or maximizing the private sector and minimizing the public sector.  It means, to the contrary, maximizing the public sector but though bottom-up cooperation rather than top-down dictation. 

Although cooperation is a key to anarchism, the system does not require people to be good.  The story in Wizard is, for example, mainly about Ged coming to accept his dark side, which is perfectly consistent with anarchism.  Anarchism merely requires people to be mostly sensible.  The idea is that working together on common projects brings out the positive in people and helps keep the negative in check.  And where that is not enough, anarchists are not necessarily against rules, just against the rule of some people over others.  Not perfect but good enough.

Anarchism is easier to imagine and implement in small-scale, face-to-face communities with a low level of technology, such as existed in early European settlements in America and in Le Guin’s fantasy stories.  But Le Guin doesn’t leave it at that, which would essentially be an admission of the irrelevance of anarchism given our highly complex and large-scale societies.  In her science fiction stories, Le Guin imagines complex anarchic societies full of technology. 

In The Dispossessed, for example, she imagines a complex high-tech society which is set on the moon.  Computers are a key to its success – they enable the administration of things as opposed to the domination over people – and it works.  It is not perfect.  Complications and conflicts regularly arise, some of which threaten the chaos that opponents of anarchism predict.  But the characters struggle on.  Le Guin is not a utopian.  But she shows how things could work with a will and a way, and a common sense of common decency.

Relativism: It isn’t relative.

Le Guin was a professed cultural relativist.  As noted above, it is an idea she picked up from her father, Alfred Kroeber, who was one of the first anthropologists to promote cultural relativism.  Le Guin adopted it but, as with her atheism and anarchism, she was a relativist with a twist.

Relativism is a theory that is generally defined in contrast with absolutism.  Relativism is conventionally defined as “The doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute.”[19] The implication is that anything can be considered true or ethical depending on the society in which you live.  In this conventional view, relativists ostensibly believe there is no universal truth, good or evil, and there is no stable benchmark with which to evaluate potential truths, good and evil. 

By contrast, absolutism is generally defined as “the acceptance of or belief in absolute principles in political, philosophical, ethical or theological matters.” [20]  Absolutists believe in absolute truth and falsity, and in moral absolutes.  Right is right and wrong is wrong no matter what your culture.  And relativists, they say, are just plain wrong.  Either there has to be a set of truths that are certain or there is nothing but chaos.

Absolutists and relativists have been battling each other over epistemology and ethics since at least the ancient Greeks, as exemplified by the absolutist Plato and the relativist Protagoras.  Protagoras was a Sophist to whom is attributed the axiom that “Man is the measure of all things.”  Relativists cite this axiom in support of their position, but absolutists cite this same axiom against them.  At the heart of the conflict between absolutists and relativists is the different ways in which they interpret this axiom.  The axiom also exemplifies a way in which relativists and absolutists often talk past each other because they start with different definitions of key terms.     

To absolutists, the axiom means that every individual man and every individual culture can decide for himself/itself what is true and what is good, and there is no common ground.  The axiom ostensibly exemplifies a hardcore relativism, i.e., a skepticism in which nothing is true or false, a nihilism in which nothing is right or wrong, and a solipsism in which no one can really know anyone else.  To absolutists, relativism is the epistemological and ethical complement to an atheism that is anti-theist and an anarchism that is pure chaos.

To most relativists, the axiom has a very different meaning.  It is a statement of humanism that says merely that epistemological and ethical truths are made by humans.  Truth, they say, does not come from God or some Platonic universe of ideals, but from people struggling to define themselves as humans and work together.  And people do this by measuring themselves against others, defining themselves through comparing and contrasting themselves with others, and looking for ways to bridge the gaps and break down the barriers between them.  To relativists, absolutist theories and practices comprise one of the biggest barriers to peaceful coexistence and to cooperation among different people and cultures.    

Absolutists have largely won the definitional battle and theirs has become the conventional definition of relativism.  In this view, relativism is equated with subjectivism – everyone has their own code of right and wrong – and cynicism – there is no legitimate way to judge right from wrong – and even nihilism – there is no right and wrong. In the conventional view, cultural relativism means that every culture has its own ethical standards and someone from one culture cannot judge the ethics or behavior of people from another.  For that reason, cultural relativists supposedly cannot condemn other cultures’ practices of torture, racism, sexism and other things that mainstream Americans rightly reject. 

This is not what Kroeber and Le Guin had in mind.  Nor most other self-styled relativists.

By definition, in order for something to be relative to something else, there has to be a third thing that they have in common which makes for the relation between them.  In physics, the theory of relativity posits the speed of light as a limit which is used to describe the relativity of moving things.  Likewise, in the theory of cultural relativity, two cultures that are relative to each other have to have some cultural thing in common to identify their relativity.  For Kroeber and Le Guin, that common benchmark is human nature and a common sense of decency.     

Kroeber recognized the boundaries and blinders that made it difficult for people from one culture to understand and empathize with those from another.  But he emphasized that intercultural understanding was doable because at bottom all people seem to share a common sense of decency and fairness.  People are naturally empathetic.  In fact, they know themselves largely through understanding others, and comparing and contrasting themselves with others.  His work with Ishi, the last of the Yahi, exemplifies his views.

In 1911, Kroeber was working at the University of California, Berkeley when he was introduced to a man who called himself Ishi and who was the last surviving member of his Native-American Yahi community.  The rest of the Yahis had either been killed by white people or had died of white people’s diseases, to which Ishi also eventually succumbed.  The Yahis had existed for many eons as a very small low technology community akin to what we consider Stone Age societies to have been like, until they had been annihilated as vermin by white people moving West in the late 1800’s. 

When Kroeber came upon him, Ishi was a middle-aged man barely surviving by foraging in the back woods of northern California.  He had no inkling of modern society.  He had never seen an automobile, an airplane, a multi-story building, a group of more than fifty people at a time, or any type of mechanical or electrical contrivance.  And Kroeber and his colleagues who were taking care of Ishi spoke a language he could not understand and they could not understand his.  Saved by white people whose fellows had slaughtered his family and friends, and taken into a totally alien society, Ishi could have been overwhelmed by culture shock.  But he wasn’t.

Ishi kept his cool and acclimated well to his new situation.  While he mourned the loss of his family and his former way of life Ishi, according to Kroeber, accepted his new circumstances and “was content that it should be so, participating as fully as he could in the new life.”  Moden technology amused Ishi but did not faze him, and he quickly learned to use what was available to him.  Extolling Ishi’s adaptability. Kroeber exclaimed that “Ishi was the last wild Indian in North America, a man of Stone Age culture subjected for the first time when he was past middle age to twentieth-century culture.”  Ishi was, nonetheless, able to adapt to his new circumstances without losing his former identity or Yahi culture.[21] 

Kroeber particularly emphasized Ishi’s ability to share in the common humanity of the strange people with whom he had come to live.  Ishi’s adaptability was a testament to Kroeber’s theories of multicultural relativism.  The cultural differences and barriers in this case were about as extreme as you could imagine, but they were not impenetrable on either Ishi’s side or Kroeber’s.[22]  These are the sort of situations that Le Guin wrote about in her stories.

Almost all of Le Guin’s stories are about people trying to make contact with different sorts of beings, not all of them human, or adapt to different cultures, not all of them humane.  In Wizard, for example, Ged has to deal with inhumane humans like the Kargads and with inhumane dragons.  He deals with the Kargads by using what is effectively a Judo move in which the Kargads destroyed themselves by stumbling wildly and furiously around in the fog that Ged had conjured.  He deals with the dragons, whose language and ways of thinking are virtually impenetrable to humans, by empathetically working out a peace agreement with them.   

What the Kroebers found in their anthropological work, and Le Guin portrayed in her stories, was that cultural barriers could be overcome with empathy and common human decency.  What was needed was greater recognition and respect for something like the Golden Rule, treating others as you would want to be treated if you were in their situation, a version of which exists in virtually every culture.  The Golden Rule is a relativistic but realistic benchmark for humane behavior.  It is not a prescriptive absolute that tells you specifically what you must do in any given situation.  It is a pragmatic starting point for evaluating whether what you are doing is the right thing. 

The Golden Rule is a relativistic test that can be applied in many different ways depending on the culture and the situation.  And well-intentioned people can disagree as to its application.  But it gives you a reasonable guideline and basis for discussion as to what should be done.  It is an answer to the question “Relative to what?”  It appeals to something that seems to be universal in humans – empathy – and that is what makes relativism reasonable.  Empathy is what enables us to understand others and reason with them.  And since we know ourselves only through knowing and caring for others, it is arguably what defines us as humans no matter our culture.

Atheism, anarchism and relativism in their original forms, and as Le Guin seems to promote them, are both more and less than most people think.  More sensible, less radical, more feasible, less scary.  As portrayed in Wizard and her other stories, Le Guin’s atheism, anarchism and relativism come across as an attractive form of humanism.  These theories and their practices, in their original forms, can also be seen as a variation of the well-nigh universal Golden Rule. 

The fact that such unconventional underlying messages in Le Guin’s books have been taken in stride for so long by so many readers, both young and old, is a testament to her skills as a writer but maybe also to the attraction of the ideas she promoted.  It may also be an indication of directions in which our culture might be heading.

                                                                                                            BW  4/23

[1] Johathan Herman. “Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018): Author, Activist, Amateur Scholar of Religion.” Religious Studies News. 10/16/18.  Mark Woods. “Ursula Le Guin: What the atheist writer taught this Christian.” Christian Today. 1/24/18. Rick de Yangpert. “Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea taught Pagan path to many.” The Wild Hunt. 2/4/18.  Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Ursula K. Le Guin.”  Freedom from Religion Foundation. Accessed 3/20/23.

[2]Ursula K. Le Guin. A Wizard of Earthsea.  Boston: Clarion Books, P.1.

[3] Ibid. Pp. 7,.9, 14

[4] Ibid. P. 15.

[5] Ibid.  Pp. 5, 19. 24

[6] Ibid.  P. 25.

[7] Ibid. Pp. 47-48.

[8] Ibid. P. .66.

[9] Ibid. Pp. 67-68.

[10] Ibid. Pp.84-101.

[11] Ibid. P.90.

[12] Ibid. P. 173.

[13] Ibid. Pp 194, 196

[14] Ibid. P.178

[15] Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Ursula K. Le Guin.”  Freedom from Religion Foundation. Accessed 3/20/23.

[16] Ursula K Le Guin. A Wizard of Earthsea. Boston: Clarion Books. P. 196.

[17] Lewis Call. “Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.” SubStance #113. Vol  26, No 2, 2007.  Victor Urbanowicz.“Personal and Political in The Dispossessed.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol 5, #15, Part 2, July 1978.

[18] “Anarchism.” Google’s English Dictionary. 

[19] Relativism. Oxford Languages Dictionary.

[20] Absolutism. Oxford Languages Dictionary.

[21] Theodora Kroeber. Ishi in Two Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. P.9.

[22] Ibid.  P..250.

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Socialism of the Heart in William Dean Howells’ “Annie Kilburn.” The Common Sense of Socialism at the turn of the 20th Century. Are we witnessing a revival today?

Socialism of the Heart in William Dean Howells’ Annie Kilburn.

 The Common Sense of Socialism at the turn of the 20th Century.

Are we witnessing a revival today?

Burton Weltman

“61% of Americans aged between 18 and 24

have a positive reaction to the word ‘socialism.’”

Axios Poll. 6/27/19

Historical Recycling: Gilded Ages then and now.

“What is the chief end of man? To get rich.  In what way?  Dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.”  Mark Twain on moral values in the Gilded Age in which he lived.   

Setting the scene: Widespread poverty.  Increasing gun violence.  Enormous gap between the incomes of the rich and everyone else.  A predominant ethos of selfish individualism.  Large-scale uncontrolled immigration and widespread hostility toward immigrants.  Rising racism and ethnocentrism.  Rabid right-wing demagoguery.  Political violence and dangerous threats to democracy.  Widely spreading infectious diseases and deadly pandemics.  Contaminated food and drugs.  Serious and rapidly increasing environmental problems.  And more… 

If this situation sounds much like that in the United States today, it is.  But it is also a description of the state of affairs in the country at the turn of the twentieth century.  It was an era that contemporaries such as Mark Twain derided as a Gilded Age, a time when the rich thrived and gilded their lilies, while the rest struggled to survive.  It was also a time when political discussion turned toward a serious consideration of socialism as a solution to the country’s problems, and when luminaries such as William Dean Howells identified themselves as socialists. 

Howells, who lived from 1837 to 1920, was a literary star whose light has faded but whose gravitational influence can still be felt.  His works are rarely read today except in college English classes, and less frequently even there.  But Howells was a major cultural arbiter for the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what we might today call an “influencer.”  He was widely hailed as “The Dean of American letters,” which was much more than a play on his middle name, and when Howells spoke, people listened.  And that influence lingers to the present day.

Howells came from a politically active family and he was politically precocious as a young man.  He wrote Abraham Lincoln’s campaign biography in 1860 when he was only twenty-three, and remained politically well-connected and active throughout his life.  Over the next two decades, he moved ideologically from a liberal Lincoln Republican to an outspoken Christian Socialist. 

It was a path to socialism that was taken by many in his day, both luminaries and ordinary people.  It was reflected in the rise of the Socialist Party at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the enactment by federal and state governments of progressive legislation based on socialist ideas.  Invented as a political term in the 1830’s, socialism had become a main topic of conversation and controversy by the late 1800’s, with Howells in the forefront of the discussion.

Howells is significant both as an influencer of public opinion in his time and as a reflection of it.  He was the popular author of some forty novels plus several books of poetry, literary criticism and plays over the course of more than fifty years.  A best-selling book by Howells was almost an annual event.  And, as a long-time editor and literary critic at the Atlantic Monthly, the premier magazine of that time, he befriended and promoted many of the most important cultural innovators of the era.  These included Henry James, a founder of the modern psychological novel, William James, a founder of pragmatic philosophy, Henry Adams, a founder of modern historical methods, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a founder of modern jurisprudence.

Howells also discovered and promoted a generation of the best new American writers at the turn of the century.  These included Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Abraham Cahan, Sarah Jewett, and Paul Dunbar.  And he introduced to American audiences the writings of European authors such as Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Zola. 

Politics, which to Howells meant trying to make a better world, was embedded in almost everything he wrote and did.  Most of the authors he promoted were, like himself, on the political left, including his best friend Mark Twain, a staunch anti-capitalist.[1]  Socialism was in the cultural air of the time, a minority opinion as a whole but very influential in parts.  “Socialist” was a respectable designation and an acceptable adjective.  Even conservative opponents of socialism, such as Henry Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes, had to respect its influence.

Déjà vu all over again, we may be going through a similar time.  Another Gilded Age in which the social problems are similar and the public reactions are as well.  On the one hand, a significant portion of the population, mainly among elderly, isolated, rural and small-town Americans, have been embracing rabid right-wing demagoguery and conspiracy theories that threaten democracy.  There is a desperation among some of these people who seem to feel that they have nothing to lose in embracing extremist ideas and actions. 

At the same time, liberal ideas are seeming to be taking hold among younger people, and especially among urban, highly educated young adults.  This political trend seems to be the culmination of several decades of liberalization.  Every generation of young people since the 1960’s has been more progressive than the last, and today socialism seems to be gaining a level of respectability and acceptability similar to that in Howell’s time.  This is exemplified by the success in recent years of socialists such as Bernie Sanders.  It is also indicated in polling numbers that have been trending in favor of socialist ideas, with more than 50% of young adults having a positive view of socialism.[2]  A turn toward socialism similar to that at the turn of the twentieth century may be occurring today.

Focusing on William Dean Howells, this essay discusses the idea of socialism as it was promoted in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and as it may apply to the political situation today.  The discussion centers on Annie Kilburn, a novel by Howells that reflects his socialist ideas and ideals.  It exemplifies an ethos of “socialism of the heart” and “the common sense of socialism” that was widespread at that time and that may be resurfacing again today.

Defining Socialism: Socialism of the Heart and Socialist Practice.

Socialism is a word with many different shades of meaning, ranging from totalitarian communism to libertarian anarchism.  Since this is an essay about Howells, I will use the word the way he and his colleagues used it which, in turn, is essentially the way most self-styled socialists today would define the term.  In this regard, I will distinguish between what we might call socialism of the heart, which Howells called “complicity,” and socialist practice.[3] 

Socialism of the heart can be described as a feeling that we are all in this world together, and so we ought to share the burdens and rewards of our collective efforts.  It is a feeling of mutuality and interdependence, and a sense of fairness.  It is exemplified in the Golden Rule that we should love our neighbors as extensions of ourselves and that we should do to others as we would have others do to us.  It is an ethos of individuality, as opposed to individualism, through cooperation.  One for all and all for one, as the Three Musketeers would put it, instead of all for me and mine, as Donald Trump, for example, would have it.

Socialist practice can be defined as the ways and means of institutionalizing socialism of the heart.  Howells described a socialist society as one that implemented the Golden Rule, and promoted liberty through equality and equality through fraternity.  Whereas conservatives generally claim that liberty is inconsistent with equality and fraternity, Howells argued just the opposite.  Without equality, he claimed, there could be no real liberty, just universal resentment, resistance and reaction.  Without fraternity, in turn, there could be no equality, just a Social Darwinian struggle for advantage over others.  This was just common sense to Howells and to most socialists then and now.[4]

Socialist practice for Howells meant socialized solutions to social problems, making use of government and other public institutions.  This, too, was just common sense to Howells and most socialists then and now.  A socialist political system could be described as a democratic regime of majority rule with minority rights, the most important of which is the right of the minority to possibly become the majority someday.  The last clause of that sentence is crucial because logically flowing from it are virtually all the civil liberties we associate with our Bill of Rights. 

In economics, socialism could be described as a democratic system based on the presumption of public ownership or control of big businesses, unless it is in the public interest for businesses to be privately owned and/or controlled.  Socialists generally assume that small businesses would be privately owned and operated as part of a mixed public-private economy.  In social relations, socialism could be summarized as promoting a culture of diversity coupled with cooperation, and of support for people who respect others, opposition to people to the extent that they disrespect others.[5]       

Socialism in Flux: Now you see it, now you don’t.  What goes around comes around.  Maybe.

“So, what’s so bad about that?”

“That’s just common sense.”

Students reacting to the idea of socialism.

The idea of socialism has had an up-and-down history in the United States. Socialist ideas trended upward during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Then downward in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.  In flux now, socialism maybe trending up again. 

If you came of age during the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, you might not realize that socialism was an idea and ideal that animated most American reform movements from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century.  Ideas derived from socialism underlay the reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, reforms that became the foundation of America’s social welfare programs, health and safety regulations, economic controls, and environmental protections. 

Socialists were regular participants in the political conversation in this country during that time, and socialist ideas were generally considered to be within the political mainstream, albeit on the left bank of the stream.  Many prominent citizens, such as William Dean Howells, considered socialism to be desirable and even commonsensical, as did large numbers of ordinary people who supported the socialist movement and the Socialist Party.[6] 

Socialism was an ideology of the urban working class for the most part, but it also appealed to small farmers and business people.  Socialists fought against the exploitation of workers, but they also fought against the oppression and exploitation of small businesses and small farmers by big corporations and banks.  The state with the highest percentage of Socialist Party members and voters in the early twentieth century was Oklahoma, an overwhelmingly rural state of small farmers, the predecessors of the Dust Bowl Okies struggling to avoid what became their fate.

Self-styled socialists won elections and occupied important government positions .  One of the most colorful of these was Golden Rule Samuel Jones, a successful businessman and Christian Socialist who was mayor of Toledo, OH for several terms at the turn of the century.  Taking the Golden Rule as his mantra, Jones implemented numerous pro-labor and pro-consumer reforms in his businesses and in the city. 

Jones was not alone.  In 1911, there were some seventy-four Socialist mayors of American towns and cities.  Socialist ideas were becoming so popular that there was even serious speculation the Socialist Party might replace the Democratic Party as the second political party in our country, just as the socialist Labor Party was replacing the Liberal Party in England as the major alternative to the Conservative Party there.  The Democratic Party was identified at this time with the slave, segregationist and Confederate South and had elected only one President since the 1850’s, the conservative Grover Cleveland twice.  The Socialist Party, representing workers, small farmers and small business people, seemed to be a perfect foil to the Republican Party of big capitalists.  This did not come to pass. 

The Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912.  He received only 41% of the vote in a four-way race, but his election broke the downward spiral of the Democrats.  With America’s entry into World War I, President Wilson decimated the Socialist Party, which opposed the war, by jailing the Socialist Party’s leaders, banning Socialists’ speeches and publications, and prohibiting their meetings and most other political activities.  The Socialist Party never recovered from this persecution and never became a major political player.  But socialists, socialist ideals and socialist ideas continued to be influential for many years thereafter, perhaps reaching a high point during the 1930’s.[7]

The political situation changed dramatically with the start of the Cold War in the 1940’s.  Socialism became widely equated with totalitarian Soviet Communism, first by conservatives and later by liberals who defensively followed suit.  Socialist ideas were identified by conservatives with repressive Communist dictatorships.  As a result, the idea of socialism became anathema in most political circles and “socialist” became an insult, a way for political conservatives to excoriate their opponents and put them on the defensive. 

Conservatives during the Cold War labelled anything that smacked of progressive social reform or bigger government, except for the military, as a socialistic slippery slope that led inevitably to Communist totalitarianism.  As proponents of competitive individualism and winner-take-all capitalism, conservatives also equated ideas of cooperation and economic equality with Communism.  That equation was a smack-down for liberals as well as socialists.

One of the main playbooks for this Cold War political tactic was Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative in which he claimed that liberals and socialists were more dangerous to America than outright Communists.[8]  Goldwater, the Republican candidate for President in 1964, contended that Communists who showed their true colors openly could be readily identified and resisted.  But liberals and socialists falsely colored their Communistic proposals with ostensibly benevolent intentions.  In reality, both were either Communists in disguise or, even more insidious, Commie dupes who promoted Communism without knowing it. 

In either case, Goldwater insisted, liberals and socialists sugarcoated their Communistic policies and sweettalked the ignorant masses into bondage.  Progressive programs, he proclaimed, are Trojan horses for a Communist takeover.  They look good but they are a form of “creeping socialism” that will end in totalitarian Communism.  The process was compared to a frog sitting in a slowly heating pot of water who is boiled to death without ever realizing anything is wrong. 

In sum, socialism was widely equated during this time with oppression, and the word “socialist” became an expletive.  To be labelled a socialist was political death.  Until recently.

The times they may be changing: Come gather round young people.

A person coming of age today might not be able to appreciate the intense fears of Communism and antipathy toward socialism that were so widespread during the Cold War, or understand conservatives’ anti-government ideology which is rooted in those fears.  The Cold War is long over.  The Soviet Union is long gone.  Communism is a dead letter.  And progressive government programs that began as socialist ideas, such as Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act in the field of medical care, are ubiquitous, useful and popular.  To most young people today, these programs seem commonsensical.  If this is creeping socialism, they say, then what is the problem? [9]

Contrary to much popular opinion, mainstream socialism is not a radical ideology.  By definition, radicals want to get to the roots of what they see as a wicked society, tear up those roots, and plant something entirely new.  It’s the right-wingers who want to tear up the roots of the social welfare state and social justice movements that have been developing in the United States over the last one hundred years.  They are the radicals.

Mainstream socialists, to the contrary, do not reject the foundations of American society.  They claim to build on the social ideals that most Americans already hold and on social instincts that most Americans already display.  Mainstream socialism is designed to be democracy taken to the next level, and socialists do not have to start from scratch.  They can build on the democratic institutions and ideas that already exist in capitalist America and, thereby, move gradually toward a socialist society.  This pragmatic gradualism – which conservatives condemn as creeping socialism – has historically been one of socialism’s strengths. 

 And, after some seventy years as a fringe idea in political limbo, socialism seems to be making a comeback, especially among young people.  Exemplified by the popularity of socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the pendulum may be swinging back toward normalizing the idea of socialism as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.

While most conservatives still preach the same fearsome sermon about socialism as a stalking horse for Communism, and try to scare up support with horror stories about creeping socialism and Communist conspiracies, those jeremiads don’t seem to resonate with most younger people today.  Communism is still a scare word to many older people and socialism with it, but Communism is ancient history to most young people. And most seem willing to consider the idea of socialism on its own terms and not on the basis of some alleged connection to Communism.

These recent changes in the attitudes of younger people toward socialism are consistent with the trending changes in political attitudes among young people since the 1960’s.  Starting noisily in the 1960’s among what was actually a relatively small percentage of politically progressive young people – there were at least nine young George Bushes and Donald Trumps for every Abbie Hoffman or Tom Hayden – every generation of young people since then has been quietly more progressive than the last. 

Recent polls show a majority of young adults have a negative opinion of capitalism.[10] At the same time, a majority of young adults have positive opinion of socialism.[11]  And large majorities support progressive policies and progressive social programs.  Even 56% of young Republicans say they want the government to do more to reduce income inequality in the country, a position that their Republican elders deride as socialist anathema.[12]  And young progressives have generally remained progressive as they have grown older, thereby gradually tilting the overall American population toward the political left.     

This trend toward the political left among young people has not been without opposition.  Conservatives and, even more, radical right-wingers have mounted virulent attacks on progressives.  Many of these attacks are racist, sexist, antisemitic, and otherwise bigoted.  The viciousness of this right-wing backlash against progressives and progressive programs, and even against democracy, can be taken as a sign that right-wingers realize they are losing the long-term demographic battle. They are desperate to do something, no matter how radical, to stop the leftward movement of the country.  But, as the saying goes, demography is destiny. 

Socialism of the Heart in everyday life.

Most Americans today seem to suffer from cognitive political dissonance.  Taught the Golden Rule and the virtues of sharing and cooperation in childhood, they are then inducted into a culture of Social Darwinian dog-eat-dog competition as they grow older.  As a result, most tend to be ideologically individualistic and conservative but instinctively socialistic and liberal. 

This contradiction helps explain polling results over the last seventy-five years in which, when Americans are asked broad ideological questions, a majority of them give conservative answers. But, when they are asked pragmatic human interest questions, they give liberal answers.  Asked, for example, if they favor government welfare programs, a majority of Americans say “No.”  Asked if the government should feed hungry children, a large majority say “Yes.”

In sum, Americans seem to be individualistic by indoctrination and acculturation, but socialistic by nature.  That is, they may espouse individualism, but most of them seem to retain a sense of socialism of the heart as part of their underlying psychological makeup.  Take the following hypothetical example from everyday life:

Six people in a family are sitting around a kitchen table, two parents and four children of various ages.  The family has limited financial resources.  They are discussing how to manage their finances so as to maximize the opportunities of each person and promote the success of the whole family.  All see themselves in the same boat, and each is looking out for the other.

What are we to call this scenario?  Conservatives might offer it is an example of family values, and evidence of the strength of nuclear families as opposed to the broader society.  But progressives could cite it as an instance of socialist values, and as evidence of underlying socialistic feelings that most people have, no matter what ideology they espouse.

Take these other hypothetical commonplace examples:

Six people are on a basketball court.  They have not been previously acquainted.  They split into two teams of three people each, and begin a half-court game of basketball.  Within five minutes, the players on each team have bonded with each other.  They are positioning themselves to play to their teammates’ strengths, passing to each other, blocking for each other, compensating for each other’s weaknesses, each finding a role that plays to their strengths while helping the team, and each subordinating their egos to promote the success of the team.  Is this merely smart competitive strategy?  Or is it also instinctive mutuality, socialism of the heart?

Six workers in a workshop are standing around a machine.  They are discussing how to organize a project so as to complete it most efficiently and effectively.  They dole out assignments based on the relative skills of each worker, so as to play to the strengths of each and promote the success of the group.  The joint project is the center of everyone’s attention.  Is this just good competitive business practice or is it also an underlying common sensibility of socialism?

These scenarios are only a few of the millions of similar situations that play out every day in reality.  They seem to represent socialism of the heart in widespread practice, and illustrate how most Americans are instinctively socialists of the heart.  For William Dean Howells, this sort of everyday practice of socialism was the foundation of the common sense of socialism that he promoted.  In turn, everyday scenarios such as these make up the core of Howells’ novels

The How of William Dean Howells: Realism as a way of life and literature.

Howells was a self-proclaimed realist in his approach to literature, adamantly so.  He was strongly opposed to the romanticism that had been the predominant literary style during most of the nineteenth century.  Romantic literature was full of heroes, heroines and lurid villains, and focused on extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.  It conveyed extremes of emotion in its characters and aimed to evoke similar emotions in its readers.  Howells, while acknowledging that romanticism had been a welcome replacement for the overly formalistic classicism that predominated during the eighteenth century, claimed, nonetheless, that romanticism had itself become stale and formulaic.[13]

Artistic styles come and go, Howells explained.  They come as fresh ways of looking at things and go when they become conventional and trite.  The romantics in the early nineteenth century were “making the same fight against effete classicism which realism is making today against effete romanticism.”  Romanticism has had its day.  It had been appropriate for the heroic era of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the more prosaic time of the turn of the twentieth century required a more prosaic literary style.[14]

Realists portrayed ordinary people making difficult but ordinary choices and doing difficult but ordinary things.  Not heroic persons or unique personalities who rise above their situations.  Just ordinary people who make do, or don’t make do, in the types of situations with which most people can identify.  Howells aimed at a bottom-up form of literature and he longed for a “communistic era in taste” when ordinary people would be the arbiters of art.[15]  

Realists, according to Howells, attempted to write the truth about people, as opposed to the exaggerations and idealizations that the romantics created.  Realism consisted of “fidelity to experience and probability of motive.”  Novelists should not be preachers.  They should convey the facts of a situation and then let the facts speak for themselves.  Res ipsa loquitor, as the lawyers say.  If an author hopes that readers will reach a certain conclusion, such as that socialism is the way to go, the author must let the readers reach that conclusion themselves through seeing the facts.  

Howells’ three most well-known books are The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)[16], A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889)[17], and A Traveler from Altruria (1894)[18].  His books are often intended as bildungsromans for their main characters and for us readers as well.  The characters are morally tested with success and failure.  With failure through success and success through failure.  And we readers are morally tested as to where and how we place our sympathies.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham, for example, a successful small businessman, Lapham, starts to make it big, rise in social status, and conspicuously consume his newfound wealth.  He is then morally challenged by having to decide whether or not to make a really big deal based on taking unfair advantage of the ignorance of a potential investor in his business.  It was an act that would likely be legal but could morally be considered a fraud.  The alternative was to confess the full situation to the investor, in which event, the investor would almost certainly back out of the deal and Lapham would likely go bankrupt.

After much soul searching, Lapham decides to fess up to the investor and the investor predictably backs out of the deal.  Lapham goes bankrupt, but he morally rises even as he financially falls.  Reflecting on his decision, he says that “I had to tell him how things stood.  I had to tell him all about it…I couldn’t let that man put his money into my business without I told him.”[19]  Lapham’s conscience prevails – his sense of doing unto others as he would have them do unto him.  In the end, he goes back to running a small business in which he works cooperatively with his employees.

Lapham learns a lesson about pride and the vanity of victory, which is a theme in many of Howells’ books.  As portrayed by Howells, victorious pride often precedes a moral fall.  And vaingloriousness in victory is not only ugly but also foolish since winning is only temporary.  No sooner do you gain a victory than you have to compete for the next.  Insecurity is a consequence of competition. 

Many of the main characters in Howell’s books gradually come to accept what we could call the common-sense of socialism or, at least, socialism of the heart, with most of these having to overcome bourgeois middle class resistance in themselves as well as from others.  And so do we readers.  In A Hazard of New Fortunes, the central character, March, is a decent, moderately liberal editor of a new New York magazine.  He is a newcomer to a big city and we see the social problems and conflicts of that time through his eyes.  A variety of social ideas are presented and represented by characters in the book, even an argument in favor of slavery. 

At the end of the book, March is still unresolved as to his social ideas, but it is an old socialist working man Lindau who is the most sympathetic character.  Lindau is a German political refugee who came to the United States after participating in the democratic revolution of 1848.  In America, he became an ardent abolitionist and volunteered to fight in the Civil War, losing a hand in battle.  A highly educated person who knows several languages, Lindau has been living in poverty since the war while supporting the labor union movement.  He is a selfless person who helped March when March was younger and whom March hires to work at his magazine.[20]

Lindau weaves in and out of the story, invariably engaging March or one of the other characters in a tirade against capitalism and the enormous wealth gap between the rich capitalists and the poor workers.  “It is the landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal barons (the oppressors to whom you instinctively give the titles of tyrants” who rule and ruin the country.  Excoriating the idea of philanthropy, Lindau says of rich do-gooders that “Yes, when they have gathered their millions together from the hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and despair of hundreds of thousands of other men,” then they give a pittance to the poor.[21]

Lindau is the moral center of the book, the strongest statement of a clear and consistent moral life.  His social commitment is, in turn, reflected in Conrad Dryfoos, the son of a wealthy businessman, who dies while trying to support Lindau and some striking workers, and in Margaret Vance, a society girl who turns to what we would call social justice activities.  Socialism of the heart is the underlying message that arises out of the arguments and events of the book.[22]

Howells’s socialist views were most explicit in a series of three utopian novels that contrast life in an imaginary land of Altruria with life in the United States.  Altrurian society is explicitly based on the Golden Rule.  The country was supposedly founded by disciples of Jesus Christ who emigrated from Palestine some two thousand years ago and who established a genuinely Christian society in which everyone works and lives as one big family, and shares all things.[23]

In the first of the books, A Traveler from Altruria, a visitor, Mr. Homos, comes from Altruria to the United States.  He says that he particularly wanted to visit the United States because of the country’s celebrated dedication to the ideals of liberty, equality and democracy, ideals to which his country was also dedicated.  The gist of the book consists of showing that the United States does not practice what it preaches.  When the Altrurian compares how workers, women, poor people, artists and other social groups are treated in America as compared to people in his country, it is clear that people are better off in the ideal Altruria than in the real United States.[24] 

Although the comparisons are done ironically, humorously and without rancor, we readers come away with a feeling that the Altrurian way is obviously the better way to live.  The Altrurian visitor is, for example, continually doing things that he is told by his bourgeois hosts he shouldn’t, such as helping a porter carry his bags, helping a waitress carry a heavy tray, and talking with a poor person in the street.  The situations are comical but we instinctively think Mr. Homos was in the right.  And we come to see that his way of treating people is more humane than the class-based and status-ridden American way.  Howells makes his case by setting up situations that appeal to our better natures, that is, to the socialism embedded in our hearts.[25] 

That is the key to Howells’ method.  Set up the situations and then let the facts speak for themselves to our better natures.[26]  Annie Kilburn is one of Howell’s less well-known books, but it is a prime example of his realistic and socialistic style.[27]

Socialism of the Heart in Annie Kilburn

Annie Kilburn (1888) is the story of a young woman, the eponymous Annie Kilburn, who inherits a fortune and returns from sojourning as an expatriate in Italy to the small New England town from which she originally hailed.  She returns with the philanthropic intention of doing good things with her wealth for the lower-class workers and poor people there.  The book is a record of her efforts in this regard and the maturation of her thinking. 

The novel consists for the most part of dialogue in which the characters debate social issues and the question of doing good in the world.  It is not, however, a didactic book.  The conversations are realistic and weave naturally in and out of the action.  Each character’s argument has both strong points and weak points.  Howells’ intention seems to be for us to see for ourselves that socialism makes sense.  He is not going to tell us what to believe, albeit he seems to expect that we will reach conclusions consistent with his ideas of complicity, what we might call socialism of the heart.  And I think we do. 

Annie is the central character in the book and the focus of the debates.  Everyone is trying to convince her of their ideas, and her education is what drives the story.  Annie is not, however, an infallible or flawless heroine, and her conclusions are not necessarily the same as ours or those of the author.  

While Annie is the central character, the moral and intellectual center is the local minister, Mr. Peck, who preaches a socialist gospel that attempts to put the Golden Rule into practice.  Peck’s goal is a society based on liberty, equality and fraternity.  Americans proclaim theirs is a land of the free, but liberty, Peck claims, cannot survive without equality and fraternity.  Liberty must be used “to promote equality; or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty.”  And this, he concludes, will form the basis for “the universal ideal of fraternity.”[28] 

Peck proposes that the means of achieving this ideal society is through labor unions in which workers become brothers to each other in their collective struggle for a better society, and through communal living and working arrangements which are cells of the new cooperative system within the old capitalist order.  Toward this end, he supports labor organizing and intends to establish a commune among workers in a neighboring town, practicing what he preaches. [29]   

Peck heaps scorn on Annie’s philanthropic plans.  He claims that philanthropy demeans the poor and demoralizes the rich.  “When the philanthropist offers help,” Peck says, “it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things” in which we live.  It is “a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”[30] 

He claims that in “the truly Christian state, there shall be no more asking and no more giving, no more gratitude and no more merit, no more charity, but only and evermore justice; all shall share alike, and want and luxury and killing toil and heartless indolence shall all cease together.”[31]

When Annie complains that she does not know how to help the poor, Peck responds “Yes, it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves.”  She is rich and does not think she needs anything that poor people could give her.  So, she cannot connect with them.  The only way to genuinely help others is in a cooperative effort in which they help you as well.  That is the gist of the Golden Rule.  It is also the gist of socialism.[32]

There is, however, a troubling gap between Peck’s preaching about the Golden Rule and his practice.  His wife having died, Peck is solely responsible for the care of his young daughter and, in pursuit of his political goals, he is very neglectful of her.  She is shabbily dressed and wanders around the town on her own.  She seems in large part to be fed and cared for by kind neighbors.  Peck, when questioned about whether he cares more for strangers than for the members of his own household, retorts “Who are those of our own household?”  And answering his own question, he proclaims that “All mankind are those of our own household.”[33]

It is a response that raises perpetually perplexing questions about the priorities of social reformers.  Peck is seemingly unable to reconcile his love for humankind with his responsibilities to his daughter, essentially sacrificing her to the cause.  It is a problem that faces all activists.  What limits are there to the risks and hardships to which reformers may subject their friends and families?  And how does one practice socialism at home in a capitalist society?

Peck’s socialist ideas are the main thesis of the book around which most of the discussion turns.  The book consists mainly of characters’ reactions to Peck’s ideas and his reactions to them.  And all of it is directed toward educating Annie.  Prime among the discussants are Mrs. Munger, Mr. Gerrish, Dr. Morrell, and Mrs. Bolton. 

Mrs. Munger is a well-meaning, well-to-do do-gooder socialite for whom philanthropic activities are a way to help her feel good about herself.  Public-spirited for egoistic purposes, she organizes lavish benefits that are ostensibly to aid the poor but that often cost more than they raise.  Dismissing Peck’s insistence on learning from the poor, she also promotes worker education through which the rich can indoctrinate the poor with middle-class ways and mores.  

Although Mrs. Munger feels real sympathy for the downtrodden, and makes convincing appeals in favor of helping the disadvantaged, her philanthropic activities ultimately seem demeaning and disrespectful to workers and the poor.  For these reasons, Peck is dismissive of Mrs. Munger’s activities and won’t support them.  And it is in large part from watching Mrs. Munger, and being dragooned into helping her, that Annie comes to conclude that philanthropy is a form of vanity that serves mainly to puff up the rich rather than elevate the poor.  It is a conclusion that we readers come to feel as well.[34]

Mr. Gerrish is a self-made successful local merchant who, like Peck, is an opponent of philanthropy, but for very different reasons.  His opposition is Scrooge-like.  Espousing conventional views in favor of capitalism and individualism, Gerrish condemns labor unions, the mollycoddling of workers, and aid to the poor.  He repeatedly boasts about his financial success and high standing in the community and his harshness toward his own workers who better not speak out or step out of line.  He claims to be a model for the poor to emulate.

“I came into this town a poor boy without a penny in my pocket,” Gerrish exclaims, “and I have made my way, every inch of it, unaided and alone.  I am a thorough believer in giving everyone an equal chance to rise and to – get along; I would not throw an obstacle in anybody’s way; but I do not believe – I do not believe- in pampering those who have not risen, or have made no effort to rise.”  He favors what might be called equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome.[35] 

Although he is clearly a boor, Gerrish makes some strong arguments in favor of self-reliance – it builds character and promotes innovation – and against labor unions – they protect the lazy and incompetent, and they disrupt efficient business operations.  But Annie and we readers come to feel repelled by the callousness of his arguments and actions.  His boasting also seems to reveal an underlying insecurity that is endemic to capitalism.  It is a system in which people are constantly engaged in zero-sum competition, with today’s winner in danger of becoming tomorrow’s loser.  Our instinctive humanity is provoked against Gerrish’s Social Darwinian inhumanity.[36]

Dr. Morrell represents enlightened bourgeois opinion, sympathetic to the plight of the workers and the poor, but sufficiently satisfied with the way things are not to want to upset the status quo.  He is a decent man, and he is amused and attracted by Annie’s enthusiasm for social reform.  But he is too skeptical and self-satisfied to seem to Annie or to us like a hero.  Morrell calls Peck “a dreamer,” which is not a compliment, and facetiously derides Peck’s insistence on working with the poor and sharing their lot.  The doctor remarks that when Peck says “that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay in the world, he must share them.  It seems to me that I might as well say that as long as there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I must share them.”[37]  Morrell cautiously courts Annie and seemingly catches her at the end of the book.[38]

Mrs. Bolton, Annie’s hardworking housekeeper provides a facetious view of the rich people who take their vacations in the town.  She wonders, for example, what the rich women who visit the town mean when they say they come there for a rest.  She declaims “I don’t know what they want to rest from; but if it’s from doing nothin’ all winter long, I guess they go back to the city boot’ near’s tired’s they come.”[39]  Some of them are rich busy-body do-gooders, like Mrs. Munger, but most are rich do-nothings. 

Mrs. Bolton and most of the townspeople have mixed feelings about Peck.  Most respect his idealism but think his ideas are utopian.  The narrator explains that “They revered his goodness and his wisdom, but they regarded his conduct of life unpractical…and he could not himself have kept the course he had marked out.”[40]  They are supportive but skeptical.  Except for Annie. 

Annie is enthralled by Peck’s ideas and his example, and she comes to a decision to join him in working and living with a group of poor people in what we today might call a commune.  This romantic venture does not come to pass, however, and the ending of the book is realistically anti-climactic.  Peck is killed in an accident before Annie can effectuate this drastic change of life, and she is secretly relieved.[41]  Annie had regretted her pledge to join Peck in his project almost immediately after making it, but had felt bound by her word to him.  His demise relieved her from that pledge. 

Having been saved from her own foolish romanticism, Annie resigns herself to a privileged existence, albeit henceforth doing small deeds of goodness with others, and not just philanthropically for them.  Annie adopts Peck’s daughter, and spends time on local community projects, working well with people who are socially her inferiors, even including people she does not like.  She no longer gives money.  No philanthropy, just common work.  She finds that it’s the work that makes the relationship.  In this, she keeps some allegiance to Peck’s philosophy. 

In the end, no one wins the debate in the book, and Annie, is still adrift in her ideas and inconsistent in her actions.  But we readers are left with the feeling that the socialist minister Peck has had the best of the argument even if he, too, is inconsistent in his actions.  I think we are left with the feeling that Annie’s contradictions, and seemingly ours as well, stem from being well-off and unable to reconcile our responsibilities to ourselves and our families with our responsibilities to humankind.  We have difficulty giving up our privileges to fully join the cause with others.  We are left feeling socialist in our hearts but inconsistent in our actions.  But maybe that is all right and all that Howells would have hoped for and expected of us.                                   

The Food and Drug Administration, Workers’ Compensation, Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Civil Rights Acts, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, these are just a few of the programs that were part of the socialist agenda and that have been spurred by socialism of the heart.  This was an agenda and an attitude that was promoted by Howells and many others in his time.  To them, socialism just made common sense.  The key was to help other people to realize that fact.  Howells hoped that presenting the facts and letting them speak for themselves would help people to recognize the underlying socialist message in the facts and in their hearts. 

It worked to a great extent in Howells’ time.  Maybe it is working again now?  I was a college history professor off-and-on from the 1960’s to the 2010’s and what I increasingly heard from my students over the years was, “If this is socialism, what is wrong with it?” “That’s a good question,” I would usually reply, “What do you think?” 

What do you think?

                                                                                                                                    BW 2/23

[1] William Dean Howells.  My Mark Twain.  Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 1910.  P.52.

[2] Laura Wronski. Axios/Momentive Poll: Capitalism and Socialism. 6/15/21. 

[3] Jason Puskar. “William Dean Howells and the Insurance of the Real.” Project Muse. American Library of History. Oxford University Press, 2006.

[4] William Dean Howells. Annie Kilburn. Braschi Digital Publishing.   P.124

[5] Michael Harrington. Socialism: Past and Future. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1989.

[6] Axel Honneth. The Idea of Socialism: A Renewal.  Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017. p.10.

[7] David Shanon. The Socialist Party of America: A History.  New York: MacMillan Press, 1955.

[8] Barry Goldwater. Conscience of a Conservative. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.

[9] Robert Kuttner. “Socialism rears its ugly head.” The American Prospect. 4/9/19.

[10] Julia Manchester. “Majority of Young Adults in the United States have a negative view of capitalism: Poll. The Hill. 6/28/21.

[11] Felix Salman. Axios Poll. 6/17/19.

[12] Laura Wronski. Axios/Momentive Poll: Capitalism and Socialism of June 15, 2021.

[13] William Dean Howells   Criticism and Fiction.   A Public Domain Book. 1891. P.11.

[14] Howells. Ibid. P.7.  

[15] Howells. Ibid. P.5.

[16]William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham.  American Classics Series. Musicum Books, 2017.

[17] William Dean Howells. A Hazard of New Fortunes. American Classics Series, 2015.

[18] William Dean Howells.  A Traveler from Altruria.  New York: Harper & Bros., 1894.

[19] Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham. Pp.307-308, 320.

[20] Howells. A Hazard of New Fortunes. P. 80.

[21] Ibid. Pp. 75-76, 152-153, 230, 250.

[22] Ibid.  Pp.314, 333-334

[23] Howells.  A Traveler from Altruria.  P.27.

[24] Ibid. Pp.10, 13.

[25] Ibid. Pp.2, 5, 35.

[26] Howells. Criticism and Fiction.  Pp.3-4, 7.

[27] Christopher Key. “Willaim Dean Howells and the Genteel Socialism in Annie Kilburn.” Academia Proceedings. University of West Bohemia, 1999.

[28] Howells.  Annie Kilburn. P.124.

[29] P.125.

[30] P.124.

[31] Pp.124-125.

[32] Ibid. P.89.

[33] Ibid. P. 118.

[34] Ibid. P.136.

[35] Ibid. P.46.

[36] Ibid. P.141.

[37] Ibid.  P.155

[38] Ibid.  P.173.

[39] Ibid.  P.26

[40] Ibid.  P.165

[41] Ibid.  P.153.

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Rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Pre-Modern Moralist as Post-Modern Cynic. Resolving the Liar’s Paradox.

Rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

Pre-Modern Moralist as Post-Modern Cynic.

Resolving the Liar’s Paradox.

Burton Weltman

Summary: Rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

This is an essay about rereading the novel Cat’s Cradle and trying to get it right this time.    

I first read Cat’s Cradle almost sixty years ago, shortly after it was published in 1963.  It is a satire of science, religion and social relations that largely takes place on the fictitious Caribbean Island of San Lorenzo.  The book created a sensation in the United States and was widely considered a bible to the countercultural youth movement at that time.  It remains popular today, especially among high school and college students.  And there have been at least a half-dozen dramatizations of the book for movies, television and the stage, including a calypso musical.

The book focuses on four main characters: John, the book’s hapless narrator; Dr. Felix Hoenikker, an unrepentant inventor of the atomic bomb; Bokonon, a fanatical religious leader on San Lorenzo; and, Papa Monzano, the vicious dictator of the Island. The book has generally been read as a diatribe against the soullessness of science, the oppressiveness of government, and the boorishness of the bourgeoisie.  It has also been seen as an invitation to postmodern nihilism. 

The narrator is a lost soul seeking an answer to the question of whether there is meaning to life and the universe.  He seemingly finds his answer – which is “No” – in the metaphor of a cat’s cradle.  A cat’s cradle is a string sculpture made up of loops of string and the empty spaces in between.  In describing a cat’s cradle, the narrator focuses on the empty spaces between the loops of string and concludes that the universe is similarly empty of meaning.  

Conventional readings of the book follow the narrator’s conclusion and see universal meaningless as the book’s main message.  Hoenikker’s complete indifference to human life and the horrible consequences of his scientific discoveries reinforce this conclusion.  Bokonon, in turn, preaches a fatalistic nihilism that is also generally taken as a message of the book.  The inhumane brutality of Monzano and the cruel dysfunction of his country are conventionally seen as Vonnegut’s dystopian description of the real world and his prediction for the future.  This is the way that I read the book back in the 1960’s. 

Upon recently rereading the book, I have, however, come to the conclusion that this conventional interpretation is a mistake.  And it is a misreading that contributed, or at least reinforced, anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-social attitudes among counter-culturalists, including me, that I now believe were wrongheaded during the 1960’s and have had harmful consequences to the present. This essay is an attempt to read the book in a way that I think makes better sense.  

The essay makes three main points about the book.

First, I think that the metaphor of a cat’s cradle is best understood by focusing on the connections made by the strands and loops of string instead of the empty space between them.  The metaphor speaks to the connections between people and their mutual aid, not the emptiness around them.

Second, I think that the book is best read as an example of the liar’s paradox. The narrator openly says that everything in the book is a pack of lies.  Readers must not take literally what the narrator and characters say but should instead focus on what they do.  That is the way to resolve the liar’s paradox.

Third, I think the book should be seen as a warning from the narrator, who is a self-described Jonah, and not as a dystopian description of reality or prediction for the future.

If you accept these three points, I think you come to a very different conclusion about the book’s attitudes toward science and society than the conventional reading, and it makes a difference.

What does it matter?  It’s only a book.

A basic assumption of this essay is that it matters how people read and interpret books, including novels such as Cat’s Cradle.  I believe that reading a book is an exercise in understanding the world.  Understanding a novel such as Cat’s Cradle, for example, requires readers to get out of their own heads and their own lives, and to empathize with the book’s author and characters in order to see the world as they do.  It requires readers to get past their prejudices and consider alternative views of things.  And it requires them to get beyond the superficial surface of things in the book and look for potential underlying meanings. 

If readers fail to do these things, and read merely to reinforce their prejudices, they are likely to get nothing from a book or, even worse, get reinforcement for misguided ideas and attitudes.  In turn, I think people who misread books are more likely to misunderstand the world.  I believe that is what happened to me and others who misread Cat’s Cradle.

Mea Culpa: Words have consequences.

Rejection of science.  Scorn for intellectual elites.  Distrust of government.  Skepticism toward electoral politics.  Support for tactics of social and political disruption, including violence.  Advocacy of social and political divisions and divisiveness.  Cynicism as a way of life.

Looks like a list of present-day rightwing attitudes and ideas.  And it is.  But it is also a list of attitudes and ideas that were common among members of the leftwing countercultural movement during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  What goes around comes around, as the saying goes.  Seeds that leftists sowed during those years have grown to threaten many, including me, who supported the countercultural movement then and who are now, in the name of sanity, in the position of opposing things we once espoused.  It’s ironic.

And Kurt Vonnegut, himself a master of irony, looms ironically large in the origins of this mess. Vonnegut was a guru to the countercultural movement and his novel Cat’s Cradle was widely considered a bible to the movement.  Alas, as happens with many gurus, he was, I have come to believe, misunderstood by many of his acolytes.  As was Cat’s Cradle.  And these misunderstandings have come home to plague us. 

This essay is an attempt to correct those misunderstandings.  In particular, I think that many readers of Cat’s Cradle misunderstood the symbolism of the cat’s cradle in the book.  I think, also, that many readers failed to penetrate the liar’s paradox that lies at the heart of the novel.  And I think that many readers took the book as a description of the real world and/or a prediction of the future, instead of a warning about what could occur if people didn’t change their ways.  These were mistakes.

As a result, these readers, including me in my younger days, may ironically have fostered some of the idiotic ideas and attitudes we are opposing today.  Because the rightwing idiocy of today seems in part to be an offshoot of the skepticism turned cynicism that was promoted by the countercultural movement and that we in the movement attributed to Vonnegut.  Mea Culpa.

Background: The Times were Changing.

Much has been written about the decade of the 1960’s, perhaps overmuch.  For purposes of this essay, the 1960’s was a particularly tumultuous time in American history.  While it is true that every time is the best of times and the worst of times, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, the 1960’s were a time of unparalleled prosperity for Americans, and especially middle-class young people, and a time of disastrous social and political turmoil.  Young people, especially white young people, enjoyed material lives better than the kings of old, but were also disheartened and even endangered by social turmoil and political dysfunction. 

They were confronted with the hypocrisy of a government that was destroying Vietnam in the name of saving it and that supported dictators around the world in the name of freedom; mortified by a scientific community that produced atom bombs in the name of peace, and scientists who swore that cigarettes and asbestos were safe to inhale and that napalm was a benign defoliant; assaulted on all sides by advertising in which famous people proclaimed the virtues of useless and even harmful products; affronted by professors who worked for government agencies and corporations rationalizing all of these horrors. 

To many young people, the contrasts and contradictions between material prosperity and social bankruptcy were stark.  Facing a seemingly endless Vietnam War for which young men were being drafted and sent off to die as cannon fodder, recurring racial riots in American cities in which young black people were the main victims, multiple assassinations of liberal political leaders, and the ever-present danger of a nuclear holocaust, many young people despaired at the state of American society.  A combination of guilt at being prosperous in the midst of poverty and fear of being killed in war drove many young people into political causes.

 Many of them supported the counterculture and the political New Left in hopes of disestablishing what they called the Establishment – the politicians, professors and businessmen who they claimed were running and ruining the country.  Full of the impatience characteristic of young people, and aiming but failing to make a quick difference in the world, the skeptics among them often turned into cynics, and dissent became defiance.  Epater le bourgeoisie (stick it to the middle class), a mantra of the late nineteenth-century French countercultural movement, was adopted as a slogan of the mid twentieth-century American countercultural movement.       

The question of authority loomed large in the movement and “Question authority” became another one of the movement’s mantras.  But questioning authority and demanding that those in authority justify their right to power slid into rejecting authority whole cloth.  Rejecting illegitimate authority and wrongheaded supposedly authoritative expertise turned into skepticism and then cynicism toward all authority and expertise.  Authority was frequently conflated with authoritarianism.  And as is so often the case, those who went to unreasonable extremes in disdaining authority and the authority of expertise got most of the media attention.  And they cited Kurt Vonnegut in support of their position.      

By the 1980’s, the countercultural movement had pretty much died, but many of its attitudes lived on, sometimes in unwanted ways.  Echoes of the science skepticism, defiance of middle-class social norms, and rejection of pragmatic politics that counter-culturalists promoted can be heard in the science denial and political vigilantism of the rightwing today.  It is an unfortunate irony that in the name of sanity and reasonableness we are having to fight back today against attitudes and positions promoted by the right-wing that we on the left originated back in the 1960’s.  And irony of ironies, I think we even got Vonnegut wrong.

Cat’s Cradle: The Plot?

Kurt Vonnegut is commonly called a postmodernist writer, based largely on the seemingly random flips and flops of the plots of his novels and the seemingly cynical and dystopian views expressed by narrators and characters in his books.  Finding a plot in his peripatetic works is often impossible and, in any case, often irrelevant.  Cat’s Cradle was published a year before Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in his widely influential book Understanding Media (1964) that “the medium is the message.”  Consistent with McLuhan’s thesis, Vonnegut’s disjointed method has generally been taken as conveying a sardonically anarchistic message.  And the sardonically cynical views of his narrator have also been widely taken as Vonnegut’s message.  I don’t agree.

Vonnegut has, in turn, often been accused of contributing to the dumbing down of American culture.  Cat’s Cradle, like his other books, is made up of short chapters, vignettes full of easy witticisms, a few pages each, with people coming and going in circles for a couple of hundred pages.  Based on this narrative method, Vonnegut has been accused of promoting the shortening of people’s attention spans.  Critics compare and conflate his short chapters with the ten-minute segments of the typical television program, and with the instant and abbreviated messaging on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.  I don’t agree. 

Cat’s Cradle is, in fact, mildly amusing, easy to read, and it is easy to get taken in by its cynical surface.  But I think that the book was actually a challenge to the notion that the medium is the message, and that reality is at bottom a hodgepodge of postmodern nihilism.  I think Vonnegut adopted a postmodern form to deliver a premodern moral message.  His chapters are epigrammatic and his characters hop-skip all over the world, but he challenged the reader to find the themes and messages that underlay the chaotic surface and to connect them in meaningful ways.  Underneath the new-fangled postmodern form is some old-fashioned premodern moralism, a humanist message lurking in cynic’s garb.

What can be called the plot of Cat’s Cradle consists of the meanderings of the narrator whose name is John but who calls himself Jonah.  He is a journalist in search of a story about the founders of the atom bomb and he has ostensibly written the book we are reading.  John is initially focused on the life and times of a scientist named Felix Hoenikker, who was supposedly one of the inventors of the bomb. 

Hoenikker is portrayed as a total nerd, completely wrapped up in his scientific work, divorced from humanity, and indifferent to the inhumane uses of his discoveries.  His last invention is a chemical concoction called ice-nine which completely freezes anything into which it comes in contact.  Released into the world, it would freeze everyone and everything.  Hoenikker carelessly leaves some ice-nine to his three very weird children.  Not a pretty picture of science and scientists.  

After Hoenikker dies, the narrator wanders to the fictional Caribbean Island of San Lorenzo in search of Hoenikker’s kids.  San Lorenzo is ruled by a vicious dictator named Papa Monzano, whose mortal enemy is a spiritual leader by the name of Bokonon.  Bokonon teaches a philosophy of passivity in the face of inevitability and detachment from humanity.  “As it was supposed to happen”is his response to anything that happens, especially things that most people would regret or mourn.[1]  And “Nothing” is his answer to the question of the meaning of life.[2]  Monzano is ostensibly dedicated to wiping out Bokononism, hoping to find and kill Bokonon, and to execute anyone who is found professing Bokonon’s religion. 

This hostility of Monzano to Bokonon is seemingly a strange contradiction.  You would think that Bokonon’s philosophy of passivity would be the perfect doctrine for sustaining a brutal dictatorship.  And in the end, we find out that Monzono and Bokonon are secretly in cahoots and that Monzano has secretly been a supporter of Bokonon’s philosophy.[3]  The supposed feud between Monzano and Bokonon had been manufactured by the two of them to stimulate public interest in Bokonon’s banned religion while also justifying Monzano’s brutal regime.

The story flips and flops around San Lorenzo and the narrator encounters there a disparate cast of discontented, disoriented and dismal people from many walks of life.  Toward the end, the narrator is slated to become the President of the island and marry the most beautiful woman in the country, but then things fall completely apart when some ice-nine is unleashed and everything starts to freeze.  In the midst of the mess, Monzano dies and Bokonon tells his followers to commit suicide, which almost all of them do[4].  It’s a Jonestown tragedy written some fifteen years before that event.  The perils of passivity. 

Except for Bokonon.  He doesn’t commit suicide and merrily meanders away.  In the end, the narrator and a few other foreigners in San Lorenzo are hanging on for dear life.  Having previously acknowledged that he, too, is a Bokononist, the narrator apparently intends us to see his book as a Bokononist tract.  But I don’t think we can.  A true Boknonist would not write this book.

Cat’s Cradle and a Karass.

To a Bokononist, life is worthless, the universe is meaningless, and society is one big fraud.  All is empty and emptiness is all.  Focusing on the empty space in a cat’s cradle is a Bokononist point of view.  The emptiness is a commentary on life, the universe and everything.  But it isn’t the only way to see a cat’s cradle.

Cat’s cradle is a child’s game played with a piece of string.  You wind the string around the fingers of your hands to form various shapes that could be considered a string sculpture and that looks like a cradle.  Although it is a game played with little children, it is actually an exercise in a field of mathematics called topology.  Topology is the study of the geometric properties and spatial relations which can be derived from a continuous and interconnected network, such as the shapes you can make with a piece of string. 

Contriving a cat’s cradle requires a dexterous bit of handiwork and a lot of complicated twisting and turning of the string.  The result is string and space forming a geometric configuration which is wide open to interpretation.  What you make of it depends on how you look at it.  It is like a gestalt in which you decide what is the figure and what is the ground.  And what you make of a cat’s cradle depends in large part on whether you focus on the empty space formed between the segments of the string or on the connections made by the various turns of the string.  Most people, including the characters in Cat’s Cradle, focus on the empty space.  And they are unhappy with the result. 

One of the characters in the book, Newt Hoenikker repeatedly complains that his father, the renowned nuclear physicist, insisted on playing the game with him and chortling when Newt was dumfounded at the emptiness of the result.  A lot of twiddling with a piece of string, Newt complains, and, in the end, there was “No damn cat, no damn cradle.”[5]  Newt grumbled that the game was a just nasty way for spiteful adults to make derisory fun of innocent children. 

But I think Newt got it wrong, as do most readers of the book.  I think Vonnegut intended us to focus on the connections made by the string, not on the empty space.  The connections are a metaphor for social relations, a message that we are all connected and the connections are what counts.  “Only connect,” famously opined E.M. Forster, and I think that is the point of the book.  It is a premodern moral in postmodern garb.  But it is visible only to those who have eyes to see it.  Like most readers, I did not see it when I first read the book, but I think I do now.   

It is a message that is easily missed since Bokonon, whose philosophy runs through the book, disparages making connections among people.  In speaking about social relations, Bokonon distinguishes between what he calls a karass and a granfalloon.[6]  A karass is a group of people who, unknown to themselves, are linked together in some obscure way to fulfill some obscure purpose of God.  The people have no idea who is in their group and what the purpose of the group is.  It is a mystery, and it is a waste of time and effort to try to figure it out. 

As such, Bokonon says, people should just go through their lives as separate individuals without consciously linking up with or caring about anyone else.  If people somehow become part of a karass and do God’s work, so be it, even though they don’t know it.  In turn, if they don’t become part of a karass, so be it, because they won’t know it anyway, and they should just get on with their meaningless lives.  “Whatever…,” as young people today might say. 

A granfalloon is a network of people who think they are a karass but they aren’t, and who consciously try to do God’s good work, but don’t.  According to Bokonon, if you try to make connections with others and make your life meaningful, it will inevitably be foolish, fraudulent and a failure.  So, don’t try.  The moral of Bokonon’s philosophy is that if you try to do good work, you won’t.  If you don’t try to do good work, you might do it anyway, albeit incidentally.  In any case, there is no sense in trying.  It is a fool’s world and we are all fools in one way or another.  All will be as it will be, so just let it be.

That is what Bokonon says.  But it is not what he does.  Bokonon is neither passive nor private. He is personally and publicly very active, even as he supposedly tries to hide from the dictator Monzano.  Bokonon fervently writes books and goes around preaching.  And he courts converts who are linked to him and to each other, and who consciously form a group of Bokononists, a grouping that should be considered a granfalloon, a false grouping, according to his philosophy. 

The contradiction between what is said and what is done in the book includes the narrator.  Even as John claims to be a Bokononist, he is writing a book that he expects people to read and, thereby, become linked to him and to each other as readers of his book.  And despite his professions of Bokononist misanthropy, he goes around helping everyone he meets. This contradiction between what is being said and what is being done is at the core of the liar’s paradox that is, in turn, at the core of the novel.

Bokononism and the Liar’s Paradox.

No sooner do we open Cat’s Cradle than we see on the dedication page the warning that “Nothing in this book is true.”[7]  It is commonplace in works of fiction for the author or the publisher to insert a liability disclaimer to the effect that nothing in the book is intended to reflect on any real person.  The disclaimer is a protection against suits for libel.  Since Cat’s Cradle is a work of fiction, and a satirical work at that, we might expect a disclaimer of this sort in the book.

But in Cat’s Cradle, this statement is no mere liability disclaimer.  The idea that everything is a lie is like a mantra that is repeated by characters throughout the book. The narrator tells us, for example, that “The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: ‘All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.’”[8]  And these statements by the narrator and his mentor Bokonon place readers squarely in the middle of the liar’s paradox/ What are we to believe? 

The liar’s paradox is an ancient Greek conundrum.  A man says that he always lies and that everything he says is a lie.  So, are we to believe him?  If we do, then we are, in effect, contradicting him and saying that not everything he says is a lie.  If we don’t believe him, then we are saying that he is, in fact, a liar but we can’t believe him when he says he is a liar.  We are trapped in a contradiction and foiled at every turn.  What are we to do?  The solution, I suggest, is not to rely on what the man says but on what he does.  And this is, I think, a key to understanding Cat’s Cradle:  Look at what the author, the narrator and the characters do.

While ostensibly adhering to Bokonon’s misanthropic philosophy of isolationism, the narrator is continually trying to make connections with people.  He makes friends and helps people wherever he goes.  His prosocial actions are a complete contradiction of his supposed antisocial beliefs.  And they save his life.  

At the end of the book, the narrator bands together with a group of unlikely allies, all of them very different from each other and himself, to save themselves and try to make their way in a world devastated by ice-nine.  Based on these characters’ actions, the message of the book seems, therefore, to be proactive and prosocial rather than passive and antisocial.  The book seems to be telling us to make connections with people, trust people, and cooperate with others.  Very different from the Bokononist cynicism and nihilism that most readers take from the book. 

But maybe not.  Given that the book is supposedly a pack of lies, can we believe that the narrator’s description of these actions is true?  Are we still caught in the liar’s paradox?  I think not.  And I think that the metaphor of the cat’s cradle shows the way.

The story is structured like a cat’s cradle with the deeds as the strings and the ideas as the empty spaces.  The disclaimers that everything in the book is lies refers to the words being spoken and the ideas being promulgated, not the deeds being described.  The deeds provide the context and the framework for the characters’ words.  The narrator provides the doings in the story as merely a set-up for the speeches.  What the narrator and the other characters say is essentially empty of truth.  But we readers can rely on the accuracy of the things the characters did as background to what they said.

A cat’s cradle can be seen as a metaphor of mutual aid.  Each twist of a cat’s cradle depends on the others.  If one connection fails, all of them fail.  During the course of the book, the narrator hooks up with a disparate and often desperate group of people, some of them quite obnoxious and unappealing, but who end up supporting each other in the ice-nine crisis that ends the book.  It is this cooperation, rather than the cynical sayings of Bokonon, that I think is the underlying message of the book.  The book is an overlay of cynicism with compassion underneath.  I think this overlay/underlay aspect of the book may account for much of its popularity.  The book gives readers a chance to sneer at the world and feel superior to the dummkopfs around them, but it still leaves readers with a feeling that help is at hand.  

An action speaks louder than a thousand words, as the saying might go.  The book is like a gestalt and the reader has to decide whether to focus on the words as the foreground with the deeds as background or the deeds as the foreground with the words as background.  Like the strings and spaces of a cat’s cradle.  And, I think that the underlying message spoken by the actions of the narrator and his colleagues in Cat’s Cradle is that caring, connecting and cooperating with others is the means and meaning of life.  The book seems, thereby, to be a warning against the passivity, misanthropy, and nihilism that seem to be spreading like ice-nine in our society, freezing the very sources of our humanity. 

Jonah and the Warning.

The conventional reading of Cat’s Cradle is that the book is a dystopian description and prediction of the future.  We are like the horrible people in the book, and we are heading toward some facsimile of the book’s horrible events.  “We have met the enemy and they are us,” concluded the cartoon character Pogo after searching near and far for the source of the world’s problems.  There is a fatalism in this reading of the book that parallels Bokonon’s nihilistic philosophy.  I don’t agree.  I think the book was intended as a warning, not a prediction.  We are called upon to change our ways.  And there is room for hope. 

In the first words of the book, the narrator admonishes us to “Call me Jonah.”[9]  His actual name is John, but his admonition is a parody of the opening lines of Moby Dick, in which the narrator says to “Call me Ishmael.”  Ishmael in the Bible was the spurned first son of Abraham.  He was known as a messenger and a prophet in his own right, that is, as someone who brings warnings from God to shape up or be shipped out.  In telling us to call him Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick is seemingly alerting us that he is bringing us a warning in the form of the story in the book.

Jonah in the Bible plays a similar role to Ishmael.  He was a messenger from God who had been sent to warn the people of Nineveh to change their evil ways or face destruction.  Afraid that the citizens of Nineveh would attack him for bringing such ill tidings, Jonah tried to run away.  He disguised himself and sailed as a passenger on a ship.  But you can’t run or hide from God, and the ship was hit with a terrible storm.  Unable to escape the storm, the sailors decided that Jonah was to blame, that he was a magnet for misfortune, so they threw him overboard.  At which point, he was swallowed by a big fish. 

Jonah eventually repented of his disobedience, escaped from the fish, went back to Nineveh, and delivered God’s warning to the people.  Hearing the word of God, the citizens of Nineveh almost immediately repented of their evil ways and became righteous.  There are many potential morals to the story of Jonah, but one of them is that if you warn people of impending doom, they might actually change their damned ways.  There is hope.

Hope is not the moral that the narrator of Cat’s Cradle derives from the Jonah story.  To the contrary.  In claiming to be a Jonah, the narrator focuses on how he has throughout his life been a magnet for misfortune.  He does not seem to get the point that Jonah’s misfortunes were the result of his failing to deliver God’s warning to Nineveh and to care for the fate of Nineveh’s citizens.  And he similarly does not seem to get the point of his role in Cat’s Cradle, the book he is writing. But we can see the point, if we look. 

The key to the story of Jonah was that he was supposed to give a warning.  I think that is also the key to the story of the narrator in Cat’s Cradle.  It is not merely that Jonah and John were magnets for misfortune.  It is that they were sent to warn people to change their ways, in John’s case to infuse their lives with humane caring.  In this view, science need not be soulless and society need not be oppressive, if they are based on caring.

The story in Cat’s Cradle is not intended to mirror reality, either past, present or future.  That is evident in the fantastic nature and science-fiction aspects of much of the story.  But it is also evident in the admission, even repeated insistence, that the story is a pack of lies.  As a pack of lies, the story is a metaphorical warning against the sorts of horrors that could be in store for us if we don’t change our ways. 

In disguising his warning in satire and science fiction, the author/narrator perhaps hoped he might be spared the wrath of his readers (Jonah should have thought of that strategy).  But maybe he also hoped that readers might be induced or seduced into thinking about what is being said, and might conclude that the book is not about sneering but about caring.

In the last lines of the book, after ice-nine has killed off most of the people and other living things, the narrator runs across Bokonon wandering around the countryside.  Bokonon says that if he were younger, he would climb the highest mountain and commit suicide while giving the finger to God.  It is an adolescent gesture of defiance, the sort of sneering bravado that is likely to appeal to adolescent readers of Cat’s Cradle.  But the key word in Bokonon’s statement is “if.”  If he were younger, he would die and defy God.  But he is not younger and so he has no intention of actually killing himself and making his meaningless gesture.  It is just the last of Bokonon’s cynical lies.  And it is the last piece of evidence that we readers should not take him or his sneering philosophy seriously.

Despite having supposedly adopted Bokonon’s fatalistic philosophy, the narrator chose to compose this book and offer it as a warning to us.  If he believed that everything was predetermined as Bokonon says, and that everything points to the inevitable doom of humankind, the narrator wouldn’t have written the book and left it for us to read.  It’s only if he cared for us, and because he cared for us, his readers, and had hope that we might heed his warning and change our ways, that he would bother and did bother.

Beyond Cynicism: Seeing through a glass half-full.

The conventional interpretation of Cat’s Cradle is that it is a darkly cynical book.  Semi science fiction, semi fantasy, semi magic realism, and thoroughly dystopian.  Support for the typical adolescent’s discovery that adults are fallible, and that people are not what they seem to be, or try to seem to be.  Easy to conclude that the adult world is a fraud, the game is fixed, everything is predetermined, and we are powerless to make things better.  Cynicism logically follows. 

But cynicism is an elitest attitude.  The cynical think of themselves as superior to the masses of people who accept the stupidities of society and conventionality.  Cynicism is also pathetic.  Cynics wallow in self-pity, and think of themselves as especially put upon.  Woe is me to be stuck in such a stupid world with such stupid people.  Not a very democratic attitude.  And a contradiction of the equal rights, participatory democracy and “power to the people” that many young progressives promoted during the 1960’s.

I think that Cat’s Cradle is a test for those who think of themselves as politically and socially enlightened.  The cynical surface of the book is a trap for self-styled progressives who say they are for the people but who really think of themselves as above the people.  Those who see the book in solely cynical terms, and don’t see the underlying moralism, are falling into the trap.  I think Vonnegut is subtly mocking them as much as he is overtly mocking the bigoted, ignorant yahoos who promote racism, sexism, and all the other evils he excoriates.

I think that Vonnegut uses cynicism as a pose that we readers are expected to identify with but then see through.  Cat’s Cradle is postmodernist cynical and hopeless on the surface but pre-modernist moralistic and hopeful underneath.  The hopefulness is something you have to look for, and you have to be hopeful yourself in order to find it.  Like faith, which is a sentiment that can overcome doubt, hope is a feeling that can overcome pessimism.  Just as you cannot really have faith without first having doubts – there is no need for faith if you don’t have any doubts – you cannot have hope without first feeling pessimistic. 

And I think that the underlying sentimentality in Cat’s Cradle is one of the reasons the book was so popular among young people when it was first published and continues to be popular today.  Young people can identify with the cynical surface while, at the same time, be comforted by the underlying moralism, even if they don’t realize it.  Like Mark Twain, with whom Vonnegut is often compared, Vonnegut’s work got darker as he got older.  But in Cat’s Cradle, which is one of his earliest books, light shines through if you open your eyes to see it. 

Vladimir Nabokov supposedly claimed that there is no such thing as reading, only rereading.  Reading mainly glides along the surface of a book.  Rereading is a way of getting beneath the surface.  I think that rereading can take at least two different forms.  The first is to actually read through the book a second time.  A second is to take notes, make annotations, raise issues, ask questions, propose counter arguments, and generally think thoroughly about the book while you are reading it and after you have finished it.  The point is to get beneath the surface of the book.

I think that in Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut was challenging readers to get beneath the surface of his glib narrative, to see that caring and not cynicism was the core message of the book.  Like a lot of other people, I failed to recognize, let alone meet, that challenge when I first read the book.  That’s too bad.  It made a difference.  I think that I recognize it this time.  Better late than never.

                                                                                                                                    BW 11/22

[1] Kurt Vonnegut.  Cat’s Cradle. New York: Dial Press Paperbacks, 1963. P. 100.

[2] P. 256

[3] Pp. 186, 229-230

[4] P.283.

[5] Pp.21, 178.

[6] Pp. 13, 106.

[7] Dedication page.

[8] P. 16.

[9] P.11

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The Second Amendment cannot mean what the NRA and right-wing Justices on the Supreme Court have said it does. Would you want to keep a musket in your house? Checking your guns at the Tombstone city limits.

The Second Amendment cannot mean what the NRA

and right-wing Justices on the  Supreme Court have said it does.

Would you want to keep a musket in your house? 

Checking your guns at the Tombstone city limits.

Burton Weltman

Note:  I am writing this introduction on May 25, 2022 and I am reposting an essay that I first wrote some eight years ago.  Yesterday, yet another mass school shooting took place in the United States.  So far, nineteen elementary school students and two teachers have died as a result of this latest massacre.  There have been some 212 mass shootings in the United States so far this year in some 144 days.  It is estimated that some 45,000 people will be killed this year with guns in this country.  This is a rate of death by guns that is quantum leaps higher than any other industrialized country.  The situation is crazy and it is crazy to think that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution requires us to put up with this.

Whatever your approach to construing the Constitution, and especially if you are a proponent of strictly construing it and/or of finding the original intention of the Founders, as the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court claim to be, it is literally impossible for you to find in good faith that the Second Amendment was intended or can be extended to cover the gun laws, or rather lack of gun laws, in this country.

In construing the Constitution, it is one thing, for example, to extend the free speech protections of the First Amendment to radios, televisions and internet communications when the Founders had only newspapers and the town square in which to say their piece.  Modern methods of communication are just more of the same sort of thing as newspapers and public spaces.  But the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to carry a gun as part of a government militia is a whole different thing than the right to keep a gun in your own home and carry it around in public.  Let alone own and carry an assault weapon.

As I try to explain in this essay, it was literally impossible for the Founders to have intended this sort of behavior, or for the Second Amendment to be extended to cover it, both because of the explicit language of the Amendment and because of the factual situation that pertained at the time the Amendment was written.  And the Second Amendment was never construed to guarantee an individual’s right to own and carry a gun, or to overturn gun control regulations, until fairly recently in the twenty-first century.

Remember the oft dramatized battle of the Earps against the Clantons at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona?  The fight was precipitated by the refusal of the Clantons to check their guns at the city limits before entering Tombstone.  Tombstone had strict gun control regulations, as did many towns during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including such famous western cowboy towns as Dodge City, Abilene and Deadwood.  Law enforcement officials were the only ones allowed to carry guns in town.  And no one thought these regulations were somehow in violation of the Second Amendment.  A right-wing majority of Justices on the Supreme Court – they cannot be considered conservatives as they are often called and like to call themselves – has undertaken in recent years a radical rejection of some two hundred years of Second Amendment practice in this country.

It has often been said that the Constitution should not be construed as a suicide pact.  It is either mass murderous lunacy or murderous political cynicism to keep on as we have been doing in this country.  In the vain hope that arguments in this essay might contribute to the discussion of gun controls, I am reposting it today.

BW  5/25/22

Construing the Constitution.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution cannot plausibly mean what a majority of Supreme Court justices has been saying it means in recent years.  In the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and in subsequent cases, the Court’s right-wing majority has ruled that the Founders intended the Amendment as a guarantee of the right of individual citizens to defend themselves by keeping guns in their homes.  This conclusion is not plausible, and any ten year old kid watching movies about the American Revolution could see its implausibility as I did when I was ten years old.

While the Court’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment seems to be partly a result of the right-wing justices’ letting their partisan political opinions trump what should be their nonpartisan judicial wisdom, their misinterpretation can also be seen as a result of their failing to understand the Amendment as a product of historical options and choices.

The Constitution was drafted by a committee of gentlemen who attended the Constitutional Convention as representatives of diverse political views.  Anyone who has been a member of a committee knows that in producing a statement of the committee’s views, members will almost invariably have to compromise. They will also generally have to articulate many of the committee’s conclusions in vague terms that can encapsulate a multitude of positions and that can, therefore, be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of them plausible, others not.  And so it was with the Second Amendment and the Constitution as a whole.

It has long been a general principle of Constitutional construction that when a provision is clear and specific, such as the requirement that Presidents be at least thirty-five years old, the provision must be strictly construed and applied.  And there has been little controversy and no change in the way this age requirement for Presidents has been applied.  But when a provision is vague and merely directive such as, for example, the Interstate Commerce Clause, the provision is supposed to be interpreted in the general direction intended by the Founders but can be plausibly interpreted differently at different times depending on the interpreters’ points of view and the situation in the country.  Consistent with this principle, the Interstate Commerce Clause has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in different ways over the years based on the changing composition of the Court and changing circumstances in the country.

Construing the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment is specific in part and vague in part.  It states that “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  According to the general rules of construction, the specific part should be strictly applied by the Supreme Court and the vague part should be interpreted in the direction that the Founders seem to have intended.  In its recent rulings, the right-wing majority on the Court has done neither.

The first part of the Second Amendment is clear and specific.  It states that the purpose of the Amendment is to ensure that each of the states in the United States should be able to maintain a militia for its protection.  This means that no matter how the rest of the Amendment is interpreted, the interpretation must relate to the purpose of maintaining a state militia.  Self defense in eighteenth century America was considered as primarily a communal and collective effort rather than an individual responsibility.  The Second Amendment reflects this fact.  The Second Amendment also reflects the specific concern of southern slave-owners that they be able to maintain vigilante militias to keep their slaves in check.  In recent decisions of the Supreme Court, the right-wing justices, including the self-styled strict constructionists among them, have completely disregarded both the specific language of this first part of the Amendment and the circumstances in which the Amendment was enacted.

The second part of the Amendment is vague and general.  Its interpretation depends on how one defines “the people,” what one means by keeping and bearing arms, and what one considers to be an infringement on keeping and bearing arms.  This part of the Amendment is open to various plausible interpretations but not to the interpretation that it has been given by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.  That is, even if you go along with the majority in disregarding the clear intent of the first part of the Amendment with respect to militias, you still cannot plausibly arrive at the conclusion that the Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to keep guns in their homes.

Would you want a musket in your house?

This is where it takes merely the mental acuity of a ten year old watching movies about the Revolution — you can glean it from even a glitzy Hollywood production — or an approach that looks at history as people making choices to see the light.  The key facts are that the most widely available gun at the time of the writing of the Second Amendment was a musket and that almost no one would have wanted to keep a musket or other gun for personal protection in their home.

A musket had a smoothbore barrel and was muzzle-loaded.  You loaded a musket by stuffing some paper and pouring some gunpowder down the muzzle, then you shoved a round bullet down the barrel.  The concoction was ignited and the bullet fired from the gun.

Muskets were very inaccurate.  Since the barrel was smooth and the bullet was round, the bullet wobbled as it traveled down the muzzle and continued to wobble as it went into the air.  As a result, you could not aim a musket at a target more than a few feet away with any expectation of hitting it.  That is why standard military practice at this time was to stand soldiers in a line and have them all fire at the same time.  No one of them would hit what he was aiming at, but the group would unleash what was in effect a wall of lead that would eventually hit something.

Loading a musket was time-consuming.  The same was true of rifle-barreled long guns, or rifles, that were more accurate but much more expensive than muskets and not widely available.  It could take an ordinary person some two to three minutes to load a musket or rifle.  Thus these guns could not be repeatedly fired with any rapidity.  That is why standard military practice at this time was to have at least two rows of soldiers with one row firing while the other row was reloading.  Even so, it was standard practice to make a bayonet charge on your enemies after they had fired their guns and before they could reload.  The expectation was that the bayonet charge would be the decisive maneuver, not the gunfire.

These two facts about muskets, by themselves, would have made it unlikely that anyone would want to keep one in their home for defensive purposes.  A weapon that could not be accurately aimed and that took several minutes to reload was not a very reliable defensive weapon against an intruder.  A pike or ax would be much more reliable and, in fact, these were seemingly the defensive weapons of choice of most colonists.

A third fact about muskets and other guns made this choice almost inevitable.  Keeping a gun at home meant keeping a bag of gunpowder in your home.  The gunpowder in use at that time was highly volatile and liable to explode in the vicinity of the slightest spark or change in barometric pressure.  Keeping a bag of gunpowder in a house that was heated by wood burning fireplaces or stoves was a very dangerous undertaking and not one that many people would choose.

The final fact about muskets and other guns is that they were almost always stored in some sort of armory that was kept for the local militia rather than kept in people’s homes.  That is why the British were on their way to Lexington and Concord when Paul Revere made his famous ride.  The British wanted to confiscate the arms that were stored for the militia in the  armories of those rebel towns.  The Americans repelled the British and defended the right to have an armed militia.  And that, in turn, is what the Second Amendment was all about: securing the viability of the militia under the new Constitution.

In sum, given the state of arms at the time the Second Amendment was written and the fact that very few Americans had or wanted to have guns in their homes, it is not plausible that the Founders could have intended the Amendment to guarantee the right of individual citizens to keep guns for self-defense in their homes.  As a ten year old kid watching old movies, I could see that it would be impracticable to have a musket and undesirable to have a bag of gunpowder in one’s house.  Why couldn’t a majority of the Supreme Court justices see that as well?

Bibliographical note: There are no reliable statistics on gun ownership during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America.  All we have is anecdotal evidence.  An attempt was made by Michael Bellesiles to produce statistical evidence in his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000) demonstrating that few Americans owned guns during that time.  Bellesiles, however, committed gross scholarly errors in some of the assumptions he made about his data and in some of the extrapolations he made from his data.  He was accused of inventing data and of committing academic fraud.  Under sustained attack by the National Rifle Association and other so-called gun rights advocates, who claim that gun ownership was a founding principle of American society, the book has been widely discredited and generally disregarded.  Bellesiles’ dubious statistics are, however, only a small part of the evidence he presented in support of his contention that few Americans owned guns during this period.  The book also contains a large amount of undisputed anecdotal evidence that is worthwhile reading and, I believe, ultimately convincing.

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Child’s Play. Irony in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Tragic Form/Comic Substance. What if they had lived?

Child’s Play.

Irony in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Tragic Form/Comic Substance.

What if they had lived?

Burton Weltman

Preliminary Question: What are we to think of the marriage of Romeo and Juliet?

What are we expected to make of the marriage of Romeo and Juliet?  Are we supposed to assume that their marriage would have survived and thrived if they had lived?  I think the answer to that question is a key to interpreting the play.  And I think most interpreters of the play assume an answer of “Yes,” whereas I think the better answer is “No.”

Prologue: Should we see Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy or a comedy?

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s most popular play and it is most popularly played in a way that I think is inconsistent with Shakespeare’s words and with Shakespeare’s intentions as they can be construed from his words.  The play is usually treated as a tragedy – as a story of heroes brought down by their own heroism – in which Romeo and Juliet go too far too fast in their relationship.  This view regards their marriage as a serious long-term commitment that would have stood the test of time if the young couple had lived.  Their marriage is doomed, however, by the heroic intensity of a love that would brook no caution, and by the heroic actions they took in trying to fulfill that love, actions that backfired on them.  It is, in this view, a beautiful tale and a heartfelt tragedy. But I think it is a misconception of the play. 

I think the play is better seen as a comedy – as a story of fools caught up in foolishness – in which two immature adolescents develop a crush on each other and then rashly rush off to get married without any realistic idea of how they might live thereafter.  Their folly is compounded by the foolishness of their feuding parents who cannot properly supervise them and, especially, by their inept priest who repeatedly gives them bad advice.  In this view, the marriage would not have survived even if they did, which is, I propose, the better reading of Shakespeare’s script. 

The play is ironic, I think, in that it fits the form of a tragedy but is best performed as a comedy.  The sentiments of the lovers are sincere, as is often the case with adolescents, and the language in which they are expressed is beautiful.  But I think that we, the audience, are expected not to be fooled by the wonderful words that gloss over an immature and unsustainable relationship.

Questioning Romeo and Juliet: Defining our terms. 

A thirteen-year-old girl who is prone to childish enthusiasms and is still in the care of a nurse-maid.  A teenage boy who is girl-crazy and flits so quickly from one infatuation to the next that his friends can’t keep up with who is his latest flame.  These two adolescents, after one brief meeting that resulted in mutual love at first sight, plighted their troth and got married the next day.  Three days later, they were dead.  Both of them suicides.  Their short-lived marriage is the central focus of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.[1]  What are we to think of it?

Are we to think that it was a good marriage, a realistic long-term commitment of the two young people, and that it would have been a happily-ever-after union if the lovers had lived?  I think this is a key question that we should ask ourselves when we are thinking about the play.  And I think the way we answer that question largely determines for us the meaning of the play, the moral of the story, and the way we think it should be performed.

As the play is popularly produced, the answer is “Yes.” That is, the marriage is portrayed as a realistic long-term commitment that was cut short by tragic circumstances.  Tragedy has been characterized as a story of too much of a good thing that then goes bad.  It presents characters who pursue a too narrowly prescribed good too far until it turns on itself and precipitates a disaster.  Tragedy is, thereby, a story of hubris versus humility, and the failure of characters to recognize limits to the good they are pursuing. [2]   In the popular view, Romeo and Juliet should be performed as a tragedy.   

 In this view, the tragedy arises from Romeo and Juliet pursuing their romance too far too fast without sufficiently considering circumstances, especially their families’ feud, that might wreck their marriage.  Passionate in their feelings for each other and heroic in their actions, they thought they could overcome any countervailing circumstances, but, instead, brought about their own demise.  Extremism in the pursuit of true love brought on tragedy.  In this view, however, the marriage was in-and-of-itself a good thing, and the two lovers could seemingly have lived happily ever after if it weren’t for the tragedy.  I don’t agree. 

I think the better answer is “No,” that the marriage was unsustainable irrespective of the circumstances, and that the youthfulness of Romeo and Juliet, and their unchecked adolescent impetuousness, were at the root of their demise.  In turn, although the action in Romeo and Juliet superficially fits the form of a tragedy, I think that the play is better performed as a comedy.  Not a “ha, ha” light comedy, but an “Oh, my” scratch-your-head dark comedy.  Going too far too fast, their rashness reflected immaturity, the stuff of comedy, not heroism, the stuff of tragedy.

Comedy has been described as a story of wisdom versus folly, foolish people doing foolish things and suffering the consequences.  In comedy, the problem is created by someone acting out of stupidity or ignorance, “the intervention of fools.”[3]  In Romeo and Juliet, almost everyone, adults and children alike, behaves foolishly, needlessly feuding, heedlessly fighting, and impetuously acting.  The result is that there are no responsible people to help curb the adolescent enthusiasm of Romeo and Juliet for each other and to advise against their precipitous marriage. 

Romeo and Juliet turn instead for help to an irresponsible priest who encourages the marriage and secretly performs the ceremony.  In my view, it is this lack of responsible advisors and restraining adults that dooms the lovers.  It is not just that they go too far too fast, which is human nature for adolescents, but that there is no one to slow them down.

Romeo and Juliet should be seen, I think, as a story of children playing at being grownups and, in the absence of adult supervision, taking the game too seriously.  They were just teenagers without a clue as to what they were really doing.  As a result, an adolescent crush led to deadly consequences.  In sum, despite the power of their passion, the sincerity of their sentiments and the poetry of their language, the romance of Romeo and Juliet was folly from beginning to end.  And, while their deaths were sad, their lives would likely have been sordid if they had survived.    

Young love and young lovers: How should we see Romeo and Juliet?

Performances of Romeo and Juliet often underplay the youthfulness of the couple.  Although Shakespeare’s text describes them as very young – Juliet is thirteen years old and Romeo is around sixteen[4] – directors often either ignore or omit references to their age, and the lovers are generally played as mature beyond their years.  They speak, move and appear like adults.

Compounding this impression, Juliet is often played by a mature young lady who looks and acts nothing like a thirteen-year-old girl, while Romeo is played by a mature young man who looks and acts nothing like a feckless sixteen-year-old.  Given this casting, it becomes easy to think of their marriage as a mature long-term commitment.  I think that is wrong. 

Romeo and Juliet should be played by actors who look and behave like young people of their tender ages.  They are teenagers and, as such, are caught up in all kinds of age-related physical and emotional changes.  In playing their parts, I think we should be presented with a contrast between their beautiful sentiments, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the physical awkwardness of growing teenagers, the self-conscious preening of insecure young people, the edginess of unsure adolescents, and the assertive swaggering (Romeo) and swaying (Juliet) of immature young adults.  All of these being characteristics of people their age. 

I think we should be able to see that they are not of an age to be making life-long commitments that we should take seriously.  They are brilliant but they are still immature and impetuous adolescents.  And their love at first sight should be played in the context of their recent romantic experiences.  Shortly before he meets Juliet, Romeo has been scorned by an older woman, Rosaline.  He is clearly miffed and has suffered a severe blow to his ego. When his friend Benvolio advises Romeo to get over his loss and find a new girl, Romeo says he never will.  He is totally and eternally devoted to Rosaline.[5]  

No sooner, however, does Romeo say this, than he meets and falls for Juliet.  Later, Romeo uses much of the same flowery language in his description and wooing of Juliet that he used to describe and woo Rosaline.[6]  All of this reflects on Romeo’s constancy and on whether his commitment to Juliet would have lasted.  In this same vein, Romeo’s choice of Juliet may reflect on the damage Rosaline did to his ego and his need to recover his self-esteem.  Romeo meets Juliet when he was on the rebound from Rosaline and it may have been that, at least unconsciously, he saw a pretty little girl, such as Juliet, as better game.  Having succeeded in that game, would he have remained satisfied?    

At the same time Romeo was unraveling from Rosaline, Juliet was being courted by an eminent and eminently eligible older man, Paris.  This is her first experience of courtship, and she is for the first time seeing herself as a desirable woman.  I think when she first meets Romeo, Juliet should be played as testing her newfound powers on him and, at least unconsciously, experimenting with him.  This is not to say that Romeo and Juliet aren’t sincere in their feelings as they develop, but that the lovers are essentially impressionable and changeable kids.

I think that we should see Romeo and Juliet as playing a game.  A game of young love, full of beautiful sentiments, and intensely sincere in the way of many adolescent enthusiasms.  But, like most adolescent enthusiasms, it was likely to be transient.  It was a game that in the normal course of things would probably have run its course and come to a safe and sound end.  But, because of the feud between their families, things were not normal.  And because of the feud, they were forbidden to play together, which is not something that two star-struck and love-sick adolescents were likely to accept.  To the contrary, opposition from elders is generally an incentive for teenagers to keep doing whatever it is their elders oppose.  Which is what happened in this case, much to everybody’s detriment.

If Romeo and Juliet had survived, how would have fared their marriage?

Juliet is thirteen years old, barely past the minimum marriageable age for a girl of that time and essentially still a child in thoughts, words and deeds.  Romeo is in his mid to late teens which is young for a man of his social class to be considering marriage.  While girls of that time generally married young, albeit not usually as young as thirteen, men generally married older, after they had established their financial and social status, and were able to support a family in the style to which they were accustomed.  Romeo was anything but financially or socially established.

If they had survived, Romeo and Juliet were supposed to escape from Verona to Mantua.[7]  They would have had few prospects and little on which to live in Mantua.  Romeo does not have any profession, trade or property upon which to live.  Romeo’s adviser, Friar Laurance, does not seem to have considered this at all, let alone considered it a problem. According to the friar’s plan, Romeo and Juliet were supposed to wait in Mantua for their parents to renounce their families’ feud.  He expected that the marriage between Romeo and Juliet would be a means of reconciling the feud between the families.  The parents would, the friar predicted, welcome the married couple back to Verona and into the bosom of their generosity[8].

Among the problems with this plan is that Romeo had been banned from Verona by the Duke.  Romeo would be executed if he came back.  In addition, it is likely that the couple’s respective parents would have renounced their offspring instead of their feud if the lovers had returned.  Juliet’s father was ready to disown her when she merely said she wanted to wait a little longer before marrying Paris, the suitor that he has chosen for her.[9]  He would not have been happy when he found out that she was lying to him when she indicated she would marry Paris, that she had already been married to Romeo when she made that promise, and that she had tricked her parents into thinking she was dead in order to run off with Romeo.  He was not likely to have generously welcomed Romeo as a son-in-law.

Although the marriage of Romeo and Juliet is often treated as having been made in heaven, it is not likely that it could have survived a trial on earth.  Romeo and Juliet got married after less than a day together and did not know each other at all.  Even if they seemed perfect for each other at first sight, they had very different temperaments and, in any case, were just teenagers who were still developing their mature characters and personalities.  It is likely that, like most young people, they would have become over time very different persons than they were at that moment.  What is the likelihood they would like each other when they got to know each other better, or fit together when they had changed?  And how would their romantic idyll have survived the likely arrival of squalling babies and dirty diapers?  All very doubtful.   

In addition, Romeo was a Romeo, that is, a womanizer.  When he met Juliet, he had just been mooning and moaning over being jilted by his previous love interest whom he claimed he would love forever and whom he described in the same sort of mellifluous terms that he later described Juliet.  Given his track record, isn’t it likely that Romeo would fall in love or in lust with another beautiful young lady in the future?

In sum, I believe Shakespeare expects us to think that the marriage of Romeo and Juliet was doomed from the start by their immaturity. Their deaths were sad but if they had lived, their lives would likely have been a disaster. Their romance was beautiful, but it was wrong.  And the fault lay not in the stars, but in their immaturity and in their advisers.

Shakespeare’s Catholic priests: Father knows best?  Not.

An underlying problem in Romeo and Juliet can, I think, be seen as a failure of socialization and social institutions.  In the ordinary course of things, young people such as Romeo and Juliet would be counseled and trained by their parents, other adults in the community, and the social institutions and structure of the community to find their proper places and make their appropriate ways in the world.  But things in Verona, the home city of Romeo and Juliet, were not normal.

Verona was in disarray.  Law and order were being disregarded.  Respect for authority was being undermined   Civility was dead.  Egged on by the example of their elders, young men were brawling and dueling in the streets, and they were not merely rough-housing like adolescents but fighting to kill.  All of this because of a foolish feud between the heads of the two leading households, the Capulets and the Montagues.  As a result, instead of being taught civility and sociability by their elders, young people were being tutored in disobedience, hostility and anti-social aggression.  The Duke who ruled over the city, and who is a voice of reason in the play, was distraught and unable to curb the disorder.

In the midst of this mess, Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet meet and sparks fly between them and love scenes ensue.  Given the turbulent context of their romance, I think that love scenes between Romeo and Juliet should be played against a contrasting background of Capulets and Montagues arguing and fighting in pantomime, and the Duke trying to separate them and pleading with them in pantomime to desist.

Because of the feud between their families, Romeo and Juliet are in a bind as to whom to turn for advice and assistance.  Given that their families are at odds, they would not be allowed by their parents to court each other.  As such, theirs is a relationship they have to keep secret from their families and friends, and they can’t confide in them or seek advice from them.  So, Juliet turns to her old nursemaid and Romeo turns to their local priest, Friar Laurance, for help.  And, therein lie the decisions that took their lives.      

Juliet’s nurse is conventionally played as a sympathetic and caring person, someone who really wants Juliet to be happy.  This is, I think, a gross mischaracterization.  She is, instead, a lascivious old lady who seems to get vicarious enjoyment from others’ romantic ventures. Instead of counseling caution, the nurse encouraged Juliet to run off and secretly marry Romeo.  This was bad advice, and she thereby violated the trust she owed to Juliet’s parents.  The nurse not only didn’t tell her long-time employers about the affair, she encouraged and facilitated it.[10]  And she later cynically counseled Juliet to marry Paris even though Juliet was already married to Romeo and it would have been bigamy.[11]  The nurse should be played as a clever, coldly calculating conniver.

Friar Laurance is conventionally played as sympathetic and dignified priest – “so noble a character” – who does his best for Romeo and Juliet.[12]  I don’t agree.  In the first place, Romeo’s seeking romantic advice from a celibate Catholic priest would seem to be folly on the face of it.  In Shakespeare’s plays, Catholic clergy are almost invariably knaves or fools.  In this case, while the friar is generally well-intentioned, he is terribly inept as an adviser and should be played as a doddering idiot.  And his blundering is the proximate cause of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.

Friar Laurance seems more concerned with religious proprieties than with the long-term well-being of Romeo and Juliet.  After initially giving Romeo the sound advice to go slow in his relations with Juliet, the friar agrees to marry them because he can see that they intend to sleep with each other and he does not want them to have sex without being married.  “You shall not stay alone til holy church incorporates two into one,” he insists.[13]  In his narrow-minded obsession with sexual propriety, he overlooks the likely problems that the marriage might cause and that the married couple might face.  And in failing to tell their parents about the young couple’s plans, he violates the trust that community members have placed in him as their priest.  

Finally, Friar Laurance’s advice and behavior after he has married the couple is fantastically foolish and is the proximate cause of their deaths.  He conceives the ridiculous ruse of pretending Juliet is dead so that she can avoid marrying Paris and flee with Romeo to Mantua.  Then, he misconceives and misdirects messages to and from himself and the lovers, which leave them in the dark as to what is happening.  He then leaves Juliet alone while she is pretending to be dead so that when Romeo arrives, he thinks she is dead and kills himself.  Finally, he again leaves Juliet alone after she wakes up so that she sees Romeo dead and kills herself.  As the saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

The Moral of the Story: Whom do you trust?

It has been said that the most important question in life is “Whom do you trust?”  All of us rely on other people for almost all of our information and ideas.  We get very little of our factual knowledge and very few of our ideas from ourselves.  For the overwhelming majority of our information and ideas, we rely on other people.  On people whom we trust. 

If we trust unreliable people, we will get unreliable information and ideas.  That is dangerous for us as individuals but also for our society.  We put ourselves and our society at risk if we fail to find the right people to trust.  That danger is one of the themes in Romeo and Juliet.  Romeo and Juliet suffered fools gladly and suffered the consequences therefrom.  As did their society. 

At the end of the play, their parents call off their feud.  At the same time, the Duke reasserts his authority over the community.  He says that he regrets not having previously been harsher with the feuding parties, and he warns that some of them will pay a penalty.  “Some shall be pardoned, and some punished,” he says as he closes the play.  Enough of foolishness.[14] 

The Duke seemingly hopes, in the wake of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, to regain some of his lost authority.  He was the voice of reason in the play and he kept telling the feuding parties to cool it, but they wouldn’t heed his advice.  They had to suffer a grievous loss before they would listen to him.  Is that what it takes before people will wean themselves from foolishness?

If you play Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy, the moral of the story might be a warning against strong emotions or strong emotional attachments, emotional overloads that might induce you to go too far too fast in some sort of relationship or other commitment.  I don’t think that is a very helpful lesson.  If you play Romeo and Juliet as a comedy, the moral might be a warning against falling for fools or falling into foolishness.  It might also be an admonition to be careful whom you trust and upon whom you rely for information and ideas.  That, I think, is a more helpful lesson, and one that is timely for our world today.

I am writing this essay in early April, 2022 at a time when knaves and fools are spreading all sorts of blatant lies and horrendous conspiracy theories in our country, stirring up feuds and prejudices, and undermining the civility and democracy of our society.  All too many foolish Americans are falling prey to these scoundrels, putting their trust in woefully wrong people and places.  As a result, we are suffering grievous losses as a society and worse may be on the way.  Finding a way to encourage more people to place their trust more wisely is an urgent task for our society.                                                                                                                           

BW 4/22

[1]Citations to the play are from William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet. New York: Penguin Books. 1983.

[2] Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. Pp. 61, 81-86. Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Pp.37, 39.  Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1954. Pp.35, 172.

[3]Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. P.59. Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press. 1961. P. 41. Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1954. Pp.82-100.

[4]  I.2.9-10; II.2.70-75.

[5] I.5.45-55.   

[6] I.5.200 et seq.

[7] IV.1.115.

[8] II.3.85-88; III.3.140-160.

[9] II.5.193-195.

[10] II.5.68-70

[11] II.5.68-80.

[12] Harrold Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, 1951, P.138.

[13] II.6.38-40.

[14] V.3.308

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Life is but a dream. Not. A note on the logic of reality. Going one-up on Bertrand Russell?

Life is but a dream.  Not.

A note on the logic of reality.

Going one-up on Bertrand Russell?

Burton Weltman

Adolescent Dreaming: Me, My, and Mine.

“Oh, life could be a dream, sh-boom.”  The Chords/The Crewcuts.

A fifteen-year-old boy is playfully arguing with his father: “I’ve been thinking.  In my science class, we were told that all we can know of the world is what comes to us through our senses – things that we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell.  But my senses are often erroneous and even deluded.  I frequently see and hear things wrong.  And if I can’t trust my senses, how do I know that anything is really real?  Maybe the world is merely an illusion that I am seeing?  Or just a dream that I am having?  And so,” the kid concludes in a taunt that was the underlying purpose of his argument, “maybe you’re not real and I don’t have to do what you say.  Right?”

As a parent and a long-time teacher, this is an argument that I have heard many times.  I made it myself when I was a teenager.  The possibility that life may be just a dream or an illusion is an idea that seems to occur like a bolt out of the blue at some point to most teenagers.  It is not an entirely serious idea to them.  Teenagers don’t really believe that nothing is real and that life is nothing but their own dreams.  But it is an interesting thought and a provocative idea to spring on your parents and teachers.  “If nothing is real and the world is my illusion,” the boy says to his father, “why do I have to conform to social norms, and why can’t I do whatever I want?” 

And a parent’s typical response to the argument is usually something in the nature of “Right.  I am not real and if you don’t do what I say, you won’t get your allowance.  But you won’t mind that since your allowance isn’t real anyways.  Right?”  That response generally ends the argument.  Having control over the purse-strings, the parent’s might makes his commands right.  It is a light-hearted interchange.  But despite its superficial frivolity, the boy’s argument reflects some serious concerns that young people often have about the world.      

These concerns stem from the dawning realization of most adolescents that the world is not as certain, safe and secure as they had thought it was when they were younger.  Adolescents become aware of significant changes occurring in themselves, and become uncertain as to who and what they are.  At the same time, they become aware of the fragility of things around them.  Their parents begin to seem old and fallible, and they sense dangers in the world from which their parents cannot protect them. 

Of course, not all of these changes are perilous.  Some are promising. Adolescents begin to see in the changing circumstances new opportunities for self-development, choices they might make to empower themselves, and possibilities for becoming successful in the world despite the potential pitfalls.  Between the hopes and the fears, it’s a turbulent time.  The world can be bewildering.  Almost like a dream.

It hasn’t always been this way in all societies or, at least, this tumultuous. The turmoil of adolescence in our society is largely a function of the fact that young people in our society are generally not expected to merely follow in their parents’ footsteps.  They are expected, instead, to step out from the shadow of their parents and develop identities of their own.  Adolescence is when this is supposed to happen.  It is not an easy time or simple task. 

It can be scary to feel that one must think about navigating the world as oneself, whatever that may be.  It can seem to adolescents as though the weight of the world was being hoisted onto their shoulders.  Playing with the idea that life is only a dream can be a way of distancing oneself from the intensity of the situation, lightening the emotional burden, and zapping one’s parents and teachers at the same time.  An ego-boost.  An idea that deflects, but also reflects, the egoism of adolescence.  

Adolescence is a time when egoism tends to run rampant among young people, filling them with a combination of grandiose self-pity and self-importance.  “Nobody understands me” is a common complaint, and it is mostly true since adolescents undergo so many changes so quickly that they usually don’t even understand themselves.  At the same time, adolescents often magnify their newly developed powers into feelings of omnipotence which, among other things, is a reason so many of them get into automobile accidents.  In any case, for better and worse, self-centeredness is a common affliction of adolescence. 

It is in that context, when adolescents think of themselves as the center of their own universe, that it dawns on them that maybe they are literally the center of the universe.  And, thus, is born the idea and, more importantly, the feeling that maybe everyone else and everything else is either just a dream that I am having or a projection of my own mind.  There is nothing but me and my thoughts, and I am the sole cause and the sole effect of the universe.

Other than for monomaniacs like Donald Trump, this is a conclusion that few people take seriously or believe for long.  But it is a thought that reflects uncertainty about the world.  In the midst of adolescent turmoil, nothing is as it seems and, in fact, maybe nothing is anything at all. 

That nothing is what it seems is a disturbing thought, but also a thought that enables young people to gain a bit of one-upmanship on adults who would venture to tell them what-is-what in the world.  “You think you’re so smart,” a teenager might say to a parent or a teacher,” but maybe all of this is just a dream.  Prove that it isn’t.”  And that is a difficult challenge, but one which we should try to meet.      

Philosophical Dreaming: I think, therefore I am.

“There exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep.”  Rene Descartes.

The idea that the world may be nothing but a dream is not merely an idle adolescent musing.  It is a possibility that has been seriously considered by many philosophers around the world since ancient times.  In the seventeenth century, Renes Descartes, who is generally considered the founder of modern philosophy in the West, entertained that idea as he sought to counter skeptics who claimed we could know nothing about the real world. 

As a means of establishing a firm foundation for knowledge of the world, Descartes embarked on a project of systematically doubting everything that he could.  He hoped to find something which he could not doubt and from which he could build knowledge of the world.  As part of this project, he needed to get past the possibility that life is just a dream, and that what we experience as the world is just a delusion.  It was a challenge that he took seriously.

Descartes’ method was to doubt everything about which he did not have a clear and distinct idea.  He claimed that if he was able to conceive of something clearly and distinctively, then it must be real.  On this basis he initially found that he could doubt everything except for his own existence.  “I think, therefore I am,” he concluded.  That is, even if everything he was thinking or seeing was a dream or a delusion, he could not doubt that he was thinking and seeing it.  So, he could know for sure that he existed.

But what about everyone and everything else?  The conclusion that “I think, therefore I am” still left him without a foundation for belief in the world outside himself.  He was seemingly mired in a slough of solipsism, that is, of knowing about no one and nothing but himself. 

Descartes saved himself, and seemingly the rest of us, from the depths of solipsism through a leap of belief in God.  Descartes claimed that he had a clear and distinct idea of God and that he could, therefore, not doubt the existence of God.  In turn, since his idea of God was that of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being, he could not doubt that God would create a real world for us to inhabit, and that He would not allow us to be misled with dreams and delusions.  In sum, Descartes overcame skepticism through positing the existence of a God who is good and who guarantees the reality of reality.  God saves us from our adolescent dreams.

God or a god of some sort has generally been the way in which philosophers have overcome the skepticism and the solipsism that is a result of trying to get from the evanescence of our sensory experiences to the permanence of things.  God, say these philosophers, makes things persist and makes a permanent reality, despite the vagaries of our sensory experiences.  God was the solution, for example, to the solipsism into which the eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley had rationalized himself before calling on God to save him from absurdity.

Berkeley reasoned that since it is only through our senses that things exist for us, it is only through being sensed that things exist.  On this basis, but for God, if I saw a cat and then turned my head away, the cat would cease to exist, and then would come back into existence when I turned my head back.  That, he acknowledged, was an absurdity.  What saved the day for us was God, who was always watching even if we weren’t.  And the cat can thank God for saving him from jumping into and out of existence at the turn of my head.

On the same basis, but for God, no two people could see the same cat, since our perceptions of the cat would be different depending on where we were standing when we looked at the cat.  But for God’s omniscient perception of the cat, I and another person could not know that we were seeing the same now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t cat.  In sum, because God was always watching, we could be sure that we were looking at the same cat.

Berkeley’s solution may be satisfactory to those who believe in God, but what if you don’t believe in God or are just not satisfied with a deus ex machina answer to the question of whether life is just a dream?  Bringing in God to save the appearances of the world seems like an arbitrary solution to the problem, like the parent who tells a kid that if the kid doesn’t believe in the reality of the parent’s authority, the kid won’t get an allowance.  They are both appeals to might-makes-right power rather than to reasoning.  Is there no way through logical reasoning to answer the question?

Agnostic Reasoning: I think, therefore we are.

“All I have to do is dream.”  The Everly Brothers.

Surprisingly, it seems that most philosophers think there isn’t a logical response to the challenge of proving the existence of the world.  Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest logicians and premier philosophers of the twentieth century, did not believe in God and did not think the existence of the world could be proved.  He said that “it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences.  No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy.”[1]  Russell concluded that as a practical, common-sense matter, we must acknowledge the existence of the world.  But we cannot rationally prove that the world exists, and must live in ontological and epistemological limbo. 

With all due respect to the late Lord Russell, I very humbly disagree.  As I understand the logic of the problem, which could be an illogical misunderstanding on my part, I think that logical absurdity does result from the hypothesis that all the world is but a dream.  And I think that one can logically prove the world’s existence.  My reasoning is twofold.

First, once you begin to analyze something, you have acknowledged that the something exists independently of yourself.  As such, once you ask “Is the world just a dream?” or say “The world is just a dream,” you have stepped outside the supposed dream in order to analyze the world you are perceiving.  That is, you have logically acknowledged that everything cannot be a dream and that at least some things must exist on their own.  And that existence even goes for your own thoughts which are objectified and given independent existence once you begin to analyze them.

Likewise, if you say that everything is an illusion, and that if God did not exist to save the appearances of things, everything would cease to exist when no human was looking at them, then you have stepped outside of the illusion in positing a God who is not illusory.  In any case, you don’t need God to save the appearances because, as with the idea that life is but a dream, once you have asked the question “Is everything merely an illusion?” or declared that “Everything is an illusion,” you have stepped outside the supposed illusion in saying those things.

There is, of course, the argument that when I step outside one dream in order to analyze it, I may be inside another dream analyzing the first dream.  But I don’t think it helps to suggest that when you ask “Is this a dream?” or say “This is a dream,” you may be just dreaming inside of a dream because in saying those things, you will have thereby stepped outside of the second dream.  The fact is that each time you say “This is just a dream that I am dreaming,” you have stepped outside of the supposed dream and demonstrated that everything is not a dream.  So that repeatedly saying “This is just a dream” only pushes the analysis back a step, and puts you into an infinite regression and vicious cycle of repeatedly saying “This is just a dream that I am dreaming.”

Such an infinite regression and vicious cycle is illogical and absurd.  And, among other things, it violates the logical principle of Occam’s Razor.  Occam’s Razor holds that it is vain (and Occam seems to have meant “vain” in a moral as well as logical sense) to explain something with greater complication when a simpler explanation will do.  In the case of the existence of the world, it is clearly simpler to affirm the world’s existence than to go through the gyrations of claiming it is but a dream.[2]    

In sum, if I have got my logic right, I conclude that it is illogical and self-contradictory to claim that everything other than your own experiences and thoughts is a dream or an illusion.  Your own thoughts prove this by stepping outside of the supposed dream or illusion in order to analyze it.  So doing proves that everything is not a dream or an illusion.

Second, once you say the word “I,” you have acknowledged the independent existence of others.  You cannot say that youare dreaming everything, and that nothing exists other than your own thoughts, because you cannot have a sense of yourself, and be able to say “I,” unless there are other people against whom you can compare and contrast yourself. 

There is no “I” or “me” without “You” and “We.”  There have to be people and other things that are not me in order for me to have a sense of myself.  People and things that are not part of a supposed dream of mine. It is illogical and self-contradictory to say that I am dreaming everything or everything is an illusion, and Descartes’ mantra should logically be “I think, therefore we are,” not “I am.”

We define ourselves in relation to others and, in turn, the way in which we relate to others defines who we are.  If we treat each other as enemies, obstacles, and the means to selfish ends, then we are that kind of person.  If we treat each other as friends, colleagues, and co-workers toward cooperative ends, then we will be that kind of person.  Really.  Not just a dream.    

Utopian Dreaming: We can be together.

“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”  Bob Dylan.

All of this arguing about whether or not the world can be conceived as merely a dream or can be proven to really exist is not, I think, a matter of academic or linguistic quibbling.  It makes a difference if we respond to adolescents with confidence about the reality of things (facts are real and not just what you say they are) and if we promote a cooperative approach toward the world (it’s not just my world but our world and we are all in this together), instead of a skeptical attitude toward reality, a cynical attitude toward facts, and a self-centered individualistic approach to each other.

As I am writing this essay during February, 2022, we can see all around us the detrimental consequences when large numbers of people reject scientific reality and political facts in favor of their own personal prejudices and selfish self-interests.  Covid vaccine denial.  Climate change denial.  Democratic election denial.  Conspiracy theories.  Racism.  On and on.  It makes a difference if people don’t respect scientific reality and cooperative social norms and claim, instead, the right to their own personal facts, personal prejudices, and selfish norms. 

Instead of responding to the natural skepticism and egoism of adolescents with more skepticism, selfish individualism, and might-makes-right rationalizations, we should respond with the logic of reality.  If we did, it might take hold and we would all be the better for it.

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[1] Bertrand Russell.  The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. P.22.