Preserving a Way of Life

The 1951 film Scrooge is widely considered the best adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Despite considerable creative license taken by the director, Brian Desmond Hurst, I concur with this assessment. It is a rare instance of a movie improving on the original novel.

One such revision was the addition of the character Mr. Jorkin, who eventually buys out Fezziwig & Co. The pragmatic businessman woos the young Scrooge away from his apprenticeship to the kindly and sentimental Mr. Fezziwig. The following dialogue is entirely the work of screenwriter Noel Langley. Yet it is true, I think, to the Dickensian ethos.

Jorkin: “Mr. Fezziwig, we’re good friends besides good men of business. We’re men of vision and progress. Why don’t you sell out while the going’s good? You’ll never get a better offer. It’s the age of the machine, and the factory, and the vested interests. We small traders are ancient history, Mr. Fezziwig.”

Fezziwig: “Yes, l dare say we are. And the offer is a very large one, l have to admit. But it’s not just for money alone that one spends a lifetime building up a business, Mr. Jorkin.”

Jorkin: “Well, if it isn’t, l’d like you to tell me what you do spend a lifetime building up a business for?”

Fezziwig: “lt’s to preserve a way of life that one knew and loved. No, l can’t see my way to selling out to the new vested interest, Mr. Jorkin. l have to be loyal to the old ways and die out with them, if needs must.”

Is it inevitable that those ways must die out? The Christmas season perhaps reminds us that there are still opportunities to nurture and share our traditions with others. In the words of Samuel Johnson: “It is the duty of every man to endeavour that something may be added by his industry to the hereditary aggregate of knowledge and happiness. To add much can indeed be the lot of few, but to add something, however little, every one may hope…” (The Rambler, No. 129).

Related commentary: Dickens, Orwell and Others

Johnson and the Enlightened Despot

Samuel Johnson was well known for his studies of intellectuals like Sir Thomas Browne, the Dutch physician Boerhaave, and many of the English poets.*  It is therefore interesting to see him focus on a contemporary political figure in his 1756 essay on the “King of Prussia.”

Johnson commences with a thumbnail portrait of Frederick’s father. He remarks that the “chief pride of the old king was to be master of the tallest regiment in Europe…. In all this there was apparent folly, but there was no crime.” His other shortcomings, however, were less amusing. Frederick Wilhelm I was noted for his luxuriant tastes, oppressive taxation, and abusive behavior towards his family. His son would inherit some of his mercurial temperament, of which subordinates and his heir and nephew (Frederick Wilhelm II) learned to be wary. On the other hand, he possessed comparatively simple tastes, in that age of Rococo opulence, and was not unduly fixated on rank and ceremony. He understood the value of personal excellence.

One of the achievements of Frederick’s “enlightened absolutism” was the Code Frédérique, modeled on the regulations of the French monarch Louis XIV. It was a relatively concise volume. As Johnson observes: “To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seem to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.” Frederick abolished judicial torture and the death penalty for lesser crimes. Overall, he sought efficiency and the elimination of corruption, albeit at the cost of increasing centralization of state power.

Johnson chronicles the Prussian king’s military adventures in some detail. To cite one incident during his conflict with Austria, Frederick invaded Bohemia in 1744. “When he entered the country, he published a proclamation, promising, that his army should observe the strictest discipline.” At the same time he demanded that all privately-owned firearms be surrendered. Failing that, the offending individual would be hanged. In the case of a local lord not complying with the Prussian orders, “his village shall be reduced to ashes.” Johnson says such measures were without precedent in an age of military restraint.

It is unclear if the Prussian warlord ever put these draconian measures into effect. The leaders of that epoch were still curbed by a residue of gentlemanly moderation. They feared he excesses of religious intolerance which had ravaged central Europe during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Unfortunately, the revolutionary generation which followed Johnson and Frederick the Great espoused new forms of fanaticism. National leaders—initially the French, and later the Germans—would completely subordinate moral ideals to ideological exigencies. They also erected bureaucratic tyrannies that would quite surpass the old absolute monarchs in both scope and power.

*Selections from these writings can be found in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford).

Everywhere and Nowhere

I am not in the habit of perusing The Atlantic, but a retired colleague shared an essay by Yiyun Li on Montaigne. It was a thoughtful meditation in the manner of the Renaissance essayist himself. One passage is worth quoting at length:

Nowhere-ness—I don’t think I’m alone in having now and then been trapped by the feeling of being in no specific place…. This is different from being lost. The latter implies an opposite state of existence, of being unlost, of being found again. Being nowhere, however, feels bleaker: The past and the future merge into an everlasting present, and the present is where time and space take on a permanent stillness.

Sometimes the feeling of nowhere-ness calls for the ambition of everywhere-ness…. In our contemporary world, the desire to be everywhere is assisted and exacerbated by technology, which is faster, more connected, more ubiquitous. People on social media travel to many countries, dine at different restaurants, read 300 books a year. And yet: “He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere,” Montaigne repeats in “On Idling,” quoting Martial’s Epigrams.

Our present epoch did not originate these delusive temptations even if it has accelerated them. I would add that the technological ubiquity of the workplace has reinforced this sense of virtual overextension and alienation.

The lure of “nowhere-ness” is rooted in the cultural ascendency of nihilism. It is frequently (and bluntly) manifested in public obscenity. To give one example, the ad hoc crudities of the internet are now formally packaged in volumes appearing on library and bookstore shelves. Even the covers indulge in crass titles or images of people flipping off the universe. These appear as acts of futility—whether of despairing conformity or equally pessimistic defiance.

Montaigne does not offer the last word on the subject; nevertheless, his reflections elevate our gaze above the toxic distractions of the age:

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality. Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition (Essay XL).

Spoiled Child of the Enlightenment

“Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such philosophers will love the Tartars to avoid loving their neighbor”—Rousseau, Émile

To conclude my series on Rousseau, the Swiss-born intellectual abounded in inadvertent irony. His comments on brotherly love may well have been a swipe at Voltaire who was the inventor of modern philanthropy—the creed of loving one’s neighbor… from a distance. Yet Rousseau was no better. He espoused improved methods of child-rearing even as he abandoned his own. Like the man who “loves the Tartars,” the sage from Geneva found it easier to treat the “general rather than the particular, and consider… man in the abstract” without definite responsibilities, however mundane and unexciting.

“At all times and in all societies,” says historian Crane Brinton, “some men feel that they have abilities which are denied free-play by existing social, political, and economic restrictions.” In particular, the frustrations experienced amongst a certain class of aimless educated men “is likely to be rapidly reflected in the alienation… of the intellectuals” (The Anatomy of Revolution).   No longer need one strive for socially acceptable qualifications when ideological qualifications would suffice.

Noble expressions about matrimonial felicity and child-rearing were belied by his personal conduct: “According to Rousseau’s own account, Thérèse [his wife] bore him five children, all of whom were deposited at the foundling hospital shortly after birth, an almost certain sentence of death in eighteenth-century France” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Neither was he capable of pursuing regular employment. The champion of ideal society could only lament:

I was never made for society where everything is compulsion and burdensome obligation…. As soon as I can act freely I am good and do only what is good; but as soon as I feel the yoke of men I become rebellious and headstrong—and then I am nothing (Rêveries, VI).

Even sympathetic writers acknowledge that in later life Rousseau displayed a pronounced arrogance which repelled erstwhile admirers. This, in turn, fostered a growing misanthropy. After wandering about and importuning friends and acquaintances, as he had done for most of his adult life, the itinerant philosopher returned to Paris in 1770—from which he had been banished for his seditious tracts—and completed his celebrated and egotistical Confessions.

Rousseau’s dread of secret enemies grew out of control and he retired to the countryside at Ermenonville, where he died suddenly in 1778, at age 66. His life and death thus appear as an embodiment of Socrates’ warning: “For so many are in such a hurry to pry into other people’s business that they never turn aside to examine themselves.”

Totalitarian Democrats

To resume the theme of my last post, Rousseau’s views on education presaged Nietschze’s idea that the enlightened man is “beyond good and evil”:

The very words obey and command will be excluded from his vocabulary, still more those of duty and obligation; but the words strength, necessity, weakness, and constraint must have a large place in it…. It is no part of a child’s business to know right and wrong…. (Émile, Bk. II).

As the sage of Geneva says of his imaginary pupil: “When you leave free scope to a child’s heedlessness, you must put anything he could spoil out of his way, and leave nothing fragile or costly within his reach. Let the room be furnished with plain and solid furniture; no mirrors, china, or useless ornaments. My pupil Émile, who is brought up in the country, shall have a room just like a peasant’s” (Émile, Bk. II).

The psychology behind Rousseau’s pedagogy is that sin is primarily, or even exclusively, a matter of bad environment rather than bad choices. Ban jewelry if you don’t want people to steal, etc. It reverses the Christian ethical standard that it is not things which corrupt us, but our use of such things. As St. Paul says, not money itself, but “the love of money” (or greed) is “the root of evil” (I Tim 6:10).

Rousseau unconsciously acknowledges his own lack of self-discipline in seeking escape in a system which does not “oppress,” yet which removes all “evils” by abolishing responsibility. It is the daycare state that seeks to legislate worldly ills out of existence. Needless to say, Rousseau’s combination of total “freedom” and total “equality” is contradictory and unattainable, and the best explanation of his theory is that it is absurd.

As political scholar J. L. Talmon explains, “It was of vital importance to Rousseau to save the ideal of liberty, while insisting on discipline,” believing that true liberation came through submission to the General Will (The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy). Thomas Molnar adds that all utopian thinkers believe in the paradox of “unrestrained human freedom” and “at the same time, they want so thoroughly to organize freedom that they turn it into slavery” (Utopia: The Perennial Heresy). Such glaring inconsistencies have not hindered people from embracing a philosophy that appears to excuse their own irresponsibility on humanitarian grounds.

Commentary concluded in next post.

Social Contract: General Will

Continuing my commentary on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss-born theorist accepted the concept—originally developed by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)—of alienated individuals who coalesce to form a “social contract” as the basis for political order. At the same time he rejected the potential curb of early rationalism with its emphasis on human depravity. The sage of Geneva favored the new trend in optimistic and salvific social theories that were taking root in Europe.

The ideal state of the Contrat Social would be achieved through revolution, which imagined not Hobbes’s equilibrium or consensus of competing wants, but a collectivist state with an altruistic dedication to the volonté générale (“General Will”). Only in such a polity, Rousseau asserted, could the “natural man” exist and be truly free. As for the family, the author felt compelled to acknowledge it as the most ancient of societies; yet he sought a short-cut around it, stating that the association of parents and children is a conventional arrangement and needed only so long its younger members cannot provide for themselves.

Rousseau’s outlook was one of political faith. In contrast to the practical atheism of Voltaire, this new vision embraced an impassioned Deism that was to become the fashion under Robespierre and St. Just with their feasts to the “Supreme Being” built on the altar of thousands of dead “tyrants” (and other ordinary citizens).

The idea of natural religion forms the most celebrated chapter of Émile in which the fictional Vicar of Savoy—a sort of proto-modernist cleric—explains to his pupil a lofty creed which has no need of dogmas and accepts Christ’s excellence, if not His divinity. While the author entertains a vague notion of the afterlife, the Romantic dream of building “God’s Kingdom” on earth comes first.

Rousseau was in accord with later rationalists, like Baron d’Holbac, in believing that human ignorance was not insurmountable. Man was not the inherently flawed creature that the Church made him out to be; a creature who, while capable of doing good, was nevertheless inclined to pride and weakness. “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil… [T]he first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart.” Accordingly, the “entrance of every vice” can be traced to the repression of man’s noble instincts by tyrannical institutions (Émile, Bk. I).

The enthusiastic ideologue never explains how institutions, made by men, lead to corruption if all men are inherently virtuous. In that respect the “General Will” becomes a sort of ersatz Holy Spirit that will set everything aright in the much anticipated new society.

Continued in next post.

Rousseau’s Daycare

“But, you know, no one will ever manage even his own household successfully unless he knows all its needs…. But if you can’t do anything for one [family], how are you going to succeed with many?” – Socrates

The current reputation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) rests on his formulation of the mass state that influenced the Republican Terror of the French Revolution. But in his own lifetime, Rousseau’s essays on society and culture had a more immediate impact than his reveries about utopian government. In particular the book Émile, published in the same year as the famous Contrat Social (“Social Contract,” 1762), is considered the founding educational text of the modern age.

Émile was apparently based on Rousseau’s brief experience as a tutor for a family in Lyons in 1741—a job which, like many others, he was incapable of holding for very long. Written as a didactic narrative, it traces the career of the imaginary student Émile, at the hands of an ideal tutor, from pre-school to young manhood and marriage. The book was widely read and acclaimed.

Part of Rousseau’s success lay in the fact that his observations, while often platitudinous and prosaic, were occasionally tempered by commonsense. He was correct about the importance of the maternal role in early education. By way of background, Rousseau’s mother died at his birth and his father, a dissipated and violent man, paid little attention to his son and finally deserted him. The absence of parental affection leaves a pathetic mark on all his writing. “There is no substitute for a mother’s love.” (Émile, Bk. I). Rousseau was a dysfunctional child let loose on a society that was losing its own moorings, with a declining faith in God and sagging moral stability. In this respect he was very much a child of his age.

Rousseau’s theories must be seen in light of his overarching social vision. In the same way that Aristotle’s Ethics was the foundation for his Politics, so Émile is meant to nurture the ideal citizen of the Contrat Social. According to George Sabine, Rousseau’s polity departed from older rationalist conceptions. Previous writers identified “morality with rational self-interest [which] at least presumes freedom of private judgment.” But Rousseau’s “ethics of sentiment” need not do so, “especially if it stresses sentiments that are equally native to all men” (A History of Political Theory). This meant the exclusion of prudence from the list of virtues and the belief that group morality is more important than that of the individual.  

Just as important as familial and societal antecedents was Rousseau’s intellectual genealogy. The rationalist vision of the early eighteenth century claimed to take in the whole of human life. It was believed that a divinized human rationality was a sufficient guide to personal conduct if properly developed.

Continued in next post.

Waugh’s Dystopia

The British author Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was not only a contemporary of George Orwell, but also his intellectual counterpart – perceptive, articulate and frequently skeptical – albeit writing from a conservative Catholic as opposed to a socialist atheist point of view. Despite their philosophical differences, they admired each other’s literary craftsmanship. What is less well known is that, like Orwell, Waugh penned his own dystopian work, the futurist satire Love Among the Ruins (1953).

Waugh’s tale begins with a terse sentence that parodies the scientific obsessions of his day: “Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.” From that point we are introduced to the dubious protagonist, Miles Plastic.

Miles lives in an elegant manor shared with a number of other men. There are carefully manicured gardens, live concerts, stables, and rooms crowded with chandeliers, satin curtains and expensive furniture. Waugh explains that Miles’ room “was not one of the grand succession which lay along the garden front. Those were reserved for murderers.” It turns out that Miles is a sociopathic arsonist who is undergoing gentle, albeit intensely boring, therapy and mild incarceration to rehabilitate him as a good citizen.

The State had made him. No clean-living, God-fearing Victorian gentleman, he; no complete man of the renaissance; no gentle knight nor dutiful pagan nor, even, noble savage. All that succession of past worthies had gone its way, content to play a prelude to Miles. He was the Modern Man.

We follow Miles through his unsuccessful romance with a dancer whose failed birth control treatments have resulted in abundant facial hair. Miles indulges in pyrotechnical escapades and suffers additional (but ineffectual) reprimands from the authorities. Eventually he is forced into a temporary union with another woman to ensure his social stability and physical gratification. Unfortunately, his wedding is not destined to last long. He still has his pocket lighter.

To the modern reader, Waugh’s story would be hilarious if so many of his predictions had not come true: abortion on demand, ready divorce, and euthanasia. The English novelist foresaw how the seemingly plausible vision of progressivism would trend toward chaos and savagery.

The citizen of the new age lives in a state of increasing schizophrenia. On the one hand, he is told that social nirvana is around the corner; on the other, he is bludgeoned with the direst predictions. How does one explain this trend? Writing about the same time as Waugh, the poet Roy Campbell saw the crumbling of modernity’s optimism. He said that this “disillusionment depends upon one’s having believed that life is in some way honour-bound to progress nicely and pleasantly and finding that it does not do so.”

A Note on Philosophy and Conformity

“I am as fond of my own intellectual freedom as anyone else, but I want to be free to agree with somebody when I think that what he says is right.”— Étienne Gilson

The irony of the French scholar was directed at the conformity of contemporary “free thought.” In this instance he had come to favor the views of the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who was well out of favor by the time that Gilson (1884-1978) pursued his studies. As such, his peers were baffled by an outlook that challenged their notions of alleged independence.

We all conform to one way of thinking or another—even if there remains scope for individuality in terms of how we arrive at our conclusions. The real divergence is between those who favor an objective notion of truth and authority versus those who are purely subjective. It is the age-old contest between Socrates and the sophists.

I find a similar point made by René Descartes. While his own rationalism was often excessive, he did not seek to undermine religion and moral tradition; rather, he thought to radically reassert the foundations of theism against the new wave of materialistic thought. He was turning doubt on itself… which, indeed, is the only logical approach.

Descartes maintains that everything we conceive as true “is certain only because God is or exists and because he is a perfect being, and because all that we possess is derived from him…. But if we did not know that all that we possess of the real and true proceeds from a perfect and infinite being, however clear and distinct our ideas might be, we should have no ground on that account for the assurance that they possessed the perfection of being true” (Discourse on Method).

Lacking a certain and independent source of reality there is arguably no yardstick for the veracity of anything else in the universe. Descartes’ remark is a sensible antidote to postmodern irrationality. I am thinking of the tendency to dogmatically impugn ethical customs (or empirical facts) without establishing any authority for one’s claims, aside from an arrogant pursuit of novelty.

Related posts: Meditating with Descartes and The Christian Skepticism of Rasselas

Piety and Patriotism

A recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal prompts some thoughts on patriotism. D. G. Hart’s op-ed examines a small but growing phenomenon of Christian sectarians who take a dim view of U.S. origins. I can understand the nuances involved, since my own political outlook passed through various phases of enthusiasm and pessimism before settling into a sort of “principled pragmatism.”

In one respect both reactionary* and revolutionary viewpoints are analogous: they expect too much of the civic framework. Historical experience, however, tends to cast doubt on theocratic utopias. By theocracy I speak broadly of an anointed ruling class (whether theistic or atheistic) leading the people toward the Millennium.

Hart notes this trend on the part of Catholics nostalgic for “throne and altar” or Protestants who idealize John Winthrop’s Puritan New England. The chief lament of these Christians is secular decadence apparently ushered in by the Enlightenment’s separation of Church and State. The roots of the dilemma are too difficult to unravel in a short commentary. Men like Paine and Jefferson were undeniably anti-Christian, while Washington, Adams and Franklin respected the benefits of traditional monotheism.  

Even if it’s true that some trends were accelerated by the Novus ordo seclorum, the tensions of polity and theology pre-date the Enlightenment. It is a recurring pattern with Emperors Constantine and Theodosius I, King Henry II, the Reformation, the Gallicanism of Louis XVI, etc. From that point of view I am inclined to agree with Hart’s assessment. The Founders thought that an absence of political repression would allow genuine faith to flourish. Thus, “if Christians wanted to complain about the nation’s religious decline they had only themselves to blame.”

The growing disrespect for religious freedom reveals a more menacing stage of societal decline. But there is no obviating the strife inherent in the human condition. The distinguishing mark of Christian orthodoxy is adherence to the perfection, and precedence, of spiritual belief while acknowledging that said perfection will not be consummated in this world.

Religion can inform our political actions without being tied to any particular regime or ideology. According to Hart, “It’s possible to mix expressions of religious faith with patriotic fervor in ways that are unhelpful and unwise. And of course if the government makes demands that collide with religious duty, believers will, as the apostles sometimes did, ‘obey God rather than the emperor.’” At the same time he reminds us that “gratitude is a Christian virtue.” This includes appreciation for the blessings bestowed on one’s country and the noble sacrifices of past generations.  

*Reaction, as I understand it, differs from classical conservatism. It insists on restoring our culture to a fixed idealized moment in the past. Progressivist fanatics, in turn, pin their hopes on a pristine moment in the future.