Devils from Rila Monastery
In a prior blog, I attempted to “periodize” the moment when American culture turned toward stupidity and away from the Prometheanism implied in the conception of American exceptionalism and the making of the Constitution by such as Alexander Hamilton (not that Hamilton was an American Candide). In that blog (https://clarespark.com/2012/03/13/dumbing-down-when-did-it-begin/), I fingered William James and other “pragmatists” as major figures in the deterioration of education. Now I add that moderate man Reinhold Niebuhr to my enemies list.
In the Fall of 1957, I took David Brion Davis’s course in American intellectual history at Cornell U. I have a clear memory of his stating that “the devil was back” in his discussion of Hawthorne and Melville. What Davis meant was that both writers took a dim view of the theory of progress, attacking its key precept, that man was malleable morally (as demonstrated in travel narratives or utopian communes such as Brook Farm) and that better government and capitalism could ameliorate what had been lives that were “nasty, brutal, and short” (Hobbes). Davis also lectured about the importance of Reinhold Niebuhr in furthering that pessimistic ideology after the second world war. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr. That Niebuhr should have switched his political views at that time, puts him in the camp of other pessimists who sought to dampen American hubris after the defeat of the Axis powers by the Western democracies (see my blog on film noir: https://clarespark.com/2011/04/27/james-m-cains-gorgon-gals-2/.
It was also a moment when the high school population exploded and when returning veterans were availing themselves of the G. I. Bill, flooding colleges with cocky survivors of a war unprecedented in its mayhem. The major universities took note and reconstructed the humanities curriculum in collectivist and anti-urban directions– a direction that would halt the feared road to communism in America. Simply put, the real Marxist-Leninists were mostly purged, and “right-wing social democrats” (the “moderate” conservatives) took over and now are referred to as “the Left.” Their statism (but one that includes “ a reasonable amount of private property”) often leads some right-wing authors to conflate social democrats with Leninists, Italian Fascists, and Nazis.
As the Wikipedia biography of Niebuhr demonstrates, the key element in his conversion to “Christian Realism” (said to be a forerunner of “realism” in foreign relations), was the linking of evil to self-love and pride. Comes now the canonical reading of Melville’s Promethean Captain Ahab as the epitome of narcissism; indeed the Icarus legend was used to describe his literary fortunes from 1919 on. (As Ahab, his wings melted, plunging HM back to earth where he either drowned as Narcissus or burned as Icarus. In any case, he was demonic—the mirror of the Parsee Fedallah– and that theme remains dominant in Melville criticism as taught in the dumbing-down schools and universities controlled by the so-called left.)
Melville was ambivalent about “evil” as an independent entity apart from historically specific institutions and individuals. At times he wrote “evil is the chronic malady of the universe,” or in another mood he would say that good and evil were braided together so confusingly that he could say through one of his characters (the ambiguous Pierre) that “virtue and vice are trash” and that he must “gospelize the world anew.” I am convinced that Mark Twain read Melville, for in his fragment “The Character of Man” he echoes Melville in his most depressed and misanthropic moods.
To summarize: “moral relativism” has been a term used by some conservatives to condemn the explorations typified by the modern, mind-expanding world. What it meant to the Enlightenment was not the trashing of “virtue” but the realization that such conceptions as good and evil were socially constructed and could vary according to the institutional structures and resources of different societies; that in lauding individuals or social practices as either laudatory or destructive, such valuations had meaning only in specific historical contexts. Because many of the Founding Fathers were highly educated men, conversant with antiquity as well as with the discoveries of European explorers, they did not rely upon such ahistoric conceptions as The Devil to mold the Constitution that would govern negative human impulses in favor of a more orderly progress than had heretofore existed. But in the “progressive” world view of such as William James and Reinhold Niebuhr, the human capacity to be educated and uplifted has been ringed round with anxiety and self-doubt. Learning is hard enough without that extra dollop of immobilizing fear. For more on “the moderate men” (Melville’s phrase), see https://clarespark.com/2011/09/29/the-abraham-lincoln-conundrum/. Moderation is a buzz word without concrete meaning, and is a key word in psychological warfare.
The Clare Spark Blog 
The Devil was created to answer the question of “Why does God, who is good, allow the acts of evil men to go unanswered?” The myth of an anti-god, God’s eternal nemesis, a tempter of man, is what is needed. Ultimately, this is the origin of the view that Man is inherently evil, a pseudo-logical thinker, doomed by original sin and the fall from grace. Only the enlightened man, the man who has been blessed by God’s divine word, can properly guide other men’s thinking and morality.
This elitism, which harkens back to Plato’s philosopher kings and is echoed in the modern Left’s statist PC culture, denies to common people the ability to think rationally about moral issues and make their own conclusions. And of course the Devil still exists in the hearts of men. Chaos would reign if he did not.
Comment by stereorealist — December 29, 2015 @ 10:26 pm |
You have described, in your first paragraph, a Protestant view of religion, but why do Catholics join in a belief in the Devil? It should be noted that innate depravity comes out of Lutheranism, but not from either Catholicism or Judaism. Perhaps you could expand your comment.
Comment by clarelspark — December 29, 2015 @ 11:40 pm |
I’m not sure. The Founders saw Natural Rights as something transcending parochial, traditional law. They saw them as good, and their violation anywhere evil. They provided a vantage point, much like the eye of God, from which one might criticize even the king. Indeed they saw that without such a vantage point it is impossible to oppose even tyranny, which makes the state god.
Comment by Mark La Rochelle — July 17, 2015 @ 6:04 am |
What claim that I made are you disputing? Show me in the Federalist Papers where they supported religion as the inspiration of the Constitution. I read them carefully, and God is mentioned only once. Deism, associated with the Enlightenment, is generally agreed upon by historians as a shared characteristic of most of the Founders.
Comment by clarelspark — July 17, 2015 @ 1:31 pm |
[…] What can parents and other concerned readers do? Silent acquiescence and going limp are not options. Study, fight back, use public libraries and the resources of the internet, and ask your children and students and friends what they mean by certain words. Draw them out and don’t be harshly critical, but stay with the subject until differences are clarified. We will even find agreement over some basic values, different though we may be at the outset. Start a book club. Study the curricula of your children and young adults and decode their agendas. (For part two of this series see https://clarespark.com/2012/03/22/3760/.) […]
Pingback by Dumbing down: when did it begin? | YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — December 3, 2013 @ 6:09 pm |
[…] https://clarespark.com/2012/03/22/3760/ (The Great Dumbing Down in two parts) […]
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[…] https://clarespark.com/2012/03/22/3760/ (On the great dumbing down) […]
Pingback by Index to blogs on education reform | YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — February 23, 2013 @ 4:20 pm |
[…] with https://clarespark.com/2009/12/18/assimilation-and-citizenship-in-a-democratic-republic/. Also https://clarespark.com/2012/03/22/3760/, the second of two blogs on the Great Dumbing Down.] It is true that politics are messy, by […]
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Pingback by Links to feminist blogs « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — May 6, 2012 @ 4:31 pm |
this is really excellent, I love your blog!
Comment by easytolo — March 22, 2012 @ 9:57 pm |