This is the 3,000th
posting on this blog, so we decided to do something deluxe. Sort of.
As a result of our researches into early nineteenth century America, we
have come to the conclusion that most people — including (or especially) most
Americans — have no idea what was going on in the United States between the
American Revolution and the American Civil War.
Yes, there was something about slavery, the War of 1812, the Battle of
New Orleans (but only if sung
by Johnny Horton), and maybe a war with Mexico, but it’s all kind of vague.
This posting will
not correct generations of misinformation and non-information, but it can at
least alert people that the United States in the first half of the nineteenth
century had more to it than meets the eye.
In particular, we’d like to focus on what some people have called “the
Great American Novel,” but have been hooted down by others, most of which have
only heard of the film version without actually seeing it.
We’re talking, of
course, about Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, or, The Whale. Many people have not read it, and we contend
that most of those who did, did not understand it. The problem is that most people are simply
uninformed, whether about the book or the time in which it was written, to say
nothing of what Melville was satirizing.
Did we say “satirizing”? Yes. Melville
wrote much more than Moby Dick, most of it thinly veiled satire and social
commentary, and all of it darkly somber even when humorous and lighthearted on
the surface. There is genuine humor
there, but always with a point that was not always obvious even to the reading
public of the mid-nineteenth century, a time far more complex than most people
realize.
That is, perhaps,
why some (okay, many) authorities reject the idea that Moby Dick is the
Great American Novel, or even that there can be THE Great American Novel — and
they are correct, but only up to a point.
The fact is that American life has changed so much over time, and each
time is too diverse to characterize in any one novel, that the Great American
Novel cannot be written until we have regained whatever it was that made
America unique in the history of the world and purified it of its flaws.
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
And what made
America great? It was not political
slogans or bombastic chauvinism. On the
contrary, what made America great was analyzed in great detail in Alexis de
Tocqueville’s monumental two-volume study, Democracy in America (1835,
1840). From the Just Third Way point of
view, this can be summed up in the triad of natural rights of life, liberty,
and private property.
Life in America
was far removed from the stratified society of Europe. The ferment of the French Revolution had not
unstratified society. It had only changed
the identities of who had power over whom.
In America,
however, aside from the two mortal wounds of slavery and the treatment of
native peoples, people could live in what seemed to be the manner intended
people should live. Even the popes, the
heads of the Catholic Church, seemed to realize this, and modeled the Catholic
Church’s incipient social doctrine on the admittedly imperfect American model,
albeit with a few improvements.
In particular,
there was the habit Americans had of not waiting for some great man as in
England or the State as in France to do something. Instead, Americans exercised their liberty by
forming associations of all kinds to carry out everything from the largest
undertaking to the smallest task. As de
Tocqueville commented,
Americans of all ages, all
conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not
only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but
associations of a thousand other kinds. . . . If it be proposed to advance some
truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they
form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the
government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you
will be sure to find an association. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.2.v.)
And what gave
Americans the power to access the common good directly in this way? Widespread capital ownership. With some form of capital readily obtainable,
whether land or technology, wages were high because factory owners could not
keep workers if it became more profitable to quit and become a farmer, artisan,
or factory owner one’s self.
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| Pope Gregory XVI |
Land, the most
common form of capital in early America, was easy to get if one ignored any
prior claim by the natives (which they did).
If a factory owner failed to treat his or her (yes, her) workers well,
he or she would quickly discover there was no one willing to work for him or
her, regardless of pay. In the South,
perhaps one reason slavery flourished was because no one else could be forced to do
the work when alternatives were available.
There was,
however, a serious problem in early America, even after setting aside slavery
and treatment of native peoples. That
was the spread of what Pope Gregory XVI in 1834 called rerum novarum, “new
things”: what eventually became known as socialism, modernism, and New Age
thought . . . and it was rampant, and Melville, born in New York City in 1819
(yes, 2019 is his bicentennial!) saw it all.
Some modern books, such as Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. New York: Random House, 2016, and Adam Morris,
American Messiahs: False Prophets of a
Damned Nation. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 2019, give some of the history of what was going on, but perhaps
the only way to sum it up in a single word is “surreal.” That is, unless you prefer “bizarre” or “totally
weird.”
Take, for
instance, the “Age of Aquarius.” You
thought it was just a song from the 1960s or some modern, New Age invention. Think again.
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| Cyrus Reed Teed, a.k.a. "Koresh" |
Even the idea of
a “New Age” superseding traditional Abrahamic religions dates from the Middle
Ages and the distortions forced on the thought of Blessed Joachim of Flora in
the fourteenth century. Its modern usage
dates from 1869 when Cyrus Reed Teed (1839-1908) claimed to have received a
visit from a divine spirit while unconscious from the effects of electric
shock. Teed was messing around with batteries
to see if his innovative theories about medicine could harness the healing
power of the lightning.
Anyway, the
spirit informed Teed that he (Teed) was the new Messiah sent to redeem humanity
and bring it into the Age of Aquarius that had dawned with Teed’s birth. Teed took the name Koresh and established a
utopian socialist community that lasted until 1961. (Morris, American
Messiahs, op. cit., 146-147.) In 1894
the Christian socialist magazine The New
Age began publication, which provided a venue not only for socialist, but
also modernist and esoteric thought of all types.
And you read that
right. David Koresh viewed the Branch
Davidians as the inheritors of the theories of Teed. Teed, by the way, also claimed to have proved
that we live inside of a hollow Earth.
The belief that we live on the outside of an oblate spheroid is caused by an
illusion.
And then there
was the innovative Biblical exegesis of the Shakers and others, who took a line
from the Bible in a, er, call it “different direction” than most interpreters
and theologians. “Man and woman He
created them” was interpreted to mean that every human being was originally
both male and female. By committing
Original Sin (which may have been sexual in nature, “forbidden fruit” being
construed as a euphemism for coitus), human beings were split into male and
female aspects or halves. They would be rejoined
only through the practice of perfect celibacy, whereupon human beings would
reproduce without all that dirty, dirty sexual intercourse.
As the late,
great Anna Russell used to say, “I’m not making this up, you know!”
Melville saw all
this and more on every hand while growing up.
Allegorical and mythic interpretations of Moby Dick are as common
as they are traditional, while more modern interpretations align the work with
the sort of “dark parable” familiar to the readers of the works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated the novel.
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| Herman Melville |
In the “parable
interpretation” school, “The ‘dark’ teaching of Melville’s book is that a man
invites destruction if he accepts the transcendental theory of knowledge which
makes physical objects emblematic of some spiritual reality.” (Leon Howard, “Introduction,” Moby Dick. New York: The Modern Library, 1950, xii-xiii.)
We think that’s
close — but no cigar. Correlating the
times in which Melville lived, the fact that the Transcendentalist movement had
pretty much run out of steam by 1850, and many of the socialist experiments had
failed (even Brook Farm had converted to a socialist Fourierist commune, and then
shut down completely by 1847), and taking Moby Dick as a satire, it
seems evident that Melville was creating a satiric parable of a sort that
showed what happens when weird social theories meet reality.
Understood that
way, Moby Dick is, in a sense, a “Catholic novel” on the order of Miguel
de Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
Melville’s novel lacks the final redemption that comes to the Man of La
Mancha (Ahab is utterly lost), but it also raises the context from the
individual to the social, from the tragedy of individual failure to conform to
truth, to the disaster when society itself, symbolized by the Pequod,
runs counter to reality.
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| Msgr. Luigi Taparelli, S.J. |
Only a few years
before, Monsignor Luigi Aloysius Taparelli d’Azeglio,
S.J. (1793-1862), the first person known to have used the term “social justice”
in the “Catholic,” natural law sense in contrast to the socialist understanding
of the term as a form of redistribution alone, had commented that mistakes by
scientists in the natural sciences could have no effect on how nature
operates. Mistakes in philosophy,
politics, and theology, however, have far-reaching consequences in human
society. The Revolutions of 1848 throughout
Europe confirmed him in his opinion.
In response,
Taparelli developed a principle of social justice to counter the socialists. In 1840 he published Saggio Teoretico di
Dritto Naturale — “The Theoretical Essay of Natural Law” — to explain his
principle.
Socialist social
justice can be summarized as “the end justifies the means.” Even the principles of natural law, the
capacity for which defines human beings as human beings, can be set aside to
achieve the goal of a better society.
In contrast, in Taparelli’s
principle of social justice, the end does not justify the means. Everything, even (or especially) social
improvement and the general welfare, must be subordinate to the natural law as
understood in Aristotelian-Thomism, i.e., in Catholic belief, to God.
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| Aristotle |
This, however,
was not a true social ethics, but individual ethics with a good intention
toward the common good. What Taparelli
developed was a new principle of social justice as an application of
traditional virtues meant to benefit individuals directly, but with a general
intention to benefit the whole of society indirectly.
As Aristotle
explained in the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics, this is
sound guidance for the bios politikos, the life of the individual citizen
in the State. It does not, however,
address specifically social problems, such as flaws in our institutions that
inhibit or prevent the exercise of individual virtue.
Most (if not all)
of the confusion over social justice results from generations of scholars and
advocates attempting to resolve the socialist and the Taparelli versions of
social justice and synthesize a consistent definition. Obviously, however, a theory of social
justice that says the natural law is subordinate to the will of the people
(socialism), and one that says the will of the people is subordinate to the
natural law (Taparelli) can never be reconciled. Any attempt to do so, or even define it in
any meaningful way, can only result in contradiction.
Essentially,
Taparelli’s work did no more than restate traditional moral philosophy. As such, it was no more effective at
countering socialism and the other new things than papal condemnations had
been. Social justice remained, by and
large, a euphemism for socialism, and people continued to be alienated from
society at an accelerating rate.
And that meant society
— as far as Melville was concerned (at least in this interpretation of Moby
Dick) — was headed for disaster, led there by Ahab, a man who let his loose
grip on reality and his flawed vision destroy the world when it came face to
face with unforgiving and all-too-real truth in the form of the Whale.
#30#
