Wednesday, October 30, 2019

A Whale of a Tale


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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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#