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Editor’s note: For Independence day this year, please enjoy Carson Holloway’s timeless review of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism, from our archives (originally publish July 5, 2017).
The presidency of Donald Trump raises the question of patriotism more forcefully than it has been raised for a long time in American politics. On the one hand, Trump and his followers think of their movement as a restoration of a proper patriotism, an effort to rescue a country and a people, the true interests of which have been shamefully neglected by an excessively cosmopolitan elite. On the other hand, Trump’s critics think that he appeals to a dangerously atavistic nationalism, an unenlightened and extreme love of country that neglects our duties to the world community. Thus the Trump movement and the controversy it has created force us to ask: what is a just and reasonable patriotism? More specifically, what kind of patriotism is appropriate to a country like America, which is founded on universal principles and not on any particular and exclusive ethnic or religious identity?
This question is especially relevant for American conservatives. In general, patriotism looms larger in the minds of conservatives than in the minds of their liberal counterparts. Conservatism is about preserving, as much as circumstances permit, the country we have inherited, and such an enterprise necessarily presupposes patriotism—a loving approval of that country’s way of life and a desire to see it safely extended into the future. This is not to say that American liberals are unpatriotic. It is just that their patriotism is rendered more complicated, and perhaps more qualified, by their commitment to progress—which necessarily entails a belief that the country is imperfect, and hence more in need of improvement than of preservation—and by their commitment to cosmopolitanism—which leads them to think in terms of political obligations aside from, and maybe in some cases more compelling than, those they owe to their country.
The present question of patriotism is also more compelling for American conservatives simply because the Trump phenomenon arose on their own political turf. Trump is not a conventional American conservative, but his movement is certainly of the right. He has, for the present at least, taken over the traditional political instrument of American conservatism, the Republican Party. His candidacy first swept aside his conservative opposition and then co-opted a good deal of it. These reasons, too, force conservatives to ask themselves whether they can support the kind of patriotism to which Trump has so successfully appealed.
In this context, American conservatives—and anyone interested in American politics—should welcome the publication of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism. As his subtitle indicates, Hayward’s book offers in the first place an account of the intellectual journey of Jaffa and Berns, two students of Leo Strauss who became in their generation two of the leading scholars of American political thought and the American regime. Unlike their great teacher, however, Berns and Jaffa did not limit their intellectual activity to the realm of scholarly and philosophic inquiry. Strauss was primarily an interpreter of the great texts of the western philosophic canon, seeking to understand them on their own terms and to use them as a springboard for his own philosophizing. He rarely commented at length on any of the political questions of the day. In contrast, Jaffa and Berns chose to be both scholars and public intellectuals, offering commentary from roughly the right side of the political spectrum, Jaffa operating from the Claremont Institute and Berns from the American Enterprise Institute. Accordingly, the story of their thinking, of their agreements and disagreements, is to a considerable extent an account of many of the important issues with which conservative intellectuals have grappled over the last fifty years.
Although Hayward writes with a winning affection for Jaffa and Berns, both of whom he knew personally, his primary aim is not to provide a pair of intellectual biographies. Rather, his main interest lies with the key issues themselves, using Jaffa and Berns’s arguments to explicate them. The book is not and does not claim to be an academic study of Jaffa and Berns’s political thought. Indeed, for whoever wishes to take up the task, a scholarly book (perhaps beginning as a doctoral dissertation) remains to be written on Strauss’s first generation students who took up the study of the American regime, including not only Jaffa and Berns, but also Martin Diamond and Herbert Storing.
Hayward, however, writes here for a more popular audience of thoughtful citizens, offering them an accessible account of the questions that Jaffa and Berns pondered and that played an important role in conservative intellectual debate during their careers: Can modern political science be morally serious without being moralistic, avoiding the extremes of scientistic value neutrality, on the one hand, and ideological fanaticism, on the other? What is statesmanship, and how can it be guided by high principle while also accommodating the intractable imperfections inseparable from political life? To what extent can conservatives look upon Abraham Lincoln as a model of American statesmanship? What role, if any, should natural law and natural rights play in the exercise of the judicial power? Can equality be understood as an intelligible and limited political principle, or must it degenerate into an unreasoning and unquenchable passion?
All of the questions that Hayward explores are of perennial interest to students of American politics. Once again, however, none is of more immediate importance than the question of patriotism and its proper basis, which is a key theme of the book, as its title indicates. What does Hayward mean by asserting that “patriotism is not enough”? He seeks to remind us that, at least for a political community like the United States, a healthy politics requires more than just a sentimental attachment to the country and its interests. As he says, “American patriotism is based on ideas.” Unlike most countries, America was founded at a particular moment in time and, more importantly, on the basis of certain moral and philosophical principles to which its founders dedicated it. American patriotism, therefore, needs to be an enlightened patriotism, in the sense of being informed by knowledge of the founding principles and reflection on how to preserve them and apply them anew in each generation.
Put another way, America has a political identity much more distinct, and much more central to its being, than other nations, many of which have existed for a long time and maintained some kind of stable identity under a variety of regimes. At least until recently, a perfectly good Frenchman might be a republican, a monarchist, a socialist, or a communist. A good American, however, must be committed to a particular political creed: the natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence and the republican self-government under law established by the Constitution. Accordingly, American patriotism, and American conservatism, is concerned with understanding and preserving this creed, the way of life to which it gives rise, and the institutions and mores that sustain it. This is the kind of patriotism and conservatism taught by both Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, whatever disagreements they had on other questions.
Hayward’s book is so timely precisely because the kind of patriotism he discusses provides a useful corrective for Trump-style nationalism. The patriotism to which Trump appeals is almost entirely affective and hardly at all intellectual. As has been observed many times, he almost never refers to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the founding more generally. Instead of meditating on the country’s highest ideals, Trump usually expresses patriotic solicitude for its most elementary needs. He wants America and its citizens to be safe and prosperous.
One can see this, for example, in the way Trump talks about how immigration should be regulated. A conservative in the mold of Jaffa, Berns, and Hayward would remind us that the immigrants we admit should understand, believe in, and have the habits necessary to preserve the doctrine of natural rights and constitutional self-government. Trump has never said anything like this, but has instead simply held that we need to make sure that the immigrants we let in “love our country and love our people.”
As Hayward’s book rightly reminds us, Trump’s emotive patriotism is “not enough.” As a candidate for the presidency, Trump was once asked in what sense he is a conservative. He replied that he wants to “conserve the country.” There is no reason to doubt his sincerity in this. Trump seems to be animated by a genuine protectiveness for America and its citizens. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the country cannot be conserved or preserved without going beyond sentimental patriotism and adding an intellectual appreciation for the founding principles and disciplined thought about how to carry them forward. An America that is safe and prosperous, but not committed to constitutional self-government and natural rights, would no longer be the same country.
This is not to say, however, that there is anything wrong with the kind of patriotism to which Trump appeals. That it is insufficient does not make it irrelevant. Feelings of love for the country one inhabits—irrespective of its regime or form of government—are a natural and just human impulse. Among American statesmen, there has been no greater teacher of philosophic, principled patriotism than Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, even Lincoln admitted the legitimacy of the more elementary patriotism to which Trump appeals. In his famous eulogy on Henry Clay, Lincoln noted with approval that Clay loved his country both because it was a “free country” but also in part because it was simply “his own country.”
Moreover, Trumpian patriotism is politically effective not only because it speaks directly to the simple and untutored love of country that any ordinary person feels, but also because it addresses the vital link between the nation’s well-being and the self-interest of individual citizens. Thus Trump denounces certain trade practices, for example, as not only bad for the country, but also as contrary to the economic interests of the working- and middle-class voters whose votes he sought and won. This is, to be sure, not the lofty, principled politics of, say, Lincoln’s effort to preserve respect for the equality of rights promised by the Declaration of Independence. But neither is there anything illegitimate about it by realistic political standards. On the contrary, the American founders themselves recognized and taught openly that most ordinary political activity is animated by self-interest. Thus, when Trump appeals so directly to the economic interests of those whose support he courts, he is only doing what the founders expected that politicians would do as a matter of course.
Accordingly, we can say not only that Hayward’s principled patriotism provides a useful corrective to Trump’s emotive and interest-based nationalism, but also that Trump’s nationalism provides a useful corrective to a patriotism based only on philosophic principle. They are mutually correcting and mutually supportive. On the one hand, a patriotism that is based only on the principles of the founding cannot succeed in winning elections, because voters rightly demand that any political movement that seeks their support have some plausible plan to address their ordinary interests. On the other hand, a patriotism that is based only on the untutored loves and interests of ordinary voters cannot preserve our precious inheritance of a regime based on natural rights, the rule of law, and self-government. A movement that acknowledges each of these concerns amounts to the kind of patriotism, and the kind of conservatism, that can both win elections and deserve to win them.
At the beginning of the year, I posted about my planner set-up for the year which included the Midori B6 Pocket Planner in the Clover design ($23.50, out of stock but a Birds edition is still available) tucked into my leather B6 cover from Bassy & Co ($81 and up) with my Stalogy Editor’s Series 365 Days ($21) everyday planner and note-taking notebook.
Since the beginning of the year, the pockets of my planner have become filled with an assortment of stickers, postage stamps and washi tape. I’ve gotten into collaging on my daily pages so having a few stickers to add along the way is a great option.
I am still loving the B6 size for my planner. It’s not as small as an A6, which I often felt like I needed more than one-page-per-day, but not as intimidating as an A5 which always seemed like too much space and too large a notebook to tote around everyday. If you haven’t tried B6 yet, I highly recommend it as the Goldilocks of notebooks.
This image above shows that I’ve filled about 2/3rds of the Stalogy daily planner and evidence of collage-y bits can be seen from the edge.
I added the Midori pen clip to the back of the Stalogy at the beginning of the year and have managed to keep it for six whole months without losing it. Good news since my rare Sailor ProGear Slim Stargazer has been riding around in the loop all year.
I mark my place each month and each day with the Midori gold Chiratto Index Clips ($8.50 for 8 clips). It makes getting to my current spot fast and easy.
I’m getting some mileage with the monthly pages to keep track of silly holidays like Graham Cracker Day (July 5), travel, pen shows and birthdays and such but I am not using the week-on-two-pages like I thought I would.
I had thought I would utilize the page on the right of the week-on-two-pages in the Midori for work-related tasks and notes but I have ended up keeping a notebook at work for these tasks and the pages go largely unused. Its extra sad because I really like the paper in the Midori Pocket Planner and the little illustrations throughout are cheery.
The only creature in my house that uses the ribbon bookmark is Apple. He thinks it’s delicious.
In the Stalogy, on days without a lot of activities (like a Sunday when you discover you have Covid-19), I have started adding collage elements with washi, stickers and some rubber stamps. I also bought a Polaroid Mint mini-printer to add the occasional photo to my planner.
I often treat my planner more like a log book of what I did, what I ate, where I went, who I saw, what I read, watch or listened to, etc. so adding photos in is a good way to log activities. If you want to be able to add photos to your journal or planner, many people recommend the Canon Ivy which is currently available. The Polaroid Mint has been discontinued. Both the Mint and the Ivy use Zink 2″ x 3″ printer paper. The color output is not great but the printer uses instant film technology and the printers don’t need ink cartridges making it a little easier to use. So, it makes fun, little retro-looking images that add some much-needed personality to my planner.
Usually, on Sundays, I try to pre-decorate a few pages. Since I am doing a (sort of) page-a-day for my planner/journal/logbook I just add a few decorative elements to add some interest for the week but I am not locked into using a whole page for one day. Some days, I might use two or more pages. I’ve found this open method so much easier for me since there is no pressure from day-to-day. Some days are super busy and active, and some days I skip altogether.
I don’t know how to solve for the largely unused Midori Pocket Planner. I thought about removing the monthly pages and pasting them into the Stalogy but I would want the whole year’s worth of calendar pages so where doe I put them? In the back altogether? At the beginning of each month but what about later months?
I would like to streamline a little bit but I haven’t figured out the best way to do that. As it is right now, the book is quite chonky so I suspect I will try to reduce the bulk I carry on a daily basis a bit.
How’s your planning/journal/notebook set-up serving you? Have you needed to switch it up?
Apple insisted on hanging out with me while I photographed this post so he wanted to put his paw stamp on this post. It’s “Apple-approved.”
The post Mid-Year Planner Review appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
For most of us, the title The Shining first calls to mind the Stanley Kubrick film, not the Stephen King novel from which it was adapted. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that the former has entirely eclipsed the latter, the enormous difference between the works’ relative cultural impact speaks for itself — as does the resentment King occasionally airs about Kubrick’s extensive reworking of his original story. At the center of both versions of The Shining is a winter caretaker at a mountain resort who goes insane and tries to murder his own family, but in most other respects, the experience of the two works could hardly be more different.
How King’s The Shining became Kubrick’s The Shining is the subject of the video essay above from Tyler Knudsen, better known as CinemaTyler, previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on such auteurs as Robert Wiene, Jean Renoir, and Andrei Tarkovsky (as well as a seven-part series on Kubrick’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey). It begins with Kubrick’s search for a new idea after completing Barry Lyndon, which involved opening book after book at random and tossing against the wall any and all that proved unable to hold his attention. When it became clear that The Shining, the young King’s third novel, wouldn’t go flying, Kubrick enlisted the more experienced novelist Diane Johnson to collaborate with him on an adaptation for the screen.
Almost all of Kubrick’s films are based on books. As Knudsen explains it, “Kubrick felt that there aren’t many original screenwriters who are a high enough caliber as some of the greatest novelists,” and that starting with an already-written work “allowed him to see the story more objectively.” In determining the qualities that resonated with him, personally, “he could get at the core of what was good about the story, strip away the clutter, and enhance the most brilliant aspects with a profound sense of hindsight.” In no case do the transformative effects of this process come through more clearly than The Shining: Kubrick and Johnson reduced King’s almost 450 dialogue- and flashback-filled pages to a resonantly stark two and a half hours of film that has haunted viewers for four decades now.
“I don’t think the audience is likely to miss the many and self-consciously ‘heavy’ pages King devotes to things like Jack’s father’s drinking problem or Wendy’s mother,” Kubrick once said. Still, anyone can hack a story down: the hard part is knowing what to keep, and even more so what to intensify for maximum effect. Knudsen lists off a host of choices Kubrick and Johnson considered (including showing more Native American imagery, which should please fans of Bill Blakemore’s analysis in “The Family of Man”) but ultimately rejected. The result is a film with an abundance of visual detail, but only enough narrative and character detail to facilitate Kubrick’s aim of “using the audience’s own imagination against them,” letting them fill in the gaps with fears of their own. While his version of The Shining evades nearly all clichés, it does demonstrate the truth of one: less is more.
Related content:
Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining
How Stanley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Seven-Part Video Essay
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies
The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Without much overstatement, one can describe the history of modern political philosophy as the search for a suitable replacement for Christianity. Progress replaces providence, humanitarianism replaces charity, and mind (or reason) replaces God himself. Into the void left behind by Christianity have rushed all sorts of ideologies—that is, comprehensive systems of belief that purport to explain the whole of human thought, action, and purpose.
Americans are well aware of this totalizing tendency among our least favorite ideologies, communism and fascism; however, democracy itself is likewise prone to become just such an ideology. Pepperdine University’s Emily Finley calls this the “ideology of democratism,” and her 2022 book by the same name aims to highlight some of the metaphysical and religious aspects of contemporary democracy. She contends that democracy, or democratism, has become “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” In other words, democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.
Democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.
Democracy vs. Democratism
The relationship between democracy and democratism can perhaps best be understood in parallel with the relationship between science and scientism—the former being a concrete and practical method whereas the latter is merely a comprehensive (and, one might add, dubious) belief system that goes well beyond the method. Similarly, whereas democracy is the political rule of the people, democratism is, as Finley puts it, “a hypothetical or ideal conception of democracy that is only tenuously connected to the actual, historical desires of real popular majorities.” According to Finley, the prominent characteristics of democratism are (1) the belief that true democracy lies above and beyond the actual wishes of actual people, (2) that an elite legislator or vanguard is necessary to call forth the idealized will of the people, (3) that coercion and propaganda are suitable means of instantiating the popular will, and (4) that all individuals, were they stripped of their historical and contingent particularities, would be little democrats. In short, whereas democracy is the process whereby one ascertains and implements the will of the majority, democratism is an abstract conception of what the people as a whole should ideally will for themselves.
Finley rightly identifies Rousseau as the original prophet of democratism. His notion of “the general will” is the necessary philosophical prerequisite for the present division between the actual wills of the people (plural) and an idealized will of the people (singular). Indeed, Rousseau develops something like a set of procedures for setting aside individual wills in order to comprehend the general will: for example, citizens should not communicate with one another to avoid bias, and they should be “sufficiently informed.” (The parallel between Rousseau’s procedures and John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” is perhaps too obvious to mention.) If these procedures are followed, all laws will theoretically be simple, equal, generally applicable, and therefore just.
One need not be a skeptic to think this set of circumstances is unlikely to obtain under most conditions. Enter Rousseau’s deus ex machina—a quasi-divine legislator who can ensure the people choose rightly. Rousseau’s legislator will “persuade without convincing”—calling forth from the diverse interests of the people the true general will. Finley sees this divorce between actual and idealized wills as leading inevitably to a divorce between the people and their democratist leaders. Any version of this line of thinking, whether it be Rousseau’s or Rawls’s, will detach politics from individuals’ actual concerns and open space for powerful parties to cloak their own interests in the guise of something universal.
Whereas democracy is the process whereby one ascertains and implements the will of the majority, democratism is an abstract conception of what the people as a whole should ideally will for themselves.
Christian Origins
In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Finley shows how the notion of the “general will” was historically associated with Christian theology and still assumes some of that original framework: after all, discerning a singular, all-encompassing will requires a “God’s eye” view. Whether such an idea still makes sense in the absence of that original framework is an open question. Finley says, “For Rousseau, . . . the general will retains its original theological connotation of wholeness and perfection, but instead of being attributed to an infinite and omniscient God, it becomes a rational and ahistorical ideal. Rousseau and others substitute for the will of God an abstract will of humanity universally accessible through reason.”
In other words, the general will used to be situated in the mind of God, and fully accessible only to him; however, we hubristic moderns seem to think we too are omniscient (perhaps by virtue of our sheer number and our chronological superiority—call it “democratic omniscience”). Rousseau’s general will is certainly a major break from a Christian framework, but it is not nearly so profound as Rousseau’s total redefinition of human nature—a revolution at which Finley only hints. Rousseau plainly admits that his whole system of thought rests atop one fundamental doctrine: the natural goodness of man. If this is true, then perhaps it is Rousseau’s faith in our innate goodness that is the true foundation not only of the general will and democratism, but of political modernity itself. We have yet to fully understand how many social and political revolutions owe their existence to this fundamental shift in anthropology. Even Tocqueville points us in this direction when he notes that “the perfectibility of man” is the deepest dogma of democratic ages.
Nevertheless, there is great value in looking at democracy as an ideology. In fact, Finley helps us understand one curious fact about contemporary politics—namely, the incessant refrain of elites who blame “the people” for subverting, or perverting, true democracy. It is now commonplace to hear our moral and political elites utter—with no sense of irony—that our democracy is threatened by the will of the people (or at least the will of a certain class of people they find morally and politically repugnant). Indeed, between the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, one need not strain too hard to find examples of elites who were positively apoplectic over the result of free democratic choice. Even more recently, American progressives bemoaned the fact that abortion, as a matter of public policy, was returned to the state level (which is to say, would be resolved democratically rather than by judicial fiat).
Time and time again, we hear that democracy (the procedure) threatens to undermine democracy itself (ideological democracy), with the added irony that this typically comes from the mouths of Democrats. These mental contortions are possible because we have imported many other notions into democracy, and we are unable to disambiguate democracy as a procedure from democracy the ideology or belief system. Moreover, in one of the great virtues of the book, Finley helps us realize that we import into democracy a full-blown eschatology—the expectation of a “new age of peace and equality.” Few books have such keen vision of the religious aspects of modern democracy.
Time and time again, we hear that democracy (the procedure) threatens to undermine democracy itself (ideological democracy), with added irony that this typically comes from the mouths of Democrats.
Critiquing Democratists
The subsequent chapters of Finley’s book are a series of investigations into how democratism explains the actions and ideas of various influential thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Jacques Maritain, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, George W. Bush, and the neoconservatives in general. All of these people or groups believed, in some fashion or another, that true democracy was “just around the corner”—simply in need of a good shove. For all democratists, the success or failure of democracy rests on two factors—leadership and education—both of which should “refine” the will of the people and shape it into what it ought to be. Unlike the Founders, who contented themselves with the modest achievement of a system of compromises between interest groups, these various figures were bewitched by what Finley calls the “idyllic imagination”—a dream of a future utopia in which individual interest could be sublimated and transcended.
Some of the figures Finley critiques, such as Woodrow Wilson, won’t come as a surprise to most readers. In Finley’s poignant words, “Wilson believed that he was tasked with nothing less than completing Christ’s work on Calvary. If the world would but heed his counsel, he could help to bestow on humanity ‘the full right to live and realize the purposes that God had meant them to realize.’” While this sort of secularized theology, or civic religion, is not terribly surprising from Wilson, Finley sees the same sort of heresy on the part of Catholic political philosopher Jacques Maritain. Her chapter on Maritain makes it clear that democratism tempts individuals whether they happen to be secular or religious. Finley, who is herself a sincere Catholic, reserves some of her harshest criticisms for Maritain (as one is typically justified in criticizing most fervently those nearest to oneself).
According to Finley, Maritain’s “Christian” or “Personalist” democracy owes more to Rousseau than to the Apostle Paul, and his central social and political ideas—“the brotherhood of men,” “universal community,” “the whole human family,” etc.—emerge from a sentimental humanitarianism rather than genuine Christian charity. Harsh words, but probably justified. Moreover, while Maritain is remembered for his criticism of the atheistic and materialistic underpinnings of Marxism, Finley sees Maritain’s political philosophy as only superficially different from Marx. Here, Finley can speak for herself:
Maritain’s vision of earthly renewal founded in a new brotherhood of humanity resembles Marx’s broad outline of the same idea. Are the differences between the two visions of these major points substantive or merely rhetorical? Maritain articulates a vision of international brotherhood, freedom, and equality that is to be accomplished through major socioeconomic reorganization at the hands of a knowing vanguard, aided by what is nothing other than a secular political faith—the “democratic creed.” . . . Such a focus on the material and political . . . at times spiritualizes the political—a charge Maritain laid on Marxism. Under the auspices of Christian “democracy,” Maritain seems to be a major contributor to a new political ideology not so different from the one he repudiates.
These and similar denunciations can be found on nearly every page of Finley’s book, and they are in equal parts interesting and convincing. She reminds us that democracy, at least in its democratist form, shares many of the same assumptions as communism and fascism, lest we be too enamored of our own preferred political presuppositions. She is not the first to make these claims; they are a version of Eric Voegelin’s idea of political gnosticism. However, Finley’s contributions are still valuable: one cannot be told too often that even democracy is not immune to delusional utopianism.
On the topic of delusional utopianism, much more could be said about Finley’s other chapters on “deliberative democratism” (featuring Rawls and Habermas) and “war democratism” (featuring George W. Bush and neoconservatism), but some things are better left for the reader to explore themselves. Individuals of every political persuasion will be challenged by Finley’s account, and, best of all, one cannot level the charge of partisanship against Finley, for some of her harshest criticisms are reserved for Republicans, like President Bush, who took up the democratist mantle of Wilson. Democratism, whether right or left, represents a profound departure from the Founders.
If one is to criticize Finley’s book, one could begin by suggesting perhaps that it is not merely democracy, but progress, that is modernity’s reigning ideology. In truth, democracy worships at the altar of progress, which is why the democratists wait in expectation of a future blessed estate (rather than look backward to a rosy past). Perhaps not Rousseau, but Francis Bacon, is the principal founder of modernity. However, the truth is that modernity is probably a marriage of Bacon and Rousseau—a sentimental naturalism wedded to techno-utopianism. Maybe this nightmarish combination is what really constitutes Finley’s “democratism.”
Democracy is valuable to the extent that it is placed in its proper position and context—that it is bounded and balanced by other elements.
Democracy, like many good things, is destroyed if it is elevated above all else. Democracy is valuable to the extent that it is placed in its proper position and context—bounded and balanced by other elements. As Edmund Burke wisely noted, one does not obtain liberty, equality, and self-government by merely letting go of the reins; these things require a complex system of incentives, punishments, and checks and balances that parallel the complexities of human nature. Our Founders understood this far better than do the democratists.
Finley’s book ultimately demonstrates how we have been bewitched by a simplistic and false notion of human nature that is prone to delusional optimism, and she makes a compelling case for returning to the wise foundations of our country. Overall, Finley’s critique of democratism is a service to our understanding of modern politics and a cautionary tale against making democracy into a comprehensive worldview. I recommend to you The Ideology of Democratism, even if I maintain that the book should have been called The Religion of Democracy because that better encapsulates the sacred, if not sacrosanct, nature of democracy in contemporary society. In the final analysis, Finley shows us that democracy is ineradicably religious; the question that remains is whether religion can bolster democracy without being swallowed up by it.
I usually send out my newsletter at the end of each month. It’s just a collection of the posts published that month (you should subscribe if for some reason you don’t check this site every day). I thought it would be nice maybe to start each newsletter with some personal introduction of what has taken place over the month, and hey, I may as well make that a blog post. So here are some highlights and thoughts from June.
I went to the EDEN conference in Dublin, with Maren who was keynoting. Although I’ve been to a couple of conferences since lockdown, this was the first time meeting lots of international people who I hadn’t seen since the before times. It was a fun conference, lots of good talks, and well organised. I still feel as though my conference stamina is underdeveloped compared to pre-pandemic – it’s all that talking to people. And I’m not entirely sure I want to get back to that level either. Two or three a year seems a nice level now.
We gained a further round of GO-GN funding this month from the Hewlett Foundation, which is great news. This remains the best project I’ve worked on, and this year we celebrate 10 years since its founding.
I read 10 books this month, the pick of them was Fingers Crossed by Miki Berenyi (of 90s shoegaze group Lush). Her childhood is pretty messed up, and her account of the sexism of the music industry (particularly Brit pop) is scathing, but she tells it all with a dry sense of humour. After reading some male rock biographies, which think tales of blocking up toilets and hanging out with groupies are way more entertaining than they actually are, this was a refreshing entry in the rock biography genre.
It was also a delight to see Audrey Watters return with a Substack newsletter, Second Breakfast. I’ve paid up for a year, and it’s already a treat to have it ping into my inbox. I’ve missed her writing and insight.
AI angst continues to dominate much of the ed tech and beyond discourse. I’ve been in meetings at the OU where it is nothing short of outright panic, reminiscent of this scene:
Stay calm everyone.
Even though it's often employed innocently, there's an inherent element of tragedy in the phrase "ahead of their time" when it's associated with unsung or overlooked geniuses in a field. If one is "ahead of their time," odds are they'll never live to see the impact their existence inspired or receive the adulation they so richly deserve. — Read the rest
With a country as large and as diverse as the United States, writing a truly national history, of any kind, is a tall order indeed. By necessity, shortcuts have to Read more
The post Scott Ellsworth on Bob Blauner’s *Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America* first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
Helping verbs are curious, AND fascinating
English has a big bagful of auxiliary verbs. You may have learned these as “helping verbs” in elementary and middle school, since they are sometimes described as verbs that “help” the main verb express its meaning. There are even schoolroom songs about them. They are a curious bunch.
The auxiliaries include the modal verbs (can and could, shall and should, will and would, may and might, and must). The verb that follows a modal is in its bare, uninflected form: can go, could go, must go, and so on. There are also a number of semi-modal auxiliary verbs (such as dare, need, ought to, had better, have to, and used to). Some are compound words spelled with a space and several have unusual grammatical properties as well, such as being resistant to contraction or inversion. And in parts of the English-speaking world, modals can double up, yielding expressions like might could, may can, might should, and more.
Aside from the modals, semi-modals, and double modals, the primary auxiliaries are forms of have, be, and do, which are inflected for tense (is versus was, has versus had, do versus did), number (is versus are, has versus have), and person(is versus am versus are, do versus does). These auxiliaries help to indicate verbal nuances like emphasis, the perfect and progressive aspects, and the passive voice. Here are some examples, adapted from Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:
Those who did catch sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove … (emphatic do and perfect aspect had)
The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. (progressive aspect)
His shirt was patched so many times that it was like the sail … (passive voice)
The primary auxiliaries come before the negative adverb not and allow contraction to it.
They didn’t catch sharks.
His shirt wasn’t patched.
He hadn’t taken the sharks.
And they play a role in questions by hopping to the left over the subject
Did they catch sharks?
Was his shirt patched?
Had he taken the sharks?
or by being copied at the end in a tag question.
They caught sharks, didn’t they?
His shirt was patched, wasn’t it?
He had taken the sharks, hadn’t he?
Main verbs like see and go and walk don’t do any of those tricks.
Things get even curiouser, however, because the helping verbs have and do have doppelgangers that actually are main verbs.
The old man did his chores.
His shirt had a tear in it.
How do we know these are main verbs and not helping verbs? Well, for one thing, they are the only verbs in the sentence. For another, they can occur with other helping verbs:
The old man had done his chores.
His shirt had had a tear in it all day.
And if you make the sentences questions or negate them, you have to add a form of auxiliary do.
Did the old man do his chores?
Did his shirt have a tear in it?
The helping verb be also has a doppelganger main verb, but the forms of main verb be behave pretty much just like the helping verb. More curious behavior, keeping us on our toes. The first sentence below has past tense main verb was followed by an adjective; the other two have the past tense helping verb was.
The shark was tenacious. (main verb was)
The shark was never caught. (auxiliary was)
The old man was trying his best. (auxiliary was)
But all three was forms hop to the left in questions.
Was the shark tenacious?
Was the shark ever caught?
Was the old man trying his best?
The curious behavior of helping verbs goes on and on, with different dialects doing different things. If you’ve read many British novels or watched British television you might have noticed forms of helping verb do popping up in elliptical sentences. Here’s an example from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers: “Sam frowned. If he could have bored holes in Gollum with his eyes, he would have done.” (For a study of these forms, check out Ronald Butters’s 1983 article “Syntactic change in British English propredicates.”)
In African American English, the auxiliary done lends a completive meaning to events. You can see it in these dialogue examples from August Wilson’s Fences and from Walter Mosely’s Blond Faith: “Now I done give you everything I got to give you!” and “Didn’t she tell you that Pericles done passed on.” For more on this use of done, take a look at the chapters by Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk and by Charles E. DeBose in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language.
We’ve just scratched the surface of auxiliaries. I hope you’ve become curious about these curious words.
Featured image by Alexander Grey via Unsplash (public domain)
When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” And yet, both as a species and as individuals in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic culture, we are living under the tyranny of more — a civilizational cult we call progress. We have forgotten who we would be, and what our world would look like, if instead we lived under the benediction of enough.
How we got here, and what we might do about it, is what photographer, writer, illustrator, and wilderness guide Miriam Körner explores in Fox and Bear (public library) — a love letter to nature disguised as a modern fable of ecological grief and hope, partway between The Iron Giant and The Forest, yet entirely and consummately original, painstakingly illustrated in cut-out dioramas from reused and recycled cardboard, narrated with poetic tenderness and a passion for possibility.
Every day, Fox and Bear went into the forest to gather what there was to gather and to catch what there was to catch.
Day after day, the two friends forage and hunt together, watch the sun set and listen to the birds sing.
Life was good, thought Bear.
Picking berries and mushrooms,
hunting ants and mice,
catching rabbits and birds
kept them busy day after day.
But eventually, these joyful activities turn into tasks and the two friends get seduced by the trap of efficiency — that deadening impulse to optimize and operationalize doing at the expense of being.
As Bear and Fox begin gathering more and more seeds, catching more and more birds, laboring to water the seedlings and feed the birds, they suddenly find themselves with no time to watch the sunset or listen to birdsong.
This is how the allure of automation creeps in — Fox sets about inventing mechanical means of accomplishing the daily tasks, in the hope of liberating more time for leisure: an egg collector, a bird feeder, a water sprinkler, a berry picker.
Instead, the opposite happens as the forest begins to look like an industrial palace evocative of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s cautionary observation that “we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely.”
All this enterprise ends up consuming the time for leisure, subsuming the space for joy, affirming Hermann Hesse’s century-old admonition that “the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”
Every day now, Fox and Bear cut down more trees to burn in the steam engines, so the egg collector could collect eggs and the water sprinkler would water the plants. At night, they filled the bird feeder and fixed the berry picker and built more cages until it was almost sunrise.
As Fox keeps dreaming up bigger and bigger engines, faster and faster machines, Bear finds himself “so tired he had no imagination left.”
Suddenly, he wakes up from the trance of busyness and remembers how lovely it was to simply wander the forest “and gather what there is to gather and catch what there is to catch.”
And, just like that, the two friends abandon the compulsions of progress and return to the elemental joy of simply being alive — creatures among creatures, on a world already perfectly tuned for every creaturely need. We have a finite store of sunsets in a life, after all.
Couple Fox and Bear with the Dalai Lama’s illustrated ethical and ecological philosophy for the next generation, then revisit the forgotten conservation pioneer William Vogt’s roadmap to civilizational survival and Denise Levertov’s stirring poem about our relationship to the natural world.
Illustrations courtesy of Miriam Körner
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
With Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive now commencing, the backlash against Russian culture continues in the West, raising the question why one should read Russian literature. Gary Saul Morson, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University, offers a reason in his latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. For Morson, to read Russian literature is to live between wonder and certainty—to sit somewhere between an attitude of humble awe and unyielding dogmatism before the world. This oscillation between wonder and certainty not only shaped Russian intellectual, literary, and political debates for the past two centuries but also asks us in the West who we are in our own tradition—whether we are open to wonderment and surprise or smugly satisfied with our knowledge. Simply put, to read Russian literature is to know ourselves.
Russian literature is known for wrestling with universal questions about the nature of good and evil, human freedom, moral responsibility, and political utopianism. This is because it was written under extreme conditions. Since the nineteenth century, Russian writers have responded to their country’s experiences that included the liberation of over twenty million serfs, terrorism and political assassinations, revolutions and civil war, famines and Gulags, world wars and the collapse of two empires. As Morson observes, such extremity does “not invite euphemisms.” It created a literary intensity that has perhaps been unmatched since the age of Greek tragedy. The direct confrontation of evil stripped the veneer of civilization, so that Russian writers starkly asked what the human condition was and why suffering occurred. The answers from Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and others were equally severe and ranged from deep awe before the world to shutting oneself up in solipsistic certainty.
The direct confrontation of evil stripped the veneer of civilization, so that Russian writers starkly asked what the human condition was and why suffering occurred.
The Intelligentsia vs. The Literary Class
According to Morson, the best analogue to Russian literature is not French, English, or American literature but the Hebrew Bible, where the “artist communes with God.” Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously. For example, Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel is as much a critique of Lenin’s Marxism as of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in War and Peace. Nothing is untouched in Russian literature, and therefore everything belongs to it. The aim of Russian literature is not just “to amuse and instruct,” but to search for something higher—to discover truth itself.
The emergence of the intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Russia marked the beginning of the “golden age” of Russian literature with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Morson contrasts these writers with the intelligentsia: university-educated people whose cultural capital in schooling, education, and progressive ideas allowed them to assume moral leadership in Russian politics and public opinion. Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Chernyshevsky, and others were members of this social class who were certain of their revolutionary ideas and committed to the radical transformation of Russian society.
These two traditions in Russia—the literary and the intelligentsia—had their own canons and their own truths, with the former favoring wonder in art, beauty, and religion, and the latter valuing materialism, utility, and revolution. While Russian thinkers and writers did not always neatly fall into one category or the other, they worked within these two paradigms. Russian society was polarized like our country today, with writers and the intelligentsia corresponding to “red” and “blue” America. This exchange of ideas was aired in public in journals, newspapers, and literature, and lasted over generations.
These two traditions in Russia—the literary and the intelligentsia—had their own canons and their own truths, with the former favoring wonder in art, beauty, and religion, and the latter valuing materialism, utility, and revolution.
Take, for instance, Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Children, where the author satirized the protagonist Bazarov, who was a nihilist and member of the intelligentsia. In response, Chernyshevsky published the following year his own novel, What Is to Be Done?, which refuted Turgenev’s claim about the importance and value of beauty and instead remained steadfast in its philosophy of materialist utilitarianism that denied human agency. These ideas, in turn, were mocked by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) and Demons (1872), and later rebutted by Tolstoy in his own What Is to Be Done? (1886) which argued for the existence of moral responsibility. Yet in the next century, Lenin published his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, again echoing Chernyshevsky’s novel, and called for a vanguard party to educate and lead the proletariat to revolution.
The Three Archetypes
According to Morson, out of this exchange between writers and the intelligentsia emerged three archetypes that reflected the dominant personalities in Russian civilization. The first was the “wanderer” who was a pilgrim of ideas, often trading one theory for another, in search of the truth. Some writers experienced life-changing spiritual conversions, such as Tolstoy, as told in his Confessions, or Solzhenitsyn, as told in the Gulag Archipelago; while others accepted ideas bereft of God as the source of human salvation, such as Belinsky or Kropotkin. While both writers and intelligentsia looked to ideas for truth, the intelligentsia mistook theory for reality and thus became dedicated to a fanatical idealism. By contrast, writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky understood the limits of theory in accounting for reality, acknowledging that mystery and wonder were at the root of human existence, and they criticized the intelligentsia for their naïve beliefs.
The second archetype was the idealist—the opposite of the wanderer, because he or she remained steadfast in loyalty to a single ideal, such as Don Quixote in his dedication to Dulcinea. In fact, the character Don Quixote was an object of fascination among Russian writers, especially Turgenev, as told in his essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” In Russian literature there were two types of Don Quixote idealists: the disappointed and the incorrigible. Vsevolod Garshin was representative of the first—disillusioned with reality, accepting the ugliness that it was; Gleb Uspensky was emblematic of the second—unable to reconcile the horrid truths about the peasantry with his idealization of them. Uspensky remained incorrigibly committed to his ideals in spite of reality, leading him to praise despotism and justify policies of cruelty out of an abstract love of humanity.
By contrast, writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky understood the limits of theory in accounting for reality, acknowledging that mystery and wonder were at the root of human existence, and they criticized the intelligentsia for their naïve beliefs.
The third dominant personality was the revolutionist who loved war and violence for their own sake. Bakunin, Savinkov, Lenin, Stalin, and others represented this Russian archetype. They were motivated by a metaphysical hatred of a reality that could not be explained with certainty, and, with Russian liberal acquiescence, they came to power to murder millions of Russian citizens.
All three of these archetypal personalities reveal the limitations of theoretical thinking in accounting for reality. Russian writers showed how the intelligentsia’s infallible methods of science fell short, as in the cases of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Pierre in War and Peace, and Arkady in Fathers and Children. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn explained why human freedom and moral agency existed and why suffering brought one closer to God. Human beings cannot be simply classified as good or evil; doing so, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, was the key moral error of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”
The Mystery of Ordinary Life
Literature, particularly Russian literature, illuminates for us not only the actual but also the possible. There are no ironclad laws of human progress, nor does an inevitable future await us. In his analysis of Russian writers, Morson observes that Solzhenitsyn has shown us the Russia “that might have been” and Dostoevsky has illuminated the “cloud of possibilities” that every human confronts before choosing. As Morson states:
The poetic process suggests that no fate predetermines our future. Possibilities ramify. Constraints limit choice but allow for more than one. There will never be a moment when everything fits and stories are all complete. The future, like the past, will be a series of present moments, and each present moment is oriented towards multiple futures. Time’s potential is never exhausted.
Literature is especially suited to account for life’s endless possibilities, because its attention is on the ordinary—the family, marriage, personal happiness. Chekhov was a master at capturing the ordinary in literature, as were Tolstoy and Grossman. Characters were changed by their choices, but their choices were conditioned by their ordinary context. This is part of Morson’s theory of prosaics, that “Cloaked in their ordinariness, the truths we seek are hidden in plain view.” Meaning is not derived from some intelligentsia’s abstract ideology; it is discovered in our ordinary encounter with the world as it is.
Like Russian writers and their characters, we live in a reality that will always elude our understanding; we can respond with either wonder or certainty. Do we seek a life of contemplation and reflection that always will be incomplete, or one of convicted activism and dogmatic ideology? Does our happiness spring from being with our spouses, children, and local surroundings, or from dreams of an inevitable future of progress and enlightenment? Are we morally free creatures or merely products of a predisposed identity, whether it be race, class, or gender? This is a conversation that all civilizations have, but in Russia it was manifested in literature. All the more reason to revisit its writers and read their works.
We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. And yet the more we learn about how the mind constructs the world, the more we see that our experience of reality is a function of our emotionally directed attention and “has something of the structure of love.” Philosopher Martha Nussbaum recognized this in her superb inquiry into the intelligence of emotion, observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”
A century before Nussbaum, the far-seeing Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (February 16, 1891–June 21, 1976) took up these questions in a series of BBC broadcasts and other lectures, gathered in his 1935 collection Reason and Emotion (public library).
Macmurray writes:
We ourselves are events in history. Things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us.
They happen primarily through our emotional lives — the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves.
Three decades before James Baldwin marveled at how “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” Macmurray considers the universal resonance of our emotional confusion, which binds us to each other and makes our responsibility for our own lives a responsibility to our collective flourishing:
All of us, if we are really alive, are disturbed now in our emotions. We are faced by emotional problems that we do not know how to solve. They distract our minds, fill us with misgiving, and sometimes threaten to wreck our lives. That is the kind of experience to which we are committed. If anyone thinks they are peculiar to the difficulties of his own situation, let him… talk a little about them to other people. He will discover that he is not a solitary unfortunate. We shall make no headway with these questions unless we begin to see them, and keep on seeing them, not as our private difficulties but as the growing pains of a new world of human experience. Our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind. When we see them steadily in this universal setting, then and then only will our private difficulties become really significant. We shall recognize them as the travail of a new birth for humanity, as the beginning of a new knowledge of ourselves and of God.
At the heart of this recognition, this reorientation to our own inner lives, lies what Macmurray calls “emotional reason” — a capacity through which we “develop an emotional life that is reasonable in itself, so that it moves us to forms of behaviour which are appropriate to reality.” The absence of this capacity contributes both to our alienation from life and to our susceptibility to dangerous delusion. Its development requires both a willingness to feel life deeply and what Bertrand Russell called “the will to doubt.” Macmurray writes:
The main difficulty that faces us in the development of a scientific knowledge of the world lies not in the outside world but in our own emotional life. It is the desire to retain beliefs to which we are emotionally attached for some reason or other. It is the tendency to make the wish father to the thought. .. If we are to be scientific in our thoughts… we must be ready to subordinate our wishes and desires to the nature of the world… Reason demands that our beliefs should conform to the nature of the world, not the nature of our hopes and ideals.
In consonance with Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s insightful insistence on the courage to disillusion yourself, Macmurray adds:
The strength of our opposition to the development of reason is measured by the strength of our dislike of being disillusioned. We should all admit, if it were put to us directly, that it is good to get rid of illusions, but in practice the process of disillusionment is painful and disheartening. We all confess to the desire to get at the truth, but in practice the desire for truth is the desire to be disillusioned. The real struggle centres in the emotional field, because reason is the impulse to overcome bias and prejudice in our own favour, and to allow our feelings and desires to be fashioned by things outside us, often by things over which we have no control. The effort to achieve this can rarely be pleasant or flattering to our self-esteem. Our natural tendency is to feel and to believe in the way that satisfies our impulses. We all like to feel that we are the central figure in the picture, and that our own fate ought to be different from that of everybody else. We feel that life should make an exception in our favour. The development of reason in us means overcoming all this. Our real nature as persons is to be reasonable and to extend and develop our capacity for reason. It is to acquire greater and greater capacity to act objectively and not in terms of our subjective constitution. That is reason, and it is what distinguishes us from the organic world, and makes us super-organic.
And yet reason, Macmurray argues, is “primarily an affair of emotion” — a paradoxical notion he unpacks with exquisite logical elegance:
All life is activity. Mere thinking is not living. Yet thinking, too, is an activity, even if it is an activity which is only real in its reference to activities which are practical. Now, every activity must have an adequate motive, and all motives are emotional. They belong to our feelings, not our thoughts.
[…]
It is extremely difficult to become aware of this great hinterland of our minds, and to bring our emotional life, and with it the motives which govern our behaviour, fully into consciousness.
This difficulty is precisely what makes us so maddeningly opaque to ourselves, and what makes emotional reason so urgent a necessity in understanding ourselves — something only possible, in a further paradox, when we step outside ourselves:
The real problem of the development of emotional reason is to shift the centre of feeling from the self to the world outside. We can only begin to grow up into rationality when we begin to see our own emotional life not as the centre of things but as part of the development of humanity.
In a sentiment evocative of E.E. Cummings’s wonderful meditation on the courage to feel for yourself, Macmurray adds:
There can be no hope of educating our emotions unless we are prepared to stop relying on other people’s for our judgements of value. We must learn to feel for ourselves even if we make mistakes.
An epoch before neuroscience uncovered how the life of the body gives rise to emotion and consciousness, Macmurray echoes Willa Cather’s insistence on the life of the senses as the key to creativity and vitality, and writes:
Our sense-life is central and fundamental to our human experience. The richness and fullness of our lives depends especially upon the richness and fullness, upon the delicacy and quality of our sense-life.
[…]
Living through the senses is living in love. When you love anything, you want to fill your consciousness with it. You want to affirm its existence. You feel that it is good and that it should be in the world and be what it is. You want other people to look at it and enjoy it too. You want to look at it again and again. You want to know it, to know it better and better, and you want other people to do the same. In fact, you are appreciating and enjoying it for itself, and that is all that you want. This kind of knowledge is primarily of the senses. It is not of the intellect. You don’t want merely to know about the object; often you don’t want to know about it at all. What you do want is to know it. Intellectual knowledge tells us about the world. it gives us knowledge about things, not knowledge of them. It does not reveal the world as it is. Only emotional knowledge can do that.
Emotional reason thus becomes the pathway to wholeness, to integration of the total personality — a radical achievement in a culture that continually fragments and fractures us:
The fundamental element in the development of the emotional life is the training of this capacity to live in the senses, to become more and more delicately and completely aware of the world around us, because it is a good half of the meaning of life to be so. It is training in sensitiveness… If we limit awareness so that it merely feeds the intellect with the material for thought, our actions will be intellectually determined. They will be mechanical, planned, thought-out. Our sensitiveness is being limited to a part of ourselves — the brain in particular — and, therefore, we will act only with part of ourselves, at least so far as our actions are consciously and rationally determined. If, on the other hand, we live in awareness, seeking the full development of our sensibility to the world, we shall soak ourselves in the life of the world around us; with the result that we shall act with the whole of ourselves.
A generation after William James made the then-radical assertion that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” and an epoch before science began illuminating how our bodies and our minds conspire in emotional experience, Macmurray considers what the achievement of emotional reason requires:
We have to learn to live with the whole of our bodies, not only with our heads… The intellect itself cannot be a source of action… Such action can never be creative, because creativeness is a characteristic which belongs to personality in its wholeness, acting as a whole, and not to any of its parts acting separately.
This wakefulness to the sensorium of life, he argues, is not only the root of emotional reason but the root of creativity:
If we allow ourselves to be completely sensitive and completely absorbed in our awareness of the world around, we have a direct emotional experience of the real value in the world, and we respond to this by behaving in ways which carry the stamp of reason upon them in their appropriateness and grace and freedom. The creative energy of the world absorbs us into itself and acts through us. This, I suppose, is what people mean by “inspiration.”
And yet we can’t be selectively receptive to beauty and wonder — those rudiments of inspiration — without being receptive to the full spectrum of reality, with all its terrors and tribulations. Our existential predicament is that, governed by the reflex to spare ourselves pain, we blunt our sensitivity to life, thus impoverishing our creative vitality and our store of aliveness. Macmurray writes:
The reason why our emotional life is so undeveloped is that we habitually suppress a great deal of our sensitiveness and train our children from the earliest years to suppress much of their own. It might seem strange that we should cripple ourselves so heavily in this way… We are afraid of what would be revealed to us if we did not. In imagination we feel sure that it would be lovely to live with a full and rich awareness of the world. But in practice sensitiveness hurts. It is not possible to develop the capacity to see beauty without developing also the capacity to see ugliness, for they are the same capacity. The capacity for joy is also the capacity for pain. We soon find that any increase in our sensitiveness to what is lovely in the world increases also our capacity for being hurt. That is the dilemma in which life has placed us. We must choose between a life that is thin and narrow, uncreative and mechanical, with the assurance that even if it is not very exciting it will not be intolerably painful; and a life in which the increase in its fullness and creativeness brings a vast increase in delight, but also in pain and hurt.
The development of emotional reason, Macmurray argues, is the development of our highest human nature and requires “keeping as fully alive to things as they are, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, as we possibly can.” It requires, above all, being unafraid to feel, for that is the fundament of aliveness. He writes:
The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it, and is the subordinate partner in the human economy. This is because the intellect is essentially instrumental. Thinking is not living. At its worst it is a substitute for living; at its best a means of living better… The emotional life is our life, both as awareness of the world and as action in the world, so far as it is lived for its own sake. Its value lies in itself, not in anything beyond it which it is a means of achieving.
[…]
The education of the intellect to the exclusion of the education of the emotional life… will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life, in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself. When it is the persistent and universal tendency in any society to concentrate upon the intellect and its training, the result will be a society which amasses power, and with power the means to the good life, but which has no correspondingly developed capacity for living the good life for which it has amassed the means… We have immense power, and immense resources; we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely. I should trace the condition of affairs almost wholly to our failure to educate our emotional life.
In the remainder of the thoroughly revelatory Reason and Emotion, Macmurray goes on to explore the role of art and religion in human life as “the expressions of reason working in the emotional life in search of reality,” the benedictions of friendship, and the fundaments of an emotional education that allows us to discover the true values in life for ourselves. Complement it with Dostoyevsky on the heart, the mind, and how we come to know truth and Bruce Lee’s unpublished writings on reason and emotion, then revisit Anaïs Nin on why emotional excess is essential for creativity.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)
This Yggdrasil World Tree Leather Journal from 12 Parsecs Designs is one of those items that falls into a special category I like to call "things I have to review before my teenager steals them for Dungeons and Dragons." If you're in the market for a book in which to record magical journeys, occult recipes, treasure maps, or any other flights of fancy, you should probably check out the Notebooks page over at 12 Parsecs Designs.
This thicc journal has a sturdy leather cover that's interfaced with canvas. Its back cover tucks into the front to conceal the fore-edge, and it closes with two brass buckles on the front. The cover of this particular one is embossed with an image of Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree, with gorgeous Viking-inspired designs surrounding it. The leather is painted walnut brown with an almost woodgrain effect to the brushstrokes. Y'all, it's really pretty.
Inside this stunning cover are five signatures of 20 sheets of cushy watercolor paper, for a total of 100 sheets or 200 pages. The paper is very thick, soft, and pillowy. You could take a nap on this paper. I usually associate this fibrous paper with bleeding and feathering, but this is very well made sketchbook paper, and I did not have any issues. It is too soft, however, for sharp-pointed tools, so mechanical pencils, EF pen nibs, and ultra fine pen points are not going to be your friend here. And the paper is thirsty. While I was able to write with a medium point fountain pen just fine, it does drink the ink, and the pen's feed eventually struggled to keep up with the necessary flow. The best instrument I found for this paper was either a wood case pencil that's not sharpened too much, or a standard ballpoint pen. Of course, watercolors would be the specific ideal use for this paper, but I shan't disgrace it with my poor art.
The paper also has dried flowers scattered throughout its pages, which adds to the whimsical, fairytale effect. I know soft, flowery paper is going to send some of you running in the opposite direction, but that just leaves more fae paper for the rest of us, so bye.
This notebook is about as opposite as you can get from the streamlined, minimal, purely utilitarian notebooks that make up the bulk of my notebook stash. I love those, too. And I love this. This isn't a notebook that makes me think "perfect for meetings" or "I'll use this for class" or "so efficient and productive." No, this notebook says "time to play and dream" and I am so here for it.
12 Parsecs Designs suggests that this notebook is great for gamers, painters, scrapbookers, journalers, or even folks who want a cool photo album. I agree, and I'm impressed. For all this loveliness and versatility, they're only charging $31 (and they're actually on sale for less as I write this). That's much less than I expected after using the notebook. I can already tell I'll be back for more of these. Probably very soon, when my little Dungeon Master steals mine.
(12 Parsecs Designs provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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