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March 31, 2009
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Portrait of an ideologue
In 1841, Nathaniel Hawthorne spent several months living at the short-lived Brook Farm, a utopian commune in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He left after it became clear that day after day of laboring in the fields was not, in the end, going to enhance his ability to write (he had hoped for the opposite effect). A decade later, Hawthorne's memories of his failed experiment in utopian living became the basis for The Blithedale Romance, his third major novel and his third extended foray into the more obscure and troubling corners of the American psyche. While history, hypocrisy, guilt, and shame occupy him in The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance is concerned with optimism and idealism, the philosophy of hope, and (this is Hawthorne, after all), the terrible distortions of character that arise when people try to impose their utopian ideals on their communities (even, and perhaps especially, when those communities are expressly formed for the purpose).
I've been reading The Blithedale Romance, and am quite taken with Hawthorne's attempts to find a language to describe the kinds of psychological distortions that occur when the belief system is more important than the reality. He doesn't seem to have access, for example, to the modern concept of the ideologue (though the word was was around). Instead, he uses, as the nearest available approximation, the term "philanthropist," which nicely captures the way utopian thinking tends to rationalize all kinds of bad behavior as "for the greater good."
Here is Hawthorne's portrait of Hollingsworth, the "philanthropist" founder of Blithedale:
I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed. But it impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too intimate a connection with him. He was not altogether human. There was something else in Hollingsworth, besides flesh and blood, and sympathies and affections, and celestial spirit.This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an over-ruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them to little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly straight path. They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious, and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the Devil been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process, by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.
Of course, I am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated, in the attempt to make it adequate. Professed philanthropists have gone far; but no originally good man, I presume, ever went so far as this. Let the reader abate whatever he deems fit. The paragraph may remain, however, both for its truth and its exaggeration, as strongly expressive of the tendencies which were really operative in Hollingsworth, and as exemplifying the kind of error into which my mode of observation was calculated to lead me. The issue was, that, in solitude, I often shuddered at my friend. In my recollection of his dark and impressive countenance, the features grew more sternly prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted it with an adamantine wrinkle. On meeting him again, I was often filled with remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow of a household fire that was burning in a cave.--"He is a man, after all!" thought I--"his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!--not that steel engine of the Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!"--But, in my wood-walks, and in my silent chamber, the dark face frowned at me again.
This is a whopper of a passage. It captures the narcissism that animates the ideologue (who cannot see that his cause is ultimately himself) as well as the charisma that makes certain ideologues hugely compelling. It evokes how two-faced we can be to ourselves--recognizing truths in private that we then toss to the winds when the time comes to make good on those recognitions. Removed from the language of psychiatry--which did not properly exist when Hawthorne was writing--it leans on the rhetoric of evil ... and then retreats with embarrassment and apology, indicting itself for overstating the trouble with the philanthropic character. I sensed Hawthorne merging with his narrator there, questioning the judgment of his own instinctively strong portrait. And I wondered what Hawthorne would have done with this passage, if he could have looked into the future and seen what, a mere century later, certain kinds of utopian thinking would have wrought upon the world.
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Nice. I can't help but notice how "Hollingsworth" echoes The Scarlet Letter's "Chillingworth." Salem, too, was a utopian community, though Chillingworth is not exactly what one would call an ideologue. His kind of corruption seems more individual than social. He's not the ideologue, but the one who creates ideologues. I suppose one could argue that this is what he tries to do with Dimmesdale.
I wondered what Hawthorne would have done with this passage, if he could have looked into the future and seen what, a mere century later, certain kinds of utopian thinking would have wrought upon the world. In addition to the obvious "kinds of utopian thinking" you presumably have in mind here (e.g., Soviet communism), one could add others you perhaps don't have in mind, such as Zionism (with its kibbutzim). In Hawthorne's own time there were such vivid examples of intentional communities as the Mormons. (Somehow the phrase "the ideologue who cannot see that his cause is ultimately himself" reminds me as much of Joseph Smith as Josef Stalin, though of course the comparison cannot fairly go beyond the sizes of the egos involved.) And before that there was the utopia that leaned hardest of all on Hawthorne's imagination--the Puritan colony in New England. If we're looking for examples of the "terrible distortions of character that arise when people try to impose their utopian ideals on their communities (even...when those communities are expressly formed for the purpose)," there's no need to look to the 20th century. Before the Ministry of Love there were some pretty scary ministrations of ("Christian") love.
Also, isn't there a utopian streak in the basic idea of the residential liberal-arts college? Maybe that's why there's this constant battle over speech codes and the like.
Anyway, thanks for the post. It's got me thinking maybe I should find some excuse to teach Blithedale again. It's been many years.
The comparison between Joseph Smith and Josef Stalin can, in fact, go well beyond "the sizes of the egos involved" and could include, for example, death tolls, the number of gulags created, and the number of other countries invaded and enslaved.
Everyone who visits this site would fair much better in a kibbutz or elsewhere in Israel than anywhere in the old USSR.
Hawthorne remains for me the predominant nineteenth century American storyteller. He prepared these themes in earlier stories such as "The May-Pole of Merrymount," in which two radically one-sided communities come into horrifying contact, and "The Celestial Railroad," in which progress is forced to sober up upon contact with a darker human nature, and "Earth's Holocaust," in which all must destroyed in the name of progress.
(And for me, Toni Morrison remains our closest thing to a Hawthorne. Novels like *Sula*, *Beloved*, and *Paradise* maintain a similar jaundiced eye for false progress, monomania, and the dangers both of community and isolation from community.)
David -- Your comment made me curious to know if Hawthorne had any thoughts about Mormonism, and, if so, when he had them. Turns out he builds a passing reference into The Blithedale Romance, when, in chapter 23, Miles Coverdale describes the carnival of traveling entertainers who pass through villages, among them the proprietor of the mobile "museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide Catholicism of earthly renown by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the Pope and the Mormon Prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every sort of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even the most famous, done in wax." Seems like a tongue-in-cheek way of flagging awareness of of actual and ongoing American experiments in utopian life; fun also to think about how the rise of the Mormon church brackets Hawthorne's dabbling in communal living and subsequent novel-critique of same. Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830; by the time Hawthorne published Blithedale, Brigham Young was leading the Mormons in Utah. In one of those wonderful coincidences, Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 - the same year Brook Farm failed.
I share your curiosity, Erin, though I really don't know anything specific about Hawthorne's knowledge of things Mormon. I think there were three main waves of national focus on the Mormons--during the Missouri persecution of the late 1830s, then again during 1844 when Smith ran for president and was assassinated, and then again in the 1850s as polygamy became an issue and the Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre put Utah in the spotlight. Hawthorne certainly could not have been unaware of these things.
Clicking around a bit I came across a reference (see here) to a play in which "it is speculated that Joseph Smith and Nathaniel Hawthorne were acquaintances since both were similar in age and suffered comparable leg injuries, and might have been treated by the same doctor." Interesting. It's been a long time since I read a Hawthorne biography. I'll look into this a bit more when I get home.
David -- Thanks so much for the reference. I just love it. And I'd love to know more -- whatever your home library yields...
I just read a wonderful book by a Russian who helped manage a Stalin-era sawmill. After describing the chaos into which the forestry industry had been plunged as a result of Soviet "rationalization," he summarized:
"Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder."
("Bitter Waters," by Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov)
Erin, by "home library" I trust you mean "All those boxes of books out in the garage that haven't been opened since I was in grad school...." I found exactly nothing re Hawthorne and Smith. I did run across an amusing tidbit about Emerson's visit to Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, namely that Young seemed never to have heard of Emerson--which seems scarcely believable but perhaps says something about the nature of celebrity.
David F., have you heard the old worker's explanation of the Soviet economy? -- "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
ES..."They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work"...yes. Also, the Soviet bathtub factory which was measured on total tonnage of output produced and therefore produced bathtubs with no valves or faucets.
What's interesting about Andreev-Khomiakov's book is that it portrays a state-owned plant which was managed by someone who cared about his workers and strove to do a genuinely good job...but which was crippled and eventually destroyed by the larger economy and social system. (Arthur Koestler, reflecting on his trip to the Soviet Union, concluded that the whole country was being kept functioning only by what he metaphorically called the "twelve righteous men," who strove to do good work.) It is also interesting that accounting in money terms, as well as profit terms, played such a strong role in the Soviet economy, at least at this specific time period.
I've reviewed this book at ChicagoBoyz...linked from my blog, if anyone's interested.
David -- Thanks for checking. Along those lines -- I've been comparing Hawthorne biographies, trying to pick one. Do you have a recommendation?
Your guess is as good as mine, Erin--I've only read the James Mellow bio, and that was many years ago.
FWIW, the Ward Churchill trial just wound up. The jury found in Churchill's favor and awarded him $1 in damages.
Readers may be interested in another blogger's recent take on Hawthorne (from a very different perspective):
http://www.historiann.com/2009/04/02/a-damned-mob-of-scribbling-women/
