Harold Kaplan entitled his essay on Madame Bovary ‘the seriousness of comedy’. In his view, and that of other literary critics cited by him, this work is a ‘special form of dry comedy’ in that it stresses the conflict between feeling agent and unfeeling object. Its effect is the spirit of comedy without humor.
(more…)Tag: Harold Kaplan
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Can Democrats Criticize the Enlightenment?
Can democrats criticize the Enlightenment? In Harold Kaplan’s analysis of modern literature, he doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment (late 17th to early 19th century), but he mentions it as a timeframe for a modern state of mind which has been detrimental to western thought.1 He doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment in Democratic Humanism and American Literature either.2 He mentions it rarely, for example when he mentions that Melville’s ‘insights deserted the confident ideas of the Enlightenment’. Kaplan is a democrat. His analysis of Democratic humanism analyzes how well the writers of American classics defended democracy.
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The Crisis of Knowledge
In this series, I want to share my thoughts about Harold Kaplan’s book, The Passive Voice1. Kaplan deals with several related literary topics, but they all arise from the crisis of knowledge in modern intellectual history. I have some doubts about my part in this endeavor, which I’ll state briefly in this introduction to the series.
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Was the Enlightenment Democratic?
Was the Enlightenment democratic? According to Harold Kaplan, Americans do not question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. He wrote:
“We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the secular Enlightenment, which finally broke the traditional political structures, monarchical and hierarchical, of Europe…” (p. 14)
((Harold Kaplan, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972, p. 14)) (TWhen I first started thinking about the social effects of America’s mythology, I questioned the religious basis of the Enlightenment. Now I’m questioning its democratic basis.There is no question that those events made the United States possible. But there have always been concerns about the Enlightenment. Are we capable of talking about these concerns in the Enlightened United States?
The short answer is, not necessarily. One faction of our enlightened forefathers, the federalists, wanted a continuation of Britain’s monarchy with a king-like president. Others wanted to create a new kind of government unlike Britain’s. Unfortunately, the new-government faction lost the debate. The best they could do was add the Bill of Rights to curb federal power.
Although we might wish the anti-federalists had been successful, they were part of the same class as the federalists. One result of their class outlook was that they did not see a problem with inequality, slavery in particular.
American Politics versus Enlightenment Governance
Was the Enlightenment Democratic? As stated above, America’s government is an Enlightenment creation. In this light, it was interesting to discover that during the 2016 presidential election that we are not allowed to elect our chosen presidential candidate. After loudly objecting to our defeat, most of us accepted our limitations, unlike the Trump faction. That’s who we are.
Trump
Trump’s base apparently missed that demonstration of how democracy works. He used our act of good will to promote himself. Now we are observing billionaires and Freemasons trying to claw back democracy, and Trump’s supporters don’t bat an eye.
You could say the aftermath of the 2020 election has been a Free-masonic temper tantrum. And it’s not going away. Freemasonry is part of our political history. The important lesson here is that our system offered no protections against a candidate like Donald Trump.
Biden
On a positive note, the Biden Administration has responded to many of our demands. It’s not what we envisioned in 2016. We thought a complete change of direction was needed to address climate change and the shortage of resources. But the truth is, no politician, including Bernie Sanders, can run a campaign on a platform of lower living standards and personal sacrifice. And this is what we need. If some mythical self-sacrifice candidate were to win anyway, the markets would remove him in short order.
However, Biden’s political situation has been complicated by events in Palestine. As a recipient of AIPAC money, he supports Israel’s attack on Gaza. In addition, AIPAC is threatening to primary any political candidate who criticizes Israel’s bombing campaign. And our government does not object. Perhaps the most worrying part of this is that it is taking place over the objections of people all over the world. This is another lesson about American politics.
Class Structure in America
America has always had distinct social classes but no one bothers to explain how this came about. Immigration, of course. Groups immigrating to the colonies included Puritans (religious fundamentalists), Quakers (religious liberals), and Borderers. This last group wanted personal liberty without interference from society or government. But the largest group of English immigrants to the United States arrived between the years 1642 to 1675. They consisted of 45,000 Cavaliers of King Charles I, and their indentured servants. They had lost their former status in England because they were on the losing side in the English Civil War. However, they remained royalist, Anglican and Aristocratic.
Some say they wanted to re-create in Virginia the hierarchal, farming society they had left behind. When their servants began to die, the Cavaliers’ descendants imported African slaves. Cavalier immigrants included ancestors of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, and other first families of Virginia.
The descendants of the Cavaliers only stopped supporting the Stuart kings during the reign of Charles II. They turned against King Charles because he appointed his own people to offices in Virginia and gave cultivated land to his favorites, among other injustices.
Summary
Was the Enlightenment a democratic movement? Not as much as it could have been. It seems Ben Franklin was not quite honest when he said democracy is ours if we can keep it. Therefore, it is reasonable to question our form of government and the Enlightenment ideals that made it possible.
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American Classics and the Poetry of Democracy
Harold Kaplan said ‘humanist aspirations’ are the dominant American intellectual tradition. 1 But an abstract notion of democratic humanism is only part of the story. Kaplan explains democratic humanism in the context of writers of the American classics: Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James. They composed the American classics and the poetry of democracy, and in their works we see hints of the strange continent that confronted them. (more…)
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Was the Enlightenment a Democratic Movement?
According to Harold Kaplan, Americans do not question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But was the Enlightenment a democratic movement? Kaplan wrote:
(more…)“We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the secular Enlightenment, which finally broke the traditional political structures, monarchical and hierarchical, of Europe…” (p. 14)
((Harold Kaplan, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972, p. 14))