Misanthropy Read online

  Boosterism is an American word. In the nineteenth century, it denoted a specific historical and material phenomenon: new American small townships started making inordinate claims about themselves and their future, thus ‘boosting’ their own prospects. They aimed to attract new residents to their areas, keep up the spirits of communities and raise the value of real estate. Boosterism subsequently came to mean self-promotion, whether of a town, city, business, company or American society and culture in general, the promotion in question going well beyond mere truth-claims. The most notorious American enemy of boosterism, the one who gave the term significant currency, was Sinclair Lewis.

  In Babbitt (1922) – the eponymous hero of which is a realtor – Lewis portrayed a world in which everyone is a booster, whether of himself, his business or company, his church or other institution or his wife, family, friends and associates, or just ‘Uncle Samuel, U.S.A.’5 The booster’s world is one given over to the ‘religion of business’ (B, p. 10) with only a single register, promotion, for human living and being, and which is philistine, barbarous, vulgar, emotionally and aesthetically dead. Furthermore, boosterism is a way of turning away from and failing to acknowledge profoundly unpalatable truths. The ‘vision’ of boosterism beautifies and thereby justifies all trashiness, not least in the case of morality, or what Lewis’s boosters prefer to call ‘ethics’. Not only is it the case that, as Paul Riesling says, ‘this sweet, clean, respectable moral life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ (B, p. 48); it isn’t sweet, clean or respectable either. As businessmen, Babbitt and his cronies repeatedly if discreetly engage in one form of moral shabbiness or another, in corruption, unscrupulous or sharp practice, ‘dirty little lickspittle deals’ (B, p. 183). The flip side of the booster’s zip, zoom, zing, zeal, zest and zowie is the fact that ‘all we do is cut each others’ throats and make the public pay for it’ (B, p. 48).

  For its Babbitts, the city of Zenith is precisely that, a zenith, a peak of civilization, a consummation of progress, a representative city in what Lewis knows is fast becoming the richest and most powerful nation on earth, its boosterism ‘the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy’ (B, p. 65). Here positivity becomes a nightmare, a trap into which all must fall, an arrant delusion to which everyone must nonetheless pay tribute, since the system determines all the forms of individuality on offer. Boosterism is self-evidently disastrous for the obvious social sufferers, the poor, the destitute, those who have not made it, because it writes them off as of no account (or, worse, as having deserved it, as in American ‘prosperity theology’).6 But for Lewis it is also a disaster for the boosters themselves. What keeps boosterism upright is ‘oratory’, ‘whooping it up’, the booster’s narcissistic pleasure in ‘the sound of his own vocabulary’ (B, p. 56). But the prop is flimsy, so the booster is always in danger of seeing that he has merely been the addict of a ‘poisonous energy’ and abruptly confronting the gap between rhetoric and the world, a cleft which then suddenly appears as reality itself (B, p. 115). Hence Babbitt comes to recognize not only that he is not ‘the ideal type to which the entire world must tend’ (B, p. 139), but that, deep down, the people of Zenith actually ‘hate the whole peppy, boosting, go-ahead game, and they’re bored by their wives and think their families are fools’ (B, pp. 48, 50). In short, the booster system is a fraud, as, under their posturing, the boosters know: secretly, they loathe business, and eat, drink and smoke far too much, commit suicide or go to war as an escape. This is the ultimate meaning of the ‘new type of civilization’ (B, p. 141), its unprecedented grandeur and vast inanity together. But nowhere else is any better: Lewis’s presentation of the Englishman Sir Gerald Doak summarily kills off any notion of the superiority of European cultivation, suggesting, in good misanthropic fashion, that he thought that fraudulent systems were equally the norm beyond America.

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  American boosterism, however, is not just a comparatively recent phenomenon. In some ways, America had ‘whooped itself up’ from the start, because it seemed to promise a new liberty unprecedented in history that arthritic old Europe could not, because its founding discourses were of particular religious kinds, and because the New World was itself so very extraordinary, and seemed to plead for a language commensurate with its magnificence. The concept of America as the new Eden, a garden of unexampled plenitude where, because America had been ‘freed from the cynicism of the Old World’,7 innocence became possible again, went back as far as the early English explorers and had (still has) wide currency. So, too, the idea that America was the new Jerusalem prophesied by Ezekiel and described in the Book of Revelation stemmed from the Puritan fathers of the seventeenth century, who took themselves to be building it. ‘We shall be as a citty upon a hill’, declared John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1630. ‘The eies of all people are upon us’.8

  The conviction shared by many that America was altogether special, that Americans could think of themselves as exempted from the common humanity with which other peoples were burdened, must have always seemed distinctly ironic to some, since the country was founded on fierce and often scandalized resistance precisely to class societies that, in Europe, had allowed privilege to lift itself above the common herd. The belief was nonetheless extremely powerful, and assumed various historical forms: ‘Manifest Destiny’, for example. This was the nineteenth-century belief, from Andrew Jackson (President of the United States, 1829–37) onwards, that, because of the patent spiritual and moral distinction of its people and its institutions, America’s destiny was to spread itself and its power throughout the American continent as a whole. Theology even appeared to underwrite this imperative, certainly, if one understood that the American task was to build the New Jerusalem – a ‘Land without Evil’9 – on a corrupt old earth. Manifest Destiny was integral to God’s purposes. Thomas Jefferson believed in it. Even Abraham Lincoln partly subscribed to it. It became a principal justification for American expansion (initially, westwards).

  In time, this led to the doctrine of ‘American exceptionalism’. The exceptionalist case again was that America was not a nation like others but was the first new nation on earth, the first truly to come out of a revolution, to establish itself on the founding principles of liberty and equality, and therefore lifted free of the messy historical impediments that held back others. In the twentieth century, exceptionalism became inseparable from the idea of the American Dream10 – the term first appeared in 1931 – with the belief it sustained in limitless possibility, the right of every individual American citizen to fulfil his or her potential. Everyone could arrive at their own Jerusalem. After all, in the words of a present-day American cultural historian who actually still seems to believe it, ‘We are a chosen people assigned a unique and special purpose’.11 Indeed, according to some, far from finally choking itself back, the American Dream has by now gone global.

  Of course, notions of the unique distinction of the American way by no means remained uncontested inside America, let alone outside it. There were compelling reasons for this. From the start, the New Eden was both harrowed and harrowing.12 The early settlers invaded the hunting grounds of the indigenous peoples. They treated the country as theirs. Before long, they were driving the Indians from their ancestral lands, infecting them with the viruses they brought with them from Europe, destroying their villages and crops and killing and mutilating captives. After the American Revolution, Washington and Jefferson planned to ‘civilize’ and thus assimilate the Indians. But the Indians were wedded to their own traditions and culture, and there was less dialogue between them and the new ‘civilization’ than mutual incomprehension. In 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which licensed ethnic cleansing, the forced relocation of the Indian nations to the west of America: hence the infamous ‘Trail of Tears’, along which so many Indians failed, sickened, starved and died.

  Within a few years, the belief in Manifest Destiny was justifying wholesale colonial expansion westwards, and even lead
ing to calls for extermination. Indians were herded like cattle, quarantined like beasts and massacred. Meanwhile, the whites assumed their world, often initially through treaties that merely defrauded the natives, with 174 million acres of Indian land passing into white hands between 1853 and 1856 alone. There were subsequently plenty of high-minded philanthropic efforts to ‘improve’ the Indians’ lot. Nonetheless, to recall the Joycean adage, conquerors cannot be amateurish. America and the American Dream were founded on atrocity. Slavery with all its attendant monstrosities increasingly flourished in colonial America, and the Constitution of the new Republic protected it. According to the census of 1860, just five years before it was outlawed, there were four million slaves in the New Eden. The gulf between modern American boosterism and the historical realities was vast. To say, however, that the first existed to conceal the second would be too simple. In a sense, boosterism became as extravagantly hyperbolic as it did precisely because the history was so extreme. If the American project were to continue – or so the logic of the political unconscious ran – it required a rhetorical juggernaut to defend itself from itself, a Cadillac among rhetorics, a rhetoric worthy of NASA. That rhetoric was boosterist.

  A very different tradition altogether, however, a much darker one, was originally dominant in America and loomed sombrely within American life and culture, the Puritan tradition, which stemmed from the theology and mœurs of the first settlers in New England, and became ‘one of the continuous factors in American life and thought’.13 The Puritan settlers derived much of their orientation from the Calvin who inherited from St. Augustine: they believed in the doctrines of original sin and total depravity. Humanity was intrinsically rotten. According to Samuel Willard, ‘the unhappy Fall hath Robbed man of … perfection, and filled his heart with perverse and rebellious principles, tending to the Subversion of all Order and the reducing of the World to a Chaos’.14 So parlous was man’s state that, for Thomas Hooker, it was a wonder that the ‘great and Terrible God’ did not ‘pash such a poor insolent worm [as man] into pouder’ and send him ‘packing to the pitt’.15

  Men were enslaved to their degenerate condition, and incapable of saving themselves from it simply by referring to ‘right reason’, which meant that ‘only the grace of God’ could redeem them.16 However, God vouchsafed his grace to few (they were few even within the Puritan communities).17 According to the doctrine of election, these few were the chosen ones, the elect, those whom, in his sovereign pleasure, God had singled out to be worthy of him. God not only chose the elect, but predestined them to their election. The Puritan theorists of New England helpfully supplemented orthodox doctrine with a Covenant Theology explaining how and why some people were saved,18 but even the elect had to qualify for eternal bliss, to confirm that they deserved their hallowed status.

  It was by no means self-evident to the Puritans that they would indeed qualify. They feared lest the canker of depravity, what John Cotton called ‘man’s perverse subtilty in inventing ways of backsliding’,19 be eating away within their own communities. Willard warned that even the elect in the New World were not behaving like an elect at all.20 Cotton suggested that the top guns themselves, the ‘Magistrates and Officers in Church and Common-wealth’, should be aware that there is ‘a straine in a man’s heart, that will sometime or other runne out to excesse’, and to which they might abruptly find themselves in thrall.21 No one could trust to their own virtue, and true Puritans had therefore to submit their consciences to the most minute and searching analysis, to interrogate their innermost being without stint or mercy, not in order to ensure that they were inherently virtuous, since they most certainly were not, but the better to perceive the ‘loathsome abominations’ that lay ‘in [their] bosom’, the ‘very nest’ where the lusts were ‘hatched and bred’, the winding snares of Satan within.22 Hooker thought that the ‘lusts’ sent up ‘dunghill steams which distemper the mind’, making it wander, encouraging the vanities.23 Only constant vigilance could sufficiently protect one from oneself.

  Such thinking was bound to lead to a misanthropic political theory. The Puritans’ America was not a land of the free. They greatly distrusted freedom. Winthrop, for example, opined that ‘liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts’.24 The Puritans were convinced that, at its deep dark core, the world was immutable, and immutably bad, which meant that, without the law and its agents, there could only be infinite criminality, which in turn meant that men and women had to be controlled, harshly if necessary. True, the Puritans’ conception of criminality had greater scope than ours: Increase Mather wrote approvingly of the execution of the man in Scripture who was sentenced to death for ‘gathering a few sticks upon the Sabbath day’, and thought that sleeping during (his?) sermons was sign enough ‘that the nature of man is wofully corrupted and depraved’.25 Nonetheless, it was clear that, whatever the ‘crime’ in question, unregenerate humanity required the severest authority and discipline, in effect, dictatorship. In the New England communities, this meant the dictatorship of the few, the holy and regenerate.

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  In American literature, boosterism repeatedly breaks up against the Puritan inheritance, the Puritan temperament and imagination, the most obvious example being Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s major fiction is a dark critique of both the boosterism contemporary with him – (Manifest Destiny thinking) – and the whole tradition of American boosterism. Thus The Scarlet Letter provides an austere critique of the dream of the New Jerusalem, and The Blithedale Romance writes off the dreams of modern American utopians. The hope of Blithedale – that it will be ‘the one green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world’26 – is brusquely and cruelly dashed.

  Hawthorne’s principal focus was the Puritan past. He turned the bleak austerity of the Puritan vision on itself, amply suggesting that, as the Puritans themselves feared, they harboured proclivities that were as unpleasant as those they saw in the mass of humanity. Hawthorne’s Puritans are not only bowed down by guilt, joyless, bigoted, obsessed by dogma, sexually extremely repressed, hostile to the faintest liberalism and authoritarian, but are actually impious, unholy. This is particularly the case with their treatment of those who think otherwise than they do. They whip Quakers and Anabaptists, cut off the ears of blasphemers, exile Antinomians and execute witches, often in the most brutal and peremptory fashion, and flog their sinners and those who dissent from Puritan orthodoxy into line. All of this was historical fact. Hawthorne repeatedly points to a cold, self-righteous, self-gratifying, deeply rebarbative and perverted sadism in the Puritans.

  Thus the moral sand-waste devours the supposed oases. The Puritan pessimism that founds Hawthorne’s critique of American exceptionalism becomes self-reflexive, and finally expands to include the major foundational ideologies of America in toto, and the communities that trusted to them. But Hawthorne has no real belief, either, in the pleasure seekers who run counter to Puritan doctrine or the rebels who defy the communities, in that the first are trivial, and the second must end up sadder and wiser than they started out. Their causes are necessarily doomed. Hawthorne leaves us circling in a void, in that he implies that we can at least hold fast to the value of Puritan seriousness, but not to the system of thought and value that underwrote it.

  One can see, then, why Herman Melville took ‘the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne’ to be that ‘he says NO! in thunder’.27 Hawthorne was resisting what he took to be groundlessly or unwarrantably positive voices, and Melville was conditioned by the same Puritan heritage as Hawthorne, ending up sharing the same principle of radical disbelief. For both of them, America was strictly a ‘ruined Eden’.28 The ruin of Eden is always Melville’s concern, whether his subject is directly American or not, and his works all pursue that theme, the serpent in the supposed garden repeatedly turning out to be race. Melville published his first novel, Typee, in 1846, just after the first use of the term Manifest Destiny.29 The narrator Tommo doubly abandons America, firstly by shipp
ing on the whaler Dolly, and secondly, since there could hardly be a less Edenic life than the one the ‘tyrannical’ usage on board the Dolly offers,30 by deserting, ending up among the Polynesian Typees. Tommo is a swingeing critic of an America that prates about democracy but has no sanctions against wantonly autocratic rule on its ships, and the crew of whose men-of-war seem like a summation of ‘pent-up wickedness’ (T, p. 229; compare the later Whitejacket). He is equally scathing about white ‘civilization’ in general, arguing that it does not subdue ‘our wicked propensities’, but frees them up and gives them greater power of action, though it also isolates and scapegoats those whom it takes to embody them (T, p. 31). The civilized evils are ‘unknown’ to other races, but the white race cannot see that the so-called ‘barbarous peoples’ may possess more virtue than themselves. They rather contaminate, corrupt and ‘extirpate’ them (T, pp. 145–6).

  This clearly begins to point Typee towards misanthropic conclusions, but these are offset by the Typees themselves. Tommo stoutly maintains that, if other races seem barbaric, it is because the ‘horrible cruelties’ of whites have ‘exasperated’ them into ‘savages’ (T, p. 41). The Typees, however, have had little or no contact with whites. True, they are cannibals, which is less than heartening. But Tommo knows about the cannibalism and initially has no qualms about it, since he assumes that the tribe only eat the bodies of dead enemies, which is no reason to disqualify them as a prelapsarian people. In Typee valley, it must be, Eden survives. It cannot be true that the Typees prepare live victims for cannibal orgies, this is a derangement, the macabre fantasy of a white mind incapable of trust, always on the lookout for ‘inconstancy and treachery’, even in primitive innocence (T, p. 93). Tommo decides not, in the end, and flees, at which point the Typees respond in a manner that altogether bears out his misgivings, and leaves him finally ‘appalled by their violence’ (T, p. 277; cf. p. 279).