Senior Seminar. In Utopia, setting the stage for a contrast with the good government and wise laws of Utopia, Book I gives examples of poorly organized governments and bad laws. Prominent among them is the law specifying the death penalty for thieves. Raphael Hythloday argues against this law, and underlying his argument is the assumption that crime is at least partly a matter of social organization rather than personal morality. As he puts it, instead of attempting to prevent theft by means of harsh punishments, “much rather provision should have been made, that there were some means whereby [destitute people] might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this extreme necessity, first to steal and then to die.” His thinking here seems to be what today we would call sociological. Is the same true of Hythloday’s other arguments and observations in Book I? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The Republic covers a lot of philosophical, political, and cultural-critical ground. As a work of philosophy, it explores the nature of justice and propounds the famous theory of Forms. As a work of political analysis, it compares and contrasts various forms of government (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny). And as a work of cultural criticism it explores the social effects of the arts (especially literature and music).

Today I want to point out that The Republic uses a device that today is called the thought experiment, (for example, the story of Gyges’ ring and the allegory of the cave). The thought experiment continues to be used by philosophers to this day — most notably, I would say, by John Rawls, whose notions of the original position and the veil of ignorance are key to his influential book, A Theory of Justice (1971). The thought experiment also happens to be crucial to the genres of utopia, dystopia, and science fiction. (Actually, thought experiments have long been used not only in philosophy and literature but also in physics, mathematics, biology, and computer science — think, for example, of Zeno’s paradox and Schrödinger's cat.)

Your job today is to ransack your vast knowledge of literature and film and come up with some other examples of thought experiments. Read more!

American Studies. For class today I asked you to read two essays that have become classics in American studies: Perry Miller’s “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature” and Henry Nash Smith’s “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis” (a chapter from his book Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth). Let’s talk about Smith.

Smith argues that Frederick Jackson Turner, when he wrote his famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” got suckered by America’s pastoral ideology. He draws a distinction between the use of metaphor as “a rhetorical ornament” in an argument that has “a rational structure” (254) — which he says is fine — and the use of metaphor “as a structural principle or a means of cognition” (253) — which is decidedly not OK.

It’s one thing to be thinking logically and grounding one’s argument in facts, and then occasionally use a metaphor to help illustrate this or that point; this use of metaphor Smith terms “rhetorical.” It’s another thing entirely to unconsciously let the metaphor distort the facts or otherwise shape one’s argument; this he terms “poetic” (253). Smith goes on to argue that in many places in “The Significance of the Frontier” Turner uses metaphors poetically rather than rhetorically. And to the extent that Turner does so, he is not writing genuine history but merely perpetuating a myth (namely, the myth of America as pastoral utopia).

Smith also makes a nifty argument about the conflict between pastoral and progressive ideologies. The pastoral idea equates virtue with nature and therefore says that the closer a society is to nature, the better that society is. By contrast, the progressive myth says that societies improve as they evolve out of savagery into higher and higher degrees of civilization (255).*

Because America was historically “behind” Europe, it tended to favor the pastoral myth, which allowed it to claim superiority over Europe. Unfortunately, however, Americans could not completely escape the power of the progressive myth, even when thinking about the frontier. After all, however much of an ideological buzz they might have gotten from being “close to nature,” the average pioneer always worked hard to achieve greater and greater degrees of…civilization!

Smith argues that Turner’s essay, in addition to misusing its pastoral metaphors, finds itself trapped in the ideological double bind of primitivism vs. progressivism, nature vs. civilization. He also argues more generally that America’s fixation on pastoral myth prevented it from understanding its increasingly industrial reality. In particular, he writes, “the notion of democracy born of free land” available on the primitive frontier “is not an adequate instrument for dealing with a world dominated by industry, urbanization, and international conflicts.”

The philosophy and the myth [of agrarianism and pastoralism] affirmed an admirable set of values, but they ceased very early to be useful in interpreting American society as a whole because they offered no intellectual apparatus for taking account of the industrial revolution. A system which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature and held up as an ideal a rudimentary type of agriculture was powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology. (259)

Hmm — a mode of thought “which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature” and finds itself “powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology.” Is American environmentalism also such a mode of thought? If so, in what ways?

*Perry Miller, in “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism,” also has much to say about this theory of social progress, and illustrates its power over the nineteenth-century American imagination by referencing “The Course of Empire” (1834-36), a series of paintings by American artist Thomas Cole. See all five paintings in the series here. Read more!

American Studies. In 1893, in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the long-term existence of the American frontier was the single most important factor in shaping America up to that time. He argued in particular that the strength of American democracy derived principally from the frontier experience. That experience, said Turner, transformed the servile, dependent European personality into a new kind of self-sufficient, freedom-loving citizen that we recognize as specifically American.

Because the Census Bureau had declared the frontier “closed” in 1890, just a few years before Turner first presented his paper, he suggested that a crucial “first period of American history” had ended, and that perhaps the nation’s future would see the undoing of some or all of the benefits of the frontier. Without a frontier to democratize American politics and empower its citizens, perhaps America would cease to be exceptional and would become just another nation.

Turner’s frontier thesis became extremely influential in American historiography and American studies. It also provoked considerable dissent. Among the critics was the economic historian Louis M. Hacker, who held that “Turner and his followers were the fabricators of a tradition which is not only fictitious but also to a very large extent positively harmful” (61). For Hacker,

[t]he free lands of the West were not important because they made possible the creation of a unique “American spirit,” that indefinable something that was to set the United States apart from European experiences for all time, but because their quick settlement and utilization for the extensive cultivation of foodstuffs furnished exactly those commodities with which the United States, as a debtor nation, could balance its international payments and borrow European capital in order to develop a native industrial enterprise.

In this view the importance of the frontier is not that it developed character but that it “served…the capitalist development of the nation” (63-64). Hacker claims that the frontier further served the interests of American industrial capitalism by forestalling resistance on the part of labor:

[T]he presence of the frontier helps to explain the failure of American labor to preserve a continuous revolutionary tradition: class lines could not become fixed as long as the free lands existed to drain off the most spirited elements in the working and lower middle-class populations...and to prevent the creation of a labor reserve for the purpose of thwarting the demands of organized workers. (64)

Hacker specifically rejects Turner’s claims for American exceptionalism:

The historical growth of the United States...was not unique; merely in certain particulars and for a brief time…. With settlement achieved — that is to say, the historic function of extensive agriculture performed, class (not sectional!) lines solidified, competitive capitalism converted into monopolistic capitalism under the guidance of the money power, and imperialism [became] the ultimate destiny of the nation — the United States once again was returning to the main stream of European institutional development. (64)

Finally, note that Hacker insists that Turner’s thesis was not merely wrong, but also harmful — because it functioned as a red herring that distracted historians from other, more appropriate forms of analysis:

What is of greater concern is the perverted reading Turner gave to American history in his insistence upon the uniqueness of American experience…. The unhappy results, for forty years, were the following: a turning inward of American historical activity at exactly the time when all trained eyes should have been on events going on beyond the country’s physical borders; an accumulation of supposed evidences of the development of American institutions entirely in nativistic terms without an understanding of how closely American institutional growth paralleled the European; an almost complete disregard of the basic class antagonisms in American history; and a profound ignorance of the steps by which monopolistic capitalism and imperialism were being developed in the country. (63)

It might be a good idea for American studies to avoid what Hacker said happened to American historiography. Even though it’s called American studies, in our search for insight we should not neglect “events going on beyond the country’s physical borders,” and in our concern with what makes America unique we should not lose sight of “how closely American institutional growth parallel[s] the European.” Nor should we ignore the tremendous importance of economics.

Thanks for reading this far. Here’s your question: What are some ways in which what we’re calling “environmentalism as culture” seems to be determined not so much by local considerations but by global economic forces?

Source: Hacker, Louis M. “Sections—Or Classes?” George Rogers Taylor, ed. The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1949: 61-64. Reprinted from The Nation 137 (26 July 1933): 108-110. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Let’s talk about some of the juicier parts of Book V of The Republic. Among other things, Socrates says that in his ideal state “the wives of our guardians are to be common” — that is, the women are to be shared among the men. Monogamy is out, to be replaced by a sort of state-controlled promiscuity designed to promote a eugenicist agenda. And that’s not all. The guardians’ “children are to be common” as well, so that “no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent” (124).

How do you like those for family values? And it just gets worse. The rulers are supposed to “invent some ingenious kind of lots” to make it appear as if women are being matched up with men at random, even though the process is actually being controlled by the rulers in such a way as to match the strongest and smartest men to the strongest and smartest women. That way, when the less worthy men find themselves always hooking up with the less worthy women, they’ll blame their bad luck instead of the rulers (127).

This lottery system will only be used for women aged 20-40 and men aged 25-55. After that, the guardians will be allowed “to range at will,” provided that any women who wind up getting pregnant while thus, um, ranging are under “strict orders” to get an abortion (128).

What else? Socrates also argues against individual privacy (129) and for the participation of children in war (134) and…but you get the picture. And all this is on top of Socrates’ argument in favor of censorship.

Remember, Socrates is describing the ideal state in which he believes true justice is to be found.

Okay. We’re reading The Republic to understand its influence on utopian and dystopian literature and film. What do you think so far? Does it strike you as a better blueprint for a utopia, a dystopia, or an anti-utopia?

Is Socrates insane? Read more!

American Lit II: Today I’d like to ask you to focus on Chapter XVIII of Pudd’nhead Wilson. In this chapter the novel’s light tone turns deadly serious, as Roxana tells Tom of the abuse she suffers “down the river” (and reminds us that slavery is no laughing matter). There’s much to marvel at here, including Roxana’s incredible resourcefulness and courage, Tom’s utter depravity, and Twain’s skillful development of these two characters through the use of plotting and dialect.

For now I’d like you to reduce this chapter to three of its key structural elements — White Man, Black Woman, and Mississippi River — and then analyze this video of Beyonce performing John Fogerty’s brilliant song Proud Mary. Your job is to compare and contrast the video to Chapter XVIII of Pudd’nhead Wilson. (If you wish you may wait until after Friday’s class to respond.)
Read more!

Comm Arts II: Among the many experiments described in Animal Liberation, perhaps the most grotesque is the one that involved “transplanting the heads of monkeys and keeping these monkey heads alive in fluid after they had been totally detached from their bodies.” The goal of the researcher, Robert J. White, was “‘to offer a living laboratory tool’ for research on the brain” (75). Do you think this kind of research can be justified, or is it simply beyond the pale? If you think it can be justified, on what grounds? If you think it’s beyond the pale, what do you think it says about our culture that it permits such things? (If you’d like to see video taken during the original experiments, click here.) Read more!

American Studies. If you ask me, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” (1860) is a nifty little story. It suspensefully describes a young frontier woman who endures a terrifying night in the clutches of a cougar and survives by singing to the animal, keeping it preoccupied until her husband arrives at dawn to shoot the big cat. When the couple returns home they find their cabin has been burnt down by Indians, which calamity, I would argue, is framed in the language of the Fortunate Fall:

There is no home there. The log-house, the barns, the neighboring farms, the fences, are all blotted out and mingled in one smoking ruin. Desolation and death were indeed there, and beneficence and life in the forest. Tomahawk and scalping-knife, descending during that night, had left behind them only this work of their accomplished hatred and one subtle foot-print in the snow.

For the rest, — the world was all before them, where to choose. (704)

Thus do the couple and their infant child end up collectively as R.W.B. Lewis’s American Adam, standing at the beginning of a new history, set free from Eden by the work of Satan and liberated into an unknown but potentially limitless future. The Fortunate Fall theme is quietly underscored by Spofford’s use of the word “subtle” — an allusion to the Bible’s reference to the serpent as the subtlest of all the animals — and by the much more obvious plagiarism of Paradise Lost (1667).

Here are the relevant lines, from the end of Milton’s great poem, when Adam and Eve are forced to leave Eden:

They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.

The American Adam theme is deepened by Spofford’s depiction of the American frontier landscape in postlapsarian terms:

The green depths were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago forgot her now and knew her no longer. (699-700)

Once edenic, nature now withholds the bounty it once gave away freely.

Okay, so Spofford’s story draws heavily on Milton and the Bible. But it doesn’t mechanically reproduce either; as with any retelling, it changes the originals. What are some of the significant ways it does so? What does it add to and what does it take away from Paradise Lost and the Garden of Eden story?

Update. Here are some of the key passages in which R.W.B. Lewis outlines his classic theory (in his extremely influential book The American Adam). According to Lewis,

the American myth saw life as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human attributes. America, it was said insistently from the 1820s onward, was not the end-product of a long historical process...it was something entirely new. “Our national birth,” declaimed the Democratic Review in 1839, “was the beginning of a new history...which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.” “American glory begins at the dawn,” announced Noah Webster in 1825. Edward Everett found an acceptable prescription for national health in the simple italicized phrase, separation from Europe — separation from its history and its habits.

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation, that the new hero (in praise or disapproval) was most easily identified with Adam before the Fall. Adam was the first, and archetypal, man. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent.... All this and more were contained in the image of the American as Adam. (4)

Lewis points out that not all early American writers concurred in this Adamic conception of the American. Those who did concur he terms the “party of Hope”; the dissenters he terms the “party of Memory”:

As an index of the “hopeful” strand on national morality, I cite the editorial (of 1839) which hailed the birth in America of “a clear conscience unsullied by the past.” The national and hence the individual conscience was clear just because it was unsullied by the past — America, in the hopeful creed, had no past, but only a present and a future. The key term in the moral vocabulary of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and their followers and imitators consequently was “innocence.” To the “nostalgic” — that is, to the party devoted to Memory — the sinfulness of man seemed never so patent as currently in America. As the hopeful expressed their mounting contempt for the doctrine of inherited sin, the nostalgic intoned on Sundays the fixed legacy of corruption in ever more emphatic accents. (7)

As Lewis says, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman exemplify the party of Hope; key members of the Party of Memory are Jonathan Edwards and Edgar Allan Poe.

Lewis also identifies a third category, an “ironic temperament” that

was characterized by a tragic optimism: by a sense of the tragic collisions to which innocence was liable (something unthinkable among the hopeful), and equally by an awareness of the heightened perception and humanity which suffering made possible (something unthinkable among the nostalgic) (7-8).

Perhaps the supreme example of this ironic temperament in an early American writer is Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose great creation Hester Prynne is not allowed to partake in the American myth of innocence yet whose humanity expands through her suffering.

One goal in this class is to examine what role, if any, this myth of the American Adam plays in shaping American environmentalism.
Read more!

Senior Seminar. By now you should have read through Book IV of Plato’s Republic. Among other things, you should have noticed that, while The Republic is a work of philosophy (many consider it the work of philosophy) it is not structured mechanically as a series of conclusions drawn logically from a set of initial premises. Instead it is structured as a story, which has the advantage not only of making the argument more engaging but of letting us see how it emerges from the give-and-take of Socratic dialogue.

Also, like any good story, The Republic features strongly drawn characters (such as the calm and occasionally bemused Socrates and the hotheaded Thrasymachus). It also includes summaries of other stories (such as that of Gyges’ ring) and alludes frequently to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. All considered, a very literary piece of philosophizing.

As for the philosophizing itself, Socrates quickly gets to the question of defining justice (5), but not until well into Book II does he begin to address the question of most interest to us as aspiring critics of utopia: the construction of the ideal state (40).

According to Socrates, war does not appear until the denizens of the state find themselves dissatisfied with the necessities of life and begin to pursue luxury, at which point war becomes “inevitable” (45) — a rather depressing thought, given our own society’s addiction to luxury.

A bit later Socrates gets to a question of particular importance: “How do justice and injustice grow up in states?” (48). Part of the answer, he argues, is through the teaching of impious literature. When children hear a story in which a god acts irresponsibly, he says, they will tend to act irresponsibly themselves; therefore, one of the first orders of business in constructing the ideal state is “to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only” (49).

Freedom of speech? None of that namby-pamby liberalism for Socrates!

So, is Socrates right that the pursuit of justice requires censorship? Or were America’s Founding Fathers — who like Socrates were trying to draw up rules for an ideal state — right to insist that censorship is inimical to justice? Read more!

American Lit II: Mark Twain has given us any number of memorable characters. One of my favorites is Roxana, who strikes me as by far the strongest personality in Puddn’head Wilson. She begins the book as a light-skinned slave woman (she is “1/16 black”) owned by Percy Northumberland Driscoll, who sets her free in 1845, just before he dies. After being freed Roxana leaves Dawson’s Landing to work as a chambermaid on a steamship, the Grand Mogul. While working on the steamboat she saves up $400, which she loses in a bank crash.

What do you think about Roxana so far? How do the details mentioned above (her working on a steamship and losing her life savings in a bank crash) shape our understanding of her? How else does Twain construct her as a character? (Ditto, if you wish, for the other characters.) Read more!

Comm Arts II: Writing about animal experiments in Chapter Two of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer writes that “Many experiments inflict severe pain without the remotest prospect of significant benefits for human beings or any other animals” (36). His opening example is a project in which military researchers exposed monkeys to lethal doses of radiation. Why do you think Singer chose to make this his first example of what he considers to be unethical animal experimentation? Read more!

Senior Seminar. We’re starting our tour of utopia not in Athens but in Jerusalem, with three excerpts from the Bible. First is the six-day creation account (which those of you who took Bible as Lit will recall is attributed to the rather late Priestly source); next is the story of Adam and Eve (which comes later in the Bible but is attributed to the earlier Jahwist source); last are a few snippets from the Book of Isaiah.

What if anything is utopian about these early works? (I know we haven’t finished defining utopia yet, but give this question a shot anyway.) Read more!

American Studies. Environmentalism is a capacious term. It refers at once to a political movement, to the philosophies and ideologies underpinning that political movement, and to a set of subcultures, sensibilities, and identities. Let me give some examples.

The creation of the national parks, the banning of DDT, and the passage of the Endangered Species Act are examples of environmentalism as a political movement.

Arne Naess's famous Deep ecology is an example of a well-thought-out environmental philosophy. The deep-seated (and mostly unconscious) sense that “nature knows best” is an example of an environmentalist ideology.

Someone who only wears clothing made from organic hemp, spends their vacation backpacking, and is a vegan has an environmental sensibility and is a member of an environmental subculture. This person might identify very strongly with John Muir or Edward Abbey or some other famous environmentalist, in which case it is fair to say he or she has a green identity.*

In this course we’re mainly concerned with the latter. It will help us to know something about environmentalism’s other aspects, but our main focus will be on how environmentalism manifests itself culturally rather than politically or philosophically.

In class we’ve already brainstormed a few examples of green culture; what are some others? It might help at this point to think of green movies (e.g., Bambi) and songs (e.g., Marvin Gaye’s Mercy, Mercy Me.)

* Because I have a lot of trouble typing environmental, I’ll use green to mean the same thing. Read more!

American Lit II: Here it is the second day of class and already we’re behind! My apologies for not getting to “A Supermarket in California” on Monday. I’ve reproduced the poem below. Feel free to comment on any aspect of it you wish. Allow me just to point out that this poem was published 101 years after Walt Whitman’s revolutionary and incredibly influential Leaves of Grass (1855), that it is saturated with Ginsberg’s gay sensibility, and that its ending evokes a sense of American decline. But what say you?

A Supermarket in California
By Allen Ginsberg (1956)

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Read more!

Comm Arts II: Before class Wednesday be sure to read pages 1-23 in Peter Singer’s influential book Animal Liberation. Remember that the idea here is not simply to discuss whether Singer’s animal-rights argument is right or wrong, but to analyze how he goes about making that argument. That is, part of the idea is to pay attention to Singer’s rhetoric. You’ll hear a lot more about rhetoric as the course goes on.

For now, however, let’s forget about rhetoric and focus on the argument itself as it has been developed so far — such as the idea that “all animals are equal.” Notice that Singer is not arguing that all animals are the same in the sense of “having equal abilities” (which is obviously false) or “deserving equal treatment” (which probably strikes most of us as absurd).

Instead, Singer is arguing that all animals merit equal consideration of their interests.

Different kinds of animals can have very different interests. Some animals might conceivably have no interests at all. As Singer writes, “The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration. Equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights” (2, my italics).

So, maybe we’re not convinced that we should all be vegetarians — but do we agree with Singer so far?

What about the idea that we must “avoid speciesism,” which is to say, “we must allow that beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life — and mere membership in our own biological species cannot be a morally relevant criterion for this right” (19)? Read more!