Recommended Reading – An Emersonian Summer

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Eric

Perhaps the foremost philosophical and literary figure in all of American history, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a challenging and sometimes mystifying writer. The books on this list are arranged in hope of making his life and work more accessible, and his insights somewhat more applicable to contemporary life.

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.

In this refulgent summer, I’m reading back through the Emerson catalog, especially the early works, including the sermons, and attentive to the evolution, culminating in his “Address” to the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. There are many angles from which to approach such a read, but I remain primarily focused on that Transcendental intuition, the foundational idea that God still lives and moves in nature, through the blowing clover and the falling rain and through our interior lives as well. When Emerson gave his famous commencement speech, he emphasized to the audience that Unitarian Christianity had grown terribly musty, and that it was up to a new generation of preachers to breathe fresh life into a stale tradition. Since many in that audience were the venerated caretakers of that tradition, the speech was provocative. The students had invited Emerson to speak; the faculty ensured that he would not do so again for almost three decades.

The Divinity School Address marks an entry in the record of American Antinomianism, a concept that dates back to Martin Luther, but is here most commonly traced to the 1630s, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and to Anne Hutchinson, who challenged the Puritan leadership on a number of doctrinal points and who claimed direct revelation from God as the source of her authority. In that context, the rejection of particular moral strictures as evidence of sanctification is linked intimately to the matter of direct revelation—a pair of ideas that have made and continue to make religious establishments nervous. In America, and especially in the nineteenth century, the idea that God speaketh rather than spake, and that he might be dissenting from the reputable clergy, would inspire a host of enthusiastic prophets and religious movements, notably including the young Joseph Smith and his Latter-Day Saints. It would then be up to the people, in early republican fashion, to determine whether or not the revelation was credible in each case.

Emerson’s challenge to the Unitarian establishment at Harvard proposed that individuals may listen for the voice of God in their private minds, trusting their feelings and inclinations to guide them toward the truth. Though subject to caveats, the idea here is that the interior life of each human being is governed by the same system of laws that govern nature itself, and overseen in turn by the same divinity that created it. Each mind is host to its own genius that speaks in the voice of God, and may give us wisdom if we are willing to listen. (Religious establishments, like the Unitarian gatekeepers in Boston, have been understandably hesitant to cede this much influence to all comers, and recognize real opportunities for abuse.) Perhaps Emerson’s greatest contribution to Transcendentalist thought was his insistence that the intuition is real and can be trusted, empowering each of us to be truly self-reliant. That idea has since been incorporated cleanly into American common sense, yielding, among other benefits, one of my favorite Seinfeld bits.

The Divinity School Address marked the end of Emerson’s thirteen-year ministerial career, as well as the beginning of his life as an essayist and lecturer. In a sense, his professional transformation embodied the sort of change one must undergo when making the formal shift from orthodox believer to individual thinker. This is not to say, of course, that one cannot subscribe to a faith statement and be an individual with a brain. But that subscription does place some pretty rigid limits one what one is allowed to think and believe while remaining within that faith. For most religious practitioners, then and now, fidelity to the creeds was an important indicator of right thought, belief, and behavior. For Emerson, such fidelity marked deficits of courage and imagination. Over the next forty years, he pressed this idea into a variety of new venues, formalizing his thoughts and his flights into a new American literature, philosophy, and theology, while inspiring many others in and after his own generation. For that reason, if for no others, Emerson is worth engaging and trying to understand.

This list identifies a series of works and proposes an order to help readers acquire a foundation in one of the great men of American letters. Here again, the primary and secondary sources are interlaced, establishing Emerson’s biography before considering Nature and the early lectures, some takes on his preaching, the First and Second Series of essays, his self-reliance, selections from English Traits and Representative Men, his significance to the history of democracy and of rhetoric, and all the way up to “Conduct of Life” and some orations, including his eulogies for John Brown, Henry Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln. Emerson’s works are all classics, as are most of the scholarly treatments included here. The most recent, James Marcus’ Glad to the Brink of Fear, will be shortly. Perhaps not featured on a great many “summer reading” schedules, these books would make welcome additions to yours.

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A Recession of Charisma

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Eric

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University. His book, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, documents the political influence of military leaders on both sides of the Atlantic during the 18th- and early 19th centuries, and defines them as a type.

The “Age of Revolutions,” a fifty-year stretch roughly spanning 1775-1825, was an era defined by the charismatic leadership of great men. More than that, as David Bell frames the period, it was a time when ordinary people could participate in the historic dismantling of old institutions, the fresh construction of new ones, and the broad expansion of human freedom on the way, all beneath the oversight of a few exceptional figures. Bell’s exemplars, including George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Loverture, and Simón Bolívar, hold several important qualities in common. Each was a military leader renowned for his talent, strength, and courage; each was hailed as a savior or redeemer of his country; and each was subsequently recognized as a founder of something new, a father to his people, who ultimately made the transition from military to political leadership. Bell travels with each figure as his reputation is built, identifying the pivotal events and helpful embellishments that lent themselves to an immortal reputation in every case.

Consider Washington, for example, who was the first of the era proper, and his revolution its inaugural. The glorious year of 1776 was anything but for the American general, whose frequent defeats and retreats were eventually formalized into a “war of posts” intended to annoy the redcoats without subjecting the Continental Army to any one final and decisive collapse. Observing this regress in October, John Adams complained to his wife that “in general, our generals were out-generaled.” There was bitterness and intrigue within the chain of command as well, as some of these generals—like Joseph Reed and Charles Lee—questioned and conspired against their chief. Later, when great victories were finally won, it would be others—like Horatio Gates at Saratoga and Nathanael Greene in the South—on the field. But none of this mattered to the American people, who consistently celebrated Washington via parades marched, songs composed, and towns named in his honor. He was a new type of leader for a new era and a new form of government—not a divine monarch, but an ordinary man, elevated by extraordinary virtues and crowned by acclamation.

For the American people, Washington’s bravery, honor, and commitment made him the perfect avatar of a republican admiration that they were already enthusiastic to confer. In such a context, the hero’s heroism is largely a product of his audience’s fawning attention, radiated by them upon him rather than the opposite, and so susceptible to abuse. As early as 1777, with the cult of Washington already at fever pitch, Adams expressed concern and probably more than a little jealousy. “I have been distressed to see some of our members disposed to idolize an image which their own hands have molten,” he said to his colleagues in Congress. “I speak here of the superstitious veneration which is paid to General Washington.” When the war was won—very largely thanks to the French—Washington declined the opportunity to rule as dictator, an astonishing relinquishment of power that he would reprise with flourish later, after his second term as president. (Garry Wills has thus referred to Washington as “a virtuoso of resignations.”) Though his countrymen would immediately cite his humility and grace as yet further reasons to adore him, their adoration might just as easily have conceded him the presidency for life if he had claimed it.

In broad outline, then, Washington is representative of Bell’s men on horseback. Compelling in themselves, they are all the more so for the cults of personality that their leadership inspired. Each affected a sort of manly charisma, each commanded men in battle, and each was rewarded in turn with expansive political power—in the newly united states, in France, in Haiti, and from Gran Colombia to Upper Peru. In many ways, these careers were products of a particular time, formed by Enlightenment values and republican ambitions, captured in portraiture and popularized by an emergent press. Each man was made by his admirers to be larger than life, and each has since been re-humanized under the careful examination of history. But importantly, all of them earned their accolades in the thrill and danger of action. We remember them now less for who they were or for how they spoke than for what they did in the world.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present documents the political influence (primarily) of non-military leaders who have claimed power around the world during the 20th and early 21st centuries. These, too, offer us a particular genre of leader, but of a weaker vintage.

In that regard, Bell’s men on horseback offer a strange and perplexing contrast to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s strongmen, the latter of whom rose to power within the past hundred years or so. Individually, each of these books analyzes charismatic leadership of a sort. Read together, they document a stark depreciation in the quality of political charisma worldwide. Founded and formed by revolutionary heroes, much of the globe would be inherited later by small and hackish functionaries, few with any military experience and fewer still with any real achievement in that theater. Having witnessed the glorious conquests of Napoleon and Bolívar, the world would soon have to settle for the blustering demagoguery of Mussolini and Hitler, the indolent brutality of Franco, the absurdist violence of Pinochet and Gaddafi, the sleazy corruption of Berlusconi, the frowning kleptocracy of Putin, and the cartoonish incompetence of Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Trump. A focused consideration of this cohort necessarily asks us to think a bit about how and why we have managed to maintain our fervor for strong leaders while so dramatically lowering our standard for what qualifies as strength.

Here again, let’s consider the example from the United States, former (and maybe future) President Donald Trump. Unlike Washington, Trump did not build his reputation on bravery and selflessness in service to his country. He has never stood on principle or virtue or the cultivation and defense of his sacred honor. He certainly has never relinquished power gracefully, even when the nation’s established electoral processes dictated that he must.

Instead, Trump is—and always has been—known for his extravagant greed, lust, selfishness, and shamelessness. He was an icon of the 1980s precisely because his flamboyant excesses epitomized that era. Later, when his public profile began to flag, he regained attention as host of a reality television show on which he insulted a cast of made-for-reality-TV characters. When he took his political turn, he did so as a conspiracy theorist. And as president, he transformed the Oval Office into a daily circus, defined by bombastic press conferences, unhinged Tweets, bizarre speeches, and the signature of exactly one major bill—a generous tax cut for the wealthy. All along, he was developing a cult of personality that would cast his rallies in an explicitly authoritarian light. When he lost the 2020 election, by wide margins in both the popular and Electoral College votes, his hordes stormed the Capitol at his direction.

And yet, unlike Washington in so many ways, Trump has likewise claimed the fawning adoration of very many Americans, despite (in part because of) a much more assertive chorus of critics. He has secured, again, his party’s nomination to the presidency, and the contest was never close. The Republican base, who pride themselves on unshakeable patriotism and on their veneration of the Founding Fathers, do not hesitate to deify Trump on signs, banners, and ubiquitous flags, depicting him sometimes as the musclebound, gun-toting action hero that he has never approximated in real life. This is perhaps the one and only notable similarity—John Adams could grouse about Washington’s defeats, and today’s liberals can rant and rave about Trump’s indiscretions, lies, and crimes, but a great many of the people in either case simply do not care. The image has been molten by their own hands, and they are defensive of their creation.

Like the rest of Ben-Ghiat’s strongmen, then, Trump’s success is traceable to a charisma that has been granted by his admirers rather than produced by his initiative. As president, he seduced the people with a tale of lost greatness, effectively wielded propaganda, demonized the free press, claimed a special brand of masculine virility, used his office to enrich himself and his family, threatened his critics with retribution and violence, and sought to retain power to the detriment of democratic institutions, a playbook that Ben-Ghiat documents with care and disconcerting uniformity across all of her subjects.

They’re all basically the same. Different in degree, perhaps, but not substantially in kind—each self-styled strongman another brash and mediocre leader who will be remembered for who he was and how he spoke rather than for any good he did in the world.  

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Current

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Eric
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Recommended Reading – Regarding Henry Thoreau

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Eric

A somewhat controversial figure in his own day, Henry David Thoreau rose to his greatest prominence posthumously, in the late nineteenth century, with the publication of his expansive journals. In our day, he remains ranked among the nation’s most interesting and idiosyncratic writers. This list proposes a reading program for “getting” this deep and enigmatic figure.

The popular criticism of Henry David Thoreau has tended to fall into two categories, each the mirror image of the other. From one angle, critics have accused Thoreau of being a misanthrope–so ill-equipped for human community that he had to take his leave of it entirely. As Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote in 1882, “A man who must separate himself from his neighbors’ habits in order to be happy is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose.” Or as Kathryn Shulz put it much more recently, Walden is little more than “cabin porn,” essentially “a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” From the opposing angle, Thoreau has been criticized for staying too close to the civilized world. This species of critique is marked by the tenacious cliché that the hermit of Walden Pond was really just a man-child who had his mother do his laundry.

Thoreau’s critics are wrong across the board, though there are gradations to the wrongness, and some are at least more entertaining than others. (James Russell Lowell’s 1865 hatchet job is excellent, for example, as is Vincent Buranelli’s 1957 “Case Against Thoreau.” By comparison, Shulz’s New Yorker piece, “Pond Scum,” is notable primarily for how much it sucks.) No one is above reproach, and Thoreau had plenty of personal foibles worthy of comment and castigation. But it’s tough to read the man with attention and seriousness and still come away with any such uniformly negative assessment. Those who commit themselves to such positions in print come off looking like bad judges of character.

In any case, there are better approaches at hand. By distancing Thoreau from the political questions, and aligning him instead with a tradition of “virtue ethics” as old as Aristotle, Philip Cafaro demonstrates how Thoreau’s intense dedication to self-cultivation constitutes a politics in itself–or at least a self-conscious model for how to live a thoughtful life with or without close neighbors. It’s a useful example for our day as well, given the variety and the extent of the large social problems that none of us can hope to solve as individuals. Perhaps we should start by cultivating the few cubic feet of flesh over which we are sovereign, or tend the bean field that is ours to till. Done well, such work may develop a healthy sort of citizenship. At minimum, it will yield a healthy and introspective citizen. Probably it will help us minimize the harm we cause, and otherwise help us stay out of debt.

My current project builds on Cafaro’s insights and applies them to a treatment of Walden as an exemplar of American epideictic rhetoric. By identifying the blameable aspects of his neighbors’ lives, and contrasting these with the more intentional and ascetic form of his own, Thoreau diagnoses and critiques the most pressing problems of mid-nineteenth century American life–problems that are exponentially more pressing nearly two centuries later. In this way, and mostly without subtlety, he makes an argument about how the good life should be lived. And while it may come across as condescending or haughty, it is not for those reasons incorrect. Thoreau was a broken vessel, like the rest of us. But he was also a much better writer, and his writing casts a broad net. Everyone should have a decent foundation in Thoreau, and here I identify some books to serve as bricks.

This short list contains thirteen titles, represented as sixteen readings because I’ve split Jeffrey Cramer’s excellent (and annotated) edition of Thoreau’s essays into four parts. That Laura Dassow Walls biography is a master class, paired with one of Robert Richardson’s best. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is kind of a tough read for those of us not captivated by Thoreau’s poetry or super knowledgeable on the Greek and Roman allusions, but it also has a lot of beautiful description and is notable for the quiet dignity it lends to the author’s relationship with his brother. Walden needs no introduction, of course, and I recommend the four accompanying volumes for context. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod have their moments as well, but ultimately I think it’s fair to say that Thoreau was less compelling as a traveler of New England than as an explorer of himself. I love both of Bob Pepperman Taylor’s books, and I think that Walden Warming offers an appropriate coda to the enterprise–plus another helpful warning for us.

Any time spent here is time well-spent. (Since reading Leonard Neufeldt’s book on Thoreau’s economics, I can’t stop noticing the frequency with which I talk about time, energy, and life being given, spent, wasted, invested, etc.) I began this sort of systematic reading project in the belief that anything worth reading was worth reading well and completely and with resolve. So far the theory holds. As Thoreau put it, “To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

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Current

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Eric

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

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Conservatives or Radicals or Something Else Entirely

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Eric

Nicole Hemmer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She and I discussed her first book back in 2016. Her second book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, resituates the Republican Party’s sharp rightward turn in reaction to the Reagan presidency, rather than at its beginning.

In the autumn of 2023, shortly after becoming the first Speaker of the House to be stripped of his gavel, Congressman Kevin McCarthy was asked to comment on the far-right cadre who had engineered his ouster. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic,” he said. “That’s not the party I belong to. The party of Reagan was if you believed in your principles, that you could govern in a conservative way. They are not conservative and they do not have the right to have the title.” Perhaps McCarthy had not read Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Otherwise, he might have had a clearer grasp of exactly when and how the party he belongs to—the party of Reagan—became defined by anger and chaos.

If the Reagan Revolution achieved the great triumph of American conservatism in 1980, it also marked the culmination and passing of the triumphant conservative style—that sunny, smiling optimism of its Californian namesake. Indeed, though Ronald Reagan remains emblematic of 80s-era Republicanism, the balance of his political allies and admirers were even then transitioning into darker and more aggressive forms, ever more fiercely committed to the unpopular stands their popular leader was ever unwilling to take. Though they fawned on the Great Communicator in his day and invoked his name regularly for at least a decade after his death, the post-Reagan conservatives had come to view Reaganism as an opportunity missed. For all his virtues, it seems, the Gipper had one near fatal flaw in their eyes—he paid attention to public opinion.

The story of American politics in the 1990s is thus largely concerned with right-wing reaction to Reagan’s perceived moderation. The protagonists are rising right-wing politicians and media figures with radical ideas about government, who viewed election as license to enact these categorically. In temperament, these individuals—Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Roger Ailes, to name a few—were doctrinaire and inflexible. Stylistically, they were angry. Apparently convinced that morning in America had passed to afternoon, they radiated an irascible and sneering sort of frustration, rejecting conciliation and compromise as synonyms for weakness, and practicing politics as warfare by only slightly milder means. If Reagan proposed a political vision to the people and waited for their assent, his successors would make demands and force them through, or else.

In these years, Buchanan’s frowning growl and Gingrich’s bookish scorn came to define their own peculiar mode of persuasion. Confident that they were ideologically correct, they had no patience for caveats and no tolerance for dissent. When Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush in the ’92 primary, he wielded his conservative purity like a cudgel, battering his more moderate rival over a heretical willingness to tax. When Gingrich launched his own revolution in ’94, he assigned an entirely new lexicon to see it secured, recasting his Democratic colleagues as sick, selfish, radical, treasonous, and worse. In step with Limbaugh’s radio bombast, alongside the rise of Fox News, sanctified by association with the Christian Right, and contemporaneous with reactionary militia movements, this ascendent political ethos drew support from across the rightward reaches, bolstered by certainties and inflected with menace. Animated by their blinding hatred of William Jefferson Clinton, conservatives struggled desperately to retake the White House and to see their agenda finally imposed without restraint.

The impeachment proceedings launched against Clinton in December of 1998 thus provide a representative anecdote for the shift underway in the Republican Party for at least a decade to that point—the moment at which Reaganite conservatism formally surrendered to the Gingrich caucus. Because Kenneth Starr’s charges were so humiliating and salacious, the case was perfectly calibrated for the right-wing media and publishing sphere, and tailor-made for the chain emails everyone’s uncle was forwarding dutifully along. And yet, for those same reasons, the impeachment was extraordinarily unpopular with the public-at-large, creating the sort of political calculus that would likely have prompted a Reagan to balk. Asked why he pressed on despite the risks, Gingrich responded curtly, “Because we can,” a quip that Hemmer flags as “an apt summation of the right’s emerging attitude toward power” (247). Once in office, the Republicans of the 1990s would do everything in their ability to satisfy all of their desires. If the effort cost them majorities, they would thrive in opposition until winning their seats again. 

Perhaps somewhat chastened by Clinton’s acquittal and their own midterm losses in ‘98, Republicans nominated George W. Bush in 2000, entrusting their prospects once again to an optimistic candidate pitching a “compassionate” conservatism. But though Bush would win the election (sort of) and serve two terms in the White House, his party was not really reverting to a softer political style. By 2008, with the nation embroiled in Iraq, devastated by a “Great Recession,” and on the verge of electing its first Black president, conservatives were angrier than ever and amplified by a media empire with nearly ubiquitous reach. That sprawling and vicious media ecosystem is central to the story Hemmer tells, cross-pollinating with the GOP and moving steadily from backdrop to center stage with the rise and coronation of the abrasive, conspiratorial, and truly singular reality television star President Donald J. Trump.

Like so many other political volumes published in the past eight years, Partisans is ultimately an account of how the Trump administration became possible, and it is more compelling than most. Though we commonly attribute Trumpism to the dynamics and fractures of our “polarized”nation, Hemmer is thorough and careful to explain that the term is not quite correct. Indeed, she writes, though the 1990s are “so often described as an era of polarization,” this was “actually an era of right-wing radicalization” (14). Here she may be understating the extremity of movement conservatism in the 1960s and 70s, while overstating Reagan’s moderation in the 80s. But whenever it began in earnest, the era of conservative radicalism was clearly underway by 1990. It continues today.

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Church, Commerce, Creation – A Conversation with Mark Stoll

Posted on January 19, 2024 by Eric

Mark Stoll is Professor of History at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America; Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism; and Profit: An Environmental History. Each book explores the relationship between three formative influences in American life.

ECM: Your books focus on the interplay between Protestantism, capitalism, and environmentalism. Did an interest in any one of these prompt your interest in the others?

MS: I grew up in a religious household in the pre-evangelical days. I was interested in environmentalism as a kid in the 1960s, and later, when I began to take an interest in that history, I noticed that a lot of the nation’s great environmentalist figures were lapsed Presbyterians, as I was by then as well. I spent most of the 70s living in San Francisco and going hiking in the Sierras. This was a decade when the nation made great strides in environmental protection. But then, of course, Ronald Reagan became president and appointed the notorious James Watt to the Department of the Interior, and we began rolling back so much of that progress in favor of mining and ranching and timber interests and an otherwise “pro-business” agenda. I was attentive to all this, so when I went back to graduate school in the late 80s, I had these issues on my mind.

At that time, I had been reading about John Muir—who was religious—and also thinking about the Lynn White thesis, that Christianity is to blame for much of the world’s environmental degradation. You know, the idea that God has granted humans dominion over the world with a mandate to subdue it and that this has justified deforestation and extinction and pollution and all the rest. A lot of people accepted that argument at the time, but to me Muir seemed to challenge it. It was his experience, and my own, that growing up in a religious environment influences you deeply, and you retain that imprint throughout your life, even if you leave the faith. You can’t just abandon it. You may change your beliefs, but that inner Baptist or Catholic or whatever it may be lives on in your perspective. I was looking for a research paper topic at the time, and started to work in this direction.

ECM: Can your work be read as an extended response to Lynn White?

MS: Well it’s worth noting that Lynn White was religious as well—he was a Presbyterian, and the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister. But I guess I have been calling for a degree of respect for these religions, and observing that “secular” things are often not as secular as they seem.

ECM: Your second book is a history of American environmentalism by way of Christianity and capitalism and detailed discussions of landscape painting. How did you decide to write history through art criticism?

MS: I’m interested in a lot of things! I take a sort of polymath approach to the world. It’s American history, but it exists in this cultural constellation. Environmentalism can be political and activist, of course, but it is also expressed in poetry, literature, art, and so on. In my first book, I just wanted to write about the stuff that I like to read and then show how it’s all related. In the second, I was thinking about how to show, in a creative fashion, the variety of ways that these attitudes find expression. It was a joy to consider all of these beautiful paintings and learn a bit about the artists who created them and to identify their connections to each other and to their subject matter and to my subject matter as a historian.

ECM: Presbyterianism comes up frequently in your books, and you note that it has been particularly important to American environmentalism. Why?

MS: When writing the first book, I tried to focus on Protestantism as a whole. But as I was revising it, I realized that you could identify particular attitudes and trace them to figures aligned with particular denominations. I began to think about that, and pursued it much more directly in the second book. I had a very hard time coming up with a way to present my argument. At first I was just going to say here are some environmentalists who were Methodists, then here are some Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Catholics and so on. And also some Jews, who have been extremely important to American environmentalism. But that seemed like a very dry way to present the information, so I tried to organize it chronologically. This allowed me to see that there was a sequence, and they actually segue one into each other.

Ultimately I began to look at the religious upbringing of various figures in the environmental movement, and one after another turned out to be Presbyterian, which is striking because it’s not that large of a denomination. It’s mainly an immigrant church, so it’s not like it started out at the top, like the Episcopalians, or that it was blessed with a lot of natural leaders. Rather, they tended to come from hardscrabble circumstances, with an imbued commitment to hard work, a deep respect for education, and a close connection to the land. For these reasons and others, it’s hard to overstate just how important Presbyterianism has been to American environmentalism.  

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Mentor / Mentees

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Eric

On the occasion of a well-deserved retirement. With Stephen H. Browne, Professor Emeritus.

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Recommended Reading – Growth & Degrowth

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Eric

Over the course of 2023 my interest in climate advocacy has carried me deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of climate change causes, which turn out to be the same forces driving a whole host of other ecological problems, culminating in one interconnected global crisis. That crisis is the product of consumer capitalism, with its relentless and singular pursuit of economic growth. This list features both diagnoses of the problem and a variety of proposed solutions.

In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith published a book called The Affluent Society, in which he argued that gross domestic product (GDP) was not a useful metric for gauging economic success. Because it was myopically focused on the production and sale of commodities, indifferent to their use or effects, and driven increasingly by artificial demand manufactured through advertising, GDP was likely to facilitate private sector profits while impoverishing public sector services and failing to address the most basic and vital of human needs for connection, community, and meaning. Galbraith was among the first–and certainly the most prominent–figures to suggest that nations would be wise to abandon the push for growth qua growth and replace it with something more directly indicative of human happiness.

Later, in 1972, a group of scholars associated with the Club of Rome published a volume called Limits to Growth, in which they argued even more emphatically that the dogged pursuit of ever-higher GDP was unsustainable in the long term. Further, it could be directly correlated to a series of damaging environmental impacts, such that continued extraction, production, and waste were certain to perpetuate continued and ever worsening environmental destruction. Concurring with Galbraith that the reigning economic model was conducive to inequality by way of glitzy consumer junk, these writers stressed that it was also toxic to those forms of wealth most important to–and most taken for granted by–human beings, like clean air, clean water, and a stable climate, to name a few.

Then, in 1989, Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, issuing the first long-form alarm about global warming for a general audience. McKibben, too, explained how consumer capitalism was burning through a wealth of natural resources while externalizing the effects into the world that people inhabit, with consequences discernible all the way into the global atmosphere. With characteristic care and clarity, he charted the problem in terms strikingly consistent with the scientific consensus today. If human beings did not change course abruptly, McKibben warned, the near and distant futures appeared alike increasingly bleak. There is a solemnity in his writing that recognized irreparable loss even then.

These books feature among an array of others, from George Perkins Marsh to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Al Gore, that have articulated versions of this concern all along. The economic metabolism of the “developed” world has, for at least eight decades now, generated economic growth by way of ecological destruction and labor exploitation, powering the process with fossil fuels, accumulating wealth in the hands of the few, and unloading the harms onto the impoverished many, primarily those in the “developing” world. It’s a problem with profound economic, ecological, and ethical dimensions, and it will shape every other important issue that we confront from now on. There’s simply no more putting it off.

The books on this list consider the problem in depth. All of them critique capitalism in one way or another, and most propose alternatives. Many of them advocate degrowth specifically, arguing that the future depends upon a controlled drawdown of economic activity designed to prevent environmental damage, reduce inequality, and facilitate the sustainable development of poor nations. Noting the obvious disappointments of consumer capitalism–the loneliness, the emptiness, the lack of fulfillment that invariably accompany the compulsive pursuit of more stuff–these authors argue that a simpler, more authentic, and more community-oriented lifestyle will not just create the conditions for sustainability, but will make us all happier and healthier along the way. But changing economic behavior is very difficult to do, and the first step is understanding why a change is needed.

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The Year in Reading, 2023 – Abolitionism & Transcendentalism

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Eric

In 2023 I read a bunch of books on slavery, Abolitionism, Transcendentalism, the major figures and currents of each, and the ties that bound them to one another. The reading list is included here, along with some reflections on the effort. In the coming year I plan to conclude a pair of other projects-in-progress, focusing on American literature through 1900 and American history through 1917.

The year 1776 regularly serves as a synecdoche for American history–as a small part of the thing that stands in for the whole. For many or most Americans, the association of the Declaration of Independence with July of 1776 has forever established that year as a repository for all American myths, themes, and values, such that it has come to encompass all other years within its red, white, and blue mystique. That is, 1776 is the primary–often the only–historical point of reference that Americans carry close at hand, absorbing so much daylight in their eyes that all subsequent decades are cast in deep, impenetrable shadow. Especially on the American Right, 1776 radically simplifies and clarifies what American history means, quickly converting a textured and perplexing collective memory project into what Van Wyck Brooks once termed “a usable past.” This is why Hillsdale’s foray into public historiography had to be called “The 1776 Project,” and why Tea Party activists so frequently wore tricorne hats. It’s why they called themselves “the Tea Party” in the first place.

To observe that 1776 functions synecdochally is also to engage with every stern and overall-ed gentlemen who has ever stood up at a public meeting to admonish someone for mistakenly calling America a democracy, when it is actually a republic. Though true so far as it goes, this is the sort of claim you can make unequivocally only if your historical awareness extends no further than 1800, or if you simply ignore every new state law passed, every Amendment ratified, every reform movement mustered, and every civil war fought in America between the Constitutional Convention and the present. It has been the obvious tendency of the Amendments, for example, to expand the franchise to ever wider categories of citizen, each redistributing political power more evenly among the population and inviting all to use it well. Though the extensions of voting rights first to Black men, next to all women, and finally to everyone over the age of eighteen receive the marquee treatment, we should also note that non-wealthy white men like those now so fond of this quip were largely denied a seat at the political table in America’s most self-consciously republican decades. Up til and during the gradual, state-by-state repeal of property qualifications for voting starting in the 1790s, the Early Republic was administered explicitly by the elites. It’s hard to imagine that this is the sepia past imagined by the “forgotten men and women” of this latest “silent majority.” It would not explain why Donald Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the White House.

But anyway these matters are on my mind now because I recently completed a second pass through American history from the Revolution to the Civil War, focusing this time on Abolitionism and Transcendentalism, specifically. There are fifty very good books on this list, and reading them together has given me a lot to process. One obvious take-away is that some of the nineteenth century’s best and brightest devoted the balance of their time and energy to expanding American freedom in various ways, pushing stubbornly against the horizons of acceptable belief, thought, and practice in religion, politics, and family, all prior to and during the monumental struggle against slavery. That’s a fascinating story containing fascinating stories, so it’s all the more unfortunate that these have been unjustly eclipsed by some fan fiction about Patrick Henry and Paul Revere. Which is not to say that their generation was unimportant, of course. But their generation was not the only one!

Though the Transcendentalists are personal favorites–and though this reading accompanied my first real essays on Emerson and Thoreau as well as my first visit to their homes in Concord–I found the most illuminating parts of the project in other places. Herbert Aptheker’s work on slave uprisings, though old to historians, was new to me, and the May and Burge books on Manifest Destiny and filibustering were really great. (It remains unclear to me, still, how filibuster went from “pirate” to “mercenary” to “very long speech” in American usage.) Someday I’ll read all the way through American history by way of overlapping biographies, a segment of which will take me again through Henry Mayer’s Garrison, David Blight’s Douglass, Megan Marshall’s Fuller, Robert Richardson’s Emerson, Laura Dassow Walls on Thoreau, and David S. Reynolds on Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Taken together, they’re like squares in a colorful quilt.

This fall my reading on the American past has been balanced by a separate project on degrowth economics that leans present and future. I’m wrapping that one up now, and in January will start a new list from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era. On the side I’ll be catching up on great American novels, now up through Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. I also have a bunch of once-read volumes on Latin American history that I want to organize and revisit, but that may have to wait another year. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the month to learn all there is to learn or to understand it adequately. Trying is always, to some extent, a rewarding failure. But the books linked above offer a good start on an important era, and you may consider them recommended reading.

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Current

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Eric
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From Color Line to Colorblind

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Eric

J. Russell Hawkins is Professor of History at Indiana Wesleyan University. Jesse Curtis is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University. Each is the author of a newish book about white evangelicals and colorblind rhetoric in the second half of the twentieth century. This essay considers both in light of the ongoing reappraisal of Christian history and race in America.

In August of 2019, the New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project,” a full-issue effort to approach American history through the interpretive lens of slavery and anti-Black racism. Though previous histories had employed a variety of other lenses—politics, religion, economics, military campaigns, and so on—this project would center race as the definitive variable in the past four centuries of life on these shores. Widely lauded and much-discussed, the issue drew criticism from historians Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood, who affirmed the intent of the project while regretting certain factual inaccuracies. In her determination to emphasize and indict American racism, they argued, reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones had crafted a coherent big picture at the expense of important particularities. An expanded and bound edition appeared in 2021, quickly claiming bestseller status and continuing to stir debate nationwide, informed by the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and a correspondent panic over “critical race theory” in the public schools. The past, present, and nuances of American racism were hashed out everywhere.

At the same time, somewhere within this broad, national reckoning, Christian historians were examining American churches through a comparable racial lens. Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: the Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism appeared in April of 2019, withAnthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: the Politics of Morality in America and Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right going to press in 2021. These are history books that culminate in the present, mapping the route from then to now in order to situate current events, especially as they pertain to white evangelical faith, Republican politics, and the coalescence of the two in Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency. They are also small books with big arguments, painting in broad strokes and so perhaps vulnerable to the same sort of concern that has followed Hannah-Jones. Academic readers who consider these popular histories may want to pair them with some more traditionally academic fare—narrower in focus, more attentive to detail, and rigorously documented via archival research. They will find these in the two books considered here. Each focuses on white evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century, attending specifically to the ways that white evangelicals talked about race—or declined to do so. Both chart a progression from the stern enforcement of the color line in the 1950s and 60s to the strategic adoption of colorblind rhetoric in later years.

Read the whole thing in the Journal of Communication and Religion.

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Communicating Climate Change

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Eric

David Wallace-Wells is editor-at-large for New York Magazine, as well as a contributor at the New York Times. His 2017 article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” later expanded into a 2019 book of the same title, sparked a heated discussion within the climate science community over the rhetorical utility of appeals to fear and to hope. This essay considers the arguments in light of the communication scholarship.

If we were to identify and list important turning points in the national conversation on climate change over the past two decades, one of these would likely fall on July 9, 2017, with the online publication of David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. Widely shared on the internet and soon to be reprised as a bestselling 2019 book, this essay examined an array of worst-case scenarios, asking just how bad the climate crisis could get if global carbon emission continues apace. Though much climate discourse tends to focus on a range of 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming by the end of this century, Wallace-Wells observed that these figures represent the floor of projected change, and that there is no ceiling. Global warming is likely to pass two degrees over preindustrial levels well before 2100, and will not stop there simply because the calendar flips. To take the climate threat seriously is therefore to examine what may happen if the temperature continues to climb, as it surely will, if global governments fail to act. Wallace-Wells imagined three degrees of warming, then four, five, six, and upward, watching as human beings become unsafe out of doors and millions of equatorial refugees migrate toward the poles, as agricultural systems break down and food becomes scarce, as air becomes unbreathable and plagues arise and spread, as economies collapse, as wars are waged, as oceans die, and, ultimately, as the earth is left uninhabitable.

Though Wallace-Wells’ essay contained plenty of fodder for those who charge the climate movement with alarmism and hysteria, the most interesting dissent came from within the community itself. Writing at Vox, David Roberts (2017) cataloged critical responses from climate scientists and writers who charged Wallace-Wells with sowing the seeds of despair. Perhaps the most prominent of these came from Penn State professor Michael Mann, who took to Facebook to critique what he called the essay’s “doomist framing.” In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer (2017) echoed Mann, writing that, “Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” At the New Republic, Emily Atkin (2017) summarized the criticism with the assertion that, “doom-and-gloom is unpersuasive and discouraging.” She then quoted Rutgers professor Jennifer Francis to that effect. “My own experience in speaking to public audiences is that doomsday stories such as this article are so depressing that people shut down and stop listening,” she wrote. “If there is no hope, there will be no action, and goodness knows we need a lot more action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions right now.”

On Twitter, climate scientist and Project Drawdown director Jonathan Foley called the essay “deeply irresponsible,” charging that Wallace-Wells had been “cherry-picking doomsday scenarios.” Zach Labe, of the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California-Irvine, wrote that, “we can reach a much broader audience by talking about impacts and solutions rather than hyperboles.” Climate activist Alec Steffen wrote that, “Despair is never helpful,” and that the piece was “essentially one long council of despair.” Intercept climate writer Kate Aronoff concurred that the essay was not “helpful,” instead exemplifying a troubling proneness to “nihilism” on the activist left. And finally, technologist Ramez Naam critiqued the essay as being “incredibly bleak,” concluding that, “through a combination of exaggeration and hopelessness, it turns away those in the middle that we need to persuade.” Indeed, “it makes action harder” (Roberts, 2017).

In response to these objections, Wallace-Wells suggested that his approach offers an important counterweight to what he considered the too-rosy tenor of mainstream climate discourse. Asked by an interviewer from the Gothamist whether there was any hope, Wallace-Wells responded:

Oh, I would say there’s quite a lot of hope. The conceit of the piece was to survey worst case scenarios in order to ultimately motivate people to action. But one of the things that I worried about as I put it together was that readers would have a fatalistic response to it and I don’t really think that that’s appropriate. At some point in the piece, I talk about almost all of the damage that we’ve done to the planet, in the sense that global warming has occurred over the course of the lifespan of the Greatest Generation. So ultimately, I think, this could be as short a story as a story of two generations. But at the very least we have another lifespan to figure it out, and to take the necessary actions to forestall at least the gruesome worst-case scenarios that I sketched out in the piece (Fishbein, 2017).

For his part, Roberts (2017) agreed, observing that Wallace-Wells’ emphasis on worst case scenarios functions as a glass of cold water thrown in the face of those focused too narrowly on positive outcomes. He wrote that the popular belief that “Things [will] stay roughly as they are” is every bit as improbable as Wallace-Wells’ worst-case scenario, yet it is believed by vastly more people. “Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy,” Roberts wrote, “it looks just like now! — while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very difficult. It’s especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.”

In other words, if it is in fact a problem that too many people are taking climate change too seriously, it remains an exponentially greater problem that too few people are taking climate change half as seriously as they should.

Read the whole thing in the Pennsylvania Communication Annual.

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Speaking of the Culture Wars

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Eric

At the Table, tonight!

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Freedom As and Against Democracy

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Eric

Annelien de Dijn is Professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University. Paul E. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Stephanie A. Martin is the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University. And Robert Asen is the Stephen E. Lucas Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin. Each is author of a recent book on freedom and democracy.

As Annelien de Dijn tells it in her Freedom: An Unruly History, the political story of the West has been written between two concepts of liberty—one democratic, the other modern. The first of these dates to ancient Greece and Rome and defines freedom in terms of democratic self-government. In this understanding, citizens are free to the degree that they are able to participate in the selection and maintenance of the laws to which their community is subject. Unlike slaves—and understood, in fact, as their political opposite—free citizens are empowered to act in the public square. They have the agency to acquire knowledge, to form opinions, to take stands, to persuade others, and perhaps thereby to assist in guiding the course of the state. Along the way, they may enjoy the satisfaction and assurance that accompany the free practice of their citizenship on equal footing with their countrymen, who enjoy that practice as well. This democratic concept of liberty was the original of Western civilization, and remained dominant across the two millennia that followed.

Its usurper is de Dijn’s second concept, with allies as ancient as Plato but without widespread purchase until the turn of the 19th century. This modern concept defines freedom in terms of non-interference from the state. For proponents of this view, citizens are free only to the degree that laws do not bind them, effectively casting government of whatever sort as the antagonist of liberty. Following the turmoil of the 18th century’s Atlantic Revolutions, especially the Terror in France, political thinkers including Benjamin Constant and Edmund Burke reacted to democratic excess by locating freedom within the private individual. Though others have traced this development to the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of market economies, de Dijn asserts that it is best understood as a counterrevolutionary riposte. The presumption that individuals must be prioritized and popular power contained has been widely touted ever since. Today its influence is carved into our increasingly undemocratic institutions.

Unsurprisingly, then, this story of long rise and short but dramatic decline follows a trajectory similar to that of rhetoric itself. Crafted by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, democratic freedom fell out of favor in Medieval Europe but bounced back during the Renaissance, found champions during the Enlightenment, and provided the vital theoretical framework for a generation of revolutionaries who were defiant of subjugation and committed to self-government. In rejecting monarchy, the architects of the United States insisted also on a degree of popular sovereignty. And in securing the franchise for (some) citizens, they built a political system in which persuasion matters, in which good ideas and rhetorical polish could wield real influence. Attractive to the rank-and-file, this model necessarily threatened the elites, who quickly set to work fortifying their institutions against the mass. Early in the 21st century, their work remains evident in gerrymandered districts, disproportionate Senate representation, the Electoral College, and the passage of state-level voting restrictions, including thirty-four new laws across nineteen states in 2021 alone. Because rhetoric and democracy are so closely linked, the deterioration of democratic freedom unavoidably presages the forfeiture of rhetorical power.

De Dijn’s narrative is clearly oriented around this sense of loss. She recalls the Atlantic Revolutions as a collective eruption of democratic potential, ultimately confounded by internal complexities and class antagonisms. If the modern conception of freedom was first animated by fears of democratic anarchy and mob rule, it was refined and popularized by continental liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville who were anxious at the plight of powerless minorities. Adopted then by Federalists and Whigs, it was made to serve primarily as a rampart around the wealthy and a check upon the rest, effectively recasting equality as a threat to liberty rather than its actualization. Challenged by radical movements including abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and labor, modern freedom was revived during the Cold War and represented by a fresh host of intellectual advocates. “Today,” de Dijn laments, “the West’s most ardent freedom fighters (who are now more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal) remain more concerned with limiting state power than with enhancing popular control over government.” Indeed, freedom now serves as “a battering ram against democracy” rather than its raison d’être.

Long and sweeping but precise and detailed, de Dijn’s account provides an illuminating backstory to the present, a compelling context in which to understand what’s happening now. In the United States and Western Europe especially, diversifying populations are altering the composition of the citizenry and so threatening the traditional, hegemonic whiteness of the power structure. In response, resurgent right-wing movements and politicians are relying on restrictive institutions to save them, and the modern conception of freedom to justify that project. By insisting that government remain small and its purview limited, by creatively sorting and containing the voters, and by challenging the legitimacy of elections themselves, the dominant agents of the American Right have worked hard to constrain democratic freedom and to secure their advantages. Over the three sections that follow, this review will consider their progress within three specific venues, applying de Dijn’s two concepts of freedom to the work of rhetorical scholars examining politics, religion, and education in the United States.

Read the whole thing in Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

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