Defining Morality

by Lucy S.

This essay was part of my honor’s thesis. I wrote it in fall 2010.  The person about whom I wrote it epitomizes for me what it is to give one’s utmost in care-labor – as a teacher, a learner, a writer, an advocate, and a real friend.

A week into the fall 2009 semester, I emailed a professor I had never met to ask if he would consider overseeing my directed studies, to start immediately.  My son, Justin, newly in his class, said that Dan’s lectures had fully lived up to the rave reviews he'd heard from others.  He told me about Dan's wider conceptions regarding what constitutes literature, which caught my interest.  Already swamped, Dan warned me that he probably could not, but invited me to at least come and talk with him. 

I did, and he took on yet more work – work for which he was not paid and had every justification to turn down.  Though he never said so, this cut further into his own time to write and publish – a necessity for obtaining a tenure-track position, which he did not have.  Dan met with me, often weekly, for an hour or more.  He met with many other students, also.  He listened to our stories, suggested projects, recommended books, with the same kind of passion which drove his lectures. Frequently, a line of people waited in the hall to talk with him.  Before and after office hours, and on days he didn't even have office hours, Dan talked with us. 

When I used the words 'moral' and 'morality' in academic writing, he circled them, asking me to define them. “What does he mean, define them?” I sometimes ranted to anyone listening in my home.  “Don't the words have accepted meanings?  English professors are so obsessed with words!” 

Although he finds the words sometimes problematic, when Dan teaches Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in American Literature, he calls a point in the story “the moral center of the novel” and “the moral center of American literature.”  When he taught Huck Finn to our class, he told us that he loved the novel and expressed how much it meant to him.  On the day he lectured about this point in the story, he warned us that he's very emotional about it, that at times he has even started to cry when speaking about it to classes. 

I will try to respond now with a definition by working through that “moral center.”  The novel, our teacher's response to it, and his relationship with us are all bound to my conception of morality and a moral education.

In these moments of the story, Huck must choose and act upon his own definition of moral.  Like all corrupt societies, his has appropriated the vocabulary for goodness.  The dominant definitions conveniently benefit those in positions to insist upon their moral scripts. Their norms, rules, and laws enable those who make and uphold those codes to exploit and own human beings.  Justifying this requires a conception of the exploited and owned as 'less than' and 'other.'  Huck's relationship with Jim exposes the lie of this 'inferiority' and the lack of any just foundation for slavery.  Unexposed to abolitionist rhetoric, forced to face these ethical chasms on his own, Huck must feel his way to his morality.  

Finding tbat the king has sold Jim, Huck is bitterly angry and hurt that after all he and Jim “done for them scoundrels … they could have the heart to … make [Jim] a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.”  Though he doesn't realize it, Huck's own moral code is already in force when he links their hearts with their actions in the common expression, “have the heart to...”  Selling Jim 'cheap' emphasizes their hardheartedness.   The king and duke are “scoundrels” because their journeys with others leave them unmoved and unattached.

In contrast, Huck binds to and empathizes with Jim because of their journey together.  Horrified that Jim will be a slave among people with whom he doesn’t even have a relationship, Huck thinks to get word to Jim's former owner to reclaim him, but dismisses the idea, afraid she'll be angry at Jim for running away, and still sell him. Or if not, she'd  take it out on Jim because “everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger.” On one level, Huck swallows his society's logic: a black slave taking his freedom is by definition ungrateful, and to be ungrateful means people “naturally despise” him. But without calling it wrong, Huck bypasses the logic to align himself with Jim: “they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and disgraced.”  He accepts their code of norms as he would a force of nature, but Huck's feelings remain with Jim's.

The empathy and action arising from that bond clash with his society's code as a determiner of moral action for Huck.  Imagining his humiliation when people back home find out he helped Jim, Huck then feels guilty because he is in that moment thinking of himself instead of Jim in making this decision. 

But because guilt is so enmeshed with his society's moral code, the guilt itself loops him back to that code. Mulling over how white society would see what he's done, Huck starts to accept their evaluation of it as “low-down.” The just “consequences,” it follows, are that he deserves to be found out.  But the emphasis is on the dominant society's assessment of  him rather than his affinity with them.  If someone from home knew he'd “helped a nigger to get his freedom,”says Huck, he'd “be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame.”  The more he dwells on this, “the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling.” 

What he calls his “conscience,” however, is his society's morality. When he starts to internalize their morals, he feels guilt, shame, a grinding on himself, wicked, low-down. But that never means empathizing with them the way he does with Jim.  Huck's emotional response mirrors the nature of the hierarchical code; he doesn't imagine how it feels to be one of those people; he only knows how they make him feel.  Connecting his guilt to the religious doctrines he's been taught, Huck says, “my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm.” But even here, he is not actually empathizing with this “poor old woman;” he is lecturing himself, calling himself 'wicked,' in the words and tone he knows his society would use on him.

The 'God' watching him is a supernatural magnification of his society's values, terrifying Huck.  He thinks, had he gone to Sunday school, he'd have learned “that people that acts as I'd been acting about the nigger goes to everlasting fire.”  Huck has not objectified and dehumanized Jim as “the nigger” and “a poor old woman's nigger” since they began their journey down river.  But in Huck's head, white society is now inserting itself between him and Jim.  And the salvation that society's morality points to, like its condemnation, centers on the individual.  If Huck continues in relationship with Jim, its code says he will burn forever.  The major elements of his society's morality are conformity, fear, and a selfish focus on individual reward.  Others become objects who either augment or reduce one's own attainment of salvation. Their values are at odds with relationship, empathy, solidarity, and caretaking. 

In his guilt and terror, Huck decides to pray.  He kneels down, but can produce no words.  And then he knows why.

It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him.  Nor from me, neither … my heart warn't right … I  warn't square … I was playing double.  I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all.  I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me, I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it.  You can't pray a lie – I found that out.

 Who is “Him” and who is “me” from whom Huck can't hide his duplicity?  All along Huck has lied to people in his society when he had to, for his own sake or for Jim's.  But this 'Him' cannot be fooled.  This 'God' is the omniscient manifestation of Huck's society, a society in which the “biggest sin of all” is to love another person more than that society's non-relational code of 'right,' founded upon the lie of the 'inferiority' of some – to love that person enough to break the rules for the good of the person.  Huck's “me” never had to directly 'talk' to society's code before, because the people he lied to couldn't see through to that “me.”  Prayer, however, is direct communication between Huck and the personified reality of that society's morality.  And “me” is Huck's true conscience, his own code of morality, his heart. 

His society's definition of “right” and “clean” has been fighting to invade Huck's own sense of goodness, a goodness which is enacted rather than articulated.  But with the embodiment of his society's morality into 'God' which Huck's “me” would speak to, the two codes are distinct again.  And he knows that to speak to that code directly is to submit to it, because although he senses the wrong in that society, it owns the words for goodness. He doesn't know how to reclaim those words.  But he cannot submit.

Huck's way out is to instead pretend to communicate with a regular person in his society, someone he can lie to, who can't see his “me” and with whom his conscience won't have to speak.  Even before he writes the letter to Miss Watson to tell her where Jim is, he feels “as light as a feather … my troubles all gone.”  It is pretend communication because unless that letter is sent, there is no action; Huck can rest in an in-between place for a short time, where the two moralities do not have to confront each other.

Naturally, he puts off praying. In this space before prayer, Huck is free again, on the raft, where lies are unnecessary, where he's not forced to face the shores of his society's moral codes.  He thinks “how near I come to being lost and going to hell,” and we as readers know how near he is to being lost, how he's resting right on the edge of it.

 

Then he begins to remember Jim in his totality. Sitting there with the paper laid down, recalling their trip down river, Huck envisions Jim before him day and night, talking, singing, laughing.  He thinks of all Jim has done for him, the extra watches so Huck could sleep, “how good he always was.” Huck remembers how glad Jim was to see Huck when he thought Huck was lost; how, when Huck lied to save him, Jim was “so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now.” 

The Greeks called this philia (“brotherly love” or “fellowship”), and Aristotle described it as “character-friendship” and “intimate friendship.”  The most important philia in Aristotelian terms is 'friendship of the good,' a friendship that forms because “one distinctly recognizes the moral goodness of the similar life and similar activities of another person” (Cooper 345-354). 

Jim has called Huck his “best friend.”  In his re-creation of their journey, Huck has called Jim “good,” a seemingly simple naming act which naturally flows from reliving their relationship, but which nonetheless inherently contradicts what his society calls “good.”  A slaveholder might say his slave is “good,” in the way someone says a piece of equipment is “good,” meaning she/he/it serves the purpose well.  But Huck calls Jim “good” as a friend and a person, an equal. 

Then he sees the letter and holds it, “trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things.” That pretend communication allowed Huck to step back from the confrontation between the immoral society and his conscience, to drift again in that liminal space, the psyche's river.  And so the letter itself became, for that little while, a kind of raft.  But now that means of temporary escape from the confrontation of moralities has metamorphosed into the material focal point itself of the confrontation.  What he does with the paper in his hand decides the course of the rest of Jim's life as well as his own. Those written words mirror the lie of the written documents which claim ownership of some human beings by other human beings. Huck must face up to the power of words themselves as action, both the written words in his letter, and the words he will use to respond to the choice before him.

The only words needed are those which affirm his relationship with Jim and reject his society's appropriation of his conscience. “All right, then, I'll go to hell,” he says, needing no elaborate arguments to disprove that society's code.  Its morality is hollow at its core, resting only upon administered punishments and rewards not rooted in relationship, on what is best for each person, but only in a system which makes salvation itself a limited resource with some winning and others, like Jim, losing. Purporting to be objective, it indeed turns people into objects and commodities. This morality collapses in on itself, having nothing inherently good to support it – only authoritarian hierarchy, not love.  Selfishness is its only motivator.  Unlike theirs, Huck's morality is subjective, rooted in relationship; it not only develops through philia, but philia is that morality.

Convinced that throwing in his lot with Jim means he is bound for an eternity in hell, he nonetheless essentially says, “Do with me what you will,” and chooses relationship. When Huck faces the pinnacle of that hierarchical morality, taking the punishment instead of the reward, the code has no further claim on him, which is why the decision is, as he knows, “forever.”

Huck then tears up the letter, rejecting the fiction it supports, and is in “whole hog,” ready to do whatever he can to help Jim escape.  After that, there are no more rafts, no time on the river for Huck and Jim, because the in-between space is gone. Huck is back in society, back on shore, ready to act.  (Twain, Norton Anthology of American Literature 244-247).

***

We recognize morality in those moments when someone must choose between good and bad, and act on that choice.  The most dramatic demonstrations of this morality are in acts of 'rescuing' in which the would-be rescuers put themselves at risk in the attempt to save another.  And the moral actions many of us most honor and love are those which oppose the dominant immoral group or society surrounding the rescuers.  Huck's choice exemplifies this.

Fundamental questions arise from these moral acts.  How do rescuers know to do the right thing when the message from those around them is that their rescuing is wrong?  Do we believe in any conceptions of 'rightness' beyond the contextual ethics of our own societies?  Or, to relate this back to Huck, is Huck's choice in any sense universally right, or is it only right in our opinion, and wrong in the opinion of, for example, the legal system in his time?  

If rescuers can identify 'right' as 'right' (a huge 'if'), what makes the difference between those who act and those who don't?  Are these moral acts merely acts of self-sacrifice, or can they also involve individuals acting to save themselves? 

How do we apply these lessons or conceptions in our own times?  Can we characterize our society now as predominantly moral or immoral, or is there no way to answer such a question?   Is it possible to teach and learn in ways which cultivate our abilities to recognize and resist an immoral society?  And can we go further, consciously creating a moral society, so that doing the right thing would not have to mean acting in opposition?  How do we create a society conducive to caring for others, particularly the vulnerable and previously oppressed?

             

One way into these questions is through the lens of someone we could call the antithesis of Huck: Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann.  Mark Twain described Huck's choice this way: “a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat” (Hutchinson 128).  Attempting to act on conscience without heart seems close to what Eichmann did.  In a post-trial statement before his execution, Eichmann claimed he had “never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings.  His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue” (Arendt 247).  During the trial, Eichmann thought that his complete conformity would absolve him, proving his lack of corruption.   “No exceptions – this was the proof that he had always acted against his 'inclinations,' whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his 'duty'”(137).  Was it, in fact, fair to hold him accountable in these circumstances?  Hannah Arendt points out:

What we have demanded in these trials … is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. (294).

But of course, had Eichmann chosen not to arrange for the extermination of millions of people, he would not have been at odds with “the unanimous opinion of all those around him,” and he knew this. He would not have been at odds with the opinions of the millions being killed. Taking a stand against the horrendous treatment of some by many others does not require a person to stand alone; it requires him to stand with those being categorized as 'less than' and 'other.' 

And although I think I understand what Twain was getting at in positioning heart and conscience against one another, I believe that there is no conscience apart from heart.  Consider the etymology of conscience: “innermost thoughts, desires, intentions, feelings … knowledge within oneself, sense of right, a moral sense.”  The question comes down to who and what we love and do not love.

Thus, for Eichmann, “the personal element undoubtedly involved was not fanaticism, it was his genuine 'boundless and immoderate admiration for Hitler'” (Arendt 149). Even when Germany was clearly losing the war and Himmler tried to save himself by halting the murders at last, Eichmann  circumvented Himmler's orders to act in accord with “the categorical imperative in the Third Reich, … 'Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it'” (145, 137).  For Eichmann hating Jews was not necessary in order to participate in killing millions of them.   He only needed to conceive of them as meaningless.  Eichmann's “Him” – that is, his 'God,' the omniscient manifestation of his society's moral code – was Hitler.  And unlike Huck, Eichmann loved his 'God' and therefore submitted.  He loved the bureaucratic order of the Third Reich, and  he loved his position within it.  No serious battle needed to be fought between conformity, conscience, and heart; all were in alignment. 

In her study of Eichmann, Arendt noted his inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (49).  Yet, on some level he did attempt to think from someone else's standpoint – Hitler's.  What he lacked might more accurately be identified as the inability to feel from someone else's standpoint. His devotion to the Führer was not based on a close relationship with Hitler, the man. Rather, he worshiped Hitler the symbol, the apex of a hierarchical system of cold bureaucracy which objectified living beings.  Thus even what Eichmann loved was an object.  In his analysis of modern necrophilous societies, Erich Fromm says, “The world of life has become a world of 'no-life'; persons have become 'non-persons,' a world of death” (389).

Is Huck's choice universally good?  Southern white society would not have considered his decision 'good.'  But to conclude that his choice is only good in his and our opinion makes the meaning of the whole story collapse.  It implies that Huck merely exercised his preference, that there was nothing inherently good about his choice.  From there, we risk descending into the amoralism of the king and the duke, an 'every man for himself' philosophy, according to which the point in life is to get what you can for you (and yours, to the extent that others do something for your well-being as objects).  But Huck's loyalty to Jim was nothing like the king's and duke's selfishness; he believed he was dooming himself in order to save Jim.  On some level, we know that we do not consider Huck's choice 'good' just because we 'like' it.  Yet we must ask, how is it possible to believe in any form of universal morality while acknowledging the clear evidence that moral codes are not universal?

The answer must be that his and our subjectivities themselves are what make Huck's choice good and moral.  Jim's and Huck's care for one another, their relationship, is what is good; and our emotional response to them and their loyalty is what is good.  What is good is loving what is good.  The logic seems circular, but there is no way out of the circle.  For those of us who believe Huck's choice was good, we believe it because we feel it is good.  We cannot reduce its goodness to self-interest; it was not in Huck's interest to burn in hell forever after he died, which was the consequence he genuinely believed came with his choice.  Yet neither was this a kind of abject sacrifice on behalf of Jim.  Huck's choice was an affirmation of life and growth, the life and growth which are bound to our relationships with one another.  Objects are dead, but subjects are alive.  Fromm argues that humans do not simply have different, equally valid ways of being in the world.   Analyzing past and more recent human civilizations, he concludes that biophilia is:

a biologically normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psychopathological phenomenon.  The latter necessarily emerges as the result of stunted growth, of psychical 'crippledness.'  It is the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage beyond narcissism and indifference ...  Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being.  Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted.  Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution.   (406-407)

Fromm defines biophilia as:

the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.  The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more.  He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old.  He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty.  He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations.  He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things.  (406)

If biophilia is “normal,” healthy, and thus inherently 'better' than necrophilia with its reduction of living beings into dead objects, then acts of solidarity and rescuing are fundamentally moral.  And deep empathy drives these acts.  Study after study links “empathic distress” to helping behavior, notes psychologist Martin Hoffman (29-32).  This empathy goes beyond feeling briefly sad about another's suffering, or what Jonathan Kozol calls “inert concern” which replaces action, allowing people to feel good about their 'sadness' for others while doing nothing (Kozol 202).

In The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany, psychologists Pearl and Samuel Oliner point out:

What distinguished rescuers was not their lack of concern with self, external approval, or achievement, but rather their capacity for extensive relationships – their stronger sense of attachment to others and their feeling of responsibility for the welfare of others.  (249).

We do not suddenly become moral in the dramatic moment of choice, the act of rescuing. Instead, this “extensive capacity for relationships” is a continual possibility within people, nurtured and sustained by caring for others and experiencing their care for us.  This form of empathy demands action. It requires the taking of rights – rights to live and grow, as so many marginalized, exploited people and their allies have done.

  A moral education fosters these kinds of deep attachments bound to a love for goodness, a commitment to caretaking, and the strength to do what it takes to act.  That education teaches us to do what it takes to save ourselves with others, particularly those most oppressed.  And because we are still in an immoral society, in which, for example, those who could prevent it let 17,000 children die of starvation every single day ^[1](among so many atrocities), a moral education must oppose the status quo.  Whether resistance takes place in or out of institutions, it must oppose the purpose of this society's institutions when they work to turn out people who can be trusted to perpetuate the same unjust system, who maintain as much privilege as they can on the backs and misery of so many.

We have the right to create space away from the oppression, as Huck and Jim did on the raft.  We need this space in order to find our way to a morality of life and relationship, so we won't be asphyxiated by the hierarchical, objectified code.  Relationships which transgress the roles and divisions meted out to us are themselves both the raft and the journey, sustaining us and transforming us.

In societies dominated by callousness and cruelty toward those seen as 'other' and 'less than,' relationships with those deemed 'other' and 'less than' are oppositional. Likewise, relationships which undermine hierarchies are inherently oppositional.   And if they are relationships of genuine philia, they will move us to act. 

When we realize we cannot escape, whether we are cornered or choose to struggle, we have the right to fight back on our terms, not those of the system's. Someone once argued with me that a person refusing to go to war 'must' submit to the prison time.  These are matters of strategy, not principle.  Huck and Jim were not obligated to go to court or lobby the legislature to do away with slavery in an unjust system, structured in opposition to their interests.  Opposed to the U.S. war against Mexico as well as slavery, Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience, if an injustice “is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.  Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine” (234).  Huck broke human law and even what his society told him was God's law – broke these laws for the sake of relationship, in order  to act as a rescuer. 

           

Dan is gone from this university.  The positions of many deeply committed, caring, beloved professors are precarious. These are people who transformed my life, and the lives of many others. But as I said earlier, we lack democratic rights in our institutions.  Too many of our professors can be swept away by the austerity plans of bureaucrats.

Perhaps in the context of this world's tragedies and atrocities, these losses seem unimportant.  But when we diminish our own pain because it is less than that of others, we do nothing for those who suffer even more.  We enter instead into a kind of contest in which we compete for degrees of misery so that we might allow ourselves the right to feel what we feel.  Or we withdraw from the struggle into private despair. And too many of those emerging from these institutions will then continue to be of the ilk that environmental scientist David Orr has described – those highly educated people with power, decimating life on the planet, inflicting ever more horrific miseries onto those who already suffer most. 

If our teaching and learning and relationships in these institutions ever mattered at all, then they are worth fighting for, both to stem the erosion that is occurring, and to extend what is best in this education to all who are kept out.  To do that, we must stop these uppermost layers of administrators who have set themselves over us, who insist by their actions that they are the only 'real' citizens. We must stop them from inserting themselves between the people for whom these institutions actually exist.

           

Here is what I believe Dan did for us.  He named what Huck for so long could not name. He named Huck's relationship with Jim and thus his choice as good and moral.  He showed us what the novel, and this crucial center in particular, meant to him.  He showed us that he loved it.  And that is how we learn to love what is good, by seeing someone else passionately advocate for good.  Students waited for Dan week in and week out because they loved him.  And he loved his students.  We knew he was on our side, that in his way, he would do what he could to 'save' us, to keep us growing as thinkers, to move us to value rather than degrade ourselves.  And he made us want to do the same for others.  Like all of the best teachers, Dan has that “extensive capacity for relationships,” which is so bound to the love for life – biophilia – which moves us all to be continual rescuers of one another.

Earlier this semester, at a time I felt particularly low, Dan responded by email to my questions about writing and worsening self-doubt.  He shared quotes from Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a passage I had never read by the poet Randall Jarrell, which begins: “Art matters not merely because it is the most important occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.” The passage, excerpted from Jarrell's “The Obscurity of the Poet,” articulates beautifully and precisely why art is crucial to our education; what complex, otherwise unobtainable truths we learn through art; and why those truths “by their very nature, demand to be shared,” so that “bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody.”  Dan urged me to keep writing, to trust what the process would yield, not so that I might compete against others, but to participate as part of “the collective we, the democratic we.”  The last lines in this excerpt from Jarrell's work offer a resolution to the tension between an exclusionary artistic aestheticism and the healthy striving to do our best work, as well as a recognition of the “Excellence” of others:

Goethe said : the only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.  But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such as Excellence can exist; and in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves. (22,23)

Teachers like Dan make us want to be worth their time and effort.   And as we strive to be worthy, we simultaneously learn and remember to value ourselves.  In relationship with them and kindred learners, we write our hearts out, trying to contribute words of value, not for the sake of a grade, but to express some part of what is “life itself,” of what is truly moral.

***

About this essay:
I knew that I would write about Jim and Huck Finn for my honor’s thesis. During my time in that American literature class of Dan’s, I was not willing to attempt it. I could not bear to do it shoddily, to trample over what was so exquisitely meaningful. I wanted so badly to do justice to that story and what it meant to him, to our class because of the way that he brought us into relationship with the story and himself, to my kids to whom I had read it while in that class, and to me. And still, reading this essay now, I want the words to be more perfect and the ideas to be much fuller.  Writing can be so painful because of these inadequacies, yet it remains so necessary and worthy to try.  

I have been writing in some of these essays about the contradictions of art.  The Randall Jarrell passage is another fundamental part of that conversation. Since I have more room here than I did in my honor’s thesis, I will end by including that passage which Dan emailed me one day in September 2010, a day I had sprained my ankle yet again and limped into the university library to find his message which included this:

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone – for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us?  And in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and contradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind which contains them, in some sense a single truth?  

And all these things, by their nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can.  If while most of our people (the descendants of those who, ordinarily, listened to Grimm’s Tales and the ballads and the Bible; who, exceptionally, listened to Aeschylus and Shakespeare) listen not to simple or naïve art, but to an elaborate and sophisticated substitute for art, an immediate and infallible synthetic as effective and terrifying as advertisements or the speeches of Hitler – if, knowing all this, we say: Art has always been a matter of a few, we are using a truism to hide a disaster.  One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared: that in a democracy bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody.  

If a democracy should offer its citizens a show of education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous than their old illiteracy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all, but one more variant of those “People’s Democracies” which share with any true democracy little more than the name.  Goethe said: the only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.  But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah.  Eichmann In Jerusalem.  New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.

Fromm, Erich.  The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York, Owl Books, 1973.  Print.

Hoffman, Martin. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.

Hutchinson, Stuart.  Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print.

Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age.  “The Obscurity of the Poet.”

Kozol, Jonathan. The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Print

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Twain, Mark. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”  The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Volume C, Seventh Edition.  Ed. Reidhead, Julia.  New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Print. 

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