Yesterday, in my “Wednesday History Note,” I shared Walt Whitman’s scathing takedown of the country in the time of the Gilded Age. That one sentence was focused on the political arena, but the totality of his essay called “Democratic Vistas” was aimed at the nation at large. What he wrote over a century ago rings ever more true today, and yet within the condemnation lies a hope and a warning for us.
For Whitman, as he viewed the time known as the Gilded Age, there was a danger in our material success driven not so much by the accumulation of wealth, but rather in the lessening of influence of deep thinking created by a focus on better, deeper, things such as literature. Midway through his essay, he launches into his overview of the country as he found it. Consider how much of this reflects our days today:
Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melo-dramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litté rateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable….
Not stopping there, he turns his attack on the new idea of “business.” The rise of large industries, soon to be national industries, in this time opened the door for a small group of individuals to amass an amount of wealth hitherto unknown to the average person. For Whitman, then as now, that much wealth in so few hands was bad, not only for the few, but in the example it set for others. In other words, rather than striving to be a good person, contributing in society, now young people would begin to lustfully look for ways that they too could accumulate excess wealth.
The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians….
For Whitman, this onrushing lack of morals was visible in any city. He recounts looking at New York City. Don’t, however, read his words as merely some accusation against the Big Apple only, but merely Whitman’s view of all of the country where sloth and wealth had taken over.
Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas’d, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantages enjoy’d,) probably the meanest to be seen in the world.
Not a pretty picture…and one that I believe we see around us. So, are we doomed? No. For one, Whitman wrote in the late 1800s and we survived till now…not in some downward slide but having risen, at least somewhat, to combat some of these issues. Of course, part of that rising up was forced by confronting issues like the national disaster of depression and then tyranny around the globe. Yet, in the 1950s as in the 1880s, excess wealth led us once again down a darkening path. Is there hope?
Of course there is. Don’t listen only to the negativity of how things are horrible, words that we hear from the two main political parties. But more than ensuring you are feeding your mind with “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things,” Whitman urges a second remedy.
Literature. Reading. The deepening of the mind.
I say there must, for future and democratic purposes, appear poets, (dare I to say so?) of higher class even than any of those—poets not only possess’d of the religious fire and abandon of Isaiah, luxuriant in the epic talent of Homer, or for proud characters as in Shakspere, but consistent with the Hegelian formulas, and consistent with modern science. America needs, and the world needs, a class of bards who will, now and ever, so link and tally the rational physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space, and with this vast and multiform show, Nature, surrounding him, ever tantalizing him, equally a part, and yet not a part of him, as to essentially harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest. Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused her departure—restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever.
That’s good stuff right there. It’s not an easy solution; later Whitman wrote “Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle….” But it is the high calling of disciplining the mind away from a diet of only social media, the constant screech of politicians, the lurid focus on negativity of the media.
It is the call to the Liberal Arts, the move to being a thinking person. Here’s an idea for you as we continue to be forced endure this political season….go read some poetry. Go read a play. Pick up writing from the giants of literature.