That notable economist, Henry David Thoreau, writes in Walden: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” Later in a memorable passage he adapts this pre-Keynesian program to the situation of “honest, hardworking, but shiftless” John Field, an Irishman living with his wife and several children in a ramshackle house and scraping a mean living from rented land. Thoreau tells Field that he might easily build himself a decent home and cut down on his expenses by refraining from tea, coffee, butter, milk, and beef, which are only debilitating his system, and end up with leisure time to go fishing and huckleberrying. But in the end Thoreau knows that he is only wasting his time, for “alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.”
It is a wonderfully written passage, Thoreau at his ironic-didactic best when it is easy for him to persuade the reader not simply that there is something to be said for his view of things (which there generally is) but that there is very little if anything to be said for any other. This is the way it is with powerful simplifiers, for whom quotidian life tends to be less a challenge by complexities than an affront by the absurd. And in quotidian life, as Karl Marx demonstrated, nothing is more likely to bring out one’s propensity for simplification than economics.
Thoreau in Walden, exploiting the mythic correspondence between past and present, often sounds like James Joyce in Ulysses, but it is the poet Ezra Pound whom he more regularly reminds one of. Put the latter’s Guide to Kulchur alongside Walden and it is immediately clear that Pound’s title would serve for both books, even though it is impossible to imagine Pound living contentedly in a homemade shack beside a wilderness pond. Pound, for instance, had no more hope for the culture of the English (or that of his fellow Americans) than Thoreau had for John Field. But they had a good deal else in common. Both were swimmers as well as poets, both had briefly tried teaching, both had been jailbirds, both were what Quentin Anderson has called imperial selves, with the imperial self’s need to improve the world at once, with a moral bog hoe if necessary. What Henry James, Sr. said of Thoreau—that he “was literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of manhood”—was an anticipation of what many, including his long-time friend William Carlos Williams, would later say of Pound. And of course they had in common their economic simplicities—though Thoreau’s economics was not further simplified, as was Pound’s, by the simplicity of anti-Semitism.
Pound’s economic simplicity derived from Major H.C. Douglas’s Social Credit theories which, Pound was convinced, would both abolish “usura” and preserve civilization. In the early winter of 1945, awaiting trial for treason in a Washington, D.C. jail, Pound told reporters, “I took Mussolini an economic theory that could have blown the roof off Europe.” The University of Virginia economist Kenneth G. Elzinga has written (in the Wall Street Journal) that were it not for his economic fallacy Pound’s judgment might have remained “unstained by anti-Semitism and his politics free of their totalitarian bent.” Elzinga is very clear on the nature of the fallacy; nevertheless, if a personality like Pound’s is to cease being a producer of passionate simplicities it needs not a sounder economic theory but remaking from the bottom up—something like the fundamentalist’s born-again experience.
Perhaps he did not, after all, read closely enough his beloved Confucius, who certainly has had the effect on other people of discouraging dangerous simplifications. Pound had his Confucius with him during his six months’ incarceration at Pisa, where he had about as much living space as Thoreau had at Walden, and Confucius makes the expected appearances in The Pisan Cantos, along with much else, including the funny-money theories, the anti-Semitism, and Pound’s “old great aunt” who saw “damn all Europe” and even rode on a mule at Tangiers.
Pound also had a good deal in common with Mao Zedong: both were swimmers and poets who had been teachers; Mao too had an economic theory with which he expected to blow the roof off China, if not the world; both were in rebellion against what Pound, in his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” calls “a botched civilization.” According to the critic Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era, Pound, who was then in what he liked to call the bughouse (St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington), had high hopes for Mao’s poetry, seeing in it the true sensibility. Perhaps Mao gave him the same comfort Mussolini did when, as Pound reports in Kulchur, he “told his people that poetry is a necessity to the state.” Before long, however, Mao’s men were going after the Confucians with their bog hoes.
Confucius, in fact, was part of the tradition Mao had rebelled against as a young man. He wanted to make it new in a big Marxist-Leninist way, even if he had to transmogrify both Marx and Lenin in the process. Hence, like his fellow poet Pound, he staked all on an economic simplicity which it pleased him to promulgate in poetic terms (“Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” “The Great Leap Forward,” “The Grand Harmony”) that prosaic reality had a habit of contradicting. Perhaps Mao’s conviction that poetry and making it new politically were complementary helps to explain the popularity of his own guide to culture, his Little Red Book, among radical simplifiers in America in the 1960’s. But for Mao as for Pound, the flowers bloomed in unanticipated ways and the Great Leap Forward ended in a pratfall, from which one might conclude that if, as Shelley contended, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, we might all (including the poets themselves) be better off if they remain unacknowledged.
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It is not hard to see why Mao’s Little Red Book made him a charismatic figure for many anti-Americans, particularly during our own late cultural revolution. In it, the “running dogs” of capitalistic America are the source of all evil. The American novelist Henry Miller had earlier said pretty much the same thing as he gave lengthy expression to that deeply ingrained bias against the American enterprise which among literary people has so often substituted for anti-Semitism as an organizing simplicity. Miller loved Confucius as much as Thoreau and Pound did, but he would have sympathized with Mao’s rebellion against his Confucian establishment since it was a repetition of the rebellion against what Miller’s own establishment called civilization. As for the latter, he agreed with Pound that its condition was parlous, but he also believed, at least when he was writing one of his guides to culture, The Cosmological Eye, that people like Pound and Joyce were part of the problem. Pound, however, thought that the author of The Tropic of Cancer, unlike Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, was “sane and without kinks.”
Miller returning home by boat from Paris reports that “Suddenly I was back where I had started from—the same faces, the same voices, the same blatant stupidity.” This may tell us less about Americans than about the state of mind of the reporter, but Miller’s sense that he is again among people living lives of quiet and sometimes not so quiet desperation suggests that he must have enjoyed Walden (except for those kinky parts that extol sexual continence). He admitted the influence of Whitman and Emerson; indeed, he was himself something of a transcendentalist, if only of the orgasmic subvariety, and might have been very much at home at the famous Chardon Street Convention held in Boston in the fall of 1840. There, to judge from Emerson’s report in the Dial, he would have found
a great variety of dialect and costume . . . a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak . . . as well as zeal and enthusiasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers. . . . The most daring innovators and the champions-until-death of the old causes sat side by side.
The Convention was a grand coming-together of passionate simplifiers, among them William Lloyd Garrison, Bronson Alcott, Jones Very, Theodore Parker, Father Taylor (Melville’s Father Mapple in Moby Dick), and “that flea of Conventions,” Mrs. Abigail Folsom. All of them, Emerson observes (caught as so often between irony and enthusiasm), “were made up to obey the great inward Commander,” who had already made his imperial presence felt in such Emersonian manifestoes as “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address.”
There is no indication that the Perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes was at the Convention, however he might have been there in spirit. Noyes believed that, Christ’s second coming having occurred in 70 C.E., it was now possible to achieve a condition of utter sinlessness. When he announced in 1834 that he had achieved such a state he had to give up his position in the Yale theology department, which may have suspected that the simplicities of Perfectionism were more likely to end theology than enrich it. In 1846 Noyes established the Putney Corporation of Perfectionists in Vermont, where his innovation of complex marriage, otherwise known as free love, might have struck Henry Miller as a healthy breaking of the taboos of bourgeois marriage. (“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens,” Miller stated in his Paris Review interview.) After being arrested for adultery, the good new simplicities of complex marriage having collided with the old complexities of unregenerate bourgeois society, Noyes in 1848 established his famous Oneida Community whose economic innovations surely would have struck Pound as a move in the right direction—and one more demonstration that, as Pound says in Kulchur, “Economics is NOT a cold subject.”
There were times before the Civil War when all of New England appeared to be a Chardon Street Convention from which, as one inward Commander after another proved unable to resist the urgent dynamism of a beautiful simplicity, perfectionist and utopian enterprises went off in all directions. The soil was hospitable to a hundred flowers and more, but, as most of the enthusiastic cultivators discovered, a hundred flowers may resist staying together in a bouquet, and their bog hoes, however vigorously wielded, may not produce the irreversible great leaps forward that inward Commanders demand.
People like Thoreau and Emerson, however much they may have stimulated in others the bouquet-making and forward-leaping impulses, were interested in the flowering of individual blossoms; in fact, they could be as wary of the simplifications of bouquet-making and forward-leaping as they were of the simplicities of philanthropy. So was Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he was not the one to let his innate suspicion of group enthusiasm interfere with private advantage. He joined the Brook Farm commune, seeing it as a place where he could be sheltered and fed while getting some writing done. Founder George Ripley gave him, as his special chore, the management of the manure pile, a proper enough occupation for a writer who wanted to think through simplicities to the bottom of things. The experiment left Hawthorne thoroughly disillusioned with utopian reforms of all kinds, but it paid off later with his novel A Blithedale Romance, which is about the consequence of mistaking simplicities for profundities.
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By now, of course, it is apparent that Chardon Street is perennial in American civilization. What were the 1960’s and early 70’s if not a nationwide Chardon Street Convention of greatly leaping-for-ward innovators, many of them champions-unto-death of causes old and new? Some dreamed of a gathering together of gorgeously blooming flowers into a terminal bouquet, so that we would all be home free in a grand and harmonic simplicity; some, inspired by Thoreau, went alone or in rapturous groups to grow beans in the wilderness, or, no less inspired by him, defied the obscene aspirations of the running dogs of the capitalistic state and ended up as jailbirds; some, having like the Weatherpeople discovered the intoxicating power of virtue-laced violence, trashed about with very trenchant bog hoes; some, having read Noam Chomsky, Herbert Marcuse, and Mao, were moved to go off to Cuba and cut sugar cane for Castro, who turned out not to be as sympathetic to poets as Pound thought Mussolini was; some, following the prescription of Dr. Timothy Leary, learned that drugs were the quickest of all ways to leap forward into simplicity, while others, following the lead of Noyes and Henry Miller, went peak-experiencing at Esalen and Sandstone; some hooked themselves up to A-meters, tried primal screaming, or enrolled in an Erhard Seminars Training program; some took up transcendental meditation or became citizens of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s World Government for the Age of Enlightenment; an intrepid few banded together with that charismatic simplifier and exponent of complex marriage, Charles Manson, in an attempt to reduce the whole human-potential movement to black farce; gentler souls meanwhile ate natural food, read Confucius, voted for McGovern, and hoped for the best. Mutatis mutandis, Emerson’s report in the Dial still covers the lot of them.
Even now in the less spectacular 80’s the Chardon Street factor has been at work as usual, producing at one extreme the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s loving community in Antelope, Oregon (the deported Bhagwan now flies hither and yon about the world seeking sanctuary) and at the other extreme the three-day Aryan Nations neo-Nazi Congress at Hayden Lake, Idaho, in early July of this year (a whitening of America in response to Charles Reich’s almost forgotten greening). Frederick Crews, in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books (May 29, 1986), shows the same factor at work in the human sciences as they overreact against positivism—much as Chardon Street overreacted against the enlightenment rationalism from which in time would sprout the flower of positivism.
What strikes Crews is “a growing apriorism—a willingness to settle issues by theoretical decree, without even a pretense of evidential appeal.” This theoreticism, he contends, “is less a specific position than a mood of antinomian rebellion and self-indulgence.” Coming down to us from the late 60’s, it is “a revulsion against dry rationality, a cherishing of direct intuitive belief, and a willing surrender to intellectual, political, and spiritual counterauthorities.” Since at the heart of the problem is the human appetite for unquestioning belief, slogans get treated as facts while theoreticists present themselves as “a group of deep knowers” graced with an epistemic privilege that is a sure “antidote to chronic error.” One conspicuous consequence: “Sectarian zeal, which now appears stronger than ever in the academy, provides all the guidance required to tell which tenets should be discarded or updated to match the latest political wisdom.”
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This sounds like that great breeder of simplicities, gnosticism, which was one of the presiding spirits at Chardon Street. It also sounds a good deal like the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who even before he emigrated to America could sound as if his own inward Commander had bloodlines from Chardon. Like Pound, Reich was possessed by a grand simplicity, his theory of or-gone energy, which he claimed to be able to capture for marvelous therapeutic use in his orgone energy accumulator. (When he made the mistake of transporting it across state lines, he too became a jailbird.) Like Pound, Reich was protected from scoffing nonbelievers by an epistemic privilege: their attempts to rebut him were invalidated by the clear evidence that they suffered from the “emotional plague,” the disease he had diagnosed. If in the days before he came to America Reich had been able to persuade the Russians that Marxism and Freudianism were mutually reinforcing certainties, he might have put into their hands the means of turning the whole world into a Putney Corporation of Perfectionists.
Reich’s orgone energy accumulator might have been attractive to Noyes as a means of reinforcing the cosmic dimension of complex marriage. Henry Miller, the last man in the world to suffer from a deprivation of cosmic erotic energy, would have seen it as one more gadget in the “senseless machine we have made of America,” however sympathetic he might have been to Reich’s rebellion against the psychiatric establishment. When Mao wanted to reinforce his connections with sources of the Great Harmony he needed only to swim the Yangtze river, preferably with TV cameras in attendance. And Thoreau, who prided himself on needing no mechanical aids, got the same effect from fishing Walden Pond at midnight or, lying abed on an autumn morning, from hearing the loon “making the woods ring with his wild laughter.” Reich’s accumulator, assuming that it worked at all, would have been an obvious threat to Thoreau’s athletic chastity and therefore to his whole economy.
It is a matter of degree, of course; given our ineluctable epistemic limitations, we are all prone to simplicities and all tempted to wield our moral bog hoes lest, things failing to cohere, complexities demoralize us. If you are like Emerson you can with some equanimity contemplate the hundred divergently blooming flowers because you do not doubt the benevolent presence of a transcendental bouquet-making force with which your own inward Commander has hot-line connections. But for too many of us, the inward Commander, being a reductionist and perfectionist at heart, wants coherence now and settles for the clarifying simplicity and closure of a Grand Harmony.
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The conviction that to simplify is inevitably to clarify in the direction of truth helps to make a cult out of simplicity. So Thoreau, lover of paradox though he was, failed to see as he cultivated simplicity that those violaters of his Grand Harmony, the newspapers, the railroad, and the telegraph cable, were themselves attempts not to complicate life but to simplify it, and indeed became the means to further attempts at simplification. As the Marxist world is painfully learning, nothing is more likely to complicate life than an effort to simplify it with a grand theory. When this news gets through to some people they become laissez-faireists—whether in morals, economics, or politics—in the expectation that we will all be better off if we let some kind of hidden hand determine the warp and woof of our lives. Others, more skeptical (they are often closet anarchists or nihilists), come to suspect all theory as either a naive and falsifying reduction or a cowardly refusal to confront the Gorgon face of reality. But all these people are themselves theorists, and when theories are held without irony or charity they easily become tyrannizing grand simplicities.
As Chardon Street demonstrated, to be an American is to be free to theorize, but to be an American is also to run the risk of fellow theorizers who, finding the proliferation of theories to be an abomination, yearn for a simplicity that will end all theorizing in the grand coherence that Pound hoped (but often doubted) would be modeled on his Cantos. The Chardon Street factor helps to explain why for 19th-century European radicals like Filippo Buonarroti, American democracy was a travesty of their utopian expectations. As the historian James H. Billington observes in Fire in the Minds of Men, American democracy for Buonarroti and his kind “rejected the basic impulse of the ideological revolutionary tradition toward radical simplification.” Buonarroti, a Florentine and direct descendant of Michelangelo, would have agreed with Pound and Miller about the condition of Western civilization, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution would probably have struck him as the proper way to reduce the vision of a grand simplicity to irreversible fact. But the Chardon Street Convention could only have appalled him.
The utopian Buonarroti would have been no less appalled by Leszek Kolakowski’s recent Jefferson Lecture, “The Idolatry of Politics,” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kolakowski notes that the Enlightenment has accustomed us “to the belief that all the pillars on which hope for a good world rested—freedom, justice, equality, peace, brotherhood, prosperity, abundance—can be built jointly and simultaneously in a harmonious progression.” Efforts to realize this grand simplicity have been the occasion of endless charges and countercharges between optimistic progressives (whether liberals or socialists) on the one hand and the conservatives on the other. Conceding that there is some justice on both sides, Kolakowski concludes that “it is probably safer for us that progressives and conservatives coexist in unremitting conflict than that one of those irreconcilable mentalities should gain the definitive victory.”
Kolakowski might seem to imply a paradox: democracy, which began with the highest expectations about the freedom of the individual to theorize on all matters, must learn to lower its expectations if it wishes to survive. A better implication, however, may be that to survive, a democracy must learn to change its expectations as it lives with the fact that people quite normally interpret freedom to theorize as freedom to use all possible means to close the gap between theory and praxis—that they quite normally ask the question Thoreau asks in “Civil Disobedience”: “How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?”
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Fortunately, life itself often enough turns out to be a school in which reluctant pupils sometimes learn to modify theory and so make the gap easier to live with. Mao before he died had learned that the Marxist-Leninist theory was no more likely than his poetry to produce the Great Harmony, that it was only a simplicity after all—so that having been something of a modernist to begin with he went on to suffer the postmodernist’s discovery of illusion. In old age Henry Miller, according to his biographer Jay Martin, was unhappy with the hundred flowers of pornography that he had helped to cultivate and regretted that the young lacked reverence. Pound, back in Europe after his long sojourn in the bughouse, having learned, as he puts it in “Canto 117,” “That I lost my center/ fighting the world./ The dreams clash/ and are shattered—” would obviously have written a quite different Guide to Kulchur.
Pound writes in “Canto 116,” “If love be not in the house there is nothing.” Perhaps something like this is what Emerson had in mind when he wrote of Thoreau: “He needs to fall in love, to sweeten him and strengthen him.” Emerson’s kind of falling in love (his inward Commander being still a bit straightlaced) aspires to domesticity, the complications of which can teach one to regard the imperial simplicities with a cooler eye. It is pleasant to think that Hawthorne, very much in love with Sophia Peabody and anxious to become domestic with her, knew this ahead of time as he worked on his manure pile in that Brook Farm atmosphere of transcendental simplicities.
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