Why There Are No Great Soviet (or New Deal) Novels

In The Liberal Tradition (1950), the critic Lionel Trilling called attention to the “fatal separation” he saw between

the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination. . . . Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs, then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.

Trilling believed there was no great novel celebrating the New Deal, in the first instance, or, more broadly, the Welfare State or Mixed Economy or Keynesian Interventionism or “People’s Capitalism” (a term President Eisenhower tried to popularize) or Centralized Planning or, at the extreme, coercive socialism or Communism.

I think he is right. There are great anti-collectivist, anti-Communist novels, but no great pro ones. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) may be the closest thing to an exception. It argues in favor of both government intervention (when the hero, Tom Joad, learns that the U.S. government migrant labor camp he’s driven into has not only toilets, showers, and democratic elections, but dance nights, he cries out, “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t they more places like this?”) and self-sacrifice to build a better world for others (Tom responds to his mother’s worry that, if he works to organize the poor, she may never see him again:

Well, maybe . . . a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then . . . it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the house they build -- why I’ll be there.)

But novel-lovers--apparently even Steinbeck himself, who said he didn’t deserve his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature--would not rank Grapes of Wrath as the equal of, say, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August.

One way to understand why there are no great communist/communitarian novels is to look at what I take to be the central paradox of the American character: Americans’ ideas about people as social beings come from the Enlightenment; Americans’ ideas about people as individuals come from our conservative (read: Calvinist/Counterreformation Catholic) religious heritage, from the Romantics, and from Sigmund Freud.

In our public lives we believe in reason, pragmatism, science, equality based on natural rights and the rule of law, soft-edged utilitarianism, co-operation, democracy, quantification, and, certainly not least, a free market where cream rises to the top. At the same time, we believe that the private self is radically unknowable, rich, perverse (“Every inclination of the human heart is evil” -- Genesis 8:21), self-indulgent, spontaneous, emotion-driven ("In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives" -- Freud), tortured, alienated from others and dismissive of them.

There are no great collectivist or socialist or Soviet novels because the novel is a Romantic art form. Novels focus on individual experience. In a novel, nothing is more important than personal life and relationships -- certainly not such vague, utilitarian things as the welfare of the state or Other People. It was, after all, a novelist (E.M. Forster, a favorite of Trilling’s) who wrote that splendid-sounding, stupid credo, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (But, Mr. Forster, say your friend was going to blow up an airplane or Parliament or pass an A-bomb to al-Qaeda, surely you’d do something.) It is inconceivable that a good novel could end with an admirable hero sincerely announcing to his beloved or a crowd, “I can’t tell you how great it is to be alive in a caring welfare state where I know I’ll never want for food, shelter, and decent medical care.”

Trilling wanted a great New Deal novel, which, like a square circle, can’t exist. If one wants to see the Enlightenment triumphant in great art, one must look to other arts. To music, for example, and not only to composers of the Enlightenment like Haydn and Mozart but to the Beethoven of the Eroica, the Tchaikovsky of The 1812 Overture, practically all of Prokofiev, some Shostakovich, and, of course, John Philip Sousa. The New Deal can claim at least one great composer: the Aaron Copland of El salón México, Billy the Kid, An Outdoor Overture, Our Town, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, The Red Pony. (Copland knew he wasn’t a Romantic. “Agony I don't connect with,” he said. “Not even alienation.”)

The contemporary German novelist and sometime politician Günter Grass understands the different requirements of Enlightenment politics and Romantic art. He has said, “What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both.”

A Visit to San Alberto Hurtado

Today, Saturday June 23, 2007, Irene and I made the cross-city trek to visit the tomb of Chile's 20th-century saint, the Jesuit Padre Hurtado. His caring for the street kids of Santiago grew into Chile's largest charity, el Hogar de Cristo (Christ's Home), and left behind a motto now found on bumper stickers, "Contento, Señor, contento." He also left behind a more challenging observation: "It's good not to harm anybody. It's bad to do nobody good."

In the chapel beside his tomb, looking at the cross, I thought that maybe the reason why I've never been drawn to Jesus (to Christ? I'm so uninstructed that I don't know which is correct) is that I see no reason why we humans should think his suffering special. Thousands of people were crucified before him; thousands after. Presumably his life was no worse than the lives millions of others have lived and will live.

This made me think that maybe in thinking about him I--to speak for no one else--think about my own suffering, which is to say my life, and realize not so much that my suffering has been small but rather that I've made little of value from it.

Christ thus becomes my mocker, not my brother. If he finds something of value in me, it's because his standards are low.

Anthem of 1950s America

It was common for educated liberal Americans in the 1950s to feel, as the novelist John Cheever wrote in 1959, that we were living in hell. The tragedy of life was then as much talked about as multiculturalism is today. The "tragic vision" was smuggled aboard in the New Critical ideology we learned in our college English classes. This vision fed upon the Cold War and on what we'd learned of human depravity in World War II and Korea. The vision emphasized our profound limits: said we couldn't expect to improve life much -- would fail to overcome our own failings, to say nothing of society's. All we could do was stoically keep muddling on, as we had in the war, pushing toward small, nearby, mainly private goals. At times we almost felt we were living a “long day’s journey into night,” which Eugene O’Neill play burst on the scene in 1956 and won all the prizes.

This narrow view of human possibility was set to music by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur in their failed 1956 comic operetta, Candide. At the end of the show, Candide -- having been many times seduced, swindled, and murdered -- turns up in Westphalia, where he began, and finds Cunegonde, the woman he's always loved, who herself has been raped and killed again and again. Her optimism absurdly undiminished, Cunegonde says now they can start over and make a life as harmonious and noble as their "master," the tutor Pangloss, promised them. Candide interrupts:

No, we won't "think noble," because we're not noble. We won't live in beautiful harmony, because there's no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best, and live out our lives. Dear God! that's all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.

And he sings the anthem of the fifties as I knew the decade:

You’ve been a fool, and so have I
But come and be my wife.
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow,
And make our garden grow.

Cunegonde immediately sees the wisdom of this new vision of life; she sings:

I thought the world was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But now I’ll teach my hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

The whole chorus takes up the song, their sound so big the words blur and you have to get them from the script:

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please,
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

And now the chorus overwhelms the orchestra, goes a cappella in multipart harmony for a Messiah-like climax that shakes the stage and phonograph speaker:

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow!
And make our garden grow!

In the original cast recording, you can hear a woman’s voice -- Barbara Cook’s as Cunegonde, I assume -- enter a split second early on the final “And.” I like thinking that much that was positive in my youth is symbolized by Miss Cook’s impulsiveness and energy too great to be contained.

Abortion and Capital Punishment

This article will offend some readers. If you find you are offended, please stop reading it and try another article.

As you may have found from reading other articles on this website, I believe feelings have an enormous influence on what many people--not all--think about this or that issue. Such people (I am one) find it tiresome or difficult to make much of abstract ideas; instead, their emotions get caught up by concrete instances that “illustrate” an abstraction. These people arrive at many of their opinions, then, via an epiphany, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines as “an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking.”

Take me and abortion. Abortion was illegal and totally disreputable in my youth (I was born in 1940). Countless tears and shotgun marriages and two great American novels--An American Tragedy (1925) and The End of the Road (1958)--turned on this fact. In the late 1960s, my former college roommate the late Joe Chubb got a small celebrity on New York nighttime radio by espousing far-out opinions, among them abortion on demand.

I thought Joe was nuts. I thought abortion--I still think it--a clumsy and cruel way to practice birth control, though I knew it was the method postwar Japan had used to keep its population from growing beyond what its landmass could support. Abortion sickened me morally and physically; like many males, I was squeamish about blood and the body’s liquids.

Then in 1971, my sister Missy’s five-year-old daughter, Julie Woods, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, fanconi anemia, in which, like leukemia, the marrow fails to produce sufficient red blood cells. Julie underwent many transfusions and spinal taps. My father wept telling me about the little girl’s courage. “She’ll do anything Missy says she has to,” he said. “She just holds out her arms to be picked up.”

The doctors said Julie would probably live until puberty, and by that time science might have a solution, because real progress was being made against leukemia. My father took early retirement, and my parents moved from the New York suburbs to Vermont to be near Missy and her family.

Julie died three months later. My sister and brother-in-law, Woody, were in shock. So was their older child, a seven-year-old boy. My mother tried to act as though nothing had happened. My father drank and raged. Because there would always be a 50 percent chance that their offspring would inherit the anemia, Missy and Woody started adoption procedures.

Several months later, though she was on the IUD, my sister got pregnant. By this time, a year before Roe-vs.-Wade, Vermont had laws to permit abortion when there was a likelihood the fetus was damaged. Missy decided to have an abortion and told my parents after a Sunday lunch. My father fainted. My sister had the abortion.

Having seen what Julie’s suffering and death did to my family, I realized I would have done a lot, certainly broken the law, to get Missy that abortion. If I wanted my sister to have an abortion when she needed one, I realized also that I had to allow other women that choice. If a woman’s reasons for aborting weren’t as good as my sister’s, well, they were good enough for the woman. Who was I to say that her suffering was less than Missy’s?

Thus I came to accept abortion because of an emotion-charged event; I had an epiphany. The Pope or Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia can say abortion is always wrong, goes against God’s law, etc., etc., and I will answer by pointing to a specific instance where I know it was right.

(Later reflection. "If we could get this issue away from the abortion professionals and their orthodoxies, we could reach a sensible solution," the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on April 22, 2007. "Abortion would be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward." I would accept this with the proviso, which I image Brooks would agree to, that pregnant girls who feared to inform their parents could seek a judge's authorization to have an abortion.)

•

I am less sure how I feel about capital punishment. Innocent people can be judged guilty and executed, and that is terribly wrong. Further, those whom the state seeks to put to death are, in huge disproportion, the poor, especially poor African-Americans. This is wrong too.

But . . . another epiphany. In the aftermath of the movie Dead Man Walking (1995), PBS’s Frontline series did a program on Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who counsels Louisiana death row inmates and who wrote the autobiography on which the film was based. Sister Helen was shown being feted by those who agree with her anti-capital punishment position and applaud the fact that she and the movie have made such punishment a matter of national debate.

Frontline showed several scenes of a scared white man on death row for the rape and murder of a young woman. Evenhandedly, the program also showed two small scenes of the woman’s parents, who want the condemned man executed. The wife of the couple said of him something like, “His life isn’t much, but he gets to see his family and celebrate Christmas. I don’t see why he should. We will never see or speak with our daughter again.”

To me, that seems an unanswerable argument. If that man, being of sound mind, raped and killed that woman, he should die. Sister Helen argues that to kill him is wrong because it implies that he isn’t human and that it isn’t fair to judge him by the worst thing he did. I agree he is human but think there are some acts so bad that there is no forgiveness for them except from God.

Though human, he, by his act, has cut himself off from the human community. Humanity, acting through the impersonal instrument of the state, may choose to make his estrangement permanent--to say, in effect: “When you murdered, you forfeited the right to live among us. We the people of this state have therefore decided to cast you out.”

William Graham Sumner

One of the most influential of all Yalies lived exactly 100 hundred years before me: William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). He belonged to the half century-plus of American academics who asserted the importance of what they did by using all three of their names. Charles William Eliot, William Lyon Phelps, George Herbert Mead, G. Stanley Hall, Henry Seidel Canby: it’s gravy on the tongue. These men -- and with few exceptions (M. Carey Thomas, for instance) they were men -- were fighting to establish the seriousness of the American research university against the acknowledged leadership of the German universities.

Sumner taught social economy at Yale for 37 years, but he wasn’t a researcher in our terms: he was a propagandist, the Johnny Appleseed of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism. His belief was that society is best served when the strong crush the weak. He adamantly opposed aid to the poor. He was also an Episcopal minister. He saw no contradiction.

His 1881 essay “Sociology” has this marvelous sentence:

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

In other words, you can’t change society and, if you try to do so, you make it worse.

His belief, and the illogic on which it is based, still poison American public-policy thinking.

Why There Are No Great Soviet (or New Deal) Novels

In The Liberal Tradition (1950), the critic Lionel Trilling called attention to the “fatal separation” he saw between

the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination. . . . Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs, then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.

Trilling believed there was no great novel celebrating the New Deal, in the first instance, or, more broadly, the Welfare State or Mixed Economy or Keynesian Interventionism or “People’s Capitalism” (a term President Eisenhower tried to popularize) or Centralized Planning or, at the extreme, coercive socialism or Communism.

I think he is right. There are great anti-collectivist, anti-Communist novels, but no great pro ones. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) may be the closest thing to an exception. It argues in favor of both government intervention (when the hero, Tom Joad, learns that the U.S. government migrant labor camp he’s driven into has not only toilets, showers, and democratic elections, but dance nights, he cries out, “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t they more places like this?”) and self-sacrifice to build a better world for others (Tom responds to his mother’s worry that, if he works to organize the poor, she may never see him again:

Well, maybe . . . a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then . . . it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the house they build -- why I’ll be there.)

But novel-lovers--apparently even Steinbeck himself, who said he didn’t deserve his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature--would not rank Grapes of Wrath as the equal of, say, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August.

One way to understand why there are no great communist/communitarian novels is to look at what I take to be the central paradox of the American character: Americans’ ideas about people as social beings come from the Enlightenment; Americans’ ideas about people as individuals come from our conservative (read: Calvinist/Counterreformation Catholic) religious heritage, from the Romantics, and from Sigmund Freud.

In our public lives we believe in reason, pragmatism, science, equality based on natural rights and the rule of law, soft-edged utilitarianism, co-operation, democracy, quantification, and, certainly not least, a free market where cream rises to the top. At the same time, we believe that the private self is radically unknowable, rich, perverse (“Every inclination of the human heart is evil” -- Genesis 8:21), self-indulgent, spontaneous, emotion-driven ("In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives" -- Freud), tortured, alienated from others and dismissive of them.

There are no great collectivist or socialist or Soviet novels because the novel is a Romantic art form. Novels focus on individual experience. In a novel, nothing is more important than personal life and relationships -- certainly not such vague, utilitarian things as the welfare of the state or Other People. It was, after all, a novelist (E.M. Forster, a favorite of Trilling’s) who wrote that splendid-sounding, stupid credo, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (But, Mr. Forster, say your friend was going to blow up an airplane or Parliament or pass an A-bomb to al-Qaeda, surely you’d do something.) It is inconceivable that a good novel could end with an admirable hero sincerely announcing to his beloved or a crowd, “I can’t tell you how great it is to be alive in a caring welfare state where I know I’ll never want for food, shelter, and decent medical care.”

Trilling wanted a great New Deal novel, which, like a square circle, can’t exist. If one wants to see the Enlightenment triumphant in great art, one must look to other arts. To music, for example, and not only to composers of the Enlightenment like Haydn and Mozart but to the Beethoven of the Eroica, the Tchaikovsky of The 1812 Overture, practically all of Prokofiev, some Shostakovich, and, of course, John Philip Sousa. The New Deal can claim at least one great composer: the Aaron Copland of El salón México, Billy the Kid, An Outdoor Overture, Our Town, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, The Red Pony. (Copland knew he wasn’t a Romantic. “Agony I don't connect with,” he said. “Not even alienation.”)

The contemporary German novelist and sometime politician Günter Grass understands the different requirements of Enlightenment politics and Romantic art. He has said, “What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both.”

Heaven

Before the Last Judgment, Muslims believe the dead will wander the streets of Jerusalem, greeting one another.

This belief interests me because I imagine heaven as a polyglot Moorish city not unlike Old Jerusalem but by a warm sea: Casablanca in the movie, only sunnier. And I see myself in conversation with those I love under vined trellises in cafes serving crudités, hummus, Tex-Mex, and every liquor of human invention.

∞

Is it worth speculating that heaven may be, for each of us, as we imagine it? Catholics who want none but Catholics there will find none but them -- and no dogs or cats, since the church says creatures without souls can’t get in. Fervent Muslims will find none but Muslims; animal lovers will find every species and breed they care to. Those who want heaven with no bad people will enjoy ample parking and a few weird companions. The heretic nun -- later a saint, I think -- who said she would not go to heaven so long as one soul remained in hell will get her wish, as will those who want no heaven, though surely they will be given glimpses of other people’s heavens and have the chance to change their minds.

Heaven will be full of changes -- or my heaven will. I imagine heaven as calm and safe, yet always different and thus refreshing. (Hell, I assume, is chaos, anxiety, and always the same. Hell is so much like earthly life that it should be easier to believe in than heaven, but I don’t. In this I am typically American; according to polls, eight of ten Americans believe in heaven, two of ten in hell.)

Our chief work in my heaven will be self-education, and the chief means of this education will be observation -- of what is “past, passing, or to come” (Yeats’ words) -- and conversation. One’s first conversations will be, I speculate, with one’s family, including ancestors, and one’s friends; then with past celebrities -- Homer, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed; Plato, Rumi, Shakespeare, Mozart, Spinoza, Lincoln; then with plain people, old and new. And not only people -- one will be able to chat with things: dogs and vegetables, even atoms.

There will be evening classes taught by Keynes, Einstein, Dickinson, Darwin, Goethe, DaVinci, Paul, Aristotle, translated into whatever language the listener prefers. And, of course, art everywhere. Because heaven can be any place and have the virtues of any place else, my beachy city will include London theater, with Shakespeare’s plays in every production from the Globe onward, and amateur theater in bars, lofts, squares, and schools.

The art won’t only be repetitions from life; much will be new. Beethoven will hear his late quartets for the first time and compose others if he wants to. John Keats and Sylvia Plath can write the poems that life denied them. Isadora Duncan, Aeschylus, and Brahms may attempt a collaboration. Hitler will exhibit his miserable paintings. The universe’s entire natural and human history will be on view in small, dusty museums, oases from the mid-day sun, for a few visitors wearing sandals.

Will we work in heaven? In my heaven, yes. And not only at art and sports. How else will the sidewalk cafes and museums run? And the interpreter services and public transit (I look forward to driving a London bus)? Our big work will be learning to live with ourselves and preparing to meet God, if God chooses to meet us. But we may also get involved with life on earth. As a boy I thought people went to heaven during sleep to rehearse their thoughts, acts, and words for the coming day -- which is why we experience déjà-vu. In addition to prepping the living, people in heaven may sometimes help them innovate. Religious folk aren’t the only ones to believe their inspiration comes from outside themselves; many artists and scientists believe this, too. In fact, it may take a large dose of heavenly attention to keep the world going. Who, for example, oversees everything that happens randomly (which is basically everything)? It may be heaven’s apprentice angels.

My heaven will change as my interests change. I will move from that white city by the sea to other parts of the world -- of the universe, in fact, since heaven will be enormously bigger than everything mankind knows. We will be able to live in all places and all (past?) times.

It is important to understand that my heaven isn’t finished and set in stone. It will take eons building, may never be done. Like the heretical nun, I believe that everybody and everything will have to be brought into heaven, reconciled to it, for it to be heaven. And brought in without coercion -- this is heaven, after all. Those who love evil will have to be won over by love, reason, and experience, perhaps in subsequent lives.

Even in heaven, God will be hidden, though we will be able to go back in time to witness occasions when God is said to have appeared. But whether or not we get to see God, having made ourselves ready for this ultimate encounter, each of us will be ready for whatever comes after heaven.

My hunch is that there is eventually a time when individuals decide, like the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, that they are weary of their consciousness and want to give it up. Such people elect either to go into the void of not-being or to return to life, to earth or earth’s approximation, and be reborn into new bodies with only the faintest recollection, if any, of their former selves. If they choose to -- and I suspect many would -- they may come back to life at a lower level of consciousness, as a bird, say, beach grasses, or a tree or stone.

∞

I have had one glimpse of heaven, in a dream that’s occurred several times. It is twilight in a North African city, and I’m on a crowded street, people bobbing by. At the end of the street, deepening sky behind it, is a brown tower. I don’t know where to go and take an uncertain step or two when a man in front of me stops and turns around. He is wearing a business suit, and in one dream is my uncle George, whose death in 1962 first made total death, someone’s extinction, real and hideous to me. He walks towards me and for an instant I am frightened. Then I hear his hearty voice: “Hello! So you’re here!”

In another dream the man greeting me is Jack Fischer, a family friend and extra father who died in 1978. The long-time editor of Harper’s Magazine, Jack, I realize, will tell me the latest political news, where to swim and play tennis, and the best local beer.

Since the death of Cory Dennis, my son’s best friend, in 1984, when both boys were ten, I have come to think that the person greeting me may be Cory, still a boy, his chubby face out of place in his dark burnoose. “Mr. Stott,” his voice quavers because he is still shy addressing an adult, even a newcomer. “Mr. Stott.”

“Cory!” I say, and I jump forward to hug him. I am comforted by how substantial he feels in the thick garment.

Now I have my hands on his shoulders, trying to catch his shifting eyes. “Cory, are you here to welcome me?”

He looks up with a mischievous grin and nods. “I was chosen,” he says.

“I’m so glad! Now I won’t be frightened.”

“Oh, no-o-o,” he says, making the last word linger in the air, as was his wont. “This is home.”

"This I Believe": Meaning-Making Creatures

I loved This I Believe as a teenager, and I love it now as a retiree. Man and boy, I’ve loved it for the same reason: the series suggests different ways you or I or any of us can look at life. I find myself half persuaded, momentarily persuaded, by almost everything everyone believes.

I think what I love is hearing people do well what it is our unique—so far as we know—human gift to do: make spoken sense of the world. This is what I believe: we are meaning-making creatures, and the world, whatever it is in itself, for an instant becomes what we, with our need for meaning, make it. This is, I see now, a paraphrase what the poet Wallace Stevens wrote in many poems, most obviously "The Idea of Order at Key West." Stevens took the idea from Pragmatists like William James, who adapted it from Romantic philosophers like Kant and Emerson, who were influenced by Nominalists like William of Ockham and Buddha.

Which is fine! Great! What I believe has a pedigree.

If we humans make meaning, does this mean there is no God determining What’s Really True? Who knows? We can’t know. All I know is that, as far as I know, here on earth we are the meaning makers, and the strongest meaning makers among us—people like Plato, Aristotle, Ecclesiastes, Jesus, Mohammed, Dante, Torquemada, Shakespeare, or closer to today, Marx, Darwin, Dickinson, Whitman, Freud, Einstein, Kafka, Hemingway, Hitler, Roosevelt, B.F. Skinner (the initials stand for “Bloody Fool,” detractors said)—create the worlds in which millions of us, across time, have lived, however long or briefly.

But it’s not only to past people that we look for meaning. We are always on the lookout for help in understanding life. We look for help in the movies and TIME cover stories and pop music and TV ads and the comments of Jay Leno. Walter Cronkite said “And that’s the way it is” when he closed his news show every night, and for a split second we believed him.

The Spanish say “sobre gustos, no hay nada escrito”: on matters of taste, there is nothing written. In fact, I think that’s the way life is: because there can never be enough written to explain what we experience, it’s as though nothing is written, and the world is still, and always, waiting for us, each of us, to interpret and resee it, express our vision of it and try to persuade others to share our vision.

I believe this is the greatest and most exciting challenge we face: to find the courage to tell the truth about the world as we, each of us, see it. But with this challenge comes a warning: not to believe in our truth so much that we try to compel others to accept it. We can exuberantly proselytize for our truth—as every This I Believe speaker does, as I’ve done here—but our listeners must always feel free to turn us off.