Baboons and Monkeys

As a lover of all non-human primates (gorillas especially), I'm never pleased to see them used colloquially to stand for human misbehavior or stupidity--as in "stop monkeying around," or, "you've got the table manners of a chimpanzee," or "you big dumb ape!" It seems to me bad enough that we've managed to drive the majority of our closest genetic cousins to the brink of extinction without suggesting that they, who never did anything nearly as bad to us, must somehow be held responsible for our sins.

But I've been reading a lot of Thoreau and Emerson lately (all in the context of a class I'm teaching), and I have to admit, both of them get a lot of mileage out of simian analogies. Here's Thoreau, in Walden (1854):

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.

And here's Emerson, in his 1851 address on the Fugitive Slave Law:

I thought it was this fair mystery, whose foundations are hidden in eternity, that made the basis of human society, and of law; and that to pretend any thing else, as, that the acquisition of property was the end of living, was to confound all distinctions, to make the world a greasy hotel, and, instead of noble motives and inspirations, and a heaven of companions and angels around and before us, to leave us in a grimacing menagerie of monkeys and idiots.

I resort to sentiments such as these when I hear people blather on about extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and leasing national parks to oil companies, and drilling in the Marcellus Shale, and building more strip malls, and leaving uninsured children to the mercy of the streets, and dropping more bombs on Afghanistan, and buying more handheld technogadgets, and refusing to tax carbon because China refuses to do it, and lifting regulations on Wall Street, and buying bottled water, and polluting the water that's left, and lots of other things besides. I find comfort in the thought that some people, past and present, knew the true purpose of life, and refused to allow anyone to tell them otherwise.

And I find even greater comfort in the thought that baboons and monkeys have known this all along, and never needed to be convinced.

Realism and Romance; Or, Politics and Principles

Back in college, I remember hanging out one night shooting the breeze with my hallmates. This was early freshman year, when I didn't know people that well. I remember one guy stopped me in mid-sentence, fixed me in the eye, and said, "You know, you're a romantic." I can't remember what precisely I'd been talking about that elicited his remark; probably I was saying something about how I had faith in the essential goodness of humanity or rightness of the universe. But whatever it was, I remember being taken aback; it seemed to me he'd said the word "romantic" as if it were some sort of crippling inadequacy. I never got to like the guy; in fact, I took out my anger by turning him into the lamest, most pathetic character in the comic book I drew for those on the hall who became my friends. I turned him into a lazy dreamer, a romantic. Take that!

But the fact is, he was right. I am a romantic. Always have been. If, that is, one defines the word "romantic" the way it was defined by the nineteenth-century Romantic movement in the arts: as the tendency toward the ideal, the deeper truth, the imaginative, the possible, over against the tendency toward the literal, the everyday, the rational, the "realistic." Hawthorne, for example, called his works "romances," not novels: to him, novels were about consensus reality, and as such were limited by what actually was, whereas romances were about the transcendent, the mystical, the might be, and thus were free to shape themselves according to the limitless range of human creativity. As Robert F. Kennedy put it, "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” The former folks are realists. Kennedy was a romantic.

I wish we had more romantics, and fewer realists, in politics today. Lots of people saw Obama as a romantic, and voted for him as a result; turns out he's just another realist, and not even a very effective one at that. The Democrats, as I've pointed out in several earlier posts, are all a bunch of failed realists; you might even say they're failed because they're realists, because they can't imagine what it would be like to imagine. They're game-players, bureaucrats, horse-traders; there's not an ounce of romanticism in the lot of them. If there were, we'd have universal health care. We'd be out of Iraq and on our way out of Afghanistan. We'd have climate legislation. We'd have a government worthy of our respect, and a future worth dreaming about.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was another great romantic. The philosophy he more or less founded, Transcendentalism, was an idealist one--meaning, in the narrow sense, that it hearkened back to the Platonic philosophy of ideal forms, or in the broader sense, that it was founded on a faith in the power of ideas, or ideals. In his essay "Man the Reformer," from 1841, Emerson wrote: "The believer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to begin to exist,--not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by men transfigured and raised above themselves by the power of principles. To principles something else is possible that transcends all the power of expedients." Emerson was notably skittish about involvement in politics; he frequently sounds elitist, out of touch, or frankly aloof when he discusses his reluctance to mingle with the madding mob. But he did speak out against Indian Removal and African slavery, two of the greatest sins of his day. He did rally his fellows to live their lives according to what might be, what should be, not merely what was. He did, in the best romantic fashion, imagine his heaven into existence--here, now--without waiting to see if he had enough votes to override a filibuster or enough pork to toss to the Blue Dogs.

We could use some of his romanticism today.