Twain

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself..."

"Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."

Twain at the ballgame

Mr. Clemens (Sam, not Roger) was a big score-keeping baseball fan? I had no idea!

...at a Manhattan banquet for Albert Spalding’s round-the-world touring players [he toasted]“the boys who plowed a new equator round the globe stealing bases on their bellies!” Twain then delivered a tribute to baseball as “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!”

That night, by all accounts, he was at the peak of his game. One appreciative reporter wrote that Twain played his position “without an error” and understood baseball “from A to Z.”

Had he been so inclined, Twain might have explained that his knowledge of the nation’s game derived from years of close, pleasurable scrutiny, and that it had enriched his leisure hours while influencing his imagination.

Exactly.

Vonnegut family values

Noticed an Indiana license plate the other day, inscribed "In God We Trust," and was reminded of the deep conservative strain in many of the Hoosiers I have known. Most of them are stand-up human beings who'd give you the shirts off their backs, etc., but there does seem to be something very traditional about that neck of the heartland that imprints itself ineradicably on its natives. The land of Quayle's coded "family values" seems no seed-ground for free thinkers. (It did spawn some public-spirited libertarians dedicated to spending, lavishly and liberally, the interest of Pierre Goodrich's fortune... I enjoyed my Stoic weekend in Indy two years ago. That's another story.)

But then I recall that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was from Indianapolis. Hi-ho!

So it's not quite as big a surprise, on further reflection, to discover a "magnificent victory monument for a rational outlook on life." The man who said "love may fail, but politeness will prevail" did not spring up from a vacuum.

His great-grandpa was Clemens Vonnegut.*

Perfect! Love may fail, but irony will also prevail.

==

*"We believe all that science teaches until it is superseded by new discoveries and knowledge...Our belief is built on reason, observation of nature, history and experience. We believe in the brotherhood of man...We believe in virtue, in perfectibility, in progress, in stability of laws of nature, in the necessity of improving the social condition and relations." Clemens Vonnegut (1890)

Carnegie

I've been enjoying David Nasaw's biography of Andrew Carnegie, who turns out to be a much more sympathetic figure than I'd imagined. He was no Calvinist ascetic, crediting neither divine providence nor personal brilliance for his astounding success. Wealth comes from the community, he thought; the wealthy are its trustees, obliged to give back and do good. And and so he established the precedent lately followed by Gates and Buffett of returning a substantial portion of his personal wealth to the nation whence it sprang. Carnegie libraries all across the country remain the most visible symbol of his largesse.

But he was also a social Darwinist and devotee of Herbert Spencer, and was consequently (and inconsistently) much too smugly confident of the "superior wisdom, experience, and ability" of those "self-made men" who scratch and claw their way to wealth. Credit some of them with superior tenacity but don't understate their superior good fortune.

So he was not humbled by his success, but felt validated by it as a selectee of impersonal social-evolutionary forces. He thought it better that some live in opulent splendor, surrounded by the trappings of civilized culture, than that none should, for this (he claimed) would somehow advance the evolution of humanity. And (though he espoused the virtue of material modesty) he thought himself entitled to partake lavishly of the "good life" that money can buy.

"All is well because all grows better," his slogan, is beyond optimism. Taken literally it becomes a Leibnizian rationalization for everything, including one's own fabulous good fortune. Yet he was no idle defender of the imperialist status quo in foreign policy, turning himself in retirement aggressively towards peacemaking. He opposed Teddy Roosevelt's adventures in Panama and the Phillipines, for instance.

My overall impression of Carnegie, though, as portrayed by Nasaw, is of a humane and generous (albeit egotistical) man, capable of ruthlessness in business but also of great personal loyalty and a real feeling for human beings, whom it would have been a pleasure to know. I wouldn't want to have worked for him. But, tellingly, Mark Twain was a friend (Carnegie sent Scotch, on request). Booker T. Washington was another. A former aid described him as one of the consistently-happiest men he ever knew.

The study of Carnegie's mansion on 91st Street across from Central Park, where he spent the last years of his life giving away much of his fortune, is modest and warm. A visitor had some interesting observations.

Carnegie used to spill out of his study and manse (now the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) and stroll around the Central Park reservoir a time or two on afternoons, perfectly open and accessible. That's another winning detail, to me. The reservoir loop was my last walk in Manhattan, summer-before-last. He'd have been a fun walking companion.

"This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial result for the community-the man of wealth thus becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer-doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves." Gospel of Wealth

Patronizing, self-aggrandizing, irritating, hypocritcal: sure. People who own castles in Scotland can hardly proclaim their modest lack of ostentation. But if somebody has to be filthy-rich, it's too bad more of them can't be more like him. As patrons go, you could do worse.

Inspired

Speaking of "faithheads"...

(That term, by the way, popularized by Richard Dawkins, is more derogatory and incendiary than I'm generally comfortable with. But sometimes the company one must keep, here in the buckle of the Bible Belt, just makes it bubble up, benign intentions and tolerant impulses notwithstading. Sorry. But I'm leaving it in.)

A religious zealot and publisher in Murfreesboro, Tennessee named Shelton Smith comes in today for what strikes this free-thinker as a fawning and uncritical feature story in the Nashville Tennessean about his "embrace of old-time religion." That's not terribly unusual around these parts, unfortunately.

Smith, an "Independent Baptist," publishes Sword of the Lord. He is committed to halting "spiritual drift" and spreading the Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, the Deity of Christ, His Blood Atonement, Salvation by Faith, New Testament Soul Winning and the Premillennial Return of Christ; Opposing Modernism, Worldliness and Formalism."

Smith contends that only the 1872 King James Bible is inspired. All else is imposture and fraud.

So, inspiration happened once in all of recorded human history? It simply falls to you and me to salute and genuflect and defer and shut up?

Socrates and Emerson (and Twain and Nietzsche) had a lot to say about that benighted suggestion. Why are you and I here at all, if not to enjoy "an original relation to the universe" and so on? But Smith says simply: "There's what I think, and then there is what the Bible says. I'd rather go with what the Bible says."

I'd rather think about it myself, thanks all the same. I'd rather honor the inspiration that offers itself afresh every day, beginning with the sunrise, to me and you and possibly even to Shelton Smith, though I doubt he'd notice.

But what really galls about this story is the gratuitous insult to baseball fans the Tennessean reporter hurls with its first sentences: "Being a Christian is a lot like playing baseball. Get the fundamentals wrong, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket."

"Faithheads" is too kind.

Be Good for Heaven's Sake?

Nearly half of Americans surveyed in a recent Pew study, Charles Blow reports, said that "atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go." They thought "you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person," no specific faith-based dogmas required.

Wow. I'm guessing respondents from my region were not proportionately represented in this survey, but still... I won't kick and scream, as long as the door to heaven opens both ways. I'd love to go and investigate Mark Twain's observation that hell must be lots more fun.

Is this a testament to the tolerant pluralism of average believing Americans? Or just another way of misrepresenting the moral life and making goodness instrumental to the gain of eternal reward? No. Be good for goodness' sake.

The Mormons

"It’s great to hear people who believe in something and can articulate it without sounding crazy or defensive," fawned the Times reviewer of the new PBS documentary on Mormonism. Sorry, but if it's not crazy to affirm young Joseph Smith's hallucinations (he was just 21) as revealed truth then what is?

After last night's first installment (the conclusion airs tonight) I came away shaking my head in renewed astonishment, that so many sober and serious-sounding people could believe something so preposterous. If people will believe that, what won't they believe? It does not bode well for the democratic prospect. I remembered Mark Twain's sarcasm in Roughing It:

"Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything, but for me when a man tells me that he has seen the engravings which are upon the plates and not only that, but an angel was there at the time and saw them see him and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction no matter whether I have ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel or his nationality either."

(The angel's name was Moroni, by the way.)

Then I remembered Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God," which begins by recounting a visit from a pair of eager young Mormon missionaries whose tale was so absurd that she started rethinking her own "mainstream" (Roman Catholic) credulities -- and realized that Virgin Births, trans-substantiation, redemptive crucifixion et al aren't so different, the stories have just been around longer.

My instinct in religion is to be tolerant even when I can't be open to the alleged revelation, but I'm coming around to the Dawkins-Harris hardline that we need to stop giving a free pass to incredible superstition and calling it, respectfully, religion when what it is is nonsense. (On this topic, watch for a future post on E.O. Wilson's recent overtures to Southern Baptists.)

For a refreshing perspective on the "latter-day Saints" take a look at www.postMormon.org. Unless you've already drunk the Kool-Aid yourself, you'll feel better about your species.

Addendum. Just watched part II, which on the whole took a more critically-independent stance and (for instance) acknowledged that Mormon "niceness" can mask a kind of spiritual violence. The spectacle of very young children being indoctrinated into the faith, singing about wanting to become missionaries and so forth, emphatically makes Dawkins' point that this is a form of child abuse. They are not "Mormon children" -- they are children of Mormon parents whose birthright to think for themselves has been unconscionably violated.

But, for the record: I too have found Mormons (and other religionists) to be good neighbors.

Vonnegut

"With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor..." (New York Times, 4.12.07)

Just as I prefer literary existentialism to the philosophical kind, the passing this week of Kurt Vonnegut reminds me that my disdain for philosophic pessimism does not extend to the sensibility behind "Slaughterhouse Five," "Breakfasts of Champions," "Cat's Cradle," et al. Philosophically I could never endorse Vonnegut's disgusted remark that "evolution can go to hell" if we're its product; but I know what he was saying, and it makes me smile. So does his next observation in A Man Without a Country, which leavens contempt for Mark Twain's "damned human race" with the acknowledgement that on evolution's time-scale we did just get here. (See Carl Sagan's "cosmic calendar".) We can cut ourselves a little slack, and a little hope.

Verlyn Klinkenborg: "The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be... No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith." In mine too.