Stories precede doctrine.
Many descriptions in literature about kinds of social reality can be confirmed with evidence independent of the literature. You know that the parapet constructed in York, England in the Victorian Era and described by Wilkie Collins in “No Name” could be confirmed from maps of the time and local histories. How Parliamentary politics operated in the late Victorian Era as that was described in Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” could be verified in newspapers and memoirs. The ideas and emotions of Naziism as presented in Mann’s “Dr. Faustus'' could be buttressed by reading books about Hitler. But here is another species of social reality that cannot be accessed by anything other than through literature and that is what is properly called the spirit of the age, which is the pervasive, encompassing sentiments that underskirt what is happening in a culture. Some commentators make a try at capturing that, as happens when Jimmy Carter made a speech about how America was undergoing a period of malaise, and David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” got it wrong that Americans were fighting conformity when they were embracing it. Literature provides the true compass if you just jiggle it.
“The Spirit of The Age” was a collection of studies of major figures in England during the Romantic Period. The author, William Hazlitt, was a literary critic who thought that examining the cross-currents of these figures would establish the overall atmosphere of the period rather than settle some single point of view or what we would say today a value that was shared by all of or just about all of thee population who shared a culture. So rather than Talcott Parsons defining value neutrality as the accepted premise of medical doctors, Hazltt juxtaposed Coleridge’s medieval mysticism with Bentham's Utilitarianism as both within the melting pot of what the people of Great Britain thought of during this time. The question is how to access that complex state of mind at a time when it is neither a fact nor a social structure nor an idea but something more nebulous, which is so axiomatically present that it is very difficult to observe and yet is a state of mind that obviously exists as is clear from the case that in retrospect it is easy enough to ascertain the complex point of view of other periods, as scholars do when they point to the temper of the Victorian or the Elizabethan mind.
Hazlitt comes to the rescue by making the observation that comedy occurs when what audiences observe is the disjunction between established relations of social order. A vaudeville comedian points out that things are out of joint because people with funny accents and patois thrust themselves on the theatrical and the public stages, though some people are outraged by such appositions as when people objected to early Twentieth Century protest groups because they weren’t even speaking in English. Mostly, individuals are made of the butts of jokes about the discrepancies between what people are and what they obviously have no claim to be. Malvolio, in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth’s Night” is a key example of a figure who presumes to court a high lady with the foolish idea of dressing in a way he thinks to be dashing. He is out of his place and so to be chastised with humor rather than to be dealt with harshly if he had represented a real threat to social order. The same happens to those who are “Waiting for Godot'', in the Becket play of that name, merely feckless and therefore foolish people waiting to hear the meaning of life not knowing that it will never come. So, more generally than in Hazlitt, literary revelations document the change in the temper of a time and that difference shows in any number of matters in social life even though Becket is now usually treated as part of the history of ideas within what was called “The Age of Anxiety” rather than as an indication of an even deeper current that has become formalized and named as the Age of Anxiety.
Here is an easy example of how literature can reveal deep currents in the society that are not as yet accessible to overt credos or declaratory prose, whether considered “social scientific” or not. Look at the Enlightenment when literature showed the connection between women and social and political liberation. Denis Diderot published in 1792 a polemical novel “The Nun” that showed the exploitation of women in convents. He appears as presenting this as a news problem rather than revisiting an ever present scandal. Women should not have to endure what happens in convents. This is just one of the abuses of Christianity, and so one of those pillars of the Ancien Regime that is to be overthrown. Women show themselves to be liberated into doing bad and licentious things in “Liaisons Dangereuses”, a novel of 1782 concerning personal twists but also a portrayal of the dastardly nature of aristocracy, and therefore also a condemnation of the Ancien Regime. Most significantly, is the triptych of Mozart and De Ponte, “Don Giovanni”, “The Marriage of Figaro” and Cosi fan Tutte”, which show women no longer to be beholden, respectively, to demonic men , to noble husbands, or even to men themselves, women understanding far better than men the ways of the world. Women are integral to the political and social upheavals of the period and so it was accurate for my junior high school teacher to say that “All men are to be created equal” is understood to mean to include women even though women didn‘t get the vote until more than a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence.
Even more profound and more complex than the temper of woman equality preceding overt statements of that cause, are the emotions found in stories within the New Testament, those stories revealing the real substance of the religion that is later unfolded in its systematic statements.The doctrinal statements by Peter are regarded as the earliest written elements of the New Testament. They proclaim that people are inherently sinful and have to be redeemed from that state by accepting Jesus as the savior. But why is Paul so adamant about the human condition? Why are people inevitably wicked? The answer to that is found in the stories told in the Gospels, those apparently collected from sources prior to Paul,, about the times of the ministry of Jesus. That does convey the lamentable emotional state of humankind, full of jealousy, greed and self-righteousness.
Refer to one of the Jesus stories that remains resonate, the one in John 7:53-8:11, where an adultress is about to be stoned and Jesus intervenes by asking which of the men about to stone her are without sin. That stops the mob cold because each of them are being asked to inquire whether they have not engaged in illicit sexual relationships and so are complicit in the act of adultery. Jesus is therefore pointing out the hypocrisy of those who engage in stoning. Jesus is suggesting a higher standard than hypocrisy, even if many years later the skeptical Samuel Johnson thought of hypocrisy as a tribute to virtue. Jesus is radical in wanting to eliminate hypocrisy and thanks for showing hypocrisy to b e what it is will disarm it. But there is a deeper emotion in this story. Jesus is not saying that the adulteress is redeemed or even that stoning is a bad custom, only that a stoner should reflect on hypocrisy, which is a major sin. Rather, Jesus is turning the tables on the adulteress by seeing her in a new light: not as a temptress and therefore a vehicle of evil, but rather as a pathetic wretch for which a person can feel sorry. In modern germs, she is a victim rather than an exploiter of male sexual urges. So the life of the woman is to be spared because she has fallen and Jesus reaches out to people who are shameful and properly embarrassed, and that's the whole kit and caboodle for everyone else. We are all sinners, disgraceful and embarrassed by our shortcomings and deserving of punishment except that Jesus loves the sinners without hating the sinners and endlessly forgiving people for being what they cannot be otherwise. This is a mental transformation Jesus negotiates, from enemy to victim, from sinner to ex-sinner, through Jesus’ powerful words and personal charisma and the authority of his followers. It changed the world by redefining words. To borrow Nietschze’s words, Jesus has transvaluated value, made the sinners the saints when the sinners know themselves to be. that
The story of Jesus chastising those who would stone the adulterer is a hallmark of Christian personal self reflection overcoming righteousness and resulting in compassion. Though this is a secondary effect, the main one having to do with self-reflection and finding oneself wanting. Consider, in comparison, the benchmark in the Genesis story where Cain kills Abel and then seems a totally human figure, as opposed to Adam and Eve, which are archetypes or avatars of elemental forces rather than rounded personalities. Cain says, “Am I my brother’;sd keeper?” so as to excuse addressing the event which he wants to have hidden, thereby revealing that it was an evil act, people all too human in hiding their iniquities, and also to suggest that people are indeed their brother’s keepers. Cain has become sly and so God knows what's going on just as Cain knew what he did. The consequence is not to berate Cain or even to redeem him. The deed once done is so forever. Rather, God exiles Cain as someone ever marked by his misdeed, people ever after managing misdeeds rather than repairing them.
But if the story of the adulterer is the bedrock case of morality in the Gospels, the archetypal case in that it is about shame everlasting. People dwell on their own iniquities, groove on them, so others will forgive them. That is different from owning up to one’s iniquities and having to bear them, that being the nature of human life, and trying to do better. Christopher Hutchins, who was very hard on the totalitarianism of religion, also knew that most believers were capable of the common sense natural morality endorsed by Hume, whereby people tried to be decent to one another rather than to shed their own errors and sins by a total abasement to the authority figure who forgave them, as if others can forgive us rather than, sometimes, gain the light so as to forgive or at least mitigate our own shortcomings.
The emphasis on shame is the basic motive or response to many of the parables in the Gospels. Consider the story of the prodigal son, particularly Luke 15: 20-24. This son abandons his family and later returns to it, his father rejoicing at that fact while other sons have resentment that the one who went away is praised for having returned. Is it not right that those sons who have held their course are not even more praised rather than taken for granted? There might be a financial component in that the prodigal son would get a significant portion of what the enterprise as a whole had accomplished while the prodigal son was away. Rather than finances, the story can be given a spiritual turn. Hosannas are to be addressed for those who re enter the fold rather than just follow the usual course because it means that someone spiritually lost is recovered, and that is a great boon to a religious community because it shows thne attractiveness of the religious group that it reclaims fallen away members. But go beyond the economic and spiritual aspects of the story and concentrate on its emotions. The steadfast brothers think themselves treated unfairly and have to swallow tube praise heaped on the prodigal son, and the son, even returned, remains stigmatized for having left, ever afterwards thne one who left, and therefore distrusted by his brothers at least until sufficient time heals. The prodigal son and his brothers are supposed to make amends, to be charitable to one another, but that is difficult evolve for hire when the crew chief is mos if enjoined by Jesus, and so everyone is shadowed by guilt and recrimination rather than a clear path when no one went astray. Being Christian means bearing up under having given or accepting insults.
Then there is the parable about the three workers in the field from Matthew 20: 1-16. One laborer works all day to earn his pay when he is employed in the morning but that the same pay is awarded to those workers who are hired mid day orf even closer to the evening. There are economic and spiritual meanings for the unfairness of the rewards but there is nothing that can be done about it and so, again, they have to put up with the humiliation, the grievances of their plight providing the meanings for these stories. The workers are hired when needed to finish up what has to be done and so those hired late are very fortunate to most needy of workers. Demand varies. These are the rules of supply and demand. Perhaps the workers could strike and get a collective bargaining agreement which insists on an hourly wage, but that is being ahead of the times. The story is also an allegory that one’s rewards are not done by works but by spiritual circumstances, some people favored more with grace than by others because of God’s decisions, and there is no use quibbling about it. But there is also an emotional interpretation. The workers aware of the unfairness can even feel aggrieved and humiliated but have to carry on until there is a newer dispensation when justice will be rendered, nursing their grievances until that time. Christianity notices that resentment reigns until the world will be reversed.
A third example of story allowing an emotional presentment of a situation that is additionally obscure because the time has not yet passed when the perception is reduced into doctrine is available at the present time and can again sensed through the lens of comedy. Consider how comedy changed over time. Think of it as a foil to Romantic and Victorian heroism, always tinged by the tragic, whether Byron’s Manfred or Tennyson's Ulysses, both of them having to brave their fates, undeterred from their conviction of how those people are to be. Comedy undercuts that by making people ridiculous as when Shaw shows that Major Barbara doesn’t have a clue about how social power really works however convinced she is on the right course of preferring benevolence to greed. Comedy can even overthrow the dignity and sacredness of romantic love, that ideal exemplified by “Romeo and Juliet”, however much Shakespeare puts out the markers that the hero and heroine are just foolish. Why don’t the two of them just leave town? John Updike, for his part, does his quietus make as to romantic love in “Couples”, adulterous love supposedly a social fact in the venue of suburban life in the Seventies.
Updike is doing more than that. The adulterous husband in that novel thinks he has tricked his friend to engage in the wife switching when that is not at all clear. Before that he has been seen escaping out the window so as avoid detection, which is also not at all clear. The protagonist mishandles his maneuvers to comic effect and so is foolish rather than heroic. That is very different from the traditional hero who becomes a fool because of love rather than a fool who engages in love. Antony in Shakespware’s “Antony and Cleopatra” is, afterall, a political and military colossus who succumbs to love and therefore becomes unhinged and unmanned, just as Samson does when he meets Delialah, which is the bedrock story, the paradigm for disastrous love stories.
What Updike discovers is that the protagonist is a fool and so an answer to all those heroes from Goethe’s Werther onwards who agonize at engaging in love as somehow heroic, however self destructive. The fool as lover can be generalized as a trope for the fool as a protagonist who earns some legitimacy or familiarity with that role even if in this age, this dispensation, there is also a cross current of heroism, even if in the attenuated and exaggerated mock forms of Marvel superheroes. Apply that perception of the fool as hero to political figures such as Donald Trump who people prefer warts and all because a figure can be a fool and yet a heroic figure just as Bill Clinton worked to maintain his dignity despite the foolishness of his dalliance with Monica Lewinski. Biden engages in an older view of heroism, which is to be steadfast and responsible but does not achieve high ap;proval ratings because the older view of heroism is a bit tarnished or worn out.
This rendition of political life in this century is objective rather than biased. What it does is suggest that traditional concepts to explain political motives are outdated. Neither upward nor downward mobility explain the hope and anger of the American electorate given that the state of the nation is pretty good. Nor is the idea of charisma reliable because the magic surrounding a political figure does not transform him into becoming a commanding leader because he is decisive and has a knack for leadership or is shrouded with mystery and fear as was the case with Stalin. Rather, this post charismatic figure is left to be a fool but trusted for his policies because the populace has become so cynical of heroism that even a fool can be acceptable. Neither social structure nor ideas legitimate extreme points of view, just the cynicism that results from a cultural sea change of axiomatic visions, from heroic to foolish, something apperceived but not articulated and so part of the spirit of the age strictly speaking.