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- Author: Louis Menand
- Full Title: American Studies
- Category: #books
- “God is real,” as James put it, summing up what he took to be the common-sense intuition about religion, “since he produces real effects.”
- What causes a religious crisis is the realization that people can lead exemplary lives and suffer anyway. The Frenchman has been insulated by the assumption that in a rational universe, bad things cannot happen to good people. The blow to his ego, when the image of the patient is suddenly before him, comes from his recognition that moral worth does not immunize us against disaster. “The eternal God is my refuge” is the lesson of the vision: there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves against undeserved suffering. The only salvation is faith. Evil, in James’s time, was a motiveless malignancy. We think of evils as caused by something—by greed, or genes, or sexual abuse—and miss the point of James’s story.
- Commentators prefer to assume that James was despondent in the years after his graduation from medical school because of some problem—a family problem, a sexual problem, a career problem, an identity problem, a philosophical problem. But depression is not a problem; it’s a weather pattern. Under its cloud, everything else is a problem. When the weather changes, these problems disappear, or become “opportunities,” or “challenges”—until dark skies return.
- Commentators who cleave to one of these terms usually find themselves spending a good deal of time explaining why commentators who favor one of the other terms cannot possibly be right. This is generally an easier business than defending the term they prefer; and the reason is that none of these terms can possibly be right, because each singles out one aspect of the law as the essential aspect, and it was Holmes’s genius as a philosopher to see that the law has no essential aspect.
- When Holmes said that the common law decided the result first and figured out a plausible account of how it got there afterward, the implication was not that the result was chosen randomly, but that it was dictated by something other than the formal legal rationale later adduced to support it. The purpose of The Common Law was to discover what that something was.
- “The loss of certainty” is a phrase many intellectual historians have used to characterize the period in which Holmes lived. But the phrase has it backward. It was not the loss of certainty that stimulated the late-nineteenth-century thinkers with whom Holmes associated; it was the discovery of uncertainty.
- Holmes was a lifelong enemy of the concept of natural law—the notion that individuals retain certain rights, against the state, simply by virtue of being human. There are, Holmes thought, no such immutable and universal rights. What we take to be rights are simply customs that have become settled enough to seem inevitable.
- But the belief had its roots in his experience in the Civil War, where he had been wounded three times, and where he believed that he had seen human nature in its elemental state: a war of pure aggression, in which one group of people made its view prevail by murdering those who disagreed.
- The philosophical error in Holmes’s decision is easy to see, though. It arises from the belief that the way of the universe must necessarily be the way of the human world—the idea that what people do, once all the mystification and self-deception have been stripped away, is only a fancy version of what amoebas do. This is the classic reductive philosophy of the late-Victorian secular mind, which is, of course, the kind of mind Holmes had. It replaces the believer’s supernatural picture of the universe with a materialist picture that is, in its own way, equally fantastic.
- For during those years the counterculture was the culture—or the primary object of the culture’s attention, which in America is pretty much the same thing—and that is really the basis of its interest. It had all the attributes of a typical mass-culture episode: it was a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends; it came into fashion when the media discovered it and went out of fashion when the media lost interest; and it was, from the moment it penetrated the middle class, thoroughly commercialized.
- Note: Also describes fad movements in the church (and not just modern ones)
- The gadgets and the spaceships may have given people the idea that United States enacted a disaffection with creeping dehumanization, that it was a cri de coeur against the disenchantment of the world. But its effect on me was exactly the opposite. I took the point to be that the world can’t be disenchanted, because enchantment is the mode in which human beings experience it. The trail of the human serpent (said William James) is over everything, even answering-machine beeps and aircraft safety instructions. Our electronics is no less an expression of ourselves than our poetry is.
- One of the great evolutionary leaps in the history of modern entertainment was the invention of the microphone. The microphone is more than a convenience, and it is more than a prop; it is an extension of the body. It expands the space the performer can command by reducing that space to the dimensions of intimacy. It turns the stadium into a bedroom; it murmurs softly into the ears of thousands.