On the
links between our contemporary debates over hope and two of America’s most longstanding
ideas and ideals.
As I
argued in yesterday’s post, Barack Obama has recently worked to redefine the images
and ideas of hope on which he had campaigned for and won the
presidency. Since his election, of course, some of his supporters have done the
same in a very different light, disappointed and even disillusioned by what
they have seen as the gaps between such ideas and the realities of Obama’s
presidency. There would be various ways to analyze that trend, but to my mind
one of the more convincing analyses is that advanced by American historian and
scholar James T. Kloppenberg in his Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American
Political Tradition (2010). For Kloppenberg, these disappointed
supporters (and other Obama critics) have misread the president’s ideas from
the outset, and more exactly have failed to understand the historical and
philosophical figures, traditions, and contexts with which Obama’s ideas and
goals should be put in conversation.
Kloppenberg’s
connections and argument are multi-layered and complex, and deserve to be read
and engaged with on their own terms, not in whatever ways I could paraphrase
them here. So instead, I wanted to link the specific question of hope, as I
framed it yesterday and as Obama
did in his DNC speech, to a couple of other American narratives, ideas that
have been central to our conversations for a couple centuries now. At the heart
of the speech was what I’d call a communal individualism, an emphasis on
creating and strengthening a society that gives each American the chance to
succeed in his or her own life and arc. Both levels of hope at the heart of
that idea—the hope that each individual has that potential, and the hope that a
community can collectively help engender it—seem to me indebted to
Transcendentalism, to Emersonian ideals such as the importance of each
individual’s perspective and the way that those individual perpsectives can
be perfected and made part of a collective oversoul. Emerson
was perhaps the first modern American liberal, in some key ways, and this
link would help further that idea.
Transcendentalism
is often opposed, in histories of the period and of American thought more
generally, to pessimism about human nature—see for example Melville’s
famous critique in Moby-Dick’s “Mast
Head” chapter for a contemporary such rejoinder to Emersonian ideals. But I
would actually argue that another contemporary writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
highlighted in a work such as The Scarlet Letter (1850) a third
possibility and American narrative, one that includes both pessimism and hope
among its ideas. On the one hand, Hawthorne’s depiction of his two male
protagonists, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingsworth, portrays
Americans as fundamentally flawed, doomed by their own failings to come up
short of our national, spiritual, and human ideals. But on the other, while his
female protagonist Hester Prynne is similarly flawed, she also finds a way to
remake not only herself but also her community, building from her own darkest
moments an identity and a new communal role and ideal that, the novel’s
conclusion suggests, influences the town long after she is gone. Hawthorne’s
American landscape is far more fraught and flawed than Emerson’s—but at the
same time it is more full of possibility and even hope than Melville’s. We
would do well to remember this narrative in our analyses of Obama and his
presidency as well, I’d say.
Next in
the series tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Texts, takes, thoughts on hope in America?
9/18 Memory Day nominee: Clark Wissler, the pioneering psychologist and anthropologist whose scientific work with
Native American cultures, support
for his peers, and ideas of
culture and personality paved the way for
much future research and analysis.
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