Fascist minimum follies

December 10, 2015December 10, 2015 Peter Berard#postLeave a comment

The “Is Trump fascist?” question produces a special kind of pedantry, one close to my heart on a number of levels. Questions of fascism exert a powerful attraction on certain kinds of pedant. I see three converging types here, maybe other see more:

Wannabe political handicappers have, until recently, pooh-poohed the idea of Trump winning the nomination. This particular sort of pedantry usually expresses itself as a vaguely Mencken-esque disdain for the herd. Whatever you’re seeing on the news or on your uncle’s facebook isn’t the real deal, the real stuff is the behind-the-scenes stuff I’m somehow privy to, etc. etc. They typically don’t deal with Trump-as-fascist directly, but their attitude — performatively cool-headed and unimpressed, looking for some obscure angle to explain why everyone else is wrong — influences the other two.

Academic fascism-explainers have done fine work in delineating and defining fascism but it’s important to keep context in mind. So many political actors — most notably student rebels in the ’60s and neocons from the ’80s on — have sought to put the “fascist” label to work for them. Academics, a cautious lot generally, have therefore sought to put all kinds of rules and stipulations in place about who is and isn’t a fascist. Of course, it being academia, they squabble endlessly about it. This makes it funny when think-piecers try to seize upon one given “fascist minimum” — Paxton’s, Payne’s, I haven’t seen anyone try Mosse on but I’m sure it’ll happen — to use in their pieces on Trump. In lieu of actually studying European history, they cling on to one of the academics and hope for the best. Generally, these sources are cautious about crying fascism. There’s good reasons for that, but it’s also, at this point, a habit of deflection.

Socialists, meanwhile — especially from that small but enthusiastic minority adhering to one of the legacy sects of the old days — enter into this dynamic even as it was initiated to keep them on the margins. Part of depoliticizing the academic study of fascism was discrediting the various Marx-oid definitions, especially any enshrining of class as a main factor in fascism. Most historians will allow class had something to do with it, but always rush in to add their cultural and political caveats. Especially given the centrality of anti-semitism and the Holocaust in how we understand that period, you can see why, along with a disinclination towards “fascism!”-screaming (temporarily) communist students around the time all this was gelling.

In this case, many of the serious leftists engaging with this question cooperate with their more moderate foils in the academy in deflecting the question. Ironically, it’s in the name of the sort of interpretation the academy has sought to repudiate, namely, the sort of ignition sequence — depression into leftist insurgency into rightist reaction — model of fascism enshrined in the writings of Trotsky. Trotsky, it’s worth noting, died in 1940. Even still, if it doesn’t follow that model, it ain’t fascism, and, the sectarians will have you know, there’s no leftist insurgency (but maybe if you came to our meetings…), so… case closed. Moreover, many sectarians share the same disdain for surface-level electoral politics (god knows it’s easy to disdain) that the wannabe-political-experts do, so it’s easy for them to skip from Trotsky’s formulas to “it’s not going to happen anyway” and go on to questions with which they are more comfortable.

Every other pedant has had their say, so here’s this one’s: This all gets way too tied in on the person of Trump, for whom this might all be a big game or a con. Trump is important because he’s tapped into a rich source of political energy. This is the idea of a national rebirth, a return to a golden age through a strong man leading a violent campaign against external and internal enemy others. Those who dream this dream — and generate this energy — don’t particularly care how this rebirth happens, constitutionally-speaking.

And they’re surprisingly indifferent to the results of your finely-grained study of interwar Europe, or the formulae of your long-dead sect leader.

2015 BIRTHDAY LECTURE: THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE HAMSTER WHEEL RUNNER

October 27, 2015 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Towards the end of a long and storied career, the best idea of a future Anton LeVay, founder of the Church of Satan, author of the Satanic Bible, a man about whom all manner of tall tales once circulated, could produce when asked could be summed up in one word: Disneyland. That’s not a snide lefty’s dig, either, but his own words, or rather, the words of his amanuensis, Blanche Barton, spoken in LeVay’s presence to the journalist Lawrence Wright in 1991. “That’s been a real trial balloon for a lot of this,” Barton told Wright of the theme park’s relationship to LeVay’s idea of the future, “the incorporation of androids, a private enclave with a self-contained justice system, its own private police force. It’s a good example of capitalism at its peak.” For Wright, this little tidbit was the last straw on the camel-load of evidence that his time with LeVay had provided to the effect that this supposed vicar of Satan on Earth was, in fact, a rather sad, lonely, old man, about as exciting or dangerous as, well, Disneyland.

Wright didn’t draw much social significance from his portrait of LaVey, and for good reason. The best way to describe Satanism is a term Wright would not have had access to in 1991 – trolling. Indeed, these days Satanists have embraced the concept, and have landed in the news by exploiting “religious expression” loopholes to insist that public buildings that display things like Ten Commandments statues also put up big statues of Baphomet, which I for one find pretty amusing. Try though they might, no one has ever been able to pin any of the supposed crimes inspired by Satanism on actually organized Satanists (a tiny group, it’s worth noting, however far their imagery spreads), and the waves of panic over satanic murder or “ritual abuse” that swept the country periodically from the seventies to the nineties now appear rather quaint. Moreover, in a fashion those of us who have dealt with trolls will recognize, none of the varieties of Satanism are especially internally consistent or lay out a really precise idea of what they believe or what they’re doing. This inconsistency goes right down the most basic questions, such as: do Satanists actually believe in and/or worship Satan? Is the Church a real church or more of a performance art project/tax dodge for LaVey and his pals? Are they rejecting all morality or just Christian morality? The answers to these questions change depending on which one you talk to at which time, and given that most of them belong to some little grouplet – Satanists have a tendency towards splitting rivaled only by congregational Protestants and by Trotskyites – these answers are usually barbed asides at somebody in a rival cult. Satanists have produced thousands of pages of literature and much of it reads like a lot of troll manifestos, wandering turgidly between different lines and means of arguments, frequently patching in dubious primary source quotes, making asides and then not returning to the argument where it left off, leaving the reader the impression that there’s a meta-troll, the troll of having been gulled into reading this nonsense. When the ideas are as content-light as they are here, it makes sense to angle on the personal, as Wright did, in what, after all, was a profile of a person.

But those of you who know me or, at any rate, are sufficiently indulgent as to read my facebook statuses, know that I’ve taken it as a task to try to read the history of ideas in the leavings of the trolls, con men, enthusiasts, and off-brand pedants of the modern past. No matter how obscure, some sort of choice and selection is present in all of their expressions. Some of these choices can be used as tracks, visible signs of the changes in the societal and intellectual contexts of lived existence in a given time and place. To put it another way, LaVey picked Disneyland for a reason.

Moreover, spend enough time examining different kinds of discourse, and you’ll notice certain problems crop up over and over again. Social problems as we understand them – like managing the relationship between capital and labor – come up throughout the modern era. Political problems – like those attached to the governance of dissimilar bodies of people sharing a single polity – go back farther still. Existential problems – like what the deal is with being able to conceive the infinite but still be doomed to a very finite existence – are arguably older than any. A vast array of disparate groups of people have dealt with these questions. You can treat these problems and many others like tropes in literature, which can be arranged and rearranged to produce a vast and ever-changing array of potential meanings and messages depending on context. Looking at which of these questions are asked or answered, when and by whom, can tell us a lot about history. At least, this is the operating assumption behind much of my historical work, both professionally and here with these lectures. Here’s hoping there’s some merit to it!

The tropes we’re going to deal with here belong to the genre “individualism.” I’m almost entirely uninterested in the questions like what constitutes an individual, what the rights or responsibilities of an individual are, what the relationship between individuals or between individuals and society – however conceived – should be, blah blah blah. These questions are boring and almost always posed tendentiously. I suppose if tasked with taking a stand, I would wind up opposed to most individualists in that I do not believe that the individual person is an ontologically independent fact. Basically, I think individuals construct themselves out of culturally available material. Moreover, I think our idea of what the individual can be is a culturally constructed idea. To me, this is common sense, and doesn’t necessarily imply anything about the rights, duties, whatever of the individuals thereby constructed. And if it did that’s not a conversation I would find immediately interesting. What is interesting, to me at least, is the range of different constructions of individuality that one sees people – of all walks of life and levels of intellectual sophistication — construct. It gets more interesting still when these people get together and create organizations to propagate these ideas, given that the whole point supposedly is the priority of the individual.

It gets really interesting when these organizations could be described as “cults.” “Cult” is a loaded term. Not to get all buzzfeed on you all, but every nineties kid remembers cult panic, cult stories on the news, cult members on talk shows, cults as villains in tv serials, etc. And I think most of the people here get that this panic is over the top. So when I say “cult” I mean primarily “body perceived as a cult by others.” These are typically small, passionate, insular groups dedicated to a set of principles to one degree or another at odds with the mainstream of the culture in which they live.

Several groups that meet this description have proclaimed themselves dedicated to radical individualism, the proposition that the individual is or ought to be the focal point and justification of both morality and practical existence, and that deviations from this focus – towards the social, the metaphysical, the environmental, etc. – are necessary evils at best, the seed of man’s suffering at worst. Satanism –with few exceptions, but certainly including the original Church of Satan and most of its immediate offshoots – is one such movement. Objectivism – the philosophical system propounded by novelist Ayn Rand and her followers – is another. When I call them “cults,” I mean it in the comparatively value-neutral sense I laid out earlier; I may have my opinions on the tenets involved, but this is a birthday lecture, not a Huffington Post piece. It’s worth noting, though, that neither Rand nor LaVey brooked opposition lightly, and Rand in particular allowed a culture of conformity and ostracization to develop in her inner circle. Despite Rand’s intellectual pretenses, both her work and LaVey’s – and much of that of their followers – were much more in the vein of a preacher or a prophet than a scholar or philosopher. To borrow a phrase, they were not content to describe the world, but sought to change it. That said, neither were so controlling as to be able to prevent their groups from splitting, and the ideas of both spread farther than is typical for groups we call “cults.” We’ll have more than enough on the propagation and offshoots of both groups in a bit, though, so just hold your horses on the org-chart objections.

I am going to focus on these two groups in this lecture for a few reasons. While there are some anecdotal reasons – particularly why I chose Objectivism and Satanism and passed over, say, Discordianism – they’re not especially interesting, though I suppose you can pump me for them afterwards over drinks. We can say the anecdotes were the catalyst, but as I got thinking about them, the points of comparison came thick and fast, as did a few important and telling points of contrast. I’m not the first to put the two together. LaVey, after all, cites Ayn Rand as an influence, and parts of The Satanic Bible are, to put it politely, very direct paraphrases from Atlas Shrugged. But I think the confluence runs deeper than jokes about Satanists being little more than “horny Objectivists,” as a meme I’ve seen online goes. Instead, I think both constructed their idea of the individual, the centerpiece of their belief systems and, according to them, of the moral universe, in parallel and telling ways. This is what I want to interrogate.

It’s my belief that the way these cults of individualism constructed the individual subject was both an important indicator of and an influence on the way individualism has been constructed more broadly in our society since the late nineteen-sixties. Proving influence is tricky. Objectivist interventions have played a role in American right-wing politics; this, historians agree upon, and have written a good deal about in the last few years. Satanists have few such interventions – primarily restricted to defending themselves when accused of unlikely crimes as they periodically become subjects of moral panic. I believe that these interventions are important – and have a paper trail, useful for a historian – but that the real action in the story of radical individualism takes place at the demarcation of a small but important intellectual space.

Consider: the way individuality was understood during the years of the Cold War consensus – as having strong ties to a social order whose parameters are largely agreed upon, responsible to this order and with certain claims upon it – is different from how individuality is understood today. Many factors went into this change, some of which were basically ideological, and our two subjects – especially Objectivism – contributed to this. But I think only a small-to-middling portion of the force involved could be attributed to them, at most. I think the real historical significance of Objectivism, Satanism, and other midcentury cults of individualism is in carving out a space in the aftermath of that destruction for the construction, modification, and propagation of secular, notionally oppositional, individualisms. To put it bluntly, we’re looking at the right wing of the counterculture. Any historical purpose the counterculture can be said to have served, I hold that the ideas propagated by the individualism cults have worked to turn in a rightward direction. They have worked to direct energy away from projects of collective liberation and towards… damned near anything else.

Having just made the conservative counterculture point, it’s worth acknowledging two points of comparison between Objectivism and Satanism right off the bat: first, both bear the heavy stamp of a founder; second, both founders expressed disdain for hippies and did not see themselves as conservatives. Ironically for writers who inspired many a rock band, both Ayn Rand and Anton LaVey were notably restrained in their tastes in music (preferring sentimental orchestral music- think Lawrence Welk) and generally preferred their hedonism to be indoors and private. Rand was forever negotiating the terms of her alliance with other right-wingers, with mixed results. LaVey stayed out of politics but occasionally chuckled merrily about how his ideas were a better fit for conservatism than was Christianity. Either way, ideas can serve purposes beyond the stated intent of their holders, and I hew to a broader idea of conservatism – as being about the preservation and in some cases restoration of regimes of power, especially in the private sphere – than was common at the time.

As for their interactions with the counterculture, however much they might kvetch about dirty communistic hippies – and kvetch they did, especially the San Francisco-based LaVey– the counterculture, insofar as it stood for anything, stood for the transformation of society through the transformation of individual consciousness. Even at their most communistic – and here it’s worth noting we’re talking “communistic” as in “rural communes,” not as in “Marx and Lenin,” adherents of which never got anywhere with the counterculture – the point of any communal activity was that through them, the individual could become something better, something purer and more whole. Societal change would thereby result.

This is not too dissimilar to the understanding Objectivism and Satanism shared of the relationship between the individual, morality, and social change. Both embraced an individualism that isn’t just radical, but is also – purportedly at least – transgressive. Egoism as rebellion – against a bewilderingly wide variety of supposed oppressors from the government to religion to most of their readers’ families – lays at the center of the belief system of both groups. This is another facet they shared with the counterculture: the idea that what they were doing was a rebellion. Satan, of course, has long been symbolic of rebellion, having rebelled against God. Rand’s novels are less about the actualization of individuals and more about already-actualized individuals destroying a social order that is insufficiently deferential to them. Most observers agree that it is this rebellious posturing – however affected it may or may not be – that has attracted the youth following that both groups acquired. That the posture has held up as long as it has is an important part of the continuing story.

The forms that LaVey and especially Rand used to propagate their respective ideas were as important as their content. Both were first and foremost storytellers. Rand wrote essays – and given her cult following, they are doubtless some of the most-read essays in the land – but is primarily known for her novels. LaVey was a man made of stories, mostly specious ones. Journalists and erstwhile comrades of his have made great sport of knocking over his more spectacular claims, like that he had an affair with Marilyn Monroe or that he served San Francisco as “city organist,” a position that city – or, one suspects, any other city – never actually had. While there were substantial aesthetic differences in the stories they told – Rand’s sweeping epics of good and evil set against a high modernist backdrop of skyscrapers and rail lines versus LaVey’s stories of hypocrisy and vice set against the wistful seediness of depression/WWII-era America – but structurally, they had a lot in common. They were about special people who showed up enemies. The enemies might be crooked, dangerous, or otherwise flawed, but their real crime was imposing restrictions on the hero’s individual flourishing, and worse, justifying these restrictions by reference to a priority higher than the individual – a religion, society, etc.

The political and social messages in Rand’s stories were more explicit than LaVey’s. Indeed, they are more explicit than pretty much any writer not paid by a given political movement or regime typically is. By the time she wrote her magnus opus, Atlas Shrugged, she had decided that allegory was the only fit device for a serious writer. And so the characters all embody something, from broad character archetypes (“the bureaucrat,” “the good underling”) to rather specific mid-twentieth century political ideas. LaVey, for his part, employed allegory – typically a mixture of stuff cobbled together from old books about black magic and sordid visual puns – in the various rituals he detailed in his books. He was always vague as to whether these rituals actually accomplished something in and of themselves or were more along the lines of amusing pastimes, the latter being a time-honored use of occult practices for bored rich people. Either way, these allegorical narratives – with symbolism pointed enough to be grasped easily but generic enough to be adapted to a wide array of circumstances – were what propelled the growth of the movements in question more than their arguments.

This is a good opportunity to discuss what some adherents to either creed would insist is a major, indeed irreconcilable, difference. Objectivists are so named because they believe in a universe that not just contains objective fact, but that is made up of objective facts, where everything others would chalk up to opinion or value-judgment is also an objective fact. Thus, they live in a world where morality is as objective as arithmetic. Satanists… don’t. As per usual, LaVey avoided making a definitive proclamation on the subject, and he certainly understood his philosophy as stemming from certain facts of life, most of which are drawn from popular ideas of the ruthlessness of natural existence filtered through social Darwinism. But for LaVey and Satanism, the whole point of these basic facts is that they aren’t moral – and neither should you be.

Fundamental though this philosophical difference may be, it’s surprisingly irrelevant when you look at the results of the discourse in terms of constructing individualism. Either because it’s insufficiently rigorous or all too rigorous, the prevailing socially accepted morality, whatever it is, is wrong. It’s wrong because it limits those individuals of sufficient caliber to transcend, to live according either to the objective morality of Rand’s universe or the realistic amorality Satanism propounds and thereby reach the heights of human potential. Both wind up doing versions of the usual song and dance dating back from the early days of liberalism about how self-centeredness drives creation and innovation, blah blah etc. etc.

The basic philosophical dissimilarity between Objectivism and Satanism impinges on the lived existence of either belief system at one important point: the basis of negotiation with the actual, existing, inadequate world. Here, their differing ideas of the basis of individuality and morality come into play. Objectivism, based on the idea of an objective reality that defines all moral choices, demands the believer change the political and social structures of the world. Satanism, based on the idea that morality is altogether a hobble on the strong, suggests that the believer elide the political, the social, and indeed the legal. These facets present one set of problems for the everyday believer: how to live according to a difficult code. They present an altogether different problem to the leaders of such groups (and, being small and eventually decentralized, “believer” tends to shade into “leader”): how to lead such a group and get along in the world. For all of the apocalyptic imagery in Rand’s novels and for all of LaVey’s villainous posturing, both wanted to operate freely in the existing world, and not lead a revolution or die in jail.

In the time honored tradition of moral entrepreneurs from Calvinism on, Objectivists and Satanists fudged a solution out of a combination of doctrine and circumstance. Circumstance came to the aid of Objectivism, in the form of the rising tide of the conservative political movement, primarily in the United States but to a limited extent elsewhere as well. Whatever disagreements orthodox Objectivism might have with some mainstream Republican tenets like the positive value of religion, they were quite capable of working together. This is how Rand has gotten herself in the history books – her ideas found their way into American conservatism and conservatism normalized her work and her followers. Objectivists – a few hardcores aside – never had to abscond from society, because they’ve found a real chance to change it. Satanism, for its part, faced the problem of keeping its followers within the bounds of civilized society. Here, LaVey essentially punted to aesthetics. Crime is grubby, LaVey preached. Alluding to doing terrible things is fun for shocking squares – there’s LaVey as grandfather of the trolls again – but in general, Satanists should seek the sort of dignified existence that’s only workable on the right side of social order. There, Satanists could compete ruthlessly and win exultantly thereby furthering themselves and, at least by example, the benefits of living free of moralism.

And so we see that Satanism and Objectivism both had flexible, sustainable means for solving the theologico-political problem that organized society presents to the radical individualist. This development is an example of a dynamic I think we can see in a lot of discourses. The limits of a given discourse – its blind spots and logical gaps – can be both liabilities and assets. They’re liabilities to the extent that they run the risk of leaving gaps through which energy and adherents can escape. They’re assets to the extent that they can form circuits, or corrals, or whatever sort of metaphor you like for containing and channeling the force generated by pushing the discourse’s limits. The answers that Objectivism and Satanism provided to their followers as to why they should bother following society’s laws are open to debate. What if you disagree with LaVey’s aesthetics and think murdering strangers is, in fact, aesthetically pleasing? What if you think conservatism or libertarianism are insufficiently pure in their dedication to the truth? Both systems have had adherents argue these things, but the answers provided were sufficiently convincing and flexible so as to keep adherents in – and to generate lively debate as to where exactly the lines should be drawn in any event, useful intellectual fertilizer for the growth of any movement.

Like many movements before them, both Objectivism and Satanism owe much of their shape to schism. Both began their organizational existences as the brainchildren of their founders. At the beginning of their respective existences, both had a sort of concentric circle model of organization. Around the person of the founder there was a tightly bound inner circle of long-time devotees and friends of the founder, close both in terms of their relationships and in geographical terms; Ayn Rand’s “Collective” based in New York, Anton LaVey’s church in San Francisco. Around this inner circle was the larger outer circle of readers, admirers, and inner-circle-wannabes, which included those interested in the group who lived outside of the geographical center. Both inner circles split open into schisms made more hostile than they might be due to the intense personal relationships involved. The contrasts here are worth noting. The major schism in Objectivism occurred in 1968 when Ayn Rand booted Nathaniel Branden – her declared intellectual heir, a major Objectivist writer and speaker, and also her secret lover (both were married to other people at the time) – out of Objectivism and declared him a “non-person” when it was revealed he was carrying on an affair with a younger woman, also not his wife. Branden, abandoned by most of his friends save for some younger Objectivists he brought into the fold, upped sticks for sunny California to begin a psychology practice. Satanism began breaking apart in a gradual process in the early 1970s when LaVey began selling memberships to the Church. LaVey insisted that the Church was always a money-making scheme, and what were you going to do? Tell the Vicar of the Devil he was being corrupt? This is more or less exactly what Michael Aquino, one of LaVey’s first and most important followers, told the old man when he broke off from the Church of Satan to found the Temple of Set in 1975.

Rand and LaVey had two distinct things to say about their respective friends-turned-nemeses (frenemeses, if you will): first, that they were small-timers, only worth anything due to the reflected light of the founders themselves, of no account otherwise; second, that by turning against them, their heretics now stood against everything that they preached. Perhaps, within the inner circle, both of these were subjectively true. From the perspective of critical historical understanding, both assertions, as applied both to Branden and to Aquino, are false. I argue that both, in fact, are important elaborators and propagators of the radical individualist discourse which they and their erstwhile mentors helped create.

Google Michael Aquino and most of what you get on the first page of results are conspiracy sites: being both a prominent Satanist and a career officer in Army intelligence will do that. When read through the lens of someone with a certain familiarity with the history of military intelligence, his work shows him as a near-perfect type of a long-term mid-level intelligence officer: clever but not brilliant, with a distinctly instrumental frame of mind, a bit of a showboat, given to assigning big scary terminology to banal things. Interestingly, given that Satanism is in most respects less ideological than Objectivism, the schism Aquino triggered was more about ideas than was Branden’s quarrel with Rand. Aquino’s account of the break is muddled, as break-up stories often are, but there were two basic issues. Most pressingly, LaVey’s plan to sell positions in the Church of Satan irked Aquino and other Satanists. LaVey’s defense – that Satanism was always a scam, all belief systems are scams, the point is to benefit from them – triggered the second objection: Aquino and his followers believed there were actual supernatural beings that they were worshipping. It gets into he-said-he-said when Aquino insists that LaVey, too, once believed that Satan – or, at any rate, a supernatural force at odds with the Christian God – was real and the proper object of worship, too, but abandoned it in favor of crass materialism. Of course, disagreements at to the nature and intent of these beings – which tended to turn into very pedantic arguments with inaccurate glosses of historical paganism and Gnosticism used to bolster assorted weak positions – led to further splintering of these “theistic” Satanists. In an echo of the way in which the profound philosophical differences between Objectivism and Satanism did not produce profound differences in their respective discursive practices, across the gap of the existence or non-existence of supernatural forces, LaVeyan Satanists and theistic Satanists exist in dialogue and construct radical individualism in similar ways. Aquino’s break allowed for a broader array of aesthetic and ethical options within Satanist discourse, while leaving its basic shape unchanged.

Nathaniel Branden – who died only recently – played a much larger role, both in shaping radical individualism and exporting it beyond the small, cult-like confines of movements like Objectivism. The year after his split with Rand he published The Psychology of Self-Esteem, the first book in what came to be called the self-esteem movement in psychology. He may have been a non-person in orthodox Objectivist circles – he might still be, for all I know, even in death – but he quickly became a mover and shaker in the world of pop psychology and the burgeoning self-help market. At the beginning of his career, his psychological work still strongly reflected Rand’s influence. He almost entirely refutes the idea of the unconscious and holds that psychological complexes are the result of irrationality and irrationality largely the result of “social metaphysics.” That phrase, in fine Randian style, is a sort of portmanteau of lazy thinking, subjective thinking, and simple politeness, and is what allows irrational social ideas to plant complexes in the brain. It is these complexes which therapy – a combination of talk therapy and hypnosis, according to the book – should fix.

The seventies wore much of the rougher Randian qualities off Branden’s ideas and prose. His work began to emphasize self-esteem as a boon to the self, a way of treating the self well. There came to be less emphasis on fixing hurt selves and more on self-improvement. The ethos became much gentler than it ever was for Rand – Rand would never urge people with psychological issues to treat themselves gently, as Branden eventually came to do. All the same, like with Aquino’s break with the Church of Satan, the changes, seemingly so drastic, cover for fundamental similarities between orthodox Objectivism and Branden’s “West Coast” variant. Ironically, this can be evinced in large part by the interaction between Branden’s brainchild, the self-esteem movement, and one of Rand’s bogeymen, the state.

Branden, of course, was not the first or the most important movement Objectivist to influence state decision-making: that honor, of course, goes to former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. But it’s worth noting Branden didn’t make his mark by working his way into a technocratic executive office but through influence on the legislative process. To wit, in 1986 Democratic California state assemblyman John Vasconcellos – who represented several seats in his long career, all centered around what’s now called Silicon Valley – introduced a bill to that august body to create a State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Not a joke! It passed. Branden was not on this task force, but Vasconcellos claimed that reading Branden’s work was the inspiration for his interest in self-esteem psychology, and many of Branden’s followers in that burgeoning field were represented.

Vasconcellos comes up for nearly as much abuse as Michael Aquino does if you google his name and the word “self-esteem,” largely from the sort of people who think that the practice of giving participation trophies in youth sports is ruining America and that it’s somehow Obama’s fault, but he knew what he was doing. The California State Assembly – and Vasconcello’s constituency in Silicon Valley – might be profligate with their money, and might be flighty, but when they are profligate on a flight of fancy, they usually expect results, or, anyway, an explanation from somebody. Vasconcellos and his team of self-esteem psychologists had, if not much data, at least the assertion that self-esteem training in schools and anywhere else the state had a captive audience, like courthouses and prisons, was a cheap form of social remediation. This typically took the form of things like classes in elementary schools where students would write complimentary letters to themselves, or, really farcically, state-issued award certificates and other tchotchkes for minor offenders showing up on time for court dates.

California has never lacked for serious social problems and 1986 was no exception, being six years away from the Rodney King riots and eight from the nativist explosion that led to Proposition 187. Meeting such massive, structural issues as systemic racialized poverty, exploitation, immigrant assimilation, etc. through any program of therapeutics – let alone through half-assed feel-good nonsense like the task force proposes – stops being ridiculous and becomes insulting if you think about it much at all. In a sense, through proposing the task force, Vasconcellos recapitulated the way in which all of the discourse here collapses in on itself. To put it another way: it’s impossible to treat self-esteem therapy like it’s a substitute for social policy, but it’s entirely possible to use thinking in terms of therapy as a substitute for thinking in terms of structure. The space where thinking even in terms of conventional welfare state politics – let alone more radical solutions – was nowhere to be seen, either effaced or escaped by a discursive space entirely inimical to them.

Radical individualist discourse – and even if state-funded, self-esteem psychology, especially when suggested as a social prophylactic, definitely is that – is as strong and flexible as it is in large part because of its sojourn with the counterculture and the cults. For one thing, without them, political individualism – libertarianism, more or less – would need to invent a culture out of whole cloth. The culture of the rest of conservatism – religious and militaristic, mostly – wouldn’t cut it. More importantly, though, are the cults’ influence on the forms of radical individualism. The prophetic voice employed by the founders of the cults created discursive worlds where critical thought directed away from the individualistic premises they promoted was impossible without leaving the circle – not for nothing was LaVey a circus barker and Rand a screenwriter before embarking on their final careers.

The schisms within these groups are as important – perhaps more important – than the groups themselves. What they provided was a blueprint for the replication of individualist worldviews. These worldviews stay within the basic paradigm of individualist discourse but can be modified to suit the user. Ironically, given how little they appreciated dissent, neither Rand nor LaVey would have been able to appreciate how devotedly their followers and those influenced by them adhere to their basic framework, even as differences – superficial but real enough to them — multiply. Aquino or Branden might appreciate it – Aquino is the only still alive. Perhaps I should shoot him an email. This modified replication process allows for a skein of individuality – largely aesthetic –to exist over what is actually a pretty conformist culture. It creates a network of nodes for the development of difference within the pattern of the larger discourse. Or, to be less jargon-y, discussions over WHICH individualist ideas and practices are best make people less likely to have the discussion over whether the whole individualist framework makes sense, in its own terms or anyone else’s. Anything sufficiently enthused over – we’ve seen the examples of schools of psychology or spirituality, but we could also talk about artistic modes, health notions, some political concepts, many more things – can form nodes in the network, items on the menu through which the individual can construct a worldview. Put into contact with each other, these worldviews contain enough difference to engage the holders without demanding contact outside of the paradigm in which they coexist. This outside has many things – including, but not limited to, most possibilities for action directed towards mass political liberation. And for the most part, those inside stay in.

The history of conservatism (and, to an extent, liberalism) is littered with efforts to turn a broad spectrum of the population – not all or most of it, but a critical mass – into supporters of a given system of order. Typically this is accomplished through a limited and often privatized distribution of a certain kind of property. Margaret Thatcher proposed to make property-holders out of those living in housing estates to give them “a stake in society.” Ideologues of the slave south called for tax breaks to allow more white southerners to own slaves, thereby inoculating them from abolitionism. Microlending today proposes both to lift third world masses out of poverty and tie them to finance capitalism. In a sense, what the schism-generating model of oppositional radical individualism did was to allow every egoist with a few spare opinions to become his own cult leader, even if the cult was just himself (gendered pronoun used advisedly). And of course, with the spread of information technology – and both Objectivists and Satanists were early enthusiasts of the internet, though by this point of the lecture I think we’ve gone beyond them – everyone has a platform to promote the cult of themselves. And, of course, to kibbitz on other people’s cults and argue and switch sides and in general do all of the things a public sphere is meant to do. Except in this instance the public sphere is made up of people either passively pretending or adamantly denying the possibility of the public as something other than a reticule of individuals.

This is why I didn’t write another history of Objectivism or a piece on the counterintuitively conservative politics of Satanism, beyond the fact that neither is really original, especially Rand-bashing. It’s because whatever effect their actual ideologies had, their stamp on the production of ideologies is, to my mind, much stronger and more interesting, if also harder to nail down. Even if neither belief system ever gains another adherent, their mode of discourse will live with us for the foreseeable future. What should one do about it? I don’t know. But if this lecture was useful at all, then one takeaway should be that understanding popular discourse involves kicking up a lot of strange rocks and taking a good long look at the things that live under them.

2012 BIRTHDAY LECTURE: HENRY ADAMS, BUILDER OF TOMBS

October 27, 2015 Peter BerardLeave a comment

When I was an undergraduate at Marlboro College, a lot of my historical reading was self-directed. For reasons now opaque to me, I took it upon myself to read many of the historians of the “Consensus school” of American historical writing: Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Daniel Bell, etc. To put it briefly, the consensus school believed that American political history is defined by a consensus between all responsible parties on basic political issues. Whatever disagreements Americans may have had, the consensus scholars argued with varying degrees of sophistication and smugness, Americans from the beginning basically agreed on liberal politics, democracy (but not too much democracy), free (but not too free) markets, upward mobility, and individualism. Failed attempts to divert the country away from these principles, undertaken by both the right and the left, only strengthened the establishment that adhered to these basic American principles, until we arrive at the heyday of the liberal establishment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, where the comparatively placid politics and mass prosperity of the post-McCarthy, pre-1960s revolt era seemed to vindicate the consensus school on the wisdom of their perspective. There’s was a history with a happy ending. The 1960s, of course, upset the applecart, and they reacted in a variety of interesting ways, but for a good decade, consensus scholars sat at the top of the American historical profession, and dominated sociology, literary criticism, and other fields as well. Some of them are still worth reading today, if you’re into old, kind of outdated books.

One name that came up a lot as I read these works was that of Henry Adams. He was seldom the focus of much attention, but his name cropped up again and again in these old books, usually attached to one of two things: a pithy and learned observation on 19^th century American politics and society, or a grossly antisemitic remark. Before seeing his name all those times, I knew the name Henry Adams from two sources. The first was the top of the Modern Library’s 100 best nonfiction books of the 20^th century, where sits The Education of Henry Adams. The second was the bookshelves of grandparents of friends of mine, especially if they were of a certain WASP-ish demographic, where the name Henry Adams was one of a whole roll call of names I would eventually run into in my historical reading: Van Wyck Brooks, Richard Henry Dana, Edmund Wilson, and still more Adamses, such as Charles Francis Adams and Brooks Adams. So it was with a variety of associations that I went in search of answers to the questions: who was this Henry Adams guy? Why did scholars write about him fifty or sixty years ago as though their readership would know and care about him? Why does no one talk about him now?

Here’s a brief rundown on basic Henry Adams facts: born in 1838 in Quincy, MA. Great grandson of John Adams, second President of the United States. Grandson of John Quincy Adams, 6^th President of the United States. Son of Charles Francis Adams, Congressman and ambassador to Britain during the Civil War. Henry served as his father’s secretary while he was overseas and thus spent the entire war in Europe, and was witness to a great deal of diplomatic manuevering and back-and-forth as his father strove mightily to keep Britain from recognizing or aiding the Confederacy. After the war, Henry engaged in several pursuits, bouncing from one to the other without being sure what he really wanted, but being insulated by his family position. He pursued journalism and reform politics – then largely the reserve of gentlemanly elites such as himself – in tandem, writing pieces on reform efforts of the day: currency, civil service, tariffs, etc. He also wrote novels related to this subject, politely (but not gently) lampooning the lax ethical and intellectual standards of politicians and expressing the distrust of democracy that later became one of his distinguishing intellectual traits. In the 1880s, he was worked as a history professor at Harvard, where he was instrumental in bringing the seminar model and other modern historical techniques from Germany to the United States, and he wrote several important works of American history. He had a, by all accounts, happy marriage with Clover Hooper, and no children. His marriage ended abruptly and horribly when Clover killed herself shortly after her father’s death. Grief-stricken, Adams took up travel and delved into areas of art, history, and religious expression far afield from that with which he had previously engaged. He wrote about art and medieval history; he doted on nieces, some real, some titular; he was a sought-after figure in elite social circles that fancied themselves cultured, and was widely well-regarded as a sage, though also seen as increasingly eccentric and pessimistic. In 1907, he wrote his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, which was released only to people he knew until he died in 1918, after which it was published and hailed as a masterpiece.

The Education is the definitive statement of Henry Adams’s career, and is the logical conclusion, in style as well as in substance, of the last and most important stage of his intellectual development. Stylistically, the book, written in third person past-tense like a historical monograph, manages some impressive feats: giving the impression of encapsulating the experience of a generation while emphasizing its author’s separateness from his peers; of telling the story of a man through the framework of his world and times and telling the story of the world at a given time through the framework of one man’s experience; and of giving the impression of intimacy with the author even as the author admits to self-serving omissions and obfuscations (though not as many as Adams’s biographers would later find). It also included previously unknown revelations about the diplomatic situation with Britain during the Civil War, some digs at personal and political opponents, a theory of history, and periodic descents into crude antisemitism. In short, it is a real piece of work.

In substance, The Education of Henry Adams is the most profound statement that I know of of cultural pessimism in the history of American letters. Read unsympathetically, The Education is the final screed of a deeply privileged man who didn’t like assorted aspects of a world which had passed him by, and who used the talents and education that privilege secured him to fancily dress up the sort of complaint most of us are used to hearing from older relatives or acquaintances about how the world is going to hell. That assessment is basically correct, and Adams will frequently leave contemporary readers unsympathetic or just plain angry. That said, I believe it is worth looking at the shape his complaints took, both to understand better what their context was and because the way in which Adams structured his complaints is important to understanding the significance his later readers granted to his work.

Adams was a great – and, I’ve been told, somewhat inept – borrower of scientific metaphors. As such, the basic metrics in Adams’s understanding of history were borrowed from the physical sciences: energy and valence. Adams held cultural energy to be akin to physical energy, and to be basically finite, and further held that his period was running out of it. How someone could maintain this conclusion during the period that saw the harnessing of electricity, the invention of flight, and the development of untold other scientific and cultural innovations, is where order and coherence come in. Energy without order, in Adams’s view, is chaos, and Adams understood the developments of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – damned near all of them, scientific, technological, economic, political, social, artistic – to be detrimental to an orderly, coherent understanding of the world, and thus harbingers of cultural – and, it is alluded, general, society-wide – chaos.

Adams was far from alone from thinking something like that at the time he felt it. Many beneficiaries of the nineteenth century’s changes felt the same way. Historians have advanced several explanations for the phenomenon of widespread elite anti-modernism. Some, most notably Richard Hofstadter, emphasized a social-psychological explanation: those elites least happy with the state of late nineteenth century America were those whose positions relied on something other than money alone- social position, education, etc. As big new money muscled small old money out of power and social prominence, small old money reacted by forming reform movements and/or seeking out other value systems. A somewhat more straightforward social explanation is the idea that elites of the 19^th century were simply scared by technological progress, and even more of by the specter of social degeneracy that might lead to the elite falling from their position, possibly with the help of insurrection from below. There are other explanations, too, but I’ll spare you. The point is, Adams was an outstanding example of a recognized social type: the late nineteenth century upper crust WASP who grew dissatisfied with his surroundings (regardless of how much privilege they afforded him) and sought meaning outside of western modernity as it was then understood. Some of that type went in for primitivism, others got into Eastern spirituality (particularly Buddhism), others, like Adams, turned to medievalism, and the (supposedly) serene, spiritually rich, unquestioned and unquestionable hierarchy provided by Catholicism. Adams never converted to Catholicism, but he went to his grave believing that the high point of human civilization could be found in France in the twelfth century, where the cult of the Virgin Mary provided an energy more powerful than the nineteenth century’s dynamos to a civilization vastly more coherent than McKinley’s America. Adams grew to hate capitalists, workers (especially those with the temerity to organize), and those usual figures of disintegrative modernity, Jews. In none of these ideas was Adams alone. It’s worth noting that part of Adams’s rhetorical strategy was to cite himself as an example of this decline: he neither wanted to, nor was able to, “follow the family go-cart,” as he put it, into responsible political positions and national prestige, and neither he, nor the rest of his elite cohort, could stop the decline that he saw all around him.

So, elite reactionaries reacting against the things – capitalist modernity, to put it simply – that made them elite is not a thing without precedent. If you read material from the time, it seems like everybody (everybody with a little money, that is) was doing it. Why was Adams picked out from amongst the whole gaggle of elite anti-modernists that America in this period produced to be representative? Why did historians and critics care? Why do I?

There is, of course, one obvious answer: because his work was better than that of his peers, and there was a lot of it. There’s some truth to this assertion – The Education is certainly impressive – but I don’t think I need to spend too much time with this audience stressing how hard it is to match quality to posthumous acclaim.

A tentative answer came to me, I feel ambivalent about reporting, on a recent visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Few cities are graced with one place that nearly everyone acknowledges is the most beautiful in the city, and Boston is one, and its place is the Gardner. Briefly, for anyone in the audience who doesn’t know of it: the Gardner museum was the home of Jack and Isabella Gardner, very wealthy Bostonians of the turn of the twentieth century. Isabella was a great lover of art, and by and by turned her entire home – walls, floors, and furniture included – into a mosaic composed of great art from the past. The Gardners lived in this monument to art collection, walking on Roman floors and sheltered from the elements by Gothic walls, surrounded by masterpieces of painting, sculpture, and design, until they died, after which the house was made a museum open to the public. I strongly suggest you visit if you haven’t.

Education has made my enjoyment of many things more ambivalent. It did not ruin my visit to the Gardner a few months back, but visiting after having finished Ernest Samuel’s biography of Henry Adams, I had a new and not entirely welcome perspective on the place. I knew, now, that Isabella Gardner was guided in her acquisitions by Bernard Berenson, one of the great curators and art critics of his day (no, I hadn’t heard of him either before I started reading this stuff). Berenson was, in turn, deeply influenced by the aesthetic principles of – who else? – Henry Adams, with whom Berenson struck an odd but persistent friendship, in spite of Adams’s increasingly vocal antisemitism. Berenson was a Jew, but a Christian convert, conservative politically and artistically, had an eye for art that even a critic as stern as Adams could appreciate, and, most importantly, was a high-minded and extremely patient man, and thus was able to put up with Adams long enough for the man to help shape the task Berenson took on of directing their mutual friend Isabella Gardner’s art collecting, and the creation of her sanctuary. When you know this, and know Adams, and know what his aesthetic principles meant to him and many in his circle, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum looks rather different. It loses none of its beauty, but the enclosed chambers, each themed after a different idealized portion of the medieval or early modern European past (there is very little in the place from later than the sixteenth century, and nothing that could be called “modern” except the utilities) now look like both triumphs of design and a series of efforts to block out a present made unpleasant and unworthy by democracy, the extension of rights to previously unfree groups, and the rest of modernity’s baggage. The intricacy of the construction of these spaces speak both to creative genius and meticulous attention to the details of craft, and to the lengths to which a privileged and unhappy few would go to create a counterworld deep and consistent enough to let them forget about the real one.

By stipulation of Gardner’s will, the permanent exhibitions will never change. The only change that I know of was made by the perpetrators of a heist there in 1990. Unless something drastic happens, the museum is fixed the way Isabella, Berenson, Henry Adams, and the rest of their circle wanted it, forever. This is in many respects a good thing: the museum is beautiful as it is. Combined with what I now knew about some of the animating principles of the place’s creation, this fixed quality put one word in mind the fine June day I last visited: tomb.

None of this should work to the detriment of the museum or even to Isabella Gardner. By all accounts she was a generous, free-spirited, whimsical lady (she once shocked polite Boston society by showing up at the Opera wearing a white headband on which was inscribed “Oh, those Red Sox”), who gave her home and collection to the world freely after her death. But the trip led me to think about the great creations of Henry Adams’s major phase, after the death of his wife, the time during which he became a cultural icon, and it occurred to me that all of those creations could be seen as tombs of one kind or another. In one case, a literal tomb: After his wife’s suicide, Adams commissioned his friend, the great sculptor Augustus St-Gaudens, to create what is now called either the Statue of Grief or the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C. Adams was buried by it when he died in 1918. It is still cited as a great and important piece of monument sculpture. It’s worth seeing if you have the chance.

Perhaps informing the idea I had of Adams as a builder of tombs that came to me at the Gardner museum was memory of my visit to the Adams House in Quincy, where I went one dull day last summer. Several generations of Adamses lived there, and Henry was born there, though he lived most of his life in D.C. Henry, though he had many ambiguous feelings about the house and his family’s legacy, was, along with his brothers, instrumental in getting the house designated a historical landmark, one of the first places to be so designated and protected in the country. If the Gardner museum preserves in amber a fantasy of antiquarian grace and order, the Adams House does the same for the Adams legacy, which the brothers believed to be in danger of being overrun by a century uninterested in their brand of elite leadership. If you go out there you can see, for free, the Adams’s preferred built environment, their furniture, their books, and the biological descendants of the gardens they planted. Given the beliefs that the Adams brothers (I just deleted a page and a half about Henry’s brothers, who were interesting men in their own right) about where American society, and history in general, was going, it is hard not to understand this preservationist instinct as an effort to memorialize a better way of life tragically dying, and this case, the Adamses had the chutzpah to identify that better way with themselves and their ancestors.

The most important tomb Henry Adams built was his last masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams. Here, he collapsed eulogies into still more general eulogies, like unusually lugubrious Russian dolls. The Education is a eulogy for the political power and social pull of the Adams family, defeated in Massachusetts politics by the Boston merchant and banking families; he eulogized those same interests, along with New England’s political and cultural influence, which in the course of the nineteenth century were supplanted by larger and richer powers clustered around New York and other industrial centers; he mourned for this order, too, soon to be displaced by still larger and more centralized monied powers and threatened from without by foreign competition (he had a prescient fixation on Russia and East Asia) and from within by proletarian uprising, Jews, and other supposed symptoms of decay. Upon rereading the book a few months ago, I was impressed most of all by two things: first, the nerve with which Adams managed to make the decline in political influence (which he drastically overstated, but we’ll leave that aside) of himself, his family, and his friends a metaphor for general civilizational decay AND vice-versa AND got away with it; and second, the basic rigor Adams maintained in his self-absorption. If the whole world was going down the tubes, then I suppose it makes sense to mourn the things that you once opposed along with those you hold dear, because it was all part of the larger whole that Adams believed was in the process of destruction.

Adams was prescient in writing a memorial to himself. He died, and hence gave up his personal influence on American art and literature, in 1918, just as an avant-garde dedicated to new forms of art and literature – who we could lump, somewhat problematically, into the category “modernist” – were poised to sweep to the commanding heights of American culture. The rumblings of cultural modernism existed that existed in Adams’s lifetime he either ignored or denounced in an off-handed manner. Artistic experimentation, to put it lightly, was not something he looked upon with favor. The political and social experimentation that many avant-garde figures of the 1920s and 1930s were proponents of would only compounded his difficulties, had he been alive to see them. A right-winger could do just fine in that environment, as evinced by the careers of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.L. Mencken, but even though Adams’s work was respected by people across the chasms of the cultural scene at that time, he was not the center of attention he once was.

Fast forward a few decades to the 1950s, and you get a different picture. After a world war, a depression, several red scares, disappointments for both the left and the right in America, an outbreak of mass prosperity, and a campaign on the part of the US government, including the CIA, to incorporate cultural modernism into the American side of the Cold War, most of the major American intellectuals of the day, many of whom dabbled in left-wing politics in the 1930s, decided that the political center was the place to be. It should be noted that their idea of “the center” is well to the left of what centrists hold to today: they were proponents of a welfare state and substantial governmental regulation in the economy. Here we are, back at the consensus scholars of the beginning of the lecture, at a time when they were not only at the peak of their influence, but the peak of influence for any group of American intellectuals up to that time. This was the time that the field of American Studies was developed, with the explicit intent of creating a unitary national culture to provide national coherence during the Cold War. It was out of this field that the American literary canon was first firmly established, and college students (of which there was an unprecedented amount thanks to the GI Bill) across the land learned were taught that this canon was American literature, even if some of the writers on it were not especially popular in their own times (Herman Melville is the outstanding example of this). One of these works was The Education of Henry Adams– and none of Henry Adams’s other books received anything like the same treatment.

I believe that the scholars of mid-twentieth century America picked Adams out of all of his peers, and Adams’s later work to the exclusion of his earlier work, precisely because he was a builder of tombs. These tombs served any number of pedagogical functions, and the consensus scholars were nothing if not public pedagogues. Adams’s tombs could be pointed to for vindication: look upon what happens, reader, to those who resist the current of American modernity. They could be pointed to for pathos: look at how the American elite of a bygone era fell into pessimism and bigotry. They could be pointed to with pride: look here, uppity radical or snotty European, American culture nearly fifty years

ago could produce complex literary works with as much irony and tragedy as one could want! Implicit in all of this is a sense of the broad-mindedness of the consensus scholars. Devotees of optimistic liberal progressivism, they crowned (with some ambivalence, it’s true) a deeply pessimistic anti-modern conservative. A cohort in which the first generation of Jews allowed into elite American universities in any number could discuss the work of an antisemite without prejudice. One gets the distinct impression that they would not have been as interested in the man if he were less difficult or less of a jerk; after all, many of the consensus scholars liked to play the world-weary sage at times, too. And, of course, Henry Adams was dead, his world was dead, and neither he nor they were coming back, so they were eminently safe to handle.
Who knows what Henry Adams wanted when he wrote The Education? Not his biographers, not me, probably not Adams himself, and not his midcentury interlocutors, though Lord knows they had their ideas. What I think I can speak to is this: if Adams had planned it, he could not have found an audience more ripe for co-optation into his literary scheme – the enshrining of himself and his life as a metaphor for a whole society – than the consensus scholars I read back at Marlboro. I rather suspect the old man honestly convinced himself that he did not want an audience, and that that attitude helped him acquire one. The Education is a monument not just because people took the time to enshrine it, but because of what it meant to those doing the enshrining: in a sense, it is a tomb for those who read it and took it seriously, well after Adams’s death, as evinced by the fact I need to talk to you for a half an hour to get at the beginning of what the whole thing means.

If you’re so inclined, there are numerous reasons to read Henry Adams, not least of which the work’s inherent qualities. But if there’s a reason you should take away from this lecture, it’s that any literary or intellectual phenomenon is best understood in context not just of its own times, but in its reception and the uses it is put to by future interlocutors. Left on its own, The Education is just a dressed-up complaint by an old man. Read contextually, it becomes something bigger, weirder, and in certain respects more unsettling: a look at what exactly goes into literary canonization and intellectual recognition, how it comes and how it goes. I got the most traction in thinking about Henry Adams by making odd connections and treating Adams and his interlocutors as people, with social roles, jobs, and social and personal imperatives that they had to answer to, one way or another. In short – and whether this will prove encouraging or discouraging to my audience is a question that interests me – it was another day in the office.