Sinclair Lewis, Hermann Hesse and Trump Mania

[Belligerent Savant]

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https://www.ecosophia.net/babbitt-fallacy-ways-lose/

...the novel Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Lewis recently had a second helping of fame when his brilliant satire It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about a fascist takeover of the United States in the 1930s, found a new audience again in the wake of Trump’s election. Babbitt is also a satire, but it aims in a different direction. Sinclair Lewis was a leading member of America’s intelligentsia between the wars; he was whip-smart, a university graduate at a time when that still meant something, and a habitué of avant-garde cultural circles—the kind of person, in other words, whose great-grandchildren were convinced that Hillary Clinton would surely become the next president of the United States.

George Babbitt, in turn, was Sinclair Lewis’ portrayal of his own antithesis. The main character of Babbitt, he’s a vulgar, glad-handing, back-slapping real estate salesman without a cultured bone in his body, pursuing the almighty dollar with every fiber of his being. A Republican, a Christian in that vague sense that doesn’t prevent him from committing whatever sins will make him rich, and an inhabitant of the flyover states before there were flyover states, he’s Lewis’ vision of the archetypal Trump voter, twenty-four years before Donald Trump was born.

So far, so good—but George Babbitt isn’t happy. In his heart of hearts, he knows that his life is empty and meaningless. As the novel unfolds, he makes several feeble attempts at rebellion, only to stumble back into conformity with the expectations of his peers when these fail. It falls to his son Ted to break the rules, elope with an unsuitable girl, and set out to become an engineer rather than being sucked into the same track as his father—and when crunch time comes, George encourages Ted to follow his dreams, telling him, “don’t be like me.”

It’s a great scene in a great novel, but it ultimately rings false, because Sinclair Lewis is trying to insist that in his heart of hearts, George Babbitt agrees with Sinclair Lewis about the Babbitts of the world. In Lewis’ fictive universe, there’s ultimately no room for valid differences of opinion; there’s the truth, which is of course identical to Lewis’ own values and opinions, and then there’s the malign make-believe of Babbitt and his peers, who know deep down that Lewis is right and they should all run off and become engineers or something, but persist in living their awful lives because they don’t have what it takes to act like Ted.

...

The notion that everyone really does agree with you after all, and just has to be bullied and shamed and insulted into admitting it, deserves a label. I propose to give it one: the Babbitt Fallacy. It could as well be called the Voldemort Fallacy or the Antichrist Fallacy, but those labels might encourage people on one or the other side of the political landscape to forget that the same rule applies to them, too. The Babbitt Fallacy it is, then: the notion that everyone agrees with you deep down in their heart of hearts, that no one actually has a different opinion and believes in it at least as firmly as you believe in yours. Ultimately, it’s the denial that anybody can have reasons for their beliefs except you.

There’s another work of fiction that comes to mind as I consider the Babbitt Fallacy and its alternatives, an old favorite of mine that had quite a burst of popularity at once point and then got shoved into our culture’s memory hole as its implications sank in. The novel in question is Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.

Hesse’s tale is set right around the same time as Babbitt, in Germany rather than America, and the main character, Harry Haller, is basically the Antibabbit. He’s what Sinclair Lewis and his contemporary equivalents would think of as one of the Good People: a sensitive, cultured writer who’s rebelled against the lowbrow middle-class culture of his upbringing, and likes to imagine himself as a wolf on the steppes, estranged from the human world. He’s also miserably unhappy and kind of a jerk. He’s a jerk in an excellent cause—as Hesse himself did, he tries to oppose the movement toward a renewed militarism that ended up leading Germany into Hitler’s clutches—but he’s still a jerk, and one of the consequences is that he alienates an old friend who might otherwise have been sympathetic to his ideas.

So he ends up in a bar, afraid to go home because he knows that when he gets there he’ll probably cut his own throat—and a chance encounter with a younger woman plunges him into a face-first encounter with the realities he’s shut out of his life. He comes to terms with his dependence on his lowbrow middle-class origins; he comes to terms with the lowbrow pop culture he’s convinced himself he despises; he comes to terms with the whole dizzying reality of a world in which many different values and viewpoints and tastes exist. He doesn’t give up his own values and viewpoints and tastes, but he recognizes that they’re his and not everyone’s.

There’s a lot more to Steppenwolf than that; among other things, though it never breathes a word about Carl Jung or Jung’s theories, it’s probably the best introduction to Jungian psychology I’ve ever read. (Jung and Hesse were good friends.) It’s also simply a really good read, if you can handle a bit of surrealism in your fiction. (You should be able to do this, dear reader, given the amount of it that features these days on the evening news.) Still, it’s particularly relevant here, because its portrayal of the way that an intelligent person can get stuck in a self-defeating dead end, and then get popped out of it. That’s something a lot of us can stand to learn just now.

Ironically, when Steppenwolf had its fifteen minutes of fame in English translation, critics tended to describe it as a searing, bitter satire on the futility and emptiness of modern life—that is to say, as though it were Babbitt. I’m pretty sure that this was because the critics in question realized what Hesse was saying, and ran like Babbitts back to their familiar clichés. Hesse found all this baffling; in the introduction to the copy I have, a battered 1970s paperback with pleasantly lurid cover art, he points out that Steppenwolf is ultimately an optimistic book, a book about healing, and ultimately a book about spirituality. And of course that’s just it: Hesse is talking about ways out of the suffocating insistence that there’s only one way to understand the world, and that’s a very frightening thing…

…especially when your one way to understand the world doesn’t work any more.

That’s the deeper dimension, or one of the deeper dimensions, underlying the pervasiveness of the Babbitt Fallacy in contemporary life in the industrial world. None of the ways by which we’re taught to make sense of the world still live up to their billing. The grand liberal faith in a future of limitless betterment, in which economic abundance and moral improvement would someday turn the world into Utopia, has shattered on the rocks of reality. Its equivalent on the other end of the spectrum, the conservative faith in the enduring wisdom of traditional social arrangements, was quietly strangled by its supposed friends a long time ago, and functions now the way Lenin’s corpse functioned in the late and unlamented Soviet Union, as the mummified icon of an ideology long since replaced by straightforward kleptocratic mania.

Neither liberalism as currently practiced, nor conservatism as currently practiced, have answers for the spiraling questions of the present day. Neither, for that matter, do their self-consciously avant-garde offshoots, social-justice faux-liberalism or alt-right pseudoconservatism; nor does what passes for a moderate stance these days, which usually amounts to blind commitment to business as usual at a time when business as usual has definitively passed its pull date. Since these are the only socially acceptable viewpoints just now, in turn, those who hold them are stuck in a quandary at least as savage as the one that had Harry Haller sitting in that bar, desperately looking for reasons not to go home and cut his throat. It’s no wonder that so many of them react with such frenzy to the suggestion that someone else might have a different view of things.

[Jerky]

Whoever wrote this (admittedly well written and thought provoking) look at Babbitt seems to forget that MINDSETS EVOLVE. The idea that nobody ever, in the recent past, wanted their kids to "do more" than them, to, in some ways "not be like" them, is laughable to me, as having experienced it my own self in my life. My father didn't want me to bang around building other people's homes and paving other people's streets and installing other people's sewer pipes for them. He wanted me to live the life of the mind. And he reveled in what little successes I was able to achieve. Now, nearly a decade after his death and a little more hardship and heartache under my belt, I can't definitively say whether he was right or wrong. But I CAN say that he was a conservative in his own way, and it was in a way that vibrates and rhymes with Babbitt. The fact that there are more insulated, blinkered idiots around now, fueled almost exclusively by spite, should be obvious.

J.

[Elvis]

I meant to post this recent Harper's piece anyway, and Belligerent Savage has given the perfect opportunity with this thread, given its similar, important theme:

From the February 2018 issue
Worlds Apart

By T. M. Luhrmann

In March 1997, the bodies of thirty-nine people were discovered in a mansion outside San Diego. They were found lying in bunk beds, wearing identical black shirts and sweatpants. Their faces were covered with squares of purple cloth, and each of their pockets held exactly five dollars and seventy-five cents.

The police determined that the deceased were members of Heaven’s Gate, a local cult, and that they had intentionally overdosed on barbiturates. Marshall Applewhite, the group’s leader, had believed that there was a UFO trailing in the wake of Comet Hale-Bopp, which was visible in the sky over California that year. He and his followers took the pills, mixing them with applesauce and washing them down with vodka, in order to beam up to the spacecraft and enter the “evolutionary level above human.”

In the aftermath of the mass suicide, one question was asked again and again: How could so many people have believed something so obviously wrong?

I am an anthropologist of religion. I did my first stint of fieldwork with middle-class Londoners who identified as witches, druids, and initiates of the Western Mysteries. My next project was in Mumbai, India, where Zoroastrianism was experiencing a resurgence. Later, I spent four years with charismatic evangelical Christians in Chicago and San Francisco, observing how they developed an “intimate relationship” with an invisible God. Along the way, I studied newly Orthodox Jews, social-justice Catholics, Anglo-Cuban Santeria devotees, and, briefly, a group in southern California that worshipped a US-born guru named Kalindi.

Most of these people would describe themselves as believers. Many of the evangelicals would say that they believe in God without doubt. But even the most devout do not behave as if God’s reality is the same as the obdurate thereness of rocks and trees. They will tell you that God is capable of anything, aware of everything, and always on their side. But no one prays that God will write their term paper or replace a leaky pipe.

Instead, what their actions suggest is that maintaining a sense of God’s realness is hard. Evangelicals talk constantly about what bad Christians they are. They say that they go to church and resolve to be Christlike and then yell at their kids on the way home. The Bible may assert vigorously the reality of a mighty God, but psalm after psalm laments his absence. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Beliefs are not passively held; they are actively constructed. Even when people believe in God, he must be made real for them again and again. They must be convinced that there is an invisible other who cares for them and whose actions affect their lives.

This is more likely to happen for someone who can vividly imagine that invisible other. In the late 1970s, Robert Silvey, an audience researcher at the BBC, started using the word “paracosm” to describe the private worlds that children create, like the North Pacific island of Gondal that Emily and Anne Brontë dreamed up when they were girls. But paracosms are not unique to children. Besotted J.R.R. Tolkien fans, for example, have a similar relationship with Middle-earth. What defines a paracosm is its specificity of detail: it is the smell of the rabbit cooked in the shadow of the dark tower or the unease the hobbits feel on the high platforms at Lothlórien. In returning again and again to the books, a reader creates a history with this enchanted world that can become as layered as her memory of middle school.

God becomes more real for people who turn their faith into a paracosm. The institution provides the stories — the wounds of Christ on the cross, the serpent in the Garden of Eden — and some followers begin to live within them. These narratives can grip the imagination so fiercely that the world just seems less good without them.

During my fieldwork, I saw that people could train themselves to feel God’s presence. They anchored God to their minds and bodies so that everyday experiences became evidence of his realness. They got goose bumps in the presence of the Holy Spirit, or sensed Demeter when a chill ran up their spine. When an idea popped into their minds, it was God speaking, not a stray thought of their own. Some people told me that they came to recognize God’s voice the way they recognized their mother’s voice on the phone. As God became more responsive, the biblical narratives seemed less like fairy tales and more like stories they’d heard from a friend, or even memories of their own.

Faith is the process of creating an inner world and making it real through constant effort. But most believers are able to hold the faith world — the world as it should be — in tension with the world as it is. When the engine fails, Christians might pray to God for a miracle, but most also call a mechanic.

Being socially isolated can compromise one’s ability to distinguish his or her paracosm from the everyday world. Members of Heaven’s Gate never left their houses alone. They wore uniforms and rejected signs of individuality. Some of them even underwent castration in order to avoid romantic attachments. When group members cannot interact with outsiders, they are less likely to think independently. Especially if there is an autocratic leader, there is less opportunity for dissent, and the group becomes dependent on his or her moral authority. Slowly, a view of the world that seems askew to others can settle into place.

When we argue about politics, we may think we are arguing over facts and propositions. But in many ways we argue because we live in different paracosmic worlds, facilitated these days by the intensely detailed imaginings of talk radio and cable news. For some of us, that world is the desperate future of the near at hand. If abortion is made illegal, abortions will happen anyway, and women will die because they used clothes hangers to scrape out their insides. Others live in a paracosm of a distant future of the world as it should be, where affirmative action is unnecessary because people who work hard can succeed regardless of where they started.

Recently, the dominant political narratives in America have moved so far apart that each is unreadable to the other side. But we know that the first step in loosening the grip of an extreme culture is developing a relationship with someone who interprets the world differently. In 2012, for example, a woman named Megan Phelps-Roper left the Westboro Baptist Church, a hard-line Christian group that pickets the funerals of queer people, after she became friendly with a few of her critics on Twitter. If the presence of people with whom we disagree helps us to maintain common sense, then perhaps the first step to easing the polarization that grips this country is to seek those people out. That’s the anthropological way.


https://harpers.org/archive/2018/02/the ... -others/2/

https://www.ecosophia.net/babbitt-fallacy-ways-lose/

...the novel Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Lewis recently had a second helping of fame when his brilliant satire It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about a fascist takeover of the United States in the 1930s, found a new audience again in the wake of Trump’s election. Babbitt is also a satire, but it aims in a different direction. Sinclair Lewis was a leading member of America’s intelligentsia between the wars; he was whip-smart, a university graduate at a time when that still meant something, and a habitué of avant-garde cultural circles—the kind of person, in other words, whose great-grandchildren were convinced that Hillary Clinton would surely become the next president of the United States.

[Belligerent Savant]

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Thoughtful posts, by both of you. Good complimentary piece, Elvis --- similar in tone/spirit as the OP.

Jerky: I can relate, having lost my father almost 3 years ago. He came to this country after he married, an engineer who worked here as a tool and die maker, designing and building custom/bespoke tools upon request. Although he was 'old school' in many respects, keeping much of the traditions of his country of birth, he also maintained a strong sense of pride for this country and all he was able to achieve throghout his life here -- a prospect likely to be (and already is) more challenging for my (and future) generation(s).
He never quite understood what I did -- it's not an easy one word descriptor (like cop; pilot; plumber; electrician; engineer), but was proud of my accomplishments even if he never quite verbalized them.