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>> Lecturer: All right, let's get started.
I want to thank those of you who were able to come during
for the last session for coming.
It would have been a little odd to be here
and talking just to the chairs.
And not only that, everyone who was here had good things to say.
So I'm very grateful for you for making the time.
Those of you who had a conflict or weren't able to attend,
we are going to try to do something for you.
As you know, the class is being taped, and so we're going
to attempt to stream it
from Blackboard sometime later this week
for ten days or two weeks.
So those of you who weren't able to see it will probably be able
to see it if you wish.
Personally, I think since I said it was about Edwards
and he was a crucial figure for the course
and he tied together the first part of the course
and the second part of the course, I'd watch it.
But in any case, we'll let you know
as soon as that's available.
And it will be for a limited time only.
So you should strike while the iron is hot, as it were.
Okay, so I'll let you know about that later on in the week
as soon as we sort out the tech things.
Okay, I wanted to remind us we're talking
about the Enlightenment.
If it's 2:00 o'clock, this must be the Enlightenment.
Now we're back in the Enlightenment.
And these are some of the things we laid
out as principles of the Enlightenment.
During the last hour, I was talking about Edwards
as somebody who's caught on the cusp of the Enlightenment.
He's trying to preserve the principles
of old-time Calvinism, but he's very drawn to the kind
of new intellectual technology I said that Locke is using --
John Locke -- and thinking about empirical philosophy
and the importance of reason.
Edwards is trying to understand the appeal of that.
He's trying to figure out a way to harness its power
without giving up everything
that he believes is important in religious terms.
So some of the doctrines that come along
with the Enlightenment, which seem to be antithetical
to any kind of Calvinism, starting with that top one --
the natural goodness of human beings, right?
At the end of the hour before we looked at that sermon,
"Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,"
which basically is making absolutely the counter argument:
human beings are naturally good or if they were, they weren't
for very long after the fall.
Everyone is damned to hell and is only hanging
by a slender thread with flames licking up all around it.
It's only by God's sufferance
that you don't drop into hell right now.
And who knows?
You fall asleep, you may not wake up in a good place.
Perfection is the idea.
The Enlightenment believes in the perfectibility
of the human race and in part is
because they say human beings have souls,
they have divine reason, God gave us a lot
of good stuff and we should use it.
And as a result of that, if we all have some of God in us,
the logic would go, we should all be equal.
We're equal before the law.
We have the right to liberty.
There should be various things that would flow from that,
the ideas of toleration brotherhood,
and an emphasis on progress.
Human beings' ability to make progress by applying reason
and therefore an emphasis on science.
All of these things get associated with this guy,
with Benjamin Franklin, who is often is pointed
to as the absolute embodiment of Enlightenment principles
in the Early National Period.
And something I said last time, we really ought to remember
that this country is founded in a moment
of enlightenment, of the Enlightenment.
It comes out of the Enlightenment,
as I think we will see a little bit maybe toward the end
of hour, there are some downsides to that as well.
These are the good things that are supposed
to come with enlightenment.
There are some less good things.
Toni Morrison refers to the Enlightenment as the "age
of scientific racism," for example.
And that's only one of the things we'll talk about,
in which there may be some limitations
to Enlightenment thought.
And that will become important to some of the writers
that we're talking about.
Franklin mostly lives in the light side of the Enlightenment,
or at least presents himself that way.
But again, I want to stress that he
and Edwards are almost exact contemporaries.
Edwards would be a senior and Franklin would be a freshman
if they were in college together.
But basically once you get out of college,
such differences make not so much difference.
So they're really contemporaries.
Edwards dies young as a result of failed smallpox inoculation
or an inoculation that caused him to get it and die of it.
Franklin lives a long life,
and his life basically spans the 18th century.
So they both are men who are caught in, you might say,
the interplay of larger cultural forces.
And I suggested in the last hour and will suggest again
that now I'll say the pairing
of these two thinkers is really an excellent way
of understanding the interplay of dominant, residual,
and emergent cultures.
There was a dominant consensus
in the religious intellectual life of the Americas
in the north, in and around Massachusetts, Boston,
even down toward New York, and beyond.
Which oriented itself around Calvinism --
that's the story of the Puritan origins of the American self.
Edwards wants to preserve that.
He comes from a very orthodox family.
He's even more orthodox than his grandfather, who was a preacher.
And he's trying to figure out a way to diffuse the threat
that the Enlightenment poses, although you've got
to imagine given the way in he writes and the way he's
so clearly drawn to the principles of the Enlightenment
and to what almost looked to us like proto-Romantic aesthetics.
You got to imagine that he's thinking that this is a kind
of inevitability to the triumph of Enlightenment thought,
this kind of thinking that will place human beings at the center
of what matters, rather than spiritual life or God.
The drama of the West becomes the drama
of the individual consciousness, rather than man's
and woman's relation to God.
Franklin's got a different way
of mixing these things into a balance.
He's interested -- drawn to -- the principles of Enlightenment.
But he understands that what is becoming residual,
the principles of Calvinism and religion,
still exert a powerful force.
So he wants to find a way to diffuse those,
appropriate those, channel the energies
that might be associated with those towards
of the direction of Enlightenment.
There was a moment in the letter to Benjamin Coleman,
the letter that Edwards writes to another minister,
describing the revivals in North Hampton that indicates something
of the way in the religion.
He talks about this period of revival and says
that in some sense, "people
in other towns kind of ridiculed us."
And so before there was a big period of revival afterwards.
And so you see that there's a sense
in which the Enlightenment is starting
to give sway to something else.
So as we think about Franklin, I want us to --
and as you look at his prose,
I want you to ask yourself these questions:
In what ways does Franklin show himself in the way
that he writes to be a man of the Enlightenment?
If the two of them are contemporaries,
roughly speaking, what is it that he shares with Edwards?
What strategies
of representation even might he share with Edwards?
But then also, how is he different?
And I think we would want to locate the difference in his
at attitudes towards Christian religion.
There's a certain way which in which for Franklin the use
of Christianity is not deeply felt,
but is almost a rhetorical engagement.
He needs to show himself
in certain moments to perform religion.
At one point that we'll look at he talks about the importance
of appearance even more so than reality.
So there's a certain way in which he has
to give a religious performance.
But how does he make use of that?
We'll look at some particular lines from the autobiography
that show us the way in which he actually attempts,
through language, destabilize a religious consensus.
And then one of the abiding themes we've had has been the
relationship between the individual and community
or society, and the individual and God.
And we might think about "individualism" as a word
that is not even coined yet.
Individualism [inaudible] Europe right in around the time
of the end of Franklin's life.
We'll talk about this again later on.
But it doesn't even get used by Emerson --
Emerson, who's supposed to be the great prophet
of American Individualism doesn't have the term to use.
He talks about self-reliance.
It's only later after that famous essay is published
that it's in enough currency that he actually refers to it
in a piece called "New England Reformers."
It comes into the American parlance probably
through the translation of de Tocqueville's Democracy
in America, where the translator has
to apologize for it.
He says it's an ugly word, but we don't have another word
that expresses exactly that idea.
So individualism is a new idea
and it accompanies the Enlightenment.
Again, that shifting the drama of the West, if we could put it
in those terms, onto the individual away from God
or the church or other larger communal forms.
So remember the balance that Winthrop was trying to strike.
He understands that there are energies
that we later called individualism,
energies around the individual, and economic imperatives,
and the desire to have certain kind of material prosperity,
economic opportunity, as well religious freedom.
He tries to harness those,
to subordinate those to a community.
And remember, we talked about the ways in which the symbol
that he chooses, "The City
on the Hill" eventually gets recycled later
on by Ronald Reagan and the meanings, the relationship
between the individual and the community, are flipped around.
You can't control how your symbols are going
to work later on in culture.
And that's one of the things that happened.
Reagan reverses that attitude towards individual.
Where does Reagan get it?
A lot of it has roots in Franklinian thought,
Franklin's idea about prosperity.
And so I'll try to get at some of those.
So we and to think about the ways in which, you might say
as one sign of the change from Calvinist modes of thinking
to Enlightenment modes of thinking, we can locate a set
of attitudes about the place that the individual holds,
whether individualism itself as a kind
of new idea is something that's being denigrated or celebrated.
All right.
There's a way in which we might think
of Franklin's autobiography as a secular version
of a very famous text in early America,
which is John Bunyan's Pilgrims' Progress,
his allegory.
Pilgrim's Progress.
This is from the ninth edition.
That's actually Bunyan himself figured as the sleeper.
Some people often mistake this for a medieval text.
It's not a medieval text.
It's a 17th century text that draws
on the medieval trope of the dream vision.
So it starts off as a dream vision --
I think I brought some, yeah.
"As I walked through the wilderness of this world,
I lighted on a certain place where was a den , and I laid me
down in that place to sleep: and,
as I slept, I dreamed a dream.
I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags,
standing in a certain place, with his face
from his own house, a book in his hand,
and a great burden upon his back."
And all of the biblical citations.
Should remind you of Wigglesworth or even Winthrop.
"I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and,
as he read, he wept, and trembled; and,
not being able longer to contain,
he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?"
And of course as this goes on, this guy, the dreamer,
the guy that he sees turns out to be the protagonist
of this Pilgrim's Progress.
His name is Christian, with a capital "C."
Anybody have a sense of what the great burden
on his back might be?
What's the name of the backpack?
That would be sin, the burden of sin on your back.
He's probably reading the Bible and looking at it and thinking,
"Not good, not good, not good.
What am I going to do to be saved?"
And he meets another guy who has a name that begins
with a capital "E," Evangelist.
And Evangelist says go out into the world
and go seek the celestial city, which he does.
And along the way to the celestial city --
we'll talk about this more when we get to Hawthorne --
it's one of the most famous allegories
in the English language and he meets all these people.
They have various names like "Help" or "Despair"
or "Sloth" and "Anger."
And he meets all these people.
And then eventually it's an allegory of the Christian life.
It's really a sermon by other means.
This, however, is a kind of precursor for Franklin.
This book, Pilgrim's Progress was in almost every household
in New England by the time that Franklin is writing.
And so there's a certain way in which his whole career,
and particularly the autobiography,
is designed to resonate with this, to provide almost a kind
of secular version of Bunyan's prose allegory,
Pilgrim's Progress.
Pilgrim makes a difficult journey.
He has doubts, he's propped up, he has help, he finally makes it
to the celestial city.
Franklin also is recounting for us a progress, his own progress.
But I think you would see, if you compare the two texts,
not only are they very stylistically different,
there's a way in which Franklin's writing is not an
allegory per se.
But I want you to understand
that it has some affinities with allegory.
If an allegory comes from Greek words that mean "that
which speaks other than openly," remember how allegory works.
I mean, it's the story of a guy named Christian who's looking
for the celestial city.
So you can read it as kind of an adventure story,
but really what it is is a sermon about the progress
of the Christian life.
So the characters map onto ideas and values.
Franklin isn't doing that, but he does present himself
as a representative person.
So he's writing an autobiography.
And you think about why it is that you write autobiographies.
And in the pattern of autobiography
in the West perhaps comes from before this back
to maybe St. Augustine.
So when you read Augustine's autobiography,
his conversion narrative,
you'd say that in some sense sets the pattern
for autobiographical writing in the West.
And therefore, an autobiography is going to be a form
of conversion narrative.
Now, it doesn't mean you have
to have a religious conversion necessarily
and Franklin actually doesn't.
It does mean that at least one act
of conversion has to take place.
You have to go from being -- you have to turn into author self
and you have to re-render yourself as character self.
So you have to have that conversion
from where you're living your story
to being able to talk about it.
When you talk about it, you have
to recreate yourself as a character.
And I think you can see that Franklin very consciously does
that in the course of it.
So it does have affinities with a kind of spiritual tradition.
It does have affinities with the idea
of the representative nature of autobiography.
I'm telling you this why?
Well, why did Mary Rowlandson tell her story?
So that you could learn something from it.
Although you might say what Franklin would have you learn
from his life is very different
than what Rowlandson would have you learn.
Or if you want to think about it in a slightly different way,
you might say that Franklin's entire autobiography picks
up on something that we thought of as a kind of subtext --
an almost elicit subtext in Rowlandson's narrative.
You remember we talked about the way in which the natives start
to have names and almost personalities once she figures
out she can barter with them.
Once they become economic agents, once she can engage
in relations of contract with them, all of a sudden,
they become people -- briefly, and then of course
when she's [inaudible], shuts down and she has to go back
to the doctrinaire of explanations of the things.
So Franklin understands the power
of economy to make a person.
And that's one of the things that animates his autobiography.
So Franklin's autobiography is a kind of Pilgrim's Progress,
but what it really is is a kind of [inaudible] perfectionism,
the idea of being able to perfect yourself.
And he goes, he tells you what programs that he has
in the first couple of books
of the autobiography that he has for this.
But really, there's almost a kind of process of trial
and error through which he engages in this perfectionism.
Now, to give you a sense of the way his autobiography works,
I want you to take a look at one little passage here.
This is on the bottom of page 509,
part one of the autobiography.
Now you'll notice that --
I mean, he uses many of the same kind of devices
that we would see in Taylor and Edwards, even in Bunyan.
This isn't a really good paragraph for that.
But the use of capital letters to highlight words is something
that Franklin also is making use of.
But he doesn't have the same kind
of religious investment in them.
Bottom of 509: "I grew convinced that truth, sincerity,
and integrity" -- and don't ask me why they're capitalized
and italicized.
I don't know.
Super-important.
"Truth, sincerity, and integrity."
It sounds like the Superman motto.
"In dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance
to the felicity of life.
And I formed written resolutions which still remain
in my journal book to practice them ever while I live."
And here's a sentence I want you to pay attention to:
"Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such."
Okay, so we're talking about what I said with Locke,
that revelation is one way the getting the truth.
Franklin downgrades it.
"Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such,
but I entertained an opinion" --
putting himself front and center --
"that those certain actions might not be bad
because they were forbidden by it or good
because it commanded them" -- revelation, that is --
"yet probably those actions might be forbidden
because they were bad for us or commanded
because they were beneficial to us
in their own natures all the circumstances
of things considered."
Now again, if you read this in tandem with "Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God" you'll see
that that sermon is making the opposite case.
It's "God's sovereignty, God's sovereignty,
God's sovereignty, stupid.
Only God's sovereignty."
God can will whatever He wants and that's the way it is.
That would be the same line of argument that would say,
"actually there's nothing particular about the truth,
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
God just picked that one."
It could have been some other tree, a tree of the knowledge
of 3D special effects that you weren't allowed to do.
But no, he picked that one.
Other people like Franklin would say, "No, I don't think so.
I think there was something special about good and evil,
and that in fact, there's a reason
for it being that particular one."
So it depends on how far you want
to push the God's sovereignty argument.
Franklin wants to undo that argument.
So revelation has no weight with him as such.
But he's not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Again, you might say he sees
that if something has a long-standing tradition,
it may have started out as "Fiat: Revelation do it
because we say so" or it says so,
or he says so, or whatever says so.
He said, "But maybe there actually is some good common
sense behind that."
So he first destabilizes the authority of revelation,
and then look what he does here.
He says, "And this persuasion, with the kind hand
of Providence, or some guardian angel,
or accidental favorable circumstances and situations
or all together preserve me through this dangerous time
of youth and the hazardous situations I was sometimes
in among strangers, remote from the eye in advice from my father
without any willful gross immorality or injustice
that might have been expected from my want of religion.
I say willful because the circumstances I have mentioned
had something of necessity in them from my youth, inexperience
and the knavery of others.
I had therefore a tolerable character
to begin the world with; I valued it properly,
and determined to preserve it."
I want you to look at that sentence.
"This persuasion with the kind hand of Providence,
or some guardian angel,
or accidental favorable circumstances
in situations are all together preserved me
without any willful gross immorality or injustice
that might be expected from my want of religion."
So what is it that preserves him from the
"willful gross immorality that might have been expected"
from his want of religion?
What does he say preserves him?
>> Persuasion.
>> Lecturer: What's that?
>> Persuasion.
>> Lecturer: Well, the persuasion that he has is
from the previous sentence.
It's the idea that revelation --
he's persuaded that his opinion is the same thing.
His idea that revelation didn't have any weight,
but it might have some beneficial --
if you think about what it's telling you to do,
maybe it is a good reason it's telling it.
It's kind of like when your mom says, "Because I said so,"
but actually she probably has your best interest at heart.
So you think, "Okay, Mom really is being kind of a pain,
but nevertheless she's probably got my best interest at heart
and there's a good reason for this."
Not always, but sometimes.
I'm just asking you to repeat what he says, and then I'm going
to ask you to think about how he says what he says.
So what does he say?
It's like multiple choice.
Yeah?
>> [Inaudible] Providence and guardian angels, that kind of --
>> Lecturer: Okay.
And the third thing?
>> Favorable circumstances.
>> Lecturer: What kind of favorable circumstances?
>> Oh -- accidental.
[Inaudible] circumstances.
>> Lecturer: And what's choice D?
We love choice D, right?
It's all of the above.
Okay. Now if you are this guy,
what are you going to say about that?
>> That it's only got Providence
that would be guiding you through life.
>> Lecturer: Exactly.
It's only going to be God's Providence that's guiding you
through life.
What do you need the other two things for?
Or the other three choices?
Just God's Providence, right?
That's how he would write that sentence.
"The kind hand of Providence preserve me
without any willful gross immorality or injustice."
End of story.
What's the effect of adding the other two things,
even if we want to include the third choice, the three things?
Yeah?
>> [ Inaudible ]
>> Lecturer: Is it individualistic?
What does he actually say?
I mean, where's the agency in there?
So if you're saying it's individualistic, it's like,
"yes, you make your own luck."
He doesn't quite say that, although he says it
in other places, but he doesn't quite say that here.
No. He says "Providence, or some guardian angel,
or accidental favorable circumstances and situations."
Now, how compatible is
"accidental favorable circumstances and situations"
with the idea of Providence?
>> Is he saying fate as opposed to Providence?
>> Lecturer: I don't know, did he say fate?
>> I don't know.
>> Lecturer: "Accidental" means what?
>> Not because of Providence.
>> Lecturer: Not because of Providence.
Accidental means not by intention, not planned.
Providence means it's all planned, all intention.
He's gone.
He has a triptych of three phrases, and the first
and the third are absolutely opposite to one another
and shouldn't be in the same sentence together --
not if you had any strong conviction
about the first thing.
How does he get to it syntactically?
He puts in a middle term,
which is somewhat compatible with Providence.
"Providence or guardian angel."
Now think about that.
My guardian angel.
Angel, okay that's good.
We're down with angel and the Providence thing, that's good.
But my guardian angel?
What's that?
>> That's individualistic.
>> Lecturer: That's sort of individualistic in so far
as you might say, "Okay,
you have a particular guardian angel looking over you," but --
so there are actions the guardian angel is
protecting you.
Think about It's a Wonderful Life.
Clarence comes down, has to make this guy not commit suicide.
Yes. But think about that: that's already
in this moment something from pop culture.
I mean, it's not religion reference to talk
about a guardian angel in that way.
But it's compatible with Providence.
So you go from Providence, you slide over to guardian angel,
and then from guardian angel it's just a hop skip and a jump
to "or accidental favorable circumstances."
So we've moved very quickly from Providence
or not Providence at all.
And to say "or all of the above."
See what he's done, he's given something for everybody
in a kind of common sense, low style that you find it hard
to disagree with and then he says, "or whatever."
But the effect of that "or whatever" is
to radically undermine the first term.
So there's a sense in which you can see in this passage all
of Franklin's technique: he kowtows to religious belief;
he attempts to be compatible with it; but by the end,
in this case it's through simple syntax and the creation
of association he has completely undone the reasoning underneath
it, right?
To say "Providence or this or that"
as if all things were equal means
that somehow Providence is just as culturally weighty
or as religiously weighty
as accidental favorable circumstances?
Not what Edwards would do.
So I want you to see
that Franklin is actually a very careful stylist.
This autobiography is a rhetorical performance.
And he knows he is performing for us.
And I think that's one of the things
that we want to bear in mind.
In terms of Franklin's own religious beliefs, he is,
you might say the religious equivalent
of someone like John Locke.
The kind of belief that he has is usually identified
with what's called "deism" --
I don't think I brought it today --
which is basically a belief in God but established by reason
and by evidence, most notably the evidence is usually the
argument according to design, that there are too many things
about the world that seem to be designed for there not
to have been a maker, but not on the basis
of any special information, not on the basis of revelation.
The revealed religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
they all are based on a scripture that's revealed
from God to a prophet.
He doesn't believe in the efficacy or the importance
of revelation, but he does believe there's a God
and he believes you can see the workings of God
out there in the world.
Deism is that broad position;
it has lots of different philosophical forms.
It's almost always rationalistic you could say.
It depends on the use of reason, but it can veer very close
to atheism to think there's a kind
of weak principle of -- I don't know.
If you believed in The Force as opposed to God,
you'd probably be very close to one of the positions that's
out there that was called deist.
The archetypal deist is probably Voltaire.
Voltaire believed that God's evidence could, in fact,
be proved by arguments about cosmology
and the design of the universe.
But he didn't believe in the idea of Providence.
So in this he squares with.
There's no plan, but there seems to be a kinds of design
and you can see it in what Voltaire would have called
"natural religion."
And as a result of that, Voltaire was very committed
to a lot of these principles here: toleration,
brotherhood, progress, equality.
He thought that religious impulses were served best
if they were directed towards that.
So that's where Franklin -- Franklin is a deist,
and you can see it even in that little passage,
the way in which he is destabilizing the idea
of revelation.
Now he's also a printer, right?
So you have to understand that in comparison
to Thomas Jefferson, whom I'm praying we're going to get to,
Thomas Jefferson was an aristocrat
or the closest thing we had to it in the Early National Period.
I mean, he came a wealthy family,
he was a gentleman farmer,
college was his birthright just like John Adams, too.
They were patricians.
Not Franklin.
Franklin had humble origins, although you can see
at the beginning of the autobiography is --
and this will become important to us later on --
it's addressed to his son.
It's about the importance
of those humble origins as a kind of pattern.
So at the very beginning, this is on page 473,
he talks about the way in which he has "emerged from poverty
and obscurity in which I was born and bred."
But he celebrates that because by the time he's writing this,
he's a celebrity -- a diplomat, a man of science,
a member of the Royal Academy.
He's the ultimate self-made man and seen as that.
So it's a story about material success, paving the way
for other kinds of success.
And yet he can point to his family.
His family is a little bit obscure, but it's still there
for him, not always in ways that he likes, but it's there.
This will be for us contrasted to experience
of Frederick Douglass,
who in some sense out-Franklins Franklin
because he can't even point to origins as humble as these.
So Franklin in some sense bears out the kind of argument
that Jefferson makes about merit.
Remember this quote from last week?
"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles
on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready
to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.
These are grounds of hopes for others."
Franklin's autobiography was also meant
to be the ground of hope for others.
It showed you that you could take humble origins
and transform them into something that's far from humble
because the early republic was going to be based primarily
on the concept of merit.
So a lot of people who were poor took heart
from reading Franklin's stuff.
And he writes explicitly about the idea of achieving wealth.
There's one pamphlet that's given to you in the Norton,
which is called The Way to Wealth.
Let's take a look at it.
It's on 451.
It's a preface to one --
it's separate but it's published 1757.
It's a very successful thing.
It's kind of addendum to his Poor Richard's Almanac
in which Franklin adopts the persona of an elderly minister,
Poor Richard, and then produces this stuff.
This is widely translated.
By the end of the century, by the end of Franklin's life,
it's been translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish,
Greek, Chinese, Hungarian, Russian,
Welsh, Gaelic, and Catalan.
And there are ten printings in Italian alone.
So a lot of people are reading this.
It's about 100 maxims or so delivered
by this elderly speaker named Father Abraham.
It resembles a sermon.
So I want you to see if you look at this, you will see
that there are ways in which he is drawing on the sermonic form.
And yet, he's giving a rather anti-Calvinist lesson.
For example, what would John Winthrop or Jonathan Edwards say
about this on the bottom of 453?
He's talking about maxims.
"And again, the eye of master will do more work
than both his hands; and again, want of care does us more damage
than want of knowledge; and again, not to oversee workmen is
to leave them your purse open."
And then he says this, "Trusting too much
to others' care is the ruin of many; for,
as the Almanac says, in the affairs
of this world men are saved, not by faith,
but by the want of it."
I mean, think about that.
That's an even more open and slightly jokey way of talking
about his difference from Calvinism.
"Men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it."
I mean, it's a pun on faith.
We're not talking about divine faith; we're talking about faith
in other human beings.
But even then, compare that sentiment to John Winthrop
at the end of A Model of Christian Charity,
"We must be knit together in this work as one,
make others' cares our own," right?
That vision of community?
Not so much for Franklin.
Or how about this one?
Bottom of 452.
"Industry need not wish, as poor Richard says,
that he that lives upon hope will die fasting.
There are no gains without pains; then help hands
for I have no lands, or if I have, they are smartly taxed."
I mean, it's kind of witty common sensical joking thing.
He's trying to write prose that will get you to agree,
even though he's giving you a kind of mock sermon
that in many senses is turning a lot
of well-received religious wisdom on its head.
Or this one: "God helps them that help themselves."
Famous maxim.
Some of you who have been in one
of my conwest courses might remember a piece
by the environmentalist and Christian, Bill McKibben,
who talks about the fate
of Bible religion in the United States.
And it's called the Christian paradox.
And it asks why the United States is
by profession the most Christian nation in the world,
so how come it's the least among the least Christian
by its actions, if you look at things like giving to charity,
and providing healthcare, and doing all these other things.
And he starts the article by asking --
I think he cites a poll in which people are asked:
Is this in the Bible?
And the majority say yes.
It's not. It's from Franklin.
So that has a larger point.
I mean, again you think about what happens
in culture, something like this.
Franklin makes use of the sermonic form.
He gives you this maxim,
which is really fairly anti-Christian in a sense.
And it somehow becomes associated
with mainstream Christianity in the United States.
I guess be careful what you wish for.
I don't know, maybe Franklin would actually say
that was a poison pill that will bear fruit later on.
In any case, this is an example of the way
in which Franklin is using the sermonic form for these kinds
of -- to basically produce a set of meanings that are other
than -- strictly speaking -- Calvinist.
All right, let's take a look at couple of other things
because I want to show you just some key moments in this,
so that you can understand how it works as a whole.
I talked a little bit about it as a rhetorical performance.
And he actually does talk about performance here.
Take a look at the middle of 515.
So okay, so he's had to apprentice himself,
but he manages to get out of his apprenticeship
and he eventually opens a stationer's shop.
He says here, "I had in it blanks of all sorts,
the correctest that ever appeared among us,
being assisted in that by my friend Breintnal.
I had also paper, parchment, etc. I now began gradually
to pay off the debt I was under for the printing-house.
In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman,
I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal,
but to avoid all appearances of the contrary.
I dressed plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion.
I never went out a fishing or shooting; a book, indeed,
sometimes debauched me from my work, but that was seldom, snug,
and gave no scandal; and, to show that I was not
above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I
purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow.
Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man,
and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants
who imported stationery solicited my custom;
others proposed supplying me with books,
and I went on swimmingly."
Look at the prose, a kind
of nice neo-Classical [inaudible] balanced prose
and then "I went on swimmingly."
Franklin is always in some sense performing.
He gives you sort of what you expect
and then he brings you up short.
But think about it here: His commitment is to what?
The reality of all these things?
Not so much, although that's nice but it's
to the appearance of it.
He needs to cultivate a reputation.
And one of the things to say about that is he is aware,
therefore, that he is performing for people in his life.
And that's the way he represents it.
But the other thing I want to suggest to you is
that he is aware that he is performing for you, the reader
or putatively, his son.
And therefore he is able to step back at certain moments
and think about the story as almost a critic would
or in this particular case, as a printer would.
And so he has a metaphor that's linked to the idea
of perfectionism that comes from the printing trade.
And that's the metaphor of the erratum,
the defective font of type.
If you go to the library,
and I don't know how late this would be, you might see bound
into it there's a slip of paper that says "errata" on it.
This is because they had found some things that were wrong
with it and they couldn't reprint that printing,
so they slip in a sheet of errors.
"Erratum" is Latin singular for "error," "errata" is the plural.
[ Inaudible ]
You still find that in books at the library.
So printers would do that, they would come
up with a list of those things.
And then when they reset the plate later on, they would pull
out the defective font of type or errors and plug new ones back
in and to create a new edition.
So this idea of the erratum becomes for Franklin a kind
of governing metaphor for his life.
Let's take a look at the middle of 485.
I think that's the first time that it comes up.
He's talking about the printing house.
And at the bottom, about six lines up from the bottom
of the first paragraph on 485.
He says, "At length a fresh difference arising
between my brother and me, I took upon me
to assert my freedom, presuming that he would not venture
to produce new indentures.
It was not fair in me to take this advantage,
and this I therefore reckon one of the first errata of my life;
but the unfairness of it weighed little with me,
when under the impressions of resentment
for the blows his passion too often urged him
to bestow upon me, though he was otherwise not an
ill-natured man.
Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking."
So that's the first time he talked about the erratum.
Take a little bit further on and you'll see
that this recurs as a motif.
Page 494 he talks about he had some care of money
from Vernon and he misuses it.
First full paragraph on 494.
"The breaking into this money of Vernon's was one
of the first great errata of my life; and this affair showed
that my father was not much out in his judgment
when he supposed me too young to manage business of importance."
Or turn the page.
The first paragraph on 496 tells us,
"I had made some courtship during this time to Miss Read.
I had great respect and affection for her
and had some reason to believe she had the same for me; but,
as I was about to take a long voyage,
and we were both very young, only a little above eighteen,
it was thought most prudent by her mother to prevent our going
out too far at present, as a marriage,
if it was to take place, would be more convenient
after my return, when I should be, as I expected,
set up in my business."
But a few pages later it doesn't turn out that way.
Take a look at the bottom of 499.
He's with his friend Ralph.
And it's kind of like a bad buddy movie, right?
"I immediately got into work at Palmer's,
then a famous printing-house in Bartholomew Close,
and here I continued near a year.
I was pretty diligent, but spent with Ralph a good deal
of my earnings in going to plays and other places of amusement.
We had together consumed all my pistoles, and now just rubbed
on from hand to mouth.
He seemed quite to forget his wife and child, and I,
by degrees, my engagements with Miss Read,
to whom I never wrote more than one letter, and that was
to let her know I was not likely soon to return.
This was another of the great errata of my life,
which I should wish to correct if I were to live it over again.
In fact, by our expenses,
I was constantly kept unable to pay my passage."
You see the next paragraph there's another errata.
It continues for a while.
The courtship with Miss Read is one of the errata
that he is able to correct, as is the repaying of Vernon.
He repays Vernon on page 513.
And on page 517 we find that when he comes back,
he does get together with Miss Read again.
So there is a way in which he is able to correct some
of these errors that he's made actually in his life.
But I want to suggest to you is
that in writing the autobiography,
he is able to correct all of the errors because in the act
of writing them down, and owning up to the mistake,
and pointing them out as errors, he has done the equivalent
of slipping in that piece of paper
that would be an error slip, the errata slip.
He's having his cake and eating it, too, by stepping back
and saying, "Character Ben Franklin made these mistakes
and now, I, author Ben Franklin wish to change them," he's able
to suggest to you the way that you should properly behave.
And you know, in fact, that his life has worked out okay.
So he reaffirms the entire process of being able
to correct error in your life.
You don't have to be perfect, in other words, you just have
to aspire to be perfect or you aspire
to what we might call "perfectionism."
And so this metaphor of the erratum becomes his way
of talking about how you can, if it's possible at any time
to identify these faults, you can remedy them.
Later on in the second part, he does a little bit more to talk
about some of his actual attempts
to promote this idea of perfectionism.
And I just wanted to show you one example of this.
This is on page 526.
He talks about what he calls "the bold and arduous project
of arriving at moral perfection."
He says, "I wish to live without committing any fault
at any time.
I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom,
or company might lead me into.
As I knew or thought I knew what was right and wrong,
I did not see why I might not always do the one
and avoid the other."
This, by the way, is his alternative to going to church.
He goes to church and he's not satisfied with what he hears.
So he's individualistic, he says,
"I'll make up my own precepts.
I'll make up my own conduct manual.
It will serve me better."
And so you can look at what the virtues and precepts are.
You can see that there is some affinity to the Puritan's idea
of self-denial, or abnegation, of even a kind of calling.
But his calling is almost entirely material.
There's a sense in which if he perfects his material life
and is successful, he will be able to raise a family,
he will be able to then even think beyond the family,
to the good of human kind,
to the good of his country, all of that stuff.
So the 12 virtues that he gives us here plus the baker's dozen,
the 13th, are derived from classical
and Christian traditions both.
And again, there's a certain kind of common sense
or practically that he tries to get across.
Oh, I don't know.
My favorite one I suppose is Chastity, number 12:
"Rarely use venery but for health or offspring,
never to dullness, weakness or the injury of your own
or another's peace or reputation."
I mean, that's not what the Puritans would say.
There's other reasons not to do that.
So what I want to suggest to you is there are certain ways
in which one of the things he's really doing is kind
of reversing the Puritan ethos.
And I think that's an important way in which he's sort
of using religious forms against themselves
to reverse the generally larger Puritan ethos behind it.
One other thing about Franklin --
this comes from a piece called "Information
for Those Who Would Remove."
It's from 1784, so I think it's around the same time
as that Jefferson quote that I showed you.
It's in 465 of your text.
But if you look at it, you can see the logic here taken
out of Franklin's own life and applied to kind
of larger national terms.
"Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure
to find employ," -- here in the United States --
"and to be well paid for their work,
there being no restraints preventing strangers
from exercising any art they understand,
nor any permission necessary.
If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen;
-- as he did, as a kind of apprentice --
"if they are sober, industrious, and frugal,
they soon become masters," -- as he did, he made himself sober,
industrious, and frugal --
"establish themselves in business, marry, raise families,
and become respectable citizens."
[Inaudible], but back to Reagan quote where you start
with the individual, then you move out families,
neighborhoods, communities, our nation.
It's the same kind of logic here.
You radiate outwards.
"Also, persons of moderate fortunes and capitals, who,
having a large number of children to provide
for as desirous of bringing them up to industry
and so secure states for their posterity have opportunities
of doing it in American, which Europe does not afford."
So the idea the Franklinian story becomes known not only
in America, but in Europe as one of the myths
of America very early on.
This Franklin story becomes one of the things
that Americans consider to be distinctive about their country
and it comes about because there's no aristocracy,
because theoretically, this is supposed to be a place
where merit and industry will be rewarded.
And that's the kind of Franklinian mythology.
This is where it comes from.
And I think you can you can see it has long legs
and we're still a part of it.
Jefferson is another person that's often identified
with the American Enlightenment.
And his autobiography is briefer.
And you can see that it's quite different.
I mean, it really is a text that makes you --
that presents him as a public person from the getgo
and that makes an argument not
about primarily material success, but always the idea
of himself as a statesman,
someone who has the best interest
of the nation at heart, right?
And people would argue perhaps that some of the principles
that Franklin is able to take for granted are established
in some of the founding documents
and perhaps even particularly in the Declaration of Independence
that Jefferson wrote the first draft for.
And he includes his draft, as you saw, in the autobiography.
He shows you exactly what he wrote and what changes were made
to the document by Congress.
Yes? Did you want to say anything?
No. Okay. So I wanted you to see the way in which
that document works in that context.
And in a way, I want you to get a sense
of the way the document had to be altered in order
to get consensus in that moment.
I mean, the kind of compromises that Obama has to make
over healthcare -- you always have to compromise
in a democratic system.
Jefferson wanted to condemn slavery.
Being a slave owner, he knew about it firsthand.
He wanted to condemn it,
and couldn't get the South to sign on.
I'll have some more to say about Jefferson
and slavery a little bit later on.
I think I was *** Jefferson earlier in course,
but today I really want to talk to you about the way
in which the Declaration
of Independence actually works brilliantly
as a piece of rhetoric.
So one, I've talked about Franklin's autobiography
as a rhetorical performance.
Clearly Jefferson's is, too.
All right, he's performing this statesman's role.
The body of Jefferson and the body
of the nation become almost the same thing
in this autobiography, which comes across in the text.
But I want to suggest to you that the Declaration
of Independence is a conscious performance as well
and that it's a brilliant document
because it creates a sense of inevitability.
With Franklin, you might say you were almost cajoled
into agreeing with him.
He presents his things in a kind of diction that seems
like it's common sense, how would you argue with that?
How do you argue?
Oh, it's Providence, or a guardian angel,
or some accidental favorable circumstances.
Sure, why not?
So he presents it as common sense.
Jefferson wants the Declaration of Independence also
to embody common sense.
But he presents it not in that kind of offhand way.
Franklin never appears to be arguing with you.
Jefferson wants to make a kind of --
give the appearance of a kind of rigorous argument that will be
so simple and elegant that it will seem to be inevitable.
So he's promoting the document in a sense
of rhetorical inevitability.
And one of the things we might say is that it is thought
to have come in part from John Locke's Second Treatise
of Government.
Locke is the one that I think I've already said
in the Second Treatise of Government,
he comes up with a defense of individual property
in which he says that in the state of nature, we are all born
with property, which is ourselves.
So for him, the big triple is life, liberty, and property.
That's not what it is in the Declaration of Independence.
What is it in the Declaration of Independence?
>> Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
>> Lecturer: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now you might want to think about what the relation is
between property on the one hand and the pursuit
of happiness on the other.
Is it a more idealized version, Jefferson's version?
Is it in some sense bad faith because it's covering
up what we're really thinking about?
We're really thinking about property, but we're going
to call it the "pursuit of happiness"?
There's a kind of complicated rhetoric around that.
But one of the things he would say is even
that revision is not Jefferson's own.
People now have suggested, I think Garry Wills most famously
in a wonderful book about where all of these texts
of this documents come from called Inventing America
that in fact, Jefferson owes a lot
to Scottish common sense philosophy in various forms
of more communally-oriented philosophies
in making that revision.
But one of the things that he does, so he brings together lots
of different philosophical traditions
but he gives it this form: it's a syllogism.
Can anybody tell me what a "syllogism" is?
What is a syllogism?
It comes from logic.
No one has taken philosophy?
Syllogism has a major premise and a minor premise.
So it goes something like this:
All A is C. All A is C. Minor premise.
All B is A. What's the conclusion?
All B is C. It will be easier if you see it.
A equals C, B equals A. But equals isn't quite right,
so B equals C. What it basically says is this is a
larger principle.
This is a manifestation of that larger principle that leads you
to conclude something about B, right?
So in the Declaration of Independence,
the major premise is the opening proclamation of a people's right
to overthrow a tyrannical government.
This is on 652.
"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary
for one people to dissolve the political bands
which have connected them with another
and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate
and equal station to which the Laws of Nature
and the Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind requires
that they should declare the causes
which impel them to separation."
That's the Preamble.
Then, "We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their creator with certain inalienable rights,
that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form
of government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it
and to institute new government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers
in such form as to them shall see most likely
to effect their safety and happiness."
That is the major premise.
Governments are instituted among men to preserve rights
and happiness and a government that does not do
that can be overthrown.
The minor premise, which is most of the declaration itself,
most of you what read afterwards is the minor premise,
takes the form of accumulated evidence that British rule
in the Americas has been destructive.
A long train of usurpations, right?
And a conclusion, therefore,
is that the British government is exactly this kind
of government that's destructive and therefore
that the colonies have a right to free themselves
from this destructive rule.
So it takes that form of inevitability:
we assume that we have the right
to overthrow a destructive government,
we prove that the British government is a destructive
government, therefore, we have the right to overthrow
that destructive government.
Now the reason to use the syllogistic form, again,
is to give it a sense of rhetorical inevitability.
And again, we might say that Jefferson is drawing
on what he takes to be common sense arguments.
And most of the arguments
in the declaration are not original with him.
In fact, afterwards he wrote this:
"The object of the Declaration of Independence was not to find
out new principles
or new arguments never before thought of,
but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject
in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."
He wrote that, "it was intended to be an expression
of the American mind and to give that occasion the proper tone
and spirit called for."
This is close to the end of his life, 18-something.
I forget when it is.
That's too late.
So that's what he's remembering, that he was trying
to give it this sense of common sense.
Now there's a couple of other things that he does
that are quite brilliant.
How is it that he goes about proving
that the British government is a destructive government?
What does he actually do in the language on pages 653, 654?
How does he actually go and list all of these things?
It's almost if it were a poem, it would be kind of anaphora.
Yeah?
>> He uses [inaudible].
>> Lecturer: So that procession of "he's" --
he has refused, he has forbidden, he has refused,
he has called together legislative bodies,
he has [inaudible] gives it that stately sense of rhetoric
and a sense of inevitability.
That's certainly true.
But who is the "he"?
Who is the he?
Oh, come on.
Who is the he?
>> [ Inaudible ]
>> Lecturer: Yes, it's the King of England.
Did the King of England do all this stuff actually all
by himself?
Exactly, right?
"He" is standing in for the British government.
And you have to imagine that the people
in the Second Continental Congress have ties
to people back in Britain.
You don't really want to get in the business of necessarily,
you know, criticizing Parliament too much.
But everybody can get behind criticizing the king,
who was thought at the time to be mad.
So the king serves as a kind of synecdoche
for the larger British government.
If he lays the charges
of the British's government being destructive
onto the footsteps of the king, you might say,
that has the effect of getting everybody behind him.
We can all get behind this.
It's easier to criticize the king.
It in some sense compels a certain kind of inevitability.
That's one thing.
The other thing is: Why is it called a declaration?
Well, a "declaration" is a legal document.
The English jurist, William Blackstone, describes it as the
"foremost form of pleading."
So this is a legal document of a plaintiff against the defendant.
So who is the defendant?
Who is the defendant, if that's what this is?
It's King George.
And if King George is the defendant, who is the plaintiff?
Yeah, all the American colonists.
And what's just happened if you are suddenly
on equal legal standing with the king?
That's ennobling.
It's a radical assertion of self-confidence, you might say.
And one of the things to suggest about this is
that the document works brilliantly in that way.
It has a sense of rhetorical inevitability.
The language is beautiful.
I mean, it's like a play by Shakespeare.
It has many sources.
You could look at other things.
I brought the [inaudible] along.
The preamble to the have a Virginia Constitution,
which he had worked on, George Mason's Declarations of Rights
from the previous year, even the English Petition of Right --
all of these things have echoes
in the Declaration of Independence.
We don't tend to remember their language
because somehow the language of the Declaration
of Independence is not only better,
but it's had a certain kind of cultural weight.
It's again, exactly the way that we read Shakespeare's plays
and forget that there are sources for them.
We don't care about those sources.
We care about Shakespeare.
But we care about this document.
That's one of the things to remember.
And I think it has something to do
with that sense of inevitability.
And it works through the creation of syllogistic logic,
drawing on all these phrases that are in the air,
drawing on different kinds
of philosophies that are in the air.
It appeals to many of the people who were the founders
because they were all lawyers themselves.
So they understood the symbolism of being able
to create a declaration and charge the king
with this long train of usurpations and abuses.
And in the end, the document itself almost stands in.
I mean, this brings us almost full circle
from where we started out.
Again, with Jefferson I'm saying the importance of writing.
We told you about Jefferson telling Lewis and Clark
to go off what write and when you're off looking
for the Northwest Passage.
It's almost like a nation can be born, or deserves to be born,
or deserves to be created if it can produce a document
like this one, a document that is
so brilliant at compelling assent.
And you might even say people who give US culture more
of the benefit of the doubt than somebody
like Toni Morrison would, would say, "Look, this is a document
that is so brilliant that it even manages
to transcend aspects of its ideological moment."
"All men are created equal, we hold these truths
that all men are created equal."
On the first day of class I said, "Okay, come on.
They really meant men."
They didn't let women participate fully.
They didn't even mean all men.
They didn't allow slaves.
But people say, "Okay, look.
That's true."
And yet there's a way in which the formulation with just
with a little adjustment can accommodate all those people,
that there are certain basic principles that are being laid
down here that can outlive the limitations
of the ideological moment that produced them.
You'll have to think
about whether you think that is true or not.
But that's what people say who think about these documents,
this continuing cultural power.
What is July 4th, 1776?
That's our nation's birthday, right?
We all celebrate July 4th.
Well, what happened on July 4th?
What happened on July 4th?
>> They signed --
>> Lecturer: They signed this version of the document.
It wasn't when they actually voted for independence,
it wasn't when they actually approved the document,
it's when they actually got up there and signed this text
and made it the official text.
And again, it's kind of a weird symbol
about how important texts were in the period leading
from colonization to the moment
when the early nation comes into being.
We can think of the Declaration of Independence as a kind
of emblem of that, of the Enlightenment in many ways,
and also as an emblem of the continuing importance of writing
to this culture in a way
that maybe writing is never going to matter again.
I should say something about Jefferson's shortcomings.
I mean, people have often asked, "Well,
you're saying all these great things about Jefferson
and he was a slaveholder.
So how do you square the wanting to condemn slavery
in the Declaration of Independence
and actually being a slaveholder and fathering children
from slaves and all of that?"
And there's two things to say about that:
one is that Jefferson, having had firsthand knowledge
of slavery, understood or believed he understood
that you couldn't simply abolish slavery, that the system
of slavery had turned into a paternalistic structure
in which the slaves were kept as if they were children.
To release them with no further help
into the world would be doing them a disservice.
And he felt that a free population of blacks
that migrated to the north would be disastrous socially.
Many people believed that.
Wheatley's own career, as I told you, bears this out.
Her life was disaster after she was freed
because she didn't have protection or patronage
and because her writing was appreciated in London,
which with the Americans were at war,
she wasn't able to support herself.
She was an inspiration to many people but not to Jefferson.
And this is one of the things Jefferson writes in Notes
on the State of Virginia: "Never yet could I find
that a black had uttered a thought
above the level of plain narration.
Never seen an elementary trade of painting or sculpture.
In music there are more generally gifted than whites
with accurate ears for tune and time, and they've been found
of capable of imagining a small catch.
Whether they will be equal to the composition
of a more extensive run of melody
or of complicated harmonies is yet to be proved.
Misery is often the parent
of the most affecting touches in poetry.
Among the blacks is misery enough?
God knows, but no poetry.
Love is the peculiar oestrum" -- madness -- "of the poet.
Their love is ardent
but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination.
Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately" --
he doesn't get it right on both counts --
"but it could not produce a poet.
The compositions published under her name are below the dignity
of criticism, the heroes of the Dunciad are to her
as Hercules is to the author of that poem."
What do we say about this?
Well, again, it's why Jefferson is an excellent example
of the Enlightenment as a whole.
He is the author of that document
which embodies all those wonderful principles that I put
on this screen at the outset.
He is also quite clearly someone who thinks
in a sense what we call "essentialist terms,"
as if people have certain characteristics according
to race.
And he's pretty much a racist.
I mean, he does believe that blacks have certain limitations.
It doesn't mean that he can't care for individual blacks
or even love someone who happens to be a slave of his,
it just means that when he thinks
about human characteristics,
he thinks that some people are less capable
and he divides them up according to race.
That makes him exactly a man of the Enlightenment.
I mean, all of those things go together.
The Enlightenment is about all of those wonderful principles
and it's also about the denial of the benefits
of those principles to large segments of the population.
The Enlightenment strains
against its ideological and cultural moment.
It's pushing against aristocracy.
But there are certain ways in which it remains unable
to transcend those moments.
Arguably, we still haven't.
If this nation is the child of the Enlightenment,
the whole slavery thing --
that had to take a while to get worked out
and it didn't work out very well.
And some would say it's still not quite working out.
You know, equal rights for women?
Yeah, that took even longer.
But there are those would say we're making progress
of various kinds.
But what I wanted you to see is the roots
of contemporary political and intellectual problems run deep.
They run back into the very founding moments
of the United States.
All right.
I am supposed to get to Joel Barlow.
Do I really want to do this?
Let me give you a little bit on Joel Barlow,
just so that it makes sense that I can play my last song.
So Joel Barlow -- when you read the Hasty Pudding,
one of the things I want you to look at is the way
in which he embodies many of these kind
of neoclassical principles and principles of the Enlightenment
that he's talking about.
Like Franklin, Barlow is very interested in economy,
particularly in the possibility of trade
as a way of promoting peace.
Interestingly, he goes to Yale.
He starts off as a kind of doctrinaire Calvinist
in the Edwards [inaudible], but then he gets converted.
He's really moved by the French Revolution.
He ends up spending a large period of time in France.
And one of the things that he writes is this famous mock epic
poem called the Hasty Pudding.
And I think we'll take a look at that next time,
but I just wanted to get you to thinking about this
because Barlow's career is another way --
he's another one of these people that seems to exemplify all
of the opportunities and also the contradictions
of Enlightenment.
The Hasty Pudding is very much about the possibility --
not even the possibility --
but the opportunity for producing poetry and culture
in this new land, in the new world.
Columbus said there were nightingales.
There are no nightingales.
Many poets would say, "How can we write without nightingales?
How can we write without aristocracy?
How can we write without these kinds of long cultural histories
that exist in Europe?"
And Barlow makes an argument as the trope of the Hasty Pudding
for saying that, "Guess what?
Neoclassical poetry has pretty much exhausted itself.
It needs a new subject.
It needs kind of new inspiration.
And we can find it here in the new world with Hasty Pudding."
So in some sense, it's a rewrite of the *** of the Lock.
It's showing how neoclassical poetic devices are perfectly
well-suited for thinking about the new world
and the particular materials that we have here.
He begins the poem much
as Bradstreet begins her first prologue poem
by disavowing the epic tradition,
even as he sort of invokes it.
And we'll take a look at that next time.
But the thing I wanted to say to you is that in the course
of his career, Barlow becomes disenchanted with all
of these things that he believed.
I'll talk about Windsor Forest next time.
Barlow ends up writing a poem called Advice
to a Raven in Russia.
He's been sent off as a diplomat.
So like Franklin he has a diplomat --
he has been sent off to negotiate with Napoleon.
Napoleon is in a bad way militarily.
He wants to put off the negotiations
as long as possible.
So he is sent off to find Napoleon and go
through Poland into Russia.
Can't catch up to Napoleon -- in fact, never does --
sees the remnants of Napoleon's battles, which are all
of these corpses strewn across Russia and Poland.
I think he writes the poem Advice to a Raven in Russian,
which is a really horrific poem
about ravens eating the dead off the battlefield.
It's kind of horrifyingly brilliant
in the imagery that it produces.
And we'll look at it next time.
But one of the things I wanted you to see is
that Barlow also comes to realize
that the Enlightenment may not be everything
that it's cracked up to be.
And so when we look at that poem and the beginnings
of Romanticism, one of the things I want you
to ask yourself is: What are the limitations
of Enlightenment thinking, even beyond the racism and sexism?
What happens if human consciousness, if human reason
and intellect are not all that they are cracked up to be?
All right, thanks a lot
and we'll continue there on Wednesday.