JOHN JAY CHAPMAN (1862-1933)

A Man Out of Season

ONE OF LIFE'S PLEASURES is discovering a provocative author worthy of attention who has fallen off the cultural map. Such is the case with John Jay Chapman. Although a prolific writer, having published numerous magazine articles and books criticizing late nineteenth and early twentieth century political, social, and moral values, Chapman is little known today. Adding to the mystery of his obscurity, is the extensive and powerful connections he had. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was his grandfather, Chapman counted William James as a friend, and he considered Theodore Roosevelt—Judas.

Chapman was a member of that segment of the northeastern intellectual elite alarmed at the cupidity, stupidity, and injustice the Gilded Age unleashed. Equally threatening to Chapman and his circle was the possibility of popular revolt ignited by the Age's toxic combination of laissez-faire capitalism and social darwinism. Chapman's disquiet prompted him to critique the moral, political, and social excesses of the day and the corruption which co-opted and silenced those who promoted radical reform.

His silence could not be bought. Chapman along with Ida B. Wells was among the first writers to chronicle and criticize lynching. In his essay, Coatesville, Chapman dissected the cultural pathology that permitted "upstanding" citizens to treat torture and lynching as acts delivering swift justice.

So why is John Jay Chapman lost from the pantheon of American letters? My hypothesis—academics and the public have difficulty categorizing him. Chapman wrote as a citizen about the issues he found interesting not as an expert specializing in a particular field. He exemplified that much praised individual—the Renaissance man. Americans, while ardently proclaiming the virtues of Da Vinci, are generally made uneasy by the Renaissance man's protean interests and accomplishments.

They harbor a deep seated mistrust of a mind that is immersed creatively in practical doings and fine art but also pertains to the highest human interests, from morals and religion to the political state and social rights, and thence to the study of the individual self in life and literature.

Americans mistrust the Renaissance quality of mind because they perceive it as characteristic of the amateur and not to be taken seriously.

Although the amateur is currently regarded with bemused indulgence that was not always the case. If one called Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson an amateur scientist, statesmen, or writer they would not take offense. Their understanding of the word was based on its original meaning: one who loves of is fond of; one who has a taste of anything.

Franklin and Jefferson were amateurs because learning was their love not their profession. Just as the lover seeks to discover all there is to know about the beloved, the amateur brings the same passion to experience.

By the time John Jay Chapman began writing the amateur's relationship to knowledge was beginning to be supplanted by the professional's. No longer was love of learning an adequate justification for seeking knowledge. The amateur became synonymous with the dabbler. In part, academics resented the amateur's quest for knowledge because it was not motivated by the need to make a living, therefore it could not be taken seriously.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a legitimate quest for knowledge increasingly demanded an academic imprimatur. Chapman, not interested in currying an academic position from which to advance his learning and air his views, cast his lot as a public intellectual, writing books, magazine articles, and lecturing to gain an audience.

Labels like public intellectual or critic do not capture the man's complexity. Chapman is a man of contradictions. A fierce defender of intellect and a person often dominated by his passions. A progressive reformer who writes about the consequences of wantonly jettisoning tradition. A citizen who was among the first to raise his voice against lynching and later wrote vitriolic anti-catholic attacks.

A man intimately acquainted with the dark night of the soul, but used humor to diagnose the pathologies of his day. The malcontent, as described by Randolph Bourne, best captures the twists and turns of Chapman's character. In his essay, Twilight of Idols, Bourne described this type.

"They (malcontents) are quite through with the professional critics and classicists who have let cultural values die through their own personal ineptitude. Yet these malcontents have no intention of being cultural vandals, only to slay. They are not barbarians, but seek the vital and sincere everywhere...

"They will be harsh and often bad-tempered, and they feel that the break-up of things is no time for mellowness. They will have a taste for spiritual adventure, and for sinister imaginative excursions. It will not be Puritanism so much as complacency that they will fight...

"Something more mocking, more irreverent, they will constantly want. They will take institutions very lightly, indeed will never fail to be surprised at the seriousness with which good radicals take the stated offices and systems. Their own contempt will be scarcely veiled, and they will be glad if they can tease, provoke, irritate thought on any subject...

"They will give offense to their elders who cannot see what all the concern is about, and they will hurt the more middle-aged sense of adventure upon which the better integrated minds of the younger generation will have compromised. Optimism is often compensatory, and the optimistic mood in American thought may mean merely that American life is too terrible to face. A more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the sign of more vivid and more stirring life fermenting in America today.

"It may be a sign of hope. That thirst for more of the intellectual 'war and laughter' that we find Nietzsche calling us to may bring us satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never bring. Malcontentedness may be the beginning of promise."

Regarded as an amateur and a malcontent, Chapman has not taken his place in America's literary pantheon. It is our loss. The quality of Chapman's prose and thought make apparent the need to correct that oversight. To acquaint readers with Chapman's work I have provided links to his essays about education and will explore Chapman's essay, Learning, in depth.

Read it all.

ONE COSMOS, ONE TRUTH

And we don't mean Kosmo Kramer! By way of introduction, here is an excerpt from the blogger whose work—One Cosmos—is a hilarious look at the world as we have come to know it, a world turned upside down. Be sure to check it out here.

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Back to the question before the Cosmos: why is the moral compass of the Left so broken? Why can they not see the obvious? I’ve written on this in the past, and to my mind, the philosopher Michael Polanyi has provided the most satisfactory answer. I remember the first time I read it, perspiring, trembling, and vigorously nodding in agreement at his metaphysical insight. (Real Truth is felt throughout the entire bodymind.)

People typically think that the Right represents the party of sanctimonious, judgmental morality police, while the Left is the hang-loose, live-and-let-live crowd. Not so. In fact, this is an exact reversal of the situation. The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes leftist thought in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless contempt for traditional moral values with an unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection. (This is all explained very clearly in a nice introduction to Polanyi’s thought, entitled Everyman Revived.)

The first step in this process is a complete skepticism that rejects traditional ideals of moral authority and transcendent moral obligation. This materialistic skepticism is then combined with a boundless, utopian moral fervor to transform mankind. However, being that the moral impulse remains in place, there is no longer any boundary or channel for it. One sees this, for example, in college students (and those permanent college students known as professors) who, in attempting to individuate from parental authority and define their own identities, turn their intense skepticism against existing society, denouncing it as morally shoddy, artificial, hypocritical, and a mere mask for oppression and exploitation. In other words, as the philosopher Voegelin explained it, the religious hope for a better afterlife is “immamentized” into the present, expressing the same faith but in wholly horizontal and materialistic and terms.

What results is a moral hatred of existing society and the resultant alienation of the postmodern leftist intellectual. Having condemned the distinction between good and evil as dishonest, such an individual can at least find pride in the “honesty” of their condemnation. Since ordinary decent behavior can never be safe against suspicion of sheer conformity or downright hypocrisy, only an amoral meaningless act can assure complete authenticity. This is why, to a leftist, the worst thing you can call someone is a hypocrite, whereas authentic depravity is celebrated in art, music, film, and literature. It is why, for example, leftist leaders all over the world were eager to embrace a nihilistic mass murderer such as Yasser Arafat—literally. Yuck.

All emotionally mature people understand that sexuality, for example, can be a dangerous and destructive force when unhinged from any moral framework. But few people seem to understand that the same type of destruction can occur when the moral impulse is detached from its traditional framework. We can see the deadly combination of these two—“skepticism and moral passion,” or “burning moral fervor with hatred of existing society”—in every radical secular revolution since the French Revolution—from the Bolsheviks to Nazi Germany to campus unrest in the 1960s. If society has no divine sanction but is made by man, men can and must perfect society now, while all opposition must be joyfully crushed—with moral sanction, of course.

Although Polanyi was describing communism and fascism, the same formulation equally applies to the Islamists, who detest everything about modernity and are convinced that the total destruction of existing society and the establishment of their own unlimited power will bring total happiness and harmony to humanity. Again, this must be sharply distinguished from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which holds that fallen mankind can never bring this transformation about on its own. Rather, this type of perfection is discussed only in eschatological or messianic terms, something each individual most work toward. The moral imperative to do this cannot be shifted to the collective.

You often hear it said (in the MSM) that suicide bombers are not immoral, that they are simply operating out of a different moral code. This only highlights the point that, just because you have a moral code, by no means does it mean that you are moral. In fact, the moral code may be entirely corrupt, in that it allows one to behave immorally, all the while being sanctioned by the code itself. This is similar to primitive societies that operate “logically” within a cognitive system that itself is illogical. These primitive individuals can reason perfectly well within the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside or against their beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts. Logic doesn't help; it can prove anything, so long as the conclusion follows its premise. If the premise is faulty, then so too will be the conclusion. Likewise, if I believe that murdering infidels will gain me instant access to heaven, it is perversely logical and thoroughly “moral” under such a system to murder infidels.

One can be so enmeshed in the system that, for example, a woman might confess to having ruined her neighbor's crops through witchcraft, just as a a university administrator may confess to crimes against womankind for uttering a banal truth that is forbidden in the cognitively closed, tribal system of the contemporary feminist Ovary Tower. The intellect no longer serves Truth, but is in the service of the ideological superstructure, so that freedom of thought is bound by the confines of the system—by political or academic correctness.

For a while, civilization was able to withstand the skepticism unleashed by the enlightenment, by benefitting from the momentum of the traditional moral framework that gave rise to science to begin with (for example, the use of our God-given free will in pursuit of objective truth in a rational world made so by a beneficent creator who wished for us to know him through his works). But this could only go on for a few generations before it began detaching itself from the religious morality that underlie it. Since no Christian society can ever live up to its ideals, it wasn’t difficult for the skeptics to begin the process of hammering away at the foundations of tradition.

Similarly, for a while, America escaped this destruction because it had a very different intellectual genealogy, having been much more influenced by the skeptical enlightenment of Britain and Scotland rather than the radical enlightenment of France. In addition, America never lost touch with its Judeo-Christian ideals, which inspired individuals to to work to improve and humanize society without violent disruption of traditional ways or heavy-handed government intervention.

Since we see only “through a glass, darkly,” sometimes Truth is most conspicuous in its absence. With rare exceptions, we cannot see Truth “face to face” under the conditions of human existence. But we can see evil face to face, just as we can see the palpable consequences of the absence of Truth, both in individuals and institutions. I think about Polanyi’s simple formulation every time I wade into the left-wing blogosphere. The utterly sad and destructive cynicism. And the boundless moral fervor. Its mantra is “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” For it is purely mindless and reactionary: no digestion at all, just chewing up and spitting out, repeated ad bulimeum. In short, one is not enough and a hundred is too many when you partake of the Satanic Eucharist of primordial envy.