The Monkey Cage

Here is a small thought piece to try out - while many of our current crop of leaders may have extremenly redeeming qualities - many would be severely criticized for their lack of religious faith by 19th century pundits. It makes one wonder what is the purpose of trying to take a set of contemporary mores and apply them to another historical period? That isn’t to come down on the side of moral relativism - just to point out that the exercise itself serves little purpose. If they still insist - let the students read much of what Franklin’s contemporaries were writing about native americans. I have less sympathy with Mencken - to hold such views in the 20th century seems to me to be out of step with many (but unfortunately not all) of his contemporaries who were coming to quickly see that European anti-semitism had played a major role in fueling the brutal actrocitis of the second world war.

I guess I don’t see the issue. People are a combination of good and bad traits and we should acknowledge all of them. Nothing wrong with saying Mencken was a vicious, hateful anti-Semite who also wrote some wonderful quips over the years. We should neither excuse their behavior nor say that people with lousy attitudes never do anything of value.

I remember vividly how an old girlfriend and I had a heated discussion over Rousseau. I was able to disregard his reactionary view of women, she was not.

I am ambivalent towards Rousseau today - and I can live with that.

For Franklin and the founding fathers, in particular, try a spiral dynamics based view. What makes them heroes is that they played a huge role in advancing a whole country to a higher level of development. At the same time, they were men of their time and should be judged as such.

Sometimes very smart people are nevertheless wrong about some things. This could be a result of cultural blinders, place in history, personal biases, or from having reached the limits of their intellect. Descartes’ philosophy (and he is certainly not alone) suffered from all three and yet he is still considered a great philosopher. —And I use that argument specifically because I think it’s harder to defend and yet it never inspired the kind of debate that the subject of your post does.

Can we condemn what’s bad in Descartes philosophy and still appreciate him as a definitive and influential philosopher? Sure. And if we can do that, it is certainly easier to appreciate Ben Franklin as a consummate statesman, diplomat, inventor, and political philosopher and allow us the room to condemn him for his despicable personal tastes.

We certainly have no problem doing the other thing. We don’t for example, admire Hitler for his dedication to the vegetarian lifestyle, even if we are vegetarians.

It is important to consider too that many of the insights that Mencken had are genuine insights, but they are true, not because Mencken had them and wrote them down. Those insights are insights because they shed actual light on actual previously obscured truths. We run into the problem you are describing only when we attempt to say that an idea is true because Mencken said it. If we say that, then we must accept that anti-Semitism is correct too. The converse is also true. If we try to say that Mencken was wrong about anti-Semitism because he was a product of his age, then we can also infer that all of his insights about human nature were wrong too—because they were also products of his time.

Mencken et.al…are not the proof or disproof of ideas. They just provide and shocking, concise, provocative, or funny way to convey the idea. We like him for that…and because he has so many of them not because he was always right.

Living with the contradiction is the only solution to this dilemma I’ve ever been able to manage.

Put another way, instead of asking what the answer is, maybe we need to wonder if we are asking the right question in the first place.

Why must a hero be perfect? It’s hardly reasonable to expect that of anyone human.

Maybe the problem is not the imperfections of our heroes, but the flaw of absolutism in our thinking that expects it.

I have a similar problem in literature — James Thurber is my favorite author, but he was misogynistic and demonstrated all the racial sensitivities of his time. I just don’t read/like the particularly egregious stories.

I rather find it encouraging that such flawed people from various historical epochs have contributed useful or enlightening things to society and to thought. Firstly, but for a few fortunate turns our society might have come more to reflect their viewpoint than the current dominant viewpoints. Therefore those people who we do think of as enlightened might have just as easily been ignored for what would have been perceived as their flaws as we could easily dismiss these figures. Secondly, not only do I like pointing to people’s heroism as examples, but specifically to their flaws even if they be not so glaring as anti-Semitism or racism. I think it is useful to point out to people that those who have had the greatest impact in society are not perfect, because it makes it all the more plausable that those around us, and we, ourselves, flawed as we obviously are, can, too, have an impact. Lastly, I find it comforting that even horrible people can have good effects. Perhaps the world is not entirely doomed by being populated by so many of them.

This question doesn’t bother me any more than “Was Mencken a wave or a particle?”. People can be heroes and yet not entirely admirable. Certainly the Greeks recognized this.