The Liberal Dilemma

...If that kind of skepticism had been more widely shared in 1860, there would have been no Civil War...

...As one Southerner wrote on the War's eve, "I think the South is committing suicide, but my lot is cast with the South and being unable to manage the ship, I intend to face the breakers manfully and go down with my companions...

...They taught a kind of skepticism that helped people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-market society," he summarizes...

...Individuals had no inherent right to voice unpopular opinions, but competition might be as valuable in ideas as it was in other products...

...His attempt to grapple historically with this current dilemma gives his volume an importance that a study of four dated and fairly secondrate thinkers would not otherwise possess...

...The point is important, for Part Two begins: "William James did not fight in the Civil War...

...His dissent mAbrams v. United States, involving an anarchist convicted of distributing seditious pamphlets, was one of the decisions that made him a hero to liberals...

...It returned with particular force during World War I, when anyone who opposed America's participation ran the risk of losing his job or even going to jail...

...The first, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar Straus Giroux, 560 pp., $27.00), deals with the impact four post-Civil War thinkers had on the modern American mind...

...Broadly speaking, the new attitude was what has come to be known today as relativism...

...The segregationist South was, after all, a distinct culture...

...the South simply disappears except as a shadowy adversary...

...If unpopular but fundamentally unthreatening ideas were given a chance to prevail in the marketplace, once in a while the majority would benefit by learning something new...

...The Southern poet John Crowe Ransom wrote ironically long ago, "O such a little word is Honor...

...Holmes, whom Menand accurately describes as "indifferent to the notion of individual rights," dealt with several such cases as a Supreme Court Justice...

...Wyatt-Brown's analysis implies that an uncompromising sense of honor—a certainty of the righteousness of one's own side and the need to sacrifice without limit—was not exclusively a Southern property...

...The War," he declares in his Preface, "was fought to preserve the system of government that had been established at the nation's founding—to prove, in fact, that the system was worth preserving, that the idea of democracy had not failed...

...The book gets its title from a shortlived debating club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to which three of the four belonged...

...This did not mean every conviction was bad, or that one could not speak of right and wrong...

...Mark Twain advanced it mercilessly in The Adventures of Hucklebeny Finn, where two clans of pseudo-aristocratic hicks feud each other practically to extinction for reasons nobody can remember...

...Can one maintain that all moral beliefs are relative to time, place and circumstance, and simultaneously risk one's life in a holy war against slavery, fascism or segregation...

...The talking heads who populated Ken Burns' documentaries on the Civil War, baseball and jazz may be passionate experts on their subjects, but their deployment on TV had much more to do with the battle over whether affirmative action and other policies designed to help black Americans should be scaled up or down...

...and he could never make up his mind...

...Menand points out that pragmatism, along with the related styles of thought associated with Holmes, Peirce and Dewey, became unpopular during the Cold War but made a comeback after it ended...

...Menand does not much like the consequences of James' rationalizations...

...In recalling the Brooks-Sumner encounter of 1856, Wyatt-Brown notes: "The two antagonists were almost caricatures of their sections' image of each other—Sumner the selfrighteous, priggish, intellectual Puritan zealot and Brooks the epitome of Southern savagery and violence...

...The lesson Holmes took from the War," Menand says in one of those sentences that encapsulate a whole book, "is that certitude leads to violence...

...The opening sentence of Part One of The Metaphysical Club reads: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr...

...this style of oratory is now practically extinct among white politicians, but it continued to flourish well within living memory...

...Holmes' prime example of the moral fanaticism that led to violence was the abolitionism of his father's generation, the superior certainty that, in Holmes' own words, "a man was either a knave or a fool who did not act as they (the Abolitionists) knew to be right...

...The thinking of these four disparate men followed the same general lines and was, as Menand describes it, designed to abolish the mental habits, especially the moral absolutism, that had brought about America's bloodiest conflict...

...But one must always be cautious, he felt, for right and wrong were relative to delicately balanced social circumstances...

...More than that, it came to birth precisely as a reaction to the Civil War...

...Each side demonized and sought vengeance on the other...

...Tolerance in turn would prevent conflict, whether with one's immigrant neighbors or with a faraway region that had different values...

...Yet he believed, like John Stuart Mill before him, that freedom of speech was defensible only when it served the interests of the larger society...

...Menand's climactic chapter is entitled "Freedoms...

...The price of reform in the United States between 1898 and 1917," he says, "was the removal of the issue of race from the table...

...The prospect of dying for an idea takes us back to the War and its sorry aftermath...

...Abolitionists harangued the North in tones every bit as overheated as those indulged by defenders of the Southern way of life...

...The great movement to secure civil liberties in the United States during the Cold War arose out of a religious community, black Southern Baptists," Menand notes in his epilogue, "and it was founded on the belief that every individual has an inalienable right to those freedoms by virtue of being human—precisely the individualism that Holmes and Dewey felt they needed to discredit...

...The reader who asks why it was so vital to fight in a conflict that, according to the very school of thought these men were inventing, should never have taken place, may be asking in vain...

...His own attitude toward the Southern way of life that he has devoted so much research to is never in doubt...

...Holmes' friend James, who was never moved to fight, had a somewhat different reason for seeing beliefs in relative terms...

...Similarly, while a few historians get genuinely exercised over what the Vatican did or did not do during the Holocaust, today's shrill public controversy on that subject has almost nothing to do with the 1940s and everything to do with the Catholic Church in 2001...

...His new book puts several crises in Southern history under the microscope and meticulously separates out strands of honor that led the South to embrace a ruinous conflict and, subsequently, to defend its past and blemished institutions as if it had learned nothing from the experience...

...To have fought is for Menand both a sign of virtue and critical training for a leader of modern American thought...

...It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing...

...many Southerners made it themselves at the time of the events he analyzes...

...Some 600,000 men, North and South, had paid for that certainty with their lives...

...He might have extended the date forward to 1941, for the New Deal, like successful reform movements earlier in the century, depended on Southern support, and it would not have been forthcoming had Northern progressives energetically raised the issue of civil rights for blacks...

...The least insult to any of these objects prompts touchy reactions that seem wildly disproportionate to observers brought up in a different tradition...

...Their appeal was to right and wrong, specifically the wrong of slavery and the moral duty to abolish it no matter what the cost...

...Politically, pragmatism could help one avoid choosing between the conviction that former slaves had inalienable rights and the less stressful opinion that the postwar Southern political system, with the connivance of many Northern progressives, was entitled to prevent them from voting...

...Between two regions increasingly dominated by such antagonists, perhaps no further compromise was possible...

...A badly wounded Union veteran named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the first of Menand's four thinkers, seemed to confirm this when he said on Memorial Day 1884: "Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire...

...At the beginning and end of his study, he approvingly quotes another historian, Julian Pitt-Rivers, who declared, "Honor has caused more deaths than the plague...

...A judge should resist the temptations of activism, of imposing his own beliefs about the world on others...

...It seems to me that he might with equal justice have cited the struggle against Nazism in World War II, where an even more widespread moral consensus prevailed that what our enemy represented was wrong, in fact evil, and that compromise was completely unacceptable...

...Two new books about American history neatly illustrate this law of polemics...

...The question has obvious relevance to abolitionists before the Civil War...

...The grandiloquent phrase, the references to manliness, bravery, nobility, and resolute action, for example, were scarcely reserved for politics alone...

...Wyatt-Brown himself has been refining the theory for two decades with a historian's precision, mostly notably in Southern Honor (1982...

...Not very consistently...

...In The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s1890s (University of North Carolina Press, 412 pp., $55.00 cloth/$19.95 paper), Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that the key to the Southern mind before, during and for a long time after the War was an archaic, quasi-aristocratic concept of honor...

...Holmes was after all a judge...

...The contradiction, which is central to the confusions of contemporary liberalism, is likewise central to what Menand is trying to accomplish...

...Given the character of Southern politics and its ethical framework," WyattBrown adds, "the road to secession does not seem so puzzling...

...William James," Menand tells us, "was fragile...

...Abolitionism was back, this time in a Southern form that incorporated large traditional elements of honor...

...Yet even today American liberalism remains on the whole reluctant to face, let alone resolve, its internal struggle between a tolerant belief in diversity and a crusading fervor on behalf of the oppressed...

...Twain once went so far as to say that Scott was responsible for the Civil War...

...They believed," Menand continues, "that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals...

...Yet Menand sees his four thinkers as the most influential prototypes of 20th-century American liberalism, and somehow it seems appropriate that they should have taken part in the crusade to abolish slavery...

...This claim is not new...

...Nonetheless, Menand thinks the moral relativism that pragmatism encouraged was probably necessary to liberal reformers in the early 20th century...

...So was South Africa under apartheid...

...It also raises again the concept of honor, whether in Holmes' rather abstract nostalgia—the happy memory of risking his life for a cause about which he developed grave doubts—or in its less complicated Southern forms...

...It seems a weak, halfhearted basis for a free society...

...The employment of honor in its linguistic and political character helped immeasurably to reinforce the social order," Wyart-Brown observes...

...In Menand's scheme, both the War itself and the American mind are entirely Northern and largely New England matters...

...Honor, in Wyatt-Brown's description, consists of an almost feudal loyalty to one's family, region and personal sense of esteem...

...The fact that only one of them did, and he became so disillusioned with the outcome that he lost his moral fervor, sheds a profoundly ambiguous light on the variety of liberalism at issue here...

...The War itself in this view was a kind of duel writ large, an attempt to avenge an insult to the South's institutions regardless of whether victory was even possible...

...By examining the careers of Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey, Menand boldly tries to demonstrate that the whole structure of modern American thought came into being as a result of the Civil War...

...He attributes this change of fortune to the moral confidence that underlay the struggle against Communism and weakened after its defeat...

...Like many people in his own day and since, he wanted to enjoy the emotional benefits of religion without renouncing the discoveries of science...

...in the antebellum South it was strengthened by such cultural influences as the novels of Sir Walter Scott...

...What replaced that "culture" was a different attitude toward ideas, with Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey functioning as "the first modern thinkers in the United States...

...Its ideal character is the warrior...

...The result was the philosophy he called pragmatism, or the contention that the value of belief depends not on its logical or abstract truth, but onits usefulness...

...About the generation that lived through the Civil War, he asserts: "To some of them, the War seemed not just a failure of democracy, but a failure of culture, a failure of ideas...

...The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it...

...On the most important moral issues, the pragmatists and relativists found themselves on the wrong side of history...

...Honor arises and endures in a rural, backward society...

...But what led contemporary liberalism into unending contradictions was the gap between believing that other individuals, ethnic groups or cultures have their own ways of doing things that should be respected—that imposing our own moral or political theories on them, at home or abroad, constitutes a form of moral imperialism—and the uncompromising moral absolutism represented by the civil rights movement...

...Beliefs held loosely and with full attention to their relativism, beliefs that were really only half-believed, would presumably lead to tolerance...

...Yet political correspondence, public letters, editorials, and speeches all employed a tone that sounded bombastic and overblown to the unaccustomed, perhaps Northern ear...

...The episodes Wyatt-Brown recounts —from Andrew Jackson's killing in a duel a man who had insulted his wife, to South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks' caning Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner for insulting the South, to secession and Pickett's Charge—all demonstrate the mesmerizing power of the little word over those born beneath its sway...

...As a contemporary scholar WyattBrown emphasizes the prominence of race in Southern attitudes past and present, fashionably comparing slavery to the Holocaust and concluding with the controversy over whether the Confederate flag should continue to fly in some form or other over Southern statehouses in the 21 st century...

...In Holmes' view and Menand's, pragmatism gave James an opportunity to make a virtue of not choosing between what many people regarded as mutually exclusive alternatives—for instance, that God created the world or it evolved naturally...

...The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the status quo [as in the prewar South], or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it [as among prewar abolitionists]—was the essence of what they taught...

...he was socially insecure...

...This is the meaning of the Gettysburg Address and the great fighting cry of the North: 'Union.'" It takes two sides to make a civil war, and south of the Potomac the other one had—to some extent still has—a different notion of what the war was fought for, not to mention which side really stood for democracy...

...Apart from the speeches of Senator Robert C. Byrd (DW. Va...

...was an officer in the Union Army...

...that ideas are social...

...Except for Dewey, who was a small child, Menand's thinkers were all the right age to fight in the War, though only Holmes did...

...In conflict with the South's antique language of honor, he maintains, was the modern (that is, Victorian) language of conscience...

...If ideas and ideals are socially conditioned, relative to circumstance, "not absolute" in today's all-purpose cant phrase, then what rights can a dissident individual have...

...Pragmatism," he declares, "explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one...

...While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us...