Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy

Alexis de Tocqueville

                                                      Samuel Langhorne Clemens

What men called 'the people' in the most democratic republics of antiquity was very unlike what we designate by that term. In Athens all the citizens played a part in public affairs, but there were only 20,000 citizens in a population of three hundred and fifty thousand. All the rest were slaves....

Athens then with her universal suffrage was no more than an aristocratic republic in which all the nobles had an equal right in government.

The struggle between patricians and plebeians at Rome must be seen in the same light as an internal quarrel between the elder and younger branches of the same family. They all belonged to the aristocracy and had an aristocratic spirit.(475-476)

This is really important to me.  Think about the Charter of Liberties which was the precursor to the Magna Carta. To whom, did its stated 'freedoms' or 'rights', apply?

Reading the ancient literature of the Welsh, Irish, Scots and English, you come to realize that there were a hell of a lot of kings. Same thing all over Continental Europe.  'Duke' means leader/king.   A kingdom might refer to an area of a few square miles. That is why I am bemused when someone touts their aristocratic roots. EVERYBODY HAS ARISTOCRATIC ROOTS.

When we speak of Habeas Corpus, this had no application to that scene with Michael Palin and Eric Idle piling up manure and spouting Marxist ideology. I mean, our heritage is composed of two classes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xd_zkMEgkI The aristocrats and the animals.

Democracy a few hundred years ago did not have anything to do with the Common Man.

The purpose of this post was really taken from Jonnienohands' blog.  http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/jonwisby/2009/07/societal-memory-test.php

You know, we are supposed to know the sins of our fathers or we are destined to repeat them.

HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER

We must cherish our history so that we do not forget from whence we came.

Now our Forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation...But how was it really and truly new?  This is what Tocqueville is so excited about.

No you could not vote if you did not own land in most places in this country. And attorneys are expensive as he likes to point out. (zzzzz)  And the constitution had nothing to do with some small farmer who had a plow and a horse and happened to kill his neighbor over a tree line dispute. Not really.

Greek and Latin should not be taught in all the schools. But it is important that those who are destined by nature or fate to adopt a literary career or to cultivate such tastes should be able to go to schools where the classics are well taught and true scholars are formed. (477)

John Quincy Adams was translating Thucydides when he was eight or nine. I mean I love Herodotus, I really do. And I had the best of educations but I never read him in the 'original' Greek.

I do have a tome of Thucydides somewhere here and frankly I do not care where it is right now. It is one of the most boring reads I have ever come across. This student of Herodotus goes on and on about battles on the sea and on the land and he continues to go on and on and on. And I must say that Alcibiades is one of the most interesting characters of all time. I mean forget Benedict Arnold. This guy changed sides more often than some of our modern day quarterbacks.

Our forefathers were disciplined oligarchs.

Although America now pays perhaps less attention to literature than any other civilized country, there is nevertheless, a large number of people who take an interest in things of the mind, and if they do not give their entire lives to such studies, at least entertain their leisure with them.  (477)

Tocqueville then goes on to describe how we got most of our books from England and concludes with this strange line:

I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

Now John Quincy Adams had daddy and mommy around to tell him how to read his classics. I doubt there were people at our first universities who could have done a better job. Hell I doubt we have anybody better now. ha

But this is 1830-1840 and Abe Lincoln had already read his copy of Henry V in his log cabin many years before Tocquiville arrived here.

We, that is Americans, READ THINGS OUR OWN WAY. And if you liked to read, it had nothing to do with your blue blood. Or how much land you owned.

Alexis goes on to note that educated Englishmen do not appreciate the American Writer:

Their complaint is not only that the Americans have introduced a lot of new words....but these new words are generally taken from the jargon of the parties, the mechanical arts or trade. They also say that Americans have given new meanings to old English words. Finally, they maintain that the Americans often mix their styles in an odd way, sometimes putting words together which, in the mother tongue, are carefully kept apart.(478)

WE AINT DOIN IT RIGHT. HAHAHAHHAHAHA

The language of an aristocracy ought to be as at rest as are all its institutions. But few new words are needed, as few new things are made and even when something new is made, people are at pains to describe it in familiar words whose meanings is fixed by tradition.(478)

Just as an aside, I really did think not so long ago that BFF was some sexual profanity. Hahaha 

By and large, the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature, formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold...Short works will be commoner than long books, with than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please and to stir passions than to charm taste. (474)

Immediately I think of Twain. Twain would not write his first news story about 25 or 30 years after Tocqueville gets here. But his essays and his short stories would take over literature forever....Why? How did such a thing come to pass?

So Americans have not yet, properly speaking, got any literature. Only the journalists strike me as truly American. They certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard. (471)

This is where Twain came from. Ha!!!!!

Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers...The power of newspapers must therefore grow as equality spreads. (520)

Among the twelve million people living in the United States, there is not one single man who has dared to suggest restriction the freedom of the press.

I must demur here a little, I mean there have been huge attacks on the press in this country going back through the centuries. But Tocqueville is looking at our press in contrast to his experiences in Europe.

The he writes about the first American news article he ever read:

In this whole affair the language used by Jackson was that of a heartless despot exclusively concerned with preserving his own power. Ambition is his crime.....He governs by corruption and his guilty maneuver will turn to his shame and confusion.(182)

Tocqueville is shocked and I think this is when and how he falls in love with America.

Tocqueville even has a short chapter entitled: WHY AMERICAN WRITERS AND SPEAKERS ARE OFTEN BOMBASTIC. (488)  HAHAHAHAHA

HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER

Not Americans.

See, fifty years before Europe even knew there was an America, this goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg  who invented the printing press. What was the first book printed? THE BIBLE.

Oh, and not in Latin, but German.

Not a good omen for El Papa. People started reading their own bible. What the hell did they need a priest for, let alone El Papa. And in 75 years or so Luther shows up with 95 Theses in 1517.

Of course it did not take Martin too long to become part of the 'establishment'; responsible for putting down his own uprisings. Ha

One hundred years after that fiasco, America is up and running. And they bring the press with them. Less than a hundred years after THAT, well...

Anybody can read if given the opportunity, and anybody can read in their own language. There are these penny newspapers all over the goddamn place (blesses himself) and longer newspapers and petitions and............

We are off and running.

And Tocqueville gets here about 1830 and writes two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

These newspapers, penny or not, start a revolution. Anybody who knows how to write, can be published somewhere. Take a look at this:  http://faculty.mdc.edu/jmcnair/Joe28pages/Schooling,%20Education,%20and%20Literacy%20in%20Colonial%20America.htm

There are great pix on this link showing what an English Primer looked like in the 17th century here.  It also demonstrates that our roots for public education arose in the North and the South eschewed this concept. BIG SURPRISE HUH?

Tocqueville gets to this country only forty years after the French Revolution. Yet he is astounded by what newspapers get away with in this country. I mean attacking our own president and calling him such terrible names.

Well to sum up.

American writers are bombastic.

American writers are not concerned that much with how others have chosen to written.

American writers are not concerned with the constraints of the language of the aristocrats.

American writers are irreverent.

American writers often write shorter works than their European counterparts.

American writers will oft times go for satire and irony than worry about exactitudes.

So I am struck, not only with the fact that Tocqueville predicts the arrival of Mark Twain; but how he predicts so much about our writers for the next 160 or 170 years.

And we may have lost the penny newspapers. Hell we are losing our dollar newspapers as well.

But this internet...

I mean articles are even shorter than in our own newspapers.

Voices are being heard again from our people. Voices that we would NEVER HEAR.

And we are in a new oligarchy.  A small group of powerful people that have all the real rights; that have real control over almost every single part of our lives. But maybe there is a chance something could be done about it.

If I get caught with a little 'crack', I can tell you for sure that trial would not begin in a couple of years. Ha!!!

And I can tell you for sure that there would be no two week trial let alone two month trial.

And I can tell you that I would end up in prison.

We kind of started out like this, with a controlling oligarchy....and yet,  we didn't.

Tocqueville saw something different. He saw the promise of democracy, something I believe we have lost.

But, for now anyway, we have the penny newspapers back.

And who knows.  Millions of voices that must be heard by our representatives.

We do not have to do things the way our parents did.

We do not have to talk like them, or write like them, or eat like them, or work like them, or recreate like them.

I think Tocqueville and Twain taught us this lesson.

(The tome from which I quote is Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by George Lawrence, Harper & Row, 1966 NYNY)

Oh and you can get this on line but it is a different translation:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KO8tAAAAIAAJ&dq=Alexis+de+Tocqueville&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=kRxaSr7ICIaaMa370EI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4