Late Pragmatist Poetics

Every humanism which is not a proletarian humanism is a bourgeois humanism, and will prove at base ideologically coherent with the interests of that class, argued Maxim Gorky in 1935. It was the merchants of Renaissance Europe, Gorky contended, who first proclaimed universal humanity against the aristocrats whose hereditary gifts appeared to include a monopoly on the human: ‘When the rich bourgeois, manufacturer, or merchant spoke of the “equality” of men’, Gorky asserted with ardent contempt, ‘he understood by this his own personal equality to the feudal parasite in knightly armour or in a bishop’s vestment’.¹ In the later bourgeois era that humanism would become, for Gorky, a corrupt apologetics, but perhaps it always was. After all, it had coexisted comfortably from the first with the relentless social and religious persecutions of early European modernity. But the enormities of the bourgeois class had since industrialisation exceeded the capability of earnest humanist discourse to explain or, as Gorky might have preferred to put it, to obscure them: ‘Is it necessary to speak of all the abominable crimes which are well known to all, and which testify to the fact that “humanism as the basis of bourgeois culture” has to-day lost all meaning? They no longer speak of it; apparently they realise that it is too shameless to mention “humanism” while almost daily they shoot down hungry workers in the streets of the cities, pack the prisons with them, and behead or sentence to hard labour thousands of the most active of them.’²

Gorky was wrong, on this count at least: for bourgeois culture had, in fact, realised no such thing. In America, an especially shameless brand of bourgeois humanism had seen robust assurgence during Gorky’s lifetime. Around the start of the twentieth century Irving Babbitt and John Elmer More advocated their disagreeable, hobby-horsical confection, the New Humanism, in a flurry of minatory and doctrinaire books and essays, which bear about as much similarity to the writings of Erasmus as the teachings of Elmer Gantry bear to those of Pope Pius II. They argued not only for the virtues of the competent study of the Classics, of patriarchy, and of Christian doctrine, but for the benefits such virtues would bestow on a particular caste, a caste predicted by Babbitt: the ruling elite of the American empire to come. As Babbitt’s mordant conclusion to Democracy and Leadership³ implied he believed, the emergence of American empire from American democracy, however regrettable its fate, was more or less historically inevitable. Though it would not be an empire of the old territorial kind, being more subtly convened, reflecting the complex means of America’s pre-eminence, American empire would require an administration of great finesse and wisdom if it were not to fall in quite the same manner as the old kind of empire had always fallen. Yet if wisely administered, American empire’s classical decline might be delayed, even to some degree averted. Under the governance of New Humanist leaders, American capital might disdain to gamble national stability on outrageous growth; the American state architecture might abjure the temptations of absolutism; American university instructors might eschew the temptations of charismatic dilettantism and vain philology alike. The vital task for the educators of American modernity was not to teach resistance to the ascent of the American bourgeoisie, therefore, nor to teach suspicion of America’s destined greatness under their sovereignty, but anticipating its most harmful effects, risked in an excess of vulgar democracy no less than in an excess of dictatorial or bureaucratic authoritarianism, to ameliorate them by proselytising the ancient traditions of the art of wise governance to the governors of the future. For Babbitt, the practice of this art began with learning wise self-governance; and the means for the development of a virtuous national life were to be discovered in the self-activity of a stoic citizenry who would, under the direction of wise elders, exercise continual restraint over their desires...