James E Hartley

Steppenwolf and You

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

I read this book a quarter of a century ago, soon after I began serious reading. I think I picked it up at the used book store in Davis, CA, but it may have been at a library book sale. The appeal was obvious: Great Book with the same name as a rock band. So, it must be good, right?

I have a vivid memory of being terribly disappointed with the book. There is this guy who is a werewolf, the Steppenwolf, see, and he knows he is a werewolf, and he starts meeting people, and there is this constant threat that the werewolf will take over and do some violence, but then the werewolf guy goes to some bizarre theater thing and some bizarre things happen there and then he talks to a strange guy named Pablo and then Mozart shows up and then the novel ends. What kind of werewolf book is that?

By the way, that plot description above is not actually a plot description of the novel Hesse wrote. It is the description of the novel my mid-20s-self read.

I reread the book. Wow. My mid-20s-self sure didn’t know anything. It isn’t surprising that he read this book so poorly; his education—and let’s be clear, he had a bachelor’s degree by this point—had left him so woefully uneducated that there was no way he was ever going to make sense of Steppenwolf, the novel that Hesse actually wrote. Even a love of the band of the same name left him woefully unprepared to have any hope of understanding anything at all in that novel that Hesse wrote.

(I have often told my bookish students who enjoy a long conversation about books that they would have had utter disdain for me if they had met me when I was in college—I knew nothing compared to what my bookish students know.)

So what about the novel Steppenwolf that Hesse wrote…you know the one that doesn’t have a werewolf or even a hint of a werewolf, the one in which the Magic Theater isn’t really all that strange?

It is actually a good book—maybe even a Great Book. As an exploration of the human psyche, it is quite thought-provoking. The book was littered with passages which made me wonder, “Is that true?” The mind is a strange place, after all. Our hero, Harry Haller, thinks of himself as being of two minds—the coldly rational human self and the wild wolfish self. The human half must keep the wolfish half at bay. So far, so conventional.

Except, Harry is living in a world (early 20^th century) where the norms of Civilization which help keep man civilized, help keep the wolf at bay, are breaking down. How does a man whose life is ordered to keep his beast under control manage in a world in which everything, from the dance halls to the music to the women, are conspiring to release man’s inner beast? At this point, the novel was starting to intrigue me—after all the early 21^st century is even farther down the path of civilizational decline than was the early 20^th century.

Then, a funny thing happen on the way to the novel I was expecting. The book begins a sustained argument that Harry is wrong to think of himself as being divided into two parts. He isn’t two parts at all; his parts are legion. Crafting this multiplicity of parts into a cohesive whole is the fundamental challenge of becoming human. Take all the parts of you that make up who you are and combine them in this way and you are one person, but combine those same parts in a different way and you are someone else entirely.

So, how do you craft a self? Can you craft a self? And even more interestingly, can you craft a self which is different than the one you have already crafted? Is there a way to take all the constituent parts which make up You and shuffle them up and come up with a different person? The book is wildly optimistic on this. I am much more skeptical.

Can I readjust my personality? I don’t see how. And more interestingly, I don’t see why I would want to do so. After all, if I readjusted my personality, am I still me? Is my immortal soul intricately bound up with, say, my Myers-Briggs personality type?

The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent

The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, is marvelously fun.

Quirky beyond belief—a seemingly wild random ride that ends up all linking together in the end.

The basic plot is perfectly circular. It is the type of story that my wife, who hates looping time travel stories, would hate.

(By the way, the recent Doctor Who invention of “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” was a hysterical dodge to avoid the inherent problem of maintaining continuity in a 50 year long science fiction series in which time travel is the whole point.)

In the midst of that circular plot, there are all sorts of crazy subplots having nothing to do with anything, but amusing in their own right. (There is even a proto-“Harrison Bergeron” which was much better done in the short story than in the novel.)

There is one subplot which truly intrigued me. In the middle of the novel, a character creates a new religion: The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

The theology of the church is perfectly explained in the name of the church. In fact, once you have a theology that says
a) God Exists, and
b) He is Utterly Indifferent,
well, there really isn’t much more theology to work out.

A fascinating thought experiment, this new religion.

Compare The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent to the conclusion of Sartre’s Nausea. In both the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and in a state of total existential nihilism, there is no point to anything.

But, is it more comforting to think that world is meaningless because there is Nothing or because the God who created everything is totally and completely indifferent to the creation?

Oddly, those two worlds would be observationally equivalent—if you live in one, surely someone would think the world was actually the other. So, while at one level it would make no difference which was right, I suspect most people would rather live in one universe than the other. But, I am not sure which is more attractive.

There is no point in denying the attractiveness of a universe in which God the Utterly Indifferent exists.

If God is Indifferent, then why should any of the rest of us be otherwise? That would be comforting. I can stop caring about all the problems in this world.

But, then we’d have that problem of wondering why God was so Utterly Indifferent and that would be rather insulting. After all, I care about Me, so shouldn’t God care about Me?

So, maybe the existential crisis of Nausea is better. Though, it is hard to fathom how Nausea could be a preferred state to any other state.

It’s almost like the more you think about it, the more you realize that maybe it is better if there is God the Not So Utterly Indifferent.

All of which gets me wondering why there are people who seem to hope it is a godless universe. I understand doubting the existence of God, but I am genuinely baffled by people who seem passionate about the desirability of such a thing.

Vonnegut’s human history is senseless from our standpoint. That is the whole point of The Sirens of Titan. Yet, there is a merriness in the senselessness. I do understand that. If there is no point to any of this, then why not take joy in it?

Happiness is underrated in modern philosophical circles.

Related Posts

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat’s Cradle “Does Life Have Meaning?”
Nietzsche, Friedrich Twilight of the Idols “Philosophizing With a Hammer”

Odysseus: Natural Born Leader

Everyone likes the idea of a role model for leadership.

Here is the candidate of the day for that honor: Odysseus.

There are thousands of books on How to be a Leader. Thousands. Yet, one of the best of them is also one of the oldest books in the world: Homer, The Odyssey.

(As always—if you don’t read Greek, get a good translation. Life is too short to read bad translations. I highly recommend Fagles.)

As a leadership text, Homer makes a fantastic starting place for a debate on what make a great leader. Odysseus is a Leader, with a capital L.

Why? His virtues, beautifully illustrated in his stops along the way home, all point in one direction—never get distracted from your goal. The man who succeeds is the man who avoids the temptations of the moment, always keeping a firm focus on the end goal.

And then, in the magnificent endgame, Odysseus goes out and takes what he wants. He schemes and acts decisively. Slaughter in the Hall. Blood everywhere. “How it would have thrilled your heart to see him—/splattered with bloody filth, a lion with his kill!” (23:51-52).

In the contest Odysseus vs (insert leader of your choice): who wins? Odysseus by a mile. The man is clever and silver-tongued and strong and brave. He takes what he wants and all good people rally around him because he is a Natural Born Leader.

The framing story amplifies the point. The book begins with Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, wondering if he is really good enough to follow in the footsteps of his long lost father. As the story develops, Telemachus grows into maturity and becomes every bit the man his father is. And then the book ends with a marvelous display of the passing of the heroic virtues from Laertes to his son Odysseus to his son Telemachus.

Homer asks the Muse to sing for our time too—and that is Homer’s challenge to us—are we good enough? Can we too rise up and lead like Odysseus? Or is our age so degenerate that we no longer recognize heroic leadership when we see it?

Homer would be utterly depressed by the classes I have taught using this book as a model for leadership.

I try really hard to convince my students that this is True Leadership, that simply rising up and acting is the best possible, if not the only, form of leadership. I try to convince them that the slaughter in the halls should be replicated at a college—a single slaughter of the noisy, lawless students breaking quiet hours during finals week in one of the dorms would be a magnificent act of leadership and bring untold benefits to the campus for years to come.

I fail at convincing my students of this. Every single time.

None of the students seem to think murdering their fellow students as a means of bringing order to the society is a good idea. (Shocking, I know.)

Indeed, they all seem to think this sort of action isn’t really leadership at all. They argue that true leadership really needs some sort of ethical core, that for example, Odysseus is sorely lacking in mercy. They want more conversation, less action.

While I never concede the point in class, the students are right. (Insert sighs of relief from the Reader who was hoping I don’t really think a slaughter in a dorm is a good idea.)

Yet, faced with the starkness of Homeric leadership, it really is hard to see what other type of leadership would merit the name. Odysseus, standing in the halls after the slaughter, is a magnificent image. One part recoils from the image, one part is attracted to it. Who wouldn’t want to follow Odysseus into battle?

Reading Native Son in the 21st Century

Some books get better with age. Native Son is a book like that.

The story, originally published in 1940: Bigger, a young black delinquent, gets a job as a chauffeur to wealthy white family, murders the daughter on his first night on the job, does a terrible job trying to cover up the crime, is discovered, flees, murders another girl, is caught, and is put on trial.

The book highlights two great divides in American society.

First, the Black-White divide. As a historical matter, Wright’s book is enormously influential in highlighting this divide.

No doubt about it: in 1940, three quarters of a century after the Civil War, the divide between Blacks and Whites was large and in desperate need of being corrected. Wright does a fantastic job illustrating the divide and the effects of the divide.

On this level, Wright’s book is an amazing piece of American history. But, on this level, it is comparable to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an enormously important and influential novel that is dated and not really all that engrossing.

The second divide, and it is well worth noting that it is not obvious whether the first or second divide is the more significant one in the novel, is the difference between the wealthy and the poor. Communists loom large in this book.

In other words, the explanation for the actions of Bigger are overdetermined—does he act the way he acts because he is black in a society which relegates blacks to being second-class citizens or because he is poor in a society which relegates the poor to being second class citizens? Presumably, some teacher somewhere, desperate to find an essay topic in which students could analyze or review Native Son, has assigned that question.

But, and here is where the novel reaches Greatness, there is a third possibility.

Imagine for a second that Bigger is a person. Not a black person. Not a poor person. Just a person.

Everyone around Bigger wants to label him. They want to tell him he is black or poor. (Just like everyone reading the novel wants to label him as black or poor.) So, Bigger grows up learning to act like he is just a walking label.

But, imagine the sudden realization that Bigger has sitting in his jail cell that he is not just a label. He is a complete and full person. Imagine the shock. He has a hard time wrapping his mind around it all. But, he begins to see the possibilities:

Another impulse rose in him, born of desperate need, and his mind clothed it in an image of a strong blinding sun sending hot rays down and he was standing in the midst of a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men, and the sun’s rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and good upward toward the sun…

I have this strange dream where one day people will read Native Son and notice that Bigger is not a poor, black man, but that he is a man and they will treat him like a man and ask him what he feels not as a part of a larger class, but what he feels himself.

I have this strange dream that one day we will all talk to each other like that, that we will all treat each other like individuals unique and three-dimensional.

I have this strange dream that one day the idea of assigning Richard Wright in an “African-American Literature” course will seem insulting and old-fashioned because Richard Wright is not an African-American author, but he is an author, a man who wrote a Great Book.

(The Library of America volume adds some really interesting details about the publication history of the book. Indeed, this is the first time the book was published in its original form. If you haven’t read it, and even if you have, get the LOA edition.)

In reflecting on his fear that the Communist party might condemn the book because of its “individualist and dangerous element,” Wright realizes, “I felt that a right more immediately deeper than that of politics or race was at stake; that is, a human right, the right of a man to think and feel honestly.”

This book is a beautiful testament to the problems inherent in thinking of people only as a member of a class of people.

Bigger deserves more. He deserves to be seen as an individual, not as a member of a class.

It is a tragedy, a true tragedy, that three quarters of a century after Native Son, Bigger is still not accorded his full measure of humanity.

So, You Want to Pray Like a Jesuit?

What is a book? When is a book not really a book?

Before now, I thought I knew; that doesn’t seem like a terribly complicated question after all.

War and Peace is a book. So is Thus Spake Zarathustra. So is Go, Dog. Go!

But what about a lengthy instruction manual for a Television? It’s bound like a book, and is longer than many things which are obviously books. Is it a book or is the category “Instruction Manual” not contained in the set of things called “books”?

The question is prompted by The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.

I enjoyed reading this…what do I call it?…that is where I get stuck. It looks like a book; I thought it was a book. But, it is an instruction manual. It is much more like the instruction manual for my television than like anything I have in my office. (Well other than itself—technically it is most like itself).

Ignatius sets out a series of exercises which he believes will, over the course of weeks, draw one closer to God. It is a pretty rigorous set of exercises—hours a day for roughly four weeks.

Broadly speaking, the exercises would fall into the category of prayer, but here again we run into a definition problem. For example, one of the exercises is to spend the hour (Ignatius is really insistent on the fact that you need to spend an hour at a time doing each exercise) imagining the Last Supper.

Picture where everyone is sitting, what they are wearing, what they are saying to one another. Imagine the room and the food on the table. (Is there a dog?) Fill in all the details. This is all part of a reflection on the Last Supper.

This sort of imaginary thought experiment is quite common in the Exercises—there are lots of things to picture here. So, is that prayer? Again, I am not sure.

(Thinking through the types of prayer described in the Zaleskis’ excellent book, Prayer: A History:

Parts of the Ignatius exercise fit cleanly into the category of devotional prayer. But, I am not sure if a meditation on hell (week 1, fifth exercise) counts as prayer or not.)

What I am sure about is that I would not make a very good Jesuit. Not only would I have a hard time spending an hour imagining the details of the Last Supper or most of the other things in these exercises, I have a really hard time even imagining the act of imagining them.

Clearly some people find such exercises meaningful and profound and worthy of their time. Is it a failing that I think I would get nearly nothing out of the attempt to follow these exercises? Is it possible I am wrong when I read them and think, “Not for me”?

In other words, are the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius for universal application? Ignatius does note that not everyone is ready for the whole series of exercises—some people may not graduate from week one to week two, but does that mean week one is suitable for everyone?

If I spent a month in the summer at a Jesuit retreat going through these exercises, would I learn something and become a more Godly person? I don’t think so, but how would I know if that is just being shortsighted?

As I said above, I am glad I read through these exercises, but the only point in rereading them would be to actually go through the exercises.

Now you have now been warned—don’t pick this up expecting a book.

Perfect Gift for College Students

If you are looking for a graduation gift (high school or college), here it is.

If you are looking for a gift for a student still in college, here it is.

Charles Murray’s, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life.

Every student I know or have ever known would benefit immensely, immensely, from reading this book.

Indeed, in all honesty, I cannot think of a book of advice I would more whole-heartedly endorse for a college student than this one. I feel an acute sense of guilt that I do not be hand this book to all my students. They would benefit so much from it.

Now I do have quibbles with the book. Most importantly, the title.

Having read the book, the title makes perfect sense. But before I read it, I had the wrong impression. That wrong impression will limit the number of people who read this book. That is a tragedy.

This is not a book for curmudgeons on how to get ahead. It is a book by a curmudgeon giving advice to everyone, curmudgeon or not.

As Murray notes, the world is full of curmudgeons. Curmudgeons, in fact, are the people who will be hiring you. You will meet them all the time.

Curmudgeons judge you. You may not like it, you may wish they didn’t, but they do.

Curmudgeons judge you because your behavior is not very good. You are squandering your life. You are obsessed with silly things.

For example, you think judging is bad; curmudgeons judge you for such soft, brainless thinking.

You don’t understand proper grammar, you don’t know how to rewrite or proofread, you don’t dress well (ouch!), and it all adds up to you don’t know how to interact with people older and wiser than you.

This book will tell you how to improve yourself. The improvements will be dramatic. And they will make you happier.

It’s that last bit which really jars most of my students. In an age in which happiness is confused with doing whatever you want at the present moment, the whole idea that reforming your actions now so that you can build a deep and satisfying life later on is anathema. And, particularly galling is the idea that anyone can tell you what will make you happy in the long run.

Well, we curmudgeons can tell you what will make you happy in the long run. We can easily tell you because we are wise. Indeed, our wisdom is what makes us curmudgeons. We see so much foolishness that we get terribly curmudgeonly.

What will make you happy? Family, vocation, community, and faith. You need all four.

The modern liberal arts college prepares a student to achieve happiness in precisely zero of those four realms.

We don’t ever, ever!, talk about family. We don’t know the difference between “high paying and prestigious job” and “vocation,” and insist that the former is what matters. We think “community” is Facebook and feel-good expressions of banal political correctness. And faith? Are you kidding?

It’s not just the deeper things and the way you present yourself that are the problem. You are going about your life all wrong. Leave home. Do real work. Stretch yourself. Build resilience. Don’t rush into a career. Reflect often on good behavior.

Indeed, this book even has the bit of advice I spend more time giving students than just about anything else. Stop worrying about your silly summer internship. Internships don’t matter. At all. Nobody cares about your internship. You will learn nothing at your “internship.”

Just go get a real job, doing real work and enjoy your summer reading some books and watching some movies and interacting with people who are not carbon copies of yourself.

Murray notes that there are a zillion summer resorts that want to hire college students for the summer. Go get one of those jobs. They will pay you and you will do low-skill work and you will learn more about yourself than you ever will filing papers on Wall Street for no pay.

And, funny thing—you can still get that 20 hour a day Wall Street job if you really want it when you graduate, because, you see, nobody cares what you did last summer.

I could go on and on, but all this is doing is making me wish I was fabulously wealthy, so wealthy I could just start handing this book out to every student who walks into my office with her latest life crisis, to every student who is graduating, to every student is worried about her summer internship, to every student who is depressed about grades.

This is the best book of practical wisdom I have ever read aimed at the college students of today.

I hate modern books of practical wisdom (I am a curmudgeon). I love this book.