eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Ambivalent about the disruption, confusion, perplexity, and boundless variety apparent in the London of his day, Johnson was committed to the conventions of moral reflection but also troubled by the pressure to adopt the perspective of the crowd and the language of social theory. Regulating Confusion explores the consequences of his ambivalence and his attempt to order the chaos. It discusses his critique of moral generalizations, concept of moral reflection as a symbolic gesture, and account of what happens to the notion of character when individuals, having lost the support of moral convention, become faces in a crowd. Reflecting generally on the relationship between skepticism and political ideology, Reinert also discusses Johnson’s political skepticism and the forms of speculation and action it authorized.
Challenging prevalent psychologizing and humanistic interpretations, Regulating Confusion leaves behind the re-emergent view of Johnson as a reactionary ideologue and presents him in a theoretically sophisticated context. It offers his style of skepticism as a model of poise in the face of confusion about the nature of political truth and personal responsibility and demonstrates his value as a resource for students of culture struggling with contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822382423 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/17/1996 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 205 |
| Lexile: | 1270L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 539 KB |
About the Author
Thomas Reinert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Read an Excerpt
Regulating Confusion
Samuel Johnson and the Crowd
By Thomas Reinert
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8242-3
CHAPTER 1
The Desire for Fame
* * *
According to sentimentalist social theory in the eighteenth century, moral action finds its natural home in small societies. Benevolence, the source of moral action, is natural to humans, and it expresses itself, in the Earl of Shaftesbury's phrase, as a "herding impulse." As long as this impulse gives rise to a small community, Shaftesbury writes, it guides the spirit of the group: "In less parties, men may be intimately conversant and acquainted with one another. They can there better taste society, and enjoy the common good and interest of a more contracted public. They view the whole compass and extent of their community, and see and know particularly whom they serve, and to what end they associate and conspire." Adam Ferguson, similarly, argues that the moral instincts of mankind appear where we feel ourselves part of a close-knit, well-defined social order: "When we are involved in any of the divisions into which mankind are separated under the denominations of a country, a tribe, or an order of men any way affected by common interests, and guided by communicating passions, the mind recognizes its natural station; the sentiments of the breast, and the talents of the understanding, find their natural exercise."
But mankind's intrinsic sociability, and with it the moral instinct, become obstructed in large societies because they have too much material to contend with. Shaftesbury and Ferguson speak of a breakdown of vision when "society grows vast and bulky" (Shaftesbury 76): no "visible band is formed, no strict alliance" in the "body politic at large" (76); "members can no longer apprehend the common ties of society, nor be engaged by affection in the cause of their country" (Ferguson 363). Shaftesbury observes that sentiment accordingly flags; people cannot feel a strong social impulse toward a group whose outline and identity they cannot readily see: the "close sympathy and conspiring virtue is apt to lose itself, for want of direction, in so wide a field" (75).
Bernard Mandeville, who argues rather for an instinctive selfishness in human nature, nevertheless agrees that moral law might govern the social order in small communities; but it will prohibit the growth of the community beyond certain narrow bounds. Scale proceeds from luxury, self-indulgence, fraud, and other vices, according to Mandeville. If "Mankind could be cured of [these] Failings"—which "they are Naturally guilty of"—they would "cease to be capable of being rais'd into such vast, potent and polite Societies, as they have been."
The sentimentalists argue that the expansion of society has an ambivalent moral consequence. On the one hand, people in a large society are driven by their sociable, sympathizing instinct to form smaller societies within the larger one. "To cantonise is natural," writes Shaftesbury, "when the society grows vast and bulky" (76). People long to feel the "confederating charm"; where they cannot feel it naturally, they find ways to produce the feeling artificially: "Distinctions of many kinds are invented. Religious societies are formed. Orders are erected, and their interests espoused and served with the utmost zeal and passion" (76). Within the confines of such social orders, people feel themselves in the "natural station" Ferguson speaks of. "Wisdom, vigilance, fidelity, and fortitude, are the characters requisite in such a scene, and the qualities which it tends to improve" (362). But in the society at large, or in the field of humanity generally, these distinctions breed conflict. They are responsible for political factions, tribal prejudices, and wars between countries. "'[T]is in war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn," writes Shaftesbury (76). "In territories of considerable ex-content ... the national union, in rude ages, is extremely imperfect. Every district forms a separate party; ... their feuds and animosities give more frequently the appearance of so many nations at war, than of a people united by connections of policy" (Ferguson 364). David Hume observes that the very impulse to be sociable tends to throw people back upon their private interests in a large society, and a general selfishness takes over: since things which are contiguous to them impress them most strongly, they neglect their political interests in an extended society, and concern themselves exclusively with their private circle of friends and business associates.
This line of thought, by linking moral sentiment to a particular social circumstance—that is, the limited circle of personal affection and acquaintance—tends to drain that sentiment of its authority as an ordering principle. Its value comes to seem equivocal. Man-deville explains this consequence in a notoriously robust form. For him, the two spheres of experience here—the private and the public—exist in sharp contrast, and as such they force us to doubt the general application of moral precepts. Vice produces personal misery; but since it is essential to the growth of society as a whole, its wickedness is only relative to one's perspective. One is bound to hate vice, especially if one is victimized by it, but Mandeville urges that one might learn, at any rate, "more patiently to submit to those Inconveniencies, which no Government upon Earth can remedy" (55) as long as one considers the benefits that vice brings to society at large: that is, one should suppress moral judgments in favor of social and economic aims. Mandeville compares this conflict of perspectives to the experience of walking in the London streets: people wish the streets were cleaner "whilst they regard nothing but their own Cloaths and private Conveniency; but when once they consider, that what offends them is the result of the Plenty, great Traffick and Opulency of that mighty City, if they have any Concern in its Welfare, they will hardly ever wish to see the Streets of it less dirty" (57). This contrast of perspectives does not absolutely dispel the authority of moral concerns; but it means that moral philosophy cannot hope to generalize its maxims.
Intellectual historians find in sentimentalist social theory as well a drift toward an institutionally and economically defined conception of social order, and away from one based on moral precepts. Though eighteenth-century social philosophers reject Mandeville's idea that social prosperity requires and depends upon private vice, they nevertheless tend to affirm his view that, in the analysis of large masses of people, it is relevant only in a roundabout way, if at all, to invoke the precepts of traditional moral wisdom. Ferguson claims, in a Mandevillean moment, that the internal feuds of a nation are beneficial because the participants "acquire a spirit ... in their private divisions, and in the midst of a disorder, otherwise hurtful, of which the force, on many occasions, redounds to the power of the state" (364). More generally, society runs on the united strength of a vast array of businesses and institutions which work out their proper relations among themselves without the guidance of any governing intelligence. Society grows by the subdivision of the social work among more and more citizens who know less and less about the system's total organization. "Nations of tradesmen come to consist of members, who, beyond their own particular trade, are ignorant of all human affairs, and who may contribute to the preservation and enlargement of their commonwealth, without making its interest an object of their regard or attention" (296–97).
To characterize the integration of such isolated figures, who may or may not be morally upright, Ferguson makes use of the amoral metaphor of the machine. Speaking of government officials, he writes that they "are made, like the parts of an engine, to concur to a purpose, without any concert of their own; and equally blind with the trader to any general combination, they unite with him, in furnishing to the state its resources, its conduct, and its force" (297–98). John Barrell speculates that the image of the machine derives from efforts, like Pope's Essay on Man, to imagine man as a moving part of a universal machine, his function being "perhaps to 'touch some wheel' which is invisible to him"; but, he says, the idea of the machine came to have an explanatory power in its own right, and figures as a metaphor for society not only in Mandeville, but also in Shaftesbury and Hume (30–31). According to Adam Smith, the social order in civilized and commercial states is at bottom this one of a blind integration of human parts. It derives advantages from an educated populace—they are less prone to enthusiasm and superstition, and they are more decent and orderly, and easier to govern, than an ignorant and stupid public. But the division of labor, which lies at the basis of commercial expansion, inevitably narrows the average worker's understanding to a very small circuit of experience. When a man spends his whole life performing a few simple operations, he loses the habit of thought. "Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging." In "barbarous societies, as they are commonly called," every man takes part in all aspects of the social process, and so every man "is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society" (2:303); but a large commercial society, though it would benefit from this kind of well-roundedness among its citizens, not only does not depend on it but operates on a principle antithetical to it.
The sentimentalists insist, against Mandeville, that social order and private virtue can be integrated; still, they write as social historians and theorists, not as purveyors of moral maxims. The impulse to moralize appears in them as a kind of political nostalgia: Ferguson and Smith harken back to the age of barbarous societies where every man was a statesman; Hume invokes the figure of the benevolent magistrate as an anchor of social order (537); and Shaftesbury depicts the calming influence of a moral, enlightened elite laughing to scorn the delusions of public enthusiasm. None of them, though, shows, or particularly cares to show, how the general precepts of traditional moral wisdom hold up, what kind of authority they have, when set against the backdrop of an extensive theoretical distinction between private life and society as a whole.
It is Dr. Johnson's distinction that he does struggle with this problem, following it through a long path of complications, paradoxical conclusions, and doubts about the value of his work. He writes as a determined moralist; but he takes seriously the possibility that the rationale of society at large, the movement of crowds, and the work of institutions in some sense render moral reflections trivial and irrelevant. A whole style of pathos, irony, and black humor grows up around his attempts to get clear in what sense particularly this might or might not be true.
It is to be noted, first, that, for a variety of reasons, including his skepticism about the theory of human nature's innate benevolence, and his hatred of atheism, Johnson did not like any of the social theorists. Mandeville seems to have impressed him the most; Johnson said he "opened my views into real life very much" (Life 3:293). According to Mrs. Piozzi, he "took care always loudly to condemn The Fable of the Bees, but not without adding, 'that it was the work of a thinking man.'" In conversation he was quite certain that Mandeville was wrong to disjoin social order from personal virtue: "It may happen that good is produced by vice; but not as vice.... No, it is clear that the happiness of society depends on virtue" (Life 3:293). But in his writing, the figure of the crowd often appears as an agent of moral disorientation, much as it does in the work of the social theorists. It is not a strictly vicious force; but it calls to mind, as London streets do in Mandeville, a perspective from which moral considerations are not relevant.
Johnson rarely takes the crowd as a conscious object of study. It figures into his writing usually metaphorically; it comes in short bursts of reflection that give odd colorings to his tone. Perhaps the most sociological of his essays is Rambler No. 99, an essay about benevolence and friendship in which he enters a popular contemporary debate about the Christian injunction to love all mankind equally, but in which he formulates a Shaftesburian theory of crowd behavior. Like Shaftesbury and Hume (and like Feguson, who wrote after him), Johnson believes that benevolence cannot take the totality of mankind as its object, a notion he renders as the impossibility of empathizing with the crowds of big cities: if "man were to feel no incentives to kindness, more than his general tendency to congenial nature, Babylon or London, with all their multitudes, would have to him the desolation of a wilderness; his affections, not compressed into a narrower compass, would vanish like elemental fire, in boundless evaporation" (4:166). Johnson claims that the moral impulses of man in this condition, having too wide a field to work on, would degenerate: "he would abandon himself to the fluctuations of chance without expecting help against any calamity, or feeling any wish for the happiness of others" (4:166). Moral action requires a narrower compass, a more personal setting, than the totality of mankind, or even the multitudes of Babylon and London: Johnson thinks that people fabricate the setting they need, by way of avoiding the dissipation and misery that would come from general benevolence operating alone. Man improves the "condition of his existence, by superadding friendship to humanity, and the love of individuals to that of the species" (4:165; my emphasis). And again: because general benevolence, operating alone, would result in misery, the "great community of mankind is therefore necessarily broken into smaller independent societies; these form distinct interests ... [which] are again separated into subordinate classes and combinations, and social life is perpetually branched out into minuter subdivisions, till it terminates in the last ramifications of private friendship" (4:166–67).
Johnson echoes the sentimentalist theory of "cantonisation" in striking detail here; and he deviates from it just as strikingly. He gives the crowd an even more autonomous power and logic than Shaftesbury does. For Shaftesbury, people form political combinations and factions because their powers of sympathy are overextended in the crowd of society; the fact of crowding balks the herding impulse, but that impulse remains the fundamental driving force behind all social formations, public or private. According to Johnson, the fundamental force is rather crowding and the structural necessity it presents of breaking into small groups. Even friendships are driven by the need to ward off the dissipating effects of crowding. But this means that society is not constructed out of friendships; they are not its building blocks. Though Johnson posits an original "general benevolence," he thinks that the impulse to friendship arises not as a way to refocus that benevolence, as in Shaftesbury, but as a new principle "superadded" to protect the self from "evaporation." Personal affection, on this view, is a secondary psychological phenomenon, a kind of defensive artifice. The deep structure—it is not clear that one actually has an experience of this except as a structural necessity—is the pressure exerted by the undifferentiated crowd.
This is perhaps Johnson's most explicit statement of the idea that the crowd dislocates human relationships; but in metaphorical asides he elaborates on the idea throughout his moral essays. He does not appear to be making a hasty or chance remark here. The crowd has in his writing an autonomous logic; it calls up a distinct style of commentary. On the other hand, again, it does not crystallize as a conscious object of study. Its appeal is that it appears mainly as a warp in his efforts to moralize.
One of the resulting rhetorical features of Johnson's writing is an extreme simplification in the depiction of character. In crowd portraits, people reduce to single identifying traits, such as an occupation or a ruling passion. A writer addressing the public has to contend, for example, with the "man whose sole wish is to accumulate money," with "sportsmen and the men of dress," with "the naturalist" and "the philologer" (R 118, 4:268, 269). This is partly because Johnson views the people in crowds as being driven essentially by self-interest; immediately pressing obligations take up their attention so completely as to define their character. He disencumbers them of all the freight of imagination that torments the figures drawn in his individual portraits. Crowds have no imagination; they do not harass themselves with speculations about the distant future, or indulge themselves with memories of the distant past. "Among the lower classes of mankind," at least as they appear to the aspiring candidate for fame, who thus sees them as a crowd, "there will be found very little desire of any other knowledge, than what may contribute immediately to the relief of some pressing uneasiness"; "nor will the trader or manufacturer easily be persuaded, that much pleasure can arise from the mere knowledge of actions performed in remote regions, or in distant times" (4:267–68). Crowds do not particularly care for fantasy: "The truth is, that very few [people] have leisure from indispensable business, to employ their thoughts upon narrative or characters" (4:268). Crowds take a passionate interest in matters of public dispute, but primarily in those which affect them directly. The public's mind is restricted, for Johnson as for Hume, to the present and immediate. Their interest is fixed, for instance, by adherence to a party: "It is scarcely to be imagined, through how many subordinations of interest, the ardour of party is diffused; and what multitudes fancy themselves affected by every satire" (R 106, 4:202). Such enthusiasms arise out of the narrowness of the public mind: "An object, however small in itself, if placed near to the eye, will engross all the rays of light"; and so it is with "trivial" transactions—disputes between factions: they "swell ... into importance, when [they] press ... immediately on our attention" (4:202). Once they are removed to a distance, the crowd loses interest (R146, 5:16).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Regulating Confusion by Thomas Reinert. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
One The Desire for Fame
Two Periodical Moralizing
Three The Vanity of Human Wishes
Four Exemplary Self-Sacrifice
Five Probability and Conjecture
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index