It All Started With Rousseau by Bernard-Henri Levy

It all started with that unprecedented book called The Social Contract, whose thesis provoked first in France and then in Europe – a thrill, a shock, almost a spiritual earthquake.

What?

All the people needed was a “general will” to create a society?

All the people needed was to say “We want to be joined into a society, we don’t have anything in common but we’ve decided to join together” for such an association to exist and take effect?

Starting with a transcendental purity – an abstract and empty form, whose only principle would be the well-negotiated exchange between each member’s freedom and a superior liberty guaranteed by an agreement – a true community of men and women could come about?

People might have nothing in common – nothing, neither heroes, nor great events, nor shared miseries, nor even a common place of birth – and found a nation by a simple act of understanding – by one of the purely mind-based decisions described in the Encylopedie, in the same terms Rouseau used in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, as reasoning “in the silence of human passions” and of “associations.”?

People are never quiet about passions and associations, grumbled the Contracts outraged readers.

Counterrevolutionaries like Burke and Carlyle mocked Rousseau, saying that nobody had ever seen a society come about through such vain and artificial methods.

When, On December 26, 1815, Bonald went before the National Assembly to plead for and obtain the abolition of the divorce law that the Assemblies of the French Revolution had voted for, he insisted that history had never known a society that was not based on this common principle, these primary and natural limits, that were, for example, families.

What’s all this about the “contract,” Lamartine himself wondered, in issues 65 and 67 of his Cours familier de literature? Societies don’t come about thanks to contracts! They can’t be decreed! They are “instinctive.” They are “inevitable.”

How could you possibly imagine –thundered Maurice Barres, once again in the  National Assembly, on June 11, 1912, during a session dedicated to celebrating the bicentennial of Rouseau’s birth – how could you even conceive that the national congress could wish to glorify this “false spirit,” this “extravagant creature,” this prince of lies and artifice? I admire “the artist,” he allows. I admire “the musician.” And ‘the man himself, that poor and crabbed virtue allied to that lyrical love of nature and solitude, I won’t attack him.” But as for signing up for “the social, political, pedagogical principles of the author of the Discourse on Inequality, the Social Contract, and Emile – as for celebrating the person who “established as a principle the idea that the social order is entirely artificial,” and that it is “based on conventions” – as for anointing with the holy republican chrism the big bloated head of someone who preaches every one’s right to “reconstruct society at whim” - as for letting France look ridiculous by celebrating that lunatic, drunk on himself and his own correctness, one whose whole life was dedicated to chasing the pipe dream of “placing all life on a Procrustean bed” – as for following, therefore, this false prophet in his “detrimental, and moreover powerless, rebellion which advises us to act as if we had to remake everything all over again”- I won’t do that: I won’t give him so much credit.”

Herder too followed the lead of the French Counter-Revolutionaries; also opposed to Rousseau’s bad “Gesellschaft,” that abstract entity issued from contractualism that was obtuse and definitively deaf to the soul ( the “Voklksseele”) and to the spirit of the people (the “Volkgeist”), the good “Gemeinschaft” which itself was founded on a community of memory and roots – Herder to, upon hearing the name Rousseau, cried that he was refusing reality, following a figment of his imagination, something arbitrary, and pulled out his naturalistic, and already volkisch revolver . . .

I’m simplifying things, of course.

But that’s exactly how, over the course of two centuries, with inexhaustible rage, the mad hatred of Rousseau and his “contractualism” has been expressed. The leading figures of the anti-enlightenment shared the feeling that contractualism is the apex of the “sin of pride,” the “vice” in “all its splendor (Burke); the image of an illegitimate government whose prince would be “more disgraced than a valet or a laborer (Carlyle); but which, praise God, is all; just a big fraud – so big, so enormous – then one thing is sure: it will forever remain irrelevant.

Barres, once again, thought the Social Contract was “profoundly imbecilic.” And Renan,  a text from 1869 reproaching Napoleon III for having ceded too much to the American myth of “equal rights for all” and of transforming his government, in so doing, into a simple “public service,”: without memory, without ambition, and without the ability to elicit in others that elementary political feeling known as “respect”; wasn’t he already talking about American “impertinence’?

Since this is where we realize that it’s not just a fraud.

This is where it appears that Rousseau’s construction – a utopia, a whim, a dangerous and criminal fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless – was a  bit more than that.

This is where the idea, seemingly so crazy, so devoid of meaning or future prospect, incapable of bearing any relation to the real history of a real people; the idea which nobody ever imagined would go further than the prospect for the Constitution of a Corsica or a Poland that themselves were figments of the imagination – here’s where that flight of fancy takes shape in a place that is neither Corsica nor Poland.

Far, far away, in the New World, a real place, not a dreamland or a paper construction – where, we’re told, people have come from every end of the earth, people with different skin colors, different languages, different histories and traditions, different gods, different heroes. Have decided to come together, to agree on a contract and to gather in a nation – there is a country, America, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s project, that almost unthinkable doctrine that all the people needed to do was make up their minds, then say it and swear to it, in order to create a political body, left their skies and descended earthward, where it actually came to pass.

At first, nobody believed it.

They say it’s so absurd that it can’t last.

It goes against the grain of things and it will necessarily fail.

They say, they repeat: it’s nothing, it’s ridiculous, a remake of Glaucon’s “City of Swine” in the Republic, an experiment, a flash in the pan – it will fall just as it rose, in a cloud of dust and a burst of laughter, once reality strikes.

But here we are.

Time goes by.

Thee experiment has staying power.

The country Renan thought was impertinent scoffs at the serious nations.  .  .  .

Today, to be sure, it’s not the first crisis – nor, I’ll bet, will it be the last –of the old, beautiful idea of human universality.

There was the Romantic crisis, a direct reaction to the Enlightenment: universality doesn’t exist; the only thing that does, said Herder, are individual cultures, each bearing witness to the progress and appearance of God among men.

In reaction to the region of the Enlightenment that was Kantianism and its attempt to discover universally applicable principles of morality, there was the great Hegelian offensive: Moralitat! The only serious basis, not only of morality but of politics, as Sittlichkeit, ethnicity, the conditions that the world Spirit made for every people’s path towards the Absolute.

There was Kierkegaard answering Hegel’s own argument, since he saw in this dialectic of the Absolute – in this odyssey of a Spirit devoted to imposing itself, not today, to be sure, but tomorrow, the day after tomorrow – an even more subtle form of stamping out uniqueness” :  Moralitat or Sittlichket, what’s the difference, Kierkegaard thunders! For painful subjectivity, for my irreplaceable and irreducible self, what’s the difference between one person’s immediate Universal and someone else’s deferred Universal?  In both cases, the same murderous generality suffocates me, crushes me .  .  .

There was Nietzsche, of course, whose “perspectivism,” whose conception of philosophy as the “art of transfiguration” and of the “hammer,” the “main theme of the body,” the theory of the “will to power” as a “transvaluation” of all values, was another way to shatter the concept, for him too poor, to oversimplifying, of Kant’s and Hegel’s Universality: “Could the culminating point, the final point, of the universal process, coincide with his own Berlin existence?” – childish, ridiculous, he suggests.

Rosenzweig, from the trenches of Macedonia, where he conceives and writes The Star of Redemption, amid the blood and the horror of the battles he witnessed, sees the true face of humanity supposed, again according to the universalists, to have discovered itself spontaneously, to have affirmed God’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil, to be enshrouded by the divine halo of fully achieved Presence: it was nothing more than savage states! Nations thrown against each other in combats whose violence exceeded anything ever before seen! Poor wretches, faceless and nameless, thrown into carnage, tossed into blood baths: that’s who we are in this age of the Universal! What an idea.  .  .

Nazism, of course, and the crisis of a universalism to which it opposes paganism and its “volkisch” beliefs.

Marxism, which was another way – in the name, this time, of the “class position” of the subject, of his “interests” in relation to his own “alienation” – of rejecting a still-to-easy, lazy Universal, which wanted to treat subjects identically despite their structural differences.

Nietzsche once again:, or, to put it more precisely, his return, under the guise of Michel Foucault, who called the ancient art of the hammer “genealogy,” a genealogical hammering that will finally finish of these poor, empty generalizations tradition placed under the name of the Universal.

So we’ve gone through all these crisis.

Throughout the last centuries, the Universal has never ceased to be attacked on every front, from every side. On the Right as well as on the Left – but here again, aren’t we in one of those areas in which that distinction itself becomes muddied and absurd? – I see a general movement of retreat, of moving away from the duty of caring for others, even of questioning what we no longer want to call the ideology of human rights – “Such Western arrogance!” Such unbearable ethnocentrism! Where do you get the right to impose rules on a bunch of people who’ve never asked for them and, above all, never even thought of them?

Everywhere, indeed, we see the powerful return of the old “differentialist” doctrines – based on the idea that humanity is divided up into little sections, separated from the other parts of itself, and that we have to give up the idea of imposing the same idea of justice and law, the same conception of democracy and its regime,, the same regime of development and survival – all the way to Alain Badiou’s “stay out of their business”.  .  . all the way to “Stop imposing your norms, let others be and exist according to their own values and norms,” which is the common denominator in all these retreats.  .  .

And, observing and hearing all this – the disavowal of Europe, anti-Americanism and the morbid fixation on Empire, this recurrence of anti-Semitism, this refusal to understand the truth about Fascislamism -observing it in the reflected light of past re-considerations, hearing it with a slightly philosophical ear, it’s hard for me not to think that this is a crisis that, perhaps because it was preceded by all these others, perhaps because it randomly synthesizes and extracts from the old arguments – not in detail, just taking whatever goes best with the needs of the moment (at one point someone borrows from Herder’s characterology of nations; someone else from a sub-Marxism arguing against formal rights and liberties; another, from a popularized Nietzsche, suggesting that there are as many ways to evaluate something as there are cultures; yet another, in terms of a follower of Rosenzweig could almost recognize, describes the process of the leveling of the planet by the flattening universalism of the big states) – I can’t help- but think, therefore, that we’re faced with a disarray that is exceptionally serious, perhaps also in part because we are emerging from a time that did value internationalism, care for others, and dreams of emancipation. . .

2008

The Conference of Birds by Farid Attar

The world’s birds gathered for their conference

And said: ‘Our constitution makes no sense.

All nations in the world require a king;

How is it we alone have no such thing?

Only a kingdom can be justly run;

We need a king and must inquire for one.’

They argued how to set about their quest.

The hoopoe fluttered forward; on his breast

There shone the symbol of the Spirit Way

And on his head Truth’s crown, a feathered spray.

Discerning, righteous and intelligent

He spoke: ‘My purposes are heaven-sent;

I keep God’s secrets, mundane and divine,

In proof of which behold the holy sign

Bismillah etched forever on my beak.

No one can share the grief with which I seek

Our longed-for Lord, and quickened by my haste

My wits find water in the trackless waste .  .  .

With Solomon I set out to explore

The limits of the earth from shore to shore

I know our King –but how can I alone

Endure the journey to his distant throne?

Join me, and when at last we end our quest

Our King will greet you as His honored guest. .  .

Do not imagine that the Way is short;

Vast seas and deserts lie before His Court.

Consider carefully before you start;

The journey asks of you a lion’s heart.

The road is long, the sea is deep – one flies

First buffeted by joy and then by sighs;

If you desire this quest, give  up your soul

And make our Sovereigns court your only goal.

First wash your hands of life if you would say:

“I am a pilgrim of our Sovereign’s Way";

Renounce your soul for love; He you pursue

Will sacrifice His inmost soul for you.  .  .

Whoever wishes to explore the Way,

Let him set out –what more is there to say?

The hoopoe finished, and at once the birds

Effusively responded to his words.

All praised the splendor of their distant King:

All rose impatient to be on the wing;

Each would renounce the Self and be the friend

Of his companions till the journey’s end.

But when they pondered on the journey’s length,

They hesitated; their ambitious strength

Dissolved; each bird according to his kind,

Felt flattered but reluctantly declined. .  .

All the birds in turn received their chance

To show off their loquacious ignorance.

All made excuses –floods of foolish words

Flowing from these babbling, rumor-loving birds.

Forgive me, reader, if I do not say

All these excuses to avoid the Way;

But in an incoherent rush they came,

And all were inappropriate and lame. .  .

When they had understood the hoopoe’s words,

A clamor of complaint arose from the birds:

‘Although we recognize you as our guide,

You must accept – it cannot be denied –

We are a wretched, flimsy crew at best,

And lack the bare essentials for this quest.

Our feathers and our wings, our bodies ’strength

Are quite unequal to the journey’s length;

For one of us to reach the King’s throne;

Would be miraculous, a thing unknown

At least say what relationship obtains

Between His might and ours, who can take pains

To search for mysteries when he is blind?

If there were some connection we could find,

We would be more prepared to take our chance.

He seems like Solomon, and we like ants;

How can mere ants climb from their darkened pit

Up to the  Simorgh’s realm? And is it fit

That beggars try the glory of a king?

How could they manage such a thing?

The hoopoe answered them: ‘How can love thrive

In hearts impoverished and half alive?

“Beggars,” you say – such niggling poverty

Will not encourage truth or charity.

A man whose eyes love opens risks his soul –

His dancing breaks beyond the mind’s control.

When long ago the Simorgh first appeared –

His face like sunlight when the clouds have cleared –

He cast unnumbered shadows on the earth,

On each one fixed His eyes, and each gave birth.

Thus we were born; the birds of every land

Are still his shadows – think, and understand.  .  .

You are His shadow, and cannot be moved

By thoughts of life or death once this is proved.

If He had kept His majesty concealed,

No earthly shadow would have been revealed,

And where that shadow directly cast

The race of birds sprang up before it passed.

Your heart is not a mirror bright and clear

If there the Somorgh’s form does not appear;

No one can bear His beauty face to face,

And for this reason, of His perfect Grace,

He makes a mirror in our hearts - look there

To see Him, search your hearts with anxious care. . .

An ancient secret yielded to the birds

When they had understood the hoopoe’s words –

Their kinship with the Simorgh was now plain

And all were eager to set off again.

The hoopoe’s homily returned them to the Way

And with one voice the birds were heard to say:

‘Tell us, dear hoopoe, how we should proceed –

Our weakness quails before this glorious deed.’

‘A lover’, said the hoopoe, now their guide,

‘Is one in whom all thoughts of Self have died;

Those who renounce the Self deserve that name;

Righteous or sinful, they are all the same!

Your heart is thwarted by the Self’s control;

Destroy its hold on you and reach your goal.

Give up this hindrance, give up mortal sight

For only then can you approach the light.

If you are told: “Renounce our faith,” obey!

The Self and faith must both be tossed away;

Blasphemers call such actions blasphemy –

Tell them that love exceeds mere piety.

Love has no time for blasphemy or faith,

Nor lovers for the Self, that feeble wraith.

They burn all that they own; unmoved they feel

Against their skin the torturer’s steel.

Heart’s blood and bitter pain belong to love,

And tales of problems no one can remove;

Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine –

And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.

Love thrives on inextinguishable pain,

Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.

A mote of love exceeds all bounds; it gives

The vital essence to whatever lives.

But where love thrives, there pain is always found;

Angels alone escape this weary round –

They love without that savage agony

Which is reserved for vexed humanity.

[When love has pitched his tent in someone’s breast,

That man despairs of life and knows no rest.

Love’s pain will murder him, then blandly ask

A surgeon’s fee for managing the task –

The water that he drinks brings pain, his bread

Is turned to blood immediately shed;

Though he is weak, faint, feebler than an ant,

Love forces him to be her combatant;

He cannot take one mouthful unaware

That he is floundering in a sea of care.]

Islam and blasphemy have both been passed

By those who set out on love’s past at last;

Love will direct you to Dame Poverty,

And will show you the way to blasphemy.

When neither blasphemy nor faith remain,

The body and the Self have both been slain;

Then the fierce fortitude the Way will ask

Is yours, and you are worthy of the task.

Begin the journey without fear; be calm;

Forget what is and what is not Islam;

Put childish dread aside – like heroes meet

The hundred problems which you must defeat.

[You seek for faults to censure and suppress

And have no time for inward happiness –

How can you know God’s secret majesty

If you look out for sin incessantly?

To share His hidden glory you must learn

That others' errors are not your concern;

When someone else's failings are defined,

What hairs you split – but to your own you’re blind!

Grace comes to those, no matter how they’ve strayed,

Who knows their own sin’s strength, and are afraid.]

Once Jesus reached a clear stream’s bank –

He scooped up water in his palms and drank;

How sweet the water was! As if it were

Some rose-sweet sherbet or an elixir;

One with him filled a jug, and on they went.

When Jesus drank, to his astonishment,

The jug seemed filled with bitterness. “How strange,”

He said, “that water can so quickly change –

They were the same; what can this difference mean?

What tasted sweet is brackish and unclean!”

The jug spoke” “Lord, once I too had a soul

And was a man –but I have been a bowl,

A cruse, a pitcher of crude earthenware,

Remade a thousand times; and all forms share

The bitterness of death –which would remain

Though I were baked a thousand times again;

No water could be sweet which I contain.”

O careless of your fate! From this jug learn,

And from your inattentive folly turn;

O pilgrim, you have lost yourself –before

Death takes you seek the hidden Way once more!

If while you live and breathe you fail to see

The nature of your own reality,

How can you search when dead? The man who lives

And does not strive is lost; his mother gives

Him life but he cannot become a man –

He strays, a self-deluded charlatan.

How many veils obstruct the Sufi’s quest,

How long his search till Truth is manifest!

When the last veil is lifted neither men

Nor all their glory will be seen again,

The universe will fade – this mighty show

In all its majesty and pomp will go,

And those who love appearances will prove

Each others enemies and forfeit love,

While those who loved the absent, unseen Friend

Will enter pure love which knows no end.

The Conference of Birds by Farid Attar; translated by Afkhan Darbandi and Dick Davis; Penguin Books, revised in 2011

In the Garden at Combray by Marcel Proust

The dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which ( thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.

But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing too hot, had broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come up and beg me to go outside.  And as I did not wish to interrupt my reading, I would go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut tree, in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas in the depths of which I used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who mighty be coming to call upon my family.

And then my thoughts, too, formed a similar sort of recess, in the depths of which I felt I could bury myself and remain invisible even while I looked at what went on outside. When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

Upon the sort of screen dappled with different states and impressions which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the bottom of the garden, what was my primary, my innermost impulse, the lever whose incessant movements controlled everything else, was my belief in the philosophical; richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever the book might be.

For even if I had bought the book at Combray, having seen it outside Borange’s – whose grocery lay too far from our house for Francoise to be able to shop there, as she did at Camus’s, but was better stocked as a stationer and bookseller –tied with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly serials and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, it was because I recognized it as a book which had been well spoken of by the schoolmaster or the school friend who at that particular time seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.

Next to this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of Truth, came emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.  These were the events taking place in the book I was reading.

It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Francoise would have called “real people.” But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a “real” person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of “real” people would be a decided improvement.

A “real” person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.  If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelists happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.

And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worse sorrow; but we know it only through  reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human element, would come the landscape, more or less projected before my eyes, in which the plot of the story was taking place, and which made a stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual landscape which met my eyes when I raised them from the book.  .  .

.   .   .   .   .   .   .  

My counsels persuaded my love that the morrow would not be different from all the days that had gone before; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, too long established now to be capable of alteration, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, it was I alone who loved. “It is true,” my love answered, “there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter now.” And so, as from the very next day (or from the next public holiday, if there was one in the offing, or an anniversary, or the New Year, perhaps – one of those days which are not like other days, on which time starts afresh, casting aside the heritage of the past, declining the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to terminate our old friendship and to join me in laying the foundations of a new one.

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust; translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin; Vintage International, 1981

Martyrs on the Altar of the Nation by Richard Bell

In the dark and rancorous years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War a growing number of commentators, including Abraham Lincoln, had mustered the rhetoric of self-destruction to characterize the gathering storm. Whether in literary or polemical contexts, whether from pulpits, in the pages of the press, or in private correspondence, a steadily increasing number of northern pundits had taken to likening the burgeoning prospect of violent disunion to the individual act of committing suicide. The newspapers published by Fredrick Douglass between August 1848 and September 1855 illustrate the general pattern.  The North Star equated proposals to extend slavery into California and New Mexico to “moral suicide.” To withhold support from the Free Soil Party was “morally to commit suicide" and the senators who had blocked the passage of the Wilmot Proviso "may have committed suicide.” The Fredrick Douglass’s Paper described the dissolution of the Whig Party over the slavery question as a felo-de-se and the use of popular sovereignty to determine the fate of the Kansas Territory as ‘the suicide of Slavery.”  In 1858 Massachusetts congressman Eli Thayer told his Democratic opponents in the House that their efforts to repeal the Missouri Compromise amounted to “a suicidal act,” an overreach into once-neutral territory that compelled the Free States to respond and retaliate.

The object of such purposefully provocative language was to persuade stakeholders that disunion was to be avoided at All costs.  Similar motifs even inflected the language of the minority of slave owners who issued public warnings about the extremity of secession.  Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis argued that constitutional separation “would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide.  The act itself is insanity .  .  . Dissolution means death, the suicide of liberty, without hope of resurrection.”

Despite its striking and insistent ubiquity in public discourse throughout the 1850s, 1860, and, most especially in 1861, such restraining rhetoric, however visceral and emotive, proved wholly insufficient to diffuse the sectional crisis.  It never became a transforming force.  On the contrary, when war came Douglass and men like him felt overwhelming pressure to embrace the Union’s martial aims and soon turned their oratorical talents to the business of recruiting volunteer soldiers and buttressing northern morale. Here, too, suicide motifs provided useful ammunition, as  boosters for the war effort promoted images of noble, romantic self-sacrifice in which the battlefield slaughters of volunteer soldiers were reconfigured as acts of selfless martyrdom for a righteous cause.  While the use of this sort of language had long been standard practice in western warfare, the scale of the Civil War, and the attendant push to mobilize hundreds of thousands of young men, was unprecedented.  Even as northerners continued to understand all but a handful of noncombat suicides as selfish, antisocial deaths that denied their subjects the prospects of salvation, the romantic rhetoric of heroic self-sacrifice that began to spread as America went to war recast the meaning of one species of self-destruction, promising every volunteer soldier who succumbed to a martial death a glorious remembrance and the eternal comforts of heaven.

As the Confederacy’s early offensives made the prospect of Union victory appear even more remote, clergymen across the Free States took to arguing that the blood of the fallen was necessary atonement for the sin of slavery.  The blood sacrifice of “cheerful,” God-fearing soldiers was required if the Union was to prevail and if America was to be cleansed, sanctified, and renewed.  Through repetition, such claims soon became instinctual and reflexive.  “A republic for which such sacrifices have been made,” Albany, New York, pastor Rufus Clark declared at a memorial sermon delivered in July 1864, as the war finally began to turn in the union’s favor, “and upon whose altar such noble and precious lives have been laid, must live, must triumph over all its foes, and shine with new splendor in ages yet to come.”  In this absolutist moral crusade, even Lincoln’s assassination was an essential - and some how voluntary – sacrifice for the larger cause.

There was no place in this emerging civic religion for soldiers who drew knives across their throats of hanged themselves from tent poles. Unlike the tens of thousands of troops who surrendered their lives in the line of duty, soldiers who did so by other means seemed like cowards, deserters, or even traitors to the Union cause. In the midst of total war., their deaths seemed to telegraph a disconcerting dearth of self-discipline and mental vigor, a lack of faith in the power of prayer or the belief that God was on their side, and a deficit of honor and manly fortitude in the face of discomfort, privation, and atrocity.  Their fatal disillusionment seemed also to signal their apparent surrender to childish, selfish fears, as well as their willingness to desert their comrades and disregard their place in a military hierarchy that, like a strict patriarchal family, rested on unquestioned obedience.

For these reasons, most northern newspaper editors paid little heed to the mounting evidence that Union soldiers unable to cope with the debasement of the war were committing suicide in ever-greater numbers.  Indeed, when stories of self-destruction in the Union army first began to surface in the northern press in 1861 and 62, their authors typically declined to speculate as to the deceased’s motives, or pointed instead to purportedly preexisting conditions such as intemperance, trouble at home, or ill health as the prime causal factor.  Only as the war ground on and as pockets of opposition to forced conscription developed did some of the more critical Union newspapers begin to assert that the prospect of the draft, the trauma of combat, to toll of camp life, and disillusionment with the cause at hand had, in fact, driven many young men to suicide.

After the war, the War Department would calculate that only three hundred enlisted men and twenty-four officers had taken their own lives during the fighting. This too seems like the result of under-counting. If the grim reportage collated from dissenting journalists and from piecemeal manuscript sources is anything to go by, it seems likely that almost every company in the Union army was touched by self-destruction or the threat of it. It was not until after the war that the majority of the reading public came to properly understand the true extent of soldiers’ daily struggle to fight off the inclination to surrender to starvation, fear and despair.  .  .

In retrospect, there is little doubt that both sides sustained heavy numbers of self-inflicted casualties in the course of waging the Civil War. Yet while the mainstream northern press seemed reluctant to offer a full account of the many Union suicides committed during the five years of fighting, the same editors had no such qualms about reporting on the situation behind Confederate lines.  Throughout the war, the pages of the most northern papers were often stocked with news and hearsay claiming that self-destruction attributable to the ongoing war was ravaging every rank of the Confederate army.  .  .

Between the Revolution and Reconstruction Americans engaged in an all-consuming ideological struggle to reconcile the expansion of individual liberty with the imperatives of coexistence and mutual obligation. To document the distinctive role that suicide politics played in this dynamic story is to understand how that politics came to shape and be shaped by all manner of related transformations in American society. Over the course of this crucial, formative period in the nation’s early history, wide-ranging, intangible processes such as secularization, democratization, and medicalization altered how the reading public understood the meaning of suicide, even as these processes were simultaneously influenced by assumptions about self-destruction.  By the same token, the rise of the novel, the twinned ascension of liberal and evangelical Christianity, the multifaceted development of the antislavery movement, and the growth of sectional interests drew strength and momentum from an evolving cultural politics of self-destruction, and, in turn, remade that politics.

The same dynamic exchanges inform our present moment. The vestigial traces of early American efforts to leverage decisions to die for political purposes linger on in many of today's headlines.  The early national crusade to police sentimental novels deemed to be a deadly influence on weak and waxen young minds corresponds closely with modern assumptions about the copycat consequences of listening to expletive-laden rap music or playing violent video games. The same concerns that fired suicide prevention campaigns at the dawn of the nineteenth century are now manifest in attempts to overturn assisted suicide laws recently passed in Oregon and Washington.  Likewise, the demagoguery and political gamesmanship first heard in debates over abolition, capital punishment, and revivalism now accompany news reports of the suicides of bullied students and ruined executives, as well as war veterans, cult members, terrorists, and hunger strikers.

From this perspective it seems that moral crisis over self-destruction never entirely dissipate.  Instead, they evolve and metastasize to serve the needs of those who stand to profit by them. Americans live in the midst of a seemingly unending series of suicide panics, each one more urgent and alarming than the last, and each one a damning “proof” that the country is benighted by ever more crippling social dislocations and by unprecedented extremes of atomization and alienation.  If we are to better understand why opportunists in politics and the media continue to exploit certain species of suicide and the rhetoric of self-destruction more generally, we must attend to the origins of this morbid inclination in the decades after the Revolution, an era when the expansion of print culture made the fraught relationship between the self and society the subject of general conversation for the very first time.