REVIEW
The last
PETER
puritans
AUGUSTINE
LAWLER
ROOK
Farm was ofthethemost
and secular
in someutopian
ways
most successful,
manyvisible,
American
experiments of the 1840s. This decade, as Sterling Delano
explains in Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia, t was one
of our nation's most distinctive, infused as it was by the idea
of the perfectibility of humanity. Delano's book is impressively researched but also, through no fault of his own,
pretty boring. The "dark side" of the experiment just isn't
very dark, consisting mainly of the community's chronic
inability to achieve financial solvency, as well as ordinary
quarrels over organization. Social utopians don't usually deserve our sympathy, but I put down Delano's book moved by
the genuine decency of these not-so-radical reformers.
The founder and leading light of Brook Farm was the
Reverend George Ripley, a Unitarian minister who--out
of
spiritual integrity--felt
compelled to surrender his pulpit.
He described himself to his parishioners
in his farewell
sermon as "a peace man, a temperance man, an abolitionist, a transcendentalist,
[and] a friend of radical reform of
our social institutions." But he was no longer a Unitarian.
Today, calling someone a lapsed Unitarian is a sort of bad
joke, because everyone knows that Unitarians nowadays
have nothing to stop believing in. But in the New England
of the Transcendentalists,
the Unitarians
were regarded as
the hidebound
political and religious conservatives.
They
had some faith in the supernatural
teaching of the Bible,
about the miracles of Jesus, and they supported the existing political
establishment.
So intolerant
were they that
literal belief in the Biblical miracles was a requirement
for membership
in the church! So Ripley cheerfully
conceded that he had to leave.
t Belknap Press of Harvard University. 448 pp. $29.95.
126
THE LAST PURITANS
127
Ripley replaced his faith in miracles with faith in radical social reform. For him, "the purpose of Christianity
...
is to redeem society as well as the individual from sin."
When society is redeemed, then the individual
is too, because individual
sin is caused by eradicable social alienation and inequality. That was, in Ripley's view, the true
teaching of Christ. The Kingdom of God was "to be realized on earth." War, slavery, and oppression would disappear, and "mutual love would crown every dwelling." To
complete the Redeemer's
prophecy and his work, Ripley
sought to create a community where "the general tone of
morality, the every-day dealings between man and man,"
would be based on Christ's "new commandment"
of love.
This new community
would be real or "practical"
Christianity.
OME
might among
object sinful
that mortals
the creation
of
community
would of
be that
nothingkindshort
of miraculous.
But for Ripley and the other Transcendentalists, such critics didn't understand
the power of the
human mind and imagination.
The Transcendentalists
rejected the materialistic
rationalism
of John Locke in favor
of the "transcendentalist
idealism" of Immanuel Kant. "Their
leading idea," as Delano explains, was "the supremacy of
mind over matter." That means that religious truth doesn't
depend on tradition or historical facts, but on "an unerring
witness in the soul" of every human being that allows him
"to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented."
In
other words, there's a human capacity for unlimited spiritual enlightenment,
which will in turn drive social reform.
The selfish, material limits to human existence described
by Locke can be overcome; that, according
to the Transcendentalist,
is the true teaching of Jesus.
Ripley once wrote Emerson that the purpose of his
community
was, in effect, to overcome the tensions and
contradictions
that, up until then, had plagued human beings in this world. The community would unite "intellectual and manual labor" or "combine the thinker and the
worker, the same individual."
By doing so, it would "guarantee the highest mental freedom to all ... by opening the
benefits of education and the profits of labor to all." The
result would be "a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons."
Because "labor would contribute
to the
expansion of thought," the result would be "industry with-
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out drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity."
Who can deny that equality without vulgarity is part of
the true teaching of Christianity?
And who can't admire
Ripley's
refusal to rest content
with Tocqueville's
dichotomy between the vulgar mediocrity of modern materialism and the cultivation
and great injustice
of ancient
aristocracy?
Brook Farm attempted to overcome such distinctions.
Everyone worked or in some way paid his own
way. Compensation
was according to the number of hours
worked; effort, instead of results, was rewarded to discourage socially destructive
competition.
Women and men
got the same hourly rate. And "domestic servitude"
was
abolished by allowing both men and women to choose the
work for which they were best suited. (It turns out that
women did most of the domestic chores, and men most of
the agricultural
and industrial ones. But this was accepted
with little resentment because the choices were freely made.)
Everyone benefited from aesthetic education and enjoyable
conversation,
and the excellent school the community ran
did not view wealth, class, or gender as a barrier to education. Community
members retained enough private property to preserve
their individuality
and to ensure they
would not be "cast penniless into the world" should they
decide to leave. All this high-minded
and well-intentioned
innovation
made Brook Farm in some ways a very interesting place; it attracted far more visitors, Delano reports,
than any other antebellum
American utopian experiment.
NE
reason
this "ahead
community
of course,
is that
it was
of itsinterests
time" us
in today,
embodying
most
of our politically
correct values. But missing from Brook
Farm was our liberationism
and libertarianism.
For readers
used to nostalgic
books about 1960s communes
or even
the Clinton White House, what's most striking about Brook
Farm is the apparent
absence of sexual promiscuity
or
even sexual impropriety.
When Orestes Brownson and others raged about the infidelity at Brook Farm, they meant
only the absence
of Christian
faith. When the community-partly
out of conviction
and partly as a gimmick to
attract
donors--eventually
embraced
the principles
of
Fourierism,
an early variant on socialism,
it was with a
ringing repudiation
of the "speculative"
parts of FranqoisMarie Charles Fourier's
theory--his
very unconventional
views concerning sexual relations between men and women.
THE LAST PURITANS
129
Marriage and the family were carefully protected at Brook
Farm, mainly by the chaste good sense of well-bred and
genteel--as
well as independent,
intelligent,
and reformminded--women.
It's refreshing to read about utopians who were not for
free love or against the family. Marx's description of communism would have struck the men and women of Brook
Farm as self-indulgent,
as lacking order or direction. Plato's
Republic they surely would have condemned
as morally
repulsive. But it must be pointed out that the good people
at Brook Farm were so decent because they retained so
much of Christian morality, though without really having
a good reason to do so. They were, despite themselves,
the
last of the Puritans.
Yet in the end, the Brook Farm experiment
failed because it was both anti-Christian
and anti-capitalist.
Similar
experiments
have worked pretty well among monks and
nuns--not
to mention the Amish. These genuinely egalitarian communities
are animated by a vision of the human
soul that balances thought and work. Their ideal of selfdiscipline goes beyond an imaginary vision of this-worldly
perfection. The people at Brook Farm had no sense of sin,
and so they expected too much of both work and thought.
Individuality
and community
never exist in perfect harmony-at
least without God's miraculous grace; individual
spiritual
longings can never be fulfilled simply through
the pursuit of social reform. All that is admirable
in the
cultivated
leisure of aristocrats
cannot be combined with
democratic
productivity.
And so Brook Farm failed because of both its lack of real spiritual devotion
and its
lack of economic self-sufficiency.
Had these decent people
been either genuinely religious or relied on the great American profit motive, their community
might have endured.
Brook Farm's greatest failing was its truncated and superficial view of human spiritual longings. The most striking and profound individuals associated with Transcendentalism-Thoreau,
Emerson,
and Brownson--offered
only
distant and ambiguous
encouragement
to the experiment.
They were happy to visit but not tempted to join. The
most spiritually
seeking and intellectually
serious young
man at Brook Farm, Isaac Hecker, ended up becoming a
Catholic
and founding a religious
order. Ripley himself
reportedly said that his relationship
with his wife Sophia
was "founded not upon any sudden or romantic passion"
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"upon
great
respect
for
her
intellectual
power,
moral
worth, deep and true Christian piety and peculiar refinement and dignity of character." He was an admirably egalitarian but not particularly
erotic man. Sophia too became
a Catholic almost immediately
after leaving Brook Farm.
HE
animated secular
American utopianism
havelongings
become that
progressively
shallower--less
concerned
with love, truth, personal virtue, friendship, death, justice,
and so forth--over
time. The great chronicler
of contemporary utopianism,
David Brooks, reported on America's
bourgeois
bohemians,
or "bobos," in his first book. Like
George Ripley, bobos claim to have reconciled work with
personal self-fulfillment;
they too claim to live in an earthly
paradise. But our bourgeois bohemians lack the chaste and
refined manners and genuine egalitarian
concern for the
well-being
of others of their Transcendentalist
ancestors.
Their moral and aesthetic
senses are far more permissive
and undemanding.
They are at once more pretentious
and
more boring.
There's a road from the old to the new American transcendentalists,
but it's mostly
downhill.
Our social
utopianism--our
dreams about freeing ourselves from alienation and anxiety--is
more shallow and farfetched
than
ever.