Fresh with a mostly useless degree in American history and without a clue as to what to do with the rest of my life, I took a job in a gritty factory town just west of Chicago working at a sheltered workshop for retarded adults. Today we’d call them the developmentally challenged.
I was a supervisor for a small group of “clients,” maybe a dozen or so, whose job was to count out 10 plastic picks and bundle them with rubber bands. To this day I don’t know who these bundles were for and thus why we needed to bundle them, but that was what we did.
I learned a lot from the clients. They were like children except that they weren’t. They certainly had their challenges, ones we “normals” typically don’t have, but there was something truly compelling and, indeed, attractive about them.
For one thing, they were real.
I fondly recall the times they would lightheartedly tease us normals. Often this would occur when a delivery man would show up. They would crowd around the unsuspecting victim and attempt to engage him in conversation.
What was funny and, believe me, they were in on the joke, was that the normal person would get nervous. He wouldn’t know what to expect or how to act, something, as I say, the clients were keenly aware of.
I loved watching the normal person attempt to patronize the clients, trying vainly to camouflage his discomfort. But the joke was always on him, because the clients knew exactly what was happening, even if the hapless delivery guy didn’t.
I concluded that the reason for all this was that the clients didn’t have the intellectual ability to extrapolate themselves out of reality. Instead they were forced to deal with life as it comes. They weren’t capable of devising elaborate mental schemes to avoid or soften reality. That’s what made them real, down to earth, in ways we “normals” often aren’t.
I had a wise family member who often would say, “Some things are so dumb only an intellectual could believe them.” How true. As I’ve pointed out before, the mind can hold two polar-opposite ideas, simultaneously, without skipping a beat. The intellect can imagine anything. There’s no limit. Only when these ideas are tested in the crucible of real-life situations does the proof of the pudding become clear, or at least one would hope.
Thus it is the cleverest among us who are most apt to fall prey to generating and promulgating absolutely terrible, unworkable ideas. A facile mind, in other words, is tempted to venture into creative unreality, something my clients were rarely guilty of doing.
Above is a poster for Les Misérables, based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel of the same name, later made into a play and movie.
[As a funny aside, a friend once went on a bus tour to see the play in Boston. At one point, the driver asked her if she was a part of the group going to see Les Miserables, as if referring to a man’s name (pronounced not in French but English). How would you like to go through life with a name like that?]
In any event, the play and movie, as we all know, became a huge hit. One of our granddaughters, in fact, played a lead character in a community production a few years back.
Though I haven’t read the book, the play and movie portray a kind of sentimentalized version of events following the French Revolution of 1789. “Les Mis” relates to the later period known as the “July Revolution” of Paris, which began in 1815 and concluded around 1832.
Like the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution also sought to codify democratic principles, equality, and the sanctity of human rights.
Unlike its American counterpart, however, the French Revolution quickly devolved into the “Reign of Terror,” led by radicals such as Robespierre. What had begun as a democratic protest against the monarchy and its unjust, hierarchic rule, quickly escalated into an attempt to destroy all perceived authority, not just the crown, but landowners, the wealthy, as well as the church. The guillotine became the symbol of the era, employed liberally by roaming bands of radicals and revolutionaries. What followed were decades of political unrest and bloodshed, part of which serves as the backdrop to “Les Mis.”
The American Revolution, for its part, led to the formation of a democratic republic which sought to respect the received wisdom of Western Civilization including, among other things, the law, human rights, and, perhaps most saliently, religion. The French version, on the other hand, turned nihilistic and sought to erase history, not least religion.
Enter Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, who lived from 1712-1778, rejected society as an abstraction, as something that alienates the human being from his or her true self. How he knew just what our true self is remains unclear. For Rousseau, society is the source of all injustice, its artificial constructs distorting the innate natural goodness of all human beings.
His “general will” sought to replace previous civilizational laws and truths. The origins of his thinking go back to the earlier Enlightenment period, which similarly had promised to remove all false ideas of the past, including religious ones, with the use of emerging natural and scientific laws. Humans were now in charge.
Ever since Plato, and before, human beings have struggled with the terrors of contingency, meaning that they live aware that they are separate from God, from others, and from the various finite “objects” we daily encounter.
Humans thus live as helpless creatures, reliant upon a distant, if not unreal God, amid a sea of limitation, alienation, uncertainty, loss, and death. The whole of philosophy, in fact, might be summed up as the human search to reconcile the finite and the infinite, subject and object, to make all of life into a harmonious, indivisible whole.
Rousseau’s contribution to this effort involved jettisoning all political, social, and religious falsehoods. These would give way to what he imagined as the “general will,” reflecting the supposed true essence of human beings, hidden beneath life’s outward multiplicities. The “general will” was something shared by every human being on the planet, despite our seeming differences.
Not to be outdone, other intellectuals picked right up on the theme. Soon the curious idea emerged that history was evolving or progressing from lesser to higher form. For Hegel, as we’ve discussed previously, this meant the Spirit was working through history, displacing old and useless forms and leading ultimately to the perfect unity of Spirit and matter. Multiplicity and alienation overcome.
Other intellectuals ingeniously decided that history involves three stages. The first, human infancy manifest at the dawn of time, was characterized by a unity of subject and object, of the human being and the world around him or her. But this unity was primordial and thus entirely unconscious.
The second phase involved religion, where the human being conceived (or projected) a God or gods from whom, for the first time, they felt alienated and distant. The world was no longer unified but broken into pieces (objects). The good news, according to these speculative thinkers, would come about in the third phase, the one we’re in now, where life’s inherent unity is finally reclaimed, only this time consciously.
The significance of this is that, as in Rousseau’s scheme, anything that appears to separate us from this primordial oneness is an aberration and a distortion. God, religion, society, civilization, history, past truths, past laws, are all holdovers from stage two, when we were alienated from our true selves and from life itself.
Such “false consciousness,” as Karl Marx named it, distorts our basic “species-essence,” effectively preventing us from knowing life as it truly is.
For many thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries (and, unfortunately, the 20th and 21st as well) all boundaries are aberrations because they obscure this universal truth. Therefore, all “positivist” religions, for example, all those that claim unique and specific understandings, are random manifestations that defy humanity’s underlying oneness. Think Unitarianism.
Thus all religions, families, cultures, nations, languages, beliefs, governments, civilizations, etc., are understood as purely random circumstances which effectively deny some imagined underlying universal species-essence. All boundaries are therefore false.
Yet, ironically, it is precisely in the particular, in the specifics of everyday life, amid the very real confines of family, church, society, and civilization, that we learn what is the good, the true, and the beautiful, to put it in philosophical terms. The universal, in other words.
Of course, in the end, I seriously doubt any of my former “clients” would have fallen for Rousseau and his ilk. After all, as has been said, only an intellectual could come up with something so incandescently dumb.