Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Dispatches From the Front, argues that Trollope’s work offers a challenge to the moral peril of modernity.
It is not hard to document the central place of constancy and forgiveness throughout Trollope’s work. That he saw these themes as central no doubt has much to do with his sense that the England he loved and cherished, the England of the genry and the honest workman, was in danger of being lost under the onslaught of the new commercial culture. Thus, in his Autobiography he says: “A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.” The threat of such people, vividly portrayed in Lopez (The Prime Minister) and in Melmorre (The Way We Live Now), was not that they were unambiguously evil, but that they could so easily be mistaken for gentlemen. Even though Trollope was no doubt concerned with the passing of a certain social class, he was yet more deeply concerned with the accompanying threat to moral order. It is that concern which shapes his entire literary enterprise.
As this makes clear, Hauerwas shares Trollope’s concern about the threat of capitalism and liberalism to the moral order. For Hauerwas, the Enlightenment has abstracted moral principles from community and tradition. Thus, liberalism (in its broad sense, including Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, and more) organizes politics as the pragmatic magaerial effort to balance interest groups. “Freedom” and “equality” are seen as the most important virtues, and truth, honor, and everything else is abandoned in their name. Thus, Hauerwas argues:
I have found it hard to enter the debate about abortion since I do not believe the issue for Christians can be framed in “pro-life” or “pro-choice” terms. Such descriptions are attempts to win the political battle on the most minimum set of agreements — that is, that abortion is primarily about the sanctity of life or freedom of women. As a result, abortion is abstracted from those practices through which our lives are ordered that we might as a community be in a position to welcome children. It is a political necessity to make our moral discourse, and our lives, as thin as possible in the hopes of securing political agreement. As a result, the debate is but a shouting match between two interest groups.
Again, Hauerwas sees Trollope as offering a different vision of society — one based on honor, constancy, and forgiveness rather than lowest common denominator interest group squabbles. Trollope presents a vision of a community in which people strive, not for freedom and equality, but rather to be gentleman and Christians.
I have a fair bit of sympathy for this view. Capitalism is an acid; it dissolves social relations and community. It believes in nothing but desire — the freedom to desire, the equality of all desire, and the need for infinite space in which desire can expand. We’re all autonomous wanting machines, scrabbling for oil and sex and the money to buy both as our hydrocarbons and progeny scuttle across the globe, leaving nothing but extinction and advertising slogans in their wake.
So, if Trollope is the cure, then, hey, I’ll read Trollope.
I picked up The Prime Minister; coincidentally one of the books that Hauerwas discusses. Here’s the passage where the gentlemanly, virtuous Mr. Wharton, scion of the old class and old morality, confronts Ferdinand Lopez, the reckless capitalist adventurer, who wishes to marry Mr. Wharton’s daughter. Wharton is turning over, in his own mind, why he cannot allow his daughter to do so.
this man [that is, Lopez] who was now in [Mr. Wharton’s] presence and whom he continued to scan with the closest observation, was not what he called a gentleman. The foreign blood was proved, and that would suffice. As he looked at Lopez he thought that he detected Jewish signs…
As the book goes along, we learn that Lopez is, in fact, not a gentleman. His whole life is devoted to reckless speculation and the pursuit of money. Like capitalism itself, he has no sense of good and bad — and no sense of social fitness. In his egalitarian amorality, he envies those above him (rather than respecting them) and ruthlessly exploits those below (rather than protecting them.)
Lopez is, in other words, modernity incarnate. And modernity incarnate, for Trollope, is a Jew.
I’m a Jew myself, as it happens. There are Jews who see anti-Semitism everywhere in the media. I have to say, I’m not one of them. Jews are, as far as most Americans are concerned, white. Anti-semitism is pretty thoroughly despised…in part because Jews have so thoroughly assimilated, and in part because the U.S. fought a massive, successful war against anti-Semitism, and, partialy as a result (thanks Hitler!), anti-Semitism continues to be equated with absolute evil.
All of which is to say that Trollope’s anti-Semitism in itself doesn’t bother me so much. I don’t feel like I’m being oppressed. Lopez is an invidious stereotype, but it’s a stereotype that lost. I, for example, married a shiksa, and nobody in the shiksa’s family cared. Lopez hasn’t hurt me and can’t hurt me. In the book, all his plans may have failed and he may have offed himself in the interest of conveniencing the uptight Brits. But, in real life he got to keep the girl and have little baby Lopezes who no one could tell, or even wanted to tell, from the uptight baby Brits. Admittedly, Lopez had to go through the gas chambers first, which sucked…but all’s well that ends well.
What does bother me, though, is that I think there’s a real sense in which Trollope isn’t wrong about Lopez. I mean, clearly, he’s wrong that Jews are evil sneaking submen who don’t deserve to marry shiksas, because, in fact, Jews are awesome, and should marry whoever they want. But I think he’s right that the old moral order which Hauerwas defends, the anti-capitalist, cohesive morality he challenges, is, by its nature, anti-Semitic.
Hauerwas is aware that this is a problem…but he tries to get around it by suggesting in passing that Trollope has us identify with Lopez’s frustrations and by emphasizing that it is Lopez’s conduct that makes him not a gentleman, rather than the happenstance of circumcision.
None of which is very convincing. Mr. Warren identifies Lopez as not being a gentleman because Lopez is a foreigner and a Jew before he knows anything else about him. Indeed, he dislikes Lopez, as he says, precisely because “no one knows anything about him” — and no one knows anything about him because he’s a Jew without lineage or proper family.
And lo and behold, the rest of the novel goes about remorselessly demonstrating that Mr. Warren’s prejudices were correct. It’s true that Lopez does not act like a gentleman…but that conduct is not separable from his ancestry. On the contrary, the ancestry comes first, diagetically and I believe thematically.
Trollope does, as Hauerwas says, show the virtues of constancy, forgiveness, and gentlemanliness…virtues that Lopez and capitalism repudiate. But Trollope also shows that virtues of keeping to one’s own set and keeping away from the greasy foreigners. I can sneer at the Enlightenment and liberalism all I want, but the fact remains that it’s because of Enlightenment liberalism that I was able to marry my wife without a great deal of unpleasantness. Capitalism eats through moral truths and communities — but one of the communal moral truths it eats through is anti-Semitism.
Hauerwas seems to believe that we can get Trollope’s honorable cohesive, pre-capitalist community without that anti-Semitism, and, presumably, without the sexism or the homophobia. It’s an appealing vision…but if he wants to make me believe in it, he needs to do better than just pointing to Trollope. Because, lovely as Trollope is in many ways, I don’t think too many Lopezes are going to want to live in his world.
Nazi caricature of a Jewish banker
BARRIERS! OBSTACLES! TIGER TRAPS!
Modernity! Pointless, purposeful, impossible and fun and horrifying, slo-mo, sudden, and endless….
Noah, you should read Trollope’s mother on America. An entire nation of barbarians.
I’ve read Trollope’s mother on America! It’s pretty entertaining…
And still true in many places…
It seemed to me when I just read it that in “The Way We Live Now” the character of Brehgert is used to expose other characters’ anti-Semitism as a character flaw.
And few mistake Melmotte for a gentleman, every character seems aware that he is a swindler but nonetheless most are eager to suck up to him with all their might in order to get a portion of the pie.
I haven’t read “The Way We Live Now.” Anti-semitism definitely isn’t a character flaw in the Prime Minister, though….
Well, by that I meant that as the characters are revealed to be anti-semitic, the reader who might have perceived them sympathetically before, now sees them as narrow and prejudiced.
Yeah…that’s not at all what happens in the Prime Minister. Mr. Wharton is shown as being entirely justified in his anti-Semitism, and his daughter is shown as essentially failing morally because she doesn’t share in his prejudice.
I can believe that Trollope had a different take on it in a different book (and you’ve made me curious to read that one now), but in the Prime Minister the anti-Semitism is pretty unambiguous….
I’m excited to talk about Trollope. I think he is critically under-served.
I never saw Trollope himself as anti-Semitic, but he certainly exposes London society for its prejudices. In “The Way We Live Now,” Trollope maps their anxiety around invisible and imaginary wealth and Jewishness, which is quite an astute connection. He knows his Capitalism, and this idea is seen in Montesquiou’s discussion of how Jews invented the letter d’exchange in the 1748 “Spirit of the Laws” in order to have movable goods that could not be stolen from them by Kings and nobles. Of course by the time Trollope writes “The Way We Live Now, “ the anxiety can be seen as a city country divide. Nobles’ immovable goods, everyone else’s invisible goods.
I think it’s pretty much impossible to read The Prime Minister and not see anti-Semitism. Lopez is utterly debased and villainous, and his evil is constantly connected to his lack of family and his (completely assimilated) Jewish identity.
Along those same lines, Trollope in general is pretty opposed to anything like woman’s rights I think. He has some sympathy for women in marriages where they are controlled by their husbands, but that sympathy never takes the form of suggesting women’s rights, and in fact, as far as Emily is concerned, the whole novel is directed to demonstrating that she needs to better heed the advice of her male relations, father and (second) husband.
Which isn’t to say that I dislike Trollope at all. He’s very insightful about human nature and about class and social interactions. He’s just really a conservative, in a more straightforward way than even someone like Shakespeare. And that makes it hard for me to look to his novels for unambiguous moral guidance in the way Hauerwas wants me to.
I forgot to say that Trollope seems to love the contingency of the capitalist. He enjoys and admires the risk takers. In the end Mr. Melmotte is treated sympathetically, but he of course has to pay in the greater scheme of the novel.
In his autobiography Trollope says he is a “conservative liberal”. This totally contradictory state is perhaps why Hauerwas sees him as trustworthy.
There’s a long section in The Prime Minister where Palliser talks about his millenial hopes for equality, and how those hopes have to be tied to equality coming very, very slowly if there not to do more harm than good. There’s something to be said for that…but MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a pretty thorough and devastating refutation.
Marguerite: “In his autobiography Trollope says he is a “conservative liberal”.
Well, this sort of makes sense. A position represented by economists like Hans Hermann-Hoppe in our modern age – a conservative libertarian who despises the false “liberalism” of the past and present, and who feels that the natural state of man (which should be respected) is to stick to this own kind. Hence the exclusion of the foreigner in many instances. He is similarly disgruntled with “a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places” (Trollope as quoted in your article).
As for Hauerwas (and in the context of Christianity), I think it’s often dicey to appeal to man and the creations of man for guidance on life. Even in a primary text like the Bible man is represented, with rare exceptions, as being fatally flawed. Hence my disagreements with Chesterton’s hagiographic treatment of St. Francis which we discussed previously.
Hauerwas is fairly interesting on that. He argues againt Neibuhr that social institutions and communities are often more moral than individuals. Thus he thinks (like Chesterton) that the Christian church, guided by tradition, provides a ground for more moral actions than does (for example) capitalism, or liberal atomised individualism.
Like I said, Niebuhr would I think reject that. It’s not a Protestant position (Hauerwas is thinking in terms of the Mennonites, who apparently don’t consider themselves exactly Protestant.) But it’s consistent with conservatism, which sees value and wisdom in (some) institutions.
Hauerwas is also not especially concerned with the Bible, for a theologian. He really is focused on Christianity as a community. He sees the Protestant focus on the primary texts absent communal context as the initiating move of the Enlightenment, which has gotten us into the abstracted capitalist mess in which we currently toil.
Alternatives to capitalism? Well, okay – but the idea of the “gentleman” is based on ideas of “propriety” bound up in classism, sexism, paternalism, binarist gender-policing, ableism, racism, colonialism and imperialism – goddamn near everything bad, really. Trying to use the “gentleman” as a framework for post-capitalism seems like a strange and pointless quest, especially given that there are many better frameworks available.
Rather than trying to rehabilitate the ideas of conservatives into visions of a post-capitalist world, thereby conveniently ignoring the larger network of oppressions of which capitalism is only a part, I’d rather start from a theorized event horizon in which the world’s major ills have been solved, and try to build a plausible chain of actions from hither to thither that can be not only thought about but acted upon.
Theological discussion, likewise, strikes me as pointless – better to find ways out of the shithole we’re in here on Earth than to speculate about a vision of life in Heaven propagated and enforced largely by authoritarian gangsters in bejeweled robes. Maybe there’s a There there, but in the extremely unlikely even that there is, how can I know until I get there – and why should I prioritize that over solving oppression here in this world, in the meantime?
Well, I’m an atheist myself. However. Lots of smart, thoughtful people throughout history have felt that religion is central to social change and a just life here on earth. Those people include folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and St. Francis…and for that matter all those folks currently attempting to throw off oppression in the Middle East. You don’t prioritize religion over this-world issues; the argument is that if you don’t have a thoughtful spiritual and philosophical basis for your actions, you end up unable to achieve this world goals…or worse, you achieve them and find out that you’ve created a hell on earth rather than a heaven.
For Hauerwas, religious community is central to his pacifism, which he believes is central to fostering meaningful social change. And labeling a notion of honesty and integrity with a bunch of interest group anathemas is not in any way undermining his point about liberalism or capitalism.
In talking about the relationship of anti-semitism and anti-capitalism, I was trying to point also to the relationship between other anti-isms and anti-capitalism. For example; queer politics often likes to position itself as anti-capitalist. I think this is a lot less clear than folks like to think it is. Capitalism enables the undermining of tradition in the name of the egalitarian justness of all desire — a formulation which paves the way for queer equality in much the same way as it paved the way for Jewish assimilation in the past. It’s not an accident that the creators of Dragon Age 2 are willing to cater to a broad range of genders and sexualities. Capitalism doesn’t care about your gender or sexuality. It is happy to sell to everyone equally.
Like I said in the piece, if the choice is between more capitalism and greater equality, or the end of capitalism and a return to inegalitarian social relationships, I will choose the greater equality. But capitalism is really problematic for any number of reasons, and it’s worth trying to think through ways to enable, say, greater isolationism which aren’t also automatically nativist. You can’t really do that if you insist that many of the forces which have been traditionally most successful in resisting capitalism — such as religion — are so utterly misguided that nothing can possibly be learned from them.
To address some of Noah’s earlier points (and not to derail the more important discussion): I think, as in many cases, the solution is not one or the other but a balance between the two. His view makes sense in the light of American Evangelicals (their individualism and the cult of personality present in many of these institutions), as opposed to the traditional churches and there firmer theological positions worked out through years of gestation. But I presume that Hauerwas also addresses Luther (and his ilk), and the early Christians in the light of his thesis…? What’s his take on that?
As for the “Protestant focus on the primary texts” resulting in our “abstracted capitalist mess”, one could equally argue that it is the lack of focus on the primary texts that has resulted in this. Focusing on Christianity solely as a community results in the modern day Gnosticism Hauerwas so reviles. It is, in fact, the intensely superficial absorption of the primary texts by Evangelicals which appears to rub so badly against him. What is tradition inspired by but a intense focus on the Bible in its entirety. Poor tradition is inspired by superstition. But I’ll have to read Haeurwas to assess the strength of his arguments. You may be representing him wrongly.
Yeah; you’re more knowledgeable about theology and may be able to position him better, Suat. He’s definitely skeptical of Luther though. And he sees gnosticism as a move away from tradition to abstracted knowledge, not as poor tradition inspired by superstition, at least as far as I can tell.
Agree with most of what you wrote in “Not a Gentleman”; particularly relished the phrasing and argument of your “Capitalism is an acid” paragraph.
As usual, alas, I find it more interesting to nit-pick:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…the old moral order which Hauerwas defends, the anti-capitalist, cohesive morality he challenges, is, by its nature, anti-Semitic.
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Sure, being old-fashioned Christian, anti-Semitism came along with the other baggage. Which included Anja’s comprehensive list of faults.
But, is it necessary for that morality to be anti-Semitic, or was that just an unfortunate appurtenance which was dragged along with the good?
I’ve been reading a lot of books from the “golden age of detective fiction”* lately, and in Agatha Christie and such, you find many characters automatically holding other in suspicion for Not Being British, being foreigners, with all the flaws those “types” are prone to (“knife-wielding dagos” in one recent example), and such. The writers not necessarily endorsing those prejudices, which usually turn out to be unfounded, but acknowledging their prevalence. Would not anti-Semitism be part and parcel of the same overall attitude?
And these books were mostly from the 20s and 30s; Trollope was a Victorian, from an era whose attitudes were hardly more enlightened…
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Capitalism eats through moral truths and communities — but one of the communal moral truths it eats through is anti-Semitism…
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True. Though, not from any moral concerns whatsoever, but because Jews are “consumers” too, who must not be alienated. (Ford Motor Co. execs were appalled by Henry Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism; after his death, donated money to Israel…)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Detective_Fiction
“But, is it necessary for that morality to be anti-Semitic, or was that just an unfortunate appurtenance which was dragged along with the good?”
Mike…I’m really not positive one way or the other. I would have liked Hauerwas to explain why it *wasn’t* necessary. But he didn’t, and I’m left wondering….
I am so sorry I missed this discussion. I was just reading German Hitler-era anti-Nazi theologian Oscar Cullman on “Immortal Soul or Resurrection From the Dead?,” who seems sympathetic to Suat’s take on neo-Stoic Gnosticism as a byproduct of an insular elite community (and, at least more recently, an undue fascination with favoring Gentile influences over Jewish ones).
I just reread that Bourdieu book on Paul… Bourdieu sort of argues that Paul’s anti-Biblical in some ways; that he doesn’t focus on the actions or teachings of Christ but on the resurrection as event. I think Hauerwas would probably disagree with that though, insofar as Christ’s teachings about nonviolence seem pretty important to him….
Yeah, Badiou wants Paul to be a heretic like Nietzsche, when neither Paul nor Nietzsche were heretics. Which is pretty funny since Badiou is so dead set on being a realist (there are real truths, not just languages), and scoffs at the idea that ontology isn’t all about limits and excess and such. Of course Badiou and his ilk are the ones who want to write off the Resurrection and make Paul a Dionysian community organizer.
And I think Badiou’s emphasis on the Law is great (one could start to question whether there is something mildly anti-Semitic in this emnphasis), but Jesus was a more radical figure than Paul in many ways. For one thing, Jesus trashes rich people and hypocrites in terms that could be called violent, while Paul kind of encourages everyone to just live their lives and fulfill their roles. Badiou calls Christ a charlatan, but Paul is writing letters and encouraging unity in the ranks while Jesus is telling everyone to ditch their family and give up all their possessions.
But Paul made me a Christian– he’s a peacemaker and bridge-builder, while Jesus created an archetype for the pacifist militant.
Badious scoffs at the idea that philosophy is poetry and all about limits. Sorry, I screwed that up.
Well, there’s not question that there is an anti-Semitic strain in Trollope growing out of his linkage of Jews with the ills of modernity, but his entire oeuvre is more complicated than that. He wrote a quite sympathetic novel called Nina Balatka about a Christian woman who marries an Orthodox Jew and is ostrasized by her community. Trollope’s sympathy in that novel is with Nina, not with the anti-Semites. Trollope was enticed by the idea of race mixing as much as he was disgusted at the prospect of gentlemanly culture being polluted by outsiders, so a lot of his novels have characters who marry people who are foreign or even (on one occasion) have non-white ancestry (Dr. Wrotle’s School).
The thing with a novelist like Trollope — who wrote around 50 novels, many of them very long and complex — is that you can’t easily make generalizations about them. Trollope often seems like an self-satisfied prig but then will surprise you with unexpected outbursts of quite radical thoughts and feelings. I’m very fond of him, for all his flaws.
Hey Jeet! I like Trollope quite a bit; I think I’ve read maybe 10 of his novels or something, plus the autobiography? In any case, I wasn’t really generalizing; just focusing on this particular novel, and noting that the gentlemanly standard espoused by Hauerwas via Trollope appears to have some downsides.
Hi Noah,
I agree with your basic point that the gentlemanly standard does have flaws, although I guess the question is whether such flaws are intrinsic to the standard. Historically, societies that idealize “the gentlemen” tend to exclude outsiders (not just Jews but really anyone foreign and also lower class). But perhaps its possible to have a gentlemanly standard that is based entirely on merit rather than birth so that a gentleman (or a lady) achieves his/her status based on what they do, not how high born they are.
My larger point was that Trollope’s actual relations to Jews and anti-Semitism was complicated and he took different stances in different novels. But I liked your post!
I think there was a book once on “The Gentleman in Trollope” (if I remember aright the author was Shirley Letwin) which tried to redeem the gentlemanly ideal and even argued that it transcended gender norms. And its true that there are women in Trollope who explicitly think of themselves as gentlemen bound by a code of honour.
Thanks!
Yeah; Hauerwas thinks it’s a standard that can apply across gender and racial lines. And it seems like you *should* be able to do that. But…then there’s the really uncomfortable fact that the recent ideologies that have been most effective in resisting capitalism are those which are religious, conservative, and very, very much not egalitarian.
There was a children’s book I read a while ago called the Ear the Eye and the Arm by Nancy Farmer (Wikipedia reminds me.) It’s set in Zimbabwe in the near-future. Anyway, there’s a traditional enclave within that future society. the traditional enclave has a lot of good things going for it— better treatment of the environment, less of many kinds of exploitation. However, women are treated as essentially slaves. One of the people who runs the enclave explains that you can’t delink different parts of a culture; it all goes together.
There isn’t really an explanation of *why* it all has to go together in the book that I remember, and it’s obviously false to some extent — all cultures are syncretic cultures, really. Yet at the same time…I think there’s some truth to it. Or at least, it’s not really easy to take only the bits of a culture that you want. You can say, well, this looks like it should be easy enough to take out…but the fact of the matter remains that in the U.S., for example, opposition to, say, the kind of boundary-crossing capitalism of NAFTA is often quite hard to separate from various kinds of racism, even though there isn’t exactly a logical reason why the two couldn’t be teased apart in theory.
This Yglesias post is, I think, relevant: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/04/against-nostalgia-against-fatalism/
This is very good and very true.
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