A Paradise Built in Hell (9 page)

But if we do not wholly create our worlds, they do not arise without us; we shape them, from the most intimate relationships to the most public and enduring institutions, and these conditions arise out of acts guided by beliefs. Thus it is, for example, that the founding political document of the United States opens with a belief that “all men are created equal.” The American Revolution is an outcome, in part, of that belief; subsequent revolutions have attempted to broaden who is sheltered under that umbrella of equality. The struggles of our times have been as much to change beliefs—about gender, about race—as to change policy, for the policy changes are largely an outcome of changed belief. Ideas matter. In disaster, they matter urgently, and the disaster James found himself in the middle of in April of 1906 gave him a great crucible to test his own.

In 1905, James had delivered the lectures that became his 1907 book
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
, the book in which he asks the question quoted at the beginning of this chapter. He was intermittently ill in the first decade of the twentieth century, his last decade of life, but he was also at the height of his intellectual powers and fame, writing prolifically, lecturing in the United States and Europe, collecting honorary degrees and membership in various national academies, a revered public intellectual who weighed in on war, religion, spiritualism, psychology, and almost everything else. He had been born in 1842 in New York City to a wealthy Irish American family, the oldest of five children—the next oldest was his brother Henry, who became as renowned as a novelist. Their father was an enthusiastic dabbler in spiritual ideas, an occasional writer of books on ethics and religion, a friend of the Tran scendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and heir to a considerable fortune.

William James wavered a great deal as a young man, avoiding service in the Civil War, studying art and hoping to become a painter, then studying medicine. Medicine led him to a position in anatomy at Harvard College that eventually evolved into his long professorship in philosophy and the new discipline of psychology, in which he did pioneering work. He suffered one severe depression in his early adulthood, and the rest of his life can be seen as a struggle for sufficient meaning and purpose to keep from being pulled under again, a struggle perhaps made more intense by his relief from the necessity of struggling for economic survival. (And like his brother Henry, he suffered regularly from various ailments and was, if not a hypochondriac, at least exceedingly preoccupied with his symptoms.) He was a tenderhearted friend, husband, and father, and even his writings convey warmth, informality, open-mindedness, an interest in the most subtle minutiae of experience, and hope. He sometimes thought the breezy informality of his writing and talking style undermined his intellectual standing, but it made him widely accessible and popular.

He had been ready to retire from teaching when Stanford University pursued him and paid him lavishly to come and teach in the spring of 1906 at the shining new country campus some thirty miles south of San Francisco. Delighted by the situation, he wrote to friends again and again some version of “the University is absolutely Utopian. It realizes all those simplifications and freedoms from corruption, of which seers have dreamed. Classic landscape, climate perfect, no one rich, sexes equal, manual labor practiced to some degree by all, especially by students, noble harmonious architecture, fine laboratories and collections, admirable music, all these latter things belonging to the community as such, while individuals live in the simplest conceivable way.” He added in another letter of praise, “It is verily the simple life, and democracy at its best.” James was skeptical about the possibility of Utopia but admired the efforts toward it. In an aside in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, he remarked, “The Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticality and nonadaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.” It’s a pragmatic response: a comprehensive Utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realize it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.

At Stanford, James lectured to a class of 300 students with as many as 150 others in attendance at times. As his public address, he delivered an early version of his great manifesto, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in late February, about six weeks before the earthquake. The issues he addressed there would be answered another way in the earthquake, and so his “Moral Equivalent” manifesto makes, with his earthquake essay, a pair examining purpose, meaning, heroism, and satisfaction in life. In its 1910 published version, it begins “The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.” He had joined the Anti-Imperialist League founded in 1898 to oppose the United States’ war against Spain and its annexation of Spain’s former colony of the Philippines. The public appetite for war had been whipped up by the newspapers during the era of sensationalistic “yellow journalism,” though James tended to believe that there was an inherent appetite for war. Many prominent intellectuals and public figures, including writer Mark Twain (who was vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 to 1910), were ferociously opposed to the explicit amorality of that war and feared the transformation of their country into an imperial power. James moved from the question of shaping—or checking—American foreign policy to the larger question of whether war could be eliminated.

He admitted that war was itself a sort of utopia for some, because “all the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride. . . . Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise.” That is, war is not inevitable; it arises for particular reasons—but ending war requires coming to terms with what human ideals and desires it feeds. James, of course, was living in a time when Civil War monuments proliferated, heroism on the battlefield was a major subject for poetry, and the abstracted, mechanized wars against unseen armies and civilians hardly yet existed (though massacres of nonwhite peoples were exceedingly common, if seldom reported as such).

He argued that a permanent peacetime was only viable in a society devoted to something more than pleasure, that there must be causes, hardships, demands, common struggles. He had been born into pleasure and had to struggle for meaning himself. He proposed something akin to the Peace Corps or the War on Poverty—if “there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against
Nature
,” then even privileged youths would understand “man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and window wash ing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.” The essential argument that human beings are at their best when much is demanded of them doesn’t depend on the particulars of his proposals. “The martial type of character can be bred without war,” James continued. “The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.”

James’s ideas about what the moral equivalents, the great struggles to which humanity might dedicate itself, might be, didn’t take a more practical form than this universal enlistment in community works—until the earthquake. He was already awake when the earthquake struck: his instant response “consisted wholly of glee and admiration . . . I felt no trace whatsoever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome. . . . I ran into my wife’s room and found that she, although awakened from sound sleep, had felt no fear, either.” In the essay he wrote that June, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” he added, “A good instance of the way in which the tremendousness of a catastrophe may banish fear was given me by a Stanford student.” The student was on the fourth floor of a stone dormitory that collapsed; he felt no pain and no fear, though he expected to die as he plummeted through the three stories below, crawled through daylight, realized he was in his nightshirt, walked back for clothing, and only later realized that his feet had been seriously injured. On the campus, James reported, “Everybody was excited, but the excitement at first, at any rate, seemed to be almost joyous. . . . Most people slept outdoors for several subsequent nights, partly to be safer in case of a recurrence, but also to work off their emotion and get the full unusualness out of the experience.” Much of the heavy architecture of the Stanford campus was devastated, spectacularly, though casualties were almost nil.

That morning, James’s colleague, the psychologist Lillien Jane Martin, was worried about her sister in San Francisco—news of the city’s devastation had already come—so they set out together on the lone train for the city that day. Eight days later he returned for another view of the city, and throughout the rest of his stay—which was shortened by the disaster and Stanford’s cancellation of the rest of the semester—he quizzed everyone as to their psychological responses. “My business,” he wrote afterward, “is with ‘subjective’ phenomena exclusively; so I will say nothing of the material ruin that greeted us on every hand—the daily papers and the weekly journals have done full justice to that topic. By midday . . . everyone [was] at work who
could
work. There was no appearance of general dismay, and little of chatter or of inco-ordinated excitement. . . . Physical fatigue and seriousness were the only inner states that one could read on countenances. Every one looked cheerful, in spite of the awful discontinuity of past and future, with every familiar association with material things dissevered; and the discipline and order were practically perfect.” (Later he wrote to the president of Stanford University, “The crop of nervous wrecks may yet have to be reaped.”) One of his biographers charges that James “simply could not bring himself to empathise with the sufferers in San Francisco, but insisted that work and a sense of community were prescriptions for overcoming the disaster.” But he saw conduct that called for a more complex response than pity.

His earthquake essay continued: “Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and are the most emphatic of all my impressions. Both are reassuring as to human nature. The first was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos.” He described how people took initiative, without leadership or coordination, for much of what needed to be done, giving as an example the way two admirers of the painter William Keith went to the centrally located homes doomed to burn and saved his paintings from the flames. (They brought the salvaged roll of canvases to him in his studio, where he had given up his work for lost and was already painting more.) An echo of “The Moral Equivalent of War” is evident in his statement that this purposeful energy, “like soldiering . . . always lies latent in human nature.” The second thing that struck him was “the universal equanimity. We soon got letters from the East, ringing with anxiety and pathos; but I now know fully what I have always believed, that the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance than to the immediate victims. I heard not a single really pathetic or sentimental word in California expressed by anyone.”

One of the most pathetic came from his brother Henry James, reading sensational newspaper accounts and imagining the worst while he waited to hear from his family. The novelist effused, “I feel that I have collapsed, simply, with the tension of all these dismal days . . . I should have told you that I have shared every pulse of your nightmare with you if I didn’t hold you quite capable of telling me that it hasn’t
been
a nightmare.” The older brother did just that in breezy reply: “We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part,” with Henry’s concern for “our mangled forms, hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so.” He added that such agony is felt most at a distance. In the essay he went on to say, “Surely the cutting edge of all our usual misfortunes comes from their character of loneliness.” That is, a major loss usually isolates us from the community, where no one else has suffered thus, and we are alone in being bereft of beloved, or home, or security, or health. When the loss is general, one is not cast out by suffering but finds fellowship in it.

A friend tells me, as I write, of someone we know who has joined a support group for his grim disease; these groups create communities of sufferers so that one feels neither alone nor marked out uniquely for suffering. The religious contemplation of suffering and work with the sick, the poor, and the dying likewise serve to develop compassion and subvert tendencies to self-pity and its twin, self-aggrandizement. Or as Pauline Jacobson had put it, “Never again shall we feel singled out by fate for the hardships and ill luck that’s going.” James continued, “The cheerfulness, or, at any rate, the steadfastness of tone, was universal. Not a single whine or plaintive word did I hear from the hundred losers whom I spoke to. Instead of that there was a temper of helpfulness beyond the counting. It is easy to glorify this as something characteristically American, or especially Californian. . . . In an exhausted country, with no marginal resources, the outlook on the future would be much darker. But I like to think that what I write of is a normal and universal trait of human nature.”