The Helgalian Chronicle, Ed. 03 Since my voluntary escape from the facility Upstate where the positivists shocked the living daylights out of me and injected me with positive facts, I have managed to convince Helga, my concerned Canadian friend, of my sanity.
In fact, in full view of the elaboration of my Vain Philosophy, which the scientific course of treatment left intact, I believe anyone in their right mind would declare me certifiably sane. At least Helga's fears were assuaged, restoring her faith in United States citizenship, whereupon she sent me an article of her own from which I have extracted, with her kind permission, the following sentimental effusion--I have taken the liberty of converting certain key words to the upper case:
"America was and still is a BEACON to the world, and in a profound sense, to me. It represents recognition and a celebration of the INDIVIDUAL above the group, ideals of LIBERTY, enterprise, and possibility. It is the only country I'm aware of that has articulated the right to pursuit of HAPPINESS - a novel political and HUMANISTIC concept for that time, or any other - in its Declaration of Independence. In doing so, it recognizes that personhood has an emotional, as well as PHYSICAL AND MENTAL component. An individual has the RIGHT TO emotional WELL-BEING and to seek to improve the quality of life. This goes beyond the right to live and have one's basic needs met, and even to be free. It is the basis for the AMERICAN DREAM, which still thrives. One just has to watch A&E's Biography almost any night to see the parade of famous individuals who have COME UP FROM LITERALLY NOTHING to make something of themselves and their lives, from Elvis, and Coalminer's Daughter, Loretta Lynn, to Senator Jesse Jackson, and Forty-Second President, Bill Clinton." (1)
I most liberally and wholeheartedly agree. It is obvious to me that Helga Ross is a wholesome and sane person with strong romantic inclinations. We, the People of the United States, need more friends of her calibre. Helga is a Civil War buff who is particularly fond of the South yet is not favor of secession. She enjoys driving a thousand miles to tour the battlefields. I have read her account of her last visit to Georgia--one of my favorite states, second only to Tennessee (where I purchased my first pint of real whisky at age thirteen).
So charmed is Helga by Southern comfort, she likes to recline by her garden in Canada on a warm day and imagine she is way down South. I do not begrudge Helga her love for the South. I recall how diligently I practiced my Southern accent when living up North. My ideal liberal democracy then was oxymoronically populated by Southern aristocrats; romantic individualists who lead noble, heroic lives when they are not stretched out on the veranda sipping gin or making love with passionate women who drink lemonade and who do not have to do a lick of work--I recall they wore hooped skirts and carried parasols.There were no slaves or poor folk in my Southern utopia. As for as I was concerned, my American Dream was definitely assured because of the advanced technology I had read about in science fiction fantasies.
Every American dream is possible, is it not? That is, if the American Dream is of individual well-being. Yes, our Constitution promotes the general well-being, but that consists of securing the blessings of individual liberty. It is no small wonder, then, that such a paradox would be a beacon to the entire world.
Richard Price, a Welshman praised by Washington, Jefferson and Adams, was a radical reformer who was under the influence of the radical philosophy of Bentham. Price certainly believed the United States should become a model state built on principles of liberty and justice alone, a beacon for the world bearing world-responsibility. He wrote to his friend Benjamin Franklin that he thought the American Revolution was one of the most important events in world history. But he was well-aware of the inequality wealth, slavery, mistrust of central authority, privileges, and taste for luxury in America. Fearing for her future, Price was free with his political advice. He was also invited to become a financial adviser to the young republic. Even today, those concerned with the necessary radical reform of our social security system should study the history of his famous Sinking Fund--Price was a pioneering social-security theorist and statistician who served, for instance, as technical adviser to the Equitable Society.
Now I am moved to say a little more about Price in the context of Helga's remarks about individual liberty and humanism; my previous rant about the preposterous denial of the unity of consciousness both relative, in the individual, and absolute, in god; and my statement that the concept of one god was the original motive for positivism and its several science-loving relatives.
Price was a Rational Dissenter, a Presbyterian minister who preached at Newington Green near the village of Hackney. His visitors and friends included Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Howard, and Adam Smith, and the feminist Mary Wollenstonecraft among other notables-- I note that most Utilitarian Radicals were feminists; according to principle of Utility, women must, for example, have equal access to education, for human beings are the product of education; the happiness of the mankind depends on the education of the greatest number of humans.
Price set forth his Unitarian doctrine in a collection of sermons. By "Unitarian" he means a single god, the Father alone. The Unitarians are split between those who believe Christ is an ordinary human, and those who believe Christ is an exceptional human being. Price takes the Arian position that Christ is a superior human who attains to the divine. Any man, as a son of god imitating the Son of god, can become to their fellow men a kind of deity, a creator who transforms the world. He is a trustee of god, and, as such, is charged with mankind's true happiness; there are many kinds of happiness, but only within the fulfillment of one's rational moral obligation resides the happiness of truth.
With Price's attitude in mind, the time is meet for a brief mention of French positivism's august founder whose youthful idol was Ben Franklin: Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the High Priest and Prophet of Positive Theology. Comte arrived at the adulation of science by virtue of his intimate relation with the Great Being, similar to Hegel's Reason, that causes mankind to progress through Three Stages: Theology, Metaphysics, and Positive. Metaphysics is childish, according to Comte, for the only absolute universal is that all universals are relative; that is, the theory of absolute relativism which holds that "general facts" or laws describing regular occurrences are the only valid explanation of events. Yet Comte has his Great Being, the providence of which is fixed by its laws of social dynamics, moving from base superstition to exalted Science.
Society's salvation, therefore, is dependent on Science, at the apex of which stands Sociology because it is the most complex development of Great Being in the range from simple to complex, from mathematics to Sociology. That is to say, the more complex, the more "positive" a science is, and since the object of all knowledge is the improvement or happiness of mankind, Sociology is the ultimate science. As for the human personality, it is odious and childish because it is a relic of an earlier stage, namely, the metaphysical.
The rulers of Comte's Positive Utopia are capitalists under guidance of scientists; capitalists and scientists harmoniously adhere to the maxim of positive religion, the Religion of Humanity: Live For Others. According to that precept, society would be managed by means of a complex educational system.
Women in Positive Utopia would be recognized as morally superior. Although dominated by and dependent on men, they would thereby suffuse the whole society with gentle warmth. Their virtual superiority in Comte's system stems from his personal relation with Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, with whom he fell in love while her husband was serving a life sentence in prison. Despite his rigorous, dogmatic scientific attitude, Comte was prone to nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. He met Clotilde during one of his trying periods, and was forthwith converted to the elevation of Feeling over Reason. When she died, he went off the deep end, worshipping her image: thus the high status of feminine sentiment in his utopia.
Comte's sociology became more of a religious mania than a science, a catholic Positive Church over which he presided as pope; the saints of same were heroes of human progress. Regardless of its irrational character, his later, more sentimental sociology was quite influential, particularly in Brazil with its fondness then for all things French.
There are obvious similarities between the views of Price and Comte; but of course, for the benefits of capitalistic economic changes were obvious to everyone and were therefore bound to influence everyone interested in having goods that can be weighed and measured, goods that can be produced by anyone with sufficient means regardless of his creed. Science is based on the truth of universal practical verification, and technology is something that can be learned by all. Considering the miserable lot of the populace of the day, and the promise of profit, it is no wonder that even men became excited about the prospects. It is no surprise that those prospects became part and parcel of the American Dream.
Honolulu 2001
(1) Helga Ross,'My American Love Affair', Australia: Writtenbyme, 2001
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