Category Archives: Classic Books

The Revaluation of Morals

Classic Books, Critical thinking, Morality, Rebel

 

When Huck Finn does what he thinks is wrong—helping a slave to escape his master and gain his freedom and deprive his master of her property—Huck decides he must be wicked, because to do “the right thing” is the wrong thing. He turns morality on its head. In doing so, Huck helps to turn civilization on its head too.

 

Hopefully this can help all of us to think better by making a “long think” about what is right and wrong. Is it what we were taught in Sunday school? Is it what our parents taught us? Or our friends? Or our betters? Or is it something we can discern for ourselves? Are Indigenous children slovenly brutes as many of us were taught? Do Jews really smell as many were told? What is respectable? What is civilized?  Don’t just believe what we are told. We must look for ourselves. We must give it a “long think.” We must be willing, if necessary, to turn the world on its heads even if means risking a place called hell.

 

Azar Nafisi said this is what she tried to teach her students when she was a professor,  in Iran, where they were indoctrinated from birth to believe what the Imams and parents told them. Who can do this in America? Who can do this in Canada? In her view, gleaned from Twain and other writers, “I tried to share with my students in Tehran , explaining to them that moral choice comes from a sound heart and from a constant questioning of the world and of oneself and that it is just as difficult , if not more so in society that appears to give you every freedom.

 

I think it comes from starting with fellow feeling and then a long think where all the relevant facts must be ascertained and then weighed.

 

I remember one time having a serious discussion with a young lawyer on an issue of morality.  His argument against what I said consisted of saying, “Well this is what I learned at home.”  It is all well and good to be taught at home. We all needed parents to do that as we could not have survived without their help. But when we become adults, we have to learn to think for ourselves too. Mark Twain once said elsewhere that “education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.” And as much as we loved our parents and respected their viewpoint they were not always right. Just as our children won’t think we were always right.  Thank goodness for that.

 

The same goes for teachers. I know I have learned a lot from good teachers. But Friedrich Nietzsche that great German philosopher, said “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil.”

 

Azar Nafisi said this source of wisdom was “the rebellious heart that beats to its own rhythm.” What we really need, in addition to good parents and good teachers is critical thinking combined with fellow feeling. This is what I have gleaned from one of my old philosophy professors. I am eternally grateful to him for that.

 

 

The Religious  Mob

Classic Books, Extremism, Fear, Freedom, Politics & Religion, Rebellion and Resistance

 

In the amazing novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when it is discovered that a slave has escaped from his master, a mob of white people—mainly good Christian white people—got excited and gave horrific chase to the slave aided and abetted by his young white friend. These were good ordinary citizens of America. They believed it was their religious duty to give chase to an escaped black slave and return him to his owner. Of course, it helped that they might reap a $40 reward from the owner. Is that all it takes?

 

Azar Nafisi was a Muslim woman living in Iran who taught Huckleberry Finn to young Islamic men and women.  By and large these students were respectful of the tyrannical regime in their country. Like good American citizens, they were good citizens and good Muslims? What would they think of Huck Finn?

The book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is as I have been saying a book about freedom and resistance to authority.  Those are both characteristics that have usually been absent in Iran. At least that was true until recently, when there have been some rebellion led by young women resisting the authority of the government to impose dress requirements upon them, as well as other even more important impositions on their freedom. The women have demonstrated uncommon bravery in the face of that tyranny. A number of them have been killed by the government for their opposition.

Mark Twain in that brilliant book showed how an uneducated white boy and his black slave friend revolted against the “conscience” of the nation. Most people in America, at the time, believed in the racial superiority of whites and in their absolute right to do as they saw fit with the inferior black race in their midst.

Nafisi said this about the book:

“It looks at how ordinary decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in Huck Finn, into a murderous mob? It might have been the question that gave Huck such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran”.

 

How can good people wreak such havoc on other more vulnerable good people? Is a $40 reward all it takes?

Yet the young students of Iran largely supported the rebellious position of Huck. They applauded his actions in refusing to return the slave to the master.

Even though they were good Muslims, they did not support the religious mob! I found that interesting.

The Religion of Huck Finn: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Classic Books, Conservative, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Some of the absurdity in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is of course the result of taking religion too literally. Sometimes that means Huck and Tom and others times the civilized people. Taking religion literally is always risky. As Huck reported early in the book, after he got in trouble for failing to behave as he so often did:

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hook three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me but she said I was a fool. She never told me why and I couldn’t make it no way.”

 

How could it be that religion worked for people like Miss Watson and not Huck? He must be doing something wrong. So again, he did what he always did, he thought about it. As Huck said,

“I set down one time way back in the woods and had a long think about it. I said to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork?  Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No says I, to myself, there ain’t nothing in it.  If I went and told the widow about it and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me she meant—I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.”

 

Interestingly, this later of course turned out to be true, for Huck really did spiritual gifts when he ignored his own welfare and thought just of Jim.

 

Though Huck was not satisfied with this advice he actually soaked it in through osmosis for later that is exactly what he did when he saved Jim for the slave hunters and he won Jim’s freedom and in doing so won his own freedom as well! It was marvellous advice but it didn’t’ smell right to Huck.  Such advice always seemed like a con to a rapscallion like Huck but it really is the best advice he could get.

Pap, his father,  on the other hand gave him the worst possible advice. He taught him how to lie and steal as much as he could and only look out for himself.

Tom Sawyer on the other hand advised Huck to get his advice from books like Don Quixote because they were all about “enchantment.” I would have thought this would have been pretty good advice actually, but later in the book we learn how crazy it was when someone like Tom Sawyer takes his books as literally as the Bible Thumpers take theirs. Tom even said, “I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed  in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me, I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday school.”

An independent thinker like Huck would avoid the traps of traditional belief if he could, but he found it very hard, as he later learns. He puts eternal life on the line! You can’t get braver than that.

Fear and Slavery and Injustice

Classic Books, racism

 

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. America is a wonderful country but it is consumed by fear. They need a military that costs them as much as the next 9 most expensive militaries cost combined! They need that fire power because they fear retribution for their sins of slavery of blacks and genocide of indigenous people. The more guilty your conscience the more protection you need.

 

There is a good example of this in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The incident happened on the Phelps farm, a small plantation of slaves. There was a minor slave revolt on the Phelps farm; what every slaveholder dreaded. They dreaded that justice would be imposed on them.

 

The rebellions started when “one nigger was crazy but there was “a dozen helping him” to steal a nigger slave.  There was a “plumb crazy” nigger  with a dozen disciples! Who else would make a “ladder out of rags,” to steal into and out of a white man’s house.

 

The white folks figured the slaves must have been spirits because even their dogs could not track them. The white women of course were terrified. They were afraid to live!  They could hardly go to bed, or lay down or get up.  They were amazed the niggers hadn’t stolen any of their family. Why were they afraid of that? Because that is what they would have done!

 

She said, “I was just to that pass I didn’t have no reasoning faculties no more.” She was so scared for her children she locked them in their room. As she explained, “when you get scared that way, and it keeps running on, and getting worse and worse all the time, and your wits get to addling, and you get to doing all sorts of wild things.”

 

The people are of course entirely credulous, expecting the worst that is imaginable, because that is what they would do. They think the time for retribution is at hand. In a nation built on the twin original sins of black slavery and indigenous genocide such fears are as real as fears can be.

 

Dehumanizing

Classic Books, racism, religion

 

The first trick of the racist and the slave holder is to convince himself that the blacks are not fully human. Once we dehumanize someone, we can do anything to him or her. Dehumanization is the first step on the long journey to genocide, or slavery. And when one realizes the slave is actually human, as Huck  did, the long road to justice has begun.

Huck was astonished to learn from Jim that he missed his wife and children and longed for them. How was that possible? This was an epiphany for Huck. Miss Watson never learned that. She was prepared to sell Jim and his wife and children to different owners. As Huck said of Jim,

“he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.”

It was like when Huck was asked by his aunt, another good Christian woman, if anyone had been killed in the steamship accident, and Huck said no. Only a nigger was killed, and his aunt responded gratefully, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” Niggers are not people. They don’t count.

When Huck arrived at the plantation that was owned by Phelps, he learned the white children were just like the children of the adult slaves: “acting the same way the little niggers was going.”

Later Huck admits to Tom Sawyer that he helped nigger Jim to escape and he was ashamed of that saying, “it’s a lowdown business, but what if it is? I’m low down.”

Of course, it is not just conmen who are infused with unreality. So too is the “Sunday-like” small plantation owned by whites and filled with a family of black slaves.” Reality is forbidden to intrude there too. You can tell from Huck’s description of the plantation that he understands the reality of it. It deadens all who live there. Not just the slaves, but the slave owners too.

Here is the reality of the plantation: Niggers, it goes without saying, are not people. They don’t count. They’re suffering is not real. That is the reality of the plantation. And we learn it without a sermon, because a sermon is not necessary. We understand the reality of the plantation, even if nice people like the Phelps family did not. We learn that reality because we hear it from a magnificent story teller.

Here is the reality of the plantation:

His aunt asked Huck when he arrived and told about an accident on the river steamer:

“Goodness gracious! Anybody hurt?” Huck replies: “No’m. Killed a nigger.” Her quick response: “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Niggers, it goes without saying, are not people. They don’t count. They’re suffering is not real. That is the reality of the plantation. And we learn it without a sermon, because a sermon is not necessary. We understand the reality of the plantation, even if nice people like the Phelps family did not.

We learn that reality because we hear it from a magnificent story teller—Mark Twain. He does it all without preaching about it.

 

 

 

Mark Twain and White Supremacy

Classic Books, racism, White Supremacy

 

Mark Twain knew what white supremacy was worth.

Twain certainly was not an unmixed champion of the white race, like so many of his contemporaries and ours. He made this clear in his landmark novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

During Twain’s youth in Missouri he had seen how slaves were treated. Then he travelled the world and saw more. It made him ashamed of his own race. And caused him to say this:

 “In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death. In  more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mothers  with dogs and guns through the swamps for an afternoon’s sport. In many country’s we have taken the savage’s land from him and made him our slave and lashed  him every day and broken his pride and made death his only friend and overworked him until he dropped in his tracks. There are many humorous things in the world among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

 

Actually white supremacy is not  as humorous as it is absurd. This is equally applicable to the early Canadians’ and Americans’ treatment of indigenous people. Blinded by their sense of white superiority, they claimed to be civilizing the savages. How blind could they be?  But how much better are we today?

 

My Country right or Wrong

Classic Books, Conservative, racism

 

Unlike the so-called modern patriots, exemplified by the insurrectionists on January 6 in the US, Mark Twain was not a nationalist.  As Azar Nafisi said,

“defending the Jews, women, the people of the Congo , workers, and all of the oppressed; claiming to be a revolutionary, already predicting the ideological wars to come when he declared not, “My country right or wrong, but “my country when it is right.”

 

Twain realized what modern conservatives often don’t—that his beloved country could do wrong. They were not exceptional. In many ways his countrymen and women were wrong. Even some of the maiden aunts like Miss Watson who seemed to be so perfect taking Huck into the closet to pray and making him go to Sunday School, but was actually utterly spoiled by their own racism. After all, she would decide to sell Jim, her slave, and then his wife and children to someone else. What could be more utterly degenerate than that?  No amount of church or Sunday school could wash away that sin! Yet people believed that was natural and good. How was that possible? America, Twain knew, must look the dreadful truth in the face and not shrink from its own sins.

 

Twain told a story from his youth when he saw a German hotel manager who mistreated his Indian servant who accepted  his punishment without a word of protest.  Twain realized that beatings were the way white people demonstrated their disapproval of actions of their slaves. Beatings were as natural as rain. Twain remembered how his own father, whom he had been raised to honour and respect, would cuff their slave boy. Again this was completely natural. Twain even admitted in his notebook that he had thought such actions were natural although he also “felt sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.”

Of course, one cannot be a brilliant novelist like Mark Twain without having deep empathy. It is the stock and trade of the artist. Later in life Twain realized that his parents had mistaught him. Slavery and racism was profound sin. His parents were not always right. This is what he wrote in his notebooks:

“In those slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him, or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slaveholders is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers, the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education & stick to it.”

 

The “conscience” is what we are taught by elders and others in authority in our society and it can be horribly wrong, as Huck discovered.

Huck felt miserable when he helped the slave Jim escape. It was in his world the worst thing anybody could do, because property, especially slave property was sacred. Huck felt “trembly” and “feverish” when he did that. He was to blame because Jim was almost free. He was rightly to blame for that and knew he had committed a horrible sin. He felt horrible that Miss Watson was deprived of her property because of him. This is the conclusion Huck’s conscience led him to:

“Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, and coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; that man that hadn’t ever done harm to me.”

 

This shows  the abject poverty of  complete acquiescence with the conventional morality can be. We moderns must remember that.

 

The skin of every human

Classic Books, racism

 

Although Mark Twain was brought up believing slavery was natural and good he gradually learnt better. He came to realize, as he said in his notebooks after he wrote Huck Finn, “The skin of every human being contains a slave.” We don’t have slavery any more in North America, at least to the extent we once did,  even though we still have racism aplenty. Racism has taken over from slavery in many places (though slavery has not disappeared) and it is just as wicked. So long as we have racism, in our system, the skin of every human will contain a racist.

 

That is why we all need liberation from racism. The racists need liberation as much as the oppressed races. Just as Twain was right when he said “Lincoln’s proclamation…not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.”

 

The person who most exemplifies the wickedness of slavery and racism was Huck’s father: Pap. Though Aunt Sally and the widow Watson exemplify a more subtle racism that is perhaps more reprehensible because it is so sly. Pap is the most repulsive character in the novel. He also demonstrates the close connection between hatred of slaves with hatred of government. He would no doubt today be a card-carrying member of the truckers’ convoy movement. As Huck pointed out, “Whenever his liquor begun to work he most always went for the govment. Pap was appalled that the government would take a man’s son away from him because he was abusing his son. For  Pap like a slave belongs to the slave owner, the son belongs to the father! As Pap lamented:

 

Call this a govment! Why, just a look at it and see what it’s like. Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him—a man’s own son, which he has had all the trouble and the anxiety and all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to suthin’ for him and give him rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call tdo hat govment!”

 

And if that is not clear enough—if the connection between parenting and slaveholding is not clear enough, Pap, speaking of the judge who ordered that Pap had no more right to be considered a parent of Huck because of his deep misconduct, he adds, “The law backs that old judge Thatcher up and helps  him to keep me out of my property.”He saw his son as his property.

 

To Pap it is irrelevant that he never did raise Huck or pay his expenses because that does not matter. What matters is that as a son Huck is his property!

 

Pap was also disgusted that in some parts of the country, like Ohio, there are free niggers!  Imagine that! And this nigger was allowed to dress in fancy clothes and carry a fancy cane and “talk in all kinds of languages and… be a “p’fessor in a college.” What was the country coming to he asked? There were even states where niggers were allowed to vote! That was why he decided he would never vote again. And he could hardly believe that a nigger would not make way for him unless he shoved him out of the way. And the last straw, in some states they could not sell niggers!

 

This was the father who taught Huck morals and educated his conscience. No wonder Huck needed to be freed from him and his views.

 

And even though bald-faced racists like that are now less common, racism is very common. And unconsciously we are taught it from our parents and our world. Revolting from it is not easy. It is hard.

Mark Twain and Spiritual Slavery

Classic Books, Freedom, racism, Truth Seeking, Uncategorized

 

Mark Twain had a deep aversion to slavery.  That was an unusual attitude at the time. In fact most people in the south of  the United States, and elsewhere for that matter, including many people in Canada, felt slavery was natural. That was just how things worked.  But Twain did not always feel that way. Like Huck Finn he grew into hatred of slavery, because he grew up with it and thought it was normal and therefore right. Only later in life did he realize that slavey was a sin and must be resisted.

Late in his life Twain said this:

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery.  I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”

This reminds me of an argument I had once had with a young lawyer. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but it was an ethical argument about whether or not a particular action or activity was wrong. His ultimate position was that he had been brought up to believe that so he believed it. He was a slave to his parent’s opinions. He was not free.

Frankly, I was stunned that an educated person who had spent 7 years in a university could hold that was an answer to my argument. But really, he was just clearly enunciating a position held by many people in society. They implicitly believe what their parents believed and do not question the authority of the parent to control their beliefs even deep into maturity. This is what I call spiritual slavery.  When we are growing up we naturally believe what our parents tell us, but I believe when we are mature we have a duty to question what we have been  told us, even if we continue to respect the parents.  What Friedrich Nietzsche said about teachers and students is equally applicable to parents and children: “One repays a teacher badly by remaining always a pupil.” Would you want your children to believe as you believe just because you taught them to believe it? I think not. We want our children eventually to think for themselves. Perhaps even to teach us where we went wrong!

I would even hold this position if I were God. I would not want people to believe me only because I said something was true.  I would not give them a Holy book with prescriptions that must be followed. I would want them to think for themselves. Again, I would want them to teach me if I was wrong. I want people—all people—to be spiritually free!

Later in his life Twain realized what he had been taught by his elders was wrong. Slavery was wicked.  As Azar Nafisi said, “his childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity, and depravity.” This is what I now think about racism. It too has been inculcated in us since the days of our youth by a system of systemic racism that we have not recognized, because we were like fish who don’t see the water in which they swim. At one time slavery was  like that. It is not like that anymore. But racism is still like that. And we must resist it.

If we are not free to think for ourselves we are not free.

 

 

Deep Freedom

Classic Books, Exploitation, Freedom, racism, Rebel, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book about freedom.  It is about the freedom of young boys who are smothered by demands that they conform to narrow constraints of maiden aunts and Sunday schools. And that is important. Revolting from such constraints is the freedom Huck seeks. That is the freedom that Huck seeks and is willing to pay the ultimate price when he lights out for the territory. He wants it even if means hell.

 

But it also about freedom that a large portion of Americans didn’t enjoy, namely the indigenous and black people of America. The freedom extolled by Americans since the time of the Puritans that for some reason was not for them. Some of them in fact were enslaved—i.e., as unfree as they possibly could be in this land lauded as being the land of the free.  It was free only for some. Most them were white and most of them were men.

The novel is also about freeing humans like Huck from the ideas that enslave him. These are the ideas—like making humans into property—that Huck must learn to renounce. And it is hard to renounce ideas with which we have grown up.

How can anyone who believes in and relishes freedom as so many Americans and Canadians do, ever think that slavery is acceptable? Canadians have to remember that slavery was also prevalent in Canadian society. Canada was much more than the underground railway inviting in slaves to sanctuary.

When charlatans, murderers, and thieves join the “God-fearing” white folks of the community to chase down en mass Jim the runaway slave, Huck says, aptly, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.”

Mark Twain once said, “Lincoln’s proclamation…not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.” I believe that is profoundly true.

This is beautifully materialized in the character of Jim the black slave. Jim frees Huck. In pursuing freedom for Jim, Huck is also freed from the chains of the Sunday school marms.