Felix Holt: the Radical

Over the past 21 years I have posted almost 1000 articles to my blog, Of Clay and Wattles Made and this will be another. Some of those postings addressed issues not unlike what I might have written in a journal if I were a more careful journal keeper. Thoreau might have edited his journals to give them organization for future use, but I am not so careful a scholar. My blogposts were expressions of personal, aesthetic and cultural issues that I wanted to think more about than I might have in casual consideration. Though a public blog few were read by others. No matter. As Montaigne had said years earlier, “And if no one reads me have I wasted my time entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts.” I was for the most part entertained. They were personal, written, edited expressions about the world—the universe—in which I lived, functioned and thought, expressions not of facts but of feelings which were translations of those facts. The feelings were the facts embedded in context.  Sometimes I translated those feelings into moral and ethical principles. And in those postings occasionally I addressed issues of politics that ended up too often as screeds against the winds that too often smelled of excrement. These latter posts were angry comments many of which I am not now proud, not because I felt wrong but because they were composed in a white heat; I suppose I might have been more circumspect, though during Trump’s second term I have noted that anger is often the feeling expressed in the opinion pages of the newspapers to which I am a resistant and too often regretful subscriber. I have too often written my anger into my blog. Thoreau says that to read a newspaper daily is like a dog returning to his vomit: I appreciate his observation. But somehow it is a vomitus with which I am familiar and though foul-smelling it nevertheless grounds me: or rather, distracts me from grounding myself.
           Sometimes in my postings I have bemoaned the state of education in the United States; I have spent almost fifty years as a teacher in the public high schools and in one public university and before that I was a student in the schools and colleges. There I began to understand and to think in a language that had not been part of my upbringing nor public discourse; in my readings I acquired a perspective that broadened my understanding of myself and my expanding and expansive world. Thoreau writes, “It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” Even before I had studied Thoreau this was the belief I embraced and promoted in my classrooms; I thought it made me a liberal teacher of literature and a good professor of education preparing teachers for the schools. I thought teachers should be wise and with wisdom; I though everyone should be taught to be wise. Thoreau writes, “we should learn liberality.” I did. And I blame the education system for the ignorance that has pervaded our country and that elects corrupt, even criminal and unfit leaders. To think has become anathema in the schools; following rules and algorithms is the accepted methodology of the classrooms. We have just to hear about the silencing and even punishing of students who protest the ways things are and demand an ethical and moral liberality that detests corruption and criminal activity in the supposed leaders of the country. We watch the lists of banned books in school libraries grow, and watch in horror as life choices have turned chooses into criminals.
           I read this in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, published in 1866. It is considered Eliot’s political novel but I believe it is more complex than that. Felix cannot vote because the Reform Act of 1832 only gave the vote to owners of property that had achieved a sufficient value. But Felix calls himself a radical because he advocates for a greater liberality in British political life. He argues for an informed populace that knows right from wrong. Standing before a crowd of mostly ineligible voters he says, “I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful . . . How can political freedom make us better, any more than religion we don’t believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? An while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petter private ends,—I say no fresh scheme of voting will med our conditions.” Here, I thought, is a novel from 1866 that speaks to our present corrupt administration with an accurate bitterness. 

            But actually Felix Holt is hopeful and advocates for citizens who “had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all.” What Felix Holt calls for is an ethical foundation for living and for political and religious action. To an understanding of the contexts of our facts. For years I have offered in my critique of education an opinion that it has failed to promote an attainment of wisdom that might lead to a liberality; rather it has narrowly focused on skills for a marketplace that might enrich the already wealthy and leave in power the corrupt and corruptible. What Felix, Thoreau and myself bemoan is that too many “have no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another,” who “have wasted their own drinking money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five shrilling piece when it was offered them.” 

            Ah, yet another screed, but it intrigues me always that our contemporary state of things is not new; as Dylan sang, “it’s all been done before, it’s all been written in the book.” Ours is not just a political problem but an ethical one. And one with which I wished education would address.