Humanizing the Humanist

Irving Babbitt

[Dear Substack Reader, as always, a huge thank you for following me. I’m very honored. As I type this, I’m about 10 miles west of FairPlay, Colorado. This is one of my all-time favorite spots on this earth. Today, sadly, is the last day of our family vacation—which took us through Nebraska, Kansas (my ancestral home), and Colorado. Basically, we’ve hiked every morning and early afternoon, and I’ve written every late afternoon. In fact, yesterday, I finished the first draft of my manuscript, The Declaration of Independence: 1776 And All That (forthcoming, AIER Press). As I was going through my old files, I found this piece I had originally written for Liberty Fund in response to my friend, Allen Mendenhall’s article on Irving Babbitt. Here’s hoping you had a wonderful 4th of July. God bless, Brad]

Irving Babbitt was exhausted at the end of his life. “’Fighting a whole generation,’ he remarked to me in an intimate moment, ‘is not exactly a happy task.’ He added somberly, ‘I have had to live at a time when all the ideas which I know to be most vital for man have more and more declined.”^[1]

Raised in a spiritualist household (Babbitt’s father was a sort of new-age charlatan who sold crystals to pregnant women, claiming that they could determine the sex of the baby with the proper crystal), Babbitt found little comfort in Christianity, either. His closest friend, Paul Elmer More, remembered an outburst while passing a church in Boston. “The dogma of Grace, the notion of help and strength poured into the soul from a superhuman source, was in itself repugnant to him, and the church as an institution he held personally in deep distaste, however he may have seemed to make an exception of the disciplinary authority of Romanism. . . . I can remember him in the early days stopping before a church in North Avenue, and, with a gesture of bitter contempt, exclaiming: ‘There is the enemy! There is the thing I hate.’ . . . . ‘Work out your own salvation with diligence.’”^[2]

Yet, this seems to be a younger impatient Babbitt.

On his death bed, he softened his stance. “’Oh, god is very great and a man is a worm.’ After a silence, I said, ‘But the God whom men worship is not just a Will, as in your writings, but a Being, a complete Being, who—‘ ‘Yes, yes,’ he broke in with humorous impatience, ‘but that is beyond my province as a writer. Why do you keep wish me to be a theologian? I am merely a critic.’”^[3]

And, yet, what a critic. Allen Mendenhall has done a brilliant job of reminding us just why we should never have forgotten Irving Babbitt. He was, to be certain, not only an excellent professor and scholar, but he was also one of the most important founders of modern conservatism. His book, Democracy and Leadership, served as an unofficial prequel to Russell Kirk’s 1953 The Conservative Mind. Even much of the language Kirk employs is similar, especially in a passage such as this:

When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.^[4]

In ideas, as well as in construction of language, this could easily have been a passage from The Conservative Mind.

In his own day and age, Babbitt was widely known, widely commented upon, and widely attacked. Truly, he was always in the arena fighting for the ideas he thought good, true, and beautiful. No wonder he was exhausted at the end.

Babbitt, however, was much more than a scholar and professor; he was a powerful personality. A fitness nut long before such things became mainstays of western civilization, Babbitt hiked, walked, and ran everywhere. He would even hold office hours with students following him on his daily walks. Famously, Paris police once chased him through the city, believing him a robber. As it was, Babbitt had just wanted some exercise.

As noted above, Babbitt was raised in a strange household—one that took seances and automatic writing and ghosts seriously.

He had been immersed in childhood in an atmosphere of spiritualism, and had absolutely none of the common inhibitions as to believe in what transcends ordinary experience. He would talk in the most matter-of-fact manner of having seen tables, nay, even pianos, float in the air, and used to laugh away my doubts. . . . he professed himself so inured to the idea of supernatural apparitions as to be quite prepared to see, any night, without the slightest tremor of surprise, a ghost standing at his bedside.^[5]

But it should also be remembered that Babbitt, as a young man, worked on a ranch in Wyoming and hunted rattle snakes.

When he came to teach at Harvard, he was disappointed not to receive a position in the classics department. Instead, he was hired by the Modern Language department. “I once heard him, when an instructor in French, say to the chairman of his department that French was only a cheap and nasty substitute for Latin.”^[6]

It's not clear that Babbitt ever actually taught much French literature or thought, however. One student remembered:

At that time he had very small classes—meeting around a table. He came in with a bag bursting full of books, and took out a handful of notes which he arranged around him..—Began to sway in his chair, then leaped out upon one of them and poured a barrage of criticism upon some doctrine or some line of poetry,--‘to cast o’er erring words and deeds a heavenly show’—Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Dante, Montaigne, Pascal, Milton, etc..—etc. He deluged you with wisdom of the world; his thoughts were unpacked and poured out so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. You didn’t know what he was talking about, but you felt that he was extremely in earnest, that it was tremendously important, that some time it would count; that he was uttering dogmatically things that cut into your beliefs, disposed derisively of what you adored, driving you into a reconstruction of your entire intellectual system. He was at you day after day like a battering ram, knocking down your illusions. He was building up a system of ideas. You never felt for a moment that he was a pedagogue teaching pupils. You felt that he was a Coleridge, a Carlyle, a Buddha, pouring out the full-stuffed cornucopia of the world upon your head. You were no longer in the elementary class. You were with a man who was seeking through literature for illustrations of his philosophy of life. You were dealing with questions on the answer to which the welfare of nations and civilizations depended. He himself seemed to know the right answer and was building a thoroughfare of ideas from the Greeks to our own day. You went out of the room laden down with general ideas that he had made seem tremendously important . . . . He related for you a multitude of separate and apparently disconnected tendency to the great central currents of thought. You carried away also a sense of the need for immense reading. He had given you theses about literature, about life, which you would spend a lifetime in verifying.^[7]

He was a powerful presence in the classroom.

The man who presently entered the room and seated himself behind the desk was of big frame slightly stooped. The face was craggy, the jaw obtrusive, the voice vibrant, the gestures quick and angular. And certainly when he spoke he laid down the law; but not as though the law were his own. It belonged to humanity, so he made one feel; it had been enacted by the parliament of history and he was a clerk announcing it. He did so in tones full of its importance but empty of his own. I had known many professors who were modesty because they were mild, and some who were not modest because they were professors. But Babbitt was neither mild nor officious. The moral laws were for him too clear, urgent, and fateful to permit of gentle circumspection in the enouncing of them; but also they were so transcendent as to belittle his office.^[8]

It must also be noted that Harvard, at the time, was one of the greatest universities in the world, and Babbitt’s most famous student—who became a life-long friend—was T.S. Eliot.

Though Allen has already done a tremendous job walking us through Democracy and Leadership, it’s worth summarizing Babbitt’s overall views.

First, Babbitt believed, man was defined more by his duties than his rights. The true man restrained his passions and willed his way toward reason.

Second, all things and all of reality is a whole. While neither a Christian nor a Stoic, Babbitt had been influenced rather strongly by eastern philosophy and mysticism.

Third, a man finds himself best through his work. Here, Babbitt seems to be embracing the Roman virtue of labor.

Fourth, historically, the great break in western civilization—the one that led to modernity—came from Nicolo Machiavelli and his reworking of St. Augustine’s ideas from The City of God. Such errors continued through Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Fifth, without question, Babbitt labeled Rousseau as the great demon of the modern world. If Rousseau represented all that was evil, though, Edmund Burke represented all that was good.

Sixth, democracy at home almost always results in imperialism abroad.

None of this should suggest that Babbitt’s thought was easy or even easily reducible to just six tenets. Still, each one reminds us, yet again, that, as Allen wisely argued, that Babbitt should never have been forgotten.

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^[1] G.R. Elliott, “Irving Babbitt as I Knew Him,” American Review 8 (1936-1937): 58.

^[2] Paul Elmer More, “Irving Babbitt,” American Review 3 (1934): 29.

^[3] Elliott, “Irving Babbitt as I Knew Him,” 59-60.

^[4] Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 23.

^[5] W.F. Giese, “Irving Babbitt, Undergraduate,” American Review 6 (1935): 74

^[6] Giese, “Irving Babbitt, Undergraduate,” 68.

^[7] “Chronicle and Comment,” The Bookman (November 1929), 293.

^[8] Elliott, “Irving Babbitt as I Knew Him,” 36-37