Chapt Twenty-Four- Sampling the Bathwater

Chapter 24

Sampling the Bathwater

Retrieving American Values

A beautiful family which had all the ingredients of a Norman Rockwell existence, or at least a Mark Twain classic, still the Samuel Clemens clan lived a Faulknerian debacle. American readers might find the Clemens story a bit shocking for a couple of reasons. Most Twain fans probably assume that such a beloved author just naturally enjoyed a wonderful home life, especially since most Americans have never heard otherwise. And most of us assume that Mark Twain was active during an era which was free of the troubles which plague our times. But since the Clemens did suffer so, it leaves his fans wondering how such a man, blessed and wealthy, and his family so idyllic, might have ended in such tragedy. If the Clemenses could not achieve happiness and serenity, then who could? There are answers to these questions, even though Americans have avoided them for one hundred years.

The problem was not just the spiritual impasse between the parents, or the reckless finances of Samuel Clemens, nor were these issues necessarily inflamed by the corrupting affects of fame and celebrity. Families overcome all of those things all of the time. The Clemens home was influenced by all of these things, but most importantly these were added to a family already adrift, led by parents who willfully threw away many cultural and marital paradigms with no vision for their replacements. In the midst of raising three brilliant, free-thinking daughters, many time-tested cultural patterns in Western civilization were tossed aside.

Children of farmers and merchants, Sam and Olivia delved into the uncharted territory of Victorian popular culture; professional writing, publishing, and entertainment. To fit into their new bohemian social strata they dispensed with orthodox Christianity, its Bible, and conventional wisdom about family life. These cultural foundations were dispensed as if totally optional, arbitrarily traded for the latest philosophy of an eccentric neighbor, or one touted in a modern periodical.

Gone were Judeo-Christian structures and functions of marriage and child-rearing, leaving a gaping hole of questions and unsettled responsibilities. The Clemenses had to reinvent the human family, with only their conscience as their guide. And as was sometimes the case, they foolishly threw their babies' spiritual lifelines out with the bathwater.

People have every right to reject the culture and beliefs they are raised in, but only foolish people think these things are totally expendable, especially without an immediate alternative. Cultural and religious and governmental paradigms have evolved over thousands of years because of very practical needs and purposes, and one of them is survival; More people lived than died, more survived and found a degree of safety and happiness, than otherwise. A “brave new world” can more often than not be a fool's paradise.

In Samuel Clemens's experimental sociological frontier, there was no god, no authentic Ten Commandments, no greater authority beyond himself. This left Clemens, a sarcastic escapist to decide the meaning of commitment, duty, and right and wrong. Over the years he proved to be an unwise risk-taker, a poor judge of character and a worse judge of opportunity, and a man burdened by indecision. Sam Clemens would make a poor substitute for Divine Authority. And he never tried to be. He never really became a pure atheist, because he much more enjoyed voicing his anger at an unjust, unworthy god, rather than facing a universe without him. Yet most of Clemens's ethics and morals were borrowed straight out of the very Holy Scriptures he claimed to be spurious. Sam Clemens objected and berated his moral compass, and its alleged authority, but he never provided his children with a better one. And no person could.

Clemens could not and did not replace the social order of Moses with anything. Only doubts and ridicule. Admittedly, replacing it would be hard to do. Sam Clemens, best understood through Huck Finn, his alter-ego, could defiantly throw a rock through a window. But he could not make the window. And he could not stop himself from looking through the window. But even more telling, he had no alternative explanation to the origins and purposes of everything he saw through that window. This would be enough to discourage most self-made armchair philosophers. So Clemens was no philosopher, only a skeptic and protester. And he threw lots of rocks through Heaven's windows.

All Sam Clemens could tell his children were his doubts and suspicions of the Maker of the space beyond the window. He did not believe what much of the rest of his world accepted as obvious. In his estimation, “God,” or whatever you call the power in charge, was either an idiot or absent or just cruel. Too much tragedy and heartbreak in the world indicated that there was no active deity in control of the Universe. But even Carl Sagan would have argued that “absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

Clemens had an angry spirit, defiant, caustic, and needed that adrenal fire to write. So he vociferously despised the common understanding of the window, told his children it was unreliable, but he still had no clue how else to see the outside. He would have been out of inspiration, had he not had such a reliable foe. But his children would have to fight their own battles, and figure out spiritual questions for themselves. Their mother had once contentedly gazed out, even cherished that window, and used to enjoy the view, but no longer did since Sam hated it so. Their daughters had to reinvent the universe.

Olivia Clemens replaced, or tried to replace the nineteen hundred years of Faith fostered by her culture with Spiritualism... seances where she attempted to converse with the dead... and she practiced self-healing, an early version of positive thinking. Somehow she could fathom souls of dead persons, still roaming and listening in this world, but no was longer confident in a god, a creator of all souls, active and listening in the Universe. She and her daughters could imagine the power of the human brain to stop disease and heal bodily damage, but not a powerful god who answered prayer. They thought they might, with the assistance of a medium, communicate with persons who had died, and supposed that some persons now dead wandered the earth, especially in the neighborhoods of their descendants, looking for a séance to attend, so that they might set the record straight.

As the Apostle Paul so eloquently described, “They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.”

The results of the Clemens family experiment speak for themselves. Even if the Clemenses were absolutely correct in their assessment and dispensing of nineteen- hundred years of man-god relationships, their vague replacements were certainly no more effective in establishing health and harmony, not to mention safety and prosperity.

So enough about them. Wonderful people, tragic results. It's too bad that neither Sam nor Livy ever knew Rose Wilder Lane. An author and a daughter of another, she would have immediately connected with them, and she had very useful theories which might have helped. Unfortunately, Rose was not writing her observations and conclusions until the Clemens has expired. She was the first generation born into the iconic, pervasive philosophies of Mark Twain, which had come to define our culture.

Rose also had her doubts in the beginning. She had also joined up with the bohemian set in San Francisco, the same place where Sam had been introduced to Spiritualism, free love, and total contempt for most “authority.” She had become a star in that boiling pot of liberality, as she launched a career of enviable literary accomplishments. Rose claimed that at one time she had been a communist, and had grown up harboring hatred and suspicion towards the bankers and railroads. Mark Twain would certainly have shared these distastes with her. But even though the Clemens would have identified well with Rose, Sam especially would not have been able to follow her lead.

Clemens always fled from direct conflict. Rose ran towards it. A lieutenant in a Missouri Militia, he had abandoned his Confederate unit during the Civil War, and sought safety and peace in the far west. Rose went to work for the Red Cross in war-ravaged Europe and found inspiration from people serving the hungry and homeless. She was no escapist, but looked hardship and tragedy in the eye. Both authors were adventurous, but Rose was often heroic, even recklessly self-sacrificing. When duty and human decency called, Rose came like a mother to the rescue. Clemens ducked and made a joke. When God allowed each of them to wander into dire circumstances, Clemens cursed God and sought sympathy, while Rose saw a fascinating chance to grow and learn deep truths. Both found in life what they sought.

Rose began to see an inexplicable order to the Universe, in spite of Man's willfulness and folly. She observed undeniable correlations between the United States and an accelerated progress in human history, and more importantly in Human Rights. Rose saw that most identifiable evil was man's inhumanity to man, and that every thing good in life seemed to have been bestowed, however randomly by a benevolent god, probably the God of Abraham and Jesus and perhaps even Mohamed.

Jesus had promised that those who seek will find. Rose had traveled all the way to Albania, seeking a society uncorrupted by modern civilization. She wanted to experience a society without materialism, or oppressive government; a free people living as they had for centuries, before the world went mad. What might they still have, which provided wisdom and contentment, which modern people lacked? She trusted that she would find a better paradigm... where a collective consciousness was more spiritual, and wiser. Once the new wore off, she noted the pervasive squalor and ignorance, and ultimately found little inspiration, and a whole culture needing to be saved from itself. There was no Shangri-La. Rose came home, still seeking basic human common denominators.

American multiculturalism, born of Liberal assumptions, had sent her to find deep answers elsewhere... and then Rose came to realize she had been born and raised in the fount of deep answers. But those answers had been scoffed and discredited by a modern intelligentsia, determined to remove religion from the American ideal. Science was the new arbiter of philosophy and behavior. But Rose, being Rose, was unconvinced.

Rose would have told Carl Sagan to do the math. He was a scientist. He understood complex math. She would have told him, given the success of the Darwinian researchers, or lack of it, what were the odds that spontaneous generation, something all of Science depends on, was true? They still had no evidence. At least there were once believers in the miracles of Jesus and his resurrection, people who saw and wrote of these things, and others who wrote of them, and his teachings had changed the world and inspired America. That was some kind of proof. Given that Christianity began in duress and violent persecution, what were the odds that all of that could have survived if it were a lie? And what are the odds that scientists, blessed with complete cooperation for a century,  have never found any proof of spontaneous generation, ascendancy of species, and only a handful of fossils which might be interpreted as ancient, transitional species... and Darwinism could still be true? The odds are way against Darwin now, and thus in God's favor.

If the Clemens threw out the baby with the bathwater, Rose picked up the baby, dried it off, and analyzed it. In the process she also gave it resuscitation. She had once given birth to such an innocent thing, and lost it. The loss had planted certain absolutes in her mind. One was that her her baby was in the arms of a loving God. Even a Deist can believe in that. Even Clemens in a weak moment said the same thing about members of his own family. And if that baby was in the presence of God, then so was our country. Rose took all of the things which inspired confusion and skepticism in Twain and saw the fascinating mysteries and unlikely creations of the universe, and behind them… God.

If you were Mark Twain, then the world was a hostile mess and man was damned and just a random mutation. Nothing mattered. There is no justice, no posterity. Never. Nothing to believe in, no responsibility to a higher cause, nothing worth fighting for. The earth and all of Nature is an accident. And not even a happy one. If there was a god, there should be order, purpose, and justice on this earth... But Rose had some interesting responses to such reasoning...

“It is always possible not to believe in any God in whom other men believe. But it is impossible not to believe in God. The human mind will not work without a standard of value.”

Rose poo-pooed true atheism as nothing but flawed semantics.

“Anyone who imagines that he has no religious basis of thought and action is merely using another name for his god.”

Rose reasoned that the supposed atheist Russian Communists believed in the authority and power of the “State,” or “the Party,” and Hitler and his Nazi followers believed in him as their sovereign Savior. The Japanese had their all-powerful emperor, who inspired their confident, religious zeal. There has to be a socially acknowledged structure of behavior, and an authority figure who establishes and enforces it. And that authority... whatever you call it... is god. If not, why pay your taxes, or stop at red lights or refrain from whatever behavior which might make you rich, or realize your wildest fantasies? Why get up in the morning? If not God, then the government or society or your mother or SOMEBODY, even yourself- motivates you to conform to accepted social parameters. And in effect, whichever that governs your conscience is your god.

Rose went on... “Read any so-called attack on religion. Listen to any man who claims to be an atheist. He bases his argument on faith in The Truth. He has a standard of good, a God. He must have one; the human mind will not work without it.”

If Rose was right, then it would be foolish to kick at the goads of your own culture, which may be the ancient shins of the “Deity.” If she was wrong, and Clemens was right, then it does not matter if you get it right, if you beat your wife or murder your children, we are all just complex yet accidental organisms destined to return to the dust from which we came. You are no more noble than a lion who kills his own offspring. Or less.

Rose proposed that men, trusting in their own limited knowledge and experience, impose their own “Truth” in the vacuum left from the abolition of religion. Science, Philosophy or some other paradigm then tries to replace the necessary structure and order previously provided by religion. Society has always required a standard of good, a basis for civilization and its idea of justice, or it has demanded a king, a strong man to make it behave.

Men and women have always acknowledged this need. The Israelites begged for God to give them a king. They got Saul. The French made Napoleon, a short, delusional Corsican their emperor, rather than trust in representative government. Americans pleaded with Washington to take the helm of our new nation, as a king rather than trust it to anyone less worthy. And Washington changed history by refusing. He already knew, God was our king.

Washington and our founders understood that no man-made standards can establish the nobility of the human soul, or the preciousness of human life, and thus the motive for protection of Human Rights. Germs don't have rights. Neither do bricks or grains of sand or accidental creatures who evolved out of apes. Darwinian Science, as Hawking suggests, insists that we are nothing special, products of random selection, even though we cannot replicate ourselves, not even a single living cell. Darwin and his followers did not care how unfounded their theories might have been, as long as they provided an acceptable alternative to a universe governed by, god forbid, God.

But most man-made “Truths” fall way short of inspiring humanity to a higher consciousness. That is not their goal. Knowing that which is empirical is their goal. Science supposedly insists on proof, and does not accept mere theories; Mere belief.

According to Rose Lane, most man-made “truths” are designed to distract or redirect men towards a certain man-made authority. Consider “political correctness,” which is nothing more than a public correction and shaming designed to coerce the general population. Things or words once thought to be innocent or inconsequential have been sensationalized and inflated into controversies worth fighting about... in the absence of an accepted religious authority. Unaccountable political brain-trusts have begun to indoctrinate the population with moral standards, behavior limits, language modifications and prohibitions, and prescriptions for modern-day salvation. These standards supposedly save us from modern day judgments.

Society today is driven by assumptions consisting of nothing more than faith, especially in science, and especially the kind where hypotheses are not proven, as our new societal authority has vaulted major campaigns concerned with global warming, sexual identity, abortion, energy sources, education and drugs.

Women and men seek to create new standards of good, even standards of gender, based on how they feel and what they want, right now. It is this tension between the believers and the experimenters, the people of God verses the social “scientists,” which defines the line of scrimmage in our country today.

Rose and Eleanor would have agreed that our American population was soft and quite vulnerable. It was this human proclivity for complacency and ignorance that had allowed mankind to march along, obedient to kings and tyrants, for centuries, and to live and die in bondage and want; to blame the system, whatever it was, for their hopelessness, and to naturally hate the wealthy and powerful. Rose pointed out that the United States was the first country to ever build on the power of the individual, and the axiom that all men are free. Imperfect as it was, it still released the greatest and most beneficial explosion of human energy in mankind's short history on earth.

Some of her most interesting observations were about human babies. Rose was fascinated by them, and saw them as perfect illustrations of humanity and its primal battle with authority. It is a baby, and each of us was one, who must first contend with his own utter helplessness...

“ ...A chick can scratch as soon as it is dry from the shell, and a fish emerging from the egg can swim, but a baby must be spanked before he can breathe... For a long time he will kick himself in the eye when he is only trying to taste his toes to find out what they are.” Rose based much of what she understood about mankind from the perspective of a newborn... which develops painfully slow compared to all other species. If people came from monkeys, then they degenerated to do so. We cannot imagine children which are born one week and go straight into Kindergarten the next week. Instead the human baby has to depend on others for his survival for years. Little monkeys are running around, swinging from trees, fighting over food in far less time. Human babies are pitiful, and just not feasible. But the human baby has more to learn... to fathom deep truths. Such a waste since he is only a soulless organism.

“He is hungry and he can not get food. He is uncomfortable, and he can not turn over. Food, warmth, comfort, cleanliness, everything he wants and must have, come from a power outside himself, enormously stronger than he.” Babies learn from birth, are seemingly hard-wired, to know instinctively they depend on a greater personage for sustenance. At first, that person is their mother. In the end it is their God. If they are lucky, they grow up knowing that.

Rose saw in the human baby a transformation like that of a butterfly who pulls itself out of a cocoon. “A time comes when every normal man is a responsible human being. His energy creates a part of the whole human world of his time. He is free; he is self-controlling and responsible, because he generates his energy and controls it. No one and nothing else can control it.”

Man morphs from an intestinal tract that cries to a majestic, intelligent and totally autonomous predator. Once again, he is lucky if he actually knows that.

Communism was a workable ideal... if men were insects. But men are not bees, and they are not just nameless servants of the hive. In a system where there is no soul, no God, then Communism makes plenty of sense, to negotiate a truce between neighbors and competing hives... some kind of pragmatic treaty of cooperation, where nobody can ever advance beyond worker bee. Nor do they deserve to. Everything done, or not done is for the common good; To serve the greater good... Communism is a human hive of fairness and equality and pervasive individual insignificance. But this system of bondage or ones similar to it are actually very old, and they never unleashed the power or creativity common to free men in a free society.

It was only in America that kingdom and serfdom were abandoned, as H. G. Wells admitted, and so many inventions were produced and mass-produced and eventually fed the world's hungry and conquered most disease and gave men opportunity to pursue happiness and to know self-actualization. Only in our Republic, where the highest acknowledged authority was... God.

And the closest thing to that authority on earth is a... mother. It is mothers who teach their children the way things work in the world. And it takes years to feed an intellect, to shape a soul. And that is why the Creator slowed down our development. Rose offered, “Governments had always had the simple governing function that every parent has. Every mother makes laws, enforces laws, judges and punishes law-breaking...”

Mothers are the most versatile, most basic authorities on earth.

Mothers are our first encounter with power and authority, but they are also our first brush with reliability and nurture; of unconditional love. In God's universe, these things are supposed to go together. Unfortunately, most governments have fallen way short of their duties, but mothers rarely do.

Mothers never will. Unlike almost all other governors, most mothers have not failed. A mother knows her job and gives her life to it. “She simply thinks and acts to take care of the child,” as Rose explained it. Mothers don't get distracted by video games, golf, fishing, sailing, or facebook. And as for governments, most of them are more concerned with self-preservation. As much as mothers love and nurture us, they have not just been a dumb, warm breast, but have always known they also had to provide structure and discipline to our behavior. And so try governments, and so has God. Mothers have been the most successful.

Babies learn so much more than gorging on a nipple, that there has been an ample provider to meet their intellectual needs since their conception. No wonder people grow to expect so much from their government! But mothers are infinitely more reliable.

And everything a mother does is out of love and a personal covenant, a calling from God himself, and the baby can do nothing to change any of that. Even though mother is an omniscient authority, baby is never fined, or sent away to prison. There is always reconciliation. Atonement is fairly accessible. Man would do well to remember those lessons from the crib.

So it was given to Eleanor Roosevelt, a mother of five, who had sent all four of her sons into military service during WWII, and traveled all over the Pacific while the war raged around her, to quite literally mother the fledgling United Nations.

A shy, nearly introverted woman, a syndicated columnist whose only political credentials were being the widow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, emerging among a field of men, but recruited by the President, sent to do what no men had ever been able to do in the history of the world. The whole world had to watch and pray.

But Eleanor had a remarkable outlook on life. She had already been through so much. And it was as if it had all been an education to prepare her for playing her part in American history. She once advised “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively, unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.”

Well said- by a woman, an American mother, who had achieved competence, and grown to regard a challenge as her irresistible purpose.

We have to wonder what might have transpired had the likes of Eleanor and Livy and Rose ever been able to work together, and share their collective wisdom, and pass on the truths which could enrich and save our families. But it is not too late. Their lives and words belong to all of us and are still a testimony to the ages. It is not too late for mothers to find purpose and great satisfaction, literally shaping our country, even all of humanity, as they do what they do best, and teach their children.