“What a Bedlamite is man!” That’s Thomas Jefferson, lamenting man’s inability to make progress despite his seemingly endless capacity for improvement.
I appreciate the sentiment, but the statement doesn’t make much sense. If a person is crazy, he or she must be crazy according to a standard. If man as a species is crazy, then no person is mad — except, maybe, those people who are sane, but that’s not what Jefferson meant.
I’m not trying to be hard on the third president. He was a good thinker who got a lot right. He understood, for instance, the goodness of the republican form of government and the importance of agrarian living. He understood that it’s good to have men and women who sink their hands in the soil regularly. In this, he was a highly practical, down-to-earth, thinker.
But then he went off on terrific fancies, such as embracing the excess that was the French Revolution, a Revolution based on abstract rights and ideals with no basis in the human condition.
I’m no Jefferson scholar, and I hate to summarize his thinking too much since it's such a hotbed of scholarly controversy. But I think this is a fair summary of his thinking: When he was dealing with real problems, he was dead on. When he drifted to abstractions, he was dead wrong.
And I think the problem can be seen in that quote above: “What a Bedlamite is man!”
Notice Jefferson isn’t referring to a particular man. He is talking about mankind in general. And “man,” when used that way, is pure abstraction. Moreover, it’s an abstraction that seems to have done a lot of damage in the past couple of hundred years.
Marx proposed Communism to help the working man. The French Revolution was concerned with the rights of man. Pretty much every bad form of feminism has concerned itself with “womyn” in the abstract.
It seems that nothing good has ever come from worrying, writing about, or theorizing about “man.” Granted, we need to consider rights and dignity and laws that apply to all people equally, but efforts to consider “man” as an entity detached from concrete situations — his neighborhood, his material needs, his family — seem to fall short repeatedly.
I think the explanation is fairly simple: When man is considered detached from his status as a creature (created by God), there are no intellectual moorings. The theories just start rolling off the thinker’s pen, and there’s no way of knowing whether the theories are right or wrong because there’s no way of knowing whether the starting point is correct.
I think that’s why thinkers like to use man the abstraction. It’s easy to write about abstractions: “man,” “society,” “culture,” and “those kind of people.” As a writer, I know I’m far more likely to wax poetic about a lovely abstraction or spray poison at a hated one, but when dealing with a particular person, my ink flows much less freely. I hesitate. Suddenly, things aren’t so easy to understand. I can’t see through all the issues with a mere ten minutes of thought. Things become more opaque.
Which is fitting, since I’m now looking at a body, and bodies are solid. I can’t see through them. And I can’t read the mind of the person I’m writing about. Suddenly, my pen has to get honest. It must get humility.
I remember reading once that it’s much harder to hate a guy in person than in the abstract, and even harder to love a guy in person than in the abstract. I have no doubt that’s true. It’s sure harder to write about a person in front of you than about his shadow.
But we all ought to try. Or else we’ll be making absurd statements like Jefferson’s observation that would, its implications carried out, put us all in the insane asylum.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
