Willam Hazlitt was a literary critic who published his book, “The Spirit of the Age”, in 1825 and in doing so started out a new method of investigation that remains available and practiced up to and including in our own time. Hazlitt said that an examination of the literary and philosophical works of the elite could tell what was going on with English society. The elite are tied to the general culture. The idea that there is a general culture was elaborated a generation later by Macaulay, and Samuel Johnson, writing a few generations before Hazlitt, had separated his criticism from his essays about the state of English society. I am particularly struck by Hazlitt’s vivid and accurate essays on Bentham and Coleridge. Bentham simplified life and morality to calculating benefits to be derived from pleasure and forgetting everything else, like obedience or moral obligation, reducing life to quantums of pleasure though never presenting a metric for it, though he left himself an out by considering “satisfaction” as a pleasure and that lets in treating honor or justice as that even if that involves pain. Coleridge, on the other hand, was a quasi-mystical medievalist committed to the sense that society was organic and complicated and that, as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons. But both views, Bentham’s late Enlightenment and Coleridge’s Romanticism, were both strands in the early nineteenth century English experience each to be savored and evaluated by the reader.
I am of the inclination to think Hazlitt’s method is superior to the survey research approach for investigating what is going on within the thoughts of the populace because the questions asked such as whether a person “approves” or “disapproves” of a President is too vague to mean much in that people will approve some things and disapprove others and may arise as a blanket statement only if pressed to make such a choice. Political opinions are more complicated than the questions posed by survey researchers while elite texts are complex even if it is necessary to treat the views of the population to be inferred from those texts are a faint version of what the writers themselves say, but perhaps more likely to capture what the populace is saying, agreeing that the elite writer, to the extent understood, is what the ordinary person is driving at even if not fully elaborated. That is the gist of the thing while survey researchers are not getting at the gist, only platitudes that cannot get at, for example, why Trumpists feel so deeply about him that they would prefer to believe that an election was stolen better than that it was legitimate. Why are the Trumpists so adamant in their cynicism? Is it based on racism or economic displacement? Look for novelists and political theorists to supply some answers, these not as yet readily apparent.
Apply Hazlitt’s method to other eras than his own. Consider America in the first decade of the Twentieth Century through its literature and its ideas. Social Darwinism stalks the land although William Graham Sumner, the sociologist who coined the term “mores'' and invented the idea that social processed like slavery became antiquated and therefore faced extinction, that the inevitable consequence of history, also finds the dog eat dog dynamics of society in Theodore Dreiser, whether writing about the poor or the rich, and also holds for those less Conservatively inclined, like Jacob Riis or Ida Tarbell or Louis Brandeis. Add to that the complementary theme of hierarchy and decorum exhibited by Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent and you have gone a long way in capturing the age even if other authors and painters could be offered as substitutes and even if some themes, like the closing of the frontier or imperialism, are neglected.
Move twenty years later, to the Twenties, and what unfolds for the student of literature and thought is a very different complexion for the state of the American psyche, where replacing Social Darwinism is the idea of american community and its clinging together of what was called in the Fifties both togetherness and its fractionation.The key book, for me, is Lynd’s “Middletown'', which is the greatest work of all community stories, as it shows how family and factory and school unfold as larger processes in American life unfold, such as lifetimes of work by an employee for a single factory, while people cling to what the high school claims as its “Bearcat Spirit'' of communality despite what Lynd recognizes as its underwhelming education. Lynd is so superior to the sarcasm of Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street” and “Babbitt'' because Lynd does not exaggerate, just straightforwardly tell how men spent their disposable income on buying appliances like dishwashers for their wives to ease their work and show off their own prosperity, family life a competition rather just pleasure driven, very much like the anthropologist Ruth Benedict at the time was showing that Northwestern Indians were engaged in conspicuous consumption. Add to that, I think, is “The Great Gatsby'', about how thin is the quest for fame and fortune, however much it is a theme of the time, and add in the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey, in his major works “Art and Experience” and “Human Nature and Conduct” which advise a calmer and more humane and more experimental future prospect, and also, I think, Osgood’s “Social Change”, which chronicles the world wide upheavals of large scale immigration, and that pretty much offers a picture of what America was like before the Great Depression.
There are certainly drawbacks to the Hazlitt approach. There are other works that could be used to define the tunes of the time. And topics can get left out, as happens when the western expansion is left out by failing to refer to Willa Cather and the absence in that period in Black history, the experience of Jim Crow where is eliminated from the lynchings of the Twenties unless you remember the journalism of the time by W. E. B. DeBois. But we may consider as canonical those works without which the period under question would seem lacking its essence. The Twenties wouldn’t be the Twenties without jazz and Babe Ruth but most critics would agree that the early Eugene O’Neill is not as important a definition of that era as he was in his late work in the Fifties. The choice of writers and themes are more questionable than is the complexity, the core, of what is elaborated.
It was easy enough when I hit college in the late Fifties to find the landmarks that situated my own spirit of the age, at least for liberally inclined New York public school graduates, I myself willing to acknowledge that if I had grown up in a private school I might have given more respect for William F. Buckley, Jr. for his glib views-- but maybe not, given his resistance to civil rights and his insistence that religion was the basis of politics. Instead, the canon for me included Lionel Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination” where he went deep into any number of ways literary thinking, as informed by the idea that being humane and tolerant made all of us Liberal, even to appreciating what Kinsey said about sex. The economic pillar was John Kenneth Galbrieth’s “The Affluent Society” whose idea that building a useless ice mountain in Texas was a good thing because it would lead to prosperity, which is still a good idea in that is what Biden creating electric cars really amounts to, clean energy just an excuse for creating jobs. The complement of Galbraith was Michael Harrington’s “The Invisible Poor”, which showed how much work was still to be done, and “The Lonely Crowd”, which was an answer to the ideal of community, partly through an analysis of “High Noon” at a time when movies were more directly experienced as the temper of the time and Riesman predicted correctly, before the time of Julia Childs, that the culinary arts would become a pastime to fill out the lives of people whose motives weren’t pecuniary and were contrary to those of Ruth Benedict
Add to this mix for at least some of the ever expanding numbers of the educated was a soupcon of the bourgeois version of Existentialism in the form of “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Albert Camus proclaimed that life was pointless and then insisted that people remain moral and purposeful rather than go whole hog Existentialist, like Sartre, and let people do what they want. It was a twist on the death of God theologians at the time saying that God had gone invisible and to get over it, which hardly provides any religious pizzazz. And some outliers were attracted to the anti-Stalinist Marxists like Herbert Marcuse who decried alienation and consumerism, but that is to get ahead of the story to the Sixties, what with its very different story where a rebel without a cause in the Fifties was replaced by many causes, such as for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
The task now at hand is to use the Hazlitt method to describe the present cultural and social situation, one to indicate the other. It is easier to look at earlier periods and generations because it is easy enough to identify the key writers and artists, on the one hand, and match them up with the key social themes to be explained. Not so easily done in the present where neither the themes or the authors, as they are today, are not so easily identified, or to be so provincial, as was the case with those who created a canon for Modernism, which included Joyce and Mann and Kafka and Lawrence but did not deal with the Depression because Steinbeck was such an inferior author.
My problem is that I do not know what are the major works created since the turn of this new century that grip the emotions and understanding of the current social and political situation. Certainly, the rise and decline of Trump is noteworthy, but there are only rather pedestrian journalistic accounts to get it right. And sociologists and economists have not come to the rescue. I don't have a Galbraith to explain the economy or Riesman to explain the society. I rely on the economic columnist Paul Krugman but he seems at a loss of words, testing tea leaves for why inflation was going to be brief, then a bit longer, and then again no big deal, and journalists rely on Richard Hofstadter’s Fifties idea of downward mobility (supposed rather than demonstrated) and his idea of the paranoid style of political life to explain Trumpists, who are angry for reasons insufficiently explained.
So try it the other way round. Rather than look at the topics of the generation that has passed during the Twenty First Century, and then look for the writers and thinkers that illuminate them, look instead at the great and maybe only good literature and try to see what they are getting at about society that is really pretty deep even if not yet appreciated as a topic of controversy. Consider Michael Chabron who during this century produced novels about popular music and comic books so as to evaluate those arts, while also producing works of great seriousness, especially about the situation of Jews, as if to try a standard of what is serious and what is not, the topic to be addressed is how to treat culture as significant or lasting or not, that topic occasionally arising as a pressing or apparent topic that may have great moment for our present social condition, even to arising in New York Times opinion pieces in the last few weeks about whether anyone can still manage to read “The Scarlet Letter” whether because it's sentence structure is outdated or its themes of sexual and spiritual purity are themselves outdated. The point of the Nineteenth Century novel was that it was accessible, meant to entertain its middle class readership. Is that too high a standard in the world of digital media with its short takes of opinions without arguments? That might be the temperment of today’s times, however much just barely perceived despite its pervasiveness, an undercurrent rather than a flood.
And so I refer to my favorite writer of this generation, Kazuo Ishigaro, whose most major ork to me is “Don’t Ever Let Me Go” where human like clones, developed from dogs, have their organs harvested for regular humans, this creating a caste system as inhumane but as readily recognized as such than is the case in ‘“Caste”, which is Isabel Wilkerson’s widely read and acclaimed polemic on race, obviously a topical issue for the first quarter of this century, but sadly lacking in analysis, as if caste was something of which people engaged in discrimination did not recognize as denying people of their humanity even though castes have gone on for millennia and people knew where they stood on the totem pole even if caste life in Nazi Germany and the American experience was bi-polarf rather than multipolar. The highpoint of the Ishiguro’s novel is its poignancy, best visualized when one of the human caretakers watch a clone dancing by herself, perhaps noticing that the clone gave away being what a dog would do if it danced while erect, like a circus dog given a tutu and a parasol, revealing more than she understood. So here are the complexities of race and what is hidden and what is covered up.
Also look at Ishiguro’s long view, which is that verbal tone is more important than plot. People are polite to one another, however malicious, in his novels set in Japan in the early years after the War ended. That is the way they got through. “We Were All Orphans” is about rhetorical excuses filling people with fantasies to make up for their failures and “The Buried Giant” is about how people emerge into developing memory by creating mythological stories of how they became what they were. That strikes home to today as a theme when both Morning Joe and Trumpists proclaim that people are beyond truth, each group preferring its alternative truths, the narrative more important than facts, when an old fashioned person like me insists that there have always been lies and liars, certainly for Hitler and Joe McCarthy, and so there is no need to dress it up as a new philosophical conundrum, but maybe Ishiguro is on to something, forms of talk substituting for what talk is supposed to represent, which is reality.
It seems that Hazlitt thought that the writers of the spirit of the age were right out there, easily identifiable, as were the themes of the times. People were responding to the end of Napoleon, some like Beethoven and Wordsworth who separated from him early, while Hazlitt himself did not give Napoleon up. And everywhere there was the spirit of Romanticism replacing a Stoic severity and natural law with a sense of the possibility of personal ecstasy from Lermontov in Russia through Germany's Goethe through Jane Austen’s concern against enthusiasm and even to America where the romance of James Fenimore Cooper’s Ayn Rand like heroes replaced the stylish provincial tales of Washington Irving, his stylized Gothic tales reminiscent of how Eastern Europeans would recast their folk songs as the then modern music for many a generation afterwards. While today, there are only inklings of what is really going on, authors not readily canonized, as was the case not so long ago when Roth and Updike were the major authors however critics thought them too limited to carry such weight, and so writers nowadays are to be plucked out for the themes contained in them and the themes not the obvious ones of race and gender but something deeper and elusive, such as a reconstruction of rhetoric that gives meaning to the idea that this is a post-fact age where AI will form our thoughts. New spirits of the age emerge from time to time but this time it is obscure.