the sane and the duly goggled

Book review:

Character and Opinion in the United States

by Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás

[George Santayana (1863-1952)]

Spanish philosopher, poet, novelist

Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956 (first published 1920)

Santayana wrote this book in 1920 after he had left the United States for good. He had taught in the philosophy department at Harvard from 1889 to 1912. He returned to Europe, taught at the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally settled in Italy for the remainder of his life.

Much of the book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to British audiences after leaving America. In the Preface to Character and Opinion he says “Only an American—and I am not one except by long association—can speak for the heart of America. I try to understand it, as a family friend may who has a different temperament.”

Santayana took his own sweet time to take a look at the people around him in the United States, and to make his own unhurried assessment of their characters and of their manifestations of human nature.

For example, he gave respectful recognition to “…the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks…”—not otherwise explicitly defined—who, notwithstanding their possibly dubious claim to respect, may nevertheless be the beneficiaries of “heavenly influences.” You can make your own determination about the prospective positive impact of such influences. I think Santayana’s point was that we do not fully know the prior byways or the future trajectories of another person’s life.

Moreover, Santayana distinguishes the cripples/hunchbacks and their (presumptively enlightened) presumptive betters—“…the thick-skinned, the sane and the duly goggled…”

These goggled elites are admonished to be wary of their limitations in discerning the realities and the frequency and the potency of “heavenly influences.”

I guess I have, perhaps smugly, collaborated with Santayana in a more than marginally self-satisfied effort to say something like:

“Give the other fellow a break.”

Think about it for another minute.

Here endeth the lesson for today.

Source:

Character and Opinion in the United States, p. 46.

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