Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby

The disheartening saga of the separation of church and state

Susan Jacoby is a former journalist and an outspoken atheist who has published a few books on the history of atheism and freethought, among other topics. Her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was published in 2004. “Freethinker” is a blanket term that could be used to describe those who don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to any formal organized religion—perhaps anyone from a hardcore atheist to a liberal protestant. In American history, the term may refer to many of the founding fathers who were deists (e.g. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine) or to the atheist and agnostic activists of the late 19th and 20th centuries (e.g. Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clarence Darrow, Madalyn Murray O’Hair). Was Abraham Lincoln a freethinker? Jacoby looks into that too. Basically anyone who believes in the separation of church and state is covered here. The book essentially charts the changing status of that separation from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to the end of the 20th century.

This is not an impartial, objective history. Jacoby certainly has an axe to grind, but that’s part of her point. The real history of freethought has been suppressed by American religious factions, and the only person who would write a book like this is a true nonbeliever. Many of America’s founders were freethinkers, yet today a myth persists that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation. Historically, many White Christian clergy in America were pro-slavery, anti-women’s rights, and anti-civil rights, and encouraged their congregations to toe those party lines, yet somehow when you read today’s history textbooks you’d think that all those problems were solved by the God-fearing faithful singing “Amazing Grace.” Jacoby sets the record straight from a freethinker’s perspective.

This book often reads less like a history of freethinkers than a history of freethought’s adversaries. It’s as if Jacoby defines freethinkers by their challenges, and their persecutors seem to get more coverage than the secular saints they’re persecuting. The book includes entire chapters on Catholics and their exertion of influence on American government. Jews, on the other hand, have generally been political allies of freethought who often found themselves grouped with atheists as alleged radicals and communists. Jacoby discusses the movements to abolish slavery, win women’s suffrage, teach evolution in schools, and make abortion legal, all of which were notably supported by freethinkers.

For an American freethinker such as myself, this book can be really depressing. Among the events chronicled, there are few freethought victories here. The one high point is the popularity of Robert Ingersoll in the 1880s and ‘90s. Thomas Paine is another hallowed freethought luminary, but sadly he ended his life more reviled than revered. By the time you get to the late 20th century, you’re convinced that the United States is one step away from becoming the Christian equivalent of the authoritarian Islamic regimes of the Ayatollahs or the Taliban. Jacoby repeatedly and bluntly points out how Christian Conservatives have subverted the Constitution for their own theistical agenda. This book ends with the George W. Bush administration, which Jacoby considers the low point in the ongoing battle for the separation of church and state. Things have only gotten worse since then—not because Donald Trump is more religious than Bush, but because Trump’s administration cozies up to religious interests to further his conservative aims. I’m glad somebody told this story, and Jacoby tells it well, but the truth hurts.   

The Great Hunger by Johan Bojer

Norwegian naturalism

Norway’s Johan Bojer is known as one of that nation’s important realist authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bojer garnered enough critical respect to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Several of his novels were translated into English in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s. He is known for writing novels about Norwegian immigrant life in America, but his novel The Great Hunger, published in 1916, takes place entirely within Norway.

Peer Troen is a typical boy growing up in a small town in Norway. Troen is not his birth name, however. Peer is the illegitimate child of a prosperous former military officer from Christiania (today’s Oslo), Captain Holm, who pays the Troen family to board and raise his son. Peer’s mother was a prostitute, so his father, though friendly enough, refuses to claim him as a son. In fact, Captain Holm has another, legitimate family, and admitting that Peer exists would be an embarrassment to them all. Though Peer is certainly not happy being disowned, he learns to come to terms with his lot in life. He dreams of becoming a priest, at that time an upper-class profession requiring higher education. When both his parents die, however, there is no one left to pay the Troen family for his upkeep. Peer finds out his father was not as wealthy as he thought, and his inheritance is paltry. Peer is dropped into a life of poverty, but he still manages to work his way through engineering school in hopes of succeeding in a career.

The title of the book is both literal and figurative. While there is no mass famine here, the story does deal with the poverty and hunger of one Norwegian family. The “hunger” in question, however, more pointedly refers to the desire of humans to create, accomplish, and/or conquer and to leave behind a legacy for posterity. Bojer asks the question is enough to simply enjoy life? Are love and happiness the purpose of our existence? Peer seems to think so, for a while anyway. But can a man, or mankind, be truly satisfied with blissful complacency? One of Peer’s close friends begs to differ, asserting that the irresistible force of evolution imparts to everyone a Promethean drive to create, build, and strive toward progress, even at the expense of comfort and joy. This novel is chiefly concerned with the conflict between these two attitudes toward human nature and the meaning of life.

The Great Hunger is strongest in its first act, when it adheres most strictly to the tenets of naturalist literature. Peer must deal with the hand that’s dealt him by his heritage, and through him Bojer realistically depicts the struggles of poor and working class life in Norway. At about the halfway point, the novel starts to get more didactic and preachy, as if Bojer were delivering a sermon. This sermon, however, is a secular one that appeals to my personal freethinking inclinations. Bojer makes many openly atheistic statements that are a breath of rationalistic fresh air. By the early 20th century, more Scandinavian writers were penning literature from an atheist viewpoint, such as Bojer in Norway and Jens Peter Jacobsen and Johannes V. Jensen in Denmark.

I was less impressed with the later chapters of the book. For a while, it seems like Bojer is going to follow up on Peer’s bastard upbringing. Peer becomes friends with his own half-brother, who is unaware that they share the same father. That plot thread is never followed through, however, and remains inconclusive. The ending of the book in general is rather week, but adhering to realism often means that expectations of closure remain unsatisfied, much like real life itself. Nevertheless, I found Bojer to be a writer certainly worth investigating further, and I’m sure this won’t be the last of his books that I’ll read.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Big universe, big thoughts

The 1980 PBS TV series Cosmos was a landmark in the history of television. The companion book to that series, also published in 1980, was the bestselling science book of all time (until Stephen Hawking beat it a few years later). The Cosmos book has 13 chapters that parallel the 13 episodes of the TV program. Alexander von Humboldt published the original Cosmos book back in 1845 to 1862, and Sagan does mention Humboldt in a footnote. The intent by both authors was to summarize and encapsulate in one volume the state of scientific knowledge on the heavens and the earth. Though Humboldt’s Cosmos was popular in its day, his was a pretty dry scientific text compared to Sagan’s more accessible and inspirational book. The way Sagan combines science writing with philosophy, skepticism, and freethought reminds me of another book from the end of the 19th century: Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe.

As one would expect from an astronomer and planetary scientist, Sagan spends much of Cosmos discussing the planets and other bodies in our solar system, as well as galaxies, the universe as a whole, space travel, the Big Bang, and the search for extraterrestrial life. In addition, however, he discusses particle physics, the origin of life, DNA, evolution, the history of science and astronomy (particularly in ancient Greece), and the human brain. The final chapter of Cosmos is about nuclear war. Although still a threat, Armageddon is not on people’s minds as much as it was in the ‘80s, and disarmament now seems further from reality.

Like any science book of years gone by, the obvious drawback to Cosmos is that it’s outdated. Sagan doesn’t really say anything wrong in this book, but what’s omitted is notable. There’s no mention of quantum physics or dark matter, for example. Sagan wrote Cosmos after Voyager 2 had performed its flyby of Jupiter but before it had reached Saturn. There was no Hubble Space Telescope. The existence of exoplanets was still suspected, not confirmed. The nearly fifty intervening years since publication, however, didn’t really bother me. I consider myself pretty well-versed in astronomical matters for a general reader, but I still learned many interesting scientific facts from Sagan’s Cosmos. Sagan is great at putting things into perspective, both humanity’s insignificance in the universe and the immensity of space and time. (He’s much more eloquent than the “billions and billions” catch phrase for which he’s known.)

I’d read much of this information before, but never as succinctly nor as elegantly put as Sagan presents things here. The other famous science book of this era was, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Though also aimed at the general reader, Hawking’s book is not easy to understand and his explanations aren’t quite user-friendly for the layman. Sagan, on the other hand, is great at explaining complex scientific phenomena in simple terms that anyone with a high school education can understand, without dumbing down the scientific content or the philosophical implications of the matters discussed.

Sagan stopped short of declaring himself an atheist, but for readers of a freethinking persuasion, he is one of the best areligious writers out there, if not the best. He is a superb rationalist preacher, without the pretensions or cynicism of Richard Dawkins and other “neo-atheists.” Since Sagan’s death, others have tried to assume his role as leading spokesman for science—most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye—but no one has quite matched his passion, eloquence, and trustworthiness as a public intellectual. Cosmos, although published in the middle of his career, is Sagan’s magnum opus, the distillation of his entire career. His other books may focus in more detail on some of the topics presented here, but no book better encapsulates his thought in its totality as this one. In the 1980s, this book was a must-read, and today it’s still an important and rewarding work for anyone who cares about science.

Understanding History and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell

Three unrelated articles from the 1940s

British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, back when philosophers used to be considered for that award. Understanding History and Other Essays was originally published in 1957 by the Philosophical Library, whose books have been recently rereleased as ebooks by Open Road Media. This volume consists of three of Russell’s previously published essays: “How to Read and Understand History” (1943), “The Value of Free Thought” (1944), and “Mentalism vs. Materialism” (1945). I believe the first two essays were originally published as Little Blue Books by the Haldeman-Julius publishing company. “Mentalism vs. Materialism” is from The Rationalist Annual of 1945. Although the history essay is the title selection, I was attracted more by the subject matter of the latter two essays.

The essay “How to Read and Understand History” is nothing special, probably because Russell is not a historian. He starts by stating that a study of history is useless to most people’s daily lives, and the only reason to read history is if you simply enjoy doing so. He briefly discusses the works of some notable historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and a few modern scholars. Russell criticizes philosophers like Hegel and Marx who attempt to come up with a unified theory of history, characterizing them as “mythologizers,” and offers some thoughts on how he thinks history should be written and taught.

In “The Value of Free Thought,” Russell begins by defining what exactly is “free thought.” The term is not synonymous with atheism or agnosticism, as some might think, but rather with scepticism. A freethinker can believe whatever he chooses to believe, but to be a freethinker, that choice must be based on evidence and rational inquiry. The antithesis of free thought, as Russell asserts, would be William James’s argument: Why not believe in religion when believing is more convenient, comfortable, and who’s to say you’re wrong? Russell goes on to critique religion because of its denial of rational inquiry. Like many atheist writers (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens), Russell sometimes lapses into smugness. I agree with the message, but not always the tone. Also, if you’re already a free thinker, then this primer on free thought tells you much of what you already know. Overall, however, “The Value of Free Thought” is a good concise manifesto of sorts for the modern freethinker.

“Mentalism vs. Materialism” is exactly what it sounds, contrasting dualism (matter and mind or spirit) with monism (just matter). Russell, as one might expect, is on the side of the materialists, or “physicalists,” the label he prefers. He starts with an explanation of physics that is forgivably outdated and unforgivably confusing. Once he gets into the epistemology of consciousness, however, his argument is well-stated. This essay is very brief, only about half the length of either of the other two selections.

I bought this ebook as a Kindle Daily Deal. Whenever possible, I look over the table of contents before I purchase an ebook. In this case, the table of contents makes it look like there are 18 essays in this ebook. In fact, however, there are only three, the longest of which is maybe a 45-minute read. The remaining 15 lines of the table of contents are just subheads within the last essay. Open Road could have done a better job formatting that. Had I paid more than a couple bucks for this ebook, I would have been a little disgruntled by the discrepancy between what I thought I was buying and what I actually got. Given that these writings are not in the public domain, a few bucks for a few essays is reasonable. These are not earth-shatteringly revolutionary essays, but those sympathetic to Russell’s atheist, materialist, and skeptical views will appreciate his eloquent and intelligently reasoned discourses.

Essays in this collection

How to Read and Understand History

The Value of Free Thought

Mentalism vs. Materialism

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

Yet another English novel about a country parson (or two)

English author Samuel Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh was written between 1873 and 1884, but it wasn’t published until 1903, after Butler’s death. It’s unlikely that England would have been ready for the novel much earlier than that, since the book is defiantly critical of Christian doctrine and conservative Victorian conventions. This novel traces the lives of five generations of the Pontifex family but focuses primarily on just two of those generations: Theobald Pontifex and his son Ernest, both of whom are clergymen. The bulk of the narrative takes place during the 1850s and ‘60s. The novel is narrated by a playwright named Overton, a childhood friend and lifelong acquaintance of the Pontifex family. Overton has a bothersome habit of foreshadowing, which often amounts to spoiling the events of future chapters.

The Way of All Flesh is a satirical work in which Butler lampoons the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the Anglican church and its clergy. In addition, he criticizes the educational system, the class system, and even the marriage system in practice in England at this time. Butler mentions Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species and recently published works criticizing contradictions in the Bible as challenges to fundamental beliefs of Christianity. He stops short of atheism, but his criticism of the church and his skepticism of Christian dogma would have been considered radical freethought by Victorian standards. This multi-generational story also illustrates a recurring pattern of cruelty from fathers to sons and its effect in molding those sons’ later lives and characters. The wryly comedic tone, though not overly done, at times clashes with the serious subject matter—such as child abuse, for example—but Butler’s comical comeuppance of the clergy is deftly pointed and amusing.

Even though The Way of All Flesh is a refreshing reaction against religion, I was still disappointed to come across yet another British novel about a country parson and his moral crisis, including lengthy debates about church policy. Why were English authors so obsessed with their clergy? Other European national literatures—French, German, Spanish, even Polish—just seem to be more concerned with real life and a broader view of it. In French novels of the same era, for example, the characters actually have sex like real people, whereas the antiseptic morality in English novels doesn’t allow the characters to even touch each other; they just seem to reproduce by spontaneous asexual blastogenesis. Though Butler satirizes Victorian stuffiness, he still buys into many traditional British ideas of class. People are born as “gentlemen” or born “low,” and the best they can do is learn their place and stay there. As an atheist, I admire Butler for boldly criticizing organized religion. I think there are better ways to do that, however, than making me sit through 60 chapters about the life of a country parson.

The final quarter of the novel finally veers away from theology, at least temporarily, into more secular matters, but it’s still rather tedious. Marital, financial, parental, and medical problems are dispatched far too conveniently to be believed. Another cliché of English lit rears its silly head: An abundance of bachelor uncles and spinster aunts just waiting, like a good deus ex machina, to bestow their wealth upon nieces and nephews. When a man has all the money he could ever want handed to him on a silver platter, and he can pawn off his children onto idyllic foster parents, imagine what he can do with his life! That’s not realism; that’s fantasy.

The Way of All Flesh is a great title, but it implies that this novel will reveal universal truths about human existence. There’s really nothing universal about this story, however, unless you happen to be a clergyman or a seminary student. The characters are sympathetic and the humor is witty, but the life lessons are contrived and unrealistic. Even so, if you can make it through the first half, the second half is moderately entertaining.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Championing skepticism over superstition

The Demon-Haunted World, published in 1996, is a collection of essays by astrophysicist turned popular science communicator Carl Sagan (1934–1996). Many of these essays were originally published as articles in various magazines and then adapted for this book. In particular, Sagan mentions Parade magazine, a nationwide Sunday newspaper supplement, as one recurring venue for his writings. Four of the book’s 25 chapters were cowritten by Sagan’s wife and frequent collaborator Ann Druyan.

In this book, Sagan tackles many different categories of the paranormal or pseudoscience, including angels and demons, reincarnation, ghosts, spiritualism, communication with the dead, hypnotism, UFOs, witchcraft, and more. Sagan begins by assessing the state of each belief in today’s society, and then talks about ways of addressing such topics. By explaining the scientific method and the logic techniques of “baloney detection,” Sagan instructs readers in how to practice intelligent skepticism. Probably because of his astronomical interests, the most thoroughly covered topic in this volume is that of UFOs and alien abductions. Sagan looks for scientific reasons behind why so many people claim to have been abducted and sexually abused by extraterrestrials, which leads him into the psychology of hallucinations and false memories. In addition to such supernatural myth-busing, Sagan also laments the sorry state of science education in America and offers suggestions on how we can improve scientific literacy. He is also critical of the scarcity of sound science presented in the news media, political rhetoric, and popular entertainment.

There are few figures of my lifetime that I admire more than Sagan. As far as I can recall, I agree with everything he has to say about matters pertaining to science and religion. He was a veritable knight in elbow-patched blazer the way he fearlessly championed rationalism and science to an overly religious and superstitious American public. The fact that I agree with his views so unilaterally, however, makes the reading of his writings less than exciting for me. I find this common when reading other writers of an atheist or freethinking bent. They’re basically just telling me things I’ve already figured out for myself. Sagan doesn’t have to convince me, because I was already convinced before I picked up the book. 

For similarly minded readers, the best this book has to offer is its revelations on just how pervasively pseudoscience and superstition have permeated our society. Since the book was published in 1996, I would assume the statistics Sagan cites regarding the number of Americans who believe in biblical literalism, ghosts, psychics, alien abductions, and so on are outdated, but I’m afraid those statistics have probably only gotten worse since then. The internet (which existed in 1996 but didn’t dominate our lives to the extent it does now) has only amplified conspiracy theories and tall tales of the paranormal, and it seems like American politicians become more religious and less scientific with each election. If you are a rationalist, and you weren’t already ashamed of American anti-intellectualism, you’ll likely be mortified after reading The Demon-Haunted World.

Fortunately, this book is so well-written that Sagan may very well have changed many minds that were on the fence about astrology, witchcraft, UFO abductions, and the like. His tone throughout the book is that of a hopeful educator. He wants to change people’s minds, but he doesn’t stoop to insulting people’s beliefs. He does, however, go after some prominent paranormal hucksters. Though I felt like much of the book’s content was familiar and just plain common sense, I’m glad somebody wrote this book. The world (or at least the United States) really needs it, and no one could have written it better than Sagan.

The Absolute at Large by Karel Capek

One-joke satire of religious fanaticism

By the time Czech author Karel Capek published his first novel, The Absolute at Large, he had already established himself as a playwright. His most famous work nowadays, the science fiction drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), was first staged in 1920. Like that play, The Absolute at Large, published in 1922, is also a work of science fiction that takes place in the future. Capek is an exceptional writer who deserves to be better-known among English-language readers. His writing bears some resemblance to that of his countryman Franz Kafka in its dystopian visions, pessimistic tone, and deadpan sense of humor. The Absolute at Large, unfortunately, is not one of Capek’s better novels.

The story begins in 1943. G. H. Bondy is an industrialist who owns a factory in Prague. While perusing the newspaper, he comes across an ad placed by an inventor wishing to sell his latest invention. Bondy recognizes the name of the inventor as a former classmate of his and decides to call upon his old friend. The inventor, R. Marek, shows Bondy a dynamo he has created that runs on atomic power. He calls the device the Karburator. Unlike the inefficient burning of coal or wood, the Karburator can utilize the full atomic energy of its fuel, completely obliterating the raw material for a far more efficient and clean energy production. With such a wonderful and potentially lucrative invention, Bondy wonders why Marek is so eager to sell his creation.

It turns out that the Karburator produces an unusual side effect: an overwhelming feeling of religious fervor. According to philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s pantheistic doctrine of monism, God is inherently present in all matter, thus permeating the entire universe. When Marek’s Karburator annihilates matter, the portion of God, or the Absolute, contained in that matter is then released, affecting the minds and souls of those in proximity to the machine. While Marek finds this side effect troubling, Bondy has no such scruples. He purchases the Karburator and begins mass production. Soon the world is run by these atomic power plants, and outbreaks of piety and zealotry become more frequent. Various cults arise, and members of established religious denominations become increasingly fanatical, leading to killings and war. In addition, the Absolute not only affects human minds but also acts on its own behalf. By applying its creative powers to manufacturing, it destabilizes economies by glutting the market with overproduced goods.

The premise of The Absolute at Large is commendably ingenious. What follows, however, becomes tedious. Capek presents scene after scene of religious fanaticism, which to the reader is like hearing the same joke over and over again. I don’t have a problem with Capek’s religious irreverence, as we seem to share the same freethought views. He is not satirizing Spinoza so much but rather making a mockery of organized religion and each believers’ sense of denominational superiority. The conflicts between sects escalate into a dystopian, apocalyptic future, but one told with satirical silliness. Capek keeps introducing new characters every couple chapters, thus making it hard to become emotionally invested in any protagonist. Towards the end of the novel, Capek makes some valid points about religious tolerance, but by that time I was rather bored. 

For his time period, Capek was a unique voice in science fiction, and his works are still surprisingly thought-provoking and impressively innovative a century later. In general, however, I think I prefer his more serious works (not all of them sci-fi), like his “Noetic Trilogy” comprised of the novels Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life.
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A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Straight talk from a seeker of meaning

Published in 1879, A Confession was Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s first work of philosophy. By this time he had already achieved fame through his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Around the age of 50, Tolstoy underwent an existential midlife crisis. After living a morally dissolute life, he began to question whether life has any meaning at all when all one’s accomplishments and experiences are wiped away by inevitable death. Is there a purpose to evolution, or is humanity merely random assortments of atoms, just animals struggling to feed themselves while living in fear of poverty, privation, illness, and death? Tolstoy contemplated suicide but didn’t have the courage to go through with it (his view, not mine). Instead, he began a deliberate quest for the meaning of life, seeking answers from scientists, sociologists, and philosophers and studying the religions of the world. A Confession is Tolstoy’s memoir of this personal quest for meaning.

In his rational examination of metaphysics, Tolstoy takes nothing for granted, and the book can get pretty dark when he contemplates the possible pointlessness of existence. This would not be a good read for someone with suicidal thoughts. Tolstoy is incredibly honest and forthright in his discussion of his moral failings, his loss of faith in God and life, and his attempts to find answers and become a better person. There isn’t a trace of egotism or intellectual arrogance in his narrative; he is merely a humble supplicant seeking knowledge, relating his findings, and admitting his ignorance when applicable in hopes of helping others with their spiritual quests. While some of the text can be philosophically dense, for the most part Tolstoy’s prose is very accessible to the general reader. When necessary, he constructs vivid metaphors and parallels that illustrate the ideas he’s trying to convey, thereby aiding the reader in understanding complex concepts.

The ending of A Confession is rather inconclusive, with Tolstoy still searching for answers. He mentions that he will continue the narrative of his quest in a later work. Tolstoy would follow A Confession with The Gospel in Brief (1881) and What I Believe (1884), in both of which he further elaborates on his religious and philosophical beliefs. The latter two books are mainly defenses of Christianity (or the aspects of Christianity that Tolstoy feels are worth defending) and therefore will appeal mostly to theists. A Confession, however, is an account of spiritual searching that can inspire both believers and heretical freethinkers alike. Tolstoy takes a critical view of organized religion, and when he does express a belief in God, it resembles a rational theism similar to Spinozan pantheism. As a freethinker and skeptic myself, I have never encountered a more reasoned and rational discussion of faith than that which Tolstoy presents here. Even so, from a nonbeliever’s perspective, his argument still seems to rest on faith as a last resort or faith by the process of elimination, rather than on a positive embracing of theism.

A Confession is a very candid and detailed account of Tolstoy’s thought process in searching for the meaning of life. While he talks about how he turned away from a parasitic life of wealth and status to admire the simpler life of the peasantry, I wish he had given more practical insight into the changes he made towards a life of asceticism—how did he go from Tolstoy the rich and famous author to Tolstoy the wise man who looks and lives like a monk? Perhaps he discusses that further in another essay, but he doesn’t delve too deeply into such matters in A Confession. Nevertheless, there is much food for thought and ethical lessons to be learned from this enlightening book. It may be one of the most depressing and one of the most inspiring books you’ll ever read.
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Truth by Emile Zola

Liberals vs. reactionaries in schools and courtrooms

Emile Zola’s final novel, Truth (Vérité in French), was completed shortly before his death in September 1902 and published posthumously the following year. Truth is the third novel in Zola’s Four Gospels series. (At the time of his death he had not begun writing the projected fourth novel, Justice.) Each novel in the series features one of the Froment brothers—Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean—as its protagonist, each of whom is faced with one of four social issues that Zola felt must be resolved in order for France to achieve its potential and live up to the Revolution’s promise of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Zola used these novels not only to illustrate in great detail the evils and ills facing French society in his day but also to spell out his own utopian vision of an ideal France. Thus, all three of Zola’s final novels begin in his characteristically dark and pessimistically critical fashion but ultimately conclude with surprising messages of optimism.

As the novel opens, Marc Froment, a schoolmaster in the small town of Jonville, is visiting his wife’s family in the nearby town of Maillebois. At the time, each town in France had its Catholic school and its secular public school. Marc runs the secular school in Bonville and is on friendly terms with his counterpart in Maillebois, a Jewish schoolmaster named Simon. One morning Simon’s nephew is found murdered, and Simon is charged with the crime, even though evidence points to the likelihood that one of the religious brothers at the parochial school is the killer. The Church launches a cover-up to protect its reputation. Marc, who has devoted his whole life to teaching his students to pursue truth, becomes the most outspoken proclaimer of Simon’s innocence. The legal proceedings prove divisive within the region, pitting conservative and anti-Semitic citizens against the community’s more liberal Republican members. The majority of the populace refuses to see the truth of Simon’s innocence, including Marc’s wife and her family.

The Simon affair is an obvious metaphor for the Dreyfus affair, the real-life criminal case in which Zola had recently played the part of Marc Froment. Both cases involved anti-Semitism, but the Dreyfus affair was a military scandal while the Simon affair is a religious scandal. As he has done in other novels, Zola uses the fictional affair to attack the Church, but here he specifically focuses on the contrast between religious and secular education. In Zola’s view, the latter option is the only means to an enlightened populace and an egalitarian future. He condemns the Roman Catholic Church as the deliberate sower of ignorance and superstition, the enemy of knowledge and progress, and the betrayer of Republican ideals.

Zola’s last novel is also his longest. It is comprised of 16 chapters, each as long as a novella. Lengthiness in itself is not a fault, but this book does feel overly protracted and repetitive. Like the other Gospel novels, Fruitfulness and Labor, Truth spans the better part of a century and features scores of characters over four generations. The story takes place in four or five different towns, each of which has its confusing roster of schoolmasters, clergymen, and politicians. Zola could easily have pared the narrative down and still made his point effectively. From a literary standpoint, this isn’t his most compelling novel, but as a freethinker I admire the audacity of his strident arguments against religion and his condemnation of reactionary ignorance and deceit. Though Truth was written over a century ago in a foreign land, it is easy to see parallels between this story and the state of America under and since the Trump administration. It is a shame Zola never got to finish his Four Gospels, but Truth is a commendable capstone to a stellar career.
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Joseph McCabe: Fighter for Freethought (Reviewer’s Library No. 4) by Isaac Goldberg

More marketing than biography
In the early twentieth century, one of America’s most successful publishing enterprises was run out of the little town of Girard in southeastern Kansas. There Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius printed thousands of titles in his Little Blue Books series. Hundreds of millions of copies of these small, inexpensive paperbacks were sold at newsstands and through mail order. In addition to literature and knowledge of general interest, Haldeman-Julius also published books on topics that were radical for his time, such as socialism, atheism, feminism, and sex education. The most prolific writer in Haldeman-Julius’s stable of authors was Joseph McCabe, who covered all of the above subjects and more. McCabe was a former Catholic priest who lived for 12 years as a monk before leaving the church and rejecting Christian dogma. Even before he met Haldeman-Julius, McCabe became a champion of rationalism and established himself as one of the most outspoken opponents of the Catholic church and organized religion.

Though not a Little Blue Book, Joseph McCabe: Fighter for Freethought is the fourth volume in another series of Haldeman-Julius publications, Reviewer’s Library. The text is only 43 pages long. The author is Isaac Goldberg, another likeminded Haldeman-Julius regular. Goldberg doesn’t provide a biography of McCabe but rather a laudatory critical essay. Goldberg has never met McCabe or interviewed him; he has only read some of McCabe’s works and doesn’t appear to have done much research on the man. There is some coverage of McCabe’s career in the clergy and his reasons for defecting to atheism, but the biographical content stops there. The rest of the text is mostly Goldberg’s thoughts on McCabe, but Goldberg ends up talking about Goldberg just as much as he talks about McCabe. Goldberg uses McCabe’s life and works as a springboard to elaborate on freethought issues and anti-religious views. Because of the time period, there is also much discussion about the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, with vehement criticism of Hitler and Mussolini but mixed messages concerning Stalin.

The text is written in a somewhat casual style that’s aimed at habitual readers of Haldeman-Julius publications. It reminds one of the columns Stan Lee used to write in Marvel Comics that offered a look inside the “bullpen,” making readers feel like they were part of a club. Goldberg’s prose reads more like a magazine editorial than a book. This tone allows Goldberg to work in plugs for Little Blue Books and praise for Haldeman-Julius that would be inappropriate in a more formal treatise.

The best thing this booklet has to offer is a bibliography of McCabe’s published works. The list of titles is five pages long, includes around 175 entries, and teaches you more about McCabe’s writing career and scope of thought than anything Goldberg has to say. It covers not only McCabe’s publications with Haldeman-Julius but his entire published output up to 1936.

The book closes with one piece of McCabe’s writing, but the choice of essay is questionable. It’s a book review on a series of publications by (who else?) Haldeman-Julius. This, along with the 21 pages of advertisements, makes it clear that the Reviewer’s Library is little more than a marketing vehicle to promote sales of Haldeman-Julius publications. I learned surprisingly little about Joseph McCabe from this book that bears his name, but I am glad that I at least found a decent (though partial) bibliography of his work.
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Mogens and Other Stories by Jens Peter Jacobsen

Danish modernist pioneer

Jens Peter Jacobsen

Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885) was an important writer in Scandinavian literature’s transition from romanticism to modernism. Jacobsen was a scientist by trade, and he died at a rather young age, so his career in literature was brief. His entire literary output consists of two novels—Marie Grubbe (1876) and Niels Lyhne (1880)—one volume of poetry, and a handful of short stories. Four of these stories are collected in the English-language volume Mogens and Other Stories, translated by Anna Grabow and published in 1921.

Jacobsen’s scientific and atheistic mindset is evident in his literary works, which tend toward naturalism, a school of early modern realism influenced by recent developments in science, particularly Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Jacobsen’s specific discipline was botany, and plant imagery is often prominent in his writings, particularly in the story “Mogens,” in which the blooming and withering of vegetation charts the change of seasons and the passage of time in human relationships. In this story, a councillor and his daughter Camilla venture into the country on a leisure trip. There they meet a young local named Mogens, with whom Camilla eventually falls in love. References to Cape Trafalgar would seem to situate the story in Spain, though Mogens is clearly a Danish name. What starts out as an idyllic romance turns into a more profound meditation on love, loss, and redemption. Mogens, like Jacobsen, is also an atheist whose faith lies in nature rather than in deity. “Mogens” is the longest selection in this volume, taking up half the book’s length, and it is also the collection’s best story.

On to something completely different, “The Plague in Bergamo” seems to be set in medieval times or perhaps some unspecified dystopian future. When a plague strikes an isolated town, the inhabitants go into a rapid moral decline, making their city the new Sodom or Gomorrah. A procession of devout religious penitents marches in to hold a service begging God for mercy. The message preached, however, does not follow the typical church doctrine. Instead, it reflects Jacobsen’s antithetical views on religion. This makes for an odd story, powerful yet confusing. Another unusual entry is “There Should Have Been Roses.” Stylistically this is a very modern piece, with a feel reminiscent of Katherine Anne Porter. The story has no real plot. It is more like a description of a stage set—an old manor house, a decaying wall covered in foliage (again with the plant motif)—where a scene might take place. The imagery is rather romantic, but expressed in avant-garde prose.

The final selection, “Mrs. Fonss,” returns to the more realistic style of “Mogens.” A Danish widow is traveling with her two children in Avignon, France. There she meets an old boyfriend from her youth, and they decide to get married. The drama springs from the teenaged children’s reaction to this decision. Jacobsen’s take on the situation is by no means sappy or clichéd. This is a fine work of naturalist writing, but the behavior of some of the characters seems too extreme to be realistic.

Overall, this is an impressive offering by Jacobsen, though not quite as good as his novel Niels Lyhne. One wishes he would have lived longer to produce more fine literature. The English translation is a bit clunky at times, making for uncomfortable reading. In the hands of a better English-language prose stylist, this book would likely merit a higher rating.

Stories in this collection

Mogens

The Plague in Bergamo 

There Should Have Been Roses 

Mrs. Fonss

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Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen

Atheist coming-of-age story
Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen is one of a group of writers associated with what’s known as the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature, in which several writers in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden broke away from the prevailing romanticism in European literature and forged a movement towards naturalism. French author Emile Zola is generally considered the founder of naturalism, but while he was formulating his naturalist school in Paris, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was simultaneously spearheading a similar movement in Scandinavia. One of Brandes’s recruits was Jacobsen, whose novel Niels Lyhne was published in 1880.

While romantic literature emphasizes individualism and spirituality, naturalist literature emphasizes a more scientific view of the world in which human beings are inescapably formed, governed, and directed by natural forces. One such natural force is heredity, as Jacobsen illustrates in Niels Lyhne. The novel begins with the courtship and marriage of Niels’s parents. His mother lives a sheltered, insular, small-town life. Through a love for poetry, she finds some escape from her mundane existence and develops into an inveterate dreamer. She is attracted to Niels’s father, who comes from a wealthier and more cosmopolitan family, because he has traveled to foreign lands and gained an appreciation for arts and culture. After their marriage, however, the romance of Mr. Lyhne wears off as he becomes just another practical business man. Mrs. Lyhne than shifts her lofty dreams to her son and instills in Niels the romantic visions she can no longer share with her husband. Under her influence, Niels decides to become a poet. As he grows older, however, he finds his life drifting further and further from the idealistic dreams of his youth as his manhood is shaped by a series of events that transform those dreams into lost illusions.

Naturalism often goes hand in hand with atheism, and Jacobsen was a confirmed atheist. One of the reasons I chose to read this book is because Niels Lyhne has a reputation as a pioneering work of freethought literature. Even the introduction to the English edition of 1921, by translator Hanna Astrup Larsen, calls attention to this particular aspect of the book. While there is an atheist message to this novel, however, Jacobsen sure does make you wait for it. Other than one brief conversation about midway through the text, only the final 10 percent of the novel deals explicitly with atheism and religion. It is worth waiting for, however, as this is one of the most frank and forthright depictions of nonbelief in the literature of its time. Even so, the bulk of the novel primarily concerns itself with the various love affairs one usually finds in a coming-of-age novel. Even though Jacobsen was a professional scientist—a botanist influenced by Darwin—Niels’s adherence to atheism is based more on an emotional rejection of God over the loss of loved ones rather than on any rational philosophical basis. The book’s final chapters evoke the brutally frank detachment and deterministic fatalism one finds in the writings of Zola and his disciples. The rest of the novel, however, feels more tied to the emotionalism of the Romantic era, though in a protomodern style evocative of the early novels of Hermann Hesse or Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Given Jacobsen’s strong Darwinian inclinations, Niels Lyhne was not quite the freethought manifesto I was hoping for. It is still advanced for its time, however, and a worthwhile read for those who enjoy Scandinavian literature.
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Children of the World by Paul Heyse

If Balzac were a freethinker

Paul Heyse
by Adolph von Menzel

German author Paul Heyse won the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature, but his authorial career stretches all the way back to about 1850. His novel Children of the World was first published in 1873 under the German title of Kinder der Welt. Heyse’s work, and this novel in particular, demonstrate a transition in German literature from the Romantic to the early modern. While modern philosophical and social ideas are discussed, stylistically the book harkens back to the earlier, more romantic storytelling of a writer like Balzac. The latter author, in fact, gets a shout out in Children of the World, as a few of the characters discuss the literary merits of his masterwork Père Goriot. Just as that novel depicts the lives of an ensemble cast of characters in a Parisian apartment building, Children of the World likewise focuses on the inhabitants of a Berlin lodging house and their acquaintances in the surrounding neighborhood.

Edwin, a philosopher and tutor, lives with his younger brother Balder, a semi-crippled young man who ekes out a meager living in woodworking. The pair dwell in a small flat above a shoemaker’s shop. With such poor-paying professions, the brothers live a Spartan lifestyle, but the joy they find in each other’s company alleviates the squalor of their surroundings. A few good friends frequent the brothers’ austere salon, armed with contrasting philosophical views that make for lively intellectual discourse. One night, the gift of a theatre ticket gives Edwin a reprieve from this comfortable but limited social circle. In the theatre he spies a beautiful young woman and experiences love at first sight, even though he knows the aristocratic beauty is out of his league.

A big difference between Balzac and Heyse is that the former was a Catholic while the latter was a freethinker. Roughly half the characters in Children of the World, most notably Edwin, are freethinkers—atheists, materialists, pantheists, and the like. The title Children of the World refers to these freethinkers, as opposed to the believers in religion, the Children of God. The main plot of the book does not revolve around Edwin’s atheism, however. The novel is primarily a love story. In fact, there are so many love triangles in this book they practically interlock into a star of David, and this was the era when unrequited love would cause physical illness and even death. The freethinking theme is woven throughout the narrative as a simple fact of the character’s lives. Edwin and his friends express their distaste at how religion is forced upon them at every celebration of birth, death, or marriage. When Edwin’s godless views become public knowledge, his career as a teacher is threatened. For the freethinking reader, it is refreshing to read a novel from this era that treats atheism and the prejudice against it as a matter of simple fact. One of the villains in the story is a religious hypocrite who simulates piety for his own gain. Heyse also tackles the class system by pointing out the shallowness and hypocrisy of the nobility in contrast to Edwin and friends’ more secularly righteous working-class lives.

Be warned before starting, this is a very long book. When first published in English in 1882, it was split into three volumes. Later editions crammed it all into about 600 tightly packed pages. Once the reader gets involved in these characters lives, however, it is a pleasure to watch the story unfold. The book’s main fault lies in one of Edwin’s love interests, who is portrayed too idealistically and is prone to annoying emotional histrionics. Though the book is quite modern in its philosophical ideas, its treatment of romance is still very much rooted in whatever was the German equivalent of the Victorian Era. Nevertheless, this is still a very worthwhile read for lovers of classic literature, particularly for those who share Edwin’s godless inclinations.
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The British Barbarians by Grant Allen

Lampooning English respectability
The British Barbarians, a novel by Grant Allen, was published in 1895. Allen, a science writer, novelist, and essayist, was born in Canada but lived most of his adult life in England. He was an outspoken atheist and proponent of evolution. His devotion to rational science and aversion to religion are both evident in The British Barbarians, an iconoclastic work that pokes fun at British customs of class and respectability. Regrettably, the book begins with one of the most unnecessary and pretentious introductions ever to open a novel, an exercise in self-praise in which Allen trumpets his own self-righteousness and unswerving steadfastness of purpose in the face of critical adversity and editorial censure. After having gotten off on that wrong foot, thankfully the book that follows is much better and often displays a refreshingly irreverent sense of humor.

Philip Christy, a railroad clerk and resident of Brackenhurst, Surrey, is just another common middle-class Englishman overly concerned with elevating his social position. One day he is approached by a stranger, an apparent tourist who inquires where one might find lodgings in the neighborhood. The well-dressed stranger speaks perfect English, but is apparently not from England since he has no knowledge whatsoever of English customs. Despite efforts at polite interrogation, Philip is unable to get the stranger to state from where he hails. The man will only admit to being an “alien” in England. After a couple further meetings, Philip develops a reluctant acquaintance with this apparent foreigner, whose name is revealed to be Bertram Ingledew. While Philip remains suspicious of this stranger, Ingledew forms a close friendship with Philip’s sister Frida, also known by her married name of Mrs. Robert Monteith.

As Philip and Frida educate Bertram on English manners and customs, he proves himself incredibly naive and ignorant as to the ways of society. His utter fish-out-of-water strangeness, however, allows him to view English customs objectively, and he openly and unabashedly criticizes British mores. Though a newcomer to English society, Bertram is a well-traveled man and very knowledgeable about other cultures. Viewing English customs as an anthropologist would, he constantly compares England’s restrictive social norms with the taboos of third-world cultures. Starting small with a critique of England’s confusing coinage and moving on to the unreasonable demands of fashion, Bertram eventually works his way up to hot button topics like religion, sex, and marriage, much to the shock and chagrin of his hosts and their social circle.

Allen’s humorous critiques of English social conventions are quite funny and pointedly insightful, though he does tend to dwell too long on each joke. Since the first half of the novel is so funny, it is all the more disappointing when the second half devolves into a melodramatic romance, one that comes across as strangely commonplace for the Victorian era, even though Bertram is an advocate of women’s liberation and free love. What purports to be a statement of feminine independence feels more like a lovestruck woman blindly following a cult leader.

There is a science fiction element to this novel, which makes it a pioneering work in that genre. I won’t reveal what that entails, but it is pretty obvious from chapter one. The book also includes a rather audacious freethought critique of religion, for which Allen is to be commended. The British Barbarians isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but it was cutting edge for 1895. Today, it will mostly appeal to those interested in early science fiction.
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Mizora: A Prophecy by Mary E. Bradley Lane

She blinded me with science
Mizora: A Prophecy is a feminist utopian novel by Mary E. Bradley Lane. Little is known about the author, though a brief preface states that Lane kept the writing of the novel a secret from her husband. Somehow it made it into the pages of the Cincinnati Commercial, where it received its first publication in serial form, under a pseudonym, from 1880 to 1881. Mizora was first published as a book in 1890.

The narrator, Vera Zarovitch, is a Russian aristocrat who, for speaking out against her own nation’s oppressive regime, is sentenced to Siberia. She escapes from this fate, only to be separated from her husband and daughter and lost in the Arctic. Her boat descends into a whirlpool, and she ends up in the mysterious land of Mizora, which is populated only by members of the female sex. The Mizorans are all beautiful blonde specimens of physical and mental perfection. Their civilization is much more scientifically advanced than our own, and through science they have achieved a society free of crime, poverty, and disease.

In addition to being a utopia, Mizora also falls into the category of Hollow Earth literature, along with science fiction works by Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Little attention is given to the fact that Mizora is underground, however. The Mizorans cannot see the sun, moon, or stars, but they do have clouds and rain. Light is provided by some sort of electrical phenomenon generated from an inconspicuous source. Another example of the Mizorans’ technological mastery is a “reflecting apparatus” that works like a videophone and can be used to simulcast events and presentations to a wider audience. The Mizorans are very advanced in chemistry, and are able to create food, including meat, from its molecular components, kind of like the food replicator from Star Trek: The Next Generation. By creating perfectly healthy food and environmental conditions, the Mizorans are able to ensure themselves perfect health and an extended life span, which in turn yields superb intellectual development. And, of course, they’ve found a way to reproduce without men.

For much of its length, Mizora feels like more of a fantasy wish list than a utopia. The land is full of good things, but there’s little logical explanation of how they came about. In that sense, as well as in literary quality, it is inferior to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 feminist utopian novel Herland. Sure, all things being possible, who wouldn’t opt for free education and financial security for all, but how? Perhaps the lack of defense spending might account for that, since Mizora apparently has no military. Lane too often uses vague references to science as a panacea for all ills and thus is less clear than Gilman in how the development of her utopian society was actually shaped by femininity. To its credit, Mizora doesn’t sound quite as fascistic as Herland, but both utopias rely on eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals. At one point in Mizora, the Preceptress of the National College, “the leading scientist in the country,” drops one big racist bombshell. The fact that the Mizorans are all blonde and fair-skinned is no mere coincidence.

Mizora is quite critical of religion and perhaps succeeds more as a freethought utopia than a feminist utopia. Unlike many utopias, the book is not much of a political treatise. The Mizoran government is barely mentioned, but it comes across as vaguely libertarian. Lane gets points for originality, feminism, pacifism, and religious skepticism, but the racism and eugenics really taint the reading experience.
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