ordinary sense and democratic culture

 

When Whitman came to fight his great opposite and fate, These States, like some happier Ahab taking on the Whale, in Democratic Vistas, he issued a caution:

 

“Bear in mind, too, that they [these pages] are not the result of studying up in political economy, but of the ordinary sense, observing, wandering among men, These States, these stirring years of war and peace. I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between Democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the People's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this book.”

The ordinary sense is your most democratic organ. A transparent eyeball for some, for others a nose for tabloidery, but always wandering – that is, refusing to settle in one circle or clique. And this is why, for Whitman, democracy is not a constitution, or an election, or a set of politicians – it is based on the ordinary sense writ large and small: literature. In “feudalism” – Whitman’s name for all that is past and undemocratic – literature is ultimately the reflection of a system of patronage and elevated and elegant subservience. It turns away from the ordinary sense.  Whitman sums up his credo in a one of those wonderful outbreathings that no other poet can do:

“It is curious to me that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus, and the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a  class, and the clear idea of a class, of native Authors, Literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole- mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses, radiating, begetting appropriate teachers and schools, manners, costumes, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of The States.”

I’m moved by this declaration of faith. It is to what is inside and underneath elections that, I think, democracy goes on. The allergy to “wokeness” seems to me an allergy to the ferment within and underneath, the ferment that has opened the doors in this Bluebeard’s castle of a civilization and seen the bloodshed and the butchery, and is trying to cope with it as it can. The first impulse, trained in us, is to throw down rules. But Moses went up to the mountain a long time ago, and came back with rules, and the democratic terror consists of the suspecting and more than suspecting, acting upon the perception that rules must be subordinate to sympathy, and that sympathy does not exist without a wandering with ordinary sense. It doesn’t get to fly, to unfold its wings, in coiled up rooms and relations.

And maybe we don’t want democratic flights all of the time, and want our rooms and relations.

But don’t want them too much. This, it seems to me, is where Whitman’s Democratic Vistas come in.