The following is a transcript from a discussion between Rob Johnson and Steven Hermann on the concept of “spiritual democracy” as explored in Herman’s work and the writings of American poets like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. The idea is that spiritual democracy goes beyond political and economic democracy to encompass a spiritual or religious dimension that integrates the different aspects of democracy for the common good.
Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Transcript:
Rob Johnson (00:00:00):
I’m here today with Steven Herrmann, who’s worked with our young scholars. He’s a Jungian analyst. He’s an author of several books and I would say there are many, many things in his work that have inspired me. When I had a sailboat named Shaman, somebody gave me a present called a book called The Shaman’s Call, and that’s how I became aware of who he was. He was very involved with William Everson, the birth of the poet, and worked with him at University California.
(00:01:12):
Santa Cruz Everson evolved in and around, which I call the beat generation in California, and was a very, very profound thinker. And I learned a great deal from Steven about what you might call the shamanic poetic social activists that Everson was and which we all can be in context of his teaching and learning and so forth. I’ve created a, what you might call a connection with a very enthusiastic group of young scholars at Inet and Stevens done an excellent job of how we say teaching and inspiring their curiosity. Today we’re here to talk about a book that he wrote and we’re coming up in the next week or so to the 10th anniversary, a book on spiritual democracy. And I’ll let Steven describe to you what that means and why he wrote the book. But I just want to thank you, Steven, for taking the time and joining us here today.
Steven Herrmann (00:02:22):
My pleasure, Rob, it’s always an honor to be with you in this kind of a context, and I really am eager and interested in engaging your young scholars in a dialogue about the significance of this central concept that really I think needs to be attributed first to Walt Whitman for his idea of religious democracy. This was a concept he postulated in a prose essay in 1871 after the Civil War that’s called Democratic Vistas. And in that marvelous essay, he speaks of three strata or three levels of democracy, the material strata, which includes the putting down on record of the material aspects of democracy and the rise of industry and the economy with the Transcontinental Railroad, and of course the whale fishery that Melville specialized in Moby Dick, which I’ll be speaking about a little later when I address some questions to your audience about what the significance might be about the whale hunt in the 1841 period when Melville shipped on the whale ship AusNet and headed for the South Seas where he jumped ship on the island of Kova and lived for eight days with the cannibals, the Polynesian people, and became famous in America for his first novel Tiki, a peep at Polynesian life, followed by his second novel Umo, which is about his time in Tahiti.
(00:04:47):
And interestingly, my brother just returned from Tahiti, who’s an underwater photographer just yesterday. So the synchronicity of that is quite extraordinary given the focus of my talk that I want to engage with you in today. Rob had asked earlier in a question about where I’ve come in the past 10 years with regards to this vision of spiritual democracy. The first strata was the material strata, as I said. The second was the economic, well that includes the material of course, and then the political strata. So the economic strata, we’ll just call it the economic level of democracy, which all of you have a great deal to teach me about. And then the political strata, which we seem to be really embroiled in at the moment as well as the discussions about out fossil fuels and climate change. And then the third level was the religious, or what I’m calling the spiritual level or strata of democracy.
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That’s really where all of these three poets who I write about in my books, Whitman Walter Whitman, 1819 to 1892 are his dates. And Herman Melville was born in the same year, 18, 19 and died in 1891. So you see their years are very contemporaneous with one another. And then Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who died in 1886 at the age of 55 from Bright’s disease, they were all writing out of their early inspiration by the King James Bible. So they’re all writing out of the old and New Testament literature, all three of them. And they all bring with their poetry as shaman poets, I call them or poet shamans, a certain broadening of the concept of the divinity to include a kind of transnational vision of where we might be going as a species if we can survive the current wars and climate change global warming.
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That’s currently the number one problem I think in our world today. As we know from the past week when we had the second largest hurricane in US history, hit Florida and then Asheville, North Carolina and create quite a destruction there. And Whitman brings a kind of an optimistic vision about the future. He’s really a poet of a transcendentalist poet writing in the Emersonian tradition out of his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. 1844 was the great essay the poet. And Whitman was reading this as he was composing the first lines of leaves of grass. And he says, I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil. Not only did Emerson bring him to a boil, but so did Alexander von Humboldt’s book Cosmos, which as I’ve mentioned to you before, Rob was published in 1844 and Emerson read it in the original German. That was the first volume, it was a five volume set.
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And by the time of his death, Alexander v Humboldt was the most famous man in the world in 1860 for his books with that name, A sketch of the physical view of the universe. And the opening chapter of my book is called Cosmos. And what I’m looking at are these visionaries of American spiritual democracy, and Emerson is the fountain head then Whitman Melville actually prior to Whitman because Moby Dick was published in 1851. He was writing it in 1850 during the time of the California gold rush. And during the apex you could say of the whale fisheries in the south, not only the south seas but all of the world seas, but particularly strong industry formed on our American shores on the east coast and through the production of sperm whale oil, sper, cei candles that lit the houses and the churches. And so this hunt for the great white whale Moby Dick is really still very much a current mythology of the American psyche.
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Myths are created through national literature and the poet shamans are the ones who give voice to it through what Whitman called vocalism the divine power to speak words. So we see this divine power, I think most beautifully and eloquently in the sermon chapter nine of Moby Dick where Father Mapple gives the sermon at the Siemens Bethel in New Bedford to Nantucket to the people of Nantucket. And he tells the story of Jonah and the whale. And in a sense it’s a warning and the metaphors Melville uses to describe the preacher are images of storm and thunder and that kind of prophetical voice that Melville incarnates through the narrator of the novel, which is Ishmael at the opening line of Moby Dick, call me Ishmael at the end of the story. Of course, he’s the only one who survives to tell the story of the very fateful and tragic quest for the a narcissistic, dissociated revengeful hunt for a whale that really represents what the founding fathers called in our Declaration of Independence. Nature’s God. That’s the only reference in the declaration to God is that it’s nature’s God. Nobody portrays the power, the electricity, the energy of that kind of divinity better than Melville in this novel. But let me just read a few lines for you from looming the second chapter of Moby Dick and Melville is speaking through the mouthpiece of Ishmael who tells us how his calling, how his vocation came to him and why he went on this whale hunt in the first place.
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He said that it came to him during a damp drizzly November in my soul, November in my soul. And the bill ran something like this grand contested election for the presidency of the United States whaling voyage by one ishmail bloody battle in Afghanistan. So why did I write this book in the first place? It started actually with a paper that I published in the San Francisco Young Institute Library Journal in 2003 called Melville’s Vision of Evil. And it came at that point in our history where there was a fierce battle going on in Afghanistan, in the hunt in the white mountains there for the bin Laden. And as we all know, the bloody battle in Afghanistan culminated with the death of Bin Laden in that military unit in Afghanistan. So the prophetical nature of this novel is quite extraordinary. Carl Jung, who is the founder of the School of Analytical Psychology, out of which I come as an analyst, a jgi analyst, talked about it as a prospective function in the unconscious, something like a weather forecast or a vision roughed out in advance.
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And it doesn’t predict exactly to detail how things are going to evolve, excuse me, in a narrative format. But we can look at Moby Dick as a dream, as a reverie by one of the greatest American shaman novelists of all times who wrote this book after his travels to the south seas when he saw the slaughter of these beautiful specimens of sperm whales and all other species, humpbacks and gray whales and the blue whale, all of these magnificent sea creatures in that economic drive for mastery over the environment, over nature to get economic profit and bring as many barrels of whale oil back from the journey as one possibly could. Of course, Ahab wants nothing of that. His sole aim is revenge and hate and anger and rage against the whale that took off his leg off the coast of Japan, which is another interesting metaphor since what brought us into World War II was Pearl Harbor.
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Pearl Harbor. So you see the significance of this novel as a contemporary narrative about these three strata of democracy that Whitman outlined for us and how they all intersect, but how they’re not working together. And so Moby Dick is filled with images of storm and coming storms and warnings about storms. If we continue on this a reckless and mad hunt for the whale that’s supposed to be the biggest and largest bull of the species, but really Ahab is projecting his own evil onto the white whale. And this is what Jung, I think helped us understand in the 20th century better than any other psychologist, the importance of the integration of the shadow and evil and owning the Ahab in all of us that we all have an Ahab within us. You see, this is part of the American myth. We all have an Ishmael within us, the narrator, the one who tells the story, who journals, who spins, yarns and dreams and who goes along on this whale hunt, but does it in such a way that he brings back a different kind of trophy, which is the novel itself, which has a healing potential.
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And that’s what the shaman always does, is the shaman tries to find a medicine within to heal the tribe from what’s ailing the culture the most and the most. And certainly what’s been really ailing us is the devastation that big industry and the market economy has done to our planet. And I don’t have to tell the young scholars in your institute Rob about that. You already know about it. The question is what can we do about it? And this is where spiritual democracy comes in, which is all about finding our own voice and speaking up for what we know. Are we going to speak up for solar energy, wind energy, hydroelectric energy or tidal energy today? Those are just four of the alternative, zero carbon emission, zero footprint types of renewable energy that are out there and what do we do about the coal industry and fracking now and this continuous dependence upon oil?
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You see how central Moby Dick is to our American psyche and to the international conflicts and what we did in Iraq. Were we there solely to defend ourselves against the attacks on nine 11 or were there other motives that were involved that had to do with the shadow projections within our own policy? And this so-called crusade against evil. You see, a crusade against evil is not the solution. And so not only does Moby Dick bring to light the problems that we currently face with regards to climate change, but also the problem of war, the war between nations. And this is what Whitman brings together in Saluto in 1860 when he sings this beautiful chance about the bringing together of all nationalities into a unity. And then Emily Dickinson comes along and around the same time, right around 1862 during the Civil War, she writes a poem a day in her journals and sows them together in 800 little pamphlets, in 40 pamphlets or packets as she called them and puts them away in her desk drawer.
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And then her sister Lavinia later finds them after her death and they’re published posthumously. She only published seven to 11 poems in her lifetime, which is a tragedy. But she refused to compromise her integrity because like Melville and Whitman, she had written her own version of a Bible. She said The Bible is an antique verse written by faded men. So you see this strong voice in Emily Dickinson from 1848 onward during the Seneca Falls Women’s Convention where she was at Mount Holyoke and she begins to give voice to this need for equal rights. And right at the point of Lincoln’s drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation, she says that God of the manacle, the chain God of the chain, God of the manacle God, of the free take, not my liberty away from me. So she’s really fighting for a liberty and freedom for all people, inequality.
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This is the essence of spiritual democracy, that there’s this spiritual level of our national psyche that really can bring us up to a higher level of consciousness if we work on ourselves and individuate as Carl Jung would say, and become the whole and complete individuals that we are with all of our shadow material integrated into consciousness or as much as we possibly can. And this is why Ahab is such a great teacher, because Ahab teaches us about the phenomenon of projection, the projection of evil and the war against nature. You see, it’s the war against nature’s God that’s at the center of the problem that we currently face and the war against ourselves, different ethnicities. Ishmael sleeps with a Polynesian harpoon who comes from the island of Coco Voco in the south seas. And so he represents that knowledge that Melville brought back from the South Pacific with him during his travels.
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And he has tattoos like many of the people walking around today, they have their tattoos. But Melville had seen this in the image of with all of his tattoos back in 1850, he provided portraits for us and also same sex marriage, the brotherhood of humanity and the sisterhood as Emily Dickinson brings in the love for her friends and this idea of a higher spiritual marriage that they all speak up for. But Rob, I have said a lot here and I want to bring you in to this dialogue. I want to see what might’ve evoked in you since you’re the captain of this ship,
Rob Johnson (00:23:23):
How I say sinking the ship. What I would say is that this, I want to work with you to bring out further the notion of spiritual democracy in the sense that we have what’s called democracy, which is allegedly expressing the of the population. There are rules made within an institutional democracy, discriminating who can vote, who can’t, this and that. Then there’s the interaction on planet earth of different nations. So being democratic is not just within your country, it’s especially in the digital age where you’re nanoseconds away from people all over the planet. It’s a different challenge. And then there’s what the Institute for Economic thinking is intermittently related to, which is the economy and its structure affects the quality of life. And if the economy is embedded in the democracy, how the democracy functions, determines which you might call the moral and ethical quality of the economy as a tool for the wellbeing of people whether, so when you talk about spiritual democracy, it feels to me like if the economy drives what we do for its own sake, but isn’t thinking about what happens to people, we need to broaden.
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If it’s not thinking across nations, across different subsets of the population on planet earth, it’s not thinking. And then there’s the feedback between non-human life and the entire planet and the atmosphere, which are part of what you might call God’s design and how are we interacting with and treating that as economy, as government. And I guess what I loved about reading this book was how it broadened my sense of how the different things interact sometimes badly, but to see a different structural vision of what we should aspire to, it’s sort of like a north star, the spiritual democracy, which is multidimensionally. Integrating things to produce wellbeing for more and more people is a fascinating what you might call pathway way. And I guess I often cite a book by Muriel Rukeyser called The Life of Poetry. And when she talks about the love of poetry, the first section of the book though is called The Fear of the Resistances is part one, and the first chapter is called the Fear of Poetry. You’re a youngian psychologist.
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How do we define the resistances to spiritual democracy and how do we evolve things so that we move towards those goals of the large common good? And I don’t want to act romantically naive. When you’re a parent and you have children or you have family neighbors, et cetera, you intimately worry about taking care of them and giving away everything which puts them at more risk to be what I’ll call spiritually better is sometimes very hard to do. So I guess I’m trying to understand from the definition of what you call the meta playing field looks like, how do we build things to build a better world?
Steven Herrmann (00:27:37):
I really liked your statements, Rob, in your questions too. Emily Dickinson said, the sailor cannot see the north but knows the needle can. She said that in a letter to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had a black regiment that he left during the Civil War, but he told Emily Dickinson, her poetry was too soft and too feminine at that point to publish. And her dashes, her original lines were not conventionally in alignment with the structure of meter and rhyme. And so she said, my barefoot rank is better. So she decided not to publish at that point and said, publication is the auction of the mind of man in a poem.
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Whitman said in concert with what you just said, Rob, that spiritual democracy is a worldwide phenomenon. It doesn’t support the notion of the average American, that it’s a presumption of his day that the United States could be credited with having discovered an entirely new democratic idea for Whitman real democracy. And he capitalizes real democracy meant a world democracy, not only an American democracy, world democracy when it is not wielded in the empire of any one nation has a chance to really have a spreading effect through what Carl Yung called psychic infections. When we are infected by a national archetype of such as is happening today in our nation with the kind of rhetoric we’re seeing in it has an infectious quality to it. And you see people getting on board like the sailors did, aboard the peck road on the ship and only one of the sailors, Starbuck actually made an attempt at an insurrection.
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Moby Dick begins with 81 extracts, which Melville called from world mythology and books at the time on the whaling industry. And it culminates with examples of two mutiny aboard the whale ships. One insurrection led by an insane semen who killed the captain with an ax and created a revolt. So you see the insurrection right in the opening chapter in extracts. And then what we see are the metaphors of storm, the coming storm. And I’ll send you a copy of what I wrote up for your young scholars, Rob today on the themes of climate change in Moby Dick,
(00:31:00):
But you stated it well. And I think the solution that all of them give us, Rob, to the problems inherent in the unification of these three strata, these three dimensions of democracy is through the voice. It’s through vocalism, it’s through vocation, finding your own calling, and then listening to your own conscience that comes through careful attention to the unconscious, what’s happening in the psyche. This is where dreams come in, this is where active imagination comes in, this is where visioning comes in. And so what we need are new visions for the future of our democracy that can integrate these three levels in a harmonious way where the economy is working for the planet by being in harmony with the spiritual or religious dimension,
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But not going against it and creating the kind of war with nature and the problems that we currently see. And so it does create an opening, and Moby Dick is a spacious novel. It creates space for us to imagine, for us to dream and to think new economic thinking, to think new thoughts, to contribute to the conventional knowledge that we see in the news, which is not that informative often because it’s just talking about the price of gas or the price of food and these kinds of things that really have very little to do with the immediate concerns which have to do more with what’s happening in our oceans of the world and the kinds of dangers we currently face with hurricanes and typhoons. The big storm that happens in Moby Dick is the typhoon off the coast of Japan that ends up becoming the culmination of the novel. And we had a typhoon in Taiwan just yesterday and this morning it’s actually heading up north in Taiwan as we’re speaking here. So typhoon is a warning from God, nature’s God that we better listen to what we’re doing to nature before things really heat up. And that’s not what I’m hearing in the political debates much
Rob Johnson (00:34:12):
So Steven with regard to these challenges. Say we’re in a presidential election and they don’t talk about climate, but when you’re in a place like West Virginia, I was also on a panel there and you say, well, we’ve got to do climate change. And one of the people raised their hand from the audience and said, Mr. Johnson, you’re from Michigan. When they did NAFTA automation machine learning, they smashed Michigan. And right now, you may be right that we can’t continue with fossil fuels in particular coal in West Virginia, but why isn’t there adjustment assistance for us as we shift gears to help society survive? Why is it done to us rather than with us? In other words, there are dilemmas that relate. For instance, wall Street gets bailed out, but Michigan didn’t get bailed out when we did nafta. There’s a lot of resistance now to feeling like there is a community.
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It’s a community of money, power that dominates politics and I’m not part of it. And people become frightened, resentful, resentful for the wellbeing of their children. And so how we create a democracy that properly takes out of the shadow what the real challenges are, but then how we implement it with justice is what I think spiritual democracy. It’s not just identification of the challenges, whether it’s across groups of people or across nations or vis-a-vis mother nature or vis-a-vis animal life. It’s also about how the adjustments burden is going to be shared. And I think that part has been quite missing.
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And what you see is people in a presidential election in say Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan right now, alluding to the adjustment assistance or denying the need for some of the change say in climate that does need to be made because they don’t want to make those people feel like they’re going to get throttled and smashed again like they were in an earlier episode related to Pittsburgh and steel related to the automotive world in Cleveland and Detroit. So how do we manage the political economy of the spiritual democratic awareness? I think that’s part of the specification of what governance will have to mean in this next period.
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Similarly, in the military industrial issues you find they’re going to go attack. We’re protecting these people, not those people. But wait a minute, do I have to build a bomb shelter? Do I have to keep my children in the basement? How would I say the risk of danger to us? And it’s not just from bombs going off here, it’s how as people like Daniel Ellsberg taught us how it affects the upper atmosphere and accelerates the deterioration of climate, which hurts everyone. His book, doomsday Machine talks about that, which is he was famous for the Vietnam leakages and so forth, but later in his life he wrote all about the ramifications of nuclear explosion. And there’s a movie called The Day After with Jason Robbar that was written to illuminate what the scenarios of what those dangers would be. And by the way, my understanding was that Reagan and Gorbachev allowed that to be seen. And then they went to Revic and Iceland and they made an arms reduction deal using the anxiety that the Jason movie created, create an enthusiasm among citizens and voters for the changes that they wanted to make. But there’s all kinds of side effects. And like you’ve talked about in Jung and psychology, where is the shadow? What is the media afraid to cover? What are we afraid to think about? Are we ashamed of certain things within ourselves that we hide from?
Steven Herrmann (00:39:07):
So you asked some very interesting questions there, Rob, and made some very important comments. I remember back in the mid eighties when I had a dream and I was at uc Santa Cruz after I was teaching as a teaching assistant for William Everson’s course on vocation, teaching Young’s theories of dream interpretation, I had a dream. This was at the time of the Reagan administration, as you mentioned, and the development of the nuclear weapon called, he called it the peacemaker at first. Then the Congress, I guess changed the name to the peacekeeper, but we’re talking about the MX missile, we’re talking about the rise of the escalating war with the nuclear arms race, and you mentioned justice and where’s the justice, environmental justice, environmental justice in all of this? And who gives us the criteria to follow as to what justice means in democracy at those three levels?
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And justice, of course, is a theological term comes out of the idea of the just war that began with Augustine and his city of God and then St. Thomas Aquinas, this notion of a just war. But really today I think we have to ask ourselves the question, well, what war is just and who’s to make the determination of what justice means to the average American and what power does the citizen really have in a vote about the industrial military complex? If that person is a peace activist, for example, or works for Greenpeace and wants to protect whales against the whale fishery of the Japanese who are continuing to hunt whales. So it does bring up these moral and ethical questions as you mentioned, and that’s at the center and heart of Moby Dick. Father Mapple says that the basic principle is to preach the truth to the face of falsehood
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Through one’s own individual conscience. You see, excuse me, the world’s not going to change without the individual. Individuals are the catalyst for change in the collectivity. Conventional morality is only a superficial nodding of heads in agreement with certain figures who are making the rules. So I think the question really for the young scholars is how do you tap into that individual variable of vocation, which is at the center of the problem of following your own conscience, which means listening to the inner voice through messages that we get from our unconscious, from dreams, from the imagination, from fantasy thinking, this is what Melville specialized in and Whitman and Dickinson, they all engaged in active visioning through free verse. This was vocalism. They spoke the word as it came to them. This was the word of God in the fourth Gospel. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.
(00:43:02):
You see, the power of the word comes through in the sermon chapter nine of Moby Dick, where we hear, if you watch the movie with Gregory Peck, you really get a sense of the authorial power of the word in his oratory. It’s a beautiful use of American English to deliver a stern message and a warning to the world about the dangers that lie ahead if we don’t wake up and begin to develop our own connection to the self and connection to the anima or the Aus, the doorway to the unconscious, which is really the feminine quality of the voice. We see this in Emily Dickinson beautifully, that she has this feminine quality to her voice that she doesn’t compromise. Her integrity is never compromised, but she also speaks with power. She says cherish power dear to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert in a letter. So in the Lord’s Prayer, the power in the kingdom and the glory, well, she says, cherish power to women during a time of women’s empowerment. You see, she’s speaking up for women. This is long before women got the vote in 1920. So she’s really a fierce rebel for spiritual democracy and for finding one’s own relationship to the inner voice through journaling, through poetry and through music. We talked earlier, Rob, about music in Moby Dick and the little 13-year-old black boy aboard the ship who plays his tambourine and brings music to the sailors during a time of devastation in doom.
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It’s a wonderful thing that he brings joy and celebration and laughter to the ship, and it’s through jazz. Melville was, he listened to the music of the times and also read the narrative of Frederick Douglass and got that sense of the oratory of the African-American speaker of the word. So you’re right, I think the individual vote of the average American is what matters in this election, certainly, but there’s going to need to be much more than that if the figures we’re empowering to guide our nation are going to really speak up for the collectivity. And if that collectivity is in touch with the spiritual dimension. You see a lot of the political rhetoric I hear in the news, it doesn’t really inspire much as far as my soul goes. Maybe you feel differently, Rob, but I’m not feeling particularly inspired.
Rob Johnson (00:46:37):
I would say that when one studies politics closely, there is a great deal of what you might call evasion in political discourse and trying to understand what is the source of that evasion? Who are they trying not to offend which donors are being courted? There’s a currency called votes, and there’s a currency called donations. And I always tell people that Bob Dylan has a famous song called one too many mornings, one too many Mornings, and I have a song for inet called Three Too Many Markets. There’s a market for politicians, there’s a market for avoiding media coverage, and there’s a market for expertise that, how would I say, don’t serve the public good when they’ve got to go fund, whether it’s through advertising or endowments to universities or think tanks or whether it’s contributions so that the individual can survive in office for another term. And so I think there’s a lot of indirection that’s involved in the politics, and I always, when I’m listening to you, I started hearing a song today by Teddy Pendergrass, it’s called Wake Up Everybody and the lyrics. So the first one, wake Up Everybody, no More Sleeping in Bed.
(00:48:14):
How does he No more backward thinking, time for thinking ahead. The world has changed so very much from what it used to be, there is so much hatred, war and poverty. But anyway, when we get to the backup, he said, he talks about all kinds of false resolutions, but in the end, we got to wake up each and every day, teach the children, teach the babies, teach the children. They’re the ones who are coming up in the world. And I wanted to say to you, just foreshadowing from where that song goes, you work on vocational issues. You work on mentoring people how with journaling and with dreams analysis, how to excavate their own, what you might call their own compass. But what do we need to teach young people? One of my very good friends that I says to me, it used to be people think you go get your education now what you do is you go get your credentials because you’re afraid you won’t get a job. And this individual said to me, I like Dante and Homer and Shakespeare, but I studied business administration and accounting, and he was conscious of his fear of not being employable and said, I can study those deeper spiritual visionaries later on my own time, but that’s not going to help me get a job. It’s not going to help me support my family. And so I think there’s a lot of question here. What should education evolve toward, relative to where it is now from your experience?
Steven Herrmann (00:50:09):
Well, you read my book on vocational dreams, and there I talked about Einstein’s compass, that his father gave him a compass at the age of four or five, and that became the nuclear symbol of his vocation. And later he said about Gandhi, SA one is this generations to come, shall scarcely believe that such a one is this ever in flesh and blood walk the earth. So he really was a visionary too of spiritual democracy, I would say, as a physicist, although he was involved in the development of the bomb. So it’s a very paradoxical thing that a nuclear physicist and a mathematician of that stature could have his hands on the problem of good and evil that we all face. And that has to do with justice.
(00:51:03):
And I just want to echo what you said about sacrifice to the vocation of parenthood, because I know that you have really done that, and I did in my own life with my son, Manny, who I’m very proud of and who you’ve met and know. And I think that there’s something about that that we see in Qwe. He sacrifices his own life in the end because he comes from the islands of the South seas in a sense, he can foresee the coming disasters that we’re seeing in some of these islands in the South Pacific that are being faced with a problem of rising sea tides. And so they’re losing their villages. They’re losing their homes.
(00:51:56):
So he was also very aware of the ice caps, the polar ice caps, and it’s going to happen with the melting of the ice caps. And so I know I’ve been focusing a lot on climate change today, and you’re the expert on economy and economics, and that’s what your young scholars are specialized in. But I think the solutions are going to come from that sector. We need the answer to come from this new kind of thinking, the new kind of an awareness within that economic strata of democracy. It’s not going to happen with people who you’re mentoring, taking the lead and finding their own voice. And that’s what these American poets can do for us. They can activate that voice within us. And sometimes it comes through music, it comes through a saxophone, or it comes through some instrument that a child’s given and that they play or music in the family. Oftentimes a vocation arises in the family of origin. A mother puts in a child at a piano and the child plays, and you see this kind of maternal warmth in the hearth that Melville talks about a lot. He was a mathematician himself, but he only had an eighth grade education and said that a whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard. Think about that, the greatest American novel written by a man, a 30-year-old man with an eighth grade education.
(00:53:38):
So I would say the answer is not traditional standardized education. It’s helping children find their vocation. At an early age, Melville was reading poetry in adolescence. He wrote poetry and won a prize for poem that he wrote. So how many of your children might have a calling to English or literature and they might win a prize as a poet, I know your daughter, for example, won a prize for poetry. So I think that I’ve said enough, I want to let you kind of steer the ship now north and steer clear of the dangers by finishing this up in an inspiring way for your audience.
Rob Johnson (00:54:36):
Well, I think the inspiration has been in the lens I’ve been looking at for the last 50 minutes, so I don’t feel like I have to rise to the challenge that you’ve already met. But I think the way I would look at things is that we’re at some level being taught that nature, whether our animal life or ice or whatever storms affects humanity and economic change affects humanity. And I’ll tell you because of this, how you say with Melville, this nautical sub theme, there’s another guy that really caught fire in my life, and that was through exploration in the Antarctic region and learning about Ernest Shackleton, and I don’t want to be falsely romantic here. There’s some very interesting literature about how early in his life, Shackleton was an ambitious dynamo who wanted to go out there and be a hero, et cetera, et cetera.
(00:55:59):
And later in his life, after not getting to the South Pole, he had one expedition that he led. He had been with Scott on a previous expedition, and they claimed they turned around because he got sick and he was kind of scapegoated for them not reaching the South Pole. Well, then he went the next time, and there were four guys that got within about 93, I think it was 96 miles from the South Pole, which was the record. And he turned around and told his other healthy colleague, well, we could go 192 miles back and forth, but these guys can’t make it, and we might not make it 60 miles back and keep them alive. We’re not going. We’re turning around. And then later, the famous episode with the Endurance where they crashed on the ice, they dragged their boats, they went to a place called Elephant Island.
(00:57:03):
There was no commerce going through Elephant Island. And the 29 people could see there wasn’t enough animal and plant life to sustain them. So shackled him in was six people, five in himself in a small boat across the south Georgia Island. They climbed up over 10,000 feet and down reconnected with humanity, and all 29 were saved. And so somebody said, Shackleton used to be all about this ambition. And I believe it was Amon, the famous explorer from Norway who he said, well, I don’t know if you want Shackleton to ever lead your expedition because he might not get there, but I sure want him to be on the crew when there’s an emergency, because everybody understands he cares about people. And where does this come back to the arts? TS Elliot wrote a famous poem called The Wasteland. And in it, there’s a passage called the Third Man, and it says, who’s the third man who always walks beside you?
(00:58:15):
When I count, there are only you and I together, but when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you gliding wrapped in a brown mantle hooded. I do not know whether it’s a man or a woman, but who is that on the other side of you? And he goes on meaning Elliot to talk that this was stimulated by the accounts of the Antarctic expedition of Shackleton, and it was related to a party of explorers that the extremity of their strength had the constant delusion that there might be one more member than was actually there. And yet the parable was God is walking with you to make, he is Shackleton’s ally, that res sculpt Ted, his awareness to preserve human life above and beyond anything else. And so that sense, and I’m not saying I wasn’t there, I’m not saying what was true, but that sense which inspired TS Elliot, which inspired many people to study the famous voyage of the endurance on shackleton’s hundred 29th birthday, I went with a crew of 11 people and visited his grave site in gr figan on South Georgia Island. And all of us, many of whom who was on that crew had done the whitbread around the world race and everything were so inspired by the story of his spirit and his passion for human preservation. I see him as perhaps a beacon or a role model of what kind of leadership we need in the next phase. Someone who thinks preserving life is more important than making money or getting trophies or what have you.
(01:00:23):
I don’t know. But when you talk to me about vocational dreams and journaling, and so I don’t even know why I went there, except when I started talking to all these sailors I knew everybody was enthralled with the idea of going to the place where Shackleton had what you might call regained connection with humanity and preserved life. And so what I guess I would say, Steven, to conclude is that I’m looking for the other kinds of Shackletons, not ones that understand nautical and ice, but understand social process. And you’re about as good a candidate for being the captain of that voyage as anyone I’ve ever met.
Steven Herrmann (01:01:17):
Well, I’m learning a little bit about economics from you, so it’s definitely a mutual exchange of ideas here. And I want to thank you, Rob, for this opportunity to speak on your show and podcast and
Rob Johnson (01:01:37):
Well, and we’ll schedule some more interaction direct with the Young Scholars Initiative. I’m sure they would be full of curiosity and questions, and you can be their navigator as well.
Steven Herrmann (01:01:52):
Well, like I said, I’ll send you the paper that I wrote up for them and you can pass it on and see what they might think about it.
Rob Johnson (01:02:03):
Excellent. Well, thanks again, Steven. And how would I say I am going to call Manny and tell him he’s got to be proud of Dad too.
Steven Herrmann (01:02:16):
Thank you very much, Rob. I appreciate you.
Rob Johnson (01:02:19):
Thank you. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic thinking@ineteconomics.org.
