How Mark Twain’s Stories Shape American Character And Civic Imagination

We explore how Mark Twain’s writing, not his public persona, teaches a demanding civic balance: democratic equality joined to a living culture of excellence. Through Huck Finn and Connecticut Yankee, we trace how humor, empathy, and imagination form judgment without sliding into cynicism.

• distinguishing Twain the persona from the unified teaching in the work
• equality, liberty and the cultivation of greatness in tension
• Connecticut Yankee as a parable of science, soul and trade-offs
• Huck and Jim’s shared fate and moral growth
• literature as civic education and imagination-building
• satire that critiques pretension while honoring the noble
• teaching Twain in class through short forms and humor
• America 250 as a moment to reread Twain
• patriotism as rededication, not reflex; moderation over hubris
• warnings against technocratic certainty and the loss of the human

Listeners, I will be putting a ton of links into the show notes to make sure that everything that we've talked about is available, as well as Dr. Dobski's books. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:52

All right, welcome everyone. I am very excited to have our visiting professor, Dr. BJ Dobsky, with us. And we're gonna talk about Mark Twain. And a little backstory. Um, I attended a faculty meeting. I kind of talked about the podcast we were doing, and BJ and I met. Um, and at first I was like, what does Mark Twain have to do with anything? I mean, I've read Mark Twain, um, but the more we talked, the more I got excited. And when we hopped on our call today, you know, I told BJ, I am so excited to talk about this because this is stuff I didn't even know. So we're gonna start with one question, BJ. So Mark Twain is I mean, he's one of the most famous Americans of the 19th century, right? Like people know who Mark Twain is. So, from

Framing Twain And The Big Question

SPEAKER_00 1:42

your perspective, what does Twain's work reveal about the American character um and also our democratic experiment? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

So uh first of all, Liz, thank you for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm of course I'm delighted to be in sunny tempe and uh and and and you know, while I'm missing a little bit of the the New England fall back in Massachusetts in a couple of weeks, I will not be missing the the freezing rain followed by snow and ice. So I'm I'm thrilled to be here and and of course thrilled to be on uh on your podcast. This is really terrific what you guys are doing and happy to contribute to it. Um I guess the first thing I really want to say in response to this is I'm delighted that you you make this distinction between Mark Twain and Mark Twain's work. Um, because there are a lot of people say, well, what does what does Twain the man have to say? And uh the life of of Samuel Clemens, right? So we all know that Mark Twain is the the pseudonym, the pen name for Samuel L. Clemens, it's you know, this is someone who deliberately cultivated, deliberately, okay, I can't stress that enough, cultivated many different conflicting views of himself and of his work. Um, so that if you try and unpack what Twain the uh Clemens, the man, thought about something. I mean, aside from just the kind of natural evolution that happens in a person's thinking or over the course of a person's life, there's

Twain The Man Versus The Work

SPEAKER_01 3:09

the fact that he went out of his way to contradict himself, um, to hide things, to refuse to comment on a number of things. Uh, if you this is true of his personal correspondence, it's true of what you might find in his marginalia. It's, you know, his life is, you know, what what so many, um, you know, this guy Ron Chernow is his book on biography on Mark Twain um out now. And and he, you know, he, by the way, self self-promoting plug here. I'm I have a review of that book coming out uh tonight with the public discourse. And if you believe someone like Chernow, you know, his his this is someone's life who is just filled with contradictions. Um, Mark Twain was simply too brilliant for that. And as other scholars have shown, he did this intentionally, right? So if you if you simply try and adduce what Twain or Samuel Clemens, the man, thought by looking just at his life or his correspondence, his travels, his business dealings, all that stuff, you're not going to get very far. So focusing on the work is a different thing entirely. And that's very important because the work, I mean, look, the work is cage enough on its own, right? It's very artful. Um, Twain says in a number of places that he wrote esoterically, uh, that he went out of his way to teach and preach, but that teaching and preaching could only be effective if you did so indirectly. Um, he says that, you know, genuine biography, genuine humor, genuine parity, all of that has to work through subtle indirection. So piecing Twain's work together to pull out its wisdom is tricky business, right? But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that there's a unity at work in his work that may not be detectable in his life or his personal correspondence or his relations with his wife Livy or his daughters or anything like that. So the the work is where to go. The work is where to go if you want to uh uh really kind of grapple with what Twain thinks about America, uh American character and American politics. Uh now, if I were to, if I were to boil it down, right? I mean, we could we we could be here for a long time. If I were to boil it down, I'd say, look, I think the most important thing, or arguably the most important thing that Twain reveals about America and American character, is that uh our community, our democracy, our regime uh has the potential to do what almost no regime ever in the history of politics. And I'm here to tell you, Twain read everything, right? He read everything. He was familiar with with if it had been printed, he was familiar with it. Okay. Um, so I fair I feel fairly confident in saying that he he could judge. Look, we this this country can do, this regime can do something that no other regime or political order has effectively done ever, which is effectively marry a kind of commitment to democratic pol, uh democratic equality, um to political

Equality Meets Aristocratic Culture

SPEAKER_01 6:08

liberty and popular consent, to capitalism, uh so the spread of wealth that's attendant upon that, and a commitment to kind of uh the scientific enterprise and the all of the fruits of the material comfort that that produces. Our regime can marry all of that on the one hand, right? Um with a kind of openness to and cultivation of aristocratic culture, on the other hand, a kind of aristocratic taste for greatness and individual flourishing, right? So that there's this there's this kind of marriage of popular politics and cultural uh aristocracy. It's there in Twain's work, right? There's a lot of caricature that goes on about Twain's work that I think would miss this, right? And and one of the unfortunate effects is Twain then becomes subject to audience capture, right? This phenomenon of audience capture. But if you're if you're able to distance yourself from that, to liberate yourself from audience capture, it's there and it's it's kind of shocking, right? Um now, striking a balance or affecting a balance between a commitment to democratic equality or egalitarianism on the one hand and cultural aristocracy on the other is is extremely difficult. Um, but I think Twain thought his literature was something that could affect this, right? Um, that could pull this off. Um, you know, I think what he what he had had in mind was America at its best, would be a political order that guaranteed widespread political equality, including maybe not universal suffrage, but something close to it, with um with a real openness to human greatness, because only through the universal suffrage could you remove those kind of arbitrary and sometimes irrational obstacles that impede the flourishing of other human beings and their ability, be they male, female, white, or black, uh to contribute to the kind of elevation and refinement of our of our social, political, intellectual, and spiritual uh lives. Uh, I'll just give you one quick example from his literature that that might be helpful here, right? And by the way, while we're talking about this, uh I'm not sure how familiar your audience is with Twain's body of work, but I'm here to tell you it is enormous. It is, it is, it's absolutely massive, right? I mean, you you, you know, yeah, you got the famous stuff, the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and you know, but you've got four massive travelogues. You've got um uh you've you you you've you've got uh nonfiction works on Christian science. You you you know, you have a ton of short stories, you have tens of thousands of letters, you've got uh thousands of speeches that the man delivered, you know, at the end of his life, he has all of this unpublished work,

Connecticut Yankee’s Two Souls

SPEAKER_01 9:10

massive book-length pieces that have not been published, you know, three piece 3,000 years among the microbes, you know, that what? I mean, and and and really interesting stuff, Adam and Eve's diary and so on and so on. This is just it, it's amazing. And the range of this man, right? He defies the simple kind of classification as a social satirist or a humorist, right? He's got this, uh, he's got this dialogue. It's almost like a platonic dialogue called What is Man um on material determinism. It's it's simply amazing. But anyway, to go back to the point at hand, right, is this book that that many uh in your audience may know of called King Arthur's Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court. And uh this, I think, when read properly, right, um, when you refuse to simply identify Twain with the lead character, uh and he goes out of his way, I think, if you're again paying attention not to identify himself with the lead character with the Connecticut Yankee, you'll see that you have two different kinds of souls at work in the story. You have the character and the soul, uh the uh the political character of the Yankee, uh, who is embodies our commitment to kind of democratic equality, to the advancement of science and learning, uh, to the rule of secular materialism, the spread of material prosperity, and so on. But all of that, and Twain shows this in this book, all of that, which we identify as kind of quintessentially American, comes at the expense of human happiness in many ways, comes at the expense of individual flourishing, comes at the expense of our spiritual lives, um, comes at the expense of any kind of development of our more moral and spiritual deepening, a failure to appreciate poetry, artistry, right? Love, friendship, right? His lead character is a remarkably friendless man who has no real attachments to others. And then you have on the other side, right, King Arthur. And everything that Arthur stands for, right? He he's the opposite, right? So in Arthurian England, right, uh his regime makes possible everything the Yankee seems to undermine, family life, um, a profound religious uh uh belief, healthy religious belief, moral virtue, right? Um, a testament to great art and and beauty uh and devotion and natural greatness, right? At one point the Yankee is even compelled to say, you know, Ever the Cynic, the the Yankee is compelled to say he he's naturally great. He is a man. I used to think it was all trappings of his uh of the court life. No, he is he's naturally great, right? But the problem with King Arthur is that that kind of community, feudal England, could only achieve this at the expense of political inequality, right? Or uh requiring political inequality by by uh restricting human learning, by forcing others to endure an almost unimaginable material privation and suffering and so on. So, you know, you you might think that Twain is kind of a pessimist. And there are a lot of people out there who think he's simply pessimism. I think that's more opposed than anything else. I think what Twain thinks is the American character is broad enough, expansive enough, and generous enough to include both of these elements, and that the book is really an invitation to America to say, look, you have a lot of good things, but those things come at a cost. The things you would reject also have benefits. So there's these trade-offs. You need to do your best to bring them together. Now, I don't think Twain is so simple-minded as to think all good things go together, right? No, of course not. There's tension here, there will be trade-offs. But, you know, like great literature, great politics is not easy. Right? Healthy, free politics that respects the fundamental equality of human beings while also recognizing the possibilities of human greatness. That's not easy. But Twain seems to think it's possible. And that that book, Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court, seems to be part of his broader invitation to get Americans to take this stuff seriously. So that would be my opening response to that excellent question.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

I I love that you're talking about literature and politics because you know, uh, coming from a teacher point of view, I taught both English and social studies, uh, my main thing being social studies. And I I wish that more people understood the marrying together that literature and politics can have. So my next question is kind of you know, on that political wisdom in literature. So you've written on thinkers uh from uh and I can never say this right, is it solidities?

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Um so you've written on him, Shakespeare and Twain. So what does literature uniquely offer us in terms of understanding political wisdom that maybe like political science alone can't?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Right, right. No, that's that's a great question. And and I think it's something that really, you know, more people who are interested in teaching civics

Beyond Huck And Tom: Twain’s Range

SPEAKER_01 15:03

and teaching political, um uh teaching politics and political wisdom, conveying political wisdom, should make greater use of our literary tradition because it's an extremely rich one, both both speaking broadly in terms of the kind of Western literary canon, but also American novelist. Um, it's an extremely rich uh resource for conveying wisdom, but also shaping character, right? And and this is, by the way, something that I didn't quite anticipate would happen in my career as I got started was that thinking about how literature can help shape American character, um, how the development of a political imagination is so critical to the shaping of character. But that is, in fact, what really great literature does. So, so I would just say a couple of things. I've I've I have a few points in mind that uh uh I think speak to your question. The first thing is uh there's just a great joy and pleasure in reading literature that you can't, you know, set aside political science textbooks, set aside, you know, academic jargon and academic analysis. I mean, even just picking up something like um, you know, Aristotle's politics. Whoa, boy, that, you know, I I find it incredibly meaningful uh and incredibly fulfilling, but I I do not, you know, my first encounter with it is not pleasure. I hate to say, you know, maybe that says more about me than Aristotle, but but the first thing I would say is, you know, good literature should induce a kind of pleasure. There should be an experience of pleasure here. Um and and I think that's true because human beings just take a natural joy in seeing their their nature displayed for them, right? I mean, they're not conscious of it when they're experiencing it, but you know, people like to go to plays. Why do people like to go to plays? Because they like to see their humanity staged, whether it's outrageous situations or touching situations, triumphs or tragedies, whatever. They like to see their humanity staged. And there's this kind of spontaneous delight we take in that. And this is important to literature's ability to convey something important. Uh, I often think of the T. S. Eliot when he was asked about the difference between prose and poetry. And he says that you know, genuine poetry communicates before it's understood. And that really strikes me as being, I mean, it's absolutely true, right? That you just before you sit down and you parse a great poem and you try and work it out, you you just kind of get it, right? There's something you just understand about that. And and so literature can do this too. And great literature does this partly by drawing us in, right? We we we lay down our guard, right? We we set aside rational objections, right? If if I start a course with something like Locke's second treatise of government, students are automatically going to start objecting, right? Ah, that's not right. This guy's claiming to teach me something, and I can disprove him or I can refute him. But literature, you don't start that way, right? You set your guard down. You don't start with, uh, how dare you try and teach me something, right? But that's what they do. They get you to care about,

Literature’s Power To Teach Politics

SPEAKER_01 18:08

say, a character. If you're reading a novel, you're you get to care about a character. Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them, right? But you now care about them. And and you maybe you want to see them succeed or see them fail. And once the author's got you attached to the character, to the situation, now they can go to work on you, right? And before you know it, you're you're being educated, you're being transformed in a decisive way. And you know, you get done with a book, you're not the same person you were before. You you've been transformed. And this, by the way, I would say is is another reason why literature is so important to kind of uh what elevating or refining our aesthetic judgment, right? Uh I uh you know, you you wanna you want to improve students' tastes in the beautiful. Don't give them a discourse on beauty or a treatise on beauty, show them something beautiful. And so literature is very important. So that's that's the first thing I would say. I'd focus on the the the pleasant aspect of literature. Um, but related to that, right, is that literature gives you models of excellence, um, uh models of villainy that we may not have readily available in our everyday life, at least in many cases, I'm glad we don't, um, since some of them can be so bad. Um, but they they, you know, they give us examples of people we can emulate or or cautionary tales to avoid. So when we think about something like when I'm trying to teach statesmanship or great leadership, and what does it look like? If I'm thinking about Thucydides, right? Well, well, here's a picture of Themistocles, or here is a portrait, right? A dramatic uh presentation of Pericles. Do we want our leaders to be like them? Is that great statesmanship? Or someone like Alcibiades or Cleon, right? We could think of that. Or if we're thinking about Shakespeare, you know, we said, should we model our politics on a Henry V or a Prospero or a Theseus? Or, you know, what about Coriolanus, the Roman Coriolanus or Othello or Richard III, right? Uh uh uh so you know, E. Gabs, Richard III. No, we don't want that, right? So they they give us these wonderful models uh that we're not likely to have in our ordinary uh experience. But but maybe I could give you an even different example. Uh so I I uh back at Assumption uh University, my home institution, I teach this course called political mass murder. And, you know, one of the one of the sad lessons about that is we spent a lot of time focusing on communist regimes and and all of the the mass murdering of their own citizens that communist regimes um have engaged in over the over the 20 century. Now, if I wanted to teach students the true horrors of communism and the crimes of communism, I could, say, on the one hand, take them through Das Capital or the Communist Manifesto and and go through it line by line by line. Or I could have them read selections from uh Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which is his firsthand account of his own experience in the gulag. Now, what do you think is more likely to leave an impact on the on the student? What's more likely to influence them, right? This kind of academic uh uh uh uh commentary on the communist manifesto, or getting them to live with Solzhenitsyn in the gulag, right? I my vote's on the ladder. And I think that's by the way, another reason why it's so critical for our students who are going to be the citizen rulers of America's future, to have this really rich background in in literature, right? They need to have their judgments formed by good literature, right? Oh, two more points. If I know I'm I'm going to go. I'm like, you can keep talking.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

I am I have honestly, I got my little notepad out and I already am like filling things up here.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

So so right, one of the other great things about literature area is it it prompts us to live the lives of others, right? To live along with them. And when we do that, we get to evaluate their decisions. Would we have done that? No, don't do that. We say, you know, uh, stop. No, this is you're making the wrong choice, you're picking the wrong guy, whatever this is, right? Someone um uh these certain love stories we have, right? Now that gives us an experience, again, we might not ordinarily get. And in fact, it gives us an experience we might not want to have, to have to learn from, right? There's certain things we just shouldn't have to learn on our own because it's simply too expensive. So, again, you know, well, think of Shakespeare, right? Um, do you really want to have to live the love affair of Romeo and Juliet or or Anthony and Cleopatra just to learn that this leads to disaster, death, and misery? No, it's too late, right? Don't do that. So, so literature gives you this counter experience, right? It gives you this experience so that you can save yourself. You can learn from their their failures, right? You you don't want to have to learn firsthand what it's like to have a friend like Iago to know that it's bad to have an associate like Iago, or, or in the case of Thucydides, to turn your political community over to a guy like Nickyus or even Cleon. Bad idea. Don't do it, right? So that so I think that's important. And then finally, you know, I'm thinking, um I'm thinking about thinking a lot lately about the the cultivation of political imagination. And in some ways, it's just simply important, right? It's just simply important. Like if if if you take a Plato or an Aristotle or Shakespeare or Twain, they're wiser than than we are and wiser than we can hope to be. And that presents a kind of challenge

Models Of Excellence And Caution

SPEAKER_01 23:51

for us because if we simply go to their work thinking, you know, okay, they're just going to take all this wisdom and just dump it into our heads. But it doesn't work like that, right? It's not knowledge in that way, it's not content in that way. You can't just dump it into someone's head or transfer it through writing this this down and have this people read it. You you have to to bridge that really almost seemingly unbridgeable gap between those who are truly wise and those of us who yearn for wisdom. You have to have this intermediary, and that's imagination. I mean, imagination really helps bridge that that gulf. That's huge. Um, so fortunately, we can benefit from their wisdom without having to be as wise as they are, which will never happen. That's really important for us in America, right? Um, why? Well, because America is a particularly imaginary kind of community. I mean, you think about it, our our our our whole political order is founded in ideas about the human person, about the rights we have, about what constitutes legitimate government. The founding of our government was was done by argumentation, right? These are people engaging in rational deliberation with each other. So we got these founding ideas that we're arguing over. Um, you know, one of the things I really love about America that continues to just give me goosebumps, even in my ripe old age, is that anyone in the world is in is is a potential American. And that's important because it means America isn't just reducible to a place or an ethnicity, uh, or a race or a tribe or religion, right? It it is very much a conceptual thing that one can enter into rationally and has to enter into rationally, right? And and so that that means then that if you're gonna have a an American civic body that is up to the task of preserving its liberty, it's gotta have a good political imagination, right? It it has to be not just so it's that, not just so that it's peopled with good models to emulate and bad models to avoid, but so that it can actually think well about what America is and can be. And so again, literature does this in a way, it builds that imagination that's absolutely indispensable to this to the success of the American political order.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

I love that. So if we're looking at civic education through kind of this lens, how could Twains or how might teachers use Twain's humor and satire in their classrooms to teach students about democracy, equality, and citizenship in ways that resonate with them? Because I appreciate that you said you can't just be like, here's Play Doh, dump it into your head and now you know it, right? Because I am an avid reader. I actually have um reading Brave New World with my CEL 100 class. We've we've done Rousseau, we've done Locke, we've done Play-Hoh, but I wanted to bring in some, you know, fiction for them because it it does brighten up your world. So how can we use this in classrooms, especially the humor and satire? Because I think that that is a key for students.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Yeah. So the first thing you got to do is actually assign the twain, right? I mean, that that's that's really important. Yeah, in my lifetime, right? When I was growing up, you could reliably count on young people having read some twain. Uh, whether it was the the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County or Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, by the time you know young people had graduated from high school, they had encountered some some um uh amount of twain. Uh so first thing you gotta do is assign it. Start with that. You can't do that enough. Um, and there's a lot of stuff out there

Imagination As Civic Education

SPEAKER_01 27:55

that is assignable. Uh, not everything deals with race, right? Um, not everything is 2,000 pages long, right? I mean a lot of short stories out there that you can assign. So assign it. So that's the first thing. Second thing is you got to teach students how to read well, right? Which means tending to his literary artistry, which, you know, there's a there's a lot of work there. But it also, I mean, think that this is really quite important, is teaching them how to read literary humor, right? That this is this is really important. I I think uh it's important not only intellectually, but it's morally important, all right. It's it's it's really important for the kind of cultivation of our civic character. Uh, I'll give you an example, right? So I think Twain's comedy is is terrific because we we one of the things you can say about comedy in general is that it it tends to bring the high down to the low. You know, you think of the Monopoly guy, Mr. Monopoly with his monocle, right? Monopoly guy slipping on a banana peel, right? And we all laugh at that and we go, okay, well, that that that rich so-and-so is just like us. See, he thought he was so good, right? But now he's just like us. He too can slip on a banana peel. Um, and that that's something that comedy, all comedy does. But Twain's comedy, and I think the best kind of comedy, doesn't, I mean, it punctures pretentiousness, yeah, but it punctures a kind of false pretentiousness. It exposes false pretentiousness for what it is, while preserving a respect for kind of genuine greatness. So it's not simply uh critical or simply destructive. It's not mockery for the sake of mockery, it's not derision for the sake of derision, which is what I think we see all too often in kind of contemporary humor. Let's just mock the living daylights out of things. So one of the things I think Twain's comedy teaches us, and that students would benefit from learning, is it teaches you to be critical without becoming cynical. And I think that's really important. You can be a critic without becoming a cynic. And so his critical comedy preserves this uh uh uh respect for something high, for something noble, for something elevated. Um Twain's comedy always involves something absurd. Now, absurdity again might lead us to think, well, it's uh it's a negative thing. We can, it's a destructive thing, it's a thing that allows us to reject the thing which is being exposed as absurd. But that's not what I think is true about Twain, right? I I think one of the things he does is you know, he gives us an experience with the absurd that doesn't make us jaded or cynical, but moderate. Because when we've had some an absurd situation exposed to us, we cease to make the same demands that we did before that, that maybe human life must always be super dignified, or human life must always be hyper-rational,

Teaching Twain’s Humor Without Cynicism

SPEAKER_01 30:58

or that we must always be right in all things at all the time. This again is I think critical, the really divided time we live in, right? An inability to kind of recognize the common fate we're all allotted. We all have to participate in a kind of again, uh maybe absurd is too strong of a word here, but but uh you know, I'll give you an example from from what's considered to be the great American novel, Huck Finn. Although from from Twain's perspective, his his greatest novel, his best novel was his uh the last complete one he wrote, which almost no one reads. Reads, personal recollections of Joan of Arc. Right. There's another example. I'm not sure how familiar people are with. The fact that Twain's longest, most longest complete and last work was dedicated to this French Catholic saint. But Huckfin, right? And here I have to give credit where credit's due. I have a colleague in Australia, uh Ivan Keneally, who has written a wonderful review of um Percival Everett's book, James, which is a reworking of Huckfin from the perspective of Jim. And uh anyway, uh Ivan Keneally has this wonderful review. It's going to be coming out in a forthcoming issue of um County Highway. It's a print magazine. They still exist, believe it or not. It's a print magazine published by Walter Kearns and David Samuels. Anyway, um one of the things that Keneally's in reading of Huck Finn shows is you know, both Huck and Jim share a common fate. And part of that common fate is that their their conscience has been shaped by the world they live in, which is a slaving world, right? So their conscience has been shaped by the political community of a the slave-owning South in America. And so, you know, Twain would not deny, hey, look, we we we are free agents, but we are also shaped in in really important ways by our environment in some respects. And if that were true, simply Huck and and Jim should loathe each other. They should really hate each other. But you read the novel and you see they don't come to hate each other at all. Right? They they see beyond or get beyond the deforming effects of their conscience as that conscience had been shaped or misshaped by reigning social codes. And so they learn to testify to the fundamental humanity that belongs to both of them. Now, to be clear, Twain doesn't think we should simply get a right get get rid of all uh uh social conditioning, right? You know, man is not by nature good, right? We are not by nature morally virtuous. We require uh civil society for the cultivation of our moral virtue. But that that civil society, as the novel shows, can be profoundly um deforming, distorting, corrupting. So there, so there's you know, the the human person is caught between the need to depend on society for its moral cultivation and moral discipline and moral structure, and the human person has to push back against that too. They have to to to strive to achieve some liberation from the deforming and distorting elements of that. Both Hawk and Jim have to do that. So there this is the absurd, this is what I mean by calling the situation kind of absurd. You need society to help cultivate and provide some kind of moral discipline to man's nature, but man's nature to be to reach its true flourishing has to push back against that forming uh uh social effect. And and so you know, both both Huck and Jim, I think this is part of the the the core recognition of their humanity, they realize they're both in this situation together. And and they, you know, they they have to recognize it as as as an absurdity. And in doing that, there's a kind of m mercy and reconciliation that that becomes possible. So, you know, you know, if if your audience is hoping for some pat answer here, I don't have one except to say that I think we live in this incredibly bitterly divided time, right? And and Twain is living in a far more uh writing about a far more bitter time than we have, right? He's writing in the wake of uh uh a terrible civil war and showing how we might see the kind of grounds for recovering our our humanity and our humane respect for each other, despite the fact that both Huck and Jim in some ways should, you know, should loathe each other, right? Um maybe, maybe not Huck loathing Jim, but you know, I'll say this at the end, despite his nobility, right? Despite his noble efforts to help Jim uh free himself, Huck still says, I don't want people to know the role I had in liberating this guy. I mean, they he can't fully or has yet to fully free himself from the distortion and prejudices of the society in which he was raised. So, you know, there is a way in which, you know, I think we have to exercise some grace here too. When we think about Hawk and we think about Jim, we think about Tom Sawyer in the novel. They're not perfect. But if if Twain is doing his job and effectively draws us into their lives and puts us in that situation, I think we're gonna be hard pressed to go, I would have done something totally

Huck And Jim’s Shared Fate

SPEAKER_01 36:55

different, I would have stood up and done the right thing. I think it would force us to recognize these are extremely difficult choices to be made. They're choices we all face together and we do not always choose correctly. And so there's a kind of, I think a kind of grace that we need to extend each other as a result of that. Now, if conveying that lesson to fifth graders or eighth graders or high schoolers, I mean it's tough for adults, right? But when you see that, when you when you have as a base of your education these kind of moral exemplars, that's really important. That's really important because it allows you in time to develop that capacity for for grace and reconciliation and forgiveness without sacrificing judgment either, right? I mean, that's that's the other crucial thing. We don't we don't leave something like Huck Finn suspending all judgment and going, well, you know, who's to say? We go, whoof, boy, that was that was tough. That was tough. We can understand why they did what they did or why they didn't do what they didn't do, and still go, they chose well here and badly there, even though I'm not sure I would have done much different given the given the background they had.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Well, and I think with students, especially when you're talking about like the upper elementary, middle school, even high school, having literary characters to utilize as models, like students are more empathetic to them. They they do give more grace than they would somebody who is a real life person. And it's because they can distance them, like they create that person in their head, right? And I know, I mean, I I love to read and I I love to read because I can create the movie in my head, right? Right. And that is, I think for students important too, and it allows them the empathy and allows them to have these models without it being somebody who is, you know, somebody they see on TikTok or whatever else, right? Right, yeah. I mean, I was excited about this podcast for many reasons, but I love talking about literature because when I was in the classroom, I used children's literature. I mean, I think that especially in civic classrooms, uh, literature is wildly underused. So I have James on my reading list, and now it's gonna get bumped up. And probably as soon as I can get to change a cans bookstores, I'm gonna grab it. But I I love that there is there's so much complexity in the characters, yeah, but it also allows us to create empathy and grace and models for you know what we'd like to see. So as we're approaching America 250, you know, the anniversary of America's founding, why do you think that Twain's reflections on politics, human natures, and democracy are particularly relevant?

SPEAKER_01 39:54

Right. So so the long answer, which I can't give here, would would require us to say something about like what what is America to Twain?

unknown 40:03

Right?

SPEAKER_01 40:03

What is America to Twain? And and we just can't do that here. The short answer would be something like well, Twain's relevant because he he teaches us who we are and who we can and should be. That may be too brief, so let's unpack this, right? So 250th birthday is a big one. And uh birthdays have uh this tendency to invite us to look back and say, you know, well, how far have I come or how far haven't I come? You know, is my life kind of what I wanted it to be? Have I done the things I wanted to do? Have I, you know, do I have a lot of regrets? What you know, it is these are occasions for for looking back. So, you know, America at the the 250th is, you know, same thing. Um have we strayed from our founding vision? If we've strayed, can we course correct? Uh, should we course correct, right? How do we feel about the founding vision? Um I think Twain is helpful with this because partly because um Twain's story, the story of Samuel Clemens and Twain's stories, the stories he writes, are the story of America, right? They tell the story of America, his life and his stories tell um our story. Uh, you know, so Twain is born in what, 1835, right? So America's just over 50 years old. But his his professional writing career, his national claim to fame doesn't come until 1865. Right after uh in the months after um the the war has ended, the the North and South are trying to figure out how we're gonna reunify this thing and and make this thing work if it's gonna work at all. Right at that time, Twain publishes his first big short story, which is the celebrated jumping frog of Calaver's County. Now I read that first piece as kind of Twain's opening bid to be kind of America's poet legislator. He's gonna provide the the the literary rhetoric to bring our country back together. And I think his career substantiates that effort, that he continues to engage in that effort for you know, whatever it is, the next 65 years or 75 years, right? I mean, this is this is what he he's trying to do. Um uh and so we have this, you know, we have this guy who is born to a not terribly distinctive or distinguished family. He's unlettered, uh, has doesn't have a lot of money, right? And uh he rags to riches kind of thing, right? Um, you know, we've got this guy who is uh uh what the the creator of our democratic vernacular, he is the the the the defender of the common man and yet goes on to dine with royalty and befriends presidents and is you know uh worshipped by generations of of readers. And you know, he's got these philosophers are dying to meet him and chasing him around, you know. Um his story is kind of like America, right? America starts off as this kind of backwater western upstart, and and and right by the end of the 19th century, we're one of the major players in global politics, right? So so Twain's life kind of dove dovetails nicely with the growth of America. So I think in many ways, you want you know, studying America just seems like such a massive thing to do

America 250 And Rereading Twain

SPEAKER_01 43:44

and hopelessly large. Fine, narrow it down. Let's study one man, this man, right? As I say, you know, he was he wasn't just rags to riches, he was rags to riches to rags back to riches. I mean, this guy was all over the place, right? Um so when we're thinking back, you know, how far have we come, America? How well have we done? Well, let's look at Twain and let's ask ourselves, you know, did Twain give us a pathway to refound ourselves in the wake of the North-South conflict? Did he show us a way in which we can marry successfully or effectively our concern with democratic equality to a kind of appreciation for individual human flourishing, individual excellence, true greatness? Did he provide us that path forward? So I I mean, you know, look, I'm a professor of politics. I think about America's 250th, and I I get very excited as a citizen, but as a professor, I'm like, oh, this is overwhelming. How do we break this down? And I think again, Twain's career provides Twain's career and Twain's story really provides a useful way for thinking about that, right? Again, he's he's getting started at a time when it didn't look like it was going so well, right? There's real questions. Is this is this we just came out of a nasty civil war? There's no guarantee we're not gonna have another one, and that's gonna be the end of it. His literature provides a path forward. You know, we can think about how well do we do we follow that path forward? Should we path forward, follow that path forward? I will just say this if if what I'm recommending here is America on our 250th birthday should reread Mark Twain, or should read Mark Twain perhaps for the first time, then I can't think of a better birthday present than that. Go read this great literature, right? What a gift.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

So if he was alive today, Mark Twain, what civic lesson do you think he would want Americans to take to heart?

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Two two big ones, right? Two big ones that come to mind for me. Um kind of patriotism or patriotic rededication to our country and and what it promises to be, and moderation. Um, I I should, you know, birthdays are our occasion for looking back, but they can also be an occasion for looking forward. You know, okay. Uh how much time I had, how much time do I have left? What am I gonna do with with my future in the time that remains to me? And so I think Twain would say, you know, think hard, America, uh, about what you you know, what you want this to become, because there's so much promise here. Um, there's there's so much potential here. You know, I I mentioned earlier that Twain has kind of read everything. Uh and it's true, I'm not, I'm not being facetious. I mean, I think if it had been printed, he read it, and not just in English. I mean, the man knew German, he knew French, uh, he knew Italian, he had picked up some ancient Greek and some Latin. Uh, this is really remarkable. Wow. Yeah, no, it's it's really really impressive. Again, he likes to play the kind of common man aweshucks. I'm just some, you know, a vuncular fella chopping my cigar, dropping some homespun comic yarns on y'all. No, this guy was a uh uh uh one of the rarest geniuses America has has produced. Um, so so I would say, given his reading, given his experience with the world, he he really did have a grasp of what kind of rare and precious experiment we had here and the possibility here. I mean, this is I think sometimes he got very angry with America. Um, I don't always think that anger was a front. I think that anger many times was serious because we were we were missing this really incredible opportunity and at risk of throwing it all away. And that again, opportunity is look, we you can have political liberty here. And that with that political liberty comes political equality. But that doesn't mean you should deny the possibility of human greatness. And some of that human greatness is evinced in the pages of Mark Twain's own work. I think he is itself an embodiment of what American greatness can be and and become, um, which is again a remarkably cultured, generous, refined, elevated human being

Patriotism And Moderation Today

SPEAKER_01 47:56

without without being the monopoly man, right? Um so I think Twain would say something like, I want you to try and defend that, preserve that, love that, right? He was a huge critic of this kind of thoughtless patriotism, the my country right or wrong kind of patriotism. He was a savage, relentless criticism of that. But when it came to what America could be, the promise it contained within itself, uh, I think he would say rededicate yourself to that. And again, this is really important at a time when so many Americans, we're seeing this across America today, certainly in America's institutions of higher education, where a lot of our college-educated students are being taught that America is the source of all that's wrong with the world. And you know, we shouldn't fight to preserve it, and we should fundamentally transform uh our political order in a direction at odds with our founding vision and in a very different direction. I think it's profoundly dangerous. And I think Twain would caution us don't do that because you're gonna throw away something really beautiful, precious, and rare. So a kind of rededication to uh America and what she represents at her best. Moderation, um, that's the second big thing I think uh I would take away. Twain would say, you guys got you guys gotta moderate yourselves. And I've talked about this a little bit already with respect to the kind of moderation affected by his comic irony or comic absurdity. Um, so I'm not gonna repeat myself on that here, but I will say there's a there is a way in which a lot of Americans uh have this unbridled, unquestioned confidence in the possibilities of science and reason to give us all the answers that all the answers to the problems that we face as moral, political, material beings. And I think Twain would say, you know, that is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to to to have that kind of confidence in the power of science and modern scientific reason. Um, you know, that that that one of the things, I mean, look, he was fully aware of the kind of the practical miracles of modern science. Uh he he funded a lot of projects that would promote technological innovation. Practically, well, he bankrupted himself in one case. Uh he'd thrown so much money at a particular project. Uh so you know, he he's not simply a Luddite. He's not someone who simply wants to go back to the sixth century at all, right? This is not someone who wants to return, but he's also very much aware of the limits of scientific progress, right? So, so I think he, you know, and some of those limits um are exposed when science eclipses, or when our obsession with science or our emphasis on science eclipses what makes man man and takes away our focus from our moral, spiritual, and intellectual development. And so I think Twain would would say, stop, stop doing that. And again, if you go back, and you know, he has characters like this throughout his corpus. Um, but you look at Hank Morgan in Connecticut Yankee, and his life is and his his fate, which is not a happy one, um, is a testament to this warning. You know, this character has has unquestioned confidence in the goodness of science to answer all of the problems facing human beings, and it ends up destroying his family, it ends up destroying all of his friends, and it ends up destroying himself and makes him miserable because it takes away its focus from man's moral, spiritual, and intellectual development as civic development. That's those are those are elements critical to his civic development. Uh so I think Twain would say, you know, love science. I don't want to go back and live in the non-scientific world of the the sixth century or something like that. But there are dangers with modern science, and we meet we need to be extremely mindful of them so that we don't throw out what makes us distinctly human in our effort to pursue greater material comfort and prosperity. So those are the two things I think that I would really focus on. I mean, you know, Twain is endlessly deep. Yeah. He's endlessly deep. You're you're there the you could do a lot more than what I've said already. But those, you know, I think at this present moment and the challenges we're facing, I think those are two things he would come out and say, yeah, America falls short of the glory a lot of times. You know, you you want to see some searing political criticisms. Read Twain on America's foreign policy in the Philippines. In fact, I think there was recently, uh just the other day, a piece published on America's foreign policy in the Philippines in the New York Times that that also cited Twain. You know, he he savages Roosevelt and he savages uh uh American foreign policy in the Philippines. So he's not, you know, he's he's not some benighted, you know, USA, USA, we can do no wrong. On the contrary, I mean you're not gonna find a uh a more upfront critic of American shortcomings. At the same time, right, he also recognizes the greatness and the promise that America retains. And man, we can't lose it because you throw it away, right? It's not a it's not a boomerang. You throw it away, it ain't coming back. All right. And the the history with which he was so intimately familiar would have taught him this. These things are extraordinarily rare, they're extraordinarily precious, they're extremely fragile. You break them, that's it. And so I, you know, I think Twain would say, be very, very careful, guys. You're at risk of breaking this.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

I appreciate the um reflection piece, right? Because I I connected with that. Like, oh, on your birthday, you think here's the things I've already done, and here are the things I still want to do. And it's a perfect time for Americans to think that. And I have a list of things um I'm going to make sure are in our show notes, but I will make sure to email them because you brought up so many. There's just so much here. And I'm so grateful that you brought this to us and you brought this expertise and this, you know, love of literature and bringing tying this all into America 250. PJ, this genuinely has just been again, we we are at a place that, you know, there's a lot of political thought, and I I I appreciate all of the faculty I get to work with, um, but I've yet to connect with somebody on literature. So thank you so much for this. This is amazing. And listeners, I will be putting a ton of links into the show notes um to make sure that everything that we've talked

Closing Reflections And Resources

SPEAKER_00 54:48

about um is available, as well as Dr. Dobsky, uh Dr. Dobsky's books. Oh, um, there's three of them. So I definitely want to make sure if you want to read that, anything else. But again, BJ, thank you so much for this.

SPEAKER_01 55:04

Listen, Liz, it was absolutely my pleasure. I've absolutely had a blast. I hope, I hope my enjoyment came through. Uh, I love talking about this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 55:13

It did. I have three pages of notes now.

SPEAKER_01 55:16

Good, good, good. Thank you.