People who have never read Hawthorne may have trouble understanding this paper. Enjoy!
"...In these circumstances his [Hawthorne's] characters see, and what they see, they almost always believe."
Since the inception of time, youths have gained a sense of superiority in their adolescence and early adult years in that their perceptions of the world have somehow become more advanced than that of their predecessors. The blunderings that follow need not be mentioned now, but can easily be imagined.
In class we spoke of how arguing with an adolescent would be enough even for Job to curse God’s name, and that the youthful tend to look at the world in only black and white. Black and white would then be the two categories by which they sort all matters. If such organization is rigid and logical, then it demonstrates that a vast number of youthful errors are the result of the character imbalance “too much head and not enough heart.” And who can blame them? The practice of logically organizing everything into neat, perfect, little categories on a grid is ingrained in them in their most basic studies from day one. This sort of organization is the only thinking that most children are capable of at that age. That is what the infant and subsequent childhood minds are most drawn to.
Heart knowledge is a lot harder to obtain because it is not something that can be taught only in the classroom (ie. The Biblical scholar who spends his spare time at the brothels is missing this point). However, a strong background of “head knowledge” can help a student to understand metaphor and read good literature (which can then lead to “heart knowledge”). Unfortunately, there is no course designed in which a person is taught exactly how to take their head knowledge and use it to gain heart knowledge. The course is life, and rather than a classroom, it is a moral battleground where there are no “do-overs” or “rewrites.” Inevitably, failures will occur (which is something that students today have not learned to accept as part of life). The course of life is not graded on a bell curve, and there is no scaling.
It is that imbalance of head knowledge that might cause an intelligent youth to argue that “justice is the advantage of the stronger”, thinking that life is merely about acquiring power through the use of [bad] logic (while being unable to subordinate himself to a higher standard). It may cause a young man to question goodness, becoming jealous of those around him who have more “pleasures” in their lives. The imbalance may also cause a youth to fall into the trap of thinking he is smarter than he really is, and that he can put off his studies and produce a lengthy essay with no effort (not that I know anyone like that)!
Inevitably, every youth goes through a period of time where his head knowledge has matured well, but his heart is still waiting to catch up. For some people this never happens. There are special facilities for them in the College of Business (just kidding)! They are the empiricists, the cold-hearted logicians, the ones who think that marriage is a matter of economy, and the French Philosophers (I am on a roll today). They are the ones who think that everything in the world can be neatly organized and classified, and that anything sacred can be manipulated for their own devices as long as it is justified in the name or progress. They try to measure “units of pleasure” even! Can the reader imagine how silly it would be for someone to stop and smell the roses and then hook a device into his brain to measure the number of “hedons” that it produces? (For the hedonist, one “hedon” was considered one unit of pleasure).
They even try to explain heart knowledge as a way of making up for the lack of head knowledge through mockery. “Why do the elderly tend to come closer to God?” And the head knowledge “expert” replies, “It is an irrational fear of God, who does not exist.” Did it ever occur to this guy that maybe the elderly person has finally acquired the heart knowledge needed to subordinate himself to a higher power? The head knowledge “expert” cannot see that he is acting just like an adolescent, thinking that worldly knowledge places him above everyone else!
In essence, the imbalanced, head knowledge “experts” are children. And some of them spend their entire lives in that state.
Doctor ***** once said that “moral virtue is not a product, but an activity.” And certainly this was derived from Aristotle. The imbalanced, headstrong youth will view moral virtue as some product that he can “get to” and “be done with,” and that is when he will fall.
Hopefully this lengthy introduction sets the stage and provides the reader with the sense that these problems have existed all throughout time, and will continue to exist. A young person must first acquire the basic skills needed to understand literary and political concepts, and then he must choose to find the heart knowledge. Unfortunately, this may also rationalize that everyone goes through a period of pride and “hot-headedness.” Rather than hold the naive belief that the youth of the world will someday grow simultaneously in head and heart knowledge, the best a teacher can do is provide guidelines by which the youth can use his head knowledge to find his heart; be it during the times of the Puritans or in a world of terrorism, broken families, underage drinking, and drug use.
Thus, the certainty at which I have arrived from my studies of Hawthorne is that youths make errors, and without the humility to call out for a guide, they will wander their entire lives.
There was once a young man who fell in love with a woman. Her mother was from Germany and her father was from Guam. Thus, she was tall and slender, had rich dark skin, and long, flowing black hair. She had the intellect of a scholar and the voice of an angel. Compared to most of the women his age, this girl was a God-send. The young man could not help but be drawn to her. Unfortunately, all of these wonderful qualities did not make her perfect, as the young man had made her out to be. He viewed her as the compliment that fixed all of his problems, rather than accepting that she loved him despite his flaws. One night she made a mistake and spent it in the company of another man. Though the young man had never done this, he certainly may have fallen to a similar temptation given the circumstances. Unfortunately, this shattered his perfect view of her, and he became distant from her.
The young man then went through a period of solitude, in which his studies took a cynical and dark turn. It was as though everything in the world was covered with a thin layer of grey ash, and the formerly green landscapes of his homeland became a blasted plague-land. He lost all faith in human beings, even himself. Realizing that he could have fallen to this temptation as well, he separated himself from most human contact, rationalizing that by limiting his correspondence with others that he would not fall to any temptation of wrongdoing, nor would he have to suffer through the witnessing of it. As clever as this plan seemed to him at the time, the young man became decreasingly happy. The man did not ask for a guide because he had used this one event to logically classify all humans as “awful.” He sat alone in his house with only the occasional visitor. Very rarely he would venture out (only by the courage of wine), and his previous joyful nature was replaced by academic haughtiness and cynicism. He sought to tear down the happiness of others, declaring that their joy could only be the result of their wrongdoings; their acquisition of pleasure at the bastardization of goodness. He made assumptions that every person was only out for their own sake, and treated them accordingly.
Young Goodman Brown snuck out one night and witnessed many of the people in his town partaking in the Witches’ Sabbath. They were the ministers, the shopkeepers, and even the woman who taught him his catechism. Whether or not this event was a reality or a dream is irrelevant, because it demonstrated to him that these individuals, no matter how high he hoisted them on the pedestal of perfection, were still subject to error. Rather than accept that individuals (even our teachers) still make mistakes, Goodman took it as a betrayal, and mentally separated himself from the rest of the community. He could not even look his wife in the face nor hold her at night, and his dying hour was “gloom.” He did not have the heart to forgive the people for their sins, and logically classified them all as people who should be avoided at all times.
The other young man previously spoke of may have existed in a more contemporary time than Goodman, but the events were similar. Both he and Goodman were too blighted to even give themselves a guide to find a way out of their darkness.
The contemporary young man is not yet dead, and he has not had a dying hour of gloom. Invariably there is still time for him to crawl out of the hole that he has dug, but only time will tell that tale -
There was once another young man who was very proud of his ability to catch onto all matters of academics with ease. Even as a child he was extremely fast at the mathematical drills, and was reading far beyond his level at age seven. At the time he did not view his capacities as a gift from some higher force, but rather considered himself superior to others. Though he did not demonstrate this minor character flaw in the days of his youth, it was only because he had not been presented with a situation that would turn this small crack into a gaping abyss.
Perhaps some individuals make it through their entire lives with a certain flaw of character because they are fortunate enough to avoid situations that would exacerbate the imperfection. This young man was not so fortunate. Though he had often questioned the validity of some of his teachings in grammar school, he lacked the audacity to speak up on the matter. But his pride grew along with his age, and a situation arose in which the young man’s flaw tore him to shreds. During a particular class in college, the man disregarded the teachings of a certain author which he prematurely declared to hold no value. Rather than pay attention to the intricacies of the teachings, the man spent time in other pursuits, feeling that he could overcome any lack of study time with his sheer intelligence. Needless to say, he “got his academic butt kicked.” Along with this error, the man set about deconstructing the imperfections of other people, pointing out every intellectual mistake they made. By doing this he became less popular on a daily basis, and soon people began to avoid him.
In The Birthmark, Hawthorne’s character Aylmer was considered to be well versed in every “natural philosophy.” Undoubtedly, he would have encountered teachings that delineated the line between science and philosophy (or the line between head and heart knowledge). Obviously he chose to ignore this boundary, and took science as his primary love. He loved it so much that he was willing to subject his wife to potentially deadly toxins in order to remove what he considered an “imperfection.” The result of his prideful doings caused the death of his Georgiana. Unfortunately, Hawthorne wrote nothing beyond this scene, so whether or not Aylmer would have finally admitted to his boundaries is not known.
The contemporary young man, however, licked his academic and social wounds and briefly considered that he may not have been as wise as he thought. The result was a gradual “rising up” out of the pit that he had fallen into. He took on various authors of literature and instructors as his guides. His journey out of this hole is still going on today, and he occasionally slips up a bit, but he continues to climb upward. While Aylmer refused to seek out a guide, the young man found several, and continues to rise -
Youths make errors, and without the humility to call out for a guide, they will wander their entire lives. This problem has been demonstrated to occur through time immemorial. Through this undertaking, I conclude that pride is the deadliest of all the sins. It causes celestial beings to “take evil as their good,” opens the door for the rest of the sins, and provides the “wanderers” with a false sense of rationalization. Only by removing the sin of pride can a young man find the moral guide to help him accept his own flaws and the shortcomings of others. Without it, his life will be blighted, blasted, and grey. It matters not in what time period these individuals exist, for the sin takes on various forms, but the same malevolence and ignorance is at the core. Woe to the man who never comes to realize that his elders are not as dumb as he initially thinks, and woe times a thousand to the man who goes through his entire life without this knowledge, for surely he has a fate worse than that of Cain, destined to wander the earth for all eternity.