Before I post anything else this morning, I do want to say that I'm very grateful for all the comments many of you have made in the last several days. Several of these are rattling around in my head after I've read them, and I may even respond to some of them in postings I do here in a moment (and I will respond to them properly on the blog in a day or so, God willing).
Meanwhile, I wanted readers to know that I'm sorry to be slow to acknowledge comments (and I do like to try to acknowledge them, because when people say something, they put a part of themselves into what they say, and deserve a response as human beings). And I wanted to explain briefly what I've been doing these days, in addition to blogging--and why I'm slow to thank you for commenting.
I think I mentioned in a posting or two around Christmastime that I took a trip out west before Christmas. The primary reason for that trip was for a cousin-collaborator working with me on a book right now and me to visit another cousin in California who owns an old family diary essential to the book project. (Steve and I did also visit friends in San Francisco on this trip, and Steve generously made the entire trip possible for me as a Christmas gift.)
The diary expedition was successful beyond our expectations. We had hoped to see the diary and answer some questions we had about it as we leafed through it. But the cousin who owns the diary, which had previously been available to us in a blurry (and, as it turns out, expurgated) photocopy, generously let us bring the precious and very fragile old document home with us and have it professionally scanned. And this is why my response to comments on the blog has been slow lately: I've spent the last weeks carefully reading every line in this old document in the new, complete digital copy we have, comparing the original with the transcript we'll be publishing, and adding transcripts of material it turns out we had not had in the photocopied version of the diary with which we'd been working.
A footnote about that: the person whose work we're editing, Wilson Bachelor, was a freethinker. At some point in the 1870s, his thinking made a radical turn away from orthodox Christian thought to a freethinking agnosticism that tended towards pantheism (and definitely towards a social progressivism that strongly defended the separation of church and state, promoted women's and workers' rights, called for the repeal of the death penalty, and worked against racial discrimination and racial violence). As Susan Jacoby notes in her history of American freethought (Freethinkers [2004]), the term "freethought" in the American context has always been elastic, and the movement comprises many different shades of opinion from outright atheism to dissent from orthodox doctrines by people who choose to remain in the religious groups whose teaching they're contesting--but all of whom shared a commitment to progressive causes in the latter half of the 19th century.
In essays Bachelor wrote about his turn to freehthought, he hints that his turning point occurred due to the famous series of sermons Henry Ward Beecher preached in 1877, in which he denied the literal interpretation of the bible and the existence of a physical hell. As he also notes, Canon Frederic Farrar preached a similar set of sermons around the same time, and both sermon series seem to have influenced Wilson Bachelor's thinking in his faraway home on the western Arkansas frontier.
He also indicates that it was around this time that he began reading the scriptures of the world religions and comparing them to each other, and that he was struck by the similarity between the mythic accounts of creation in the Jewish scriptures, and those in, say, Sanskrit literature, where Brahma spawns male and female from his own flesh. When he began to read widely in the burgeoning field of the history of religion, and, in particular, in the literature of the ancient Near East, he found that the Jewish scriptures couldn't even claim some primacy of place among these mythic accounts due to their age--because the mythic literature of some of their neighbors (e.g., Egypt and Assyria) was older than that of the Hebrew people's bible.
And so Wilson Bachelor came to the conclusion that all the scriptures of the world are essentially mythical, and his scientific bent (since he was a doctor) and acceptance of the notion of evolution led him to another conclusion: that science, rather than religion, offers the set of truths we need to guide us in creating humane societies at this point in human history. But his decision to become a freethinker came at a certain cost: his local Masonic lodge publicly repudiated him after he published these ideas in a written work that appears not to have survived, Fiat Flux.
And some members of his family became, in time, embarrassed by his espousal of heretical ideas in a state whose culture was and remains so largely imbued with conservative evangelical ideas. And so some family members who had such pieces of his extensive body of writings as have survived began to be reluctant to share them, and, in particular, to share the bits and pieces that speak frankly of his freethinking ideas.
Those of us collaborating to collect Wilson Bachelor's work, to transcribe and publish it and to annotate and comment on it, had previously noticed that the photocopied edition of the diary with which we were working seemed mysteriously to elide certain years--to jump in medias res from one unfinished account to another whose beginning wasn't recorded. And so we suspected pages had been omitted from our photocopy, and we had a fairly strong suspicion that those pages must have contained information about his radical religious notions.
And so it turns out, now that we can see the entire diary. All of which is, I feel certain, a grand bore to someone who hasn't spent recent weeks immersed in the pages of an old diary, but all of which is my reason for being slow to reply to comments here. I am finding it difficult to turn my attention back and forth from the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s to the present.
On the other hand, when indecipherable words on old pages begin to drive me crazy, it's actually a relief to read the current news and dash off some comments about it. And so what blogging I've been doing, I'm doing as a sanity-saving measure while I work with the dusty (metaphorically speaking: my digital copy mercifully doesn't persevere the dust) old book.
And what a world I must be living in, when reading and commenting on the current news is sanity-saving. That's a line I'm not sure I've ever written before in any other context, and one I suspect I will never write again.
The graphic is the diary's opening page, which begins 1 March 1870 with an account of the family's move from west Tennessee to Arkansas by flatboat and steamboats, accompanied by a picture from a magazine it appears Dr. Bachelor had cut out and pasted into the diary as an illustration of the journey.
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