Stones, Spirits, and Hobgoblins
Thoughts on consistency inspired by the life of Ernestine L. Rose.
You can’t have more than one inviolable principle.
1. Extreme Ultraisms
In 1854, Susan B. Anthony and her close friend Ernestine L. Rose went on a speaking tour in the South, advocating for women’s rights. This immediately started to feel morally compromising. They were staying in slaveholders’ houses and hotels that hired slaves from their masters. They were being fed by slave labor and listening to people casually talk about owning other people. Anthony worried that “even I am becoming accustomed to slavery.”
Having two radical beliefs was highly inconvenient. The abolitionist movement had splintered over women’s rights, with many abolitionists worrying that allowing women to speak would make their movement seem too weird. Anthony and Rose were still trying to keep a foot in both camps, but actually being in the South was making it even harder.
At the same time, they felt their case for women’s rights was based on the principle of intellectual consistency. The phrase “women’s rights are human rights” is sometimes attributed to Rose, and it summarizes their position well. The United States was founded on principles of equality—the full realization of its promise would clearly require equal rights for all.
On April 9th, the pair attended a morning church service near Washington, D.C. Anthony’s diary records that the hymns were beautiful, especially the one on equality.
But then came the sermon. This is what they’d actually come for—they’d heard it was going to be about the role of women in society. And so it was, but the minister didn’t seem to have listened to his own hymn. Anthony writes:
The minister admitted the justice of the demand of Woman for her Rights, but denied that they were identical with man’s. The sermon was a bundle of inconsistencies.
Later that day, the two ended up having a very intense conversation (in private, but Anthony wrote it all down afterwards). The initial topic was the Know-Nothing party, whose core principle was mistrust of immigrants, especially Catholics. The Know-Nothings were largely pro-women’s rights, but were trying to be neutral on slavery, an impossibility that would soon destroy them.
Susan B. Anthony could trace her American ancestry back to the voyage of the Hercules in 1633. Rose, born Ernestine Louise Potowska1, was a naturalized citizen, originally from Poland. They both agreed, though, that the Know-Nothings’ nativism was anathema to all they stood for.
But then Rose mentioned that Lucy Stone and Wendell Phillips, two prominent abolitionists, had said they didn’t believe in naturalization, that no immigrant should ever gain citizenship. Anthony “expressed disbelief as to either of them having that narrow, mean prejudice in their souls.” Rose retorted that Anthony “was blinded and could see or hear nothing wrong in that clique of Abolitionists.” After a lengthy argument, Anthony writes,
I said “Mrs. Rose, there is not one in the Reform ranks, whom you think true, not one but whom panders to the popular feeling.”
She answered, “I can't help it, I take them by the words of their own mouths. I trust all until their own words or acts declare them false to truth and right. And no one can tell the hours of anguish I have suffered, as one after another I have seen those whom I had trusted, betray falsity of motive, as I have been compelled to place one after another on the list of panderers to public favor.”
Said I, “Do you know Mrs. Rose, that I can but feel that you place me too on that list.”
Said she, “I will tell you, when I see you untrue.”
As a peace offering, Anthony then copied out their favorite verse from that morning’s hymns, and inscribed it.
To my dear friend, Ernestine L. Rose
’Tis man alone who difference sees,
And speaks of high and low;
And worships those, and tramples these,
While the same path they go.
She handed it to Rose, who started crying. She said it wasn’t Anthony’s fault, but that she expected “never to be understood while I live,” at which point Anthony started crying too, because she agreed. She loved her, but she did not understand her.
She writes: “Mrs. Rose is not appreciated, nor cannot be by this age -- she is too
much in advance of the extreme ultraists even, to be understood by them. Almost every reformer feels that the odium of his own Ultraisms is as much as he is able to bear and therefore shrinks from being identified with one in whose view their Ultraism is their Conservatism.”
Anthony struggled her whole life with her dual loyalties to Black rights and women’s rights, sometimes sacrificing either for the other. But she always stood up for Ernestine L. Rose. Later that year, she campaigned for the National Women's Rights Convention to elect Rose as their president, defeating objections that having an atheist as their spokeswoman would harm the cause. It’s not true religious freedom, she said, if you’re not granting equal rights to all religions, and to having none at all.
2. Nature And Nature’s God
The cause of American independence also had an Atheism Problem.
It was hard to find an intellectual who questioned the word of their king, but not their church. Typically, one of the teachings of the church was that you shouldn’t advocate for independence! The Anglican Church’s head of faith is the king. Its most senior bishop at the time, Archbishop Frederic Cornwallis, was also the president of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which instructed its American members to “inculcate submission to government and obedience to authority, not only for wrath’s but also for conscience’s sake; exhorting your people to faithfully and cheerfully pay tribute to whom tribute is due…” namely King George. So by definition being a revolutionary meant questioning the church.
This was terrible for the movement’s image. The standard line of attack on basically any movement at the time was “this ideology advocates X, which is also what deists think, and deists are secretly atheists, ergo this ideology is evil.” Having outspoken deists front and center conceded half the rhetorical battle.
The non-Bible-believing revolutionaries mostly hid their beliefs for the greater good. Mostly. Thomas Paine, whose writing more than anyone else’s had sparked the revolution, didn’t, and he was ostracized for it, completely frozen out after the war. Thomas Jefferson was more circumspect in public, but privately circulated a Bible from which he’d removed all of the supernatural elements2. His Declaration of Independence declined to invoke Christ and Christianity, instead using the phrase “nature and nature’s God,” generally interpreted as code for deism. He’s one of only a very few Presidents not to be sworn in on a Bible.
The early congresses tiptoed around the issue. When the diplomat Joel Barlow handed them the opportunity, they did discreetly affirm that the United States was “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” It took a while for America’s royalist critics to notice and seize on that, but they did. Americans, when they responded at all, generally claimed that Barlow had gone rogue and forced the Congress into it3, and that he would never again be given any opportunity to abuse a position. Except then Jefferson made him the ambassador to France.
The conflict is far from settled. When a young Abraham Lincoln wrote an essay defending Thomas Paine’s deism, a friend of his burned it, worried about his future political career. That essay would probably have disqualified him from the presidency today, too.
3. That One Time Jews and Muslims Disagreed
Ernestine L. Rose was not just an immigrant abolitionist feminist atheist. She was also Jewish, the daughter of a rabbi. Oddly enough, the nativist Know-Nothings had no problem with Jews and supported Jewish politicians. Catholics couldn’t be trusted because they were all secretly taking orders directly from the Pope, the Know-Nothings said, but how could the Jews possibly have a secret conspiracy when they can never agree on anything? (Valid.)
To believe that Jews can’t be trusted, you have to either think that our apparent diversity of belief is a false front, or you need to be so invested in the idea of consistency and Law that even Jews appear to be too flexible. For example, you might be the Prophet Muhammad.
The ahadith are the stories or hadiths of the Prophet that Muslims consider to be well-attested. They include several describing the tensions of the early days, with Jewish and Muslim tribes coexisting. The most common theme of hadiths about these conflicts is disagreement over the proper penalty for adultery.
The Torah is pretty clear on this. If two people are found guilty of adultery, say multiple verses, they must both be put to death. Deuteronomy 22:21 says that the woman is to be stoned to death, while the others don’t specify a method.
But according to these stories, the Jews weren’t doing this. Instead, adulterers were stripped naked, covered in ash, and put on a donkey to ride around their village. They were not even slightly being put to death.
Public humiliation is by its nature difficult to conceal, so of course the Prophet learns of this. In one hadith, the Prophet spots the sentence being carried out (the man and the woman at the same time, back to back on the same donkey). He approaches and asks the local rabbi what’s going on.
Q: What is this a punishment for?
A: Adultery.
Q: Is this what the Torah says to do?
A: Yes.
Q: I ask you in the name of God, is this what the Torah says to do?
A: No.
The rabbi confesses that the Torah commands that they be executed, but that they’ve found that in practice, the death penalty only served to widen existing class and economic disparities. Rich people could always get out of it, but poor people couldn’t. So, in the interests of consistency, they came up with a punishment that was just barely not worth buying your way out of, so that they could punish all offenders equally.
The Prophet is not buying it, and insists that the Jews follow the letter of their own Law. He’s especially angry when he learns that the Jews have an understanding that all of his judgments as Head Rabbi are to be obeyed except the ones commanding someone be executed. Stories like these are often interpreted as implicit justifications for the eventual decision to exile them.
As you may have noticed, making people ride donkeys is not the modern Jewish response to inconvenient commandments. Instead, Jews typically make the evidentiary standards impossibly high. The Torah doesn’t say to stone adulterers, after all. It says to stone those found guilty of adultery. If your only legal process to find someone guilty of adultery requires multiple sworn eyewitness statements and a judge appointed personally by Moses or his designated proxy, you’re in the clear.
It’s possible to read some of the other hadiths as saying that this is what was actually going on at the time, too. There’s a few where a Jew is accused of killing a non-Jew, and a feud threatens to break out because their respective tribes can’t agree on evidentiary standards. The Prophet always settles it by paying the weregild himself.
Jesus, more famously, settled the stoning issue a different way. According to John 8, his enemies the Pharisees deliberately cornered him into it. While Jesus was teaching, they brought in “a woman caught in adultery4” and asked him what should be done. Jesus preached mercy, but also adherence to the Torah, and the Pharisees had found the scenario that brought the two into the sharpest possible conflict.
Jesus escapes the trap by appealing to another principle of consistency—how can it be just to punish someone for being caught, when you yourself are simply a luckier sinner? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” he says, and one by one, everyone slinks out, “convicted by their own conscience.” Only Jesus remains, and while he may indeed be without sin, the Law in this case binds only communities, not individuals. With nobody left to condemn her, he is permitted, and in fact obligated, to show mercy.
4. A clown, not a monster
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
The story of Ernestine L. Rose is one challenge to Emerson’s rule. She was great. She was misunderstood. But Rose was also gloriously consistent. She’s perfectly easy to understand today; you’d never read anything she wrote, said, or did and get a wrong idea of her, now that all of her beliefs are mainstream.
Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who was “only following orders” and became the subject of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil, is a different kind of challenge. One of the first things Arendt wrote about him was that the court at Nuremberg was ignoring how ridiculous he was.
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed.
What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath?
Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight for his neck, to plead for mercy—and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document that contained a plea for mercy?
As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, not of inconsistencies, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content.
In other words, Eichmann was Emerson’s quintessential great man, right?
Eichmann might have agreed. Arendt wrote that he was very invested in his identity as an “idealist,” willing to sacrifice “everything and, especially, everybody” to the ideal of…something. Unity, maybe. He would have sent his own father to his death if it was his duty, he claimed. He wouldn’t be happy about it, but he would.
5. Hobgoblins and Anima
Your values can always be brought into conflict. No useful system of ethics is free of dilemma. You can say that you will absolutely never kill, and also absolutely never break a promise. But at most one of those can be true of the same person, because if they discovered that the only way to keep a promise meant killing someone, they would make a choice. One principle remains an absolutely, while the other becomes a mostly.
Having one absolute law can be an animating force. In a sense, all of us animate beings have one—there’s some underlying principle that determines all of our actions and evolutions, it’s just super complicated and mostly opaque5. When it’s simple, though, like Rose’s “always call out harmful BS” or Eichmann’s “always follow orders and in their absence do whatever sounds most noble,” that can drive you to become the kind of person who does great and/or terrible things.
From other people’s perspectives, someone following a simple principle can seem and be erratic, can seem less principled than someone whose code is fuzzy and easily modified by others. Rose is tainting the women’s rights movement with all this abolitionism, so clearly abolitionism is her real agenda—no wait, now she’s calling out sexism in an abolitionist minister’s sermon. So she’s anti-religion—no, wait, now she’s calling out anti-Semitism in the atheist community? Pick a team, already.
This animation shows one of the ways you can define “sine” and “cosine”. The green dot in the bottom right corner is moving in a circle. It’s a simple motion, one of the simplest there is. But if all you’re looking at is how high or low the dot is going, its path looks wiggly: the cosine wave at the top. If all you’re looking at is how far to the left or right it is, that’s the sine wave on the bottom.
The cosine wave contains less information than the circle—it’s measuring only one dimension, while the circular motion is two-dimensional. But it looks more complicated. Without the extra dimension, it’s harder to see why the dot keeps going up and down.
6. Because If
The hope for consistency can animate a nation, too. When Ernestine L. Rose came to the United States, it wasn’t because it was the freest nation on earth—back then, anyway, it certainly wasn’t. Like many reformers, she was inspired not by the state of the nation, but by the words in its founding documents.
Once, the Albany Daily State Register published an editorial condemning Rose and her followers. They speculated that she had come to America in order to abuse our freedom of speech.
Ernestine L. Rose came to this country, as she says, from Poland, whence she was compelled to fly in pursuit of freedom. Seeing her course here, we can well imagine this to be true. In no other country, save possibly one, would her infidel propagandism and preachings in regard to the social order be tolerated.
Rose, as was her policy, wrote them a much shorter letter in response, not rebutting any of their criticisms, but simply correcting a factual error.
In the article alluded to, you say: “Ernestine L. Rose came to this country, as she says, from Poland, whence she was compelled to fly in pursuit of freedom.”
It is true that I came from Poland; but it is false that I was compelled to fly from my country, except by the compulsion, or dictates of the same spirit of “propagandism,” that induced so many of my noble countrymen to shed their blood in the defence of the rights of this country, and the rights of man, wherever he struggles for freedom. But I have no desire to claim martyrdom which does not belong to me. I left my country, not flying, but deliberately. I chose to make this country my home, in preference to any other, because if you carried out the theories you profess, it would indeed be the noblest country on earth.
Yes, she took her husband’s name. That didn’t stop a wag in Vanity Fair from referring to him as “Mr. Ernestine L. Rose.”
Which gave it a bit of a downer ending—Jefferson permitted his Christ to die, but not to be resurrected.
I don’t think this is a valid defense. It would’ve been awkward for Congress to try to line-veto one article of a treaty, but the power of that line doesn’t come from it being legally binding. Senators could have said on the record that they disagreed with it. John Adams could have written a signing statement to the same effect. Neither of those would have invalidated the treaty. Instead, they passed it with unanimous consent, and Adams’s signing statement explicitly endorsed all the articles.
Already, the Pharisees are on shaky ground by only bringing in the woman, not her affair partner.
In another hadith, a Jew approaches the Prophet while some friends call after him “No, don’t ask! You won’t like the answer.” The Jew ignores them and asks the Prophet what the true nature of people’s spirits is. The Prophet goes into a trance and says “Nobody but God is allowed to understand Spirit.” The Jew returns to his friends. “Told you so,” they say.