What Dickens Taught Me about the Great Awokening
What many fail to realize is that the first lines of A Tale of Two Cities are not separate sentences. We’ve heard about the best and worst of times so often that our first steps into the world of the loving Darnays and sinister Defarges are swift and smooth.
But those first lines are hammer blows. Rightly read, they pound our complacence so thin that we split in two under the weight of the tension. From the beginning, our attention is drawn to two very different worlds. One is a world of revolution, the other a world of peace.
Revolutions so rarely end well that we, like Dickens, are right to be suspicious of them. Misgivings about such rapid social and political change have certainly been vindicated by the military revolutions of Africa, Asia, and South America; the communist revolutions of the 20th century; and the great French Revolution of 1789, the subject of Dickens’ novel.
The communist and French revolutions in particular were decidedly ideological in nature. Though they were indeed violent, their leaders purported to act in the service of an ideal. These so-called ideals were guilty of reductionism. They took man to be of a single shade and, therefore, utterly malleable when appropriately understood.
Communists declared that social arrangements fully determine a person, such that man is at base a machine describable in purely mechanistic terms. French rationalists posited that man apart from his benighted social mores is entirely rational, more of a disembodied mind than a flesh and blood being. What each of them vigorously asserted was that pure reason and public planning could provide anything irrational social institutions (most notably established religion) did; only they could do it better. The priests of the Great Awokening share this reductionism and have inherited their ideas from these movements. Accordingly, some factions view man a social determinant (e.g., Black Lives Matter) while others advocate pure individualism (e.g., trans activists).
What Dickens brings to the fore in A Tale of Two Cities is that humans are complex. At their best, they are a balance of social and individual forces, of external and internal operations. Some are chosen; some are not. And it is this tension that is at the heart of peace and prosperity in both personal and societal matters.
That man is complex and that happiness lies in medians between extremes is an old idea. Edmund Burke deserves all credit for introducing it into the modern world, but Aristotle argued centuries before the birth of Christ that virtue was found in a mean between two vices. It’s a terribly Dickensian idea, but all good thinkers are probably aping Aristotle anyway.
It is the tension of the social and individual that makes Dickens’ characters so compelling. And, in the case of Madame Defarge, the lack of tension that makes her so petrifying.
The happy Darnay’s and the peaceful home they inhabit with close friends such as Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry always around show the virtue of community. They are united by their love of each other and are as devoted as can be. They all make life-threatening sacrifices for each other at various points, and their desires are often fully displaced. They want good for their loved ones for their loved ones’ sakes, quite apart from any benefit that would accrue to themselves.
But they are far from mere social units. Describing the profundity of individuality, Dickens writes, “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” And, what’s more, each person has this grand secret such that the commoner has “exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London” (16). Philosophers call this ‘privileged access.’ We have direct experience of our inner lives — our most sincere individualism — that others never will.
This makes each of us unique, but we cannot rest solely on those laurels. Much of what we do every day is passed to us through tradition and prescription, through the forces we encounter via our family, friends, community, country, and culture. We may be a deep well of secret individualism, but we must live in a world in which others are, too. We cannot do it all ourselves, and in order to live together (which we all, in the end, truly desire), then our identity becomes subject to negotiation, as Jordan Peterson never tires of reminding us.
Contrast this with the single-minded Madame Defarge, to whom it “was nothing…that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live” (359). This woman is a scale titled entirely in one direction. There is no compromise between competing natures, no understanding of the tension inherent in humankind and the need to balance competing interests in our own lives and the life of a community.
It is this balance, a frustratingly delicate balance, that makes for stability. Man is both essentially an individual andessentially a social creature. When we disregard the balance as irrational or naive (as all enemies of peace do), we end up with chaos.
Look around you now. The neo-Marxists would have you believe that humans are pure social products who have no choice about their identity. All black Americans are victims; all white Americans are oppressors. The rationalists would tell you that our identity is purely a matter of choice, a choice that we have a supreme moral right to make unhampered by the prescriptions of communal bond. There is no concern here for the complexity of humans or the lives they lead. There is no acknowledgement of the world as we find it; there is only naked moral shrieking.
The end result, as Dickens so poignantly describes, is violence. When a mob is enflamed, little that we might call human is left. The sound a mob makes is “of craving and eagerness that [has] nothing articulate in it but blood” (330). When people are convinced that life is not complex but simple and that the mere fact that they are unhappy means someone is keeping them in chains, it easily calls up “the most revengeful passions of the time, and there [is] not a head in the nation but must drop before it” (330).
It is important to note that stability is not everything — sometimes revolutions are justified and do end with something better — but it counts for a hell of a lot when we consider the alternative. Stability is what allows us to plan our lives and flourish. It allows us to build our communities and develop ourselves. Chaos destroys our ability to do much of anything except hunker down and survive.
Furthermore, the revolutions that do not claim exclusively Pyrrhic victories are usually grounded in tradition. It was not a spirit of revenge or abstract moralism that compelled the American Revolution. The revolutionaries were interested in their ancient rights as Englishmen, rights which Parliament and the Crown were casting aside without opportunity for redress.
It is at first glance odd that such a famous social reformer would harbor views so…conservative. But, Dickens understood that reform and revolution are worlds apart. He understood that we can acknowledge the sins of the past without destroying all the ties that bind us. He also understood that we can fight for a better future without mortally wounding the present. Because of this, his sketches of the tyrannical French aristocracy are no less scathing than those of the violent mob.
What Dickens can show us all is that the Great Awokening is not new. Its parents scarred the earth hundreds of years ago. And it is not, as I believe many assume, a procedural or legal failure. Confirming the right justices or electing the right politicians will not solve the problem. For the problem is a misunderstanding of the very nature of humankind.
For all of the love of the Darnays, there is the Terror of the Defarges. If we do not take a stand now to defend the tension that makes us whole, we will see far more of the season of Darkness and winter of despair than the season of Light and the spring of hope. It will be the worst of times, and the best will be a distant memory.
