Welcome back to the summer book club.
We’re reading Self Made: Creating Our Identities from DaVinci to the Kardashians.
Join us this Sunday on Zoom at 3pm EST/8pm UK for a chat about the book.
Click here to join. Whether you’ve been reading along or just keeping up with these posts, let’s spend an hour talking about the ideas together.
Chapters 5-6: “Light Came In as a Flood” and “The Dandy of the Unexpected”
Three Things to Notice
The itinerary of Self Made has taken us from the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to Regency England and to post- Civil War America. In chapters five and six, we enter the American Gilded Age (roughly 1870-1920) where democratic self making takes a disturbing turn (read the chapter over at Plough), followed by a jaunt to European cities of the same era where we meet the aristocratic self maker par excellence: the dandy.
During the Gilded Age, the ideal democratic self maker shifts from Frederick Douglass’ virtuous citizen to the capitalist entrepreneur. Just as Thomas Edison learned to harness the power of electricity, industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie tapped into what came to be understood as “the latent electrical energies of the immanent world in order to gain health, wealth, and recognition” (111). The ensuing wealth gap was “a metaphysical reality, based on an eclectic mix of scientific and spiritual principles” that soon found broad acceptance in American life, from the boardroom to the pulpit.
While the capitalist magnate rose to ascendency in America, artists and writers in cities across Europe began embracing the creed of the dandy: “that artistic creation, rather than grubby moneymaking, was the key to human superiority, and that artistic creation of oneself was the highest calling of all” (111). With clothing, gesture, hairstyle, and personality, the dandy embraced a “worship of the unnatural and the artificial” to escape the meaninglessness of nature and of a rapidly changing world (110).
Notable Quote
On what binds these two seemingly opposite figures together (125):
The aristocratic and the democratic narratives of self-making had different emphases and different aesthetics, but in this they agreed. The man who cut himself off from the limitations of the society around him and listened instead to his own desires and longings was not just superior to the common rabble. He was also, fundamentally, more human: higher on the evolutionary food chain, more in touch with the mysterious energies at work in the universe, and more in tune with the very purpose for which he had been put (or put himself) on earth.
Click here to join us on Zoom this Sunday at 3pm EST/8pm UK for a chat about the book.
We’ll start by discussing where we see the ideals of self making from these chapters at work in the church and in Christian communities.
See you next week for chapters seven and eight — “I Shall Be Ruling the World from Now On” and The Power of IT.