I recently had the pleasure and privilege of participating in a reading group with the American Enterprise Institute on the topic “The Human Heart Itself: Hawthorne’s Vision of Reform.”

Friends, I have thoughts.

Actually, thoughts might be a bit too generous, but most of my musing are more than a little inchoate so…

Par for the course, I say!

You have been warned.

Onward!

Let’s start with a short summary of the piece at issue: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story “Earth’s Holocaust.”

In brief, the story centers around mankind’s bid to make a better world by burning all of the “antiquated trash” that has despoiled humanity since time immemorial.

The trash includes, but is in no way limited to:

• Newspapers
• Vestiges of royalty, knighthood, and nobility
• Alcohol (like, all of it)
• Weapons, munitions, muskets, and swords
• A whole, entire guillotine
• $$$ (reluctantly)
• Books (of course)
• Religious texts, crosses, and trappings of all sorts

All tossed into the flames with mob-minded alacrity and variations of “hip-hip-hooray!”

And yet…

At the end of the tale, when the high is fading and reality and regret are settling in amongst some of those present, a dark figure appears and tells them to buck up–don’t worry!

All the things they toasted will be back in a hurry!

Because though they’d burnt the entire earth to a crisp, they’d failed to roast the true source of all the wrong and misery.

That being the human heart itself.

The figure says, and I quote,

“Unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery–the same old shapes or worse ones–which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. O, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!”

Interesting, is it not?

I think so!

Which is why I have thoughts!

So…

Having read and briefly discussed this piece with my AEI reading buddies, there are, to me, two big questions at play:

1. What is the price of progress?
2. Are we willing to pay?

Let’s begin.

What Is The Price of Progress?

Spoiler alert: I agree with Hawthorne.

The human heart itself needs to be burned.

Roasted.

Toasted.

Thrown onto the pyre and purified with fire forthwith!

As evidence, I submit these simple words from Hozier’s hit song “Take Me To Church:”

“I was born sick, but I love it/
Command me to be well”

Don’t those words just knock your socks off?

They certainly do for me, and honestly, I think those are some of the most poignant and powerful lyrics ever written about the human condition.

They get to the heart of the matter, pun intended.

We were born sick, but we love it. Command us to be well.

To which all our politicians say,

“Oh don’t you worry. We will.“

Ah.

Such lovely people.

But I digress!

We’re not talking about them and their abject inability to pull their heads from their posteriors long enough to “command” us to anything akin to progress–we’re talking about us.

You and me.

Because the fact of the matter is even if (and this is a big if) our benevolent overlords could pluck their heads from their buttocks, they would never, ever, be able to fully control or constrain us.

In the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson,

“With respect to original sin, the inquiry is not necessary, for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from crimes.”

Isn’t that the truth?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, I say!

And human beings have a really bad track record of willing the cruel, the wicked, the corrupt, and the depraved no matter the constraints and restraints we face.

I mean, good grief!

I catch myself doing at least some of that stuff almost every day!

You might say,

“Oh, Sarah. You’re being too hard on yourself and humanity writ large. The world’s problems are so much bigger than our human hearts.”

Now… while I don’t deny that the external conditions of life can be truly abysmal (we are presently in a pandemic, after all), I think we are far too quick to say if we can just fix x, y, and/or z externally, society’s problems will go away.

I don’t think that’s the case.

I think that’s a band-aid.

One of the allergen-laden latex ones that falls off at first wash and obscures the true cost we have to pay if we want to see real and lasting change.

Truly, the question we have to reckon with is not “What about the evil out there?” but “What about the evil in us?”

To which we say,

“We were born sick, but we love it. Command us to be well.”

Friends, the fact that that sentiment is actually pretty prevalent is only further proof that our hearts are the real impediments to progress, and as such, tossing them into the bonfire to be roasted, toasted, and purified must be, at least in part, the price of admittance to a better world.

So.

Are We Willing To Pay It?

Now this, to me, is the more interesting question.

Because it’s one thing to posit a solution.

It’s a whole ‘nother thing to implement it.

Especially when the cost is so high as to be ostensibly unbearable.

Such as when our whole hearts are on the bargaining table.

See, from what I’ve observed, a lot of people talk about wanting a better world, but when it comes to ponying up, their enthusiasm mysteriously dries up.

Lawyer and apologist Abdu Murray often says,

“You know how valuable something is by how much you are willing to pay for it.”

That seems obvious, but I don’t think it is.

Because if we think about our broken, hurting world in those terms, how much, really, are we willing to pay for it?

To that end, one section of “Earth’s Holocaust” that really stuck out when I read it was this scene:

“One poor fellow threw in his empty purse, and another a bundle of counterfeit or insolvable bank-notes. Fashionable ladies threw in their last season’s bonnets, together with heaps of ribbons, yellow lace, and much other half-worn milliner’s ware, all of which proved even more evanescent in the fire than it had been in the fashion.”

An empty purse. Insolvable bank-notes. Last season’s fashions.

We might imagine an updated version would include Millennials and Gen-Z-ers flinging their old smartphones into the fire where they’d melt into an oozing, oleaginous mass of planned obsolescence.

The flingers would, of course, have their new iPhone whatever-the-latest-generation-is safe in hand.

See, from what I can tell, everyone wants to participate in the bonfire of human progress, but we want our admittance to come at a pittance.

We pay what we want to pay and wag our fingers at those with more material things, saying,

“C’mon, Daddy Warbucks. Put up and shut up.”

Friends.

I would gently suggest I don’t think that’s the way to progress.

See, it’s easy to say the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, and the respectable should be at the front lines of change, leading and sacrificing for the sake of progress.

But what if the things they have to offer don’t really matter?

It’s a scary thought because that means we cannot rely on their wealth, their prestige, their power, or their expertise.

At best, they might succeed, for a time, at stemming the flow of misery, decay, and crime, but they cannot turn the tide.

Put simply…

They cannot save us.

Why?

Well, I submit that their hearts are just as wrecked as ours.

President John F. Kennedy once famously said,

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

I’m hesitant to speak ill of the dead because I think it’s unfair to prod someone when they can’t speak in their own defense, but I have to ask:

If the price of “the survival and success of liberty” was JFK keeping his pants zipped, would he have paid it?

Because that’s the question, isn’t it?

Not just for him.

For all of us.

Because if the price of a better world isn’t grand but personal, that puts a bigger burden on us all.

Daddy Warbucks included.

So I’ll ask,

If the price of a better world was the desires of your heart…

Your greed and comfort…

Your pride and epicaricacy…

Your self-righteousness and sexual proclivities…

All esteem and notoriety…

Would you pay it?

If not, why not?

“You know how valuable something is by how much you are willing to pay for it.”

Perhaps a better world isn’t worth quite as much to us as we thought.

And listen, I get it.

I understand.

Because even though I believe with my entire being that what’s wrong with the world is me, I still fail at being the change I want to see.

I fail in a hundred–a thousand–different ways everyday to pay, what I know, is the true price of progress:

My whole heart roasted, toasted, and purified.

But my hope is that the longer and harder I force my heart into the fire the more I’ll start to reflect the one who stepped into this world’s muck and mire for me and for all of humanity, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to help set the pieces of the world I touch to right.

I want that with all my might.

All that being said, I’ll end with this:

In Foundations of The Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant writes,

“So long as a critical examination is lacking, human reason at first tries all possible wrong ways before it succeeds in finding the one true way.”

We have tried for a very long time to make our world a kinder, gentler, more loving place only to be frustrated and disappointed when things fail to change.

I only want to suggest that perhaps we have been throwing the wrong things into flames.

Perhaps it is time to try a different way.

P.S. This is the finale of what Nathaniel Hawthorne had to say:

“The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully described, were what we choose to call a real event and a flame that would scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a parable of my own brain.”