Words of wisdom from an old working-class “philosopher”

Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher.” Just a mention of him produces immediate reactions from those over 55 to whom I say that I am writing his biography — and puzzled looks from those who are younger. His books, especially “The True Believer,” were enormously popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but by his death in 1983 they were no longer in the canon of what young people read if they were interested in how the world worked. After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Americans who knew about Hoffer started remembering what he had so presciently written about mass movements and their true believers and began to understand the otherwise inexplicable actions of al-Qaeda and its suicide bombers through such lines as, “Blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect.”Hoffer didn’t like being called a philosopher, but endured it because his publisher told him it sold books. He was unique in American letters in being completely unschooled and in being a manual laborer throughout his life. Blind as a child and orphaned shortly after he regained his sight in his teens, he had then moved to California and become a day laborer, then a migrant agricultural worker and, beginning in World War II, a longshoreman in San Francisco before bursting on the scene with “The True Believer,” published in 1951 — which became a favorite of President Dwight Eisenhower and, later of President Lyndon Johnson. In his inquiries he ranged throughout history to understand human beings’ relationships to their societies, nature and work. In one, he questioned whether the masses, even when newly energized by freedom, had ever created a civilization. He decided that they had never done so until the birth of the United States of America. While most writers celebrated Jefferson, Hamilton and other thought-leaders, Hoffer asserted that the United States was the only society not shaped by an elite. The major creators of this country were the masses — the unwanted of Europe, the refuse, the dregs of humanity who had found their way here. Pyramiding on that bold assertion, he insisted, in “The Ordeal of Change,” that those who routinely deprecated the United States did so on the wrong basis. Our defects were not those of a business civilization, as his contemporary intellects charged — they were the defects of a mass civilization, which Hoffer identified as “worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the addiction to sheer action, the fascination with the trivial.”Hoffer then set out a list of America’s virtues: “A superb dynamism, an unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility that makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, an unbounded capacity for fraternization.”Fifty years have elapsed since Hoffer wrote those descriptions of our faults and our virtues, but they sure do resonate today. Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.