gat

church sociables and teachers’ conventions are taking the place of the old
heights and depths....The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still
appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is
nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals sure to make of it in the
end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale.
A mere Chautauqua assembly? Is that all this monument to intelligence and order adds up to?
Realizing the full horror of this country’s first theme park, James would seem to have experienced
an epiphany:
The scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than
anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to
fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were
the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. Every other virtue
poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, unexpectant of decoration or
recognition like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers,
these are the very parents of our lives.
Near the end of his life, James finally understood what the trap was, an overvaluation placed on
order, rational intelligence, humanism, and material stuff of all sorts. The search for a material
paradise is a flight away from humanity into the sterile nonlife of mechanisms where everything is
perfect until it becomes junk.
At the end of 1997, Chautauqua was back in the news. A young man living there had deliberately
infected at least nine girls in the small town adjoining—and perhaps as many as
twenty-eight—with AIDS. He picked out most of his victims from the local high school, looking
for, as he put it, "young ladies...in a risk-taking mode." A monster like this AIDS predator could
turn up anywhere, naturally, but I was struck by the irony that he had found the very protected
lakeside hamlet with its quaint nineteenth-century buildings and antique shops, this idyllic spot
where so many of the true beliefs of rationality made their American debut, as the place to
encounter women unprepared to know the ways of the human heart. "In a risk-taking mode" as he
puts it in instructively sociological jargon.
Have over a hundred years of the best rational thinking and innovation the Western world can
muster made no other impact on the Chautauqua area than to set up its children to be preyed
upon? A columnist for a New York paper, writing about the tragedy, argued that condom
distribution might have helped, apparently unaware that the legitimization of birth control devices
in the United States was just one of many achievements claimed by Chautauqua.
Other remarks the reporter made were more to the point of why we need to be skeptical whether
any kind of schooling—and Chautauqua’s was the best human ingenuity could offer—is sufficient
to make good people or good places:
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