Watchman and the Democratic Spirit

A Review of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman

I remember as a kid asking my mom whether or not my dad, a doctor, would treat a dying patient who disagreed with him (i.e., me) politically. It seems ridiculous now that I would have such a dark thought, and I’ll admit it took me a long time to process and accept Mom’s answer, that politics did not play a role in Dad’s profession.

I had long suspected that politics was just a game (of thrones) that grownups made up out of boredom, and Mom’s answer reinforced that suspicion. In this light, I began to understand the paradoxical Democratic Spirit that guided civil society in Taiwan and in America — one that, according to David Foster Wallace, “combines rigor and humility.” Of course, I hadn’t read any DFW at that point, but it made sense to me that Dad’s job and his moral convictions transcended a game of competing political beliefs.

Much like my dad, Atticus Finch serves as his children’s early moral spine in To Kill a Mockingbird. The moral superiority of Atticus calls upon us to imagine a principled life in an unjust world. It is undoubtedly an ambitious enterprise, but Harper Lee gives us a hero we can trust, follow, and publicly worship.

Mockingbird highlights the existence of evil and attempts to simplify it in 380 pages. We glorify Scout’s transition from a simplistic perspective of a six-year-old to a slightly less simplistic worldview of an eight-year-old. Then we pit justice against racism and expect Atticus the ultimate lawyer to give us all the answers. There is a moral victory, and we can all claim it if we are on the right side of history.

Seven years after I (grudgingly and SparkNotedly) read Mockingbird, I actually bought and read Go Set a Watchman. The popular inclination to compare the two separate-but-related works has seemingly damaged the reputation of the author, the books, and our hero Atticus. But this hero we feel we deserve is not the one we need — a fact that becomes painfully apparent in Watchman.

So who is the hero we need? This time, perhaps as Lee had initially intended, we are given something that manifests a Democratic Spirit: Isaiah 21:6, the Bible verse from which the book title is derived.

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

Watchman challenges us to see for ourselves the evils we face in our lives, then it asks us how we are dealing with them. We can no longer just point to a character in a book; we have to go and set our own watchmen, and as Uncle Jack asserts, “Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience.” Instead of a victory, there is an uncomfortable moral process.

At one point, Jean Louise complains, “I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning,” as all of us might when our own orderly perception of the world is disrupted. In Isaiah 21, God commands the prophet Isaiah to appoint someone to watch over Babylon as it faces destruction. The watchman declares what he sees — invaders destroying the city and its false idols. Uncle Jack tells Jean Louise to actively choose conscience over comfort, just as God’s command calls for intentional process and rejects willful ignorance.

When asked what type of government the Constitutional Convention had established, Benji Frank replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” For the Great Experiment to work, we are called to participate and keep a true Democratic Spirit alive. Similarly, Jean Louise is called to not only hold strong convictions, but also allow said convictions to interact with the beliefs of others in order to work out solutions in a real, sustained way. We start to see that a truly superior perspective is blind to its own superiority, and this paradox produces simultaneously the sense of responsibility that my dad finds in his job and the humility that a Democratic Spirit demands.

The idea that people can hold different opinions and not be enemies is at the core of a Democratic Spirit. It requires a moral imagination far more complex than the common theme of good versus evil. Why is this such a difficult message? Perhaps in a culture of self-serious social justice warring, being perceived as objectively right has become more important than doing the right things. Those who are convinced that they are right (and will always be) tend to resist seeing painful truths that may disrupt their carefully-constructed vision of the world. The accusation I make here — both uncomfortable and clichéd — can be directed at most participants in today’s political discourse. Then again, it may also just be part of my carefully-constructed vision waiting to be disrupted.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean to use this book review (if you can still call it that) to offend all politically-minded folks. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that if you don’t appreciate Go Set a Watchman for what it is, and instead wish to lock yourself in the literary vacuum where Atticus Finch remains a paragon forever, you’re nothing more than a delusional self-righteous prick — and I hate you.