Sleeping Through the Alarm
Re-evaluating the Moral Compass of John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Pulphead"
Deep in the latter pages of his personal essay master class Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan describes a minor historical figure whose most impressive attribute had only recently become a mark of obsolescence. Constantine Rafinesque, a self-proclaimed “Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, [and] Philanthropist,” was a self-taught polymath in an era when a specialized education was becoming essential.
The years when Rafinesque should have been getting properly taught and trained, right around 1800, are when academic specialization as we know it was codifying itself. The million philosophical projects launched by the Enlightenment had generated the West’s first overwhelming wave of data sets, especially in natural history. In order to know something thoroughly now you had to know much less. Rafinesque slept through the alarm on this shift in the matrix. He showed up still wanting to know it all, to be a synthesizer. He didn’t see it was a time instead for clean, precise, empiricist gathering.
Reading this, I wondered whether Sullivan’s 2011 essay compilation had also crossed an threshold in the Zeitgeist that made it subtly out of step with the present moral climate. Sullivan’s superpower is his fusion of opinionated skepticism and magnanimous empathy. The latter quality tends to get people into trouble in the social media and cable news-induced slow boil of the Donald Trump, #MeToo, and post-George Floyd eras. I myself frequently resist—or worse, fail to resist—the temptation to brandish my keyboard online in defense of compassion, or at least nuance, toward those adjacent to offending public figures (their colleagues, exes, and employers). These ill-advised overtures mostly bewilder the invisible majority, one of whom expressed optimism that I was “a dumb bot and not a real law guy.” The last decade has borne witness to outrages and cruelties that were unimaginable in my formative years, and in response our tribes have fractured into subtribes. I wanted to know: is Sullivan’s refined moral compass too refined for post-2017 America?
OPINIONATED SKEPTICISM
I didn’t see that query coming in the early pages of Pulphead’s opening essay, a seemingly dismissive take on Christian Contemporary Music and its fans. If anything, I was prepared to take gentle umbrage at his incredulous curiosity about “people who claim to love this music.” After all, my ears still ring with the mocking laughs my peers emitted when I disclosed that my first LP and pop concert were both performed by Amy Grant. (And this was at a Christian school.) Let’s just say Sullivan’s magnanimity was not discernible when he brushed aside my childhood guilty pleasure as a “genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.” True, “Christian rock” is an inherently derivative enterprise, at least musically. But while I don’t claim to know what the Christian rock kids are up to these days, I maintain that Keith Green, Randy Stonehill, and Steve Taylor used to exhibit lyrical substance that put “Smooth Like Butter,” “MmmBop,” and “Michelle My Belle” to shame. Not that I would argue with Sullivan’s characterization of the genre as “message music for listeners who know the message cold.” A Christian singer who visited one of my classes reported being rejected by CCM labels for her low “J-count”—an industry metric for worldview that quantified Messianic namedropping. Christian popular music has always been more driven by a weird hybrid of commerce, spiritual chauvinism, and authentic reverence than by any artistic consideration.
MAGNANIMOUS EMPATHY
In the end, however, Sullivan’s scornful assessment of Christian music is a Trojan horse for a confessional appreciation of a tribe he once belonged to. He has kind words for Christians (“smarter than any bunch I’d been exposed to”), CCM fans (“they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that”), and Jesus himself (“the most beautiful dude”). His straight-faced admission that he embarrassed his Episcopalian parents by taking evangelism (and even ‘80s Jesus rockers Petra) seriously costs him most of the cool points he earns elsewhere in the book with laudatory essays on Bob Marley’s Wailers, Axl Rose of Guns n Roses, and trailblazers in Black country blues. Still, it is his profound refutation of Christianity’s worst tenet that clinched my irreversible respect.
The hell stuff: I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who’d done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared to God, so what was His trouble again?
SUBTLY OUT OF STEP
Throughout the rest of Pulphead’s 365 pages, Sullivan consistently demonstrates that human capacity for forgiveness, and it is in this respect that the book begins to feel anachronistic. I doubt if my social media sparring partners would be impressed by Sullivan’s declaration of platonic love for a nonagenarian writing mentor from his college days who championed the Confederacy and fondled Sullivan in his sleep. There are some in both parties who would object to the essay’s defense of socialism—he cites the Biblical chapter and verse that inspired Karl Marx’s “credo of communism”—and others who would be offended by his ability to investigate the Tea Party (MAGA’s Obama-era ancestor) and conclude that “some good could come from the sheer event of so many Americans educating themselves about policy decisions.” Worse, his take on Michael Jackson’s history with children is so nuanced that I am reluctant to repeat it here for fear of incurring guilt by association.
TOO REFINED FOR 2026?
So what is the verdict on the hive mind’s response to Sullivan’s moral compass? Research confirms my suspicion that I am not the only observer to find Pulphead’s openheartedness out of step with the bitter times. In a blurb declaring the book the 81st best of the nascent century, the New York Times wrote, “If this book feels as if it’s from a different time, perhaps that’s because of its generous receptivity to other ways of being.” Some critics noted that magazine essayists in the Pulphead vein (the title is itself a dated moniker for zine scribes) don’t really exist anymore. The National review said, “To argue on behalf of Sullivan is also to throw your weight behind a kind of journalism that seems perennially perched on the precipice of obsolescence.” An admirably sculpted 2018 Goodreads review by Oriana concluded that the book “already feels like a sweet lovely relic of a more innocent but less enlightened time” and opined, “I hope he’s a little more enlightened now, has been able to adjust with the times, because he’s a crushingly stunning tale-teller.”
REGRESSIVE ENLIGHTENMENT
That, he certainly is. Sullivan’s sonorous prose exudes personality and honesty, his deft fluency with the arts, politics, science, and history providing a Rafinesque (-esque?) polymathic breadth. And perhaps he does look back at some of these essays with a recalibrated ethical framework. Maybe his current work is better informed by the numerous intense moral reckonings we’ve all been through. But I hope it’s not regressive to suggest that the 2020s could hardly produce a more “enlightened” outlook—in the meditative, higher mind sense—than Sullivan starts with here. Pulphead’s deference to “other ways of being” may make it a nostalgic artifact, but it is one worth elevating to breaking news.