Henrik Ibsen and Hendrick van Tuyll on The Majority
Blog 48
February 11
“The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools?”
Dr. Stockmann, in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Act IV
Well, this quote and piece of writing is the February 11 entry in my book, Theatre Is My Life! Thoughts on Play Quotes: A book of meditations for each day of the year. Seems to be a timely quote for the epoch we are facing. But, let’s not get into politics right now. Here is the meditation:
I was always taught never to say, “never,” because something will always happen to change the never into sometimes, certainly, or always. Surely Dr. Stockmann is overstating his point. But, many historians and politicians tell us that America and the essence of democracy — the very foundations of our government and freedom — are built on the concept of sovereign majority. Our constitution upholds the concept and those who populate our legislative branches, both federal and state, rise and fall with the will of the majority.
My undergraduate days were so dazzling I could never decide on my majors and minors, so I had two majors and one minor — and was one class short of another minor. One reason for the minor I did complete was the professor: there was only one teacher in the Philosophy and Religion Department. The man we called Dr. van Tuyll was really a Dutch count, the Baron Hendrik van Tuyll van Serooskerken.
Dr. van Tuyll’s family left the Netherlands during World War II and later came to North America, where he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Acadia University in Nova Scotia for a couple of years. Amazingly, they later settled in the town of Montevallo, where he taught at my alma mater from 1966 to 1981. His dissertation from the state university at Utrecht was on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and he enjoyed teaching his students about Kant’s structure of cognition. He knew, I believe, fourteen or more languages, including some medieval ones, and mentally translated his notes from Dutch as he lectured.
He also loved religion. He was an ordained deacon in the Church of England, a minister of the United Church of Canada, and he sometimes preached at the local Episcopal church.
Probably the most intelligent and charming man I ever knew, Dr. van Tuyll would stroll across campus in a dark suit and delightful European boots. Even when it was not raining, he would have an umbrella, and he moved this staff in a precise motion like the figure on an animated clock: forward with a punch and straight bump down, forward with a punch and straight bump down.
One day, he asked our class, “How do you know the little gray animal scurrying about campus is a ‘squill?’” as he called it.
A large provincial bovine-like male student replied, “Because we see it’s a dang squirrel!”
“But how do you know?” Dr. van Tuyll’s eyes twinkled. And the entire rest of the class time was spent on a romp, with our attempts to understand how our minds constructed such knowledge out of images.
But back to the majority never being right. Dr. van Tuyll had lived and traveled all over the world, and he was one of those “free and intelligent” people who could not “help rebelling against” some ideas. Once he told us in a discussion about American democracy a nugget of brilliance I will never forget: “Just because in the United States everyone is entitled to their own opinion does not mean that everyone’s opinion is equal in wisdom. Always remember, that some people have better perspectives and can think more intelligently than others. And what you say always tells your listeners more about yourself than the subject about which you are professing knowledge!”