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Masters of Chiasmus: Benjamin Franklin (Part 2)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Franklin was fond of making observations about money's impact on human beings. One of his most famous was:

This is a slight rephrasing of a remark made by the English statesman and writer George Savile, also known as Lord Halifax, who wrote in his Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750): "They who are of the opinion that Money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for Money."

One of Franklin's goals in the Almanack was to promote virtues necessary for leading a wholesome and successful life.

"Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."

This was the saying Franklin used to describe the virtue of "Resolution."

The point of this saying is that when people are starving, they're likely to disobey the laws, and when laws are disobeyed, the resulting anarchy will destroy the social fabric of a nation, leading to massive starvation.

Franklin is suggesting here that the poor man is so hungry, and the provisions so few and far between, that he must walk great distances before being able to eat. The rich man, by contrast, is so well-fed that he is does not suffer from hunger. Therefore, he must walk—that is, get exercise—to work up an appetite.

Franklin is referring here to what psychologists today refer to as "the capacity to delay immediate gratification." People who postpone gratification of their needs experience a certain amount of discomfort early on, in hopes of a more satisfying payoff later. People who seek immediate gratification feel pleasure early on, but the long-range results are almost always negative.

It is the last two lines here that are chiastic. In the observation, Franklin offers a piece of advice we'd all be better off heeding—when getting feedback from friends, consider them right until proved wrong, instead of the predictable tendency to consider them wrong until they're proven right.

That is, humor may not win over an enemy, but it can turn a friend against you.

Franklin is speaking as a publisher and newspaper editor here, in which he stresses not only the importance of a story's "timing," but also the importance of keeping the story alive by repetition and continuing coverage. The foregoing remark came as a conclusion to the following sentiment: "Now by press we can speak to nations. And good books and well-written pamphlets have great and general influence. The facility with which the same truths may be repeatedly enforced by placing them daily in different lights in the newspapers—which are everywhere read—gives a great chance of establishing them."

Below are three similar sayings. Note that in all three, Franklin anticipates the pragmatism we've come to associate with later American thinkers, like William James:

In both sayings, Franklin is saying that things are good or bad not for abstract philosophical or theological reasons, but because of their consequences. His thinking was far ahead of his time, running almost exactly counter to the prevailing religious thinking of his time, as reflected in this observation from the Puritan religious leader William Perkins: "A thing is not first of all reasonable and just, and then afterwards willed by God; it is first of all willed by God, and thereupon becomes reasonable and just."

Here are two similar, and oft-cited, Franklin quotes:

In both quotes, Franklin expresses a common chiastic theme: if you aren't in control of things, things will be in control of you. Once again, Franklin purloins the sentiment from others. In the 1605 play Eastward Ho!, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston wrote: "Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee."

"The heart of the fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart."

Franklin's point here is that the fool is always shooting off his mouth, even about heartfelt things that would be better left unsaid. The wise man, by contrast, keeps his opinions close to his vest—or close to his heart.

Franklin was often a voice of reason in an era when stereotypes and irrational thinking abounded:

Franklin wrote this in a 1784 pamphlet titled Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America. It was a helpful reminder that the "civilized" people from Europe and the "savages" from North America might have more in common than frequently thought.

In the remainder of this piece, I'll present a handful of additional Franklin Chiastic quotes, all without any further commentary from me:

Benjamin Franklin and Implied Chiasmus

"Implied chiasmus" occurs when the words of a popular saying are deliberately reversed. Some popular examples are "A hangover is the wrath of grapes," Mae West's "A hard man is good to find," and Kermit the Frog's "Time's fun when you're having flies." If you're not familiar with the term, you can find further information at implied chiasmus.

Some examples of implied chiasmus don't reverse sayings as much as they reverse observations about the natural order of things, or the way things should be. A good example is the 1915 poem "The Golf Links" from the American poet Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

Cleghorn was passionately devoted to social causes and frequently wrote poems to express her rage at social injustice, as she does in this stinging portrayal of the evils of child labor. What makes the poem so effective is the powerful reversal of what is with what should be true—laboring men should be looking out and seeing children at play. In his Dictionary of Quotations, Bergen Evans called this poem "One of the world's great strokes of irony."

So far, I've found only one example of implied chasms in Franklin's writings, and it is of this latter type:

"I know not which live more unnatural lives, obeying husbands or commanding wives."

Here, Poor Richard reverses the "natural" order of things-husbands who command and wives who obey. The sayings of Poor Richard were often chauvinistic in nature, which made them quite in keeping with the times. There is ample evidence, however, that Franklin himself did not hold such sexist views (even if he was a bit of a womanizer). He once wrote: "Women who smart under the tyranny of a bad husband ought to be fixed in revolutionary principles."

This completes our look at chiasmus in the life and works of Benjamin Franklin. In our next edition, we'll take a look at another chiastic master, the legendary English lexicographer and man of letters, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

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