Saturday, November 13, 2010

America’s Near Future and the Failure of American History

It must be clear by now that, in a few more years or a few more decades, the U. S. A. will no longer be the chief arbiter of relations among nations. It will not be the world’s primary democracy nor the political beacon for emerging free societies. It will not be the hub of the world economy, and its dollar will not be the center around which other currencies will orbit.

Yet, contrary to those who subscribe to linear historical inevitability, it will not “collapse” (in some Jared Diamond conceptualization of societal collapses). It still has massive agricultural resources, industrial capacity, and educational/intellectual potential. It could even become a leader in what we now call “alternative energy” or the “eco-friendly” revolution. (We call this “future” by various names but what it will be – very soon -- is simply what we will come to accept as the normative future in terms of energy-power, human interrelations, human mobility, and so on).

Like other modern nation-states that have felt the sting – and the embarrassment – of losing their leading roles on the center-stage of the world’s nation-states, the U. S. will go through a transition of denial. England, or what became the U. K., lost its primacy in the West in 1919. It did not recognize this loss for several decades, although it did recede from empire to commonwealth with more grace than India, for example, may be willing to acknowledge. France lost its moral center in 1940, disgraced itself in Vietnam and some of its other former colonies, and grudgingly gave up its European continental importance (in the 1950s) in favor of a gallic sense of internal, cultural superiority (starting with De Gaulle and lasting until Sarkozy).

The U. S. will react to its decline in a more exaggerated way than either the U. K. or France have done. Although the two latter nations are renowned for their haughty claims to cultural superiority, and for their too frequent displays of insular “jingoism,” the U. S. is an even more profoundly proud and smug nation. Its origins are based on a mythology of colonial rebellion against religious authority and arbitrary government. Its two central historical motifs – the American Revolution and the Civil War – have to do with victories for local autonomy and self-rule, in regard to the former, and the morally purposeful, industrialized, unified nation-state, in regard to the latter. “Conquering” the “empty” frontier, “stabilizing” the Western Hemisphere, and “Saving the World for Democracy” through the two World Wars, have further gilded the ornate frame around the mirror into which all Americans gaze narcissistically.

What do Americans see as they peer, seemingly perpetually, into that elaborately framed mirror? They see EXCEPTIONALISM writ large. American historical debates about who they are as Americans, or how they got here, may be sharply debated between leftist historians and rightist historians, but both sides agree that Americans have possessed, and continue to possess, a special “genius” not shared – indeed, not shareable – with or among other peoples of the world. American ideals may or may not have been achieved, depending on which group of historians (past or present) one is reading, but they are special American ideals, and not international ones.

American “EXCEPTIONALISM” has been supported by most importantly by one thing – American historians. The products of these historians have represented a nation in ways that are largely self-congratulatory and entirely self-referential. It is true that a few American historians have refused to play that game, but most American historians deal in the matter of: “how did we get to be so good and great” or “how did we fail, given our special dispensation of historical grace, to become so good or great”? The proof of this failure of written American history is to be seen in what American historians study and write about, and what they do not study or write about. Much of American history has been political, and much of that political history has been “heroic.” Until recently, it has been top-down history, from presidents down to mayors and city councils. Witness, for example, the “PBS New Hour” having a “presidential historians” panel, but no other American history panel. American History is an in-house game. Although many British and French historians, for example, live in and were educated in countries other than the U. K. of France, very few American historians are to be found outside the U. S. For ordinary Americans, what happens in America, stays in America. Its borders are sharp. Canada and Mexico might as well be the North Pole and Antartica. It is true that a few American historians have now ventured into things like “Atlantic Culture History” which links the U. S. to England and Europe. But, American History is mainly limited to the continental geography of the U. S. (Hawaii and Alaska intrude uncomfortably, occupying folding chairs at the family dinner table). When American historians are adventuresome, they consider things like “popular culture,” which, of course, is an American product with world derivations. Comparative history, which exists in the rest of the historical world, is an unknown thing to Americans and American historians. How, after all, can America be compared to anything else?

So, the prospectus for how Americans will react in the next few decades to what is only a partial demise in their importance, is not a promising one. Their claims of exceptionalism are likely to become more shrill. Their detestation for the “other,” in all forms, is likely to become more extreme. The best the rest of the world can do is to try to welcome Americans into the broader world, and that may take a great deal of good will and time.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Destructiveness of Words

In the last two days, we have heard two people use words that say more than they, and even we, want to acknowledge. First, President Obama, in his speech yesterday, referred to people in Louisiana and Alabama as “our neighbors.” I do not believe that anyone, even those criticizing the speech for partisan reasons, has picked up on this “mistake.” If the President were queried on the matter, I am certain that he would say that he meant that all Americans who did not live in those two states were neighbors of those who have suffered misfortune, etc., etc. In fact, however, Louisianans and Alabamans are full citizens of the United States; they are not “neighbors”; they are part of the nation, just as equal as any other members of the union. “Our neighbors” are Mexico and Canada. In a previous blog, I said that American ethnocentrism was not just a national siege mentality against a hostile outer world but was reflective of a strong regional disparity in the U. S., where even various parts of the U. S. A. were like foreign and strange territory to those who do not live in them. So much for democratic national solidarity. Poor Louisiana; poor Alabama. It is Katrina redux.

Today, Carl-Henric Svanberg, the president of British Petroleum (they would like to be known as BP in order to take on a greater world-wide glamour, and in order to attract more stockholders) said that he wanted to help the “small people” of the Louisiana and Alabama coast. The Huffington Post (huffing as usual) and other media latched on to this mistake. Tonight, on the PBS Newshour, Mr. Dudley, a clever spokesperson for BP, excused the Swedish president of BP, claiming that his president speaks English as a second language, and that he meant “small business people” not lesser people. Carl-Henric Svanberg almost certainly learned English as a young boy. He likely knows how to speak and write the English language better than most Americans. So, you may be assured, you can keep the “small people” reference in your mind for what was meant – people poorer, weaker, and more impotent than Mr. Svanberg and his capitalist executive colleagues.

Language means something. Who among us has not said something truly destructive to those we love, and we know that what we said had some kind of truth to it even though we immediately want to disown that truth. The President of the U. S. (who almost certainly has not even thought of “neighbors” as a mistake) has just made one of those irretrievable mistakes. Mr. Svanberg has more graphically made the mistake. And, what are the messages? First, it is still a world of “them” and “us.” In the U. S., it is a matter of “I’m all right, Jack.” In the larger capitalist world, it is a matter of large capital versus, well, everyone else, and everyone else, in the end, loses. In both cases, the real substance of “democracy” loses.

There is a tragedy beyond this. As everyone speaks the language of human-being superiority, animals throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico are in truly mortal danger. A new genocide, of sorts, is being played out. We will not lament, and shed our false tears, until someone like David Attenborough comes along ten years from now and documents the whole thing. By then, it will just be sentimentality. And, while you are at it, you might shed a false tear for democracy as well.

Monday, May 24, 2010

The (Im)perfect Storm

"Flash in the Pan" is the archaic phrase that comes most to my mind when I consider the history of the American republic and its latter-day, very short-lived empire. As an American historian, I have sometimes questioned my choice to teach and do research in the subject of American history. After all, many of the so-called "founders" of the nation thought they had failed at conception. And, the America that properly emerged victorious and confident after World War II did not last for more than a brief moment. Cold War insecurity led to dominance over mainly second and third-world nations (e.g., Vietnam) who in turn became surrogate client states that prove the adage: "the tail that wags the dog." Now the great nation -- and it was a great nation -- slips away with little effort to preserve itself as a nation, let alone as a nation with pretensions to lead the world in public morality and goodness.
Three elements have converged to guarantee the rack-and-ruin of the U. S.A. They have combined to form a "perfect storm" from which Americans and, alas, perhaps the rest of us, cannot easily escape. Only one of these elements can claim any pretense to virtue.
1. Libertarianism -- The American ideal of "liberty," born in the colonial period and brought forward in the American Revolution was truly revolutionary for its age. Without going through a discourse on the history of liberty in the last two hundred odd years, let's just say that it was a grand idea. But at least in the last thirty years that idea has suffered from distention. It has become a coarse and grotesque corruption of itself. Liberty has now become libertarianism. "Leave me alone, I want to be completely free!" In other words, I have no obligations other than to myself. Government is not just a necessary evil (as many in the 18th century would admit) but a complete evil. Regulations of any sort (other than traffic regulations) are anathema to being American, or so these ill-educated, myopic ethnocentrists contend.
2. The Public Interest -- No one in the U.S.A. dares any longer to argue that there is a "public interest" to be considered and protected. The U.S. Supreme Court proved recently in the Citizens United case that even "THEY" no longer identify a "public interest." No appeals to the needs of society or the needs of the nation, let alone the needs of the world and humanity, have any cache with Americans. There is "my" interest and nothing else.
3. Ethnocentrism -- Americans are a self-referential people. They look in the mirror and gage the rest of the world by what they see. Many of them may be"tourists" but most of them are not travelers. A small and significant number of Americans understand the "outer world" or what most Americans call the "overseas" world (even "overseas" when they are talking about Canada and Mexico). But that minority does not count at all in terms of developing a national consciousness. Instead, most Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world or fearful of the rest of the world. All but the traveling minority are scornful of the rest of the world. But it is worse than that. Most observers and commentators on the American nation (well, most since Alexis de Toqueville) assume there is a spirit of national unity in the U.S. There was, but it has largely disappeared. Americans see themselves as Virginians or Californians more than they see themselves as Americans. Few yet see themselves as "citizens of the world," as Thomas Paine declared himself to be. (Paine made a big mistake in that. Although he was an American citizen, and obviously did much to further the success of the American revolution, George Washington -- yeh, the big guy himself -- refused to retrieve Paine from a French prison during the French Revolution because, in Washington's opinion, Paine had relinquished his American citizenship by going to France and becoming a representative in their National Convention. Washington's refusal to save Paine was a harbinger of all things to come in American ethnocentrism). Narrow-minded, parochial, ignorant of and fearful of the rest of the world, Americans have imprisoned themselves in their own country.
So, what does this have to do with a perfect storm? Well, it helps to explain a lot about the tepid, almost ho-hum, attitude of Americans to the Katrina disaster and now to the Gulf of Mexico oil surge disaster. If we all want to just be ourselves, and if we have never heard of the idea of a public interest, and if everyone who lives outside our region is considered an outlander, then how can there be any response? Katrina and the oil disaster (which will probably be far, far worse than even the most negative experts claim) are just chapters in many "perfect storms" to come. The Americans have no means at their disposal to deal with any of them. Libertarianism is their individual refusal of responsibility. A lack of a sense of a public interest means that no agencies, government or otherwise, can intervene in disaster unless they do so completely on their own, without public support. Ethnocentrism leads to a sense that disaster can never touch "my" region or my home; no hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes will deprive me of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There are reformists impulses in American society, and many Americans would like to change many things. But the prospects for this happening in the foreseeable future are dim.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

What “Freedom” are we Talking About?

The reductio ad absurdum of “freedom” and “liberty” that has become the mantra and entire ideological “argument” of the right-winger movement in the U. S. A. (usually but not exclusively known as the Republican Party) needs more examination. Since the right-wing will not be addressing or defining what they mean by “freedom,” I will volunteer some definitions.

Most people probably assume that freedom is a pretty simple concept, and that everyone shares their definition of freedom and what freedom encompasses. But starting with John Stuart Mill and moving on with Isaiah Berlin in the mid-twentieth century and then Charles Taylor and others more recently, freedom has been increasingly seen as meaning at least one of two things: 1) freedom as a removal of shackles or restraints, and 2) freedom as permission and opportunity to create something, do something, to take positive action in some regard. The first – known as negative liberty or negative freedom – has an illustrious history in things like the end of slavery or the end of a censured press. The second – known as positive liberty or positive freedom – has an illustrious history in things like society or state-driven economic reforms or social justice reforms.

Paradox and irony do not begin to describe how the modern right-wing has twisted the concepts of negative and positive freedoms into comical parodies of all real freedom. First, the right-wing refuses to see any positive liberty because they refuse to see any role for the state, and ipso facto, with no state there are no social and economic reforms and justices to be addressed. Some question whether there is such a thing as society at all, following the famous dictum attributed to Margaret Thacher that “there are no societies, there are only individuals and families.” The right-wing’s world of besieged families resisting outside influences as if they were defenders of the Alamo, and their Ayn Rand world of bizarre fictional individuals who robustly and egoistically fashion their lives with little social assistance, defy the realities of a real world of mass populations and that world’s vast historical accomplishments in everything from health to education to economic well being that have been produced through the collective efforts of societies. Thomas Paine, a friend of free market ideas and an opponent of strong governments, nevertheless believed that human beings naturally formed societies, and that society was the fundamental basis for both public and individual good. In short, ignoring historical realities and real modern needs, the right-wing does not recognize positive the legitimacy of positive freedom at all.

Oddly, the right-wing now seems to outdo itself in idiocy when it comes to distending its natural penchant for negative freedom. The thirty-year revolution that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thacher seemed grounded, at first, in old (some would also say respectable) ideas about laissez-faire capitalism, low taxes, and a minimal state. Those ideas, which admitted some idea of limitations, have now taken on an unlimited character: capitalism should be left entirely unfettered; no taxes should be passed (well, unless you are fighting a war for the empire somewhere); and the state should wither and disappear altogether (they seem to know little about their ultimate affinity with Karl Marx). Many who advocate such things as unregulated capitalism are the unknowing (and sometimes knowing) stooges of big corporations and investment banking. But lately, this extension of “pure” freedom has had some very strange consequences (one would say amusing if one did not give a damn for the world and human life in general):

1. Tea Party members and other right wingers demanding lower taxes, despite the fact that some 40+% of Tea Party advocates, under new tax breaks for the middle and lower classes, do not need to pay any tax at all. In fact, some 45% or more of American households do not need to pay any federal income tax. See Gail Collins amusing blog in the NYTimes “Celebrating the Joys of April 15” (April, 15, 2010) for other interesting statistics on a tax regimen that angers the right because those with big incomes (one can hardly call them “earners”) pay most of the bill.

2. A Supreme Court which in its “supreme wisdom” has declared corporations of all sorts eligible for First Amendment free speech protections. Not only did the Court overrule a lot of impressive precedent, they gave a new, rightist, purist definition to “person” which defies reason and the Constitution. (I have said more on this elsewhere and could say much more, but it would not matter. Citizens United is the Dred Scott case of the 21st century; it has the same apparent logic and the same catastrophic unreality).

3. An oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that will have long term effects, and begs the question as to whether deep off-shore drilling can be done at all. Yet, several Republican right wingers have used this “opportunity” to ask for more off-shore drilling, in complete defiance of what has just happened and of reason itself.

4. A terrorist attempt in Times Square in NYC that has right wingers falling over themselves to proclaim their full attachment to the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution (wrongly interpreted as it is), and pledging their troth to the practice of even those on a terrorist watch list having the “right” to bear arms.

So, what do we have here? On one level, we have people so uneducated (in what we used to call “Civics”) and so simple-minded as to demand an absolutist interpretation of freedom. On another level, we have people living in fictive worlds of their own, very strange, imaginations. “Avatar,” the movie, is not much ahead of the curve. Many right wingers have in fact made themselves into “avatars.” They live in a world they imagine, or think they want. Reality plays a very small role in this exercise of freedom.

In the end, I think of the words from “Me and Bobby McGhee” – “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Total negative freedom is total alienation, and the right wing is certainly alienated from society, and perhaps now from themselves.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Talk Is Cheap (and priceless)

My father was not taciturn in his speech but he did think that actions spoke louder than words. Among his most firmly held beliefs was his conviction that the material consequences of the work he accomplished – water well drilling and plumbing -- would speak to the memory of his existence. I know some of my father’s inventions. He crafted (invented) a well-drilling rig on a homemade oak and steel frame, for example, and short of both money and access to proper well drilling equipment he made many of his own heavy tools. Unfortunately, unlike the visible fruits of labor of sculptors or architects, my father’s work was inconspicuous except to the few who chanced to examine it at close range. Still, what one did rather than what one wrote or spoke, was what mattered most to him. He did not disdain the written and spoken word but neither did he think that either was as important as the useful knowledge of the craftsman. In his mind, “book learning” was not bad; it was just secondary to the invention that flowed from experience in material crafts. For my father, those who talked were worse than those who wrote. Almost every time after having had to listen to someone talk too much (and, on more than one occasion, that included his two sons and his daughter), he would mutter: “the empty wagon is the one that makes the most noise.”

I cherish the memory of accompanying my father to drill wells with his improvised machinery, and of watching him solve a knotty plumbing problem. But I also wish that I had some verbal or oral artifacts of his life to pass along to my sons and grandsons. I only have vague ideas about his life between his birth in 1896 and WWI. I know he briefly joined the “Wobblies” (IWW) (a “youthful mistake,” he later told me) while training as a steamfitter in Detroit, and I know that he was inducted into the U. S. Army late enough in the WWI to avoid being sent “over there.” His life in the 1920s and 1930s – those were all depression years where we came from -- and even much of the 1940s will always remain obscure to those few of us who still remember him. What my brother and sister and I recall of him are more the incomplete remembrances of children and adolescents than of keen observers.

Neither my brother nor my sister and I ever shared my father’s view on the limited value of books. We all read a fair amount (my brother read an enormous amount), and I entered a profession that required constant reading. For a long time, however, I probably shared some of my father’s prejudice about “talk.” Perhaps my ill-formed diminution of “talk” or oral sources was reinforced because I am an 18th century historian, whose primary sources are manuscripts. I have always loved research that involved diaries, journals, letters, even commonplace books and almanacs, and I have always pitied those poor modern historians who had to use lesser materials like radio broadcasts and film and oral history evidence. Oral, spoken evidence was too light, too transient, too unreflective, and too “cheap” to for me to take seriously.

For the past year now, I have been conducting oral history interviews of persons who were engaged in the founding and early development of the university where I spent my career – The University of Lethbridge. Because it was not founded until 1967, many of its earliest members are still able to remember well their involvement in that university’s early years. Yet, my initial motives were more negative than positive in regard to recording these interviews. Instead of lauding the richness of oral history interviews, I too often have said (and still say), that the regrettable lack of written sources about this university’s first formative years makes the use of oral history sources necessary. No one has left rich diary and journal sources. No one’s correspondence remains extant, and since the rise of computers and email, it is certain that useful electronic source materials disappear in a nano-second as well. So, I sigh and lament that all I can do is record fifty or so oral history interviews (twenty-seven are completed as of this date). Because I have the time, I usually add with little enthusiasm, that I might as well finish this project on the first generation of the U of L out of duty. These interviews just have to be done, I suggest with the tone of voice of someone who must wash the evening dishes. Before I began the project, I also said to myself (and no one else) that these interviews would be like mining some low-grade ore field, looking for a few nuggets valuable enough to keep. I thought I was looking for a few meager answers to specific questions about the origins, policies, programs, governance, liberal education, and people of the first decade of the University’s existence.

I was wrong, of course, and after my first interviews, I slowly began to distance myself from my snobbery and weak prejudices. What I found were fascinating, highly varied, stories about childhoods and personal educational experiences. Arcs of personal narrative, of personal history, emerged in the earliest interviews and have continued ever since. The enormous achievements of my colleagues in their personal and professional lives made me much more humble about my own accomplishments, and made me respect the fullness of everyone’s life when put into an autobiographical context. I have put most of my pre-planned, specific questions aside. I now start each interview with no notes. I just try to encourage interviewees to describe their lives, and then we proceed largely on autopilot. I eventually “converse” too much with everyone I record, but what my interviewees say is so evocative of our shared past that I often cannot keep my mouth shut (my father was right, at least about me). I now find myself contemplating more openly the views of others about teaching or research or curricula or programs or liberal education that I once resisted openly and forcefully. With every new interview, my respect for oral history sources increases.

This is not to say that I am blind to the shortcomings of oral history. Remembrance of the past well after the occurrence of events is problematical at best. Autobiographies – which oral history interviews are in short form -- are one of the weakest forms of historical evidence. My personal narrative, biographic approach creates incomplete and false historical narratives. My role as an interviewer who converses with his subjects – and one who was a participant in or observer of most of the events discussed – further distorts any objective picture of the past. But, look at those written sources I used to admire above all others. Personal letters are carefully crafted to address a specific reader. Diaries and journals are biographical and generally written in a self-serving manner. It is true that if one puts together a large enough body of someone’s personal correspondence and self-reflective writing, a subtext of unintended truths seep out of this verbal self-justification. Yet, I have seen subtle, undeclared truths about the character or essential nature of my interviewees seep out of an hour and a half to a two-hour interview as well.

As a late convert to oral history, I cannot tell you how much I would now give to be able to turn on my digital recorder and talk to my father for two hours. Since I cannot, I urge the rest of you to sit down and record the stories of your family or friends. You do not have to wait until someone is old; interviews of young children also produce amazing results. While the most astute interviewer cannot get a subject to recreate the past accurately even the most novice interviewer can conduct an oral interview that will produce an astounding record of their interviewee’s experiences, ideas, and feelings.

I am just reading a memoir by Studs Terkel, the famous Chicago interviewer and raconteur, entitled Touch and Go. Terkel knew, and inevitably interviewed, an enormous range of the rich and famous. But, as he puts it, he is (was; he died last year) really someone who has “been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd.” According to him, his epiphany in this regard came at a public housing project in Chicago where he recorded a young mother. Here is what Terkel says:

I don’t remember whether she was white or black. The place was mixed. She was pretty, skinny, with bad teeth. It was the first time she had encountered a tape recorder. Her little kids, about four of them, demanded a replay. They insisted on hearing mama’s voice. I pressed the button. They howled with delight. She put her hands to her mouth and gasped. “I never knew I felt that way.” She was astonished, sure, but no more than I was. Such astonishments have always been forthcoming from the etceteras of history. Ever since the Year One.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

A Modest Proposal: Mexico, Canada, and the "Citizens United" decision

As a loyal Canadian, and someone devoted to American constitutionalism, let me make the following "modest proposal" (with apologies to Jonathan Swift). Pemex, the state oil company of Mexico, and Petro-Canada, the at-arms-length-from-direct-government-control Canadian petroleum company, should form an American "dumby" corporation -- what used to be called in the good old days, before Progressivism ruined everything in the early 20th century, a "holding" company. This company could incorporate in N. J. or N. Y. or Massachusetts, or wherever the most troublesome progressive Democrats and judges run for office. (Any first-year law student should be able to write up articles of incorporation that will pass muster in the U. S. and in these states).
Once this corporation is established, it can support candidates for federal office in the U. S., or for elected judges who might be critical to decisions important to Canadian-Mexican interests. Better yet, as a "new citizen" of the U. S., this corporation -- let's call it "Friends of American Democracy" or maybe "F___k American Democracy," both say the same thing in modern American political double-speak -- can work to defeat candidates who think that the Mexicans are just a little too lax in the methods they use to extract oil or distribute and refine it, or who think the Alberta oil sands (i.e., "tar sands") are an environmental corruption.
In addition, being the largest suppliers of oil to the U. S. -- something Americans cannot grasp given American fascination with a Middle East that always puzzles them -- Mexico and Canada can demand some quid pro quo from the U. S. Congress. In regard to the Mexican half of our new "F_____ American Democracy" "new-citizen" corporation, how about getting candidates to oppose any fence across Mexico's northern border, giving full amnesty to illegal immigrants working in the U. S. (i. e., those Mexicans who almost always out-perform Americans incapable of competing with them in wages or in quality of work), and engineering a special deal for poor Mexican corn growers who cannot compete against corn from the Midwest U. S. -- corn that is subsidized by as much as 50% of crop value. Canadians can demand that Americans quit harassing their border with idiotic security plans that have little or nothing to do with security. Canadians might want to get an even better auto-pact, and other trade advantages.
Mexicans and Canadians should revel in the opportunities that the Citizens United decision affords them. A few million dollars is nothing -- truly nothing -- compared to the advantages that these two countries might exact from a nation that does not even know that they -- Mexico and Canada -- exist. (For American readers, let me remind you that Mexico is that strange elongated one to the south, the one that used to own California and New Mexico and Arizona, and , oh yes, Texas. Canada is the cold one to the north -- but you knew that, didn't you -- the second largest country in landmass in the world). Oh, but you say that you know that tourists go to Mexico: well, then, maybe Mexico could get a special tax on American tourists who loiter on their beaches. Oh, and you have heard of Eskimos (they aren't all American, you know) and baby seals so maybe Canada could get the U. S. to end any contention over Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic. Jeez, you have to love the American brand of democracy and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. Americans truly are ahead of the rest of the world. They have seen the intelligence in giving away their manufacturing to anyone who will work for a penny an hour less than will their workers, in exchange for the celestial level of having a "service" economy only. And, best of all, they are willing to sell the bothersome governance of their country, and the decisions of their judges, to the highest bidder. What genius!!

Friday, January 22, 2010

From Liberty to Libertarianism to Anarchy

I am as flabbergasted as anyone about the decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Accompanied as it is by the probable death of any U. S. health care reform, the U. S. Senate victory by the Republicans in Massachusetts, and what appears to be the expulsion of the Obama administration to the political wilderness, everyone should be alarmed about the future that lies before us. Because I assume this blog is read by my Canadian friends primarily, I want to emphasize that the current of events in the U. S. is important to Canadians as well. As a student of U. S. Constitutional History, I can assure everyone that this is decision with monumental implications.

The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United reversed precedent set and expanded and repeated since 1907 regarding the prohibition of corporations involving themselves in financing campaigns for or against political candidates. It is impossible to conclude anything other than that ideology alone drove the majority of the court. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion implies that it is too difficult in modern times, with a huge variety of ways of speaking and technologies to convey that speech, to discriminate among speakers. And, in a kind of wave of the hand, tossing aside lightly the enormous weight of precedent, Kennedy essentially comes down on the side of a fully libertarian vision of First Amendment rights. Remember, this is a country and a court that has and does limit speech in all sorts of ways if they think that speech inimical to the peaceful maintenance of the state, and often if they merely think that speech is radical. And, they have often restricted, by one means or another, not only who can be heard but who can speak as well.

Justice Stevens -- in a dissent made enormously long (90pgs.) because he had to repeat all of the weight of precedent, stare decisis, and old arguments -- put the real argument against this new ruling by the Court by emphasizing that the Court is giving corporations new stature under the idea of protecting speech for individuals. As he said,

“The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.

In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”

In the 19th century, corporations were given the standing of “persons” for legal purposes and for certain limited rights (e. g., the right to sue and be sued), but not because anyone seriously thought that a corporation was a person in body or mind. The corporation is a fiction, and it constitutes only a fictive “person” for legal convenience.

Stevens also attacks the effects of this decision. Although assumed effects have less argumentative weight in constitutional law than fundamental principles and precedent, in this case the evidence of what is going to happen is overwhelming. Corporations will have it in their power, through clever and careful manipulation and the means to control most public speech (aside from the internet and private correspondence), and to decide the outcome of elections – no matter how vigilant the electorate may be. “One cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre and cause a panic,” so said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., but the majority of the current court is quite willing to let a corporation openly, or at arms–length or behind layers of third and fourth party front-organizations, spend millions of dollars to destroy any candidate they wish through powerful devices of propaganda expertly and precisely employed. Public lives will be ruined. Private lives will be ruined. An electoral panic for against candidates will ensue. Only the wealthy friends of corporations need apply for high public office. The greater part of the American democracy will shun politics even more than they do now. The consequences may be catastrophic.

The U. S. Supreme Court’s decision, however, is just part of a larger mudslide, a larger erosion around the very foundations of American society. This slide has its origins in leftist lifestyles as much as rightist politics. “Do your own thing” liberalism married to private profit-motive laissez-faire capitalism has produced a powerful libertarian offspring. That offspring is now well out of hand. Thomas Frank’s observations on Bill Moyer’s Journal last week (Jan. 15) are chilling in the context of the Citizens United case. I thought Frank a bit extravagant in his argument that the Right wants to destroy government altogether by crippling its authority and by placing advocates of radical libertarian principles into office (in short, sycophants or toadies who will destroy government). After this court decision, I am not so certain that he overstates things by much. Ironically, I do believe that the Right wants a powerful central state insofar as the military is concerned – a military that can force other countries to abandon their own free will.

Even more problematical is the heightened unreality about many things that has come to inhabit the minds of many people. The “birthers” are unwilling to believe birth records; Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck are willing to bend facts to suit their larger “truths”; Canadians are told that they do not like the health care system they have despite the fact that all evidence is to the contrary. It gets worse. While Neil Postman may have been correct a few years ago in claiming that we were, as stated in his book title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he has drastically undershot the mark. We have not just abandon thought and reflection through our attachment to instruments like television, we have become unable to discern truth from fiction. The two have begun to merge seamlessly, and as truth and fiction merge, we get the most outrageous claims about what is and what should be. Now we live two lives, our mundane existence (if we are indeed attached to that existence at all) and the life of our avatar. We are more than one step beyond the existentialist denial of “essences.” We now think we can shape and re-shape ourselves into many different persons. In the process, we are becoming “no person.” “No person” is quite willing to be shaped by the visual media into whatever is available, and “No Person” does not want anyone – family, society, or government – to spoil their delusion. “No Person” is quite eligible for the manipulations of corporate America in the political arena.

In our household (and I do mean that others in our family have arrived at their own independent opinions on American affairs), we used to sigh at what we saw as wrong-headed policies, grit our teeth at the election of bobble-heads, and shout at the TV over stupid decision-making. I cannot speak for others but I am now getting a little frightened, perhaps not for me, but for the future, for my family and my friends who must contend with this world for another half century or more.

Two Good Public Things During My Adult Life

As I sit here on the last day of my 67th year, I remind myself of two exceptional, revolutionary things that have happened during my adult life. Both have made a difference in my life, and both have made a difference in almost everyone’s life in the world.

1. The Beginning of the End of Patriarchy

Patriarchy is not dead. As a practice, it thrives in all areas of public life – government, employment, education, health, and religion. The idea of patriarchy as the appropriate way to organize power in everything from the family to society, however, has suffered many defeats over the last 60 years. It will not recover from these defeats, and it cannot reassert its former hegemony.

You might think that I would have mentioned the Civil Rights Movement as the one of the greatest changes for good in my adult life but I believe that that movement was well on its way to victory as the prevailing idea in educated society before 1960. With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day just having just passed, I would like to say – as both a U. S. citizen and as an American historian – that I believe King to be the greatest figure in American History. I say this because I believe that his philosophical and religious approach to civil rights won the victory for equal civil rights and propelled forward the movement for women’s rights and even the rights of the poor. The Civil Rights Movement was, therefore, antecedent to, and necessary for the women’s rights movement and the youth movement, both of which together provided the earliest assaults on patriarchy.

When we think of patriarchy, some of us probably think of fathers who governed their families, men who were usually, though not always, benevolent despots. Robert Young’s portrayal of the head of his household in “Father Knows Best” is the iconic symbol of that soft-patriarchy. Fortunately, my brother and my sister and I, growing up in a very equalitarian home in which the civil equality of Blacks and indeed of all people was assumed without question, did not experience any discomfort from patriarchy since our father never claimed that special status for himself. Almost all of the modern families I know today reveal few traces of patriarchy.

It is more likely, nowadays, to associate patriarchy with male domination and the suppression of women. With the rise of feminism in the 1960s, males of all types were identified as the impediment to progress, and the subsequent history of the women’s movement since then needs no repeating. Women still have less power, still have to outperform men, are still paid less than men, and so on, but equality is only a matter of time; progress toward the equality of men and women will not stop. Women now receive nearly equal education to men, and the recent economic downturn in the U. S. has resulted, ironically, in more men unsuccessfully seeking employment than women unsuccessfully seeking employment. That anomaly is only slightly the result of women receiving less pay for the same work.

It is often forgotten that the end of patriarchy has also benefited men as well. I will use myself as an example. When I went to graduate school, I was told that I would doing so, and told where I was going to go to school, by the head of the history department at Western Michigan. I do not begrudge this since I did, of course, have the choice of going to graduate school or not (although he seemed to make it clear that his decision was close to an order). When I got to graduate school at Wayne State, it did not take long to realize that the head of the department was a demi-god. He was in fact the perennial “head” of the department, and I do not believe he relinquished that post until he died. Older, more senior faculty members (all but one was a man) controlled all of the sources of power that were not monopolized by the head of the department. Junior faculty kow-towed or risked being driven out. Graduate students were even more subservient. Faculty did not collaborate with their students on research. Historical conferences were places where the “big men” of their fields gave papers, and commented on other people’s papers. Today, even undergraduates are often invited to join in a professor’s research project, and to publish papers. Conference presentations and commentaries are now almost exclusively the domain of young people who have new ideas about their subjects. Women are approaching equal status in grad schools. Older faculty members are now respected, if at all, for their experience, but for little else. Heads are now chairs -- persons who serve limited terms, and have limited powers.

Patriarchy is not just about male domination of women; it is about the domination of everyone by older males. Yet, even mullahs in remote regions of Afghanistan or Pakistan are now faced with recalcitrant young women who want to learn. Increasingly, they must accommodate these young women. So, the legitimacy of patriarchy has diminished as the idea of fundamental human equality has risen.

2. The Internet

The importance of the internet in changing nearly everything needs no repetition either. It is a lovely irony that an instrument designed to aid the military has become an instrument to undermine those who hold power in autocratic status as a consequence of their militaries. And, as democracy fades in the halls of governments almost everywhere, it is a happy fact that the internet enhances democratic feelings and ideas among ordinary people almost everywhere.

It only seems like yesterday that a colleague and I attended a conference in Toronto about the relationship of computers to the humanities. At the conference, we were treated to a presentation by a man who explained how a system was in place -- a system that would rapidly expand, he noted -- that allowed a person to send a message to someone else through a computer linked to an “internet” in which bundles of messages were sent at the speed of light to remote servers that distributed these messages to individuals. This was in 1980. It was like telling folks in the 16th century about jet aircraft.

In 1994, while on a research trip to Massachusetts, June and I were joined by our oldest son, Nathaniel. During a long drive home from an expedition to the ocean, we began to talk about the internet. June and I were speculating on the possible need for governance of the internet for moral purposes, etc. Nat was outraged. For two hours, he tried to convince us of the error of our ideas. Censorship as a means of attacking a few bad things failed to offset the openness of the internet, Nat argued, and its primal democratic nature and its liberating potential should not be impeded. I say today: Nathaniel – you were absolutely right and we were absolutely wrong. The recent conflict over Google’s threatened removal from China again heightens the remarkable importance that the internet holds for the entire world. Beyond that, the recent move by Google to digitize as much of the world’s literature as possible – whatever any of may think about the legal and moral problems inherent therein -- makes the internet the most revolutionary instrument in the history of humankind.

Because the internet now refers to so many things – ideas, information, communication, commerce, religion, and politics – it may have lost some of its singular stature over time, but it still remains those bundles of information shooting off in all directions, accessible to an increasing number of people world-wide. For that I am thankful.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Hey, Pat Robertson: History Matters More, and You Don't Know Any

Because this is a blog dedicated to history mattering more than many other ways of knowing, it is impossible to let Pat Robertson's idiotic analysis of Haiti pass. As you all know by now, Robertson claimed that Haitians had long ago made a pact with the devil, and were incurring, I guess, "God's" wrath.
It must be said on the face of things that not only is Robertson's logic non-existent, his distortion of his own theological beliefs is problematic as well. Does he mean to say that Haitians made a collective pact with the devil? Does he mean to say that such a pact would automatically be handed down from earlier Haitians to their progeny? Is this some new theological idea about the sin's of the fathers being bestowed on the sons? If he believes in the autonomy of the individual believer (or non-believer), as he purportedly does, how can he talk of collective pacts with the devil? If he believes in the capacity of individual redemption, how can he believe in an historical curse handed down. In fact, Robertson is denying God's redemptive power, which is a heresy in any Christian religious theology that I know.
But that is not the point here. Robertson's history is absolutely crazy. For a full reprise of what he is vaguely and erroneously talking about (please see the Christian Science Monitor article on Haiti for Jan. 14, 2010). First, he suggests that Haitians (meaning Black Haitians) signed a pact with the devil to get out from under the control of "Napoleon III". Oops, Pat, old boy, you are wrongly confusing historical eras and talking about the mid-19th c., not the late 18th and early 19th c. The fact is that the Haitians first took the principles of the French Revolution -- liberté, fraternité, and equalité -- seriously in 1791. By 1794, the radical French Revolution (which, if Robertson knew any history, he would also condemn as the work of those in league with the devil) resulted in the freeing of Haiti's massive slave population. Napoleon attempted to re-enslave them in 1802, which led to the famous revolution under Toussaint L'Ouverture against France. Napoleon -- unlike certain American "leaders" from LBJ through "W" through Obama in regard to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- knew when and where to fight and knew that victory in Haiti against this Black uprising would be too costly and too difficult (if even possible). Instead, he cut his loses, turned instead toward Europe, and sold Louisiana (the most substantial chunk of the U. S. ever acquired by treaty) to the fledgling and vulnerable U. S. for $15 million. As the Haitian ambassador to the U. S. has pointed out recently, much of U. S. territory and much of the U. S. opportunity to thrive as an "Empire of Liberty" was because of the Haitian revolution. And, what about "freedom loving" Haitians, who had destroyed the bonds of slavery more than 50 years before the Americans were able to so? Well, naturally, being Black and poor, the rest of the world turned their back on allowing Haiti to become a functioning society. Haiti had always depended on trade, and after their successful revolution they were shut out. If finger pointing is to take place, the so-called developed world of the U.S. and Europe can point their fingers back at themselves.
In short, the Americans are, in an indirect way at least, profoundly beholden to Haiti. Haiti's profound poverty, now made unimaginably worse, is the responsibility of all of us. Unfortunately, more people will hear Pat Robertson's cruel and moronic comments and say -- uh, huh, that most be true -- than will hear the real historical story. I have seen few attempts by the media to review Haiti's real history, and as I watch the devastation on television, no one contextualizes Haiti's plight in historical terms -- the only terms that can possibly inform us about why things are as they are, and why we are all responsible in terms of building Haiti to a society and state.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

A New Year. A New Decade? How About a New Century??

We can all agree that we have just entered a new year – even if January 1 is as arbitrary as any other date as a marker for the year. Purists will insist that 2011 is the beginning of the New Decade, but why quibble about that either. It is irritating, however, to have people declare that ten years ago we entered a new century, and that this new century of ours is markedly different from the previous one. In fact, despite the drama of 9/11, we in North America are living in the old century. The twentieth century, as I see it, began with the Great War in 1914. More than any previous century, it has been marked by totalities, including total war, i. e., wars that recruit the hearts and minds and bodies and lives of whole populations. It has been a century in which the victory of large-scale capitalism has been made complete. The laissez-faire capitalism of the 1920s -- despite being rescued and temporarily modified in the Great Depression – was to be repeated in the rise of the super-corporation in the 1950s, and then pushed to the rarified heights of near religion with the neo-liberal capitalist victories from 1980 to the present. After 1914, matters ranging from war to cold war to medicine to business also resulted in the near total victory of science over all others ways of resolving and knowing. In the backlash against the modernity of warfare and science and consumerism after 1914, we also saw a new kind of religious reaction (I cannot in good faith call it conservatism), beginning with the publication and widespread circulation of the “The Fundamentals” in the early part of the 20th century followed by frequent religious revivals culminating in the new giants of religion in the likes of Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee.

Unable to break, or even modify, the effects and cycle of the perfect storms created by these elemental features of the 20th century, we have increasingly come to be their victims. We have come to live in a world where ideologies and other loose systems of thought and behavior have long ago expanded beyond their original essence and their public utility. These systems and behaviors have become distentions – overwhelming, often grotesque, sometimes even caricatures of some decent value or morality that they once represented. I was fortunate enough to have taken a course in philosophy of history from Bill Bossenbrook, a distinguished professor who first alerted me to the nature of distentions. A recent article by Tony Judt – “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” – in the New York Review of Books, Vol. LVI, No. 20, has further prodded me to address the business of distentions and the seemingly perpetual century we seem unable to escape. I will not repeat Judt’s argument, although I have long held some of his opinions. I differ with him here in the elements upon which I want to focus. He halls out the usual suspects: capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. I am going to identify a different set of “isms” to highlight how I think “distentions” have distorted and made pathological our quest for social democracy and social justice.

In order to drive home the matter of distention, here are four “isms” that are not (yet) part of our ordinary vocabulary, and why I think they keep us mired in an inappropriate past and an unworkable present.

1. “Economism” – As Judt points out, “economism” does not simply mean narrow economic determinism, although it encompasses that, too. Economism for Judt is “the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.” It is, in short, a kind of economic totalitarianism. Decades ago, June started saying, “When did we stop talking about the needs of society and start talking about the needs of only the economy?” I don’t know. I do know that in many western countries we have shoved the idea of society to the background (at best) and elevated the supposed health of the economy to the very forefront of all public (and, for that matter, private) considerations. We have become servants of an economy that is much more ineffable and fictitious than those mere members of society who must slavishly tend and feed it. Among the worst consequences has been the near total victory of the idea of the trickle-down theory of economic well-being for everyone who is not a part of the financial “industry” or big business. What is so astounding is that trickle-down economic prosperity has been shown to be false in every single historical case where it has been broadly applied. We who live in North America live in societies “of the economy, for the economy, and by the economy.”

2. “Religionism” – The ameliorative effects of religion -- which make us more empathetic creatures and generally expand our humanness – are lost in the distentions of religionism. As Marx observed long ago (in his best philosophical work), religion can cause alienation – alienation from the societies we inhabit on earth as well as alienation from ourselves as full human beings. Some modern evangelical movements have, by their vigorous adherence to certitudes, created further social alienation. A siege mentality in which exclusive groups of the “saved” or the “righteous” need no longer care about the mundane, earthly lives of their fellow human beings, is not a healthy thing for a planet of 6 billion people. Yet we have large masses of people who have turned their backs to temporal society, expending their time trying to calculate the exact date of the rapture.

3. “Familyism” – Yes, I was also surprised to find this word had a meaning (to at least some people). As I understand it, some attach it to a movement associated with Senator Patrick Moynihan – his ideas on poverty, I assume -- that elevate the importance of the family and the maintenance of its strength above other social factors. This is all good in that healthy families lead to a healthy society. But we have, in the last thirty years at least, made family the be-all-and-end-all of life. Whether Margaret Thatcher actually said that “there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families,” is perhaps less important than the fact that many have acted on this precept. “We’re all right, Jack” is the saying that comes to my mind, not just in the realm of those who have succeeded economically but with those living in what they think are secure families. Like those entrapped in “religionism,” “familyism” includes a few, and exclues many. Or, in other words, the “family isn’t everything, it is the only thing” (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi’s famous words about winning in football). Even those with close friends and neighbours are more wont to erect the barricades of family than seek more broadly-based social reform. The world has grown to condemn ethnocentrism, but familyism is just ethnocentrism with a smaller circumference. Ironically, while modern science has done much to eradicate racist and ethnocentric arguments, it has inadvertently, through the promotion of ideas like “selfish genes” and the biological necessity of parents protecting their offspring before all else, promoted not only the primacy of the family but the family’s right to prior claims in all societal areas.

4. “Sciencism” – “Sciencism,” despite being antipathetic to “religionism,” is its mirror image. Sciencism is simply the belief that science will, given enough time, answer all questions and resolve all matters. There are many more adherents to this naïve belief than some may realize. Almost no form of public activity can claim authenticity without passing scientific standards. Science is the gate keeper and its near total victory can be seen in almost any modern university one wishes to inspect. Post-modernist resistance has been isolated and restricted to a few English departments and unemployed poets. Even the disciplines of History and Philosophy now claim that they are completely scientific. When I suggest to my friends that poetry might be a source of enlightenment and truth, I am given a look of condescension and amusement. The arts and literature, after all, are decorative. When I further suggest that devotees of “sciencism” would do well to reflect on irony, I am told that science will unravel all ironies as well.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, therefore, that the long 20th century has been, and remains into the 21st century, a totalitarian one. It did not end with Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. It hardly needed, or needs, villains of this type to carry it forward. We will all quietly acquiesce in one totalitarian belief or another. Of course, there have been strenuous movements aside from post-modernism that have tried to offer alternatives. Those who retreated to the land and formed small, self-sufficient communities were not as crazy as we thought in the 1960s. Those who have tried to enhance small-scale capitalism among industrious women in Bangladesh or Africa have resurrected the idea of capitalism as a social benefit just as Adam Smith envisioned it. Missionaries and Humanists who try to encourage the dignity of all human beings, have had an ameliorative effect worldwide. But until we break the iron grip of the “isms” I describe above – not destroy those parts of them that are good and valuable but the totalitarian qualities they flaunt – we will not move on to another “historical” century or a better world.