I was given a book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me". It is by James Loewen, a professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont. His stated goal in teaching is one I applaud- to get students to think instead of merely learning. He does of course bring his particular point of view to his subject. His lens is racism. He has published multiple books on racial issues in America. Several of them, including my gift, address what he sees as the 'real' history of America that is not taught in high school textbooks. This real history, as he sees it, is one of racism, atrocities, conquest and the exploitation of advantages gained not through racial merit but merely the fortunate accident of healthy climate and lesser disease. In this, he references and echoes "Guns, Germs, and Steel", by Jared Diamond, although taking the idea in a different direction.
Loewen is only one of a multitude of academics, social activists and politicians who are deconstructing American and Western history, and reshaping it as a narrative of violent oppression and exploitation of which we ought to be ashamed. This effort is a logical, intellectual extension of the destruction, in the last 50 years, of the institutions that provided conceptual and moral underpinnings for Western society- church, marriage, family unit, government. Another form of the same deconstructive idea is the attacks on our Constitution as racist and sexist, a shameful product of privileged white men who excluded blacks and women from society and power. These ideas are popular enough that Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize simply by going around apologizing for America.
Loewen raises some important points. He notes, with justice, that high school texts are superficial and closer to inculcation of national myth than they are complete histories. This seems at least superficially appropriate to me. I don't use TS Eliot to teach 5 year olds to read, and the complexities and nuances of history are not the province of high school students. We learn in stages. As much as anything else, Loewen came across to me as simply wanting his version of Truth to be the one inculcated, rather than what he calls national myth. There is certainly a place for comparative, hidden, or other elements of history, but I do not think high school is that place.
My questions that arise from the book, and others, are 'why should I apologize now?', 'what is wrong with a national myth?', and 'what has western Europe done that is so horrible in the context of the times?' I write not just about Loewen here but about all the deconstructionists and shamers of the West.
It is too easy to retroject our current values and say our Founders, or our Constitution, or whatever, are sexist, racist, and flawed. No one stops to consider whether OUR values may be flawed, but let us not consider that further. Regardless of the validity of our values, they cannot be retrojected upon a different time. This is facile, appealing, and utterly false. Let us instead make comparison to the times themselves.
Our Constitution was a startling document in 1790. No one had before given any human consideration to slaves. We made them 6/10ths of a person, and counted them as such for census purposes, acknowledging their humanity on a political as well as theoretical level. Similarly, the US was surprisingly advanced in women's suffrage. The Constitution does not prohibit it, and every state west of the Mississippi had women's suffrage prior to 1919, some as early as 1869. In contrast, in France and Italy women got the vote in.....1945. The US did not, could not, end slavery in the Constitution. It was the basis for the US' major export product, cotton, and its exclusion would have prevented the formation of a United States.
Our voting system, including the electoral college, is a brilliant and balanced design created by men who feared democracy every bit as much as tyranny. The very idea being popularized today, that a few states with large populations should control the national vote, is exactly what our Founders wished to prevent! We are a federated Republic, not a democracy. For those who say our system is archaic, we have one of the oldest and most stable governmental systems in the world. Since 1790, France has had 5 constitutions, Germany 3, Italy I can't count that high, England has even had profound changes to its governmental system since 1790. We are a historically unusual example of an enduring system other than totalitarian ones.
Today's historical revisionists disparage Columbus as the non-discoverer of America, and the Pilgrims, Jamestown, and other early settlements as white colonization and exploitation of Native Americans. Whites brought disease, notably smallpox and measles, that killed about 90% of the indigenous population. The book "1491" estimates North America's population at 100 million in 1491, greater than Europe's.
I agree with all these basic facts but do not see them as altering the narrative. Vikings came to America earlier, but never stayed. Columbus came, made records of his trips, and had ongoing interest and support from a sponsoring government. The Viking settlements were impermanent, had no record and no intention of permanence. Trying to claim that Asians crossing a land bridge discovered America in 10,000 BC, as some do, is just specious. By that standard New York was founded by Eskimos.
Native Americans were indeed slaughtered by disease, then rounded up and put on reservations. Even worse, black people from Africa were kidnapped, put in hideous slave ships, sold as property, and abused, all to make sugar, cotton and tobacco for white people. I don't see that as a reason to boast about also not one for which to apologize. One group has conquered another since there were two people living next to each other. Rome is not condemned for leveling Carthage, or slaughtering the Parthians. England would be completely confused: Celt conquered by Franks, by Norse, by Angles, by Normans, kings imported from Germany twice. If we're going to apologize for winning then England ought to just commit mass suicide.
Jared Diamond's arguments in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' certainly have validity, but are also irrelevant. One group figures something out first, and wins. Had Germany not alienated so many of its scientists, they might have had atomic weapons first, and the history of the world would be different. Should we pass off the Allied victory in WW2 as a fluke of immigration?
The horrors and evils of 'white, European conquest' should be considered next to the prevailing values of the time and of the peoples conquered. The entire world was and is violent, and conquest generally means subjugation. There is no established concept of living in peace and harmony with your defeated neighbor. God himself calls upon the Israelites to kill every last Canaanite. The Jews were enslaved in Egypt. Captives in Greece, Rome, Turkey, etc all were enslaved and put to work in mines and galleys well into the 1800s. We fought with the Barbary Pirates over this issue. During the 30 Years' War, and the wars of Austrian and Spanish Succession, civilians from opposing sides were alternately raped, killed and burned out of homes. Considering this backdrop, European settlers of the Americas did what all conquering groups of the time did. They herded the losers off to inhospitable places and killed the remainder. We get ourselves tied in knots apologizing to Americans of Japanese descent for interning them. To this day Japan has not apologized for using sexully enslaved Koreans as 'comfort women'. nor for their imprisonment of British civilians in Singapore. German and Russian soldiers killed each other savagely in WW2, with less than 2% of German POWs in Russia ever coming home alive. In Afghanistan, prisoners are still tortured by knives, with penile amputation a favorite. Russian soldiers were advised just as the English were- save the last bullet for yourself. Do not get captured. The entire world is a barbaric cesspit. There is no over-the-rainbow, flying unicorn world of peace and brotherhood. We are no more filthy than anyone else, and considerably cleaner than many.
Regardless of why European nations had more advanced technology, it is true that they did, and they used it. Aside from philosophical concepts of the equality of all people, the groups conquered were primitive and savage in comparison to their European conquerors. Certainly this was not the equivalent of Rome conquering Greece, where Romans recognized they had militarily defeated a superior culture. The groups conquered had, variously, human sacrifice, mortal combat, primitive housing, limited written language, and minimal tools. In the midst of condemning ourselves, it is legitimate to ask what did these 'civilizations' contribute to world culture that make their conquest such a source of self-contempt? Asked another way, would all the critics of western European manners be happier living in huts and tents, chewing pelts to soften them, or offering up a relative in hopes of a better harvest? I doubt it.
Our schools certainly do teach a 'national myth'. Washington cut down a cherry tree. We learn (or maybe learned. Who knows what is taught to the young now) about 'First in war, first in peace', about the nobility of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Is any of that less true because Washington owned slaves, or Roosevelt screwed around, or Lincoln was depressed? I don't think so. Every society has a national myth, a point made beautifully in 'Fiction as History' by Bowersock. Rome, Greece, Japan, all were descended from gods. While obviously not true, a national 'myth' serves, like language and religion, to ground and unite a people as a nation. Americans believe we are fairer, kinder and more honest and well-intended than other nations. That this is not completely so ought not to obscure the great acts we have done and are doing. I do not see how tearing down national 'myth' serves us any better than tearing down family, church and government. Those that wish to bring down statues of Jefferson, sully Washington and condemn our Founders as sexist, racist monsters have offered no over-arching image of the US with which to replace what they are trying to destroy.
Interestingly, the entire revisionist process seems to only apply to bashing white Europeans. If I point out that southern states were exercising a constitutional right to secede in 1860, or that Lincoln asserted an ungiven and unarticulated authority to compel states to remain in the Union, I am immediately called names. God forbid that I should point out that Michael Brown was indeed assaulting an officer and trying to grab his weapon, that the entire Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie. THAT myth is inviolate, as is the idea that Lincoln 'saved' our nation.
As far as I can see, there is a portion of academia that wants to trash the US in the name of I know not what. As Alfred says in The Dark Knight, there are some men who just want to see things burn. It's such a shame some of them are Americans. The wonderful quote from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which is the title of this blog post, applies- Όταν οι έλληνες γράφαν φιλοσοφία, εσείς ακόμα κρεμόσασταν απ' τα δέντρα- When my people were writing philosophy your people were swinging from trees. I don't see that I should apologize at all, I think a national 'myth' is part of any nation's ethos, and I think western Europe has done as much and more than any place on earth to advance ideals of civilization and its works.
Ted
Loewen is only one of a multitude of academics, social activists and politicians who are deconstructing American and Western history, and reshaping it as a narrative of violent oppression and exploitation of which we ought to be ashamed. This effort is a logical, intellectual extension of the destruction, in the last 50 years, of the institutions that provided conceptual and moral underpinnings for Western society- church, marriage, family unit, government. Another form of the same deconstructive idea is the attacks on our Constitution as racist and sexist, a shameful product of privileged white men who excluded blacks and women from society and power. These ideas are popular enough that Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize simply by going around apologizing for America.
Loewen raises some important points. He notes, with justice, that high school texts are superficial and closer to inculcation of national myth than they are complete histories. This seems at least superficially appropriate to me. I don't use TS Eliot to teach 5 year olds to read, and the complexities and nuances of history are not the province of high school students. We learn in stages. As much as anything else, Loewen came across to me as simply wanting his version of Truth to be the one inculcated, rather than what he calls national myth. There is certainly a place for comparative, hidden, or other elements of history, but I do not think high school is that place.
My questions that arise from the book, and others, are 'why should I apologize now?', 'what is wrong with a national myth?', and 'what has western Europe done that is so horrible in the context of the times?' I write not just about Loewen here but about all the deconstructionists and shamers of the West.
It is too easy to retroject our current values and say our Founders, or our Constitution, or whatever, are sexist, racist, and flawed. No one stops to consider whether OUR values may be flawed, but let us not consider that further. Regardless of the validity of our values, they cannot be retrojected upon a different time. This is facile, appealing, and utterly false. Let us instead make comparison to the times themselves.
Our Constitution was a startling document in 1790. No one had before given any human consideration to slaves. We made them 6/10ths of a person, and counted them as such for census purposes, acknowledging their humanity on a political as well as theoretical level. Similarly, the US was surprisingly advanced in women's suffrage. The Constitution does not prohibit it, and every state west of the Mississippi had women's suffrage prior to 1919, some as early as 1869. In contrast, in France and Italy women got the vote in.....1945. The US did not, could not, end slavery in the Constitution. It was the basis for the US' major export product, cotton, and its exclusion would have prevented the formation of a United States.
Our voting system, including the electoral college, is a brilliant and balanced design created by men who feared democracy every bit as much as tyranny. The very idea being popularized today, that a few states with large populations should control the national vote, is exactly what our Founders wished to prevent! We are a federated Republic, not a democracy. For those who say our system is archaic, we have one of the oldest and most stable governmental systems in the world. Since 1790, France has had 5 constitutions, Germany 3, Italy I can't count that high, England has even had profound changes to its governmental system since 1790. We are a historically unusual example of an enduring system other than totalitarian ones.
Today's historical revisionists disparage Columbus as the non-discoverer of America, and the Pilgrims, Jamestown, and other early settlements as white colonization and exploitation of Native Americans. Whites brought disease, notably smallpox and measles, that killed about 90% of the indigenous population. The book "1491" estimates North America's population at 100 million in 1491, greater than Europe's.
I agree with all these basic facts but do not see them as altering the narrative. Vikings came to America earlier, but never stayed. Columbus came, made records of his trips, and had ongoing interest and support from a sponsoring government. The Viking settlements were impermanent, had no record and no intention of permanence. Trying to claim that Asians crossing a land bridge discovered America in 10,000 BC, as some do, is just specious. By that standard New York was founded by Eskimos.
Native Americans were indeed slaughtered by disease, then rounded up and put on reservations. Even worse, black people from Africa were kidnapped, put in hideous slave ships, sold as property, and abused, all to make sugar, cotton and tobacco for white people. I don't see that as a reason to boast about also not one for which to apologize. One group has conquered another since there were two people living next to each other. Rome is not condemned for leveling Carthage, or slaughtering the Parthians. England would be completely confused: Celt conquered by Franks, by Norse, by Angles, by Normans, kings imported from Germany twice. If we're going to apologize for winning then England ought to just commit mass suicide.
Jared Diamond's arguments in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' certainly have validity, but are also irrelevant. One group figures something out first, and wins. Had Germany not alienated so many of its scientists, they might have had atomic weapons first, and the history of the world would be different. Should we pass off the Allied victory in WW2 as a fluke of immigration?
The horrors and evils of 'white, European conquest' should be considered next to the prevailing values of the time and of the peoples conquered. The entire world was and is violent, and conquest generally means subjugation. There is no established concept of living in peace and harmony with your defeated neighbor. God himself calls upon the Israelites to kill every last Canaanite. The Jews were enslaved in Egypt. Captives in Greece, Rome, Turkey, etc all were enslaved and put to work in mines and galleys well into the 1800s. We fought with the Barbary Pirates over this issue. During the 30 Years' War, and the wars of Austrian and Spanish Succession, civilians from opposing sides were alternately raped, killed and burned out of homes. Considering this backdrop, European settlers of the Americas did what all conquering groups of the time did. They herded the losers off to inhospitable places and killed the remainder. We get ourselves tied in knots apologizing to Americans of Japanese descent for interning them. To this day Japan has not apologized for using sexully enslaved Koreans as 'comfort women'. nor for their imprisonment of British civilians in Singapore. German and Russian soldiers killed each other savagely in WW2, with less than 2% of German POWs in Russia ever coming home alive. In Afghanistan, prisoners are still tortured by knives, with penile amputation a favorite. Russian soldiers were advised just as the English were- save the last bullet for yourself. Do not get captured. The entire world is a barbaric cesspit. There is no over-the-rainbow, flying unicorn world of peace and brotherhood. We are no more filthy than anyone else, and considerably cleaner than many.
Regardless of why European nations had more advanced technology, it is true that they did, and they used it. Aside from philosophical concepts of the equality of all people, the groups conquered were primitive and savage in comparison to their European conquerors. Certainly this was not the equivalent of Rome conquering Greece, where Romans recognized they had militarily defeated a superior culture. The groups conquered had, variously, human sacrifice, mortal combat, primitive housing, limited written language, and minimal tools. In the midst of condemning ourselves, it is legitimate to ask what did these 'civilizations' contribute to world culture that make their conquest such a source of self-contempt? Asked another way, would all the critics of western European manners be happier living in huts and tents, chewing pelts to soften them, or offering up a relative in hopes of a better harvest? I doubt it.
Our schools certainly do teach a 'national myth'. Washington cut down a cherry tree. We learn (or maybe learned. Who knows what is taught to the young now) about 'First in war, first in peace', about the nobility of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Is any of that less true because Washington owned slaves, or Roosevelt screwed around, or Lincoln was depressed? I don't think so. Every society has a national myth, a point made beautifully in 'Fiction as History' by Bowersock. Rome, Greece, Japan, all were descended from gods. While obviously not true, a national 'myth' serves, like language and religion, to ground and unite a people as a nation. Americans believe we are fairer, kinder and more honest and well-intended than other nations. That this is not completely so ought not to obscure the great acts we have done and are doing. I do not see how tearing down national 'myth' serves us any better than tearing down family, church and government. Those that wish to bring down statues of Jefferson, sully Washington and condemn our Founders as sexist, racist monsters have offered no over-arching image of the US with which to replace what they are trying to destroy.
Interestingly, the entire revisionist process seems to only apply to bashing white Europeans. If I point out that southern states were exercising a constitutional right to secede in 1860, or that Lincoln asserted an ungiven and unarticulated authority to compel states to remain in the Union, I am immediately called names. God forbid that I should point out that Michael Brown was indeed assaulting an officer and trying to grab his weapon, that the entire Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie. THAT myth is inviolate, as is the idea that Lincoln 'saved' our nation.
As far as I can see, there is a portion of academia that wants to trash the US in the name of I know not what. As Alfred says in The Dark Knight, there are some men who just want to see things burn. It's such a shame some of them are Americans. The wonderful quote from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which is the title of this blog post, applies- Όταν οι έλληνες γράφαν φιλοσοφία, εσείς ακόμα κρεμόσασταν απ' τα δέντρα- When my people were writing philosophy your people were swinging from trees. I don't see that I should apologize at all, I think a national 'myth' is part of any nation's ethos, and I think western Europe has done as much and more than any place on earth to advance ideals of civilization and its works.
Ted
Ted - There is just so much here. As to the 'why' of all this Deconstructionist' noise, there is again Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." The late 19th century saw Nihilists and Anarchists who embodied the actuality of the 'some people just want to watch the world burn' impulse. They really had no tangible, workable vision of the society they sought to build. We are, in many ways, again facing that same destructive drive. What comes next? It is impossible to say given that humanity's gift of divination has never, at any time, actually produced a true vision of the future. How many times have we proclaimed the End of History? Certainly those comfortable late Victorians / early Edwardians and their dark shadows the Nihilists, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists, etc., of the same time had not the slightest clue of what was waiting for them, just over the horizon. No more we than they.
ReplyDeleteNicely written. Agree with all of it.
ReplyDelete