The Weight of History

A thing happened to me when I lived in Washington D.C. that made me realize how old I have become. It also happened to be one of those things which, when it happens to you, you get the immediate and undeniable feeling that you'll always remember it so very clearly: the smell in the air around you will seem to hang the same way as it did at that moment, spiced with the scent of salt water taffy and old books.

It was too big to write about; the import of all these wars, their meaning to their participants and their inheritors. You can stare at the memorials and read up on the battles and acts of Congress, the soldiers, with their hawkish eyes. But I will never feel the foundation of a church thundered out by another country's planes. I will never have to care for or carry one of my countrymen, because he cannot walk, his legs stolen by an enemy mortar. We were at the Smithsonian American History Museum.

The war dedication is my favorite full-length exhibit, although it has every reason not to be. I hate the glory of war. Everything seems set to violin music, or to far away drums. When the throaty commentator on an audiobook tells you stories about these too-long wars, about the men who order them and who comprise them, you think of men with more grizzle and composure than you have, or ever will: and it almost must be that way. To at least somebody, a grainy picture is a hero, if he wears fatigues. I don't quite buy into it, but considering even my objection to it's actual practice, the influence of war is impossible to let alone, or even to undermine. As are the outrageous strength shown by some of its principle agents, foreign and domestic. As are, for a thinking man, its elegant, conciliatory alternatives, which I would favor categorically, and which are borne of compassion as much as calm; as much, even, as cowardice. You sit by the atomic bomb layout, and you think about your generation in every country: how many millions must die because of an argument? An impulse? An accident? An idea? How many today, and how many of their sons? How many brave?

The corner of the exhibit that is devoted to military action taken since the first Gulf War, it's hidden past a shadowy foyer with a drinking fountain and a man with two middle school daughters. The guardians of the present, these three whispy middle Americans. The dad is a balding man in his late forties, whose back looks like the part of a walking cane where your hand goes, and with just as much weight pushing down on him. His daughters were quiet, and narrowed their eyes as they found their words floating past them, in the air: ''But, why did they crash the planes like that?'' Old dad's mouth slanted down and touched the cold tile floor, and his forehead crinkled. He scratched an eyebrow, wondering whether or not a way to answer his girls even existed. They have a favorite movie, by now, and they know what they like having on their pizzas. Each girl has a best friend, each has a personality and an email address, a each has taken vitamins and has read Steinbeck. They have slang, pets, formalwear, secrets. Scars. Journals. Heroes. And they were too young to remember September 11 happening.

Broken Wheel

"Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."
Chuck Palahniuk

About two weeks ago, my knee betrayed me. I have no job, and I have no dependable schedule, so I am clothed in the evils of idleness. I do nothing all day which acts as evidence that I have existed that day. I make sandwiches, I ride my bike, I watch and listen to podcast debates, and I do one-legged pushups on the floor of a cramped bedroom. In the case that I had entered a time machine and I was concerned about irreversibly altering the future by polluting the past, this is the sort of life I would have to life in order to make sure that I affect nothing. Twelve days whipped by like the leaves of a flipbook, and I have made nothing with them. I hope that I do not have to experience this fate, but if it happens that I am one day lain in bed and around me are gathered the people I love, it is possible that I will look back on days like these have been and think to myself, there is no limit to what I would give to have those days back for the doing. I should crumple up the time I waste and shoot it at the wire basket next to my desk, like so much paper that is issued from the hands of writers who are obsessed with--and constantly motivated by--attempting to produce things of merit. I am often one of these; I have not been, recently, and my mood has soured noteably as a consequence.

For the emotional price I have paid by way of this lassitude, I have accrued quite a bit intellectually. I have watched or listened to something north of 20 debates and lectures, mostly revolving around the topics of religion, international human rights policy, or freedom of speech and press. I wish I could record the massive amount of thinking that I've done about these topics as a result of the impressive discourse, but sometimes the density of the material, combined with my poor organizational skills when I'm so furious with ideas, makes it impossible to summon order, especially among the interlacing topics. Here is a very brief list of the blogs which could come as a result of my only best use of time during my convalesence. My hope is that I will be able to turn this attrocious negative into something of a positive and productive experience, although my mood tonight, which is typical of how it has been most of the week, usually fosters either vitriol which I am sad to have thought or slop which I am embarrassed to have written. Intellectually and emotionally, then, it is obvious that I have good reason to resolve both my attitude and my body, but both of them are slow-going and neither mechanism cares much about my preference for not being ill.

1. Something comprehensive about my view on the role of religion in the world. This will easily be several essays, both perscriptive and descriptive. Specific topics needs to include dogmatism of any kind, the role and import of conversation, and the stricture that religion places around the neck of the global struggle to establish and ensure human rights. In each of these instances, I'm not sure that I can manage to reduce away the terrible fear I have about the way in which history will judge the time in which I lived.

2. Something about the terrible legacy of quarreling and antagonism beset upon us by the last administration, and the events that took place in its duration. I cannot listen to a single news telecast or talking heads show anymore without wondering what percentage of the truth I'm hearing. I very regularly hear two people say opposite things about the same event or person, so I believe there is one of two things happening. Either one or both of the people is wrong, or one or both of the people is lying. In either case, the quality and quantity of information to which I have access is depressing; the horrid clumsiness of intellectual pursuit confounds me every single day of my too short life. Should I have to constantly figure out whether or not I am receiving the truth, and how much of it? How can there be partisan news? Why can I not rely on something to just relate one small set of facts in a row? Nothing could be goddamned easier than this, and none of you will do it: you must taint everything. Well this is the world we have, because of it.

3. A short story I am working on about a man whose birth date had been confused.

4. A social contract theory for backpackers.

5. There is a Tennessee Williams quote that goes like this: "Why do I write? Because I found life to be unsatisfactory." So, something about that.

6. One of my primary historical interests, and political interests for that matter, is revolution. I have begun working on a short essay, informed by the ideology present in the entry about Dublin, that revolution must be non-violent in order to be successful.


Oh, to be able to travel again.

A New Approach to History

The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a new group whose purpose is to lobby to President Obama, has affixed this plaque to the earth in Washington, D.C., a tree which springs from a root of etched marble. I cannot concede that they speak on behalf of many people, but certainly the only world which I can conceive of as sustainable will hold this statement as fundamental to its credo. Indeed, such a world would be the realization of exactly this hope, now only lines in a stone.

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I stand now, for the purposes of this thought experiment, in direct opposition to everything with which I have formed a dear and lasting confederacy. I have, for as long as I can remember, been a tremendous fan of knowledge and its acquisition, truth and its dispensation, argumentation and its merits. But the combative position that philosophers often take towards their challenges is dwarfed in scale and in venom by the posture that seems to have won favor in recent years, one constructed on a platform of blind and brutish force. Surely, the examples are plenty: intelligence failures, addressed by silencing any contrary voice with an inspection, a dismissal, and explosion; shrieking talk show hosts, who hector at the height of their lungs to squelch factual evidence and to confound logical process; nations, who would sooner ambush and detonate than sit and dialogue; an emphasis on picking sides, racing to arms, identifying alliances by declaring an enemy, and none of it anchored on the slightest toehold of pragmatism in the mountainous glyph of humanity. Has it become of us, now, that we learn who it is to hate, and then we do our best to perform the task, lead down the righteous path to warring by only the vitriolic legacy of our ancestry? Must we fight today because we are taught that this is the way that we have fought every day for as long as we choose to remember, right the way up until yesterday? To assay the problem which plagues us today, let us dissect the germ of it with the feared antidote of that whole breed of violent action: a willingness to imagine the contrary.

To begin. During an academic session that was held here in Salzburg, I had the opportunity to discuss several prominent issues in intergovernmental policy and meta-ethics with the visiting scholars from the United States and Europe. Along with the ideas that I had not heard before, mostly concerning the new presidential administration and the role of the United Nations in the new decade, there were foisted several ideas that I had. For whatever reason, I immediately weakened in my interest, and instead of listening as acutely as I habitually do, I began to build my defamation case. Several times, a Fellow mentioned the pride that an ambiguous we should feel for our country, by which was meant either the country of our ancestral origin or the country to which we currently declare our citizenship, or both. I can understand the emotional attachment to a country, but only to the extent that we admire some bit of the environment or the culture or the history of a people. It cannot be said, after all, that a person have love for a country, but only for a way or a state of being that used to be common to that country. There was also a great deal of talk about the tragedies of the past and the hope we have for the future, all laden with a tiresome amount of self-affirmation. The linguistic key that it is important to recognize here is that, in cases of prudent assertion of one's sovereignty, it must be the case that there is a force which is doing some subjugating; otherwise, this sort of presentation is either empty, as it is not the result of any actual strife, or it is trivial, as the preening would necessarily fall on prejudiced ears. But who, among this group of highly-educated professional intellectuals who reside in the United States, is being kept down? It is my postulate that these assertions of self are in fact by proxy: the speaker who laments his condition to you is very often a surrogate for the cries of his ancestors.

Before continuing, it should be made clear that there is no reason to believe that even the most privileged among us has not at some point suffered the burn of stigmatization. It should not be inferred by these past few paragraphs that it is improper to feel sympathy or remorse for calamities of the past. These feelings certainly perform some sort of social function, such that we are each of us reminded that the empathy we feel for others is a symptom of our shared nature: that an infraction of one man against the rights or person of another is a slight against his own potential and character. In an ideal society, one could imagine that a high and stable degree of this kind of empathy would be a fundamental practice in the elimination of social injustice, but certainly exaggeration should be left out: it is tempting imagine that a heavy percentage of the people who bemoan the way things are actually mean the way things have been. That sort of criticism is certainly important, in its proper context, but the disconnect seen here between intent and actual meaning--or, more precisely, between accurate representation and transposed urgency--is highlighted by one's experience of history. It is intuitively apparent that the retelling of historical atrocities can have a dramatic impression on anyone, and most certainly on one who has some sort of kinship with the affected group. It is not too much of a stretch too assume that a recollection of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, for example, would shape the attitude of a young philosopher of any race, or would impress a heavy sense of inheritance upon black and white students in particular. But this is the very issue which strums a dissonant chord: if a historical account stirs the vigor within a person, is it too much to assume that the resultant mind is not preferable? How many agents of cruelty and discord have themselves been avid students of the worst lessons of history, impassioned and fueled forth by the venom they internalized from the story? And worse, how many have we created, who now seek their own version of reconciliation?

This is the inspiration for a thought experiment regarding the import of teaching history as a text instead of extracting only its lesson. Let us take first the common paradigm, which is to instruct students in institutions of learning from the time they are very young until they graduate with their final degree, about the events of history. Very often, the emphasis of these classes is placed on huge reactions, stark developments, prominent and influential people; categorically, the most lasting impression, and very likely the extreme bulk of the instruction, seems to revolve around clashes between two or more ideologies, and the resultant heroism of one party or another. But what about the villain of the story? Surely every hero needs a nemesis to make his struggle possible. The fight between the two has lead us to our condition today, and generally speaking, it seems that the majority seem to be thankful for the dedication and the perseverance of the victor. But a genealogy remains. I have many strains of Celtic ancestry. This very likely means that my people were tortured and killed by the British, or, having escaped that rule, were persecuted, although less vehemently, in the United States. If not, then perhaps they were more affluent, and thus the necessary benefactors of the lucrative practice of slavery, economic brutality, and international wars. Taken too much to heart, either version of that history paints a clear tormentor and a clear sufferer.

I can understand the appeal of having a history, which I will elucidate briefly in an effort to quell the critics I am certain to have built by this point. The extra-experiential ownership of history, that is, the internalization of strife from the past, has its merits. It establishes a sense of belonging, both in the sense of creating an idea of self in the context of a tremendous narrative, and in the sense that it gives a person a feeling of membership to a community which identifies with the same challenges, the same ills, the same triumphs. Further than a casual belonging, a knowledge of history produces in the learner a change to intuit intentionality, of causality. In other words, once some major historical tension and victory is understood, a man can better understand how he it is that he came to be, and thus how it is the he is a product of both the terror and the brilliance innate in the human potential. This understanding is crucial, provided that he is in turn a cog in the giant machine which will irrevocably produce, indeed in some ways determine, the future. In this way, history is an explanation, in addition to being a recollection. If things are bad, they demonstrate the why and the how, which is their link to self-affirmation: one may say--Look at how we have suffered, and yet are now so strong! If things are good, history might demonstrate the transition from poverty to sovereignty, which fosters what I will call achievement complex; or it may demonstrate the same state of good fortune and maintenance, which fosters I will call entitlement complex. History also provides context, by examining the relationship between one group and another, but this facet can be a burden as often as it can be a perk. It seems that a constant and biased re-telling of one kind of relationship has the power to subjugate or embolden the group which hears the story, to shame them or to revivify them: each of these stimuli has its social utility, but surely not a one of them serves to quell tension between two historically combative groups.

Additionally, history as an inheritance establishes an emotional connection to a sort of family narrative, which is disrupted only at the tremendous objection of those who enjoy the comfort provided by this kind of ownership. Inherent in this attitude is the idea that if the past is not retold, it will be forgotten, and the "family" to which each of us belongs would lose significance. There also seems to be pressure from the community of elders to continue some sort of tradition, by custom or by speech, or even by upholding an enduring type of relationship with each different social group. By way of this pressure, there is a tacit acceptance that it is the duty of the next generation to inherit the problems and the solutions of the last. Retelling, then, is a manner of defense of ancestry as much as it is a remembrance: a way to ensure that the fight happened for a reason, not just a commemoration that it happened. But this leap seems to miss the mark a bit. For reasons that will be outlined in the next section, it is feasible to suggest an alternative method of approaching reconciliation that does not include retelling history per se; this model will exclude the story of the embittered struggle, and will demonstrate the way in which animosity can easily fall away. Here, defectors to my upcoming proposition may issue the retort that language presents an exception which seems to fit this function as well, but that language is indispensable from complex society. This objection is respected and accounted, and is probably one of many. But it is easy to demonstrate the way in which language has an independent utility in the way that memories do not. Language allows for more rapid communication of thoughts, which have an equal capacity to praise or to condemn: to create as much good as evil. However, language also permits art, enables cooperation and cohesion, and promotes an ethic of care in the way that memories alone fail to do so. This test is repeatable against other exceptions which may be presented against the following argument.

I cannot understand the import of studying the story itself as it relates to some of the more serious human problems facing each of us today, including inter-class, -creed, -national, and -racial warfare. It is demonstrated that history has its value, but let us for a moment pretend that an institutionalized teaching of the subject was eliminated. Let us suppose further that stories about specific historic strife, with names and faces and alliances, are not told even in the most private of circles. Certainly there is no chance that this experiment could ever be implemented--nor would anyone, I think, suggest that it should--but let us postpone these objections for a moment and imagine that they were, in order to demonstrate the true point of this essay. If each of us is raised without an idea of the historical incongruity of race in the United States, for example, how could there be any animosity between the two races today? And in order to ensure that we do not repeat the injustices of the past, or to counter the theoretical predisposition that a person has to commit such injustices, we must instead simply teach the lesson that we have rightly learned, borne of tragedy.

This is the way to honor the battles of our ancestors. Instead of underscoring the importance of treating each other with respect or governing based on equality by relating the story of Antoine Condorcet or Rosa Parks, simply demonstrate the validity of those lessons a priori. Leave behind tussles between elites which restrict the rights of the public and who battle for power while ignoring the common man; but read the writings of John Stuart Mill and Henry David Thoreau, who have it figured out. We do not need to retell the story of a genocide in order to condemn all genocide, just as we do not need to have experienced falling on a sword in order to appreciate the tremendous pain. Some things are demonstrable, prima facie rights or protections, and an example of their denial does not further prove the case. Anecdotes are good for illustrations, but they might as well be fictitious enough to avoid spawning animosity, for what good is the lesson imparted if the heart is made so callous that the ears ignore a message? A retelling of history opens anew the opportunity to internalize either hatred or shame, which have no part to play in repairing the conflicts that have lasted for so long. A thought experiment works as well as a cultural immersion, if the truth is sound and its speaker is artful. It requires a change in the model we use for learning, and an alteration in our attitude both as students and as teachers. But the merit of this approach to history, while virtually unimplementable, seems to cripple the ability of one group to inherit hate for another, and may go a long way towards humanity's capacity to learn to hate based on group identity.