NVL - Historicism

[Peter Petto]

The following article in this weeks _Economist_ reminded me of some of the
recent discussion on Pynchon and M&D and history and more.

Since their URLs can be a bit flakey, here's the full text:

AMERICA, it is often said, has a history-sized hole in its imagination. Henry
James groaned about his country’s “perpetual repudiation of the past” while
another Henry (Ford, this time) called history “bunk”. A few years ago,
Hollywood marketed Alan Bennett’s play, “The Madness of George III”, as “The
Madness of King George” in case audiences got the idea they had missed parts I
and II. Nowadays, “you’re history” is a handy insult. As a popular columnist,
Christopher Hitchens, recently reminded American readers, Communists used to
air-brush people out of history rather than consign them to it. 

And yet it could just as well be said that America is fascinated by history, or
at least a mythologised version of it. In the political and legal debate on
impeachment, Americans constantly invoke the country’s founders, citing
18th-century writings to support modern views. Whenever they fret about their
country, somebody appears to tell them that things were better in a past era,
real or (usually) imagined. The rancour over impeachment appears to represent a
fall from some former Eden of civility. The cliché is that American politicians
are obsessed with the vision thing. In truth, the revision thing is big in
Washington too. 

One of the most popular kinds of historical revisionism concerns the virtue of
the nation’s citizens. The earliest Americans, according to the popular
imagination, were models of virtue, governing themselves wisely through the
fabled town-hall meetings of New England, and through a variety of voluntary
associations. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville arrived from France to marvel
at the vigour of America’s civic society, while another Gallic flatterer, J.
Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, earlier demanded, “What then is the American,
this new man?” Short of more up-to-date French compliments, Americans seem
captivated by these ones. Politicians wax lyrical about voluntary associations,
and hold their own town-hall meetings with constituents. Recently, Internet
conferences have come to be called “electronic town-hall meetings”, as though
the old intimacy of New England can be replaced by a new kind of deliberation,
face-to-interface. 

Actually, those New England town meetings were a far cry from the myth they
inspired. As Michael Schudson writes in “The Good Citizen: A History of
American Civic Life” (The Free Press; $27.50), his recent history of American
civic society, these meetings were open only to property-owning men, and, in
some cases, only to church members. Far from being models of pure democracy,
they usually followed the agenda and preferences of the chosen few, who tended
to be the richest figures in the town. Far, again, from being models of devoted
political participation, the town halls suffered from citizen apathy: in
18th-century Massachusetts, for example, attendance ranged from 20% to 60% of
eligible voters. 

Finally, the notion that these meetings served the modern ideal of political
freedom is pure “bunk”. New England town halls were meant to show-case harmony
and consensus, not be a forum for free opinions. When contemporaries spoke of
liberty, they meant the liberty of a town against outside influence, not the
liberty of the individual. 

If 18th-century New England has been mythologised, what of the early republic
that followed it? The constitution of 1787 did bring into being a polity based
on competing interests; deliberation was no longer expected to yield consensus.
Hierarchy was also softened. The constitution’s opening words, “We the people”,
summed up the new spirit of the times. And yet, though these changes were
remarkable for their era, it is odd that the early republic is so admired two
centuries later. At that time, slaves, women and the poor remained excluded
from the ballot box. 

America’s sense of its more recent past seems just as faulty. It is often
assumed, for example, that the America of the 1950s exuded civic solidarity;
indeed, Bob Dole based his 1996 presidential campaign partly on a promise that
he would speak for the pre-baby-boomer certitudes that Americans seemed to
crave. But the 1950s did not appear so perfect to many contemporaries. Robert
Dahl, a celebrated sociologist, studied New Haven, Connecticut in the late
1950s, and found people unwilling to bestir themselves for altruistic community
life. President Eisenhower was sufficiently worried about the national
aimlessness to commission a study of “Goals for Americans”. Americans then may
have been more trusting of government than people are these days, but this was
not necessarily an advantage. Perhaps they should have been less trusting of a
government that denied rights to blacks, withheld welfare payments from
eligible supplicants, and tested radioactive fall-out on unwitting citizens. 

In sum, the past for which Americans pine was far from perfect, and probably
not even preferable to the America of today. Of course it is true that
prosperity has weakened some community bonds, for instance by encouraging
grandparents and adult children to live independently: in 1950 only three in
ten unmarried adults lived alone; by 1970 six in ten did. But it is not clear
that this is a bad thing. The rise in solo living may increase loneliness, but
it also increases privacy and freedom. This must on balance be a benefit,
otherwise the extended family would still be thriving now. 

All this may seem obvious, but it has not saved Americans from nostalgia yet.
On the contrary, America clings to an array of historically derived ideals of
citizen participation—18th-century town-hall meetings, 19th-century mass
parties, early 20th-century direct democracy—even though it cannot possibly
live up to all at once. These are the “successive coats that laminate our
political ideals”, as Mr Schudson puts it; and each coat is tattered, so that
the earlier ones show through. It is reassuring to find Mr Schudson pleading
that “We can gain inspiration from the past, but we cannot import it.” It would
be even better if his countrymen read his book.