THIS IS A ST. PATRICK'S DAY REPRINT (so to speak) AND UPDATING OF AN ESSAY
FROM NOVEMBER 2011.
I'll
start with a disclaimer of sorts.
The word "presentism"
apparently has technical uses in philosophy and for literary
and historical analysis, but I found an almost colloquial usage more immediately
useful. In this sense, "presentism" is the dumb-ass cousin of a
belief in progress and is shown when people too literally think, "In every
day / In every way," people have grown "better and better and
better," and believe the way we live today is, across-the-board, the norm.
If that's the case, then — given where we are today — our ancestors must have
been pretty damn stupid and unsophisticated.
I ran into this attitude when some
of my 18-20-something students made clear they thought pretty ignorant and
unsophisticated such folk as noble and royal politicians in the courts of
Richard II and Elizabeth I, or London theater fans ca. 1600. There are a lot of
things you can say about rulers and courtiers in the late medieval and early
modern periods —words like "criminal" and "immoral" are frequently
apt — but, as a rule, unsophisticated they were not. King Richard II had some
weird weaknesses of character, but he wasn't stupid, and when it came to
running the family business (England and such), the Tudor Queen Elizabeth was
very, very, very bright,
sophisticated, and good at her job. And, of course, London audiences ca. 1600
supported a good deal of crap, but they also saw, heard, and apparently
appreciated some of the best drama ever produced.
It is useful to avoid
"presentism" in this sense when doing literary criticism so you don't
find yourself thinking that the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare and such couldn't
be as sophisticated as your instructors have suggested because Chaucer and
Shakespeare and their audiences couldn't have been that sophisticated. Now one
or more of your instructors may have been overly ingenious or, well, even just
full of shit with a reading or two — but
not because an idea we can have was necessarily too clever for the likes of our
ancestors.
If useful to avoid presentism in
this sense in LitCrit, it is actually important to avoid it when doing politics
— nothing in LitCrit is truly important
— it is important to avoid presentism in talking politics since we shouldn't often
change current practices on the assumption that our ancestors were idiots when
they came up with them. (For example, after the 2008 financial crises, the
"Glass-Steagall" Banking Act of 1933 looks like a really good idea
after all.)
Sometimes our ancestors were stupid,
of course; see above on professors sometimes being stupid and apply the rule
broadly: even bright humans, even bright humans acting where we're experts say
dumb things and do even dumber. But not all that often: Usually our
predecessors knew what they were doing, thank you, and the conservatives are
correct in the traditional conservative belief that we shouldn't muck around
changing things unless we have strong reasons to change things.
So, our ancestors weren't stupid, or
incompetent.
Having said that, however, I want get
to what is, as I write and update, a newly-released movie I have not seen (and may not) and
to the serious implications of the idea a character in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness summed up in
his reference
to his "criminal ancestors":
i.e., us and those predecessors I've been defending.
The movie I want to take off from is
12 Years a Slave (2013) and
the inevitable viewer reactions to the cruelty of nineteenth-century Black
slavery in the southern United States. The reactions are better nowadays than
with Roots in 1977, when I heard and
read from some of my fellow Americans — adults, and people who could read —
"Why didn't they tell us?!"
i.e., why weren't we told that slavery was so bad. Well, indeed they didn't tell us as much as they should have, but
the basic information was there. People are told more nowadays and at least
quieter about being shocked ("Shocked!") that cruelty was going on,
but I want now to point out that in many ways, important ways, things were
worse in the past than most of us assume.
Sorry gang, but you need to know
this — and the upshot will be rather hopeful.
In Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt makes clear that people
won't understand the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews if they think of it
as the Holocaust and don't put the Shoah in its historical context,
including a tradition of massacres. Furthermore, those of us who talk of the
eleven million victims of the Hitlerian Holocaust, and not just the five to six
million murdered Jews, sometimes have the prudent political motivation of reminding
people who are not Jews that they have more at stake here than sentimental
sympathy for victims. The "First they came for
…" litany has become a cliché, but it remains one of the most practical
bits of wisdom that history can teach. "The Final Solution of the Jewish
Problem" was central to the Nazis systematic slaughter, but the machinery
of exterminations found a variety of victims and had roots in soils in addition
to anti-Semitism.
And even as you have to have some
feeling for the history of massacres to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust,
even so you need to know the continuity of the cruelty of slavery, and you need
to know that slavery was at the extreme end and a logical extension of a continuum of cruelty that lasted into modern
times, and came back for a season of hell in the 20th century.
Since my form in these blogs is the
meditation or personal essay, I'll start with a personal observation from my
PhD candidacy in the late 1960s, when, in theory, I learned to read Latin.
I was using for homework The New
Collegiate Latin & English Dictionary (1966) and one day noticed how
often on the way to looking up something else — we were mostly reading Aesop's
Fables, for God's sake! — how often I saw Latin words referring to things
military, violent, and/or violent in relationship to managing slaves. Slavery
was woven into the fabric of the Latin language, as was the idea that slaves had
to be kept in line, fairly often through terror: beatings, blindings (altero oculo captus 'to blind in one
eye'), breaking
bones, branding, … well, a series of horrors up to and including crucifixion.
Educated and valuable slaves might be treated well; however "Unskilled slaves, or those condemned to slavery as
punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions
were brutal, and their lives short." Legal testimony
from slaves was admissible only after slaves had been tortured.
Roman slaves
gained rights as time went on, but there was continuity, with some slavery in
the European Middle Ages, moving more toward serfdom, which got into full gear
in parts of Russia
in the 17th century and lasted until fairly recently: 1861. Literal
slavery in Russia got a significant boost from the medieval Mongol and Tatar
invasions and lasted
until 1723.
There was also continuity of slavery
in areas in more constant contact with western Europe than most of Russia: The
Mideast slave trade lasted from the 7th century C.E. through the 19th,
and it ranks #8 on Matthew White's
list of "The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in human history,
accounting for some 18.5 million deaths, to say nothing of families torn apart
and lives reduced (by definition) to slavery.
So slavery was known in Europe from
their neighbors, and when the Reformation and Renaissance got into full swing,
such knowledge was increased by reminders that slavery had been regulated but
accepted in the now much-translated and much-read Bible and had been accepted
and defended by the now born again, so to speak, classics: the revitalized and
revitalizing admiration of ancient Greece and Rome and their cultures (renaissance). If the Hebrews practiced,
and the noble Greeks and Romans accepted, practiced, and, as we used to say in
academe, theorized slavery — how bad
could it be?
In his "General
Introduction" to The Norton
Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has a beautiful little quotation
attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, John Hawkins
and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred
blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have
said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance
of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" As I said, Elizabeth was bright and
sophisticated, and as Head of the Church of England she knew a wicked act when
she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum
during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages
and lent him ships" (23); business is business.
And business for some was most
excellent in the early part of early modern times as the voyages of exploration
and discovery discovered silver mines in the New World and empires loaded with
gold to plunder and new marketing opportunities with sugar and then tobacco and
rum (making fortunes through drug-dealing is old news in the Americas).
There was money to be made, and if
some of the methods were "detestable," well …. Well, by the late 17th
century, racism would theorize why a
little detestable slavery was OK for Black people, and there was the tradition
of slavery from the Holy and semi-holy scripture of the Bible and the classics.
Say what you will about the Romans, they were equal-opportunity oppressors. If
they could enslave the two known races of White and Black, plus every ethnicity
they could conquer, surely Europeans could enslave Africans, who could be
presented, in a Christian variation on Aristotle, as by nature servile and,
indeed, who could profit infinitely from contact with Europeans, and getting Christianized
(although that Christianizing bit got problematic with conservative or
proto-liberal Christians — depending on how you saw them — who disapproved of
enslaving other Christians).
There is one other item to add to
the hell-broth as we moved into the slavery inherited in the New World colonies
that became the United States. The detestable cruelty of slavery in itself, the
terrorism required to maintain people in slavery, was less obvious in its time,
including in the years of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from 1452-1807 (#10 on
Matthew White's list, with 16 million dead), until the end of slavery in the
United States in 1865. Slavery was indeed opposed by an abolitionist movement
that over time moved from the political fringe to the mainstream; but that
movement took a long time, in part precisely because Black chattel slavery was
the extreme end of a continuum of cruelty but definitely part of a continuum.
In 2011, Steven Pinker published an
impressive book on The Better Angels of
Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which required him to come up with some
strong hypotheses on Why Violence Has Declined but more so required for him to
demonstrate that, indeed, violence has,
in fact, declined.
He was able to perform that
demonstration for a reason crucial here: Violence in our time is less than in
earlier times, even acknowledging the horrors of the "hemoclysm" (blood
deluge) of the two world wars of the 20th century; but violence is
less not because this generation is all that good but more because life for
many people before quite recently was very, very bad. As Pinker summarizes much
of his book: "Tribal warfare was
nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate
of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery,
sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of
life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between
developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill
a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate
crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals — all
substantially down."
Pinker has been critiqued, and
figuratively attacked, for his conclusions, but they jibe with a Latin-English
dictionary of decades earlier with no political agenda, and with such works as
Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The
Calamitous 14th Century (1978), and the fictional but very well researched
BAROQUE CYCLE by Neal
Stephenson (2003-4). They also go along with a side comment by the US Army
colonel who taught my American military history course ca. 1961. In 1776, the
Continental Congress increased the maximum number of lashes a court martial
could order from the Biblical 39 to the decimal 100; as the colonel noted, it
could have been worse, since the 100 limit "at least meant it was unlikely
you'd be whipped
to death," as could happen in the British tradition of having someone
"whipped through the fleet" or receiving up to a deadly 200 lashes.
And then there was reading Herman Melville's, White Jacket (1850), the book arguably most responsible for ending
flogging in the US Navy. One memorable and undoubtedly effective — if
problematic — sentence:
"The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his place
in Congress, that on board the American man-of-war that carried him out
Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his
own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years."
In the words of an old joke, as H. Rap
Brown (of the Black Panther Party) might've said of the chivalric slave-owner John
Randolph, "damn White of him." Still, the point remains that sailors
and soldiers, servants and prisoners were often treated with great cruelty. As
Pinker stresses, it was part of everyday life to encounter brutality toward
non-human animals, children, wives, and others in positions of weakness, people
in culturally-sanctioned and enforced inferiority. And one definition of
"liberty" included the liberty to practice such brutality without
interference by the state in family matters or labor management or doing what
the social superior thought right to do with "my own."
Books like Pinker's Better Angels and essays like mine here
are — or should be — unpleasant to read, but there is that hopeful upshot.
Things really have gotten better, and there is hope for getting them actually
pretty good for increasing numbers of people.
As part of that improvement, it's
necessary to remember that sympathy for the oppressed is nice as a form of
altruism, but politically more effective when aspects of good character are
reinforced by insightful self-interest.
It wasn't just Jews caught up in the
Nazi exterminations, and it was not just Blacks who suffered: these atrocities
happened in worlds that kept up traditions of cruelty and fitted them to
newfangled ideologies of racism and very old-fashioned sins of pride and greed.
Jews and Blacks are strong contenders for the "Grimmy
Award" for some areas of worst suffering, but there are many out there
to join us.
Americans in the 21st
century are not particularly exceptional nor are we all that much smarter than
our ancestors; and our current relative decency is a matter of culture,
inheritance, and, in a sense, fashion. There was great continuity of slavery
and other oppression, and bad old days can return. One way to prevent such a return is
to be at least smart enough to do the arithmetic: slavery is a great way to
live, for a rich slave-owner; an oppressive hierarchical society is great, if
you're on the top. But that's not how the numbers work: If we return to worlds
with a long continuum of cruelty, there's a good chance each of us will be
receiving most of that cruelty, not dishing it out.
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