History as Judge

History as Judge

I religiously read Letters From an American every day, first thing. I was put onto it by our friend Candice several years ago. Candice is a retired NYC school teacher and is someone I always describe as a person for whom the word “Moxy” was invented. The daily post is authored by Heather Cox Richardson, a noted academic historian and Professor at Boston College, where she specializes in the arenas of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. She has a wonderful way of using history to explain the trials and tribulations we are going through at this stage of our “American Experiment”. She is very widely read after the last few years and I sense that in addition to her excellent and objective reporting of events on the global and national scene, what draws people to her writing, as much as anything, is her use of history to to explain what in hell is going on with us. My right-leaning friends are not as enamored with the words of HCR and consider her biased towards the liberal agenda and while I believe that is her tendency, I still believe in her objectivity and have never read anything in her daily work that I consider to be untrue.

History is one of most basic fields of academic study that exist. It seems to rank right after the Three R’s as a subject which is most often taught in our schools. It is, strangely enough, at the center of what is most often called the Liberal Arts, which is the compendium of subjects including history, literature, writing, philosophy, sociology, psychology and the creative arts. It is noteworthy that the word “liberal” comes from the Latin liberalis , which means free, which I think means that these arts, or “principled practices”, are those which are the most open-minded and honest of the assessment of our life and surroundings. It is often said that history is written by the victors and is often a distortion of the truth, but it is the only evidence we have to go on for a truthful retelling of what happened and therefore, perhaps, what is. People who are against any rewriting of history, presumably on the basis of new or previously ignored facts, are generally people who somehow believe that the history they know and were taught is sacrosanct and tells a story that they do not want to have changed regardless of the truth. This debate is underway right now. I read today that RFK Jr., the highest-profile third party candidate in this year’s election, is speaking out in favor of keeping statues of some Confederate heroes rather than removing them in “woke” fashion. His argument is that there were, indeed, some “very fine people” in the Confederacy, and not all deserve to be relegated to the ash heap of history. This is probably historically accurate, but still ethically unfounded. It must be true that there were some good Nazis as well, but the Nazi ideology and the thought that anyone aligned with that ideology is viewed as so antisocial that there is simply no redemption available to those who stood with the Nazis or even stood by as the Nazis carried out their policies of hatred and genocide. We can debate whether the Confederacy rises to the same degree of antisocial ideology in totality, but it is hard to disconnect the Confederacy (try as many Southern sympathizers have over the last 150 years) from the tenets of human slavery. And there are few antisocial acts (other than genocide) that rise to the level of antisocial behavior than engaging in, advocating or even tolerating human slavery of any kind.

One of the greatest living historians right now is the documentarian Ken Burns. He is not so much an academic historian and indeed he has no advanced post-graduate degrees or any teaching status, but as a filmmaker who has made over forty historical and cultural films which have mostly been done in conjunction with and shown on PBS, he is probably the nation’s most influential historian in terms of his reach into the general American population. He has been awarded two Oscar nominations (Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge), plus two Grammy Awards and fully fifteen Emmy Awards, given that television is his preferred medium. He also has numerous other awards and honors from The Steinbeck Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Humanities Award, the Jefferson Award and many other honorary degrees and speaking engagements. In other words, he is a respected and accomplished historian of generally acknowledged renown. In fact, he was the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University where he gave one of his greatest speeches, one that has, in the past week, gone viral.

What made this speech so noteworthy is that Burns, who has maintained a conscious stance of political neutrality for almost 50 years, chose to break with that tradition and make some bold statements. In the process, he made a number of poignant comments about how history works. The first is that he feels we are NOT condemned to repeat the past if we don’t remember it. Furthermore, he commented that he does not believe in the cyclical theories of history (some of which I have quoted in previous stories). He quotes Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament that what has been will be again and that human nature almost never changes since the beginning of time. His view is that the thought that human nature does not overcome what are truly random and chaotic events and that the notion that history will repeat itself despite improving human nature is just not so. He prefers the Mark Twain thought that historical events simply “rhyme” with past events. That all makes him want to listen to stories from Americans that highlight “an abiding faith in human spirit”, especially as it displays the unique and remarkable role the American Republic has played in the “positive progress of mankind.” He is a big fan of Abraham Lincoln who suggests that the enemy that will fell the American Republic is not an external threat, but rather it will be us ourselves, as he feels it almost too closely was heading into the Civil War years…based mostly on the differing opinions on slavery and the desire to continue the proactive use of the practice to drive economic prosperity at the cost of our humanity.

He also describes the unique nature of our national geography that has us sitting between “two mighty oceans” and between two “relatively benign neighbors” north and south, all of which makes us an optimistic nation. That makes us a country whose people “seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; What I want versus what we need” in the “pursuit of happiness”, as per the Declaration of Independence. But it also makes us uniquely problematic in terms of “our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies” and our sense of exceptionalism that blinds us, especially with regard to our deficiencies in our treatment of race and ethnicity. He quotes novelist Richard Powers that “the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” He feels we are trapped by our “old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions and certainties.” And that leaves us to“continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.” He ends by reminding us that there is no “them”, there is only “us”.

This causes Burns to conclude that “There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route…The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems…We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.” He ends by reminding the graduates they need to support the liberal arts because “They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; They just make our country worth defending.”

I have always been impressed by Ken Burns and I am now ever more so. As he and Heather Cox Richardson remind us every day, history will ultimately be the judge of us all.