History

The Caste of Our Insecurities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Hard truths are best absorbed in small packets, at least when possible. Depending on the immediacy of their message, that luxury may be unwise or impossible. But confronting such truths and the facts supporting them may be the primary duty decency demands. Hence, the purpose of books like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. 

The thesis of the book is simply stated, that we here in America, the United States, whether we wish to see it or not, live in a caste structure that allocates hierarchies and exiles certain groups of people to inferior status for no reason other than the preservation of those hierarchies. She makes comparisons with India’s much older and in some ways more entrenched caste structure, and examines the history and modes of its instantiation here. She gives examples, some horrific in their violence, many baffling in their intractability. 

She makes the case.

And then she examines how it functions as a stealth program, unconsciously for most people, expressed by body language, word choice, social assumptions, and a kind of cognitive aphasia in which people simply do not see what they’re doing or who they’re doing it to. Difficult to get the why if the what can be so smoothly unrecognized.

It’s hard reading, and yet fills in blanks that other attempts at addressing racism and class bigotry fall short. For instance, we tend to default to the occurrence of racism based on appearance, and to a great degree that is a major aspect. But any look at the history of it in this country reveals certain baffling inconsistencies, as when Irish immigrants were seen as nonwhites in the mid-19th Century, and how Jews have long suffered a conditional status. Italians, East Europeans, and so forth, all passed through periods of being regarded as, functionally,  not White.

At times, the idea that class is at work more than race, but that will not answer the fact that “success” is no guarantee against automatic relegation to inferior status. Over the last century and a half that African Americans have been removed from enslavement, wealth has proved to be insufficient to overcome systemic biases, even as wealth makes certain interactions easier. 

In the afterwash of the Civil Rights era, many white people would like to believe that the issue has been settled, but we are constantly reminded that it is not. Partly, this has been a consequence of not identifying the problem correctly. The frustration of seeing our best intentions regularly thwarted by behaviors which seem to have no manageable foundation dogs us through history. The key factor in this persistent misidentification is the fact that all our public declarations, beginning in 1776, overwhelming stress our commitment to equality. This pledge masks intentions that run directly counter to the stated goals. It is more than special pleading, it is a refusal to adhere to principles that require us to stop being White.

By White I do not mean the surface markers of what we semi-scientifically term Caucasian. Because, as noted, many groups that have met those qualifications in the past were, at one time or another, regarded as Not White. White is a social and political designation. The term did not exist as a group marker until the 18th Century and was intended as a hierarchical label. It quickly established a kind of “natural” pecking order upon which the future designations of racial groups could be slotted into categories. This quickly became both political and economic fuel for purposes of group identity and justification for exploitation. In America it was used to legitimate not only slavery but miscegenation laws and later eugenics programs. But more consistently, it evolved a rigid caste system with which we live today, albeit diluted sufficiently most of do not recognize it.

Not recognizing, it becomes difficult if not impossible to deal with.

Wilkerson’s book is, as I say, hard reading. The savagery with which we have treated African Americans, even after the 13th and 14th Amendments ending slavery and establishing the principle of participatory equality, is made all the more terrible because of the ideas on which our country has been founded. To be sure, caste may not be the key to undoing the systemic disregard experienced by millions of people, but upon reading this book I have found some purchase on the problem that, while not rendering it sensible, at least suggests the degree to which the problem is rooted. 

It has also given some slightly more discernible explanation for what just happened in our recent election. And if true, it is a sad and pathetic reality. 

The apparent need sewn into the fabric of our being to somehow be Better Than is a double-edged blade. One can use that need for self-improvement without it becoming a toxic excuse to constantly keep someone else down, to perfect one’s gifts, to aspire to personal achievement. Or it becomes a need to just exercise a false sense of self-entitled privilege over others by virtue of the arbitrariness of birth or group affiliation. This can justify anything from cheating on exams to murder, depending on the pathology of the obsession to simply Be Better as opposed to Doing Better. And of course, if the latter is the path chosen, the goal is already lost. All that remains then is to do all one can to hide one’s inabilities, infelicities, and lack of empathy. 

Expunging this apparently integral notion of caste may be the only way to become the better angels of our stated aspirations. But how does one do something without first recognizing it?

The Trajectory of Faith and Historical Reality

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

All histories are potentially divisive. Depending on how one approaches a period, supporters, detractors, identitarians, anyone with a self-appointed mission to either defend or attack certain sacrilized bovines may find agitation to the point of absurdity. The historian must be at least aware of all this before tackling her subject. Not with a view to self-censorship (although that may happen by default) but to know how much referencing and documentation may be required to overcome (somewhat) assaults based on issues having only tangential relation to the history being examined.

Which is one reason a book such as Peter Heather’s new Christendom: the Triumph of a Religion AD 300—1300 is both hefty and well-notated. He is not here interested much in the assertions of Christianity, only in the evolution of the religion over time as a social and political entity. The road from minor cult to the dominant aesthetic and political reality of Europe by the 14th Century is here examined as a system. How did it get to the point where we are still wrestling with questions of cultural legitimacy as they impinge upon the political realities of modern life?

Heather resents his credentials—agnostic, let’s say—as someone interested in what people did and how they did it. This is a history like any history of a country or a people. Dates matter. Major players matter. Shifting demographics matter. This is the story of bureaucracies and armies and successions and, above all, assertions of power. The Christianity that emerged over centuries after Emperor Constantine declared it the state religion of the Roman Empire is, regardless of how individual believers may feel, a political system. After Constantine is certainly became something other than what it started. The road it traveled is fascinating and maps closely to the more usual history with which we are familiar (if we are familiar with it).

This adds a layer as well to the questions of why Rome “fell” and how the Crusades began and failed and the way in which dynastic politics became inextricable from the dissemination of a faith that, in primary ways, was diametrically opposed to everything Europe became.

Two details make this a fascinating take on the topic. One, Heather goes into great detail over the matter of conversion. Of course, we know the famous ones—Augustine, Constantine, the less well-known Pegasios—and by these we understand it to be a dramatic, soul-wrenching experience. But when closely examined, it was never so simple, and for the vast majority of people at the time it was much more mundane. This month we’re worshiping Apollo, next month Sol Invictus, the month after that the Christian God. In order to comply with the law and obtain work, we must change our associations. Constantine’s mandate impacted the Empire through patronage. In order to obtain a position in the government, conversion was required. Heather makes clear with the case of Pegasios (bishop of Ilios, 350s A.D.) that it was a revolving door, as Pegasios had no trouble going back and forth between paganism and Christianity as circumstances dictated. This was not, for him (and presumably many others) a matter of salvation of the soul as it was a matter of livelihood and income.

Moving forward, it then appears obvious that the vast majority of conversions were pro forma. The king has decreed he and his subjects shall be Christians and so the people go to a different church.

This contradicts the idea of a major ideological revolution sweeping the continent. This was political.

Once understood, subsequent Church history makes more and more sense as history. Alliances, territory, prestige—all the values of a strong state—contributed to the eventual displacement of older religions as Christianity became the dominant ideology.

It is in the triumph of that ideology—or, rather, its symbols—that the success is traced. What people followed willingly (and, to our dismay, today) is a successful leader who could demonstrate a special bond to fate. The story of Constantine’s victory at Milvian Bridge is not a single unitarian narrative. There are four versions and it seems obvious in context that each served a public relations purpose. The Chi Rho triumphant, symbol of early Christianity, figures prominently in the story, but not in the same way in the various tellings.

Which is also where Christianity veered off its previous path of peace and harmony and, over time, became a militant religion. The leader who was victorious in battle and claimed aegis of the Christian god got to say which god would be worshiped. The contradiction emerged from the beginning. Peace and War joined in a paradoxical arrangement to underwrite the legitimacy of king or emperor.

The other thing Heather’s history dispels is the myth of the barbarian hordes. We tend to visualize them as rude brutes with no learning pouring brutishly into Roman precincts destroying a sophisticated civilization. In reality, these “barbarians” had learned from Rome and were in many way culturally on par with the empire they were displacing. And they brought with them their own variations of what they saw as True Christianity.

Which leads to another aspect that is oft misunderstood, which is the mythology of the Church Triumphant calling all the shots across Europe. That did happen, but it was a long process and fraught with setbacks and disputes. For much of the millennium being discussed, it was the kings who told the church what to do. Charlemagne’s crowning as the first Holy Roman Emperor was his idea, stage managed on his end, with the Pope going along with it lest there be consequences.

In short, this is an agnostic analysis of the growth of a bureaucratic, political system which follows the twisted paths of such things like any other. And by the time Rome became predominant once more, it was at the head of a religion that barely resembled the early pastoral communities from which it sprang. Each stage was a near-run thing and the unity of the Church was never what it appeared to be. 

Which is a curiously pertinent bit of history to become acquainted with now. Keeping the components separate and knowing how such things happen is a useful tonic in an age where the cries of faiths that claim unalloyed divine cause to overturn anything in their path. 

Clear-Eyed And Informed

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

One of the quickest ways to end conversations in casual social gatherings is to contradict someone expounding on myth, hearsay, and bad history. You’ve been there; we all have. Someone at some point starts holding forth on some chestnut of popular apprehension and repeats a story that has suffered the manifold revisions of a game of telephone that render the story factless, in service to a line of self-aggrandizing chest-beating at the expense of the truth. Stories many of us take for granted in the first place and, because we’ve never heard or bothered to find out the real story, assume to be accurate. We grow accustomed to thinking about these stories this way and then, when it might matter in ways we never anticipated, we don’t know that they have prepared the ground for us to swallow bigger misconstruals and even outright lies.

Into this, occasionally, steps someone who knows better and points out the flaws in the presentation. A curious thing usually happens. Either the conversation turns away from that topic or everyone gets angry. Not at the one disseminating the broken narrative but at the lone voice that contradicts the nonsense. Such reactions lead eventually one of two interpretations—either that people in general don’t care what the facts are or, adjacent, they like the error-laden chestnut more than the reality.

The reception of the corrective information can have a chilling effect on the one offering the facts. No one likes to be ostracized,

It can be puzzling. What is it about these skewed narratives that people preferred? Well, almost always there is something about them that makes people feel good about themselves—about their patriotism, they beliefs, their affiliations, but mostly about their ignorance. Once we leave school, most of us feel we are done with homework, which no one really liked anyway, and the idea that we may be less knowledgeable than perhaps we need to be just suggests that we need to do more homework. I suspect there’s an unexamined aspect of psychology that says that to be an Adult is to already have all the skills and knowledge we need. More study seems justifiable only if it leads to higher income. Even then, excuses can be made to avoid it.

But the reality is we need always to know more, especially about stories we think we know. The how, why, and wherefore of our history feeds into present issues in ways that, if we are ignorant, can lead to political and social traps.

When reading a first-class historian like Jill Lepore, one becomes aware of how tangled those webs into which we might fall can be. For those of us who may delight in being that one person at the party who will speak fact to ignorance, her books are a delight.

Her latest, The Deadline, is a collection of essays designed to counter the shallow, poorly-understood history that underlies so many of the canards foisted upon us daily as truth. As well, they are a delight to read.

In several books, Lepore has displayed an approach to her subjects that bypasses the various filters with which we view our history, opening side entrances into the underlying realities of which modern myths are formed. She examines the cultural touchstones by which we navigate the pathways of our presumably common identity.

Here, we find a range of essays that cover most of American history, topical subjects, thorny personal issues, memoir, and observations about the nature of knowing—or not knowing—what’s going on. Quite a few pieces are about the business of news itself, covering processes and personalities, and giving us a glimpse of how what we think we know comes to us too often “prepared” so a particular message is put forth, even while it is possible to find out what the other facts are. To that problem, we learn that there is nothing new about “fake news” other than the delivery vectors (and perhaps the speed with which it comes at us) but that even when such distortions seem impossible to counter, somehow we seem not to be fooled for long. That may be changing, though, and Lepore gives us her perspective on that as well.

Essentially, Lepore gives us a clear-eyed view of ourselves and our proclivities, often with the unpleasant but unsurprising conclusion that if we are fooled, it’s because we wish to be. But really there is no excuse for blindly reacting to hormone-spiking jabs at our panic buttons. We just need to know a little better.

As I say, Jill Lepore has become one of my favorite historians. She has a quirky set of interests (she did a marvelous book about the creator of Wonder Woman as well as penning one of the most interesting histories of the United States I’ve read in a long time) and this allows her to approach even the most convoluted subjects in ways that consistently illuminate. Along the way, she lets us know that one of the best ways to not be fooled is to refuse to accept the soundbite, the meme, or the two-minute report as the end of the story. While each may well contain a grain of truth, we have to understand that it’s only a grain and all that went into it is so much more interesting, richer, and liberating.