United we bicker? A sharp, hopeful look at U.S. potential
How did We the People dwindle into We the Taxpayers? Author Marilynne Robinson is making waves nationally with her new book about American society and our democratic faith in the potential of every person.
Americans are being led to disparage their finest historical legacy. In When I Was a Child I Read Books Marilynne Robinson examines the falsehoods and popular clichés propelling this impoverishment of the national character. Her hope is that when we understand why we are not only allowing but actually encouraging each other “to think in terms that are demeaning to us all,” we’ll return to the more generous and just estimation of ourselves and others that preserving democracy requires.
Robinson, who teaches at the University of Iowa, is the author of three prior essay collections and the novels Housekeeping, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and Home. Her books have always radiated a sense of human beings as marvelous mysteries, full of high potential and — being human — often falling short of that potential. Her new book most directly addresses the need for Americans to renew this hopeful yet realistic sense of each other.
The Idaho-born author credits growing up in the West for her love of reading and belief in individualism. As regards her well-known independence of mind, one reviewer of When I Was a Child dubs her “Robinson, gunslinger,” a large-souled loner faced with cleaning up whole townfuls of sloppy, pretentious chatter. Straight-talking good sense in a writer who is also a Christian has sharpened her appeal to secular audiences everywhere, including in the Seattle area, where her ties include a PhD from the University of Washington.
Now reviewers in newspapers from L.A. to the U.K. are discussing the new book as a vital contribution to conversations about human nature and the good society. The Wall Street Journal calls the essays “psalms to an indivisible America.”
Robinson writes that the American corner of the “universe of wonders and astonishments” that we’re lucky to inhabit enjoys a special form of luck. Our nation was founded on ideals that allow and encourage us to honor, even reverence, ourselves and each other. America's reality has often failed to match these ideals, of course, but our oldest traditions foster “imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement.”
Yet today’s Americans are growing fearful of their own democracy. We have “self-declared patriots attacking the very substance of our heritage,” and the cost is high. “When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hopes for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.”
Narratives of American decline are not new; Robinson traces them as far back as 1838. But now we have a deliberate “marketing of rancor.” Critics of America’s faults “never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree.” Even worse, “Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem.” Without a community in which difference and discussion are possible, democracy may not survive.
Why have warring cynicisms come to dominate public life and squelch the hopes for humanity that inspired the nation’s founders? Partly because we’ve accepted popular neo-Darwinist theories that a person is merely a bundle of instincts for power and survival, Robinson says, and we’ve starved the schools, libraries, and universities that help us develop more rounded, humane conceptions of each other.
To rationalize denying those establishments public support, we’ve adopted an “ideology of austerity.” We're oblivious to the irony that such austerities will kill off the very institutions and customs that brought America unparalleled wealth. Our leaders pander to unenlightened self-interest, saying the kinds of investments in the nation that we made throughout our history are wasteful extortions. We the people now think of ourselves as “we the taxpayers.”
But we aren’t citizens of an economy, and our democracy’s founders specified a duty to “promote the general welfare.” This includes giving everyone access to good books, schools, teachers, colleges, music, art, and civil, informed discussion, says Robinson. Without them we can’t learn to imagine and feel the affection, sympathy, and identification with other people that make community possible.
So let’s stop saying education is elitist. It's not “idleness or triviality … that has no purpose except to assert a claim to superiority.” Robinson turns the elitism cliché around by desiring an elite education for all Americans. Universal learning creates “a ruling class that is more or less identical with the population.” The undemocratic forms of elitism arise when tuitions soar, grants and scholarships are slashed, and leaders deride education for any purpose except job training, as if our great universities should be merely “corporate laboratories and trade schools.”
Public voices on both sides of the political divide promote narrow pessimisms, according to Robinson. Conservatives tend to read U.S. history as touting a small, rigid set of values that all must follow if the nation is to avoid catastrophe. Liberals take “the toxic heritage approach” to the same history, seeing only or mainly baseness, pathology, and failure.
Religion divides us, too. Robinson finds no historical basis for the biased Christian view of the Old Testament as a book teaching intolerance and uncharitableness. Christian benevolence is actually rooted in Mosaic law, whose principles of justice, mercy, and charity far outclassed the savagery toward the vulnerable that persisted in Christian Europe through the 18th century. Citizens of what self-styled patriots keep calling a Christian nation should act on the wisdom the Old Testament gave to the Gospels, Calvinism, and the American Jonathan Edwards, and be bountiful to the needy, the fragile, and the stranger, even when someone may not appear to deserve it.
Robinson is astute and funny about many of the recently multiplying books on religion, whether written by theologians or by New Atheists — their credulity, circular reasoning, and magical thinking. She punctures the notion that a perennial clash between society and the individual exists, arguing that “there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.” In the course of her book she touches on science, the human brain, mid-20th-century Russia, fiction writing, college students, the selfish gene, David Brooks, housekeeping, the rise of anthropology, the uniquely mixed character of U.S. capitalism, Freud, traditional hymns, Mao’s Red Guard, and the American West’s take on loneliness.
In short, Robinson’s writing is way more interesting than my writing about it. I've even risked mischaracterizing the author by quickly summing up parts of her book, in the process making her seem to resemble the public voices who she hopes will develop more thoughtful, historically grounded views.
Nor can my paraphrases and brief quotations capture Robinson’s style. Her units of thought are the paragraph and the page, not the sentence, and she slows readers down to a pace that makes nuanced, complicated thinking possible. Now and then I was stalled by gnarly syntax or an obscure allusion (who is Marcion?). But in following the movement of Robinson’s mind as she attends to books, ideas, and the world around her, we flex our own. We come to feel what she calls “the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being.”
Perhaps most important for the readers Robinson wants to reach, her optimism is contagious even as she raises urgent questions such as these: If we believe that human beings act solely or even mainly on the basis of self-interest, why should we join with others in building a good society? If we are basically selfish and people outside our small circle are deficient, depraved, undeserving, or unfit to thrive, why should we support them generously when they are in need? Why not just spend our days devouring, like locusts, the goods of the rich and generous nation that others faithfully labored to build?
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Apr 13, 10:59 a.m. Inappropriate
My curiousity is whetted -- thanks Judy. I can hardly wait to read Robinson's "When I was a Child I Read Books." Even the title is intriguing as I was one of these kids that's nose was always stuck in a book. I read "Gilead" and enjoyed it thoroughly. Robinson's quote about what Jesus said about feeding the hungry is right on. An optimistic book that raises questions -- what a needed novelty!
Posted Fri, Apr 13, 5:13 p.m. Inappropriate
"To rationalize denying those establishments public support, we’ve adopted an “ideology of austerity.” I think I understand what Ms. Robinson is saying here ( private indulgence as compared to public austerity) but public expenditures are not that austere are they? thanks for the article, I will read Ms. Robinson.
Posted Fri, Apr 13, 5:23 p.m. Inappropriate
Here's to you, Ms. Robinson, and you too Judy. A novel idea, to read to learn something. It was fun to see your wonderful writing to learn process, to support this author. Optimists at work are needed!
Posted Fri, Apr 13, 5:54 p.m. Inappropriate
@Kieth: Thanks for asking for clarification. Robinson is saying that public funding for institutions like schools, libraries, and universities (which our history has shown to be wealth creators for the nation as well as essential to preserving democracy) has been drastically cut, and that leaders have rationalized denying these institutions the public support they need by promoting an "ideology of austerity": a belief that cutting public spending is in itself desirable and good.
Posted Fri, Apr 13, 9:02 p.m. Inappropriate
Judy, with all due respect, what's this "we" stuff? Whether this comes from Robinson's book or Judy's review or both, what I see here is more of the conventional media false equivalence -- "both sides are equally guilty" and that sort of thing. This is not helpful to figuring out what ails America and how to fix it. It's like saying the patient's right arm is injured so let's operate on both arms. Let's look more specifically at some of the claims in this piece.
1. "...we’ve accepted popular neo-Darwinist theories that a person is merely a bundle of instincts for power and survival, Robinson says, and we’ve starved the schools, libraries, and universities that help us develop more rounded, humane conceptions of each other. To rationalize denying those establishments public support, we’ve adopted an 'ideology of austerity.' Our leaders pander to unenlightened self-interest, saying the kinds of investments in the nation that we made throughout our history are wasteful extortions. We the people now think of ourselves as '“we the taxpayers.' "
Do I even need to comment on the false equivalence here? Is it even close which party has more powerfully asserted an ideology of austerity that threatens such investments in human capital?
2. "So let’s stop saying education is elitist... The undemocratic forms of elitism arise when tuitions soar, grants and scholarships are slashed, and leaders deride education for any purpose except job training, as if our great universities should be merely 'corporate laboratories and trade schools.'
Which party recently has been criticizing and trying to de-fund higher education opportunities for the masses and which President has been defending those opportunities?
3. "Religion divides us, too. Robinson finds no historical basis for the biased Christian view of the Old Testament as a book teaching intolerance and uncharitableness."
Which party is more dominated by supporters of the type of Christianity Robinson criticizes here? Who is doing the dividing?
4. "She punctures the notion that a perennial clash between society and the individual exists, arguing that 'there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.'... If we believe that human beings act solely or even mainly on the basis of self-interest, why should we join with others in building a good society? If we are basically selfish and people outside our small circle are deficient, depraved, undeserving, or unfit to thrive, why should we support them generously when they are in need?
Which party typically argues that policy debates should be resolved in favor of the individual rather than the good of society, as in the health care reform debate, and that we as a country shouldn't support people in need because they are 'undeserving'?
5. "Critics of America’s faults 'never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree.' Even worse, “Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem.” Without a community in which difference and discussion are possible, democracy may not survive.
Which party is more prone to calling those who disagree with them traitors, Communists, Muslims, non-Americans, etc. etc.?
No, I'm sorry, but this article and apparently this book can't seem to summon the courage to call out the offenders by name. Yet I am interested in Robinson's book if it illuminates what I think is the central problem in American politics, culture, and society today -- the loss of what the Europeans call "social solidarity," which the United States had after World War II and has gradually lost.
Posted Sat, Apr 14, 12:26 p.m. Inappropriate
Harris, reading this part with some presence of mind, might have saved you the fame of so elegantly personifying it: "Even worse, 'Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem.' ”
I can assure you that setting the parties aside as often as possible opens the mind to a world of possibilities. You might even find your own close charmingly similar to the gist of "The Meaning of Conservatism"— its author coincidentally interviewed in today's WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577341521643541262.html
And his gist to that of Wendall Berry's "The Gift of Good Land" recalled for 21st century minds in Spencer Wells' "Pandora's Seed."
It IS OUR choice to go on "passing in the night."
Posted Sat, Apr 14, 6:12 p.m. Inappropriate
Sorry, afreeman, but anyone paying attention to the Republican presidential nomination contest should be able to see that the criticisms contained in Lightfoot's piece fit much more snugly to one side than the other. False equivalence in politics is not a productive exercise, any more than it is in medicine, science, law, or any other field. Evidence-based distinctions and judgments must be made. Go through my points again and see if you can honestly say that both sides are equally guilty of promoting these destructive policies and engaging in these destructive practices. The hell with this "we" stuff.
Posted Sat, Apr 14, 6:19 p.m. Inappropriate
BTW, I can't access the WSJ piece afreeman cites, but what I can see suggests that the interview subject is a classic, Burkean conservative. The problem is that today's Republican Party has nothing to do with Burkean conservatism. It's changed even in the last three years. It's now a radical right-wing party that can't be reasoned with because it largely will not consider empirical evidence, on climate change, economics, and just about any other issue. American politics will only return to sanity when traditional, Burkean conservatives seize back control of the GOP.
Posted Sun, Apr 15, 2:08 p.m. Inappropriate
Speaking of paying attention to political events and taking care to understand commenter's points, I would also like to reiterate how much more one gets out of both by setting the parties aside or, if going naked is too scary, then focusing on the similarity of purpose that each party's office holders have come to serve as opposed to needs of We the People, who numerically outnumber those now served.
A lost contemporary reference recently led me to the SPL's well-worn copy of Domhoff's "Who Rules America?" I find it serves as a more neutral starting place for conservatives than Zinn. Come to find out Domhoff continues carrying it forward here: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
Sorry about not providing the proper clue for non-subscriber access to the WSJ —do a Google search for this title in quotes: "want to save the planet?" for a much less party-driven division of objectives, albeit phrased from the viewpoint of conservatism: "a rejection of utopia for reality—a preference for improving society bit by bit over fixing society by rubbing it out." Closer to "We the People" than those now being served.
Which brings to mind the many (granted) who express this same goal from the other side of the coin, NONE of them in power, either—Hedges, Klein, Greenwald, Rybcznski, Shiva, and on and on (hopefully).
Posted Sun, Apr 15, 8:49 p.m. Inappropriate
Here's a good historical piece by an eminent Princeton historian on the history in the U.S. of purporting to set "set aside" parties and partisanship. The bottom line is that it's always been a ploy for achieving one's own political agenda. Parties have existed historically for a very good reason: groups of people in every society or country always have legitimate differences of interests and ideologies, and parties provide the most efficient way for those groups to organize and promote those interests and ideologies.
http://www.tnr.com/article/books/magazine/96706/post-partisan-obama-progressives-washington
The Mirage
The long and tragical history of post-partisanship, from Washington to Obama.
Again, the guy discussed in that WSJ piece is a Burkean conservative, a very different animal from those driving the Republicans Party today. And Hedges and Greenwald and I think Rybcznski are critical of the Democrats from the left -- they aren't calling for "bipartisan centrism."
Posted Mon, Apr 16, 12:46 p.m. Inappropriate
"they aren't calling for "bipartisan centrism"
Bipartisan, yes, centrism, only if that is the outcome of the opening of minds. As for how long that would take, refusal by even its most courteous to think beyond today's heavy-duty partisanship does not bode well at all.
FWIW, the guy in the WSJ piece, Roger Scruton's latest book ""How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case For An Environmental Conservatism" will be released very shortly. The UW's University Bookstore offers an extensive Google Preview on its webpage @ that title. The sections available there are most certainly worth a free read!
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