The Keeper, Blog#2:

History is a River of Blood

for John Davison

If that afternoon’s events marked my effective retirement from a career, hardly promising anyway, of bare-knuckled altercations on street-corners and ballfields, I can’t claim to have transcended in my adulthood the impulse to mix it up rhetorically on occasion with friends or acquaintances. Often, that is, in the exchange of opinions, a subject area is broached in which my opinions would seem to be clamoring for a more or less forceful articulation in order to drive back the darkness and endow my interlocutors with the abiding light of reason. In short, I’ve continued to be pig-headed well into my adult life, my infallibilism having been encouraged by my occupation as a teacher. Often, even, not quite satisfied with imposing my views on my dewy-eyed students, in an excess of hubris I have turned the klieg lights of my convictions on my colleagues as well—especially science and history teachers—provoking dust-ups, of course, but in the pursuit, I tell myself, of dialectical clarity.

History and science teachers, being bushy-tailed apostles of Enlightenment optimism, can be said to underwrite their pedagogies with the certainty that, whatever else might be thought of civilization, it is advancing demonstrably and will continue to do so because, well, that’s the whole point of civilization. Empirical inquiry improves our knowledge and material well-being, while studying the triumphs and missteps of the past makes us more likely going forward to build upon the former while eschewing the latter. Science liberates us from the anxieties perpetuated by superstition, while history hones and improves our politics to focus them on equity and justice rather than on the repressive consolidation of power.

My heresy is that, assured in these ways by the potential glory of our superior position in time, no matter how unapparent that glory might be, we pursue the same cruel and ignominious comportments and behaviors humanity has pursued since the beginnings of collective life, unaware that in doing so we are simply mirroring the cruelties of species-law itself, which never changes. Progress, that is, while perhaps manifest in certain highly conditioned areas of human activity, as per advances in medicine or transportation, is on the whole an illusion, as much so as any of the purported illusions cast aside by the Enlightenment in the course of its developing the concept in the first place. So, perhaps, is that optimism concerning human perfectibility through rational inquiry that has driven it—the Enlightenment, that is—to perfect, instead of people, circuitries and machines, the way the ancients created gods out of basketry or gold when they couldn’t actually summon those gods into the material world.

It was in this iconoclastical spirit that I recently engaged a colleague from the history department of the school at which I ply my trade—a highly respected and in fact legendary colleague—in the consideration of a particularly crude and reductionist notion I’d been entertaining about the essence of human history. My colleague’s teaching, you see, had been predicated for over thirty years on the notion that history inspires us to do great things. I had always been glad enough he’d found history inspiring, not only because he’d inspired my sons to think so, too, but also because, well, one should think history inspiring. That’s what history has been about down through the ages. That’s been its purpose, its reason d’etre. No one would have set about composing history in the first place if it hadn’t been out of a desire to inspire everybody. My own criticism of “revisionist” history, in fact, is predicated on exactly this assumption. The revisionists, I’ll happily tell anyone who’ll listen, reduce heroes to mere people, glory to “ideology,” and nostalgia—psychologically speaking the very essence of historical inquiry—to weak-mindedness or, even worse, wish-fulfillment.

In short, I think it’s good to believe in heroes and glory and that sort of thing, and history should help us do that. I realize I'm wrong, of course, that I’m being what amounts, potentially at least, to an apologist for imperialism and cultural hegemony and various other evils and arrogances, and that the revisionists are correct, but that's the way I feel, so I can't help thinking it.

My parents thought similar things. They raised me on the premise that the world was getting steadily better. As a kid I drank in pure American optimism with great tumblers of homogenized milk and was fortified thereby against any tendency towards mopiness. Nobody, it was generally agreed when I was growing up, should ever be mopey. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, FDR, JFK, far from being mopey, were all filled with can-do optimism, a particularly American concoction, a kind of stripped-down version of that good old Enlightenment belief in material and moral progress based on rational inquiry I’ve been so pestiferously inclined to question.

Eighteenth century Enlightenment optimism, which spawned the American experiment but was not exactly of it, had its dark side, which took the form of lots of outrage against the cruelty it posited as embedded in the irrational regions of the human heart. Its proponents’ outrage was noble enough when addressed to their own atrocities, of which there were many. However, it was a little embarrassing—morally embarrassing, I mean, and not to them, of course, but to us in retrospect—when they showed too great a willingness to reduce the souls of non-Europeans to nothing but cruelty, especially those whose continents Europeans were beginning to consider seizing wholesale and with unabashed cruelty themselves in order to fuel their newly booming imperialist-industrial complex. American optimism, though, did not admit of any such chiaroscuro effect in its self-expressions. The American experiment was brightly lit and all the lab assistants smiled openly and innocently because in America nobody was cruel and all was good.

For white people, anyway.

Being one of which, when I came along in the 1950’s and ’60’s, I benefitted from there being quite a lot of that brightness in my feedback loop. America was—with a Yes, sir!—the  best country in the world. The twentieth century—America’s century, we all agreed—was the century of progress: the automobile, the aeroplane, penicillin, heart transplants, the Internet, prosthetic limbs, you name it. Even in the realm of public policy, believe it or not, there was Social Security, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and eventually a number of other advances in civil rights for African-Americans, women, LGBTQers most recently. America was proud enough of itself even to give credit for some of this to other, older civilizations, particularly those that had taken part in the march of western rationalism. In fact, I was taught, every epoch since the Greeks had been an advance over the previous one, with the possible exception of the Dark Ages, which were a bit of a stutter step and therefore not worth dwelling on. At any rate, one certainly couldn’t deny that life today was better than it ever had been for, say, the Abyssinians.

So I admitted to my friend that there was a good if teleological argument for human progress and if I hadn’t in recent years read a lot of books about history I’d be in the forefront of making it. But I had in fact read these books and they had led me to certain gloomy opinions about the argument’s credibility. One in particular, The Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, had been about The Hundred Years War. I don’t have to say much to give a sense of how it affected my opinion of history, Tuchman’s book, more than that it was all about a war that lasted a hundred years. It’s a beautifully written and carefully researched work, which made me like it a lot, but Ms. Tuchman sort of thought the period it described, despite being a different historical epoch from ours, was pretty much just like our own, which is where the title comes from, and that’s good reason in itself to be a little skeptical about the whole idea of human progress.

Anyway, other books I’d read were about rapine down through the ages and into the present, along with witch hunts, genocides, assassinations, religious persecutions, slavery, anti-semitism, torture, world wars, sadism, poverty, pandemics, starvation, mob violence, and, of course, weapons of mass destruction. Not in any particular order. After all this reading, it had eventually dawned on me that all anyone needs to know about human history is that it’s a river of blood. Then I’d had a further thought: the best thing that can be said about history is that so few people have actually made it. Almost all the people who’ve ever made history have been killers more or less on a mass scale. The preponderance of them, by the way, have been men. Many non-makers of history have been killers, too—common murderers and rapists, again most of them men. But we were talking about history, and I kept announcing to my esteemed friend this one extremely un-optimistic thing about it. History, I kept telling him, boorishly enough, was nothing—nothing!—but a river of blood.

As I’ve said, my optimistic and studiously liberal friend believed that the twentieth century, as distinct from all the others, had seen a lot of moral and material progress, and that the twenty-first offered plenty of hope for more. So as we sat together tasting some of his excellent single-malt scotch, having cleared his throat a bit he looked directly at me and smiled, then looked away, then looked back again.

No, he said. It was more than that, history, it wasn’t just a river of blood.

In true stubborn-cuss form, though, and fortified, perhaps, by my repeated inquiries into the resonances of his scotch, I insisted on the premise. Yes it was, I said, and that was all it was: a river of blood. Not one iota of moral progress. I’d give him that the twentieth century was probably no worse than any other century, and that, as far as material progress was concerned—as well as progress in the area of human rights—maybe the twentieth was a little better, at least in America, and only if you were selective in your instances, and paid attention just to white people, particularly white men, with maybe white women thrown in, too, although they still had a lot of crap they had to put up with. But as far as the river of blood was concerned, our century was neither better nor worse than any other.

At this point, I even had the audacity to suggest that at that very moment our tax dollars were being used to pay people to slaughter old men and women and little girls and boys all around the world, that the politicians who sent them over to do this called these deaths “collateral damage,” of course, having never taken Orwell’s intelligent rage at the euphemisms of agit-speak too seriously, or, at least, in anything like a moral light. It was nothing, I insisted—history, that is—but murder and rapine on a mass scale, no excuses, please. In the Middle Ages, I continued, there were hangings and beheadings, disembowellings even, and people brought picnic lunches and sat on the ground and watched. Yes, the Middle Ages were undeniably violent and bloodthirsty. But the twentieth century, I argued, had killed many more people than the Middle Ages. The killing was all just a lot more sanitized.

Thinking back on my little tirade I’m amazed he didn’t throw his Scotch in my face.

What he did do, though, was far more constructive and far more effective.

He said something.

“If I felt the way you do,” he observed, “I couldn’t get up in the morning.”

I looked away at the dog in the next yard lying panting in the shade of an ornamental Japanese Maple and staring, as the moment would have it, directly back at me as I swallowed the last of my scotch.

“To teach, I mean,” he added. “How can you teach literature and writing and all that and believe the things you believe?”

Popping a few Spanish peanuts in my mouth, I ground at them fussily.

“How can you write poetry if you believe those things?”

I was dumbstruck for a bit. My glass was now empty, you see, so suddenly I had nothing to say.

I managed eventually to get out a kind of reply, but it wasn’t even close to being what might be considered a salvo, and it offered nothing, really, by way of a manifesto on life’s ultimate goodness, or the wonders of teaching, or even the efficacy of poetry in addressing the problems of the modern world.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s a good question, and I can’t give you a good answer because I don’t know.”

I told him I’d get back to him on that one.

I’d have to give it some thought.

Maybe I’d even blog about it.