The Better Heritage Has Had To Work Against The Worst One Embedded Into Our Governments And Laws - 2

 Law in seventeenth-century Maryland forbade the use of the words "papist" (Catholic) or "round-head" (Puritan), fighting words in the Old World whose effects were muted here by methods still familiar to us.  We learned early to live with diversity, at least by the standards of the time.  It is useful to remember that the terrible Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was fought among European Christians during the early period of European settlement in America, and that New England was largely populated by British Protestant refugees of religious oppression and warfare in Protestant Britain.  What might look like homogeneity in nostalgic retrospect was felt and acted upon as intolerable difference justifying enormity in these cultures of origin.  Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same conflicts here.  Now it is seen as un-American in certain quarters to reject participation in the bitter excitements that can surround religious difference.  This is a crucially important instance of self-declared patriots attacking the very substance of our heritage.

I can't let that go without pointing out the fact that in Calvinist New England, four Quakers were hanged by the governing theocracy for testifying to their faith, others were beaten or otherwise tortured.  And it was a capital crime for Catholic priests go be there, though that was due in part to them wanting to exclude French Catholics even at that early period, sometimes excused for geo-political reasons but which resulted in a form of bigotry which survives into living memory.  Still, I take Marilynne Robinson's point about the early adoption of an unusual level of tolerance among diverse Protestants in most of the colonies.  In some, even after the adoption of the Constitution, there were places where non-Protestants were not allowed to vote.  Some of the framers wanted to exclude Catholics from being citizens.   I agree with Robinson that America's traditional liberalism, founded on the liberal provision for the least among us, is a heritage of a strain of Calvinism but we're talking about a double heritage all through this, and that one includes some of the worst theological racism and bigotry along with some of the earliest calls for abolition of slavery and equality for Women. 

We have seen bad times and we will see more of them, like any other human community.  The question is always whether America is indeed doing well upon the whole, whether the civilization at any present time is strong and resilient enough to sustain itself despite the crisis of the moment, or the decade, or the generation, and despite the bent toward malice and nonsense that is always present anywhere but seems harder to resist during periods of crisis.

What has been the basis of the enduring health that has so far made for the stability and the dynamism of the country?  It is always necessary to stipulate, though of course it should be assumed, that a statement like this one implies comparison with the human norm, not with Utopia.  As societies go, we have enjoyed the kind of prosperity and advancement that is possible only where there is domestic peace.  We have managed this at the same time that we have created a population whose origins are increasingly various.  The canard that associates "heterogeneity" with conflict and instability would have to be reexamined if comparison were made between America and countries that claim to be homogeneous or insist that they must be.  The modern history of Europe is highly relevant here.  

We are blessed with the impossibility of arriving at a definition of America that is either exhaustive or final not only because of our continuously changing and self-transforming population but also, as Whitman says, because we have never fully achieved democracy.  This is a very reasonable light in which to consider a mingled heritage, full of lapses and errors and therefore often said to be hypocritical or failed, even by those who see themselves as its defenders.  By Whitman's lights this process of discovery with all its setbacks, is a splendid, metaphysically brilliant passage in human history.  It is moved by the power of religious imperative because it honors and liberates the sacred human person.  He says:

"There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.  This is the thought of identity-yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me.  Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts.  In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre.) creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea.  Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value.

Language like this makes clear how far our vocabulary has drifted over the generations.  So far from the sense of radical uniqueness Whitman evokes here, identity seems now to imply membership in a group, through ethnicity or affinity or religion or otherwise.  Rather than acknowledging the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being (and, considering the overwhelming odds against anyone's existence, the word "miraculous" is an appropriate superlative), it has reference now to knowing one's place, culturally and historically speaking.  And this is taken to be a good thing.  Whitman himself has been charged with rampant egoism for pondering and celebrating the centrality of the perceiver, that "hardest basic fact."  It seems fair to conclude that certain of his critics have no grasp of physics of metaphysics.  In other words, in changing, our vocabulary has not always advanced.

Taking that last point first, it is among the greatest and most central discoveries of modern physics that no statement can be made about any observation without taking into account the fact of the individual making the observation, their position when they made the observation, their method of making the observation, the other individual even peculiar aspects of THEM MAKING THAT OBSERVATION and not some other one making it from another point of view. It is impressive that Whitman identified it as "the only entrance to all facts" a half a century before the most sophisticated physicists of our century formalized it as a scientific law.

I will, again, point out that those very things that Marilynne to some extent rightly bemoans, that "identity" is so caught up with the ethnicity or affinity or religion, of membership with a group is inescapable because, among other things, our Constitution and government and laws have, from well before independence, been caught up in those and those in various elites and right down the economic scale have sought to benefit from membership in a privileged group and assigning others to groups not to have equal access to the good of life and entirely more access to the bad of it.  You can rightly point out the ways in which, largely white, largely male, largely straight, males have been somewhat unhabituated to treat differences among themselves as determinative but you won't make any real progress until you address the fact that those so privileged, the institutions and companies and governments and legal systems they have set up are based on those other discriminations based on group identity, applying those to the individuals assigned those identites.  That is so strong that identification with a larger group of People discriminated against is, itself, a necessity in fighting against that discrimination.  Given a life in which their identiy was taken as unremarkable and equally as the various Protestant, white, affluent identities were allowed to live under, every member of every such identity group would probably prefer to generally just live their lives unencumbered.  

It is no good pretending that the predominant forces with power have sought to gradually or even slightly diminish THOSE discriminations which are, in fact, still embedded within our very forms of government,  state as well as federal, informally even more so than as a matter of putting in writing.  The benefits to the original slave states are still befitting those states with the least dedication to overcoming the very discriminations the framers installed in the Constitution and, with that, the laws we still live under. Emancipating those prevented from voting merely increases the share of stolen power for their oppressors by two-fifths.   Whitman's democratic aspirations can't make the jump over those facts to arrive at some kind of peaceful prosperity because, as we can see in the white supremacist rancher-farmers who voted for Trump based on their racism, are now complaining that the immigrant laborers who were the basis of THEIR prosperity aren't there to work in terrible conditions for low pay and they certainly aren't about to improve the conditions and raise the pay to tempt unemployed white workers to take those jobs, and so Nebraska is afraid of bankruptcy but I have not seen any of the ranchers offering a living wage for those jobs.  

I see the point of the idealistic aspirations in Whitman's essay but, as all safe idealism must, have to see it in light of things as they really were and really are.  Which is about as fashionable as the get up I'm wearing as I type this out.

Again, I'll point out that when she wrote this Barack Obama was in office and there was no evidence that Trumpism was on the horizon.  I would wonder how she would write on the same themes now.