The older I get the more I wish I had multiple lives, and could live them all simultaneously. In one I'd be a lawyer, in another a writer, in a third a historian. I'd live one of my lives in France, another in Germany, a third in Japan. I'd be a much better linguist and anthropologist, I'd get a PhD in philosophy, and I'd put into practice much earlier the conviction that we all live like the blind men and the elephant, each of us describing the world we see from a different perspective, all of us failing at capturing the entirety of the big picture.
I grew up in a Christian home, firmly believing that I knew what God wanted me to be and do - never say "fuck," never touch myself "down there," be kind to strangers. I was five years old when the Second World War ended and my grandmother and I went out into the street when the whistles blew and there was dancing and crying with joy. I knew that the good guys had won and things were going to be all right now.
My German grandmother explained to me that the kids who had beaten me up on the playground when I revealed that I had a German background were wrong. "There are good people and bad people in every country," she told me. "The bad people had taken over in Germany, but things would now get better."
I held on to that belief for decades - that we Americans were the good guys, the Germans were the bad guys (not all of them) and I was incredibly lucky that my mother's family had all emigrated in the 20s and therefore didn't need to assume any guilt over being German. The lines between good guys and bad guys were clearly drawn. You just needed to make sure you got your historical facts right.
Fast forward ahead to the present day. I'm still alive at 83. And still living inside my head is the smart-ass kid who knew so much more than his mother did about history. And the wiser middle-age guy who had just become aware that there are multiple perspectives one can have on the world. And the would-be philosopher who struggles with the question of whether there is such a thing as objective truth or whether we are nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves and are unable to judge the truth of because there is no way to see truth anymore from a truly neutral perspective. This is an age when "narrative" carries - or seems to carry - far more weight than "truth" arrived at via the scientific method.
This is more than a debate for students of philosophy. It is an issue at the heart of the split between right-wing Republicans and the people they label as "libtards" - people I live among and share a worldview with. The right-wingers want to make politics all about things like critical race theory, which they understand as a bunch of lies invented by American socialists to tear this country down and make the next generation ashamed to call themselves Americans. The lefties (like myself) insist all critical race theory is really about is facing up to the fact that we - the good guys - have things in the history of our nation that need to be put right. We began as a nation of mostly European immigrants who came to North America and effectively eliminated the native population. The taboo word is genocide. You know, the thing that the Germans did with the Jews. The bad guys. No comparison.
And, say the lefties, that was only the beginning. Then came the slave ships and the legacy of slavery and segregation, redlining and gerrymandering and other tricks to keep power in the hands of the descendants of the white Europeans.
Stop it. Just stop it, say the rightists. You are fouling your own nest.
I remember a time in Japan when I was visiting a friend in the boonies of Kyushu and found myself in a bar with an official of the Ministry of Education. Because we were both sloshed, I had no fear of asking him, "Why is it you are afraid to teach your kids about the colonization of Korea, about pressing Chinese and Korean girls into sex slavery, the invasion of Mongolia, the experimentation on prisoners of war and all the other horrors of your military period?" To my astonishment, he had an answer at the ready. "Because we don't want them to hate their parents. They can learn about those things when they get older and have a better understanding of the complexities of life."
Because Hitlerite Germany was forced not only to surrender, in the end, but to agree to unconditional surrender, its victims as well as the people my grandmother would call "the good Germans" were able to carry out a denazification program and become, arguably, one of the world's best-operating democracies - effectively a nation of "good guys." Meanwhile one of the things that bothered me about the many years I lived in Japan was the denial that they had committed war crimes. I took a group of students with me once to see the Yūshūkan (遊就館 - "place to commune with a noble soul"), part of the Yasukuni Shrine, where when you first enter you see a giant map showing how the Japanese forces "liberated" China from European colonialism. My students had no idea this historical revisionism was so well-established. Chalk it up to the Japanese propensity for not making waves. The reason for the excursion was the fact that in my ethics seminar the question came up of whether we could judge history by present-day standards. For me, it remains a troubling dilemma and I don't have a clear answer. Many of them did. "The Nazis had a different moral system. We can't judge them by our standards." Because I don't buy into the view that there is no longer any truth, only narrative, I'm attracted to the idea put forth by anthropologist Clifford Geertz that we are effectively caught, like a spider, in "webs of significance" of our own weaving. Geertz' response, if I have read him correctly, is not that there is no truth (but only narrative), but that, like morality, truth has to be constantly defined and redefined as we learn from life experience.
I yanked my students up and out of the classroom and into the Museum. It worked. They came back with the view that some interpretations of history are better than others. And I, of course, already perceived as a foreign enemy to some of my nationalistic colleagues, became an even bigger threat. Fortunately, such nationalism is taken seriously by only a small number of Japanese. Much smaller than the 33% or so of American Trumpists now ready to follow their leader, as opposed to the rule of law and the constitution.
To pick up on the notion that truth - and I would add understanding - needs to be updated with regularity, I got into a discussion recently about the topic of eugenics. Somebody sent me an article about the removal of the name Mead from the Mead Memorial Chapel at Middlebury College, my alma mater. I paid little attention to the story when it first came down two years ago, thinking it was just another example of America wiping clean some of its past errors. You know, like removing the statues of Confederate generals in the South. Or changing the name of the LeConte Elementary School a block down from my house, because LeConte, it turns out, was a racist.
But then Jeff Jacoby, a writer I greatly admire from his articles in The Atlantic, published one carried by the Boston Globe, in which he takes Middlebury to task for hypocrisy. How come they're all so high and mighty all of a sudden, he asks, when Middlebury has a history of supporting eugenics?
And that brought back the shock I first felt when listening to the defense of Hitler's judicial system in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. I taught that ethics seminar for several years, and in addition to taking that class to the Yasukuni Shrine that one time, I regularly played the film, because it appeals so strongly to my sense of right and wrong. "You have to believe me," the German judge says (played by Burt Lancaster) to the American judge brought in to conduct the trial (played by Spencer Tracy), "I never thought it would come to this."
"It came to this," Spencer Tracy responds, "the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent."
Love it. Still makes the heart tingle. Such certainty about right and wrong. Such clarity.
But in the dozen or so times I played the film, I whisked right over the other great moral issue, the fact that the German lawyer (played by Maximilian Schell) asked the court why they didn't recognize that Hitler got his idea of eugenics - killing off "defective" people - from the great American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Middlebury story brought that home to me. How come? How come we were able to judge the Nazis so (appropriately but) harshly, but couldn't take the next step and provide an answer to that question? How come we didn't have as strong an impulse to rid ourselves of the belief that we had the right to kill, or otherwise mistreat, segregate or ignore, human beings we found to be "lesser" than us somehow? Where is the American analogue to denazification?
I see it in Critical Race Theory. Not the absolutist version, the postmodern one which claims that we are nothing more than the color of our skin, but the essential version, which claims that we too, like the Nazis, like the Japanese militarists, like all the "bad guys" in the world, have stuff we have to face up to and take responsibility for. We can leave the details, like reparations, for another day (I'm not in favor, but that's a separate topic), but we should not be afraid to put history books into the hands of our children which tell the whole story - and not just the right-wing Christian nationalist narrative - that America is all about heroes who fought and died for your freedom to live in a country the whole world is dying to get into.
My two cents. Or, as my friend Norm, married to a Canadian from Montreal (never mind that she's an English-Canadian) likes to say it in French, "Mes quatre sous."
No comments:
Post a Comment