What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  James and Megan

  Joseph and Katherine

  Beatrice and Theodore

  Nearest and Dearest

  Preface

  This book is a collection mostly of lectures I have given in churches, seminaries, and universities over the last few years. Most of them reflect central preoccupations that are to my mind matters of urgency and that arise from the way we think now. I know it is conventional to say we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite—in essential ways we share false assumptions and flawed conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared.

  In great part this is the fault of our intellectual culture. It pains me to say this. These are people I identify with and have learned from and whom I wish I could admire wholeheartedly. The fact is, however, that much of what I have learned from them has amounted to my taking exception to a book or a lecture and then mulling over the reasons for my discontent with it. This is no doubt obvious from my earlier essays.

  Here is an instance of the alarming like-mindedness that has emerged among us over the last few decades. Many teachers in the humanities have treated it as true that this country was always fundamentally capitalist, intending the word to mean more or less what they think Karl Marx intended by it. In 99.5 percent of cases they have never read a page of Marx, so they have no idea what he was describing. Capitalism in his time was largely the commerce between American cotton fields and British cotton factories, which generated great wealth on both sides, together with vast, nearly absolute poverty on both sides, among English workers and American slaves. It is true that slave labor was used in Northern states while they were under British law, which demonstrates that the use of it was economically viable there, too. Nevertheless, after the Revolution those states acted to ban it.

  In the South cotton capitalism accelerated, inspiring dreams of Mexican and Central American conquest. The South was otherwise remarkably static. Little schooling or publishing went on there. It realized a fantasy of itself in a hastily contrived, clapped-together timeless order, the kind enjoyed by the moneyed in the Old World, many of whom bought their castles and furnished their chapels with profits from the slave trade. I have heard, more times than I can count, that capitalism was an American invention, and the basis of our “exceptionalism.” Supposedly it was the North that was capitalist, able to bully the pastoral South because the North was greedy and aggressive, and industrialized. Marx neither said nor implied any such thing, certainly not in his essays about the Civil War. As he was well aware, Southern slavery was part of an industrial workforce whose great center was in England. Its tactics of exploitation were in the last degree greedy and aggressive. The great vision of the South was the spread of slavery and cotton all the way to California. Anyone who bothered to read Jefferson Davis would be clear on this point.

  This nonsense is important first of all because it legitimizes rapacious capitalism as preeminently American, the source of our success, including those freedoms we acknowledge. And it describes a national character formed around the values associated with it, a generalization that has important interpretive consequences—everything that has happened in our history is to be understood in its essence as profit driven. Among liberals who subscribe to this notion, which they all do, since they tend to feel that we as a nation are gravely deficient in humility, this produces a slick, unreflecting cynicism. Among those whom we call conservatives, it produces an unembarrassed enthusiasm for self-interest, so long as the interest in question is their own. It encourages the kind of brutalist heroics celebrated in the pages of Ayn Rand. On left and right, such thinking makes the enlightened, humane development of American culture over centuries inauthentic. It is shocking how defenseless the protections of the environment, of the poor, and even of the rights of voters have been shown to be in recent years. No one defends these things as American, because the Left no more than the Right thinks of them as among our core values. The great engine of capitalism can mow them down, since they were derivative at best and in any case are proved to be inessential by the very fact that they are vulnerable and exceptional. Self-interest, on the other hand, is universal and constant—and was presumably the motive behind these institutions in the first place. True, it can take some tortuous reasoning to account for their original economic utility. But if a conclusion can be assumed to be true, there is no need to worry about arriving at it by means that might otherwise seem dubious.

  The Left does not understand the thinking of the Right because it is standing too close to have a clear view of it. In important respects, the Left has nurtured and rationalized it, neglecting and distorting history in the process, therefore removing potential correctives. It is easy to tell a roomful of eighteen-year-olds that given time the efficiencies of capitalist free labor would have eliminated slavery. So the Invisible Hand would have been the real liberator, if the idealists had simply stepped back and let it do its work. Presumably this is the kind of thing President Donald J. Trump had in mind when he said the Civil War could and should have been avoided. He might have learned this from the Far Right, but it could equally well have come to him from more respectable sources. Again, nothing in the thinking or in the aspirations of Jefferson Davis suggests that he foresaw anything less than a vast expansion of slavery throughout the Americas. An unbridled South would have brought catastrophe far beyond our borders. Dare I mention the Mexican War? We can assume that abolitionists were naïve in failing to leave history in the ungentle hands of economic forces, or that they had mercenary interests greater than accommodation with the vast wealth generated by slavery. Or we can assume that they listened to the voices of the South and learned from them how very much was at stake. But why bother with context? Still, even after very many years, it sounds bold and provocative to flatten the historical landscape and to deal in moral equivalencies.

  * * *

  We have surrendered thought to ideology. Every question is for all purposes the same question, every answer the same answer. Why has anyone done anything? Self-interest. This is true of the whole species, but it is most emphatically true of Americans. Where in all this is wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity? To think in such terms is naïve. These qualities are merely apparent, never determinant. To say that we as a national community have benefited from them, that individuals have actually considered the general welfare from time to time and addressed it, acted in light of it, is to slide into shameless nationalism. The Right is more than happy to be excused from these ideals, standards that have, historically, been invoked in order to mitigate the uglier impulses, greed prominent among them. The Left cannot account for the civic virtues in theoretical or ideological terms and feels awkward speaking of them in religious terms. This is only truer because the Right has made religious language toxic by putting it to uses that offend generosity and digni
ty. Perhaps the worst thing about ideological thinking is that it implies a structure in and behind events, a history that is reiterative, with variations that cannot ultimately change the course of things and are therefore always trivial, no matter how much thought and labor goes into the making of them. The notion of an abiding sameness despite superficial differences can have consequences that are hilarious and awful, as when a roomful of professors, flown in from the corners of the world to share their thoughts, in all seriousness identify as wage slaves because they are dependent on their earnings. The other side of this is the permission given by the concept of class war to people on the right who consider themselves successful, therefore embattled. They can resist arguments for economic justice as if they were existential threats, the grumblings of resentment that, if acted on, would loot them of their trophies. In this country, at least, it is more temperament than circumstance that leads people to identify themselves with one side or the other. Meanwhile, actual American workers have no place in the conversation. If they identify with it at all, it is in their refusing to think of themselves as an exploited class, and in their readiness to identify with success and power. This is entirely understandable given the alternative, and given the memory, recent for many of them, of times when they could count on fairly compensated work, with everything this implies for personal latitude and social mobility.

  It is no accident that Marxism and social Darwinism arose together, two tellers of one tale. It is not surprising that they have disgraced themselves in very similar ways. Their survival more than one hundred fifty years on is probably owed to the symmetry of their supposed opposition. Based on a single paradigm, they reinforce each other as legitimate modes of thought. So it is with our contemporary Left and Right. Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness.

  I say this because I am too old to mince words. We have, in our supposed opposition, gone a long way toward making class real—that is, toward cheating people of opportunity. Historically, education has been the avenue by which Americans have had access to the range of possibilities that suit their gifts. We have put higher education farther out of reach of low-income people by cutting taxes and forcing tuitions to rise. And we attack public preparatory education. We make an issue about family background in terms of suitability for college, when in fact anyone who has paid a reasonable amount of attention in a decent high school will be fine in college. Unless he or she is working two jobs to pay for it, that is. I have taught for many years in a highly selective program that attracts students of every background. There is absolutely no evidence that those whose education would be called “elite” are at the slightest advantage. Our prejudices are impressing themselves on our institutions and therefore on the lives of all of us. The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking—that is, in thinking that by definition is not one’s own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted—is a capitulation no one should ever make. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.

  What Is Freedom of Conscience?

  Director’s Lecture at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago: May 5, 2016

  I assume that conscience is a human trait widespread enough to be generally characteristic, not originating in culture though inevitably modified by it. Guilt and shame, and dread at the thought of incurring them, are clearly associated with conscience, which grants them legitimacy and which they empower. Conversely, the belief that one’s actions are endorsed by conscience can inspire a willingness to stand against custom or consensus in matters that might otherwise be considered wrong or shameful, for example, rebellion against the existing order.

  The idea of conscience as we think of it is reflected in the Greek of the New Testament. It is to be found in Plato as self-awareness, a capacity for self-appraisal. In the Hebrew Bible it is pervasively present by implication, an aspect of human experience that must be assumed to be reflected in the writings of the apostle Paul and others. In Genesis a pagan king can appeal to the Lord on the basis of the integrity of his heart and the innocence of his hands, and learn that God has honored his innocence and integrity by preventing him from sinning unintentionally. The king’s sense of himself, his concern to conform his conduct to the standard he brings to bear on it, which is a standard God acknowledges, is a kind of epitome of the concept of righteousness so central to the Hebrew Bible. That the king is a pagan, a Philistine, suggests that the Torah regards moral conscience as universal, at least among those who respect and cultivate it in themselves.

  Beyond the capacity to appraise one’s own actions and motives by a standard that seems, at least, to stand outside momentary impulse or longer-term self-interest and to tell against oneself, conscience is remarkably chimerical. An honor killing in one culture is an especially vicious crime in another. We have learned that effective imprisonment at forced labor of unwed mothers, or of young women deemed likely to stray, was practiced until a few decades ago in a Western country, Ireland, despite the many violations of human rights this entailed. One might expect it to have ended in any previous century, if consciences were burdened by it. Americans have just awakened to the fact that we have imprisoned a vast part of our own population with slight cause, stigmatizing them at best and depriving them of the possibility of a normal, fruitful life. Conscience can be slow to awake, even to abuses that are deeply contrary to declared values—for example, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if conscience is at peace with such things, if it rationalizes and endorses them, does it still possess an authority that justifies its expression, since acceptance is as much an act of conscience as resistance is? After all, in this country, where freedom means that a consensus permits the actions and policies of government unless recourse is had to demonstrations, recall, impeachment, legal action, or rejection by voters, we are normally reconciled to things we may not approve of. Conscience obliges us—always fewer of us, it seems—to respect the consequences of elections, without which democracy is no longer possible. It is not always easy to tell a slumbering conscience from one that is weighing consequences.

  People who believe that an unconstrained capitalism will yield the best of all possible worlds might earnestly regret the disruptions involved in it, the uncompensated losses suffered as a consequence of capital being withdrawn in one place to be invested in another, solely in the interest of its own aggrandizement. But how does one intervene in the inevitable? Cost-benefit analysis has swept the human sciences! It explains everything! Depending, of course, on highly particular definitions of both cost and benefit. I have never seen an estimate of the wealth lost when a town falls into ruin, nor any calculus of the wealth lost when a workforce is idled, over against the wealth created in consequence of these creations of poverty. What is the cost to the Chinese, who are never asked if the benefits of factory work outweigh the loss of clean air, drinkable water, and the health of their children? The fact that a loss is immeasurable is really not a reason for leaving it out of account. Impoverishment of populations on the basis of financial self-interest makes a joke of personal freedom. Yet we accept the legitimacy of economic theory that overrides our declared values. This is to say, the public conscience is not touched by grand-scale dispossessions because it is numbed by a dubious theory, and by the fact that real power, neither political nor legal nor inclined to notice politics or law except as illegitimate intrusions on its limitless prerogatives, has passed out of the public’s control as they pass more and more deeply into its control.

  * * *

  Freedom and the sovereignty of individual conscience are ideas that in early American culture and in precursor movements in England and Europe arose together and informed each other in important ways. The great conflict in the Middle Ages, putting aside monarchical adventurism, baronial restiveness, and so on, was between dissident religious movements and the established church. Th
e question at issue was whether or not people had a right to their own beliefs. In the thirteenth century, two Crusades and an Inquisition were carried out in southern Europe against the large and influential movement called Catharism, or Albigensianism, that was associated with Languedoc but also was important in northern Italy. These people are still accused of strange doctrines and a world-hating cast of mind, as heretics have always been, but this was probably not true, of them at least, since they were associated with the troubadours and the courts of love, and since they were so deeply nonviolent that their prosecutors could distinguish them from others by a very simple test: Told to kill a chicken, a Cathar would refuse. They were defended by non-Cathars in the region in what became a protracted but effective war of extermination. These events established policy for the treatment of dissidents, also called heretics, in Europe for centuries.

  It seems fair to wonder if even terrible suppression is not, over time, a stimulus and a preservative. Whether Catharism persisted despite it is a difficult question, since the word was sometimes used polemically, and since its texts were so thoroughly expunged and its reputation so blackened that it would be hard to identify traces of its influence in subsequent history. But dissidence persisted. John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century Oxford professor whose theological writing spread throughout Europe and remained influential in England into the period of the Reformation, was exhumed from his grave and burned as a heretic. Those associated with his teaching, known as Lollards, were burned as well, again into the period of the Reformation. It must have been conscience that made them and so many others act as though they were free despite the drastic constraints placed on their freedom. Conscience appears throughout history in individuals and groups as a liberating compulsion, though the free act is so often fatal.