What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  Complexity is powerfully stripped away by half-informed or uninformed aversion. Why should people so often feel what amounts to contempt for figures, even entire populations, about whom they know nothing and will learn nothing on the grounds of this same aversion? The word Orwellian has been worked nearly to death because it is so very useful. Consensus really ought not to trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely. And reason always tells us that human beings and their societies and histories are mingled—that is, never only to be condemned, sometimes ingratiating or admirable. Decent mutual respect depends on an awareness of this fact, that is, on good history.

  A conscious strategy currently favored for excluding complication, usually on the pretext of acknowledging complexity, is cynicism. The tsar had his own motives. True enough. People do. No doubt he had a number of them. This really does not neutralize the fact that the British and French had their motives, too. By the blunt measure of their potential impact on human lives, these were, at best, far inferior. We have brought home from our wars, cold and hot, this habit of impervious antagonism, antagonism as loyalty, which dovetails neatly with our version of cynicism, better called intellectual lassitude. We have allowed ourselves to become bitterly factionalized, and truth has lost its power to resolve or to persuade.

  There is a mystery in the fact that by means of these truth-excluding encapsulations, besides making our society foolish and vulnerable, and in some ways ineducable, we do preserve, very effectively, negative beliefs about ourselves. My earliest memories take up after World War II, when movie theaters still ran ads about the need to relieve hunger and poverty in war-torn Europe. The camera dwelt on a little boy in short pants and bare legs alone in a dark, narrow street. I remember a German immigrant neighbor, an older woman who scolded my mother as if from a moral height for the inadequacies of her knitting, for her buying soap when she ought to have been making it. Her houseplants, she said, were a disgrace. My mother was impressed, even deferential, though not to the point of making soap. The neighbor was a product of her moment, a priestess in the cult of Heimat, but we would not have known. There were a number of freshly arrived Europeans then. I remember an old man who practically lived at the mayor’s office, and who scolded whomever was polite and could spare a minute with the fact that democracy was wasted on Americans. More generally, I was educated to the belief that this country was an awkward attempt at a civilization, a crude imitation of something profound and elegant and intrinsically elsewhere. Objectively speaking, this is remarkable, considering what was then the very recent history of Europe. Be that as it may, the admiration for things European, whether in any instance it was justified or not, came paired with the implication that nothing so excellent or so profound would be possible here. I’ve read a good deal of Fascist literature over the years, and I know it was believed and taught and spun into philosophy and philology all over the Continent that mingled and rootless people who spoke an adopted language could never even know how utterly they fell short—of profundity, of authenticity, both important terms of the time. By these lights such people were a corruption, a threat to the organic integrity of any true culture. A splinter in the flesh, Hitler said. In our deference to European thought we applied this thinking to our hapless selves and kind, never reflecting on the uses that had been made of it in Europe or the biases it legitimized here.

  I have never admired deference. I was dosed with Sartre and Artaud, as any college girl then would have been. I felt their nausea. It made an Americanist of me.

  But for those whose tolerances were different from mine, figures like these defined the future. It was not a very interesting or habitable future, but in the short term it opened the way to study abroad. Juniors returned knowing better how to hold a fork or a cigarette. They had heightened social confidence—they had checked an important box. None of this ends with adolescence. Or this adolescence never ends. It seems to be true now that there is no Europe of the kind to potentially unleash new literary trends or to make us line up around the block for a new French or Italian movie. Without any particular object of emulation to measure our deficiencies by, the sense of deficiency is at least as strong as ever.

  It is absurd that the products of a civilization as old and solid as this one should forever be such colonials, feeling sophisticated in the fact that they have and confess such deeply internalized prejudices against themselves. A few years ago I was seated near an American couple at one of those dinners they have at Oxford before a lecture. The Americans were doing something I see very often. They were saying that in the States there were no such events as these, that intellectualism was held in contempt there, and so on. They were earnest and insistent, even a little bit loud. I said, That might be an overstatement. They reacted, again predictably, as if the fact were plain and must be faced. When they were told that I was the lecturer, they were irritated. Not only had they been interrupted mid-kowtow. They had come out for an evening of stimulation among their betters and they had found me instead. Why do so many otherwise presentable people think they can ingratiate themselves with foreigners by talking this way? I take ingratiation to be part of the motive behind it, or the hope. A small thing in the great scheme, granted. But it enacts as much as it expresses that internalized prejudice. Put aside the notion of country and imagine 320 million souls who happen to be passing their mortal time on this continent. Why should we discourage them from major aspiration? Say 15 percent are black, 51 percent are women. Is it at all consistent with their aspirations to be told that whatever their gifts, an ultimate mediocrity awaits them? I don’t know how damaging this really is. I certainly felt the weight of it when I was young. I see students who seem to think they are excused from the kind of effort they might make by the belief that there is no audience in this country for serious literary work, for ideas. Some first-rate writing is being done here now, and finding a readership. Still, I hear again and again that Americans hate books and ideas, that demanding novels don’t find publishers. This gloom, which is mutual condescension, is unshakably in love with its certitudes.

  Then there is the matter of our press, our public discourse, which looks more and more like self-parody. The purport of all the jeering and slurring and scaring seems to be that democracy is indeed wasted on Americans.

  Well, democracy is my aesthetics and my ethics and more or less my religion. I am very grateful that my life has passed in a society where the influence of a democratic ideal is sometimes great, sometimes decisive. A thing I have long regretted, though, is that I have been significantly distracted from this privilege, and from the experience of my life and the lives around me, by generalizations about us all that are meager and belittling at best. When I was still vulnerable to those unanchored comparisons that are always made of us and that we seem always to welcome as truth, I thought we as a culture might be especially materialistic, especially intolerant, especially violence-prone, especially indifferent to the finer things. Now as I watch this supposed populism that invites some part of the public to identify with all these things as indeed American, as the voice that really is great within us, a sort of utterly corrupted Whitmanism, I fall to wondering how the grand experiment has been brought to such a pass. And this brings me back to history.

  * * *

  I am always writing about that broad area that lies between expert opinion and public assumption. It is broad in the sense that it reflects the state of knowledge in far the greater number of people, not at all in the sense that the difference between expert views and public assumptions is typically great.

  The film Amistad is based on an important event in American history and is intended as a serious treatment of it. In 1840 a Spanish ship carrying African captives in the Caribbean was seized by the captives. The navigators, who were spared so that they could take them back to Africa, misled them and sailed north. They were found off the coast of the United States, arrested, and brought to New Haven, which was an important abolitionist center. This came to the at
tention of Lewis Tappan, who organized a very distinguished legal defense to clear them of charges, including murder, and to free them. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. When they won, Tappan arranged for them to return home to Africa.

  In the film nineteenth-century New Haven looks like a set for the Salem witch trials. There are randomly assorted details to suggest a pervasive religiosity—a troop of nuns pass through the street, a close-up shows crosses on chains dangling from Bibles. Simpering, black-clad women poke crosses at the Africans through the slats in a picket fence. Puritans, as these people are clearly meant to be and would have been, more or less, did not dress in black and did not use crosses, which they regarded as icons. The Africans, watching black-clad people kneeling in the street outside their jail window in some clumsy and unspecific show of sympathy and evangelism, remark, with subtitles, that they look unhappy. This moment hardly seems necessary, since the cliché is so commonplace that even George H. W. Bush was aware of it. When they fell to thinking about it, a great many New Englanders were indeed unhappy about slavery, and about the Fugitive Slave Law, which was germane to this case and which was meant to implicate Northerners in the enforcement of slavery. This is the kind of unhappiness that should be associated with intelligent humanity, not with gloomy fanaticism. But they were Puritans, and therefore, as cliché would have it, cankered souls who simply hated life. I will not pause over the fact that this region at this time was producing a body of literature of great beauty and depth, which is generally considered a sign of cultural health.

  So, given the conventions that shape the film, what is to be done with the figure of Lewis Tappan, a great early emancipationist who devoted himself and his fortune to the cause? Among many other things he was one of the founders of Oberlin College, an institution of singular importance in advancing abolition and in asserting the equality of all races and both genders. In New York City, Tappan’s business was burned, his house was ransacked with him in it. He went right on, rather jovially and very constructively, supporting abolition.

  In the film he remarks to his black colleague that it would be better for the cause if the Africans were to die. There it is, the stereotypical fanaticism, the inevitable underlying pathology that contaminates what would otherwise be generosity and idealism. There is no truth in this, of course, but it satisfies the expectations of convention and also of cynicism. Movies love the underdog, here a rumpled young lawyer invented to fill this role. But a movie with any claim to historical significance would find the underdog in Tappan and the figures he recruited to the freeing of the Africans. That they were men of standing in their society did not make them powerful against a hostile president or the slave interests in Congress, as the length of this struggle and the larger struggle for emancipation makes clear. The controversy surrounding the Amistad and the determination of the case are very important, so why not give a true account of them? Reality is interesting.

  Well, for one thing, to do so would disrupt some deeply entrenched notions. Lewis Tappan, that Puritan, used moral and religious language to make his case against slavery. This may mean he was, as they say, holier than thou. I freely concede that he was holier than me, if we are to be judged by our works. Better, or easier, to reinforce those stereotypes, available as they are, undisputed as they are. Popular culture has its own systems of self-perpetuation.

  One last thing. There is an idealized Englishman, in the movie a naval officer who destroys a slave castle he has discovered on the coast of Sierra Leone, a place whose existence until then might supposedly have been only rumored. Since Sierra Leone was the center of the British slave trade from the sixteenth century, when it was sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth, to the early nineteenth century, this is clearly implausible. But the movie gives us someone to admire—not a taciturn, stoical New Englander but a taciturn, stoical Briton. We are very accustomed to the idea that qualities that are handsome on one side of the Atlantic are unhealthy, soulless, reprehensible on the other. Puritanical, in fact. The convention is that Puritan culture was stunted intellectually, emotionally, and morally by the religious tradition that also founded Harvard and, of course, Yale, to name only local examples of their remarkable institution-building and their devotion to learning.

  * * *

  Lately I have been reading, and reading about, another Puritan, Oliver Cromwell. In his case the expert view is typically quite different from his popular reputation, to the extent that he can be said to have a popular reputation. So far as he does have a place in the general public’s mind he looms as a giant monolith on the darkest terrain of unhipness, towering over even Edwards and Calvin on that Ultima Thule where the sanctifying words comme il faut are never spoken. Scholarly opinion reflects an awareness of Cromwell’s importance to early modern history, and a fascination with his essential opacity despite his relatively long and well-documented public career.

  Cromwell, at age forty, having had no experience to prepare him, joined the army of Parliament in its war with Charles I. Over time it became apparent that he had a genius for warfare, especially for the use of cavalry. He rose through the ranks on the basis of great personal courage and an unbroken history of success in combat, attracting and retaining an army that came to be regarded as the preeminent military power in Europe. Through all this he remained dutifully subordinate to his commander, Lord Fairfax, and after the death of Fairfax, to Parliament. Over time his New Model Army became an interest and a political force in its own right. Finally Cromwell emerged, in a country profoundly disrupted by years of civil war, as head of state. For about ten years England experimented with forms of Republican or Commonwealth government. After Cromwell died, his son and successor proved unable to govern, and the monarchy was restored.

  All this is of interest because it might be called the beginning of American history. Those abolitionists in New Haven were the cultural and, in many cases, literal descendants of the supporters of Cromwell, who came here in search of religious freedom—as we often say, without elaboration. The English Civil Wars tend to be known, if they are known at all, for the trial and execution of the reigning king, Charles I. Granting that the trial can hardly be said to have made the legally difficult case that the king was, or could be, guilty of treason as the law then stood, and granting that decapitation is an ugly fate, neither of these was crude or cruel by the appalling standards of the time. Nor, for that matter, by comparison with the French Revolution, which came more than a century later, and which, though it was closely modeled on the English example, utterly exceeded it in vindictiveness and bloodshed. In any case, among the king’s judges, called regicides, three were sheltered in New Haven and one was buried there. Others who did not escape England suffered the “superfluous death,” too ghastly to describe, which was the usual fate of condemned traitors and which the king had been spared. Connecticut was a natural refuge for those fleeing the suppression of the Commonwealth side after the Restoration. A colony had been founded there in 1635, before the outbreak of war in England. According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Saybrook “was planned as a settlement to which for a time it was thought Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke … Oliver Cromwell and other independents would immigrate.” Independents are more commonly called Puritans. So the seeds of radicalism and revolution were planted on our soil almost a century and a half before independence.

  Then again, American history may have had an earlier beginning yet. There was a period of reform and unrest during the brief reign of the boy king Edward VI, who ascended the throne at the age of nine and died when he was fifteen. As the successor to his father, Henry VIII, he came to the throne in a time of turbulence. The Church of England had rather newly been severed from Rome. With the radical exception of the king’s having put himself in the place of the pope, Henry VIII intended a minimum of change in theology and practice when he broke with the Catholic Church. But the Reformation was at its height on the Continent, and Edward VI, who passed seamlessly from tutelage
to precocity and who was fluent in many languages and a devoted student of Scripture and theology, attempted to model his church and society on European examples. This meant a great destruction of art, prayer books, and ritual objects. It meant also a great relaxation of censorship laws with a consequent explosion of publishing, much of it of religious literature, though early vernacular works such as Piers Plowman also enjoyed great popularity. It meant that the laws dating back to Richard II that punished heresy with death were repealed, and, with two exceptions, the burning of people as heretics ended while Edward lived. This was a radical departure from the practice of his father. While the stripping of the churches is often treated as harsh and philistine, the disuse of the stake and gallows is never discussed in aesthetic terms, though surely it should be. Edward repealed as well most laws concerning treason. He was succeeded by his half sister Mary, who reversed these reforms.