Some Political Insights from Literature: Carson McCullers

I recently read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It contained some passages that help us understand the political frustration that progressives feel today. I merely quote these passages for your appreciation.

One of the passages was spoken by Jake Blount the communist. His feelings reflect the frustration of millions of low-wage workers today who dare not speak out against their oppression:

‘And look what has happened to our freedom. The men who fought the American Revolution were no more like these D. A. R. dames than I’m a pot-bellied, perfumed Pekingese dog. They meant what they said about freedom. They fought a real revolution. They fought so that this could be a country where every man could be free and equal. Huh! And that meant every man was equal in the sight of Nature—with an equal chance. That didn’t mean that twenty per cent of the people were free to rob the other eighty per cent of the means to live. This didn’t mean for one rich man to sweat the piss out of ten thousand poor men so that he can get richer. This didn’t mean the tyrants were free to get this country in such a fix that millions of people are ready to do anything—cheat, lie, or whack off their right arm—just to work for three squares and a flop. They have made the word freedom a blasphemy. You hear me? They have made the word freedom stink like a skunk to all who know.’

Another passage was spoken by the black doctor Benedict Copeland, who was giving a sermon to poor blacks gathered at his house for a funeral:

‘Land, clay, timber—those things are called natural resources. Man does not make these natural resources—man only develops them and uses them for work. Therefore should any one person or group of persons own these things? Can a man own ground and space and sunlight and rain for crops? How can a man say “this is mine” about those things and refuse to let others share them? Therefore Marx says that these natural resources should belong to everyone, not divided into little pieces but used by all the people according to their ability to work…Say a man died and left his mule to his four sons. The sons would not wish to cut up the mule into four parts and each take his share. They would own and work the mule together. This is the way Marx says all of the natural resources should be owned—not by one group of rich people but by all the workers in the world as a whole.

‘We in this room have no private properties…All that we own is our bodies. And we sell our bodies every day we live. We sell them when we go out in the morning to our jobs and when we labor all the day. We are forced to sell at any price, at any time, for any purpose. We are forced to sell our bodies so that we can eat and live. And the price which is given us for this is only enough so that we will have the strength to labor longer for the profits of others. Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square, but we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom? Are we yet free men?...

‘And we are not alone in this slavery. There are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. This we must remember. There are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. The people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. People who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. This hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it. We must remember the words of Karl Marx and see the truth according to his teachings. The injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. We must remember that we all make the things on this earth of value because of our labor.’

Race as Shorthand, Not as Reality

It has always been impossible to define race. Most humans who have ever lived have had characteristics that were recognizable for their race, although nobody could ever figure out how many races there were. For example, are subsaharan Africans all one race? Bantu people (e.g. Nigeria) look very different from Ethiopians and San (e.g. from Namibia).

But in many societies the dominant people found it extremely important to define race with an exactitude that the concept will not allow. This was particularly true for people of mixed ancestry, as many of us are. This resulted in such absurdities as the one-drop rule in pre-Civil-War America, in which “one drop of black blood” made you black, and if your mother was a slave, you were a slave, even if you were only (like the children of Sally Hemings) one-eighth black. The former Apartheid leaders of South Africa struggled with this concept so much that, in their pitiful final days of rulership, they had to define people from India as honorary whites. No more needs to be added to this, other than that if you have not read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (a slave and a master, who were both one-eighth black, were switched in the nursery), you should.

Still, look around you, and you will find that race is a useful shorthand for identifying people. Even the bluest of liberals cannot avoid it. And, for me, seeing all the different races helps me to rejoice in human diversity, more so than I would if I (perhaps more accurately) saw each person as unique. On the trams of Strasbourg, I enjoyed seeing Muslims and Jews, each in distinctive garb, mixing with saffron-robed Buddhist priests.

But many people want to make each race a category of blame. The most obvious modern example of this is that millions of conservatives consider all Muslims to deserve blame for the terrorist actions of a small number of them. The solution to terrorism, they believe, is to keep all Muslims out of America. By which they mean, all people Arabic ethnicity. (I’m not sure what they would do with red-headed white Muslims from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia.)

But I’m here to tell you, from personal experience, how evil this is. I am of partial Cherokee ancestry. My sixth great grandmother was Nancy Ward, the famous peace activist of the Cherokee Nation prior to the Trail of Tears. Her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini, was the last holdout of Cherokee warriors, whose Chickamauga warriors did not surrender until 1794 on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Tsiyu Gansini and his warriors committed numerous atrocities, and Nancy Ward could not stop them. Nancy Ward said “My cry is all for peace,” while Tsiyu Gansini said, “We are not yet conquered.” Today we would call the Chickamauga warriors terrorists.

And yet the United States considered all Cherokees to be guilty of the Chickamauga terrorism. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and all Cherokees, not just terrorists (of whom none remained by that time) were forced out of their homeland by the United States Army in 1838. Even though the Cherokees by that time had their own written language, newspaper, constitution, Supreme Court, and they lived in white-man houses and had white-man agriculture,

the United States still considered them savages and took their land. It was the category of “Cherokee” that allowed the government to hold all members of the category responsible for the terrorist acts of a few.

When I think about the really nice Muslims I have known, including the couple who struck up a really friendly conversation with us on the tram in Strasbourg, I know none of them approved of Islamist terrorism, any more than my ancestor Nancy Ward approved of the terrorist acts of her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini.

I posted the foregoing on my science blog.

Homage to Abélard

At the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on July 23, the lines were very long just to get through security inspections and enter inside. This was only to be expected, since it was a Saturday during tourist season, and was also a response to the nearly daily terrorist attacks, such as a few days earlier (July 14) in Nice, and more recent ones in Germany. But I had already seen enough ornate cathedral decorations (see an earlier essay about the Strasbourg cathedral, also called Notre Dame). What I wanted to see and experience inside was something that was probably either off limits at the best of times, or maybe locations now lost to the historical record.

I wanted to see the chamber in which Peter Abélard lived in the twelfth century, and the classroom in which he taught.

Abélard was most famous for being the 35-year-old monk who had a torrid love affair with the 19-year-old nun Heloïse, in revenge for which her Uncle Fulbert arranged to have Abélard castrated. But Abélard was also one of the planet’s major scholars of his time, and Heloïse was an accomplished scholar herself.

And the thing that made Abélard different from all the other scholars was that his primary rule, first, last, and always, was to question what we think we know and what the authorities have told us. His famous quote, preserved in various forms, was this:  “The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.” This was the closest that any scholar had yet come to the scientific method.

Abélard’s world was extremely limited compared to ours today. He could not have imagined the vastness of the universe, or even that Earth was just a planet like the others that revolved around the sun. He could not have imagined Copernicus, much less Darwin. To him, the universe was as orderly as an astrolabe, the little device that calculated the time and the phases of the moon and the positions of the planets based upon a geocentric model. He and Heloïse even named their love child Astrolabius! But he stretched his mind as far as anyone could at the time.

So I satisfied myself with seeing Notre Dame de Paris from the outside. It was splendid, as the photos show, but not as significant as the contribution that Abélard made to the history of scientific thought.

An Incredibly Beautiful Peace

I ended the last essay by describing my beautiful experience in Strasbourg at seeing to what extent the horrors of past war and oppression have been swept away from Europe since the end of World War 2. I grew up hearing horror stories of the German war from my uncle. To people of his generation, the peace that has lasted in Europe since 1945 was unthinkable. But my generation has seen it. A large part of the credit belongs to the European Union, which richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize it received in 2012. And while some countries such as England have questioned the workability of complete economic integration, nobody wants to go back to the days of antagonism, certainly not of war.

I thought about these things in Strasbourg, France, on July 18 and 19. On July 18, I walked from the Wacken tram stop over to the European Union Parliament building. The main building is in Bruxelles (Brussels), but this secondary building is still very big and busy. The flags of the Union and of France were still at half staff in memory of the July 14 terrorist attack in Nice.

Nearby was the Court of Human Rights. In America, we are used to thinking of human rights as something that we choose and impose on the rest of the world. Many other nations, such as Russia and China, believe the same thing about their right to impose their values on the world. But in the European Union, the member countries deliberate together about what is right and wrong. I felt humble as I stood before the court, which also had the French and European flags at half staff, realizing that I represented a country which would never let any other country tell us, or even suggest to us, what to do.

The next day, July 20, we went with our French family across the Rhine River bridge into Germany. No checkpoint for passports. The European authorities have restricted traffic flow, presumably to monitor vehicles that might carry out terrorist attacks like those not a week earlier in Nice. But they have no plans to block the free flow of humans across the Rhine; in fact, they are constructing a new tram line over the river.

We walked through the beautiful German city of Kehl to a park along the Rhine. Of course, France was visible just a short distance away, across the river. This was the frontier of war for a millennium. But today it is just a peaceful park. Best of all, there is a pedestrian footbridge, away from the traffic of the vehicle bridge, which spans the river. We walked across and back. There wasn’t much to see or do; it was the significance of the act itself that will stay forever in my memory. In the middle of the bridge, right on the border, French-German couples have placed padlocks in the chain link, indicating that for them the new peace between France and Germany is not merely an international agreement but the most intense form of love.

The new stage of altruism that awaits the social evolution of our species is international trust and, where possible, love. I felt no hostility as I entered France, or walked between France and Germany. The only hostility I felt was in returning to the United States, where federal officials grilled me with trick questions to make sure that I, an American citizen, was not posing a threat to my own country. In Europe, there is a lot of altruism between nations; in America, especially in this political season, we have very little altruism within our country.

Our species evolved to be altruistic within our group and ferocious to everyone outside of our group. The European Union represents perhaps the best example of large-scale outside-the-group altruism that the world has ever seen, and its greatest success is the lasting peace, and the unthinkability of war, between France and Germany.

And you will notice also that this lasting peace was achieved totally in the absence of religious doctrine. While some peacemakers have religious motivation, there was utterly no theological foundation that enabled this peace to take shape. Today, the major denominations no longer scream for war. But they did not figure out international peace by reading the Bible; they had it forced upon them.