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History and the Vector of Shame
Perhaps you have seen the meme that shows WWII soldiers and says something along the lines of “they stormed the beaches for us, we’re just being asked to stay on our couches.” As far as exhortations to stay home go, I suppose it is one of the less annoying and more anodyne ones, but it’s still full of a smug, pompous, and scornful shame directed at us today, extolling the virtues of our honored ancestors over and against the alleged sins of our current generation.
It absolutely reeks of the sort of derision that says “not only are you no better than them, but you’re actually likely a great deal worse since we have to nanny you into staying in your own home.” It is an appeal to heroic nostalgia for a sepia-toned and non-existent past, where somehow the people were “more real,” more manly (or womanly) than today. Putting aside my general annoyance with such nannyism, as a perpetual student of history, I also have to cry foul over the comparison and call it what it is: bilge.
The historian in me usually wants to whack people over the head when they put prior generations on pedestals for, as in this example, going through the Depression and WWII without complaining, or whatever else. For my mother’s father’s family, they were all poor farmers and the tough times of the 1930s were all they knew. While my grandfather would talk about re-stuffing the mattresses with corn husks every summer (or corncobs if he were in an impishly funny mood, when he would freely exaggerate hardships for the sake of a laugh), he never tried to paint those times as somehow ideal.
He certainly looked back on when the doc removed everyone’s tonsils in their front room one afternoon without any fondness (for there was also no anesthetic beyond a supply of popsicles), nor did he ever show any sort of “my generation had it worse, you little snots” attitude, but rather one of deep gratitude that things were so much better after the war.
The point being to all those stories was that they didn’t complain, not out of any nostalgic sense of toughness, or that they were somehow better or more virtuous, but because they didn’t know things could be better at that time. It seemed idyllic because it was all they knew, not because they were somehow tougher.
And the stories he told of his own generation after the war don’t point to any necessarily greater “toughness” or stoic virtue than anyone else — when dealing with the union he was forced to be in it was rather a different attitude in fact, as it was filled with crooks, cutthroats, thugs, and layabouts who would think nothing of putting the rank and file through a hard winter’s strike, then immediately raise the dues and soak up any hard-won wages. My grandmother was certainly not somehow more virtuous for surviving the hardships of the ’30s and then the War — she spent much of the rest of her life, having now tasted better, wanting yet more and more.
And it was much the same with my father’s family, though since my dad’s parents were a good decade older than my mother’s parents, they did remember how much better things had seemed in the ’20s, and how suddenly it all halted. My great-grandfather’s health failed him, and my grandfather had already quit school by 1923, at the age of 13, in order to work to support the household, and that opened a lifelong rift with his brothers who (in his eyes) never did their fair share, and never toughed anything out if they could avoid it, not then and not later.
While I understand the sentiment behind it, I think Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation books were a massive disservice both to history and to those people, and a horrendous cherry-picking paean to a generation that Brokaw himself treated poorly when still a reporter, and so felt he had to make amends to while there was still time. The books selectively highlighted the good bits, and good anecdotes, and so covered over the sins of many within that cohort, sins that my grandparents knew all too well. In so doing, now those ghosts are made to loom large over us, staring out from re-used snapshots in memes, in heroic poses captured in the moments of crisis to overlay selected shots of the worst of us, from Trigglypuff to the silly stock-art we know to be staged for making easy captions. Well, cameras were expensive then, and film was by and large saved for only the “best,” while today such photos are cheap and lend themselves to cheap spectacle and vanity. Neither then nor now were mundane things fit for widespread dissemination.
And now we are facing a crisis of our own and such comparisons tempt us to shame, their best against our worst, as though somehow our own efforts are unworthy, and our own attitudes put our ancestral toughness to shame, when in fact our forebears were very much then as we are now, muddling through and wondering whether their ancestors had somehow been tougher, since they conquered the frontier and tamed the “injuns,” or else had braved leaving the old world behind for the new.
We tell ourselves that they somehow were brave and hearty stoics through it all, but the truth of it is that they muddled through, lurching from crisis to crisis while trying to adapt, groping blindly towards an uncertain and frightening future, and we are doing no differently. We revere our grandparents and great-grandparents for their frugality and hard work, forgetting that many of them were on the take (some ancestors of mine were avid bootleggers) or mooching off their harder-working relatives. We’re shaming ourselves for our own sins by denying that our forebears had any of their own.
And anyone who actually studies the 1930s and ’40s quickly realizes what a frightful political mess they were too. We forget now that Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, with their shouting heads and naked partisanship, had their own analogues at the time. We say that FDR was a demagogue, but we forget he had plenty of competition on the radio and in print. If we think there was somehow some national unity and consensus during the Depression, we are fooling ourselves — national politics then were horribly acrimonious and disunited, with the Democrats routinely accusing the Republicans of treason for opposing FDR, and the Republicans looking to score on FDR’s failings for nakedly partisan gains. We lionize the past at our own peril, especially if we do so merely to shame our own present.
We have no roadmap for whatever lies ahead. Neither did they, nor would they if somehow they were brought back today. We’re muddling through, same as them, and clueless as to how this all plays out, same as them too. We are all wondering too, whether we will be one of the WuFlu’s victims, and worried that those dear to us might get it instead. That’s ok, and so long as we do not let our fears paralyze us entirely, these fears do not unman us by their presence. Take comfort in this: two generations hence, our descendants won’t tell our stories any more correctly than we tell those of our forebears, and in their own crises they’ll look at ours and wonder how in hell we got through it all so stoically.
Published in History
When it is ever by choice? My grandmother helped keep the farm going by raising chickens and selling eggs. She kept pretty good books too. By the time I knew her, her chicken-catching moves would have made Rocky’s trainer Mickey weep. Greasy-fast Italian lighting, despite not being greasy nor Italian.
Great comment. We just do not have the models for this sort of situation on a world-wide scale.
Indeed.
I don’t understand you, Skip: Why wont you simply face the problem? Men were tough, so were women, now it’s a soft country. Them’s the breaks. Well, but they weren’t tough by choice–as though that changes somehow who they were & who we are! Well, it’s not always a virtue–as though we were facing some kind of invasion of manly men we have to fear might become dangerous! Only soft people could think this way & it breaks my heart. Always these excuses…
I am not a farm-boy in Iowa about to ship to Guadalcanal or what have you, but I can face that truth without mental gymnastics. There’s a manliness or toughness of mind required for facing this that I am confident you possess, too, Skip, just like Percy here, or Kephalitos, or others: Western Chauvinist is right, but with statistical qualifications, so no one’s feelings get hurt: iWe is right, but quick to except himself & his from the opprobrium. There are qualifications to be made, it is all of decency to accept them, but reality then still stares us in the face!
Somehow, you put your considerable intelligence & learning in the service of the excuses, not the reality: Since the people then could have been different in different circumstances, then the difference can be ignored. Character, in short, is wiped out in the name of equality, identity, sameness, all that it takes not to feel shame. I’ll stick with shame, for my part. There are a bunch of people I know personally on Ricochet who are manlier men & I know it, & they know it–we all know it! You cannot admire without also opening yourself up to shame. I am not giving up my admiration, even if the price is feeling shame that I have not done as nobly as they have, & I’ll tell you the truth of the matter–it’s because I hope to be manlier myself. But then I read your post & I think, why bother? Even my friends, even the smartest conservatives I personally know, want to liberate me from my shame & admiration, & imprison me to circumstances that are calculated to destroy manliness. This baffles me!
Yes, circumstances matter, yes, crisis changes how people behave, but that doesn’t mean we are all the same, just playthings of different circumstances. People today do not grow up with the habits & beliefs they did generations back. That’s a fact as a historian you are, of course, bound to know & to proclaim, but somehow you don’t do it. So far as I can tell, you’re instead pursuing the shaming of shame, the indignation against indignation, the judgment against judgment. It might be illegal or unthinkable in America to be judgy or negative, but what are we to do?
Coda: I agree all political generalizations involve certain contradictions or inexactness. But if you give them up, you have no thinking left whatsoever. We can clarify them, find out which ones are largely true, refine them. But not deny there is such a thing as character, formed young, & ignore beliefs. If family is the basis of society, it’s because it forms character. That, then, is why we judge people, as you yourself do.
Boomers who are despised now are despised for their prancing hippie arrogance & their death-grip on the institutions. Ok Boomer is not said to Vietnam veterans who were primarily not the college-educated exempt from the draft. Indeed, the rural or small town or at any rate poorer majority of America who fought the war were in important ways like the previous generation. Modernization or revolution of mores does not affect everyone everywhere instantly, as powerfully, as thoroughly. I concede variety & complexity there. Those were the veterans despised as much for their service as for their conservatism. Not a lot of people wanted to stand up for them at the time, or now… Ok Boomer is largely contempt for the part of the owning class in America (always a generational difference) that moralizes with the generations they’ve bankrupted.
I concede, too, that since parents get praise & admiration for raising good kids, they get the blame for failing to do so, the more so the more they are expected to on account of their own freedom & prosperity, the less so the more they are harassed by necessity. I agree with your willingness to spread the blame around, so to speak. But that does not diminish merit. I think we are agreed that the adults are to blame, the more so the more they are authoritative. The catastrophes of the 60s were not made by the Boomers, but by older people. Since they destroyed the basis of American society, I think they deserve a lot of blame, as do their beliefs.
Titus, your first comment above entirely misses my point and is taking up arguments I did not make and putting words in my mouth. I’ll not bother with any response to that because it’s nothing more than taking offense at strawman arguments you wish I’d made so you’d have something to actually disagree with. You’re accusing me of things I did not say, and by extension accusing me of some rather nasty and thoughtless errors by extension.
You coda hits nearer the mark, at least.
Yes, but then aren’t you projecting your experience onto previous generations and making generalizations that may not entirely fit the past? It seems to me my generation came of age in a cultural watershed. The ’68ers. The Vietnam War was a factor, but the sexual revolution and the hostile takeover of the universities by leftists changed Christendom forever, and not in a good way.
I know what you mean by Christianity still holding sway here — I tell my fallen away friends they have “very Christian sensibilities.” But, the Left is doing to the culture here what the Commies did in co-opting Confucius in China. Western lefties still “care for the poor,” but they do it by confiscating and redistributing the earnings of the (relatively) rich. This isn’t Christianity — it’s the corrupting influence of leftist ideology on Christianity. It’s a mockery and sham. It’s a satanic corruption of the idea of self-sacrifice with the notion that others should involuntarily sacrifice so that leftists can feel righteous about helping the poor.
Is cynicism a virtue? Are you saying by rejecting the woke nonsense, today’s kids will rebuild the culture ex nihilo? I agree, my kids’ generation sees the falsehoods being propagated by leftism (I tell my despairing older siblings to watch what the kids are saying on the webs — kids get that its a sham). I agree this crisis will have its benefits in restoring sane priorities. I’m suggesting the kids’ problem isn’t that they’ve been taught a hagiographic history of previous generations — it’s that they’ve only been exposed to the failings of the past (Zinn again, and the 1619 Project), if they’ve been taught any (real) history at all! Yes, no wonder they’re cynical.
Don’t make me defend Larry Arnn! He’s a historian and a philosopher. His point is it’s a worthwhile project to study how previous generations dealt with their circumstances to learn both their mistakes and their successes. Kids today are only learning about the mistakes.
I don’t think idolizing the past is the current problem.
Hillsdale is presenting a three week course presenting real history — warts and all — called The Land of Hope. You might approve.
I’m not writing off the current generation. I have hope for my kids and their friends and the present crisis seems like an opportunity for growth. I just don’t think conservative adulation of the past is the problem you think it is.
Almost every culture/society has a Golden Age – and it is in the past.
I want our Golden Age to be in the future.
Not exactly, no, I’m making a narrower point that not everyone gets suckered all the time, and even in the midst of relentless propaganda there are usually a few who see through it. Sometimes more than a few.
True, but in that sense Leftism can really only ever be parasitical on Christianity, and if it kills its host then it too has nothing left save will to power.
No, it’s just a survival skill when used properly, and when used improperly it decays into nihilism, as you note.
Well, nobody could rebuilt ex nihilo.
Here’s the thing with Zinn. I’ll refer back to my recommendation to read James Lowen, because the point he was making throughout the book, above and beyond documenting nonsense in the textbooks, was that telling lies about our past, even for what we hope are the right reasons, is dangerous. Eventually students will encounter (if they have even modest curiosity) more history that simply will not fit with what they were taught, and you run the risk that they’ll completely throw out the truths they learned, along with everything else – in short, they’ll flip, and reject it all in favor an entirely new narrative, which (like as not) won’t be any more true either. You have to give your kids room for nuance.
Now Zinn is a liar, and one with a purpose: he’s a hard-left socialist. The warnings of Lowen apply no less to him and his acolytes today. By constraining kids today to that narrative, and hiding or lying about things that manifestly disprove Zinn (or at least add nuance), teachers are still setting these kids up for an eventual paradigm flip. Eventually a lot of those kids are going to find other narratives, and other facts that do not fit Zinn at all, and there will be hell to pay.
You see something of the same thing often with Christian apostates – quite a lot of them (Rhett and Link being the most prominent recent ones I can think of) were taught a very very narrow and brittle theology, and taught not to question any of it lest it all collapse. Well, they did question it, and having been taught that theirs was the only one, they rejected the entirety of Christianity.
I don’t think it is the current problem, but it is certainly a recurrent one. Many an argument here on Ricochet often proves this. I need only point to a few certain members who continue to violently fight over Reagan’s corpse, for instance, as if by possessing it they could somehow
command the legions of undead votersdrive anyone they don’t like out of the party.I have an American History textbook from the 1890s that sometimes makes for fun reading. Sometimes it is very informative, but sometimes its biases make for some raised eyebrows. It’s a great shapshot of what teachers then thought important to impart to teach their kids, and it does hide rather a lot of things from view that we today consider extremely important.
It is a problem when it is misguided, or draws incorrect lessons from the past, or removes things from their contexts.
How many “Golden Ages” are really real in the first place? Lots of historians like to label this or that time period as somehow a “golden age”, but they’re often doing so at a great remove, and in order to try to pinpoint what they see as a decline in its wake, or liberation from some alleged “dark age” before.
“The Renaissance” is a prime example of something later Italian historians more or less made up, for instance. There was a lot more continuity with the past than is often credited.
Rather than “A” golden age, I’d rather see a series of triumphs.