The other day, I reposted Dying Traditions, which I suggest you read before this post because it provides a context for what I want to say here. I was reminded of it during my current reading of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which is a biography of Robert Moses. But it is not your run-of-the-mill biography. It is striking for its ambition and for the quality of its prose, and it is really the story of the clash during the first half of the 20th Century between a kind of Liberal technocratic mentality and the destruction of the customary cultures that shaped old New York and its rural suburbs and fisheries. It is, in other words, the story about how the arrogant rationalism of technocratic elites finds a way to make things worse with all the best intentions. I feel a personal connection to the story told in it because it's the story of a time in New York's history that both my wife's and my grandparents, parents, and she and I lived through. Her family stayed in the city, but mine moved out from Queens to Suffolk County in the early 50s. So it's a story about that in particular, but so much more can be extrapolated from it.
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When we hear about how the Chinese government seeks to integrate (homogenize?) into the modern world what it regards as the regressive, superstitious, and medieval Uighurs in Xinjiang or the Buddhists in Tibet, we liberal cosmopolitan Westerners get upset about how Chinese bureaucrats don't understand or appreciate their rich, indigenous, traditional cultures. But Chinese behavior is consistent with the way moderns have always perceived traditional or customary cultures--as ignorant, barbaric, and, most importantly, as an impediment to progress.
We in America, especially if we are Liberals and fairly well educated, tend to look at the loss of traditional cultures on other continents as tragic, but are less inclined to see the elimination of our own traditional cultures as worthy of our concern. The people in them vote mostly GOP, right? These reactionary xenophobes, homophobes, and racists are an impediment to progress, and we wish they'd just 'evolve' or go away.
Racism and homophobia are hateful, but it should be obvious that it is important to understand why those attitudes persist. More difficult is to find a way to reject a certain set of attitudes while at the same time to respect the people who have them and the positive things about the cultures that support them. That's not an easy line to walk, but because so many Liberals are prodigal in their contempt for people who hold these regressive attitudes that we see the emergence in the political sphere of a guy like Trump. So many white Americans in the south, the mountain west, the rural midwest, and among urban ethnic blue collars, whose identity and sense of self are shaped by their having grown up in customary cultures are attracted to Trump because he is so unapologetic in his pushing back against the prodigality of smug Liberal contempt. For these groups political correctness equals what they feel as contempt for them and the cultural worlds with which they are identified. An attack on someone's identity is an attack that triggers an adrenal response.
Anybody who has read this blog over time knows that I am no nostalgist and that I don't think saving a tradition just for the sake of saving it is a worthwhile project. What's worth saving is the life of the soul that a customary tradition preserves, but once that soulfulness has departed, there's little left in the forms that is worth preserving. There is a point when you just have to recognize that the tradition has died and move on. Nevertheless, it's important to understand that when a tradition still lives, its destruction is tragic, that something deeply human has been lost, that it cannot be replaced, and that it would have been better if a way could have been found to support the effort of the people in it to adapt and survive.
But the primary thrust of Liberalism, which is the ethos of modernity at least since its inception during the Enlightenment, has been to disrupt and destroy traditional cultures rather than to help them adapt and survive. And so there is in the modern Enlightenment project something that has been deeply dehumanizing that justifies itself in the name of progress. We see it when we have some historical perspective as most of us see the destruction of American aboriginal cultures for the wanton horror that it was. If we were contemporaries of that destruction, we would not have focused on what was rich and noble in those cultures, but on what was violent, barbaric, and cruel. Both things were true about them--they were rich and noble as well as barbaric and cruel. The same is true for our own American culture right now in ways that are very difficult for many Americans to understand or to see. We see what's is rich and noble in the American tradition, but we filter out what is barbaric and cruel. Both Liberals and Conservatives do this in their own way--they just have different ideas about what parts of the American tradition are noble or barbaric and cruel.
The Power Broker is the story about the barbarism and cruelty of Robert Moses, who was perceived in the first part of his career in the twenties and thirties as an icon of good-government, anti-Tammany progressivism. He was and idealist of a certain kind, brilliant, resourceful, and imaginative. He was a figure beside whom almost everyone else was dwarfed, including figures like FDR and LaGuardia. But in the portrait Caro paints of him, he was a sociopath who justified his cruelty in the name of progress, a progress he defined on his own very narrow in terms as building highways and parks while not caring a fig for the local communities and traditions those roads and parks destroyed.
So, as someone who grew up on Long Island in the 50s and 60s, I thought I'd reproduce this chapter from Caro's Chapter 9 entitled "The Dream". In it he vividly evokes the pristine beauty and the customary culture of the people who lived on the South Shore of Long Island before the highways went in during the twenties and thirties. Moses' dream was to make that beauty available to the teeming masses in the city by creating highways that would get them out there into it. In the beginning it was well intended and idealistic, but its unintended effects were, in Caro's view and in mine, to make things worse for everybody.
The island's South Shore, the edge of the meadow that had been transformed into the Great South Bay, offered gentle waves and sandy beaches. But the bay was the haunt of the baymen, a closemouthed, independent breed, some of them descendants of families that had "followed the bay" since the Revolution, others, New England Yankees who, hearing about the bay's bountiful harvests of oysters and clams, tomcods, and smelts, had left the whaling boats and had moved to Long Island, bringing with them their taciturnity and their distrust of outsiders.
Less than thirty miles from the borders of New York City, the baymen live in a world that resembled nothing so much as the remote fog banks of Nova Scotia. Their lives revolved around the bay. When its tides were flood, no matter what the hour, through the thick, damp mist, hip boots slung over their shoulders, caps pulled low over their eyes, they trudged to their weather-beaten little trawlers and crept out into the fog, returning hours later so heavily laden that only the bows and sterns of the boats were out of the water. They loved the bay's sparkle in summer, its cool breezes; somehow they loved its treacherous shoals and tides and the hidden traps of swamp grass that tangled their boats' propellers. Forced off it by winter storms, they settled down in taverns near the piers that jutted into it, drinking (they were famous for their drinking) and spinning legends about it. Once you were "bay salted," they said, you would never leave.
They were fiercely determined to keep their world for themselves. The bay bottoms, the hell-fire preachers in their weather-beaten little churches constantly reminded them, were "sacred," their priceless natural heritage," and when it came time each year for the townships that bordered on the Great South Bay--Hempstead, Oyster Bay, Babylon, Islip and Brookhaven--to sell leases to mine the bay's underwater crops of shellfish, the baymen crowded into town halls to listen while the leases were awarded--and no outsider was ever given a lease. No authority could awe them. In 1892, when the German liner Normandia arrived in New work flying the yellow flag that signaled a cholera epidemic on board, the state bought the only hotel on Fire Island so it could quarantine the passengers and crews there. Trawler-loads of armed baymen met then Normannia as it tied up to the hotel dock and cut loose its hawsers, and only the dispatch of a National Guard regiment put down the uprising.
Distrusting anyone "from away," the baymen distrusted especially anyone form New York. Hating the city--many boasted that they had never been there--they feared that its "foreigners," hordes of long-haired Slavs, hook-nosed Jews, and unwashed Irishmen, would descend on and befoul their beautiful beaches as the first slackening in their vigilance.
He goes on to talk about the farmers of Suffolk County, the rural eastern two thirds of the Island where I grew up:
The baymen's land-locked cousins, the farmers of Long Island, were men of conviction, too. In no part of New York State were the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose venom was directed in the 1920's not only against Negroes but also against Jews and Catholics, as numerous as in Suffolk County. Three successive chairmen of Suffolk's Republican Party had been members of the Klan, and anyone who needed an additional symbol of its power had only to look at the flagpole in front of the Islip Town Hall: the pole, read the inscription on an attached plaque, had been donated by the Islip branch of the Ladies of the Klan and gratefully accepted by the Town Board. (In 1928, when [Irish Catholic] Al Smith ran for President, fiery crosses would blaze on the hills of Alabama and Mississippi--and, by orders of the county GOP organization, on the hills of Suffolk.) Combining with the baymen to dominate the Suffolk political picture, the farmers had no difficulty persuading the county's supervisors to make sure that there was not a single park in the Suffolk open to the city residents.
Not just out in Suffolk County did these crosses burn. My father as a young Irish Catholic boy in the 1920s lived in Howard Beach, down near Jamaica Bay, and he recalls seeing those burning crosses. It scared him to death. What do these burning crosses represent? Is it just a primitive hatred of the Other? In part, yes, but it's also rooted in a fear of the impending extinction of their identity-shaping culture, a culture that was both rich and noble as well as barbaric and cruel. In other words, it was human because being human embraces both ends of the spectrum. We are wrong only to see the latter in the other and not in ourselves. We need to evaluate a culture or any complex social organism by what's humanly best in it, not worst--but as soon as a culture feels that it is threatened with extinction, the best gets suppressed as the worst gets expressed. Nativism is born of a siege mentality.
Nativists are people who think with adrenaline-soaked brains, and when they do so, it reinforces the most negative perceptions that outsiders have of them. And this in turn justifies outsiders' thinking of themselves as having a moral superiority that, in fact, they just don't have. We all struggle with this. I know I do when I think I'm right about something. I have an obligation to argue for what I believe, but that does not make me morally superior, because I never know for sure whether I am right.The most dangerous and destructive people are those who are certain that they are right. The more certain one feels in his rightness, the more morally smug he is likely to be, and in turn the more likely he is to be blinded to other things that are also right and that are equally if not more important.
Hateful attitudes and the sanctimony that negatively judges them are polarities within the same system, and they feed off and sustain one another. If people are to truly "evolve" in their cultural attitudes, they have to be won over not forced. The problem with winning over is that it takes time; the problem with using force is that it doesn't work, that is, unless you completely annihilate whoever you're forcing, because force brings the inevitable backlash, if not right away, then later. There was no backlash against the Romans by the Carthaginians or against Americans by Native Americans, or at least none that anybody felt it important to pay attention to. Not true of southern whites, not true of the pre-FDR One Percent. Both have been backlashing in a way everybody has to pay attention to.
In the 70s it became conventionally accepted that the way Native Americans were depicted as savages until then was grossly stereotypical. We could do that in the 70s because they not longer posed any kind of threat. But back when they did pose a threat they were savages in the sense that they fought savagely for their survival. Fighting savagely for one's survival is considered a virtue by everyone except those in the group being savagely fought against. Some good liberals like Bill Maher or Sam Harris, look at Muslims as savages in the same way. But are Muslim extremists savages or are they just savagely fighting to defend themselves in a way that is akin to the way that Native Americans did in the late 19th century? It's very difficult for us to see anything rich and noble in a group that poses such a threat to us.
Barry Goldwater said that 'extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice' echoing the New Hampshire state slogan "Live free or die". It sounds crazy to people who are smug and comfortable, but not to those who feel they are under threat of extinction, and Native Americans, Muslim extremists, and Ku Klux Klansmen on Long Island all in their different ways feel exactly that. Being absorbed into the great liberal consumer technocracy is extinction, and there is no real Liberty after cultural extinction, just a soulless, atomized anomie that is a parody of it. That is, in any event, how it looks to people in those groups who resist being swallowed up the Liberal mainstream culture that has such contempt for them and their old ways.
So does that justify their hatefulness and violence? No, of course not. But you can't solve a problem if you don't understand its causes, and if it's possible for us after the fact to understand and sympathize with the situation of Native Americans at the end of the 19th century, is it not possible for us to make the same effort to understand the situation of American Nativists now? Isn't it important to understand what aggravates and what mitigates their hateful attitudes? Isn't it important to understand how it's possible to work something out with the saner members of these communities before it's too late? And isn't it important to avoid all the ways that Jacobin technocrats pour more fuel on the flames of resentment and fear that cause even the moderates to justify the barbarism and cruelty of the extremists?
Like the flood that wiped out the culture of the Islenos on the Gulf, the cultures of the baymen and farmers of Long Island were wiped out by the flood of people from Ireland, Italy, and eastern Europe who after arrival in New York spent a generation or two in the city, but the highways out to Long Island that Robert Moses built in the twenties and thirties became the conduit, especially after World War II, for them to flood out onto Long Island. My parents moved our then small family from Queens to Huntington in 1954, so we were part of that flood. But growing up in western Suffolk I had no idea about the life of the people who had lived there for centuries before our arrival. Our lives were not integrated into theirs; rather we just squatted in a subdivision plotted on what used to be a farm and lived in a bizarre and soulless imagination of what it meant to be human that dominated America in the fifties. We lived in a suburban bubble dominated by the culture that came through the tube and lived oblivious of whatever was there before. I couldn't get out of that bubble quickly enough.
There are other factors--lots of them. And so perhaps the death of the old ways was inevitable. Or perhaps whatever lived there was already dead or dying. Rather than having been destroyed by the flood, it could be argued that the flood wiped away its rotting carcass and brought the possibility of something new with it. Maybe. Maybe I just don't have the eyes to see it, because I didn't see much of anything that I would describe as richly human during my time living in the suburbs of New York. Nothing like what the baymen had on Long Island or what Islenos had in Louisiana.
So I don't know for sure. But if there was any life left in the old thing, the automobile and the highways on which it traveled insured that whatever remained living of the old ways would be quickly overwhelmed, and that it would be impossible for whatever was noble and rich in them to adapt and survive. We're all poorer for their loss whether it was inevitable or not, and I understand why people who have some sense of the richness of the old ways want to push back against those who would cluelessly destroy them. Trump is a ridiculous figure to play the role of advocate for those who want to push back, but in their eyes at least he is pushing back. And when the brain is soaked with adrenaline, it's not much interested in what makes sense. It just wants to fight back, and it will follow anybody who leads.
So I understand the pushing back, but I think it's mostly pointless. It is at best a kind of Camusian, Sisysphian rebellion. Cliven Bundy as existential hero? I get why some people see him that way, but I'd argue that nobility in the service of delusion is no virtue. It's a delusion that typifies a kind of conservatism that seeks to conserve not a genuine living tradition but a zombie version of it, the soulless forms of something that once lived but is animated now by something alien in spirit to what original gave it form. Their allegiance to the old, dead thing is really just their way of showing their revulsion for the new, soul-crushing thing. While I would describe myself as a conservative in temperament, I am not conservative in my thinking because I look around and I see nothing worth conserving on this soulless, utilitarian landscape we call American mainstream culture, and what passes for conservatism shares in its soullessness.
And I think that's the crux of the problem, because you can't take something away from people unless you can offer to replace it with something better, and what that 'better' might be is something I have no idea about. Certainly conservatives are not offering it. So the impasse will continue unresolved until something emerges that clearly does offer everybody a deep, rich sense of future human possibility, and if there is anything like that on the contemporary landscape, I don't see it.