Reading · Consciousness, Society and Civilization

Much of what I learned about history I learned in college. It turned out that a lot was left out in twelve years of catholic school education. I recall as a college freshman in 1969 writing a research paper for a history or political science class. The opening sentence went something like this: “Human history is based on 6,000 years of warfare.” I didn’t start out with that thesis, but that is what I discovered in my research. As it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg. And here I was a college student at the height of the Vietnam War, oblivious as to how we got there.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I was profoundly idealistic. By my mid-twenties I had evolved into a sullen cynic. That transformation took place for a lot of reasons (assassination trauma probably not the least of it), but higher education was in large part the medium for that transformation. As an undergraduate, I began to learn about things like the Protestant Reformation for the first time. I didn’t know anything about key historical figures like Martin Luther. How did I miss that part of world history? It was never mentioned by the nuns who were my teachers.

Perhaps my cynicism started with a nagging curiosity about the “why” of things. Those things that had no answers or that were steeped in contradictions. My descent into a feeling of absurdity and meaninglessness began in these years and stunted my intellectual and emotional growth. Not surprisingly, I was a late bloomer, so I didn't consider graduate school until the early 1980s when I was in my early thirties. That endeavor continued off and on for nearly a decade at two universities (SUNY at Albany and Carnegie Mellon University) where I received a master’s degree and a doctorate. A cynic and an absurdist in search of meaning?

In graduate school one of the first things that shocked me was learning about the decimation of Native American peoples through disease, brutality, and manipulation, all starting with Christopher Columbus's "discovery" in 1492. This information had not pierced my educational bubble. As a graduate student, I majored in American History. I learned the basics of the settling of our nation and the glorious Western migration and manifest destiny and the gilded age and the rise of robber barons and the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern society. But my academic focus was on “social and cultural” history. It was here that the bubble of my youthful American idealism burst wide open.

The late 1970's and 1980's was a time of academic change. American historians broke free of old story lines and wrote vociferously on the "darker" side of our nation's not-so-glorious past. The Civil War and slavery were only two of many "reimaged" topics. I read dozens of books on a variety of subjects during my graduate school era. I felt at times that I was reading Dickensian fiction! I knew about slavery, but the brutality of it didn’t fit with the rather pastoral picture I had somehow acquired in my youth.

Then there were the masses, the common people that I was studying. The pioneers who struggled to survive the wilderness. They fit the idealist's dream. But it was the abject poverty, the abuse and degradation of laborers in the cities, and the enrichment of the few on the backs of the many that, quite honestly, shocked me. Histories (stories) about factory conditions and disease and destitution and infant death and the creation of nineteenth-century institutions to house those who could no longer bear the burden of the “golden” age: insane asylums, poorhouses, orphan asylums, not for the orphaned as much as for the working parents who could no longer feed their children. My doctoral dissertation was on the destitute children and their families. Syracuse University Press published a version of that work in 1996 (See: Mother Donit Fore the Best: Letters of a 19th Century Orphan Asylum).

In the early twentieth century Progressive movements emerged to right many of these wrongs. But even the most basic rights were hard fought: unions, women’s right to vote, child labor laws. Slums persisted for decades and disenfranchisement pushed against cultural norms that couldn’t be broken. Racism and segregation overshadowed American society like a funeral pall. The 1960s brought change and hope but little true "freedom" to America's oppressed. And the road to racial equality was rocky and bloody despite its non-violent philosophies. (Despite positive change, we now find ourselves in a nightmare of blatant, crude racism and white nationalist cultural ideology legitimized by the President and supported by half of the United States Congress.)

America's modern age, the twentieth century, was not spared engagement in war. In fact, it was punctuated by some of the most brutal human acts of violence, power, and hatred known to mankind. World I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. Wars and post-war eras accompanied by the utter obliteration of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese by the atomic bomb, the gruesome deaths of 6 million Jews in the holocaust, Stalin’s murder of perhaps as many as 20 million of his people; Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide of the cultural elite, and a death count of nearly 600,000 Americans in four wars combined. (Shockingly, that is roughly the number of people who succumbed in just four years of America's Civil War in the 1860s.)

Twenty-first-century America opened with an egregious act of terrorism –the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the death of over 3,000 American citizens followed by twenty years of war with terrorist aggressors in Iraq and Afghanistan and the death of over 7,000 US soldiers. During this time, our lives seemed unfazed, at least for those of us not directly involved in combat. Economic prosperity, which is the only "true" barometer of American health and happiness, rose for a time. But twenty-five years down the road, we have become aware of societal undercurrents that have only recently surfaced with a vengeance: anti-democratic, racist, politically divisive, classist, xenophobic (angry, hateful, even cruel for cruelty's sake).

In the last decade or so, my idealism-turned-cynicism has been eclipsed by utter disbelief and (at times) profound despair. I am not alone in this. My fellow baby boomers have been crushed by the blatant dismemberment of a generation’s hard-won legislation for social change and world-wide humanitarian aid for those in greatest need. In looking back, I think I never really let go of the youthful idealism that launched me into adulthood.

Now in later life, as I reflect on my long search for "meaning" through immersion in our nation's history, I realize that there have always been dark and divisive undercurrents, and they arise out of a single, unresolved emotion: fear. And fear is not an American phenomenon. It is global. It is what drives the human psyche and its beliefs, behaviors, social structures, civilizations, technological advances, war machines and ecological exploitation. In today’s America, fear is being harnassed by those who would use it as a means of exchange in the accummulation of wealth and power.

Our history continues to be made. Though the story is now in the hands of those who would white wash it —literally and figuratively. We will continue to divide the past into neat historical eras or decades and label each gen-eration (XYZ and so on). But who is really making history and who is recording history. In truth, at this very moment it feels as if we are at the “beginning of the end” of history. It is an era, period, moment in time in which history is unravelling. We thought history was a progressive, linear thing. But it is not.

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What I’ve Lived and Learned About History and Its Inevitable End

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