Electric Light Still Struck Like Arrows

by Katherine

The writer I feel like quoting in my belated Fourth of July post isn't Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Douglass, or King. It's an aristocratic, 19th century Russian socialist who never set foot in America:

I don’t like prophesying. The future does not exist; it is created by the combination of a thousand causes, some necessary, some accidental, plus human will, which adds unexpected dramatic denouements and coups de theatre. History improvises, she rarely repeats herself...she uses every chance, ever coincidence, she knocks simultaneously at a thousand gates…Who knows which may open?....

[T]here is no libretto. If there were a libretto, history would lose all interest....all is improvisation, all is will, all is ex tempore; there are no frontiers, no itineraries. There exist conditions, sacred discontent; the flame of life and the eternal challenge to the fighters to try their strength, to go where they will, where there is a road; and where there is none, genius will blast a path.  --Alexander Herzen, From The Other Shore

Herzen is the protagonist of Tom Stoppard's recent play, The Coast of Utopia, and if you read his writing you can see why. It's not only that most of the play's best lines turn out to be direct quotes or slight paraphrases of Herzen's work. It's also that the person speaking them sounds so much like a friend writing you a lette; so ready to get up and walk off the page. It's a quality that I cannot do justice to in this post.

Unlike most 19th century leftists, he did not believe that history had a purpose. Not the Revolution, nor Progress, nor Universal Brotherhood, nor Equality, nor Liberty, nor any other abstract ideal that promised people that "after their death, all will be beautiful on earth."

"I prefer to think of life, and therefore of history," he wrote "as an end attained than as a means to something else.” The end of history is simply "you and me,"

plus the present state of everything existing. Everything is included in this: the legacy of past efforts and the seeds of all that is to come; the inspiration of the artist, the energy of the citizen, and the rapture of the youth who, at this very moment, somewhere or other, is stealing his way towards some secret arbour where his shy love awaits him.

Or it is "the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done." Or "art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness."

To kill these things on the altar of some idea is a terrible mistake:

The submission of the individual to society, to the people, to humanity, to the Idea, is a merely a continuation of human sacrifice, of the immolation of the lamb to pacify God, of the crucifixion of the innocent for the sake of the guilty….The individual, who is the true, real monad of society, has always been sacrificed to some social concept, some collective noun, some banner or other. For whose sake this was done, to whom the sacrifice was made, who profited by it, who was liberated at the price of the individual’s freedom, no one ever asked. Everyone sacrificed (at least in words) himself and everyone else.

And yet, in the Russian introduction to the book in which he writes these words, Herzen writes without irony that

for months I have been calculating and pondering and vacillating, and have finally sacrificed everything to:

Human Dignity and Free Speech

Herzen is being melodramatic, but he is not really contradicting himself. He means simply that he decided to live the rest of his life in England, and never to return to Russia, because he knew in Russia he would be imprisoned, or worse. In England he could write and publish freely. He could publish a newspaper in Russian. It could be smuggled over the border. It could be copied, and read.  From England he could speak to his friends, which would not have been possible from prison or Siberia:

I stay here...because it is here that suffering is painful, sharp, but articulate. The struggle is open, no one hides. Woe to the vanquished, but they are not vanquished without a struggle, nor deprived a speech before they can utter a word; the violence inflicted is great, but the protest is loud; the fighters often march to the galleys, chained hand and foot, but with heads uplifted, with free speech. Where the word has not perished, neither has the deed....

I remain here not only because I should find it abhorrent after crossing the frontier to wear handcuffs again, but because I want to work....here I am more useful, here I am your uncensored voice, your free press, your chance representative.

So “freedom” does not have to be an empty word used to justify sacrificing other people’s lives. It can also be a useful shorthand for the difference between sitting in your comfortable living room composing indignant articles about far-away prison cells, and actually sitting in a prison cell.

The country where Herzen found that sort of freedom, and the country that he credited with its existence, was England, not America. He regarded America as simply a “younger, freer England". But even if he had given us primary credit for freedom of conscience, he would have found the idea this made America was the "essential nation," and the "last, best, hope of mankind," ludicrous.

Some peoples contrive to have a pre-historic, others an unhistoric existence, but once they have entered the great stream of History, which is one and indivisible, all alive belong to humanity, and conversely, the whole of humanity's past belongs to them....Anything that is not human has no part to play in history and consequently we never find there either a whole people on the level of the herd or a whole people entirely elect....

I must confess that I find it impossible to say, as you do, that France is a necessary condition, is a sine qua non of the march of history.

Nature never stakes her all on a single card. Rome, the Eternal City, which at one time could make a fair claim to be the ruler of the world, sank into decline, disintegrated, became extinct, and Humanity in its inhumanity moved on....

Perhaps Europe would also perish, "[a]nd history will continue in America." But even if it were possible to be certain of this, which it wasn't, it was no reason to abandon Europe to its fate. In From the Other Shore, he tries to talk an imaginary debating partner out of leaving:

I go to Marseilles tomorrow and take the first boat to America or Egypt--anything to get out of Europe. I'm tired, I'm at the end of my tether here. My heart and my mind are sick. I shall go mad if I stay on....

I see judment, execution, death, but I can see neither resurrection nor mercy. This part of the world has done what it had to do; now its strength is exhausted. The people living in this zone have accomplished their mission, they grow dull and backward. The stream of history has, evidently, found another bed--that is where I am going.

Herzen was an exile himself. He had left his own country and come to France and Italy as a tourist; he stayed away to write, and avoid prison. But he did not approve of leaving out of vague, existential despair. That could not be cured "by escaping to America. What do you expect to find there?" And

Why are you afraid of staying here? Do you leave the theatre at the beginning of the fifth act of every tragedy because you are afraid your nerves will be upset? The fate of Oedipus will be no better if you leave the stall; he will perish just the same. It is better to remain to the end of the performance; sometimes a spectator, broken by Hamlet's misfortune, meets the young Fortinbras, full of life and hope.

***

I wrote once that the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

aren't accurate descriptions of this country right now, and probably they never have been, but a lot of Americans are sincerely attached to them. And sometimes, when presented with a stark contradiction between the bedtime stories we learned about this country as children, and concrete effects of our actions, we will choose to make the bedtime story true rather than give it up entirely.

I just want clarify one thing: I don’t believe there was anything inevitable about that choice.  There’s nothing in the text that guarantees it. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were beautiful writers, but words alone just aren’t that powerful. 

Madison and Jefferson were sincere enough in their belief in inalienable rights to risk their lives for them, and self-aware enough to see a contradiction between those ideas and slavery. (“I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just, and His Justice cannot sleep forever,” wrote Jefferson.  “Mr. MADISON thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men,” Madison notes in his summary of the August 25, 1787 constitutional debates.) But this did not lead them to free their own slaves, not even in their wills.  If Jefferson could live with the contradiction between his actions towards people he actually owned and a document that he actually wrote, then presumably the country could have too.

Why didn’t we? Because of individual choices that other people made decades or hundreds of years after Madison’s and Jefferson’s death. Because of Garrison, Douglass, Lincoln, Sumner, Grant, King, Lewis, Abernathy, Evers, Marshall, Warren, Goodwin, Chaney, Schwerner, hundreds of thousands of anonymous others who gave the last full measure of devotion, millions of others who played a smaller part. They could have chosen differently. If they had, Jefferson's words wouldn't sound like a lovely promise yet to be fulfilled; they would sound like a bad joke.

There was never a libretto, never a map, never any guarantees about this country. America will endure—until it doesn’t. America will be a light unto the nations, the last best, hope of mankind—until the light gutters, and dies, and mankind places its best hopes somewhere else. Forced to choose, America will live up to rather than abandon its creation myths—until it chooses the opposite. Maybe that day is coming. Maybe it’s already passed. Who knows? I don't like prophesies of doom. It will only be clear in retrospect. In the meantime, we have no excuse for abdicating.

***

I spent part of yesterday morning reading mock personal ads from ex-Presidents on Unfogged. (“What I am looking for: Good conversation. –-Calvin Coolidge” “Looking for a date that will live in infamy? I'm your guy.”--Franklin Delano Roosevelt”. Read the rest, really). I spent the afternoon watching a parade in Evanston, as a white, rich, quiet suburb. Well, sort of, but not exactly: there were the usual fire trucks, the American Legion, the city aldermen, some marching bands—but also a large “Impeach Bush” contingent, and no less than three floats of people doing what appeared to be the Bolivian equivalent of Riverdance.

And now here I am on my couch, writing yet another indignant essay, with no fear at all that it will land me in prison. From my living room window, I can see two of the country’s three remaining 100-story skyscrapers. There’s another going up downtown. Chicago is the only city in America where we still build a quarter mile into the sky, not to commemorate any mass murder or celebrate Freedom (TM), but because Donald Trump needs his name on something big and shiny. A city that does not hesitate to dye the river green for St. Patrick’s Day, and set up two haunted houses and a haunted El train for Halloween. So it should not have surprised me that the half hour of fireworks over the lake on July 3 was just a warm up for last night’s two hour show. It was far away, and I’ve seen better choreographed displays—two hours is really much too long. But there’s still something about seeing it unexpectedly, out of the corner of your eye, from your own apartment.

Is America still "a rising, and not a setting sun"? I have no idea. But this country still has its share of summer lightning.

(Note: the title of this post is taken from this song.)

Comments

[John Evans]

Evanston fourth of July parade:

http://www.evanston4th.org/

best damned parade in the country.

check out the gallery of pics from previous years.

If I'd known you were there, Katherine, I would have waved as we went by.

Ut parva componere magnis:

little things like annual parades happen because a lot of people get off their butts and put a lot of time into it. And if people don't make the effort, then it doesn't happen.

Thanks, Katherine, for urging all of us to get up off our butts and make this country happen.

[hilzoy]

Thanks, Katherine.

[Batocchio]

Thanks. I'm a fan of Stoppard, but haven't read that play yet. Your own thoughts are lovely.

[Katherine]

It's really important to me that all my high rhetoric not overshadow the importance of my links to the Bolivian dancing & the Unfogged personal ads. (Here is one of my contributions to the latter, but a lot of others are far more impressive.)

[Bruce Baugh]

I like that a lot, Katherine, as is unsurprising for someone who owes as much debt to Stoppard as I do. (Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth remains a lynchpin in how I think about totalitarian life.) That particular combination of hope and joy and grief and awareness is good for me anytime, but particularly right now. Thanks.

[Matt McIrvin]

Herzen's statement that

The submission of the individual to society, to the people, to humanity, to the Idea, is a merely a continuation of human sacrifice, of the immolation of the lamb to pacify God, of the crucifixion of the innocent for the sake of the guilty…

is, I think, something I needed to read right now: I get tied up frequently in morbid speculations about the possibility that I need to make myself miserable for the greater good (usually from some elaborate utilitarian argument or assumption of collective guilt), never mind that the speculations don't actually do any good.

But it's gotten to the point that I start to become afraid of believing or saying such things about the importance of the individual, for fear of becoming a useful idiot again for imperial aggression against oppressive regimes, or for some sort of right-libertarian, I've-got-mine-Jack callousness. The state of things is that corrosive.

[Thomas Nephew]

Thought I recognized the words in the title. Very nice post, thanks.