Why the Center Can't Hold: A Diagnosis of Puritanized America

Front matter

A PUNCTUM BOOK

A Diagnosis of Puritanized

America by Tom O'Neill

Section One

SIGNS OF ACCELERATING INCOHERENCE I 1. Our Accelerating Disinvestment in Education 3 2. The Growing Ascendance of the Rich 31 2.1 Puritans 31 2.2 Adam Smith 45 2.3 Milton Friedman 58 3. Our Tenaciously Expanding Belief in Force 73 3.1 Cherokee Removal 82 3.2 Mexican Removal 85 3.3. War on the Plains 9I 3-4 War against Spaniards (and Cubans?) and Filipinos 103

4. The Sense Nature Can Take Whatever We Dish Out 141

5. How the Signs of Incoherence Cohere in Pointing Toward Disintegration 167

Section Two

CONVENIENT SKEPTICISMS AS FACILITATORS OF INCOHERENCE 6. Skepticism about History

7. Skepticism about Beauty

8. Skepticism about Morality

9. Skepticism about Anything Being Known Absolutely (Absolute Skepticism)

SECTION THREE FALSE HOPES REGARDING AN ESCAPE FROM INCOHERENCE 10. “Fundamentalism Will Save Us!”

. “God Will Save Us from Ourselves!”

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H

.“The Next Election (or the one after that) Will Save Us!”

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13. ‘I’ve Decided to Be a Survivor!”

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Conclusion

Bibliography About the author Index

237 239

335 339 341

This book is dedicated in gratitude to some of its generous sources:

to Barton Bernstein of Stanford, for eye-opening lectures and for deft guidance to graduate-students like me;

to Joseph P. Sottile of NewsVandal, for relentless reproach when I slacken my attention to current events;

and to my daughter Natasha, for listening thoughtfully to my interminable monologs.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Preface

‘This essay is an exercise in reflection—worse yet, the reflection involves theology. There’s not much of new data in it. It revisits themes some may think have been worked to exhaustion. And even in taking up these themes, the writer will be disclosed as sometimes an amateur. That is, there are others whose mastery of individual facts clearly exceeds his. My interest however is not mainly in adding to our information about America, but in taking the weight of quite familiar information.

My concern is that we have not done this. While we have admitted to bumps along the road to progress and to some inconsistencies in our practice of principles, I believe we as a people have never acknowledged some underlying contradictions in the way we conceive our task and ourselves.

So I crave indulgence of the reader. I attempt a revisiting of the American story, and I can imagine time and again the individual reader will say, “Wait—he’s got it all wrong; this isn’t what I’ve learned at all!” At such points I ask the reader to hesitate and consider that it may not be sheer ignorance of the familiar story that guides me; rather I’m attempting to tell the story in a way that may shed light on why so many aspects of our current American experience are disappointing to us and seem to have lost their efficacy as guides to the future.

XV

SECTION ONE Signs of Accelerating incoherence

We confront with wholesome skepticism those who say the sky is falling. People have been saying it since the invention of speech—and the sky is still there. Sound enough. Yet the danger of this skepticism can be that even when something is going awry systematically, we may tend to greet each indication as a mere oddity. True, one should not treat the first sneeze as a predictor of pneumonia. But when sneeze follows sneeze, and the throat clogs, and the lungs register congestion, one must at some point acknowledge the onset of illness. That moment of doing so is a positive one; without it one isn’t likely to take corrective action.

Today evidence of something going wrong shows up in many places. Consider education for instance. Granted, education is always problematic. Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance. And the effort to set aside immediate concerns for the sake of cultivating more general understandings has always been subject to thoughtful objection. A decision to postpone immediate improvements (say, re-tiling the kitchen floor) to seek a broader understanding of life is open to the charge of impracticality. Add to that that our nation, from the time of its first settlement by Europeans, has been always the site of urgency at some frontier. Our sense of the urgency of things has contributed toward a specifically American form of anti-intellectualism. “He who hesitates is lost.” Let’s get this show on the road.” There probably arent many cultures in the world where “egghead” and “intellectual elite” are such effective put-downs as they are here.

All that notwithstanding, something new and worse has been happening lately to education in America. I will speak of “accelerating disinvestment,” and this disinvestment I argue is both a matter of morale and a matter of money (often in fact beginning as a matter of morale and becoming a matter of money). I speak of this as a sign of incoherence; the disinvestment runs contrary both to what we’ve said traditionally and what we say currently in our common discourse about education. So I begin by attending to education as a place that calls for reflection.

After that, I address the profit motive as it currently establishes itself to be the arbiter in America of all other valuation and enterprise. I suggest that here too we have matter for reflection, arguing that our exclusive focus on profit is incompatible with many things we claim to believe in and care about.

Thirdly, I examine our reliance on force as our guarantee of national security. I suggest our quest for a form of absolute security, sought through intimidation, cannot co-exist with our ambition to become a beacon of light to the human race.

At the end of this section I argue there’s a kind of coherence amid the incoherencies being identified. Just before that though, I turn to Nature, and suggest there’s an ominous contrast between our sense of America as the Promised Land and our actual treatment of the land we inhabit.

1 Our Accelerating Disinvestment in Education

Our galloping disinvestment in education doesn't need to be proved. By reason of family members and friends—if not from personal experience—everyone’s aware of it. On the surface of things it’s so obviously counterproductive it seems inexplicable. It’s as if a hungry farmer were to say in desperate times: “We'll eat all the seed-corn this year, but as soon as we are again blest with bountiful harvests, we’ll start again to put seed aside for planting.”

Regarding education, Franklin, Madison, and—in his way— Jefferson were clear that, for government-by-the-people to work, the public would have to be well informed and able to think realistically about needs and prospects. Jefferson tells us “a people who would be both free and ignorant longs for something that can never be.” This is why free speech and a free press, along with freedom of religion, were singled out for protection in our first amendment to our Constitution.

Candidates for government office understand this so well that each of them campaigns to become the Education Mayor or the Education Governor or the Education President. Yet what we observe often these days is that the candidates are no sooner in office than they discover, alas, that now is not the opportune time—in our pressing circumstances, education must await more prosperous days.

Here, let me approach the subject matter in a twofold way: both by providing anecdotes that provide a plausible account of what’s happening, and by intervening with reflection as to underlying causes for these happenings. While the objection may be lodged that you can’t sketch history from anecdotes, let me counter that if the anecdotes are typical and are set forth honestly, you can— and we do.

While anecdotes are subject to charges of being inaccurately presented, slanted, subjectively interpreted, unrepresentative, I claim that my anecdotes are accurate and exemplary. Whether this is the case is for the reader to judge.

It’s not surprising that the state put Socrates to death. States don’t like criticism. Our own early colonists, particularly those of Massachusetts Bay Colony, practically defined themselves by being critical and dissatisfied with the British state; but in the same breath by which they resisted British control, they regarded themselves as beyond the reach of criticism and as divinely assigned to control others.

In the 1630s the stresses and ironies of this situation come to light in Massachusetts in this first decade of the colony’s history. We look to relations between the Governor, John Winthrop, and the gifted pastor, Roger Williams. Winthrop acknowledged that Williams was sincere and charismatic, but found him a terrible nuisance. Winthrop thought Williams took the position of the Puritan dissenting church a step too far. For Williams argued that if the Anglican Church had not the authority to dictate the beliefs of the Puritan dissenting community, so neither had it— nor had indeed the British state—the authority to license the existence of that dissenting church. The dissenting church was a community of faith which, beyond gratitude for opportunity to set up shop in the New World, owed nothing either to the established Church of England or to the British civil authority which had done the establishing. Further, according to Williams, in the matter of land grants—contrary to the position of the Puritan civil authority in Massachusetts — Indians as human beings had rights of possession which were more than equal to any rights of the white newcomers. How did the colony deal with this critical thinker? Much as John Winthrop, the chief authority in the Puritan community, wanted his colony to be a jewel of enlightened thinking and a beacon of light to mankind, he found this too much, and he acquiesced in the banishment of Williams. Winthrop and his colony believed neither in free speech nor the rights of individual conscience. Is it a too great a jump to say one can discover here an early disinclination to promote education?

This wasn’t a solitary instance, in the founding days, of a Puritan attempt to curb freedom of thought and speech in America. Anne Hutchinson too had her way of drawing conclusions from the Puritan protest against Anglicanism. Puritans rightly, she taught, had no use for pope or bishops. But if these man-made offices encompassed no special license to teach the faith, what special claim on such teaching had the appointed male ministers of the Massachusetts colony? Did not the gospel tell us the Holy Spirit was the true teacher of the faith? And was not the Spirit free to blow where it would? One can imagine how the rigorous and humorless Winthrop regarded such a proposition. He saw it as mutiny, and endorsed Hutchinson’s banishment as he had Williams’s. Later when he heard of Anne’s death at the hands of Indians, he felt God’s honor and his own had been vindicated.’

So while America was brought forth in a protest against England, it would be unhistorical to say this protest was a protest on behalf of tolerance or critical thinking. It was protest on behalf of intolerance, seeking radical limitations on critical thinking and educational development.

All too soon, there were other, glaring indications that America was not conceived in a burst of dedication to enlightened attitudes, freedom of speech, and the advance of critical thinking. When Africans were brought to the shores of “the new world,” they brought with them the skills and stamina of people raised in agricultural communities. These traits made them valuable. At the same time, it was expedient that their social bonds be subservient to the uses of those who claimed to be the owners of their labor. In being wrenched from communities in which they had operated familiarly and efficiently, the kidnapped Africans lost too their names, their tribal affiliations, their religions, and their

1. Richard Hofstadter, in his treatment of American anti-intellectualism, uncharacteristically fumbles here. While he can correctly cite Anne as an enthusiast and therefore as unimpressed by book learning and college degrees, he would be entitled to see Winthrop and the Puritan divines as stellar examples of intellectualism only if he’s right in overlooking their misogyny, their prickly narrow-mindedness in their banishment of Anne, and their emotionally-destabilizing adherence to predestination which nurtured bigotry toward anyone notably different from themselves.

languages. While they were taught the language of those who denied their freedom, the teaching was economical.

Let the enslaved learn the gospel—as it might reconcile them to their state. (And the notion they were creating Christians provided a soothing balm to the consciences of those who claimed to own them.) More urgently, no doubt, let these Africans hear and understand the voices of those who sought profit from their labor. Beyond that, not much. Aside from education for specific tasks, let the fetters of the mind bind ever tighter. Since reading was empowering and since writing enabled partnerships and organization for the pursuit of freedom, the teaching of literacy was forbidden. When misguided whites disregarded the restriction on teaching literacy, one got the likes of Nat Turner and murderous slave insurrections—and who needed that? Such was the near universal perspective within the majority culture. Jefferson, so eloquent and diligent on the importance of education, was even more diligent— by reason of its power—in denying education to those under his control.

The colonial mindset was not promising for the future of education in America. This mindset of the white majority toward denying education to blacks—a mindset often coupled with indifference toward the education of children of poor whites— remained in place right into the start of the twentieth century; and it continues to be alive and kicking, and in fact growing, in blighted parts of America today.

In the middle of the twentieth century, when the Warren Court declared that separated schools are inherently unequal, the deep insight behind the ruling was that education is not some privilege to be earned, but a necessity—like mother’s milk—which society must accord the individual if he or she is to grow up wholesomely. For this reason, the situation of an ethnic minority or economic minority is vulnerable and poignant. Unless members of the majority culture open the doors of their schools to the members of a minority, the members of that minority cannot learn the levers and mechanisms, the understandings and style, the agreed-upon wisdom and traditions and linguistic usages by which the mainstream functions. It’s not that minorities need to adopt all these; but lacking an understanding of such things, if they do not simply despair, their members seem condemned to become either tools in the hands of others, or resisters or wreckers or mere waste products of an order which would reduce them to tools.”

Unanimous though the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision was, from the day it was announced to the present moment there has been widespread resistance to its central idea. White “flight to light” has been a continuing strategy among those whites who find the ruling distasteful. Those who don’t want their children rubbing elbows with children who belong to ethnic or class minorities simply move away and found new communities in suburbs where minorities find it difficult or impossible to follow. The cost of this to society as a whole has been steep. The draining from center to periphery of finances and civic stewardship has decreed urban decay at the core of some one-time thriving American cities. At the urban core of these cities, standards of beauty, health, prosperity have dwindled, or in some cases disappeared entirely; and crime has increased. Nor do we find in such places adequate responses to increase governmental involvement and spending on education as a venture to ameliorate things.

Rather the fleeing population have preferred to take their generosity toward education with them, and spend their educational dollars on the places they come to rather than on the places they leave. It seems they’d sooner pay $50,000 or more a year to incarcerate an abandoned human product of urban blight than pay ten or fifteen percent of that amount per student to leave a semblance of good schools behind. As Brown v. Board said, the heart of the problem continues to be that separated schools are inherently unequal. If children of minorities are not to be stunted, it’s not enough that their schools have some of the amenities of suburban schools; rather they need to be in schools where they can interact with the children of those who run things. (Again, this doesn’t mean minorities must replace their culture with white culture, but it does mean they can’t afford to be ignorant of the inner workings—the levers and pulleys— of white culture.)

2. It is not really as paradoxical as it may seem that some who are closed out seem to find their richest sense of freedom in activities likely to kill them during their youth.

In 1978 in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court said in effect that UC Davis could not engage in a crash program to increase the number of minority doctors in California unless it was willing simultaneously to open the same program on a competitive basis to applicants from the majority culture; anything less the Court said would violate equal treatment as provided for in the Fourteenth Amendment. The gist of the decision amounted to a declaration that to provide special programs for the down-and-out was a matter of depriving the more well-to-do of the equal protection of the laws. It’s as if one were to say a mother would be acting unfairly if she gave an aspirin to a child of hers who was sick unless, at the same time, she offered aspirin to each of her other children. Or if she had an acutely shy son, it’s as if to say she couldn't go to his room and read to him unless she invited her other children into his room as well. That they did not share his need was irrelevant. Or it’s as if to say that if there were a scarcity of some health-improving remedy like a vacation in the mountains, she could not make it available it to a sick daughter unless she allowed her vigorous and healthy children to compete with the daughter for its possession. ‘That is a very awkward sense of “equal treatment,” and no decent mother has ever subscribed to it.

Carefully as it was penned by the gentlemanly Louis Powell, the decision in the Bakke case was insensitive to the urgent need to make medical information and guidance available to the deprived and afflicted amid the minorities of California. UC Davis medical school had wanted—by an effort to recruit from the ranks of minority communities people with skills to bring mainstream medical practice back to their communities—to alleviate one of the major adverse consequences of segregated living. If you can accept the analogy, in effect, Davis was trying to create a corps of medical missionaries, not for Africa or South America, but for Compton and parts of Oakland, Fresno, San Jose, East Palo Alto, and the like. Would it have worked? Powell and company decreed it would be un-Constitutional to try to find out.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead attorney for the plaintiff in Brown v. Board, was so unconvinced by the decision that terminated this minority-recruitment experiment that, in addition to joining the dissent of three other justices, he wrote a dissent of his own. In essence, the majority who decided the case had missed the very nature of education. Rather than being some bauble or perk which society puts out there for its best and brightest to compete over, education is something a society owes to each and all its members, and the more deprived any of its members are, the more compelling is society's obligation. His dissent included a withering rebuke to the Court in the form of a history lesson on the ways the law— especially the Fourteenth Amendment— had been used and was being used to deprive blacks of the benefits the law was designed to provide. The fact, in this case, that we were dealing with descendants whose ancestors—with full support of the legal system of the time—had been brought here against their will, could not, Marshall insisted, diminish society’s obligation, but could only add to it. Such was at the center of Marshall’s dissent.

‘The elegant language in which the court’s majority could “find no compelling reason” that would justify “imposing a burden” of exclusion on whites born into comparative privilege showed the court’s majority were indeed color blind. They lacked insight into facts on the ground in the lives of a great many suffering Americans. Priding themselves on being color-blind, the gentlemanly Powell and company refused, on grounds of high moral principle, to regard either the color of deprived Americans or the painful burdens a color-conscious society imposed on it.

‘The situation of color-prejudice is still with us. And it works to dilute the liberating effects Brown v. Board might have been expected to provide. Eventually, our exercise of stinginess toward minorities and toward the white poor has come to provide a precedent for moves toward pricing members of the white middle class out of opportunities for needed education as well. Karma isn’t just some whimsical notion. What has been going around is now coming around.

Bad enough. Yet a tradition of blindness to the needs of our minorities and poor, abetted by increasing austerity toward our middle class, isn’t the only thing retarding and downgrading educational opportunity at present.

Here are some anecdotes —some glimpses of bits and pieces — I offer for consideration. Each is trivial in itself; and you may want to dismiss me as one who “tells tales out of school” and is simply

IO airing personal grievances over current educational practice. But I suggest the implication of these stories isn’t trivial at all. I vouch for the veracity of what follows; the first names I give are real. It’s up to the reader to judge whether I’m honest and whether the examples have relevance.

Picture an episode just before Christmas, on Guam, U.S.A., at a Christian school. Father James—a young Anglican priest teaching in this American school—has given the third-grade class a kind of elaboration of his sense of Christmas. He’s said that amid the swirl of Christmas presents—amid all the buying and selling that sets up this swirl—the real thing to concentrate on is the gift God has given us in Jesus. To say such a thing was pretty radical. Father James was taking on the lifestyle in which his listeners were being raised. But as he told me in his account, he took a further step. Warming to his subject, he said we should not get lost in the myth of the generosity of Santa Claus, but should celebrate instead the generosity of God—Who created us and showers us with love.

Imagine the recklessness of such a message. And he is speaking in a Christian school, which—being private— depends upon the benefactions of the students’ parents for its existence! Father James, as I recall his story, did not reach his dinner table that evening before he heard from the headmaster. The owner of a local bank had called the headmaster, complaining that the rash and insensitive James had ruined the Christmas not only of his eight-year-old daughter, but of himself as well. James had arrogantly used the indiscreet phrase “the myth of Santa Claus,” and so in his effort to explain Christmas, he had ruined it altogether. The headmaster communicated news of this outrage to James, and assigned him to write during the holidays a satisfactory apology to the irate father. James did as he was told. He did not show me the apology; but he left the school at the end of the spring term.

Here’s another true story. In a middle school in Northern California, picture a Muslim woman hired to teach social studies. I can’t remember her name now, but I liked talking with her. She told me she’d formerly been a paid consultant to some agency of the United Nations, and I believed her; for she impressed me as untypically well informed about current events. Well, one day in her social-studies class she was talking about the praying habits of Muslims. She told her students that a devout Muslim is always aware where Mecca is in relation to his or her immediate circumstances. When they asked why, she said it had to do with prayer, and demonstrated by kneeling on the floor and bowing toward Mecca as if getting ready to pray. At least one interested student said “Let me try that!” and, not being forbidden to do so, knelt and bowed. The school had never, so far as I know, had a Muslim teacher before; and in the next term, it was back to normal. The principal told me: “I had to let her go.” Evidently a parent, or several parents, had complained she was trying to convert her class to Islam.

Then there’s Eric’s story. Eric was a colleague of mine in the philosophy section of the humanities department at a community college with mostly middle-class students in Northern California. I often talked with him. He loved philosophy, and his face would take on color when he discussed it. At the start of one term I noticed there was no more Eric. Later I ran into him at a college in Oakland where I also taught.

‘The story Eric told me—as best I can recall—is this. He was giving writing assignments at that first college, and he was grading the papers meticulously. He gave a C to a paper of a female student, and when she complained, he refused to change the grade, but told her he would work with her on future papers if she wished. Knowing Eric, I believe this; it fit with his sincerity and enthusiasm. He tells me the girl then went to the dean and told her that Eric had wanted to become intimate with her, and that when she’d refused, he’d punished her by giving her a C on her paper. Eric had no tenure—like myself, he was an instance of that great bargain in college education, an adjunct instructor. When the dean summoned Eric, she told him she did not know if the girl’s story was true, but that considering how unsavory the charge was, she could not rehire him after the end of that term.

Let me tell you my own story about an experience at the school in Oakland where I heard this story from Eric. I was not terminated from that school, but was amazed when I ran into a dean problem of my own. It, too, was over the grading of a student paper. As I recall the circumstances, a disgruntled student, a black male, had complained to the dean that my grade on his paper was too low. The dean, a black woman—having failed to

II persuade me to change the grade — sought the high ground with me by asking: “Have you considered the possibility that reading and writing may not be his preferred modalities of learning?” I’m pretty sure the last five words are verbatim or very close to verbatim because the jargon all but knocked me down. I hadn’t seen it coming. It seemed to abandon—in the case at least of this student—the long struggle for black literacy. Absolutely I knew my student’s “chosen modality of learning” was not reading or writing; that’s why I was there. Beyond that, the dean knew as well as I that the accreditation of the college was under review by the state. The state university to which we sent the bulk of our graduates was complaining that, while our students were wonderfully articulate orally, they often lacked key skills in reading and writing. It’s significant I think that this same dean was eventually promoted to academic vice president of our college.

Wrangles between teacher and administrator over grades are actually commonplace, and I shouldn’t have been surprised at mine. A friend of mine, one of the most entertaining storytellers I’ve met, was Larry. Larry had taught math at a high school in Northern California for eighteen years. When I asked him why he’d retired two years short of a full pension, he told me that one day his principal called him in to discuss “the trouble” he was having with his students. Larry said he wasn’t aware of any trouble. The principal countered there was clearly trouble since students who were getting A’s and B’s in their social studies and English classes were often getting C’s in Larry’s math classes. Larry defended himself saying he kept close records of his students’ work; when a student’s answers were right ninety percent of the time or more, the student got an A; when they were right eighty percent of the time but less than ninety, the student got a B; and so on. ‘The principal said: “Ah! Now I see the problem. I want you to know, Larry, that any answer a student has worked on is a good answer for that student. Once you understand that, Larry, let’s hope your grades will come into harmony with the grades of our other teachers.”

Larry told me he went back to his classroom and thought “Id better get out of here before I lose my mind.” At the place where I met him and heard this story, he was a very popular tutor of students in math and other subjects; he had not lost his mind, but he had gotten out of there.

I could add more of these stories from creditable, firsthand accounts, but what’s my point? When we talk about what’s happening in education, we do so usually in terms of “good students” and “bad students,” “good teachers” and “bad teachers.” We seldom bring administrators into the picture. What though is the attitude toward education of the administrators in the stories I’ve told?