It's a curious thing, this attempt of mine to make sense of
the future by understanding what’s happened in the past. One of the most
curious things about it, at least to me, is the passion with which so many
people insist that this isn’t an option at all. In any other context, “Well,
what happened the last time someone tried that?” is one of the first and most
obviously necessary questions to ask and answer—but heaven help you if you try
to raise so straightforward a question about the political, economic, and
social phenomena of the present day.
In previous posts here we’ve talked about thoughtstoppers of
the “But it’s different this time!” variety, and some of the other means people
these days use to protect themselves against the risk of learning anything
useful from the hard-earned lessons of the past. This week I want to explore
another, subtler method of doing the same thing. As far as I’ve been able to
tell, it’s mostly an issue here in the United States, but here it’s played a
remarkably pervasive role in convincing people that the only way to open a door
marked PULL is to push on it long and hard enough.
It’s going to take a bit of a roundabout journey to make
sense of the phenomenon I have in mind, so I’ll have to ask my readers’
forbearance for what will seem at first like several sudden changes of subject.
One of the questions I field tolerably often, when I discuss
the societies that will rise after modern industrial civilization finishes its
trajectory into history’s compost heap, is whether I think that consciousness
evolves. I admit that until fairly recently, I was pretty much at a loss to
know how to respond. It rarely took long to find out that the questioner wasn’t
thinking about the intriguing theory Julian Jaynes raised in The Origins of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the Jungian
conception Erich Neumann proposed in The Origins and History of
Consciousness, or anything of the same kind. Nor, it turned out, was the
question usually based on the really rather weird reinterpretations of
evolution common in today’s pop-spirituality scene. Rather, it was political.
It took me a certain amount of research, and some puzzled
emails to friends more familiar with current left-wing political jargon than I
am, to figure out what was behind these questions. Among a good-sized fraction
of American leftist circles these days, it turns out it’s become a standard
credo that what drives the kind of social changes supported by the left—the abolition
of slavery and segregation, the extension of equal (or more than equal) rights
to an assortment of disadvantaged groups, and so on—is an ongoing evolution of
consciousness, in which people wake up to the fact that things they’ve
considered normal and harmless are actually intolerable injustices, and so
decide to stop.
Those of my readers who followed the late US presidential
election may remember Hillary Clinton’s furious response to a heckler at one of
her few speaking gigs: “We aren’t going
back. We’re going forward.” Underlying that outburst is the belief system I’ve
just sketched out: the claim that history has a direction, that it moves in a
linear fashion from worse to better, and that any given political choice—for
example, which of the two most detested people in American public life is going
to become the nominal head of a nation in freefall ten days from now—not only
can but must be flattened out into a rigidly binary decision between “forward”
and “back.”
There’s no shortage of hard questions that could be brought
to bear on that way of thinking about history, and we’ll get to a few of them a
little later on, but let’s start with the simplest one: does history actually
show any such linear movement in terms of social change?
It so happens that I’ve recently finished a round of
research bearing on exactly that question, though I wasn’t thinking of politics
or the evolution of consciousness when I launched into it. Over the last few
years I’ve been working on a sprawling fiction project, a seven-volume epic
fantasy titled The Weird of Hali, which takes the horror fantasy of H.P.
Lovecraft and stands it on its head, embracing the point of view of the
tentacled horrors and multiracial cultists Lovecraft liked to use as images of
dread. (The first volume, Innsmouth, is in
print in a fine edition and will be out in trade paper this spring,
and the second, Kingsport, is
available for preorder and will be published later this year.)
One of Lovecraft’s few memorable human characters, the
intrepid dream-explorer Randolph Carter, has an important role in the fourth
book of my series. According to Lovecraft, Carter was a Boston writer and
esthete of the1920s from a well-to-do family, who had no interest in women but
a whole series of intimate (and sometimes live-in) friendships with other men,
and decidedly outré tastes in interior decoration—well, I could go on. The
short version is that he’s very nearly the perfect archetype of an upper-class
gay man of his generation. (Whether Lovecraft intended this is a very
interesting question that his biographers don’t really answer.) With an eye
toward getting a good working sense of Carter’s background, I talked to a
couple of gay friends, who pointed me to some friends of theirs, and that was
how I ended up reading George Chauncey’s magisterial Gay New York:
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.
What Chauncey documents, in great detail and with a wealth
of citations from contemporary sources, is that gay men in America had
substantially more freedom during the first three decades of the twentieth
century than they did for a very long time thereafter. While homosexuality was
illegal, the laws against it had more or less the same impact on people’s
behavior that the laws against smoking marijuana had in the last few decades of
the twentieth century—lots of people did it, that is, and now and then a few of
them got busted. Between the beginning of the century and the coming of the
Great Depression, in fact, most large American cities had a substantial gay
community with its own bars, restaurants, periodicals, entertainment venues,
and social events, right out there in public.
Nor did the gay male culture of early twentieth century
America conform to current ideas about sexual identity, or the relationship
between gay culture and social class, or—well, pretty much anything else,
really. A very large number of men who had sex with other men didn’t see that
as central to their identity—there were indeed men who embraced what we’d now
call a gay identity, but that wasn’t the only game in town by a long shot.
What’s more, sex between men was by and large more widely accepted in the
working classes than it was further up the social ladder. In
turn-of-the-century New York, it was the working class gay men who flaunted the
camp mannerisms and the gaudy clothing; upper- and middle-class gay men such as
Randolph Carter had to be much more discreet.
So what happened? Did some kind of vast right-wing
conspiracy shove the ebullient gay male culture of the early twentieth century
into the closet? No, and that’s one of the more elegant ironies of this entire
chapter of American cultural history. The crusade against the “lavender menace”
(I’m not making that phrase up, by the way) was one of the pet causes of the
same Progressive movement responsible for winning women the right to vote and
breaking up the fabulously corrupt machine politics of late nineteenth century
America. Unpalatable as that fact is in today’s political terms, gay men and
lesbians weren’t forced into the closet in the 1930s by the right. They were driven there by the left.
This is the same Progressive movement, remember, that made
Prohibition a central goal of its political agenda, and responded to the total
failure of the Prohibition project by refusing to learn the lessons of failure
and redirecting its attentions toward banning less popular drugs such as
marijuana. That movement was also, by the way, heavily intertwined with what we
now call Christian fundamentalism. Some of my readers may have heard of William
Jennings Bryan, the supreme orator of the radical left in late nineteenth
century America, the man whose “Cross of Gold” speech became the great rallying
cry of opposition to the Republican corporate elite in the decades before the
First World War. He was also the
prosecuting attorney in the equally famous Scopes Monkey Trial, responsible for
pressing charges against a schoolteacher who had dared to affirm in public
Darwin’s theory of evolution.
The usual response of people on today’s left to such
historical details—well, other than denying or erasing them, which is of course
quite common—is to insist that this proves that Bryan et al. were really
right-wingers. Not so; again, we’re talking about people who put their
political careers on the line to give women the vote and weaken (however
temporarily) the grip of corporate money on the US political system. The
politics of the Progressive era didn’t assign the same issues to the categories
“left” and “right” that today’s politics do, and so all sides in the sprawling
political free-for-all of that time embraced some issues that currently belong
to the left, others that belong to the right, and still others that have
dropped entirely out of the political conversation since then.
I could go on, but let’s veer off in another direction
instead. Here’s a question for those of my readers who think they’re well
acquainted with American history. The Fifteenth Amendment, which granted the
right to vote to all adult men in the United States irrespective of race, was
ratified in 1870. Before then, did black men have the right to vote anywhere in
the US?
Most people assume as a matter of course that the answer
must be no—and they’re wrong. Until the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the
question of who did and didn’t have voting rights was a matter for each state
to decide for itself. Fourteen states either allowed free African-American men
to vote in Colonial times or granted them that right when first organized.
Later on, ten of them—Delaware in 1792, Kentucky in 1799, Maryland in 1801, New
Jersey in 1807, Connecticut in 1814, New York in 1821, Rhode Island in 1822,
Tennessee in 1834, North Carolina in 1835, and Pennsylvania in 1838—either
denied free black men the vote or raised legal barriers that effectively kept
them from voting. Four other states—Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Maine—gave free black men the right to vote in Colonial times and maintained
that right until the Fifteenth Amendment made the whole issue moot. Those
readers interested in the details can find them in The African American
Electorate: A Statistical History by Hanes Walton Jr. et al., which devotes
chapter 7 to the subject.
So what happened? Was there a vast right-wing conspiracy to
deprive black men of the right to vote? No, and once again we’re deep in irony.
The political movements that stripped free American men of African descent of
their right to vote were the two great pushes for popular democracy in the
early United States, the Democratic-Republican party under Thomas Jefferson and
the Democratic party under Andrew Jackson. Read any detailed history of the
nineteenth century United States and you’ll learn that before these two
movements went to work, each state set a certain minimum level of personal
wealth that citizens had to have in order to vote. Both movements forced
through reforms in the voting laws, one state at a time, to remove these
property requirements and give the right to vote to every adult white man in
the state. What you won’t learn, unless you do some serious research, is that
in many states these same reforms also stripped adult black men of their right
to vote.
Try to explain this to most people on the leftward end of
today’s American political spectrum, and you’ll likely end up with a
world-class meltdown, because the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans and the
Jacksonian Democrats, like the Progressive movement, embraced some causes that
today’s leftists consider progressive, and others that they consider
regressive. The notion that social change is driven by some sort of linear
evolution of consciousness, in which people necessarily become “more conscious”
(that is to say, conform more closely to the ideology of the contemporary
American left) over time, has no room for gay-bashing Progressives and
Jacksonian Democrats whose concept of democracy included a strict color bar.
The difficulty, of course, is that history is full of Progressives, Jacksonian
Democrats, and countless other political movements that can’t be shoehorned
into the Procrustean bed of today’s political ideologies.
I could add other examples—how many people remember, for
example, that environmental protection was a cause of the far right until the
1960s?—but I think the point has been made. People in the past didn’t divide up
the political causes of their time into the same categories left-wing activists
like to use today. It’s practically de rigueur for left-wing activists these
days to insist that people in the past ought to have seen things in today’s
terms rather than the terms of their own time, but that insistence just
displays a bad case of chronocentrism.
Chronocentrism? Why, yes.
Most people nowadays are familiar with ethnocentrism, the insistence by
members of one ethnic group that the social customs, esthetic notions, moral
standards, and so on of that ethnic group are universally applicable, and that
anybody who departs from those things is just plain wrong. Chronocentrism is
the parallel insistence, on the part of people living in one historical period,
that the social customs, esthetic notions, moral standards, and so on of that
period are universally applicable, and that people in any other historical
period who had different social customs, esthetic notions, moral standards, and
so on should have known better.
Chronocentrism is pandemic in our time. Historians have a
concept called “Whig history;” it got that moniker from a long line of English
historians who belonged to the Whig, i.e., Liberal Party, and who wrote as
though all of human history was to be judged according to how well it measured
up to the current Liberal Party platform. Such exercises aren’t limited to
politics, though; my first exposure to the concept of Whig history came via
university courses in the history of science. When I took those courses—this
was twenty-five years ago, mind you—historians of science were sharply divided
between a majority that judged every scientific activity in every past society
on the basis of how well it conformed to our ideas of science, and a minority
that tried to point out just how difficult this habit made the already
challenging task of understanding the ideas of past thinkers.
To my mind, the minority view in those debates was correct,
but at least some of its defenders missed a crucial point. Whig history doesn’t
exist to foster understanding of the past.
It exists to justify and support an ideological stance of the present.
If the entire history of science is rewritten so that it’s all about how the
currently accepted set of scientific theories about the universe rose to their
present privileged status, that act of revision makes currently accepted
theories look like the inevitable outcome of centuries of progress, rather than
jerry-rigged temporary compromises kluged together to cover a mass of
recalcitrant data—which, science being what it is, is normally a more accurate
description.
In exactly the same sense, the claim that a certain set of
social changes in the United States and other industrial countries in recent
years result from the “evolution of consciousness,” unfolding on a one-way
street from the ignorance of the past to a supposedly enlightened future,
doesn’t help make sense of the complicated history of social change. It was
never supposed to do that. Rather, it’s an attempt to backstop the legitimacy
of a specific set of political agendas here and now by making them look like
the inevitable outcome of the march of history. The erasure of the bits of
inconvenient history I cited earlier in this essay is part and parcel of that
attempt; like all linear schemes of historical change, it falsifies the past
and glorifies the future in order to prop up an agenda in the present.
It needs to be remembered in this context that the word
“evolution” does not mean “progress.” Evolution is adaptation to changing
circumstances, and that’s all it is. When people throw around the
phrases “more evolved” and “less evolved,” they’re talking nonsense, or at best
engaging in a pseudoscientific way of saying “I like this” and “I don’t like
that.” In biology, every organism—you, me, koalas, humpback whales, giant
sequoias, pond scum, and all the rest—is equally the product of a few billion
years of adaptation to the wildly changing conditions of an unstable planet, with
genetic variation shoveling in diversity from one side and natural selection
picking and choosing on the other. The habit of using the word “evolution” to
mean “progress” is pervasive, and it’s pushed hard by the faith in progress
that serves as an ersatz religion in our time, but it’s still wrong.
It’s entirely possible, in fact, to talk about the evolution
of political opinion (which is of course what “consciousness” amounts to here)
in strictly Darwinian terms. In every society, at every point in its history,
groups of people are striving to improve the conditions of their lives by some
combination of competition and cooperation with other groups. The causes,
issues, and rallying cries that each group uses will vary from time to time as
conditions change, and so will the relationships between groups—thus it was to
the advantage of affluent liberals of the Progressive era to destroy the
thriving gay culture of urban America, just as it was to the advantage of
affluent liberals of the late twentieth century to turn around and support the
struggle of gay people for civil rights. That’s the way evolution works in the
real world, after all.
