The Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, by Richard Slotkin
This is an important book that builds on beliefs of mine and have held for decades.
I have long called and hoped for a new narrative that can unite our nation as it has only rarely been united, usually in times of crisis. Slotkin’s book shows what we know: Our personal lives and our understanding of our nation’s life is built around narratives. Just as we as individual will tell each other only parts of our stories, so also do we tell those parts of our national stories that seem most relevant, compelling, useful, or consoling, at the same time. Most people do not particularly care about the “whole story” but, rather, those parts of the story that relate to our current culture and what we need to remember now.
This, while clearly not all inclusive, is also not intentionally deceiving. We hope other people will respond affirmatively to “our vision” and story about the United States. Equally important, we hope to inspire each other and our children with “our story” to give them hope for the future.
To have a well-functioning democracy, we need to have “our story” one that while never uniting all people, we unite a majority of people.
It is competing “myths” that explain much of the culture wars of our time.
Slotkin’s book makes it clear that our national culture and belief in ourselves has been founded on a variety of myths: “the frontier,” “the Civil War as a just war for liberation of Black peoples” or, conversely, as the “lost cause.” There is a “cowboy/gunfighter” myth that took its form importantly in westerns.
Again, whether there are some who try to manipulate these myths in order to sew discord in events for their own political, social and economic goals, most of us find ourselves caught up in competing myths about ourselves that combine elements of hard truth and historical facts with wishful thinking or wishful dis-remembering.
Slotkin’s book reminds me of the power and the variety of myth. Of course, they apply to other countries: the founding of Israel; the plight of Palestinians. Putin’s view of the history of Ukraine is a lot different than the Ukrainians.
Slotkin makes it clear that the MAGA movement is based on a combination of at least the “frontier myths” and the “lost cause myth” which focuses on grievance and little justice to the minority.
The importance of those myths in the MAGA movement could not be clearer.
The bigger challenge is how do we frame a line of thinking, vision, “myth,” if you will, that would the majority of people behind an agenda that both recognizes the thoughts of the nation and its strengths and which points to a brighter future. I have always returned to the Declaration of Independence, which is its own myth in a way. A call for equality of opportunity, recognition of the dignity of every single person, and the rule of law.
We need a narrative that faces up to the ugliness of our past (slavery, treatment of the indigenous people, sequestering the Japanese, “not so good” wars, but also the aspiration and the good which American people have done across the world.
I think a narrative along these lines can be put together credibly and with powerful resonance. It will point to a better future.
I happen to be reading a book right now on a totally different subject, while it is not totally different. It is written by Father Nouwen. The title: Life of the Beloved. My reading this followed the reading of the new biography of John Lewis by Raymond Arsenault. In it, Arsenault develops clear and passionately Lewis’s pursuit of the beloved community.
I believe we can formulate and should try to, and follow, a narrative, a myth, that would see us at our best: recognizing truth as best we know it, the good and the bad, while seeking to meet our highest ideals, as framed in the Declaration of Independence and other documents. It might be titled “The Reformation of America” or, perhaps, something more sexy than that.
I believe there would be substantial appeal in this if it were well-packaged. But the key will be to have it well led. It requires a spokesperson with great credibility, charisma and personal power. Without that, I do not believe it will happen.
I believe the moment for such a revised “myth” or narrative is ripe. There is so much disarray, so much polarization, so much meanness and cruelty in the world, a majority of people, I am convinced, are looking for something better, real, that can bring us together.
I would love to see some legitimate approaches taken in framing such a narrative. I may circulate this to a few people with the hope they will be able to bring their imaginations and insights to this.
As Slotkin says at the end of his book, “the making of national myths has proved to be essential to the creation of nation states to the maintenance of that sense of historically continuous community that allows them to function. The danger of mythological thinking is that it attempts to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past, and to sacrifice our future to that illusion. But we are not bound to live in a fixed scenario bequeathed to us by tradition.”
No, we can create a new myth and new narrative.
