The Myth of the Golden Age. I never heard about this idea before a few weeks ago. Then, within a few days, it arose in repeated and unrelated contexts; a podcast interview with a leading business psychologist, a conversation with Becca about education, and a Woody Allen movie titled Midnight In Paris. The idea, as I understand it, is that people have a tendency to romanticize the past in a way that accentuates the positive and covers over the negative.
Nostalgia is denial – denial of the painful present… the name for this denial is golden age thinking – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in – its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
Paul, Midnight in Paris
Over the past few weeks, we lost John Lewis and heard a confusing interpretation of American history that I would like to post some reflections on.
John Lewis
John Lewis passed away on July 17, 2020. He was a great man whose background is well documented. His road from humble beginnings in Troy, Alabama, to the center of the American movement for civil rights, reflect a life as a testament to the impact we can create when vision is matched with courage, action, and persistence. “Good trouble.” I imagine many Americans will read obituaries and listen to eulogies and wonder about the Nashville Student Movement, Freedom Riders, and Bloody Sunday, and wonder about the roles of Lewis, Diane Nash, James Lawson, Bernard Lafayette, and James Bevel. I hope this curiosity leads to research and reflection. Humanity would benefit as a result.
I have a difficult time reflecting on this time of American history and imagining John Lewis concluding that his days in Nashville constituted a “Golden Age.” If anything, I can imagine Hr. Lewis talking about the Golden Age in the future tense; A time that has not yet come.
Tom Cotton
In the meantime, Tom Cotton shared this nugget with us over the past weeks:
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” Cotton said in the interview. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-tom-cotton-clarifies-controversial-slavery-comments-amid/story?id=72014468
I understand Cotton is now arguing that he was not conveying agreement with the idea that slavery was a “necessary evil” but was conveying the view of the Founding Fathers. Despite this (obviously nonsensical) revisionism, I wonder what Cotton’s point was in the first place. In context, Cotton’s is making efforts to limit funding to schools promoting the “1619 curriculum” which, as quoted, “[intends] to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”
One interpretation of Cotton’s rhetoric is that he is simply stating a perspective of history which mitigates the obvious evil in our founding milieu. By this rationale, using one founder as an analogy for America, one would interpret Thomas Jefferson’s words on slavery as a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” as an offset, to some extent, of his ownership of hundreds of slaves. Another, less favorable, interpretation is contemporary and political; By spouting messages that, ensconced with Cotton’s Harvard-pedigree, appear sophisticated, and explain a vision of American exceptionalism, he can appeal to those in the electorate to whom MAGA resonates strongly. Tom has dreams of a future President Cotton.
I don’t know how to interpret Cotton’s words, rationale, or analysis of America’s legacy with respect to slavery. I don’t know if the curriculum advocated by the 1619 project is entirely accurate or good. But, I am confident that the 1619 project is the antithesis of the Myth of the Golden Age. Accordingly, it has a better opportunity to find truth.
A trip down the road to Greenwood Furnace and thoughts of Bethlehem Steel
Our family started seeking special places in Central-PA for picnics on Saturday morning. This weekend we ventured to Greenwood Furnace State Park in Huntingdon County.
The park includes spaces for camping, a pond equipped with a beach for swimming, and restored furnaces for posterity. I was introduced to the iron industry in Central-PA in 2010 when participating in a year-long regional leadership program: Leadership Centre County (LCC). We visited Centre Furnace Mansion and a restored 19th century company-village named Curtin Village. These very impressive examples of industrial entrepreneurship fell victim to innovation in the form of the Bessemer process, which matched more functional steel to the emerging needs in the economy.
I graduated from high school in 1996 from Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which was home to Bethlehem Steel. Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The decline of this once proud business, and its impact on the Lehigh Valley, was captured by Billy Joel in his song, Allentown.
Well we're waiting here in Allentown For the Pennsylvania we never found For the promises our teachers gave If we worked hard If we behaved So the graduations hang on the wall But they never really helped us at all No they never taught us what was real Iron and coke And chromium steel And we're waiting here in Allentown But they've taken all the coal from the ground And the union people crawled away Every child had a pretty good shot To get at least as far as their old man got But something happened on the way to that place They threw an American flag in our face Well I'm living here in Allentown --Billy Joel, Allentown
Industries experience their own lifecycles, from start-up to growth, and maturation to decline. I wonder if the sentiments amongst young men and women of 1889 Central-PA were similar to those of 1996 Bethlehem, wondering about how the prior generation’s job prospects were better during the “Golden Age” of the local industry…
David Hume
I never formally studied philosophy. I enjoy thinking about different ideas and reading works by, and about, philosophers. I particularly enjoy David Hume. His ideas about “No Ought from Is” are interesting.
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation,’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it … [I] am persuaded, that a small attention [to this point] wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature
By searching for “is-ought problem,” “Hume’s law,” or “Hume’s guillotine,” you can find varying interpretations of his ideas. For me, the central point is that analysis of ethics, morality, and the way things should be (i.e. “ought”) are no less important than analysis of history, science, and the way things are (i.e. “is.”) But, by confirming that something “is” (e.g. Jim Crow laws,) one cannot therefore confirm that it “ought to be.” I imagine conversations at Bethlehem Steel in 1990, or Greenwood Furnace in 1885, looking backwards at the importance of steel or pig-iron in America, the necessity of local jobs at the present time, and the inconceivability of a continued decline of position. Hume would bristle at the final connection.
I imagine Tom Cotton sitting at a home office, noticing the energy created in certain electoral communities by ideas resident in MAGA, and wondering how he could stoke a similar enthusiasm for his own vision. After all, what is more exceptional than forming an imperfect union, despite its “hideous blot,” yet setting the chessboard up for inevitable check-mate of this “necessary evil.” What a bizarre method by which to apply the idea of historical determinism…
No. Given the choice, I hope our children connect more to the ideas of David Hume and John Lewis. “Ought” need not be determined by virtue of “is.” The arc of history is not predetermined. We can make a difference, for better or for worse, through our own vision, actions, courage, and persistence.
And occasionally, a willingness to engage in “good trouble.”
I would like them to think of The Golden Age in future tense; A time that has not yet come, and they can have a hand in creating.
