Recommended Reading – Regarding Henry Thoreau

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Eric

A somewhat controversial figure in his own day, Henry David Thoreau rose to his greatest prominence posthumously, in the late nineteenth century, with the publication of his expansive journals. In our day, he remains ranked among the nation’s most interesting and idiosyncratic writers. This list proposes a reading program for “getting” this deep and enigmatic figure.

The popular criticism of Henry David Thoreau has tended to fall into two categories, each the mirror image of the other. From one angle, critics have accused Thoreau of being a misanthrope–so ill-equipped for human community that he had to take his leave of it entirely. As Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote in 1882, “A man who must separate himself from his neighbors’ habits in order to be happy is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose.” Or as Kathryn Shulz put it much more recently, Walden is little more than “cabin porn,” essentially “a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” From the opposing angle, Thoreau has been criticized for staying too close to the civilized world. This species of critique is marked by the tenacious cliché that the hermit of Walden Pond was really just a man-child who had his mother do his laundry.

Thoreau’s critics are wrong across the board, though there are gradations to the wrongness, and some are at least more entertaining than others. (James Russell Lowell’s 1865 hatchet job is excellent, for example, as is Vincent Buranelli’s 1957 “Case Against Thoreau.” By comparison, Shulz’s New Yorker piece, “Pond Scum,” is notable primarily for how much it sucks.) No one is above reproach, and Thoreau had plenty of personal foibles worthy of comment and castigation. But it’s tough to read the man with attention and seriousness and still come away with any such uniformly negative assessment. Those who commit themselves to such positions in print come off looking like bad judges of character.

In any case, there are better approaches at hand. By distancing Thoreau from the political questions, and aligning him instead with a tradition of “virtue ethics” as old as Aristotle, Philip Cafaro demonstrates how Thoreau’s intense dedication to self-cultivation constitutes a politics in itself–or at least a self-conscious model for how to live a thoughtful life with or without close neighbors. It’s a useful example for our day as well, given the variety and the extent of the large social problems that none of us can hope to solve as individuals. Perhaps we should start by cultivating the few cubic feet of flesh over which we are sovereign, or tend the bean field that is ours to till. Done well, such work may develop a healthy sort of citizenship. At minimum, it will yield a healthy and introspective citizen. Probably it will help us minimize the harm we cause, and otherwise help us stay out of debt.

My current project builds on Cafaro’s insights and applies them to a treatment of Walden as an exemplar of American epideictic rhetoric. By identifying the blameable aspects of his neighbors’ lives, and contrasting these with the more intentional and ascetic form of his own, Thoreau diagnoses and critiques the most pressing problems of mid-nineteenth century American life–problems that are exponentially more pressing nearly two centuries later. In this way, and mostly without subtlety, he makes an argument about how the good life should be lived. And while it may come across as condescending or haughty, it is not for those reasons incorrect. Thoreau was a broken vessel, like the rest of us. But he was also a much better writer, and his writing casts a broad net. Everyone should have a decent foundation in Thoreau, and here I identify some books to serve as bricks.

This short list contains thirteen titles, represented as sixteen readings because I’ve split Jeffrey Cramer’s excellent (and annotated) edition of Thoreau’s essays into four parts. That Laura Dassow Walls biography is a master class, paired with one of Robert Richardson’s best. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is kind of a tough read for those of us not captivated by Thoreau’s poetry or super knowledgeable on the Greek and Roman allusions, but it also has a lot of beautiful description and is notable for the quiet dignity it lends to the author’s relationship with his brother. Walden needs no introduction, of course, and I recommend the four accompanying volumes for context. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod have their moments as well, but ultimately I think it’s fair to say that Thoreau was less compelling as a traveler of New England than as an explorer of himself. I love both of Bob Pepperman Taylor’s books, and I think that Walden Warming offers an appropriate coda to the enterprise–plus another helpful warning for us.

Any time spent here is time well-spent. (Since reading Leonard Neufeldt’s book on Thoreau’s economics, I can’t stop noticing the frequency with which I talk about time, energy, and life being given, spent, wasted, invested, etc.) I began this sort of systematic reading project in the belief that anything worth reading was worth reading well and completely and with resolve. So far the theory holds. As Thoreau put it, “To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

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Arguments Against Growth

Posted on March 7, 2024 by Eric

In recent years, as the connections between consumer capitalism, global inequality, and environmental degradation have become ever clearer and more urgent, a cohort of economists, ecologists, and ethicists have been at work on a literature of degrowth, exploring correctives to a global economy founded on ever greater extraction, production, marketing, and waste as means to ceaseless growth.

During an interview for the 2019 documentary Anthropocene, Earth System scientist Will Steffen was asked whether the story of humanity appeared to him more of a comedy or a tragedy. “I would certainly view it as a tragedy,” he said. “If there were another species coming down from another planet, they may see it as a comedy, or they may see it as an incredible paradox—of a species that could learn to manipulate their planet so much, but didn’t have the wisdom to understand what that manipulation was leading to, in terms of its own well-being.” Steffen, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2023, had devoted much of his career to making people wise, and, like many other scientists in the early twenty-first century, had begun reconciling himself to the limits of his influence. He—they—saw clearly how precarious our situation had become, knew plainly how it had become so, and discerned exactly what would be required to set things right in the years ahead. But the task was very difficult, and the future was veiled with uncertainties.

To read through the expanding literature on the Anthropocene is to be resituated in a young world, a new civilization shedding the skin of past millennia and growing exponentially into and beyond its fullest potentials. Since about 1945, human beings have broken and discarded the physical limits that had governed their ancestors, dramatically escalating their extraction of natural resources, streamlining the refinement and manufacture of these into products, and extending their system of commerce across a global web of connections, powered all along by the shimmer and smoke of burning fossil fuels. Tapped in the eighteenth century and revolutionized in the twentieth, the ability to extract and exploit millions of years of subterranean energy transformed the relationship between humans and their planet, necessarily disrupting the ecological and atmospheric balances that had made humans possible in the first place. Steffen and his colleagues famously dubbed this rapid new metabolism “the Great Acceleration,” noting the direct correspondence between exponential increases in socio-economic trends—like global population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and primary energy—and Earth System trends—like greenhouse gas emissions, surface temperature, and ocean acidification. All told, they produced twenty-four comparable hockey-stick graphs to demonstrate that the post-war decades have been unique in their outsized production and impacts around the planet. In light of these observations, the world we inhabit—that of four generations, or of a single human lifetime—is defined by the benefits and liabilities of rapid, anomalous, unsustainable growth.

Some of the most interesting and relevant work currently underway by economists, ecologists, ethicists, and policymakers has thus become squarely focused on what comes next—on what, if anything, will replace the relentless revolution of capitalist production, accumulation, exploitation, and waste. The partisans have formed ranks within several different categories, by turns advocating “post-capitalism,” “steady-state economics,” and “green growth,” among others. Perhaps the most energetic and provocative of these are the advocates of “degrowth,” the idea that economies should be purposely decelerated and reoriented to prioritize human flourishing rather than boundless expansion. Principally based in and around Barcelona, their work levels incisive arguments against consumer capitalism, supplemented, then, by varied visions of its eclipse. But if their critiques are to be accepted and their policies adopted, they must first persuade the public that the system can work. That is the project of the three books considered in this review.

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Current

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Eric

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

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Conservatives or Radicals or Something Else Entirely

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Eric

Nicole Hemmer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She and I discussed her first book back in 2016. Her second book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, resituates the Republican Party’s sharp rightward turn in reaction to the Reagan presidency, rather than at its beginning.

In the autumn of 2023, shortly after becoming the first Speaker of the House to be stripped of his gavel, Congressman Kevin McCarthy was asked to comment on the far-right cadre who had engineered his ouster. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic,” he said. “That’s not the party I belong to. The party of Reagan was if you believed in your principles, that you could govern in a conservative way. They are not conservative and they do not have the right to have the title.” Perhaps McCarthy had not read Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Otherwise, he might have had a clearer grasp of exactly when and how the party he belongs to—the party of Reagan—became defined by anger and chaos.

If the Reagan Revolution achieved the great triumph of American conservatism in 1980, it also marked the culmination and passing of the triumphant conservative style—that sunny, smiling optimism of its Californian namesake. Indeed, though Ronald Reagan remains emblematic of 80s-era Republicanism, the balance of his political allies and admirers were even then transitioning into darker and more aggressive forms, ever more fiercely committed to the unpopular stands their popular leader was ever unwilling to take. Though they fawned on the Great Communicator in his day and invoked his name regularly for at least a decade after his death, the post-Reagan conservatives had come to view Reaganism as an opportunity missed. For all his virtues, it seems, the Gipper had one near fatal flaw in their eyes—he paid attention to public opinion.

The story of American politics in the 1990s is thus largely concerned with right-wing reaction to Reagan’s perceived moderation. The protagonists are rising right-wing politicians and media figures with radical ideas about government, who viewed election as license to enact these categorically. In temperament, these individuals—Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Roger Ailes, to name a few—were doctrinaire and inflexible. Stylistically, they were angry. Apparently convinced that morning in America had passed to afternoon, they radiated an irascible and sneering sort of frustration, rejecting conciliation and compromise as synonyms for weakness, and practicing politics as warfare by only slightly milder means. If Reagan proposed a political vision to the people and waited for their assent, his successors would make demands and force them through, or else.

In these years, Buchanan’s frowning growl and Gingrich’s bookish scorn came to define their own peculiar mode of persuasion. Confident that they were ideologically correct, they had no patience for caveats and no tolerance for dissent. When Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush in the ’92 primary, he wielded his conservative purity like a cudgel, battering his more moderate rival over a heretical willingness to tax. When Gingrich launched his own revolution in ’94, he assigned an entirely new lexicon to see it secured, recasting his Democratic colleagues as sick, selfish, radical, treasonous, and worse. In step with Limbaugh’s radio bombast, alongside the rise of Fox News, sanctified by association with the Christian Right, and contemporaneous with reactionary militia movements, this ascendent political ethos drew support from across the rightward reaches, bolstered by certainties and inflected with menace. Animated by their blinding hatred of William Jefferson Clinton, conservatives struggled desperately to retake the White House and to see their agenda finally imposed without restraint.

The impeachment proceedings launched against Clinton in December of 1998 thus provide a representative anecdote for the shift underway in the Republican Party for at least a decade to that point—the moment at which Reaganite conservatism formally surrendered to the Gingrich caucus. Because Kenneth Starr’s charges were so humiliating and salacious, the case was perfectly calibrated for the right-wing media and publishing sphere, and tailor-made for the chain emails everyone’s uncle was forwarding dutifully along. And yet, for those same reasons, the impeachment was extraordinarily unpopular with the public-at-large, creating the sort of political calculus that would likely have prompted a Reagan to balk. Asked why he pressed on despite the risks, Gingrich responded curtly, “Because we can,” a quip that Hemmer flags as “an apt summation of the right’s emerging attitude toward power” (247). Once in office, the Republicans of the 1990s would do everything in their ability to satisfy all of their desires. If the effort cost them majorities, they would thrive in opposition until winning their seats again. 

Perhaps somewhat chastened by Clinton’s acquittal and their own midterm losses in ‘98, Republicans nominated George W. Bush in 2000, entrusting their prospects once again to an optimistic candidate pitching a “compassionate” conservatism. But though Bush would win the election (sort of) and serve two terms in the White House, his party was not really reverting to a softer political style. By 2008, with the nation embroiled in Iraq, devastated by a “Great Recession,” and on the verge of electing its first Black president, conservatives were angrier than ever and amplified by a media empire with nearly ubiquitous reach. That sprawling and vicious media ecosystem is central to the story Hemmer tells, cross-pollinating with the GOP and moving steadily from backdrop to center stage with the rise and coronation of the abrasive, conspiratorial, and truly singular reality television star President Donald J. Trump.

Like so many other political volumes published in the past eight years, Partisans is ultimately an account of how the Trump administration became possible, and it is more compelling than most. Though we commonly attribute Trumpism to the dynamics and fractures of our “polarized”nation, Hemmer is thorough and careful to explain that the term is not quite correct. Indeed, she writes, though the 1990s are “so often described as an era of polarization,” this was “actually an era of right-wing radicalization” (14). Here she may be understating the extremity of movement conservatism in the 1960s and 70s, while overstating Reagan’s moderation in the 80s. But whenever it began in earnest, the era of conservative radicalism was clearly underway by 1990. It continues today.

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Church, Commerce, Creation – A Conversation with Mark Stoll

Posted on January 19, 2024 by Eric

Mark Stoll is Professor of History at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America; Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism; and Profit: An Environmental History. Each book explores the relationship between three formative influences in American life.

ECM: Your books focus on the interplay between Protestantism, capitalism, and environmentalism. Did an interest in any one of these prompt your interest in the others?

MS: I grew up in a religious household in the pre-evangelical days. I was interested in environmentalism as a kid in the 1960s, and later, when I began to take an interest in that history, I noticed that a lot of the nation’s great environmentalist figures were lapsed Presbyterians, as I was by then as well. I spent most of the 70s living in San Francisco and going hiking in the Sierras. This was a decade when the nation made great strides in environmental protection. But then, of course, Ronald Reagan became president and appointed the notorious James Watt to the Department of the Interior, and we began rolling back so much of that progress in favor of mining and ranching and timber interests and an otherwise “pro-business” agenda. I was attentive to all this, so when I went back to graduate school in the late 80s, I had these issues on my mind.

At that time, I had been reading about John Muir—who was religious—and also thinking about the Lynn White thesis, that Christianity is to blame for much of the world’s environmental degradation. You know, the idea that God has granted humans dominion over the world with a mandate to subdue it and that this has justified deforestation and extinction and pollution and all the rest. A lot of people accepted that argument at the time, but to me Muir seemed to challenge it. It was his experience, and my own, that growing up in a religious environment influences you deeply, and you retain that imprint throughout your life, even if you leave the faith. You can’t just abandon it. You may change your beliefs, but that inner Baptist or Catholic or whatever it may be lives on in your perspective. I was looking for a research paper topic at the time, and started to work in this direction.

ECM: Can your work be read as an extended response to Lynn White?

MS: Well it’s worth noting that Lynn White was religious as well—he was a Presbyterian, and the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister. But I guess I have been calling for a degree of respect for these religions, and observing that “secular” things are often not as secular as they seem.

ECM: Your second book is a history of American environmentalism by way of Christianity and capitalism and detailed discussions of landscape painting. How did you decide to write history through art criticism?

MS: I’m interested in a lot of things! I take a sort of polymath approach to the world. It’s American history, but it exists in this cultural constellation. Environmentalism can be political and activist, of course, but it is also expressed in poetry, literature, art, and so on. In my first book, I just wanted to write about the stuff that I like to read and then show how it’s all related. In the second, I was thinking about how to show, in a creative fashion, the variety of ways that these attitudes find expression. It was a joy to consider all of these beautiful paintings and learn a bit about the artists who created them and to identify their connections to each other and to their subject matter and to my subject matter as a historian.

ECM: Presbyterianism comes up frequently in your books, and you note that it has been particularly important to American environmentalism. Why?

MS: When writing the first book, I tried to focus on Protestantism as a whole. But as I was revising it, I realized that you could identify particular attitudes and trace them to figures aligned with particular denominations. I began to think about that, and pursued it much more directly in the second book. I had a very hard time coming up with a way to present my argument. At first I was just going to say here are some environmentalists who were Methodists, then here are some Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Catholics and so on. And also some Jews, who have been extremely important to American environmentalism. But that seemed like a very dry way to present the information, so I tried to organize it chronologically. This allowed me to see that there was a sequence, and they actually segue one into each other.

Ultimately I began to look at the religious upbringing of various figures in the environmental movement, and one after another turned out to be Presbyterian, which is striking because it’s not that large of a denomination. It’s mainly an immigrant church, so it’s not like it started out at the top, like the Episcopalians, or that it was blessed with a lot of natural leaders. Rather, they tended to come from hardscrabble circumstances, with an imbued commitment to hard work, a deep respect for education, and a close connection to the land. For these reasons and others, it’s hard to overstate just how important Presbyterianism has been to American environmentalism.  

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Mentor / Mentees

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Eric

On the occasion of a well-deserved retirement. With Stephen H. Browne, Professor Emeritus.

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Recommended Reading – Growth & Degrowth

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Eric

Over the course of 2023 my interest in climate advocacy has carried me deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of climate change causes, which turn out to be the same forces driving a whole host of other ecological problems, culminating in one interconnected global crisis. That crisis is the product of consumer capitalism, with its relentless and singular pursuit of economic growth. This list features both diagnoses of the problem and a variety of proposed solutions.

In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith published a book called The Affluent Society, in which he argued that gross domestic product (GDP) was not a useful metric for gauging economic success. Because it was myopically focused on the production and sale of commodities, indifferent to their use or effects, and driven increasingly by artificial demand manufactured through advertising, GDP was likely to facilitate private sector profits while impoverishing public sector services and failing to address the most basic and vital of human needs for connection, community, and meaning. Galbraith was among the first–and certainly the most prominent–figures to suggest that nations would be wise to abandon the push for growth qua growth and replace it with something more directly indicative of human happiness.

Later, in 1972, a group of scholars associated with the Club of Rome published a volume called Limits to Growth, in which they argued even more emphatically that the dogged pursuit of ever-higher GDP was unsustainable in the long term. Further, it could be directly correlated to a series of damaging environmental impacts, such that continued extraction, production, and waste were certain to perpetuate continued and ever worsening environmental destruction. Concurring with Galbraith that the reigning economic model was conducive to inequality by way of glitzy consumer junk, these writers stressed that it was also toxic to those forms of wealth most important to–and most taken for granted by–human beings, like clean air, clean water, and a stable climate, to name a few.

Then, in 1989, Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, issuing the first long-form alarm about global warming for a general audience. McKibben, too, explained how consumer capitalism was burning through a wealth of natural resources while externalizing the effects into the world that people inhabit, with consequences discernible all the way into the global atmosphere. With characteristic care and clarity, he charted the problem in terms strikingly consistent with the scientific consensus today. If human beings did not change course abruptly, McKibben warned, the near and distant futures appeared alike increasingly bleak. There is a solemnity in his writing that recognized irreparable loss even then.

These books feature among an array of others, from George Perkins Marsh to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Al Gore, that have articulated versions of this concern all along. The economic metabolism of the “developed” world has, for at least eight decades now, generated economic growth by way of ecological destruction and labor exploitation, powering the process with fossil fuels, accumulating wealth in the hands of the few, and unloading the harms onto the impoverished many, primarily those in the “developing” world. It’s a problem with profound economic, ecological, and ethical dimensions, and it will shape every other important issue that we confront from now on. There’s simply no more putting it off.

The books on this list consider the problem in depth. All of them critique capitalism in one way or another, and most propose alternatives. Many of them advocate degrowth specifically, arguing that the future depends upon a controlled drawdown of economic activity designed to prevent environmental damage, reduce inequality, and facilitate the sustainable development of poor nations. Noting the obvious disappointments of consumer capitalism–the loneliness, the emptiness, the lack of fulfillment that invariably accompany the compulsive pursuit of more stuff–these authors argue that a simpler, more authentic, and more community-oriented lifestyle will not just create the conditions for sustainability, but will make us all happier and healthier along the way. There’s a lot to discuss here, but I’m hesitant to say much more because I have a pair of essays on the matter currently in-progress. For now it may suffice to say that changing economic behavior is very difficult to do, and the first step is understanding why a change is needed.

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The Year in Reading, 2023 – Abolitionism & Transcendentalism

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Eric

In 2023 I read a bunch of books on slavery, Abolitionism, Transcendentalism, the major figures and currents of each, and the ties that bound them to one another. The reading list is included here, along with some reflections on the effort. In the coming year I plan to conclude a pair of other projects-in-progress, focusing on American literature through 1900 and American history through 1917.

The year 1776 regularly serves as a synecdoche for American history–as a small part of the thing that stands in for the whole. For many or most Americans, the association of the Declaration of Independence with July of 1776 has forever established that year as a repository for all American myths, themes, and values, such that it has come to encompass all other years within its red, white, and blue mystique. That is, 1776 is the primary–often the only–historical point of reference that Americans carry close at hand, absorbing so much daylight in their eyes that all subsequent decades are cast in deep, impenetrable shadow. Especially on the American Right, 1776 radically simplifies and clarifies what American history means, quickly converting a textured and perplexing collective memory project into what Van Wyck Brooks once termed “a usable past.” This is why Hillsdale’s foray into public historiography had to be called “The 1776 Project,” and why Tea Party activists so frequently wore tricorne hats. It’s why they called themselves “the Tea Party” in the first place.

To observe that 1776 functions synecdochally is also to engage with every stern and overall-ed gentlemen who has ever stood up at a public meeting to admonish someone for mistakenly calling America a democracy, when it is actually a republic. Though true so far as it goes, this is the sort of claim you can make unequivocally only if your historical awareness extends no further than 1800, or if you simply ignore every new state law passed, every Amendment ratified, every reform movement mustered, and every civil war fought in America between the Constitutional Convention and the present. It has been the obvious tendency of the Amendments, for example, to expand the franchise to ever wider categories of citizen, each redistributing political power more evenly among the population and inviting all to use it well. Though the extensions of voting rights first to Black men, next to all women, and finally to everyone over the age of eighteen receive the marquee treatment, we should also note that non-wealthy white men like those now so fond of this quip were largely denied a seat at the political table in America’s most self-consciously republican decades. Up til and during the gradual, state-by-state repeal of property qualifications for voting starting in the 1790s, the Early Republic was administered explicitly by the elites. It’s hard to imagine that this is the sepia past imagined by the “forgotten men and women” of this latest “silent majority.” It would not explain why Donald Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the White House.

But anyway these matters are on my mind now because I recently completed a second pass through American history from the Revolution to the Civil War, focusing this time on Abolitionism and Transcendentalism, specifically. There are fifty very good books on this list, and reading them together has given me a lot to process. One obvious take-away is that some of the nineteenth century’s best and brightest devoted the balance of their time and energy to expanding American freedom in various ways, pushing stubbornly against the horizons of acceptable belief, thought, and practice in religion, politics, and family, all prior to and during the monumental struggle against slavery. That’s a fascinating story containing fascinating stories, so it’s all the more unfortunate that these have been unjustly eclipsed by some fan fiction about Patrick Henry and Paul Revere. Which is not to say that their generation was unimportant, of course. But their generation was not the only one!

Though the Transcendentalists are personal favorites–and though this reading accompanied my first real essays on Emerson and Thoreau as well as my first visit to their homes in Concord–I found the most illuminating parts of the project in other places. Herbert Aptheker’s work on slave uprisings, though old to historians, was new to me, and the May and Burge books on Manifest Destiny and filibustering were really great. (It remains unclear to me, still, how filibuster went from “pirate” to “mercenary” to “very long speech” in American usage.) Someday I’ll read all the way through American history by way of overlapping biographies, a segment of which will take me again through Henry Mayer’s Garrison, David Blight’s Douglass, Megan Marshall’s Fuller, Robert Richardson’s Emerson, Laura Dassow Walls on Thoreau, and David S. Reynolds on Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Taken together, they’re like squares in a colorful quilt.

This fall my reading on the American past has been balanced by a separate project on degrowth economics that leans present and future. I’m wrapping that one up now, and in January will start a new list from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era. On the side I’ll be catching up on great American novels, now up through Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. I also have a bunch of once-read volumes on Latin American history that I want to organize and revisit, but that may have to wait another year. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the month to learn all there is to learn or to understand it adequately. Trying is always, to some extent, a rewarding failure. But the books linked above offer a good start on an important era, and you may consider them recommended reading.

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Current

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Eric
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From Color Line to Colorblind

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Eric

J. Russell Hawkins is Professor of History at Indiana Wesleyan University. Jesse Curtis is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University. Each is the author of a newish book about white evangelicals and colorblind rhetoric in the second half of the twentieth century. This essay considers both in light of the ongoing reappraisal of Christian history and race in America.

In August of 2019, the New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project,” a full-issue effort to approach American history through the interpretive lens of slavery and anti-Black racism. Though previous histories had employed a variety of other lenses—politics, religion, economics, military campaigns, and so on—this project would center race as the definitive variable in the past four centuries of life on these shores. Widely lauded and much-discussed, the issue drew criticism from historians Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood, who affirmed the intent of the project while regretting certain factual inaccuracies. In her determination to emphasize and indict American racism, they argued, reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones had crafted a coherent big picture at the expense of important particularities. An expanded and bound edition appeared in 2021, quickly claiming bestseller status and continuing to stir debate nationwide, informed by the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and a correspondent panic over “critical race theory” in the public schools. The past, present, and nuances of American racism were hashed out everywhere.

At the same time, somewhere within this broad, national reckoning, Christian historians were examining American churches through a comparable racial lens. Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: the Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism appeared in April of 2019, withAnthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: the Politics of Morality in America and Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right going to press in 2021. These are history books that culminate in the present, mapping the route from then to now in order to situate current events, especially as they pertain to white evangelical faith, Republican politics, and the coalescence of the two in Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency. They are also small books with big arguments, painting in broad strokes and so perhaps vulnerable to the same sort of concern that has followed Hannah-Jones. Academic readers who consider these popular histories may want to pair them with some more traditionally academic fare—narrower in focus, more attentive to detail, and rigorously documented via archival research. They will find these in the two books considered here. Each focuses on white evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century, attending specifically to the ways that white evangelicals talked about race—or declined to do so. Both chart a progression from the stern enforcement of the color line in the 1950s and 60s to the strategic adoption of colorblind rhetoric in later years.

Read the whole thing in the Journal of Communication and Religion.

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Communicating Climate Change

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Eric

David Wallace-Wells is editor-at-large for New York Magazine, as well as a contributor at the New York Times. His 2017 article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” later expanded into a 2019 book of the same title, sparked a heated discussion within the climate science community over the rhetorical utility of appeals to fear and to hope. This essay considers the arguments in light of the communication scholarship.

If we were to identify and list important turning points in the national conversation on climate change over the past two decades, one of these would likely fall on July 9, 2017, with the online publication of David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. Widely shared on the internet and soon to be reprised as a bestselling 2019 book, this essay examined an array of worst-case scenarios, asking just how bad the climate crisis could get if global carbon emission continues apace. Though much climate discourse tends to focus on a range of 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming by the end of this century, Wallace-Wells observed that these figures represent the floor of projected change, and that there is no ceiling. Global warming is likely to pass two degrees over preindustrial levels well before 2100, and will not stop there simply because the calendar flips. To take the climate threat seriously is therefore to examine what may happen if the temperature continues to climb, as it surely will, if global governments fail to act. Wallace-Wells imagined three degrees of warming, then four, five, six, and upward, watching as human beings become unsafe out of doors and millions of equatorial refugees migrate toward the poles, as agricultural systems break down and food becomes scarce, as air becomes unbreathable and plagues arise and spread, as economies collapse, as wars are waged, as oceans die, and, ultimately, as the earth is left uninhabitable.

Though Wallace-Wells’ essay contained plenty of fodder for those who charge the climate movement with alarmism and hysteria, the most interesting dissent came from within the community itself. Writing at Vox, David Roberts (2017) cataloged critical responses from climate scientists and writers who charged Wallace-Wells with sowing the seeds of despair. Perhaps the most prominent of these came from Penn State professor Michael Mann, who took to Facebook to critique what he called the essay’s “doomist framing.” In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer (2017) echoed Mann, writing that, “Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” At the New Republic, Emily Atkin (2017) summarized the criticism with the assertion that, “doom-and-gloom is unpersuasive and discouraging.” She then quoted Rutgers professor Jennifer Francis to that effect. “My own experience in speaking to public audiences is that doomsday stories such as this article are so depressing that people shut down and stop listening,” she wrote. “If there is no hope, there will be no action, and goodness knows we need a lot more action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions right now.”

On Twitter, climate scientist and Project Drawdown director Jonathan Foley called the essay “deeply irresponsible,” charging that Wallace-Wells had been “cherry-picking doomsday scenarios.” Zach Labe, of the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California-Irvine, wrote that, “we can reach a much broader audience by talking about impacts and solutions rather than hyperboles.” Climate activist Alec Steffen wrote that, “Despair is never helpful,” and that the piece was “essentially one long council of despair.” Intercept climate writer Kate Aronoff concurred that the essay was not “helpful,” instead exemplifying a troubling proneness to “nihilism” on the activist left. And finally, technologist Ramez Naam critiqued the essay as being “incredibly bleak,” concluding that, “through a combination of exaggeration and hopelessness, it turns away those in the middle that we need to persuade.” Indeed, “it makes action harder” (Roberts, 2017).

In response to these objections, Wallace-Wells suggested that his approach offers an important counterweight to what he considered the too-rosy tenor of mainstream climate discourse. Asked by an interviewer from the Gothamist whether there was any hope, Wallace-Wells responded:

Oh, I would say there’s quite a lot of hope. The conceit of the piece was to survey worst case scenarios in order to ultimately motivate people to action. But one of the things that I worried about as I put it together was that readers would have a fatalistic response to it and I don’t really think that that’s appropriate. At some point in the piece, I talk about almost all of the damage that we’ve done to the planet, in the sense that global warming has occurred over the course of the lifespan of the Greatest Generation. So ultimately, I think, this could be as short a story as a story of two generations. But at the very least we have another lifespan to figure it out, and to take the necessary actions to forestall at least the gruesome worst-case scenarios that I sketched out in the piece (Fishbein, 2017).

For his part, Roberts (2017) agreed, observing that Wallace-Wells’ emphasis on worst case scenarios functions as a glass of cold water thrown in the face of those focused too narrowly on positive outcomes. He wrote that the popular belief that “Things [will] stay roughly as they are” is every bit as improbable as Wallace-Wells’ worst-case scenario, yet it is believed by vastly more people. “Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy,” Roberts wrote, “it looks just like now! — while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very difficult. It’s especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.”

In other words, if it is in fact a problem that too many people are taking climate change too seriously, it remains an exponentially greater problem that too few people are taking climate change half as seriously as they should.

Read the whole thing in the Pennsylvania Communication Annual.

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Speaking of the Culture Wars

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Eric

At the Table, tonight!

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Freedom As and Against Democracy

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Eric

Annelien de Dijn is Professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University. Paul E. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Stephanie A. Martin is the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University. And Robert Asen is the Stephen E. Lucas Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin. Each is author of a recent book on freedom and democracy.

As Annelien de Dijn tells it in her Freedom: An Unruly History, the political story of the West has been written between two concepts of liberty—one democratic, the other modern. The first of these dates to ancient Greece and Rome and defines freedom in terms of democratic self-government. In this understanding, citizens are free to the degree that they are able to participate in the selection and maintenance of the laws to which their community is subject. Unlike slaves—and understood, in fact, as their political opposite—free citizens are empowered to act in the public square. They have the agency to acquire knowledge, to form opinions, to take stands, to persuade others, and perhaps thereby to assist in guiding the course of the state. Along the way, they may enjoy the satisfaction and assurance that accompany the free practice of their citizenship on equal footing with their countrymen, who enjoy that practice as well. This democratic concept of liberty was the original of Western civilization, and remained dominant across the two millennia that followed.

Its usurper is de Dijn’s second concept, with allies as ancient as Plato but without widespread purchase until the turn of the 19th century. This modern concept defines freedom in terms of non-interference from the state. For proponents of this view, citizens are free only to the degree that laws do not bind them, effectively casting government of whatever sort as the antagonist of liberty. Following the turmoil of the 18th century’s Atlantic Revolutions, especially the Terror in France, political thinkers including Benjamin Constant and Edmund Burke reacted to democratic excess by locating freedom within the private individual. Though others have traced this development to the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of market economies, de Dijn asserts that it is best understood as a counterrevolutionary riposte. The presumption that individuals must be prioritized and popular power contained has been widely touted ever since. Today its influence is carved into our increasingly undemocratic institutions.

Unsurprisingly, then, this story of long rise and short but dramatic decline follows a trajectory similar to that of rhetoric itself. Crafted by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, democratic freedom fell out of favor in Medieval Europe but bounced back during the Renaissance, found champions during the Enlightenment, and provided the vital theoretical framework for a generation of revolutionaries who were defiant of subjugation and committed to self-government. In rejecting monarchy, the architects of the United States insisted also on a degree of popular sovereignty. And in securing the franchise for (some) citizens, they built a political system in which persuasion matters, in which good ideas and rhetorical polish could wield real influence. Attractive to the rank-and-file, this model necessarily threatened the elites, who quickly set to work fortifying their institutions against the mass. Early in the 21st century, their work remains evident in gerrymandered districts, disproportionate Senate representation, the Electoral College, and the passage of state-level voting restrictions, including thirty-four new laws across nineteen states in 2021 alone. Because rhetoric and democracy are so closely linked, the deterioration of democratic freedom unavoidably presages the forfeiture of rhetorical power.

De Dijn’s narrative is clearly oriented around this sense of loss. She recalls the Atlantic Revolutions as a collective eruption of democratic potential, ultimately confounded by internal complexities and class antagonisms. If the modern conception of freedom was first animated by fears of democratic anarchy and mob rule, it was refined and popularized by continental liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville who were anxious at the plight of powerless minorities. Adopted then by Federalists and Whigs, it was made to serve primarily as a rampart around the wealthy and a check upon the rest, effectively recasting equality as a threat to liberty rather than its actualization. Challenged by radical movements including abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and labor, modern freedom was revived during the Cold War and represented by a fresh host of intellectual advocates. “Today,” de Dijn laments, “the West’s most ardent freedom fighters (who are now more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal) remain more concerned with limiting state power than with enhancing popular control over government.” Indeed, freedom now serves as “a battering ram against democracy” rather than its raison d’être.

Long and sweeping but precise and detailed, de Dijn’s account provides an illuminating backstory to the present, a compelling context in which to understand what’s happening now. In the United States and Western Europe especially, diversifying populations are altering the composition of the citizenry and so threatening the traditional, hegemonic whiteness of the power structure. In response, resurgent right-wing movements and politicians are relying on restrictive institutions to save them, and the modern conception of freedom to justify that project. By insisting that government remain small and its purview limited, by creatively sorting and containing the voters, and by challenging the legitimacy of elections themselves, the dominant agents of the American Right have worked hard to constrain democratic freedom and to secure their advantages. Over the three sections that follow, this review will consider their progress within three specific venues, applying de Dijn’s two concepts of freedom to the work of rhetorical scholars examining politics, religion, and education in the United States.

Read the whole thing in Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

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American Individuals – A Conversation with Alex Zakaras

Posted on February 21, 2023 by Eric

Alex Zakaras is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. In his new book, The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson, he returns to the early nineteenth century to trace the mythology of the self-made man in the United States, an ideological tradition that has shaped our national identity ever since.

ECM: Your book grounds American individualism within three political myths. Can you tell us about them?

AZ: My approach to Jacksonian America is focused on the political stories that were told over and over again in the newspapers, sermons, and political speeches of the time. In considering these, I found myself drawn to certain foundational myths—narratives that establish what America is and who its people are. These glorified stories claim to reveal what is exceptional or distinctive or virtuous about the nation, and they ground powerful forms of collective identity that help Americans understand who they are as citizens. At the same time, they usually dramatize some sort of urgent threat. So, in celebrating and idealizing American liberty, for example, they foreground the danger that liberty might be extinguished. The more I immersed myself in these texts, the more I came to believe that there were three powerful myths, in particular, that structured the political arguments of the period.

The first of these is the myth of the individual proprietor, which says that America is distinctive for the ubiquitous presence of the property-owning farmer. This is a man who owns his own plot of land, who is not beholden to anyone economically, and who is, therefore, independent in both body and mind. The second is the myth of the rights-bearer, which is grounded in the Declaration of Independence and the Bills of Rights, and which says that Americans are distinctive because they enjoy a broad slate of rights, understood primarily as immunities from interference by government. The third is the myth of the self-made man, which emphasizes social and economic mobility. It says that Americans can be who they want to be, they are not restricted by the limits of inherited social caste or station, and, if they work hard and live frugally, there is no upper limit on what they can achieve. It imagines America as an essentially fluid society in which the talented and meritorious are constantly rising while the lazy are falling, which creates a relentless churn that ensures everyone is always where they ought to be. 

ECM: Are these ideas rooted in America itself? Were they imported from Europe or elsewhere?

AZ: Americans certainly borrowed and adapted European ideas, especially from British political culture. But they changed when they arrived in America, and it’s fascinating to trace the ways that they evolved and were reformulated for a new political, social, and economic reality. In England, for example, the idea of the independent proprietor often described a middle-class minority, a middling sort of farmer or artisan wedged between the landed gentry and the propertyless masses. But in America, independent proprietorship was much more widely accessible. It melded with the democratic idea and was asserted as an entitlement for all white men that then anchored the populist politics of the Jacksonian Democratic Party. The idea of natural rights followed a similar trajectory: White men in America used it, increasingly, as a weapon against social and economic inequalities. The idea of the self-made man was more of a distinctly American bit of lore, traceable to Benjamin Franklin and others who authored and exported the claim that anyone could succeed in America.

ECM: Were they influenced by the religious currents of the time?

AZ: The Jacksonian Era was a time of tremendous religious upheaval. The Second Great Awakening was sweeping through and transforming America into a much more devoutly religious nation. One of the tendencies that you find among the popular evangelical preachers of the time is a real emphasis on individual conscience and judgment. Theirs was an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian religious movement that was constantly criticizing the religious establishment and the book-learning and the paternalism of the religious elites who dominated the churches of the Eastern Seaboard. Its message was simply that the only reliable way to know God was through your own experience and your own direct encounter with Scripture. Religious authorities were denounced, more often than not, as sources of corruption. Evangelical preachers placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that Christ was the son of a carpenter, Peter was a fisherman, and the Gospels were conveyed by men who did not have a great deal of education but who were chosen to receive and share God’s word. The example suggested that individuals should cast aside received truths, heed their own intuitions, follow their own prophetic visions, and that the individual might read Scripture for himself and receive instruction directly from it. This sort of anti-elitism featured prominently in the political rhetoric of the time as well—in the belief that politics, like religion, was a simple affair, that everyone is equally qualified to weigh in, that we should trust our own judgments, etc. Many evangelical preachers also embraced Arminianism: They criticized the old Calvinist notion of election and replaced it with the claim that individual conversion is a matter of individual choice. This too fit with the ethos of the emerging market economy and with a political culture centered on individual rights and liberties.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Book Bans & Apple Pie

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Eric

Since 2021, American public school boards have been targeted by a coordinated campaign intent on revising curricula, altering policies, and banning books. Especially after Glenn Youngkin’s surprise victory in the Virginia Governor’s race that fall, the rhetorical power of child- and school-based concerns has been revealed and cultivated. This movement is active here in Pennsylvania, where it has staked a claim on American values.

Back in 2010, I began writing a doctoral dissertation on the role of classically liberal language in culture war rhetoric. Specifically, I was interested in the various ways that terms like liberty, freedom, and rights had been adopted by religious-political movements to align their goals with core American values. I was especially focused on conservative movements, since they seemed to do this sort of thing a lot more often (and a lot more successfully) than their counterparts on the left. After completing and defending the manuscript in 2012, I sliced it up and sent it out as a series of six journal articles. The crux of the argument appeared in the first of these, “Fighting for Freedom: Liberal Argumentation in Culture War Rhetoric.”

That essay considers the speech and writing of conservative columnist and National Organization for Marriage founder Maggie Gallagher, who worked tirelessly to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States prior to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. A devout Catholic, Gallagher might have opposed same-sex marriage from an explicitly religious angle, arguing that it violates God’s will for the institution—a view that she plainly held. But because she was also a shrewd politician, she instead pressed the argument that legalization would violate the religious liberty of its opponents. Her rhetoric advanced a religious claim in a liberal frame, in other words, hoping thereby to persuade centrists at a time when public opinion was trending steadily against her. Allies rallied, but critics smelled a rhetorical bait-and-switch.

There’s nothing wrong with religious figures drawing on liberal premises to make arguments in public, of course, and ultimately I endorsed the view that the strategy is beneficial if it allows competing factions to confront each other in a shared vocabulary. But as Gallagher demonstrates, it may also have limited prospects for success. If you’re really out to represent God, on any issue, then your claim to represent liberty may make for an awkward fit. The extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples did not really violate the liberties of conservative Christians who disapproved, and the concerted effort to claim otherwise survived only as long as it seemed useful to Republican politics. When it became a liability, Gallagher lost her platform. I, too, have mostly moved on from these sorts of questions. But I’ve been thinking through them again since learning about “Moms for Liberty.”

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I might not have learned about the Moms at all except that they turned up at Warwick High School, my alma mater in Lititz, Pennsylvania. A national advocacy organization established in January of 2021 and based in Florida, Moms for Liberty is “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” Its co-founders are former school board members, and its advocacy is focused on local politics. As of last year, the group claimed 195 chapters in 37 states, with nearly 100,000 members. Their website features a map on which these chapters are documented, with many clustered in Florida, South Carolina, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. One of these is in Lancaster County.

The Lancaster chapter is led by a woman named Rachel Wilson Snyder, who addressed the Warwick School Board on December 20. Also present were members of “Warwick Parents for Change,” an affiliated group that has been frequenting school board meetings and raising concerns about district policies and curricula. Their objections have focused so far on gender definitions, approaches to “equity,” and the inclusion of certain books in the high school library or among course assignments. At a meeting on November 29, speakers identified a pair of books as particularly troubling. One of these, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, is an assigned reading in sophomore English classes. The other, Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel Gender Queer, is not assigned but is available in the library. Both appear on American Library Association lists of most frequently challenged books from 2020 and 2021, meaning that each is a popular target of groups that claim to stand for liberty, animated by what they call parental rights.

Critics of these groups question whether liberty or rights are really at stake, and they seem to doubt that this top-down campaign is really about books. Citing a local effort to mobilize pastors and churches against Warwick’s curricula, some in Lititz have decried an effort to impose a “Christian worldview” on public school students. Others have pointed out that, though most objections focus on bad language and racy images, All American Boys and Gender Queer serve as conversation starters on race and gender, a pair of topics that the largely white, straight opposition evidently does not want to discuss. For district supporters, freedom’s just another word for letting students read.

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