A recent history book, “Lost Worlds” by Patrick Wyman, calls out a mindset that looks for “direction or pattern behind (human history’s) complexity … in which the primary role of people in the past was to bring our present world into being.” Much historical writing aims to trace evolutionary schemas of social development. Wyman, per his reviewer, focuses on many that don’t fit, asking the reader to “approach such societies on their own terms, rather than shoehorning them into a particular slot on a scale of progress.”
Much public discourse, on reflection, comprises expressions from enabled, articulate persons, in various voices such as observer, critic, predictor, or, in some cases, would-be leader of human conduct. This discourse is conducted in terms of patterns and directions of society. Much of it treats “ordinary people … in their concrete reality” as evidence for the claims of observer or critic or would-be leader. The historians among them are the ones who shoehorn past societies into their scales of progress, rather than approaching them on their own terms. Many of the others are surely aware that society’s doings today may become tomorrow’s history, some no doubt aiming to be history makers. As such, the overt participants in public discourse, call them “discoursers,” constitute a distinct community, even as many of them hold diverse, even bitterly conflicting, views.
All individuals have their own motivations, but to the extent that the food bank volunteer also campaigns for public welfare programs, or the charter school founder for prayer in public schools, they are players in that “discourser community.” To the extent they are, they have a personal stake, outside the beneficial effects of their actions. For ordinary people swept up in public concerns, a White job applicant who feels his application faces an extra hurdle in an employer’s affirmative action compliance, or a Black tenant who perceives “slow lane” treatment from a landlord, the job or the leaky ceiling are the point. If some “ism” is invoked to support their case, fine. But for active discoursers, particularly the advocates and politicians, it’s also about garnering and stoking supporters’ allegiance, gaining a contribution, winning an election or legislative vote, promoting a cause, or simply out-arguing someone who disagrees.
Many of these people are simply pursuing their careers. The detached analysis is part and parcel of whole layers of professional work. Wealth advisors, journalists, the new professional influencers, fundraisers, business analysts, critics, media programmers, even sports commentators, not to mention social scientists in their various chairs, all deal in terms of aggregated, non-personal behavior. Post-industrial society has created this new layer of economic activity, with careers and their ladders to scale as a marker of success. And there is an ambition in much of it.
The objects of discussion in this discourse are concepts. Political progressives, particularly opponents of Donald Trump, often invoke a “backsliding of democracy.” This diction, whatever anyone thinks of activists’ and advocates’ politics, treats “democracy,” as a label, a destination point of a vector on which humanity moves either forward or backward. The ordinary people who deal with costs and benefits of public policy are valued as exemplars of a trend, shoehorned into someone’s conceptual argument.
The same thing happens on the other side of the partisan trench line. Stephen Miller, the Trump administration White House aide, speaks of Realpolitik, saying “we live in a world … that is governed by force, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller has little reason to fear for food, territory or survival that drove those iron laws at the beginning of time. He is arguing over the idea. His goal is to defeat political adversaries whom he sees as naïve or false idealists.
Much of human history has been shaped by ideas and political movements and innovation aimed at social progress. Much has also been moved by unwitting efforts of ordinary people, dealing with life’s concrete realities. “Hunters in Iran’s Zagros mountains who protected and managed wild ibexes, for example, had no idea that their actions would lead to the domestication of the goat,” Wyman notes. People exist for their own purposes, with no intention to move history – they might, but for most, any movement is byproduct of happenstance.
America exists for these people as much as anyone else; by the unalienable rights all persons can live by their own lights, for their own ends. Freedom and development have enabled, and ought to enable, more of the ordinary folk to choose the lights they live by. The would-be history makers in America are also free to try their hand, in their choice of how to act on their own rights. But to the extent they treat others as clay to be shaped or guided by enlightened purpose, they will face a justified suspicion, and even resentment. Governments exist to secure the unalienable rights for all, who are endowed with them equally. Authority, official or moral, credentialed or charismatic, has no call under our creed except to serve. As Wyman asks of historians, so we should ask of our analytical, educated population.
What can the silent, the pre-occupied, the struggling-to-make-it-all-work, do? America’s first answer is “whatever they choose.” Freedom is for people as we dream our dreams and contend with concrete realities. Of course any free person has an interest in preserving that freedom. We all bear a self-interested burden to maintain this nation, as vessel of the rights by which we conceived ourselves a people in the Declaration of Independence. But it is for those who live for life, rather than for the sake of someone’s disembodied idea, that the nation exists.
Common Conviction 