The Weight of History

Several months ago, I asked my students to reflect on the following quote:

I decided not tell them that the quote is from Marx. I had several students who read it and just weren't interested in thinking about what it means. They saw big words and didn't want to put forth the effort necessary to understand them. Rather than fight that fight, I recited the lyrics to a Peter Mayer song which get at the same point as Marx:

To me, one of the fundamental flaws of the libertarian position is that we don't all start out on equal footing. This country is not a meritocracy, and it takes more than some can-do-American attitude to survive. Perhaps if no one could inherit anything, and everybody got an equal education, diet, job opportunity, etc., then maybe libertarianism would start to make some sense. But that is not the world in which we live. Our property taxes pay for our schools, so the wealthier a district's tax base is, the better education the students receive. With property values and taxes beyond the reach of median income homes, poorer families get priced out, the wealthy stay wealthy, the poor stay poor, and the cycle continues.

Atlas, bearing the weight of the world

History weighs heavily on our shoulders. We do not choose the circumstances into which we are born. In fact, those circumstances are a large part of what makes us who we are. The poor are not poor because they are lazy; they are poor because they were educated and trained to be poor. I remember Nathan, my roommate in Tallahassee, explaining to me how the local youth treated money. To them, it wasn't a tool or something to save. It was simply this stuff you had to have to get this other stuff that you wanted. Nathan told me about a kid going into the corner store to buy some junk food.

The boy didn't know how to keep track of what he spent or what was owed to him. Money was metal and paper you trade for chips and soda. He had never been taught otherwise because his parents had never been taught otherwise. His parents think money is metal and paper you trade for big speakers and tattoos, how could they have taught him differently?

But the heavy coat of history, to borrow an image from Billy Collins, has more woven in its pockets than education. Entire systems and institutions, belief structures and capital, are all anchored fast in those folds. As I've mentioned before, Max Weber uses a train to imagine history, with men and women working only to operate the switches, nudging its immense momentum a little this way or that.

As someone on the left, I think that one of the primary roles of government is to try and mitigate the landscape of history onto which we are born. I don't like the "level the playing field" analogy. This is no game, and in general no one is on our team save our immediate friends and family—and our community if we are fortunate enough to have one. That which is "ours" is ours by simple virtue of a string of historical accidents (even the very notion personal property itself didn't exist until colonial times). The individual has influence in her life, sure, but less than we are told by the pundits. My grandfather worked his way from flipping burgers to owning a tree farm and enough real estate around town to pay for all us grandchildren to go to college. But he had help too. His dad taught him the value of hard work and how to manage his money smartly. He gave my grandfather his first few jobs, helping him get started. They were both white men, back when that mattered even more than it still does today. Nobody makes himself entirely. We are social beings, inextricably tied to society, a society with a complicated past, a past which presses down on us in ways most of us never see. The French sociologist Bourdieu called it our habitus: the invisible workings of culture which govern things like what is "natural", what is "normal", what is "common sense".

I showed my students these quotes because I wanted them to have some notion that their lot in life isn't the result of something wrong they or their parents have done. To realize that you are a historical being can be a great relief. It can also lead to a sense of apathy, helplessness, or nihilism, so tread lightly. I had hoped they would see themselves as part of something bigger. It's always hard to know if I got through to any of them. After I recited the song, one of my more vocal, far right leaning students said, "Wow...that's actually pretty deep Gardner...I'm going to have to think about that." Smiling I said, "That's all I'm asking."

History is alive: it moves with us, guides our steps or trips us unseen. So, friends, to all the living be kind. Get to know your neighbors, form bonds, plant gardens. Help to build a society that helps to build us all.