Symbols and American Politics
Tomorrow, June 14th, is Flag Day. It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States by the Second Continental Congress in 1777. As is typically the case the White House recently issued its Flag Week and Flag Day Proclamation. In it, President Biden says that the flag “is a reminder of our Nation’s founding principle” [note the singular] that “all are created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout all their lives.” It also reminds us of “our shared calling” in promoting “democracy, freedom, and justice for all.” The flag, he continues, acts “as a beacon of light and purpose at home and around the globe.” The Proclamation can’t resist a thinly veiled shot at Biden’s predecessor, and concludes by encouraging “the people of the United States to observe with pride and all due ceremony those days from Flag Day through Independence Day, set aside by the Congress (89 Stat. 211), as a time to honor the American spirit, to celebrate our history and the foundational values we strive to uphold, and to publicly recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.”
There’s quite a lot to unpack here, but I want to focus on the importance of symbols in any polity. On the one hand, we can look at the flag and say that it’s only a piece of cloth dyed in three colors that has no intrinsic meaning unless we give it that meaning, and that furthermore there is no fixed meaning to the cloth but only a series of imposed meanings that hopefully we can all agree upon. A symbol that works well conveys its meaning at a fairly deep emotional level and will evoke similar emotions in all those who view it. In other words, the symbol carries a kind of universal meaning that is respected, cherished, and aspirational to all.
This is to say that the symbol itself has no inherent meaning; its significance derives from what it conveys or, more accurately, represents. The monetary value of my wedding ring is probably around $100, but its symbolic value is priceless. It reminds me and my wife of the promises we made to one another and the claim we have on one another. In other words, it represents the nature of marriage itself — not momentary infatuation but an indivisible bond. The more important the bond, the more essential the symbol.
But we also seek to re-present something when it is no longer immediately present, or when its presence is sporadic. If my wife is on vacation, I might look at her picture to remind myself of her, and that picture might evoke strong emotions in me and make me long for her presence once again. The situation would intensify if her absence were permanent: now the pictures represent what once was but can no longer be, and thus wistful joy becomes deep sorrow. A trinket that belonged to a deceased loved one may, in some ways, bring that person back into our presence by re-presenting that person. The trinket could never be the fullness of the person, of course, but serves as an essential reminder of our relationship, who I am, and what really matters in life. The more absent or mysterious the thing is, the more the symbols matter.
This is especially true of religious symbols. In the ancient world of intracosmic deities the relationship between symbol and thing was largely undifferentiated. The sun or the ocean or the bear or the Pharaoh was a god. So long as that “thing” was present, god was present. In differentiating between God and things in the cosmos, Judaism (and then Christianity) brought the problem of religious symbolism to new heights. God could be in the burning bush, but was not the bush. God could send a pillar of fire, but was not the pillar of fire. The more radically transcendent we understand God to be, the more desperately we need symbols to make God present to us. Religious rituals attempt to make God present without diminishing God’s transcendence and holiness. When those symbols lose their evocative power we become keenly aware of God’s absence.
This became an enormous problem for 19th and 20th century philosophers for whom the symbols of faith no longer re-presented God in a compelling way. There are a variety of reasons why this might be the case. Perhaps we have become overly familiar with the symbols and they now become simply objects that exist alongside other (non-symbolic) objects. They might do their job poorly, trivializing the thing they mean to represent. Or perhaps we no longer believe in the thing the symbol means to represent (for example, if going through a nasty divorce we might get rid of our wedding rings and conclude that marriage itself is an unworkable arrangement; indeed, the symbolic reduction of marriage to “just a piece of paper” indicates that the institution no longer carries the purpose and meaning it once did). Or perhaps our experiences have turned us against God (this is what theologians refer to as “the problem of evil”). Or perhaps we deeply disagree over that which is represented. We might also overvalue the symbol thus making an idol of it, mistaking the symbol for that which it represents.
We should never underestimate the effects of desecrating symbols. Symbols operate as a connector between the profane or the secular and the sacred. By profanizing the symbol we also make the genuinely sacred thing more profane in the process. This is why we develop elaborate protections around our sacred symbols — not for the sake of the symbol itself, but because of the sacrality of the thing it represents. One way we desecrate symbols is through overexposure or, worse, through commodifying them. In an open market economy it proves difficult to protect symbols against their commodification. Another way we desecrate them is through some kind of destruction or mutilation of the symbol. The two can be confused: the controversy over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ resulted from confusion over what it was meant to represent. Serrano wanted it to shock us because he believed the symbol of the crucifixion had already been desecrated through its commodification, while many who viewed it saw only a profane vandalizing of the image.
Which brings us back to the flag. Biden’s proclamation rightly indicates that the flag is there to remind us of … something, and the president resorts to some rather abstract ideas — or rather, one abstract idea. If I say that a photo represents my wife, the relationship between image and reality is a clear one. I might say that a certain photo is a bad one, but that judgement results from my intimate knowledge of what she really looks like. But we don’t have that luxury with ideas, which do not admit of perception. Democracy, freedom, justice, equality — in many ways these are already (linguistic) symbols, which would make the flag the symbol of a symbol. The problem is we can’t directly perceive these things. Nor can we directly perceive the main thing the flag represents: the nation itself. Our knowledge of the whole only comes through fitful perceptions of the parts.
This reflects a central problem in political life: what is the process by which a people not only become a people and, as importantly, become aware of themselves as a people? How do “a people” gather themselves in a particular place at a particular time and dedicate themselves to forming a polity? Our contention is that understanding a “nation” or any political entity can only be accomplished by attention to the symbols and myths by which alone its genuine purpose and meaning can be understood. We must begin with a people’s self-interpretation or self-understanding of themselves as a political society, and this understanding will only take place within a broader understanding of “history” and of reality itself. The basic questions of life — who am I? Where did I come from? Whither am I going? How am I to live? What is my purpose? How do I understand the life and death of successive generations and what role do I play in that succession? What is the nature of good and evil? — apply equally to political societies as they do to individuals. What do we consider to be true, to be good, to be beautiful, to be worthy of our efforts?
“Nations” cannot avoid these questions as they prepare themselves for action in the world and in history, both internally and alongside other peoples who are similarly constituting themselves and creating their own symbols and myths as an act of self-understanding. In their early stages, these symbols and myths may look similar to those in ancient religions: that is to say, we make little distinction between the symbol and the thing being represented. They are very compressed and don’t admit easily of rational analysis or being turned into “propositions.” A polity that aspires to anything more than a relation of command and obedience will understand itself as a kind of political symbol, as carrying within itself some sort of transcendent or historical purpose. That purpose, as we argued in our Memorial Day essays, will compel citizens to set aside their individual interests and make sacrifices for it. Those sacrifices in turn deepen and advance the mythology that the nation carries a deeper purpose and meaning. No one tried harder to articulate this dynamic than did Abraham Lincoln.
The flag is the preeminent, immediately perceivable symbol of all this. It’s why we salute it, why we drape it on the coffins of our war dead, why we have elaborate rules for its care, preservation, and disposal. It’s why flag-burning incenses some people. Some would make the argument that burning the flag is itself a symbolic gesture, and I suppose it is, but this claim makes a series of errors. First, we find in the Constitutional period nothing like our ideas of “freedom of expression” that would allow for the desecration of sacred symbols. Try spraying graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial and see what happens. Second, it takes one element of our historical self-understanding – the emphasis on rights – and treats it as if it were the whole of the thing. Our historic identity as a people is about far more than freedom of speech (or equality), as essential as that is, and the flag represents the whole of this thing we call America, not just a part of it. Third, it violates our idea of honor and our respect for the sacrifices people have made.* Washington’s favorite play, Joseph Addison’s Cato, emphasized the importance of honor in any well-ordered society.
Honour’s a sacred tie,
the law of kings,
The noble mind’s distinguishing perfection,
That aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her,
And imitates her actions, where she is not:
It ought not to be sported with.
Compare the flag to other symbols. No one would get upset over burning the presidential seal but that person might go ballistic if someone burns a flag; no one gets upset if people take a knee during the playing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” but take one during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at your own peril. My wife doesn’t like it when I spin my wedding ring on the table, not because she’s afraid I might lose it but because it demonstrates a lack of respect. The obvious point is that a piece of gold commands no respect in itself, but it does when referred to that which it represents, and that she doesn’t want me treating cavalierly. Nor can I defend myself simply by reference to having a “right” to spin the ring.
As we said, a people generate symbols and myths as a way of understanding political society itself as a kind of representation of reality itself. Part of our difficulty results from the fact that this whole process exists in time as a way of making sense of time. The meaning of symbols and myths are thus susceptible to change. Indeed, the answers political societies give to the above questions will change over time, and thus the whole system of political representation and symbolization is necessarily unstable. Political thinkers, in an effort to stabilize the regime, will often take those symbols and myths and “demythologize” them, that is, separate out the false or superstitious elements from the true and scientific ones and turn the latter into “propositions” that are unchanging and universal. Philosophy thus eclipses mythology. This undesirable state of affairs can nonetheless help clarify and possibly reanimate symbols which might otherwise seem dead to us. We might gain something in clarity, but we also lose a lot in suggestive richness and the ways in which symbols and myths appeal to our imaginations and emotions. Our ideas of freedom and equality have certainly changed since our early symbols and myths, and in some ways for the better, although a sober analysis requires us conceding in some ways for the worse as well — but that judgment requires a set of criteria based on how we understand the realities the symbols are meant to represent.
The fact that we have such difficulty understanding and defining what freedom and equality are and how they operate testifies to the importance of myths and stories as the people unfold their self-understanding. The debates over the 1619 project were not debates about whether we affirm the proposition of equality but about what myths and stories articulate the proposition more clearly. That, again, is taking the complex whole of something and reducing it to one simple element, and in this instance even at the risk of falsification. But that’s an inherent problem with myths: they easily admit of falsification.
We’ve argued that myths and symbols elaborate a people’s self-understanding and self-interpretation as they engage in the process of constituting themselves as an historical entity. One of the biggest mistakes those people can make is when they symbolize themselves acting as history rather than acting in history. This tendency to elevate the nation or a particular set of political actions into the meaning and purpose of history itself is an old and dangerous temptation, and one to which, if I may, history is indifferent as it litters its landscape with failed empires. History is also indifferent to the arrogance of those convinced they are acting on the right side of it even as we are in the process of making it.
Our flag has evolved as our nation has evolved, not only in the sense that it has more stars on it, but in the sense that it represents something different now than it did 247 years ago. For one thing, we no longer think of the “United States” in the plural; we are “one nation.” Its color scheme may mean something different for us than it did for Betsy Ross. Despite the ways in which we’ve commodified it, profaned it, and ignored it, it still flies as a reminder not only of what we created ourselves to be but also what we might still become, if we are up to the task of becoming a people once again.
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*Again, no one articulated this with more clarity than did Lincoln, especially in the famous Gettsyburg Address where he declares the ground itself “hallowed” and “consecrated” by those “honored dead.” It is now up to us, he said, to make sure that those “who gave the last full measure of their devotion” to the nation “shall not have died in vain.”
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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