What Has Been

Featured

Jan 2

Given her painful loss to Donald Trump, surely the most unfortunate of Kamala Harris’ verbal tics was her frequent celebration of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” Jokes about has-been aside, the phrase always struck me as a pitch-perfect expression of how a lot of Americans have learned to feel about history. For Harris, and for many of us, history is a weight – as in, a thing that weighs you down, like heavy boots on a runner. The past is a drag.

I think a lot of this comes from a widespread sense that the past is not real. Not real like the present is real, or real like the future will be. The past has weight, but it’s the weight of an illusion, a weight that disappears as soon as you realize it’s already gone. It’s often been suggested that Americans are especially prone to this kind of thinking, because we were founded by people who were fleeing the stodgy old European past, building a new city on a hill, and lighting out for the territories when that new city got old in its turn.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl says that not only is the past real, it’s the only part of our experience that is. The past may seem ephemeral, like it’s “just one damned thing after another,” a record of vanity, a monument to the transitoriness of human life. History may seem like “bunk.” But Frankl argues to the contrary that “the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities . . . as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. . . . Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.”

Frankl’s idea is that the present is nothing in itself: it is only the point of “potentiality,” the point at which we choose between this and that. And the future exists only as a fantasy of actualized potential. It is only the past that has weight – but now the connotation of that word is reversed. For Frankl, the weight of the past is ballast: not something that keeps you from moving forward, but something that keeps you steady as you do. When we see it like this, the past makes us “not pessimistic but rather activistic,” because it gives weight to each choice we make, each “potentiality” that we “actualize.” It gives meaning to life. The old have no reason to envy the young, because the old person can say to the young person: “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered.”

Frankl is talking about the history of an individual life, but I think the same is true for the history of a nation. The weight of a nation’s past is what makes that nation real. Unless its people have a certain kind of love for their history, the nation is just an empty space for the making of choices rendered meaningless by the sense that as soon as they are made they become nothing but a burden. In that vacuum its people then look desperately to “the future” for a meaning that can only be found in the past.

I remember that when I was younger and people asked me whether I wanted to do this or that, or what my plans for the future were, I liked to reply that I was “keeping my options open.” I liked to say that because it made me seem, to myself if not to others, that I was “free.” The idea that freedom is a matter of “keeping your options open” is a typically adolescent mistake. Hegel, the philosopher of history par excellence, has a lot to say about this error (which for him is perhaps a necessary one, a stage of development that is only a problem when the development is arrested). “A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity. . . Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself.” What a perfect description of my teenage self, and of most teenagers’ selves: inertia, mistaken for momentum.

Alongside the idea that Americans are especially given to thinking in this adolescent way about “freedom” because we are descended from rebels and pioneers, there is also the frequent suggestion that America is future-oriented because America itself is a young country, an adolescent among nations. I know that it is only as I have grown older that I have developed a genuine interest in both my own and my country’s history (as opposed to a merely intellectual embrace of the abstract claim that “history matters”). There is something natural about this, something developmentally appropriate: the younger we are, the less experience we have, and the more potential, since most of our lives are ahead of us. In Frankl’s terms, the younger we are the less real we are, and so we quite appropriately spend most of our time thinking about the potentialities we might someday actualize. Maybe then it is the same with America: if we are obsessed with the future, it is because we do not yet have enough of a past.

But this is a faulty analogy. America is young relative to other nations, but persons are not nations. Individual Americans, even if they are very old, are nowhere near as old as their country, and of course their country’s history does not begin in 1776 except in the narrowest sense. If we are young people we have some excuse for thinking that the past is a “drag,” but no such excuse is available to us simply because we are citizens of a young nation. It is our country’s ideology, not our country’s age, that leads many of us to disparage the past as “what has been” and to forget that having been is the surest kind of being, as Frankl puts it.

Given our long-standing attitude to the past, now combined with our new media technologies, I don’t think it’s surprising if Americans are increasingly afflicted by what the novelist David Shields called “reality hunger.” “Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any,” wrote Shields. Our hunger for real events drives us to seek them in simulations that market themselves as “reality” (as in “reality TV”), simulations which include much of what we call politics. Many observers will point out that a reality TV star has just been elected president (again), and they will conclude that our “hunger” is for the reality of “facts,” and that we are hungry because we live in an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” But I think this emphasis on “facts” is misguided, even though facts matter enormously, because we have a shallow notion of what “facts” are. Facts, as any good philosopher of science will tell you, are not things in the world. They are stories about things: true stories (ostensibly), but always partial, as all stories are. “From the standpoint of the person, place, or thing itself, of Reality itself,” writes Wendell Berry, “it doesn’t make any difference whether our pictures are factual or imagined . . . All of them literally are fictions – things made by humans, things never equal to the reality they are about . . .”

There is a difference between fiction and non-fiction, but non-fiction is still story-telling. Our hunger is not for “facts” as we tend to misunderstand them: after all, there are always more facts than you could possibly digest, now more than ever. No, we are hungry for true stories, for things, for events, for action that commits itself and so lays down something that we can rightly call reality, something which is hopefully adequate to Berry’s capital-R Reality. We are hungry for history. And as Frankl says, this hunger is not pessimistic but “activistic.” To nourish ourselves with history is to work up an appetite for the resolutions that make history, and thus make us real.

To root our work as citizens in a love for our country’s history is to take up a stance of hope – which is very different from optimism. As Christopher Lasch puts it, optimism is “a kind of cheerful fatalism, which assumes that we are carried along on an irresistible flood of innovation.” By contrast, hope “rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories—no doubt distorted, overlaid with later memories, and thus not wholly reliable as a guide to any factual reconstruction of past events—in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionment cannot dislodge it. Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakeable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced . . .”

Optimism about our country’s future naturally will not come from an acquaintance with our past, since our past is full of sin and suffering. Hopeless nostalgics who deny that this is true and insist on reading only the most cheerful versions of American history, versions in which the past was better than the present, lend credence to the pessimists who eagerly accept the record of sin and suffering as proof that the past is only a burden on the future they wish to create. Neither the nostalgics or the pessimists actually love history: they use history for their own purposes. Our history is not their reality: it is only their tool.

Our challenge is to cultivate in ourselves and in our fellow citizens a genuine love for our country’s history, a sober delight in what’s ours, a sense of being home in it, not only in “the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered,” especially when our forebears include those who inflicted the suffering. This is a tall order. Feelings will run high. But as much as history is a site of conflict today – witness the fight over the 1619 Project, or the hubbub caused by Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with a revisionist telling of World War II in which Churchill is a villain - it is good to engage this conflict, because history is also the only possible source of real common ground. Without a shared past, all we can have in common is a perpetual present of infinitely “free choice,” or a thin fantasy of some future utopia. People hungry for reality need more than that thin gruel.