What Would They Think of Us?

Sid and I watched the John Adams video from PBS the other day. Paul Giamatti plays the title role as a man of undoubted passion and deep political philosophy but with dubious social skills and absolutely no tact. His self-awareness stops at the boundary of his own reputation, about which he is sensitive to the point of paranoia, even though he seems to understand the limitations of his own personality. “I am not a tactful man,” he admits frequently but without any obvious plan for changing it.

I was struck by several things in this presentation. As with any historical drama, there is always the potential for historical creep—what I call the artistic problem of whether to take historical figures out of their time and judge them by contemporary standards. I had this same problem in writing about Aonio Paleario, a 16th Century Italian academic who was a major character in my novel Every Purpose Under Heaven. I solved my challenge by having it both ways. I have him defend himself in a debate with a modern man who is his equal. The result became a conversation across time, the kind of exchange I would love to have with some of my ancestors, whose folly has visited itself on my life these generations later.

My own curiosity thus leads me to wonder what such a conversation might look like if we were indeed able to go back and somehow talk with the political leaders from three hundred years ago. My take is that once they got over the culture shock of what our technology has produced, I doubt that they would find us very different.

For example, I think they would recognize our sometimes vulgar political infighting. While we may be a bit more restrained than the member of the Continental Congress who called Adams, among other things, a hermaphrodite, currently there is a cartoon circulating on the internet showing open-mouthed public figures (all Democrats) along with Hitler and Bin Laden etc. under the heading of “assholes of the world.” The person who sent it out (Republican) thinks it very amusing. Personal attack appears always to have been part of the American political tradition. There must be something very satisfying about name-calling rather than debating, something in the tradition of the loudest and most offensive voice wins.

Chances are these men from three hundred years ago would also see the endurance of one type of American personality. Many of those who made the treacherous journey to the New World were restless, rebellious, volcanic, and non-conformist—I think here of Tom Payne, who came from Lewes, just a hop-step from where I grew up in England. I doubt these men would have accepted authority if given the chance to resist—and I suspect this type is out living today in a shack in the wilds of Montana armed with enough guns to start WWIII. The American frontier ended only a hundred years or so ago, and once outer space is ready for colonization, I predict that these restless Americans will be among the first to go.

On the other hand, I believe the founders would be shocked at the ignorance and lack of education among many modern Americans despite its availability. Before universal education, only wealthy families could afford tutors for their sons who went to the private universities (Adams went to Harvard); women, even in wealthy families, often went begging (as my grandfather told my mother, he wasn’t going to pay for her education because that was just giving something to another man).

The underlying principle of public education was political, to create educated voters, but the benefits to someone like me who was provided with basic education and state-subsidized higher education are beyond calculation. Our gratitude for this blessing should be everywhere apparent, and yet all too often a strain of American anti-intellectualism clouds over the wonder of knowing who we are and where we come from. I personally find little to admire in the current habit of labeling anything the government supports as “socialism” (i.e. very bad, just like using the term communist back in the fifties) when it is clear that the person using the term has not taken the time eitherto understand its meaning or to recognize that public education is one benefit of government. Parents arguing for lower (i.e. more state funded) tuition might stop to consider that it might be more socialized education they are calling for.

Socialized benefits are all around us and we take them for granted. I think the original thinkers would point out our hypocrisy because the political thought behind the various documents that American’s cling to was the product of 18th Century enlightenment philosophies—which are the most self-aware I know of. So I think our sometimes pride in our own ignorance would appall our ancestors.