“Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation”*

I came across the (mis-)quote above from the 19^th Century French orientalist Ernest Renan in the most recent Julian Barnes novel Elizabeth Finch. Barnes notes the import of “being” and not “becoming”. Getting history wrong is not just part of the foundation of a nation on these terms but an ongoing process that reinvigorates, replenishes and sustains the thread of nationhood and shared identity. The fact that the collective history is largely myth is not incidental, but part of the initiation into the community – getting history wrong is a condition of entry.

In Renan’s essay, the actual quote centres not on the “historical error” though, which is an extension of the thought, but on the importance of forgetting. “It is good,” he goes on to say, “for everyone to know how to forget” such that we don’t fall into an endless spiral of chasing historical grievances that would tear at the delicate fabric of a nation. Yet the frame of forgetting is interesting in its distinctness from the quote above since, unlike wilful error that might remain robust to historical enquiry as it doesn’t lay claim to any basis in fact, the risk with forgotten things is that they might one day be remembered. History is continually being rewritten, after all, and inconvenient facts rediscovered.

Back in June 2020 the New Yorker took up the topic in a discussion of James Baldwin’s writings on history. It focuses on his desire that America shake off a version of its history that seeks only to provide “comfort, nostalgia, or a fixed arc of progress” and instead face a full, clear-eyed reckoning with the past. As Baldwin wrote, channelling Faulkner: “All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history . . . which is not your past, but your present.”

Time and history is, of course, perhaps the central motivating force in much of Faulkner. From Thomas Sutpen’s doomed obsession with escaping his impoverished past and building an accepted and acceptable dynasty in Absalom, Absalom! to the weight of familial legacy that ultimately consumes Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury. In the more macro sense, Yoknapatawpha County as a whole is steeped in the broader context of the Civil War and the South’s begrudging attempt to reconcile itself to its defeat (and, through that, to itself). Faulkner, not unproblematically, places a significant part of the responsibility for the repeated failure of the South to face its own history on the imposition of values by the North, the impatience of the victors to bring its defeated foe to heel.

Baldwin pulled no punches in his own response to Faulkner: “It is only the American Southerner who seems to be fighting, in his own entrails, a peculiar, ghastly, and perpetual war with all the rest of the country.” Where Faulkner called for patience and for the North to “go slow” in attempting to compel a reckoning with history whether through the courts (e.g. the Supreme Court outlawing segregation) or through culture, Baldwin saw only further myth-making to allow the South to avoid the confrontation with its past and its present. For him there is never a time in future where these things can be suddenly resolved, but rather the challenge is always in the present and the time for its resolution must be now.

The South, for Baldwin, was clinging to two conflicting histories, and therefore two realities that could never reconcile feeding a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, it wanted to place itself as a central force in the American foundational myth, even in defeat. Indeed, the defeat itself could be cast as a necessary hurdle to achieving a coherent concept of the nation – both sides leaving their blood in the soil. On the other, it wanted to wallow in the myth of the Lost Cause as an assertion of its ongoing links to a distinct cultural identity to maintain that thread to its own past, and in the process recast and rescue the cause itself.

The internal tension stemmed from an apparent desire to reconcile themselves to the reality of defeat, but doing so in a way that does not require the dissolution of its shared history. Even one that had become inexorably intertwined with the institution of slavery. The loss may even have hardened that process and trapped it in time as the South came to define itself by the set of behaviours and values that had differentiated it from the North. As the Bundren family in As I Lay Dying find for themselves, “the future seems arrested, as if the war has fixed it in place”. For many of his characters, the South remains hopelessly tethered to the worst of its past. “In sum,” Baldwin writes, “the North, by freeing the slaves of their masters, robbed the masters of any possibility of freeing themselves of the slaves.”

Why bring any of this up now? I have noted a central tendency in contemporary discourse between (over-broadly grouped) progressives and the reactionary right is the insistence by the former of problematising history and the equally forceful refusal by the latter to countenance the re-remembering. Or, perhaps that is a little unfair. Instead, it’s maybe fairer to say the former would like an acknowledgement that different people/groups can have a relationship to the same history that differs dramatically from each other. And that that difference requires not merely respect but some representation in mainstream discourse – getting our history a little less wrong is part of increasing the scope of a nation.

In ceding this ground, however, we may be forced to reopen some of the foundational myths of the nation that form the basis not only of whatever coherence there can be in the disparate masses of a country but also people’s places within it. The inevitable bending towards justice of the arc of the moral universe operates as a vindication of the status quo, and underwrites the hierarchy. Not only is it the case that it could not have been otherwise, but more it should not be otherwise because society has progressed in line with its moral destiny (albeit with the odd wobble or two along the way).

Here I would bring in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. On its face, the play focuses on the layers of myths and community. In placing the action around a caravan surrounded by bored kids and detritus it reveals the gap between the imagined "green and pleasant land" and the reality of drinks, drugs, prejudice and planning permission that is every bit as much the lived culture. Fitting, of course, that it takes its inspiration from Blake's poem takes as its subject an apocryphal visit by Jesus to Glastonbury where the clear consensus among historians is that the answer to the question "And did those feet in ancient times/Walk upon England's mountains green[?]" is a resounding "no". While it's unclear whether the poet accepted the story as truth his work has nevertheless become a national anthem of sorts, sung on the terraces at Twickenham. We too indulge the myth.

Unlike Faulkner, Butterworth does not suggest reconciliation of the myth and the lived reality is inevitable. Rather, it ends with another version of the foundation myth that offers little by way of comfort in the concept of the nation but invites us to see the damage of the world as it is. A world of folklore, closer to the primal. A badly beaten Rooster Byron banging the drums to call forth the ancient giants to retake possession of their land. It may even be read as a broader call to action to wipe away what has gone before in the hope of a better world.

Beneath Blake's poem he added the biblical quote "Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets", which has been interpreted as a call for people to bear witness to a deeply imperfect world and each seek in their own way to help (re)build a new Jerusalem.

By contrast, Faulkner’s determination that reactionary communities must be allowed to reconcile themselves to their circumstance without interference from the outside finds a close contemporary resonance in the work of people like J.D. Vance and other members of the post-liberalism movement. The concept still clings to the notion of the inexorable arc of progress, but is twisted until inversion. It is often those who are challenging the conventional wisdom that are asked to reconcile themselves to existing norms insisted upon by the reactionaries; that the principle of mutual respect requires the preservation of national myths (including their symbols such as statuary) even where they are themselves the subject of the dispute.

Increasingly, the import of symbolism is finding its form in legislation (see, for example, the UK government’s efforts to curtail the influence of the European Court of Human Rights on domestic policy, limit the right to protest or even Brexit itself as an expression of cultural and economic exceptionalism; or, in the US, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade). In his recent New Yorker essay, Corey Robin casts the latter decision explicitly in terms a resistance by conservative members of the Supreme Court to an expansive interpretation of the Constitution.

In particular, Justices including Clarence Thomas reject the notion of “substantive due process” that allowed the SC to become involved with issues such as abortion in the first place. Robin writes: “In his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Thomas calls substantive due process an “oxymoron” and a “legal fiction.” The due-process clause “guarantees process” only.”

Of course, originalism is by definition a reactionary position in that it asserts that there can be no change to meaning over time and that different cultural context have no bearing on the contemporary interpretation of a text. That is not just a statement of the persistence of history, but its ossification.

In case there was any doubt over Thomas’ reactionary intent Robin continues (emphasis mine): “Thomas linked a broad reading of the due-process clause, with its ever-expanding list of “unenumerated” rights, to a liberal “rights revolution” that has undermined traditional authority and generated a culture of permissiveness and passivity… To reverse the downward spiral of social decadence and patriarchal decay, conservatives must undo the liberal culture of rights, starting with the unenumerated rights of substantive due process.”

It might appear that there are also two mutually incompatible histories presented here too, producing much the same cognitive dissonance Baldwin noted in the South. Conservatives want to portray their reactionary tilt as a defence of core liberal virtues on which the nation is built, and yet it is also explicitly trying to stymie the pace of social change or even reverse it. So a restriction of abortion rights is framed instead as a constitutionally-required expansion of states’ rights and the loss of the right for UK citizens to live/work in the EU is portrayed as an expansion of domestic policy scope.

Ironically, the impact of these moves has been to raise the level of insecurity and precarity experienced by the wider population even as they are shrouded in comforting mistruths. When fundamental rights are in flux it threatens to reopen what had seemed like settled positions across the political spectrum. The very fuel of the reactionary movement can be said to be its anti-conservatism; a fervent radicalism of programme and process that is willing to upend convention as it claims to defend the status quo. That is why they call it a culture "war".

There is a tendency in such situations to argue that the internal contradictions of reactionary politics makes it difficult to maintain a stable coalition and means that politics ultimately reverts in favour of moderation. But that is precisely why reactionaries are playing a destabilising role. By appearing to reduce the nation state's ability or willingness to enforce and defend rights, reactionaries make technocratic arguments that rely on claims of state capacity for expanding rights and opportunities less credible, encouraging clientelism and zero-sum thinking among the base.

All of this is underpinned by appeals to exceptionalism built on a wilful misremembering of history or, as Du Bois put it, a desire to remain in comforting “lies agreed upon”. As Baldwin noted, it is deeply unwise (and itself a form of delusion) to appeal for patience in the hope that the reactionaries eventually find a way to reconcile the cognitive dissonance for themselves. There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

*This is, fittingly, itself a misquote as the quote is actually “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” https://archive.globalpolicy.org/nations/nation/1882/renan.htm