At what point does a nation move from attempting to grow and evolve beyond its past, to considering its past illegitimate — and then forgetting it? What effect does this have on a people?

21st century America offers a surfeit of examples, from recasting the Founders as racists builders of an aristocratic or plutocratic society to the effort to reform our literature. Here are three snippets of this process in action.

“ Losing Sight of History “, James Bowman, The American Spectator, 29 November 2007 “ Ken Burns’s War “, James Bowman, The New Criterion, 30 November 2007 Closing of the American Mind , Allan Bloom (1987)

What might be the effects on America?

1. “Losing Sight of History“, James Bowman, The American Spectator, 29 November 2007 — Excerpt:

Not that anyone could be surprised at the feminist production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington this fall, but it has got me wondering if anyone will remember, in another generation or so, that people used to be different from the way they are now – or the way they will be by that time. Oh, people will know it in theory, perhaps, but they will have got so far out of the habit of trying to imagine themselves back into the world of their great-grandparents that stories of their curious customs and habits will appear to them as fairy tales do to us, or the Greek myths. People will as soon believe that the abduction of Helen of Troy caused the epoch-making Trojan war as that the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused the equally epoch-making World War I. It just won’t be credible. People don’t do those sorts of things, any more than they converse with gods and giants. … Such people look at the past and its cultural artifacts and they can only see themselves reflected in them. Soon, perhaps, that will be true of everybody.

All historians will be like Ken Burns, who showed us earlier this fall that even the brand name of World War II is susceptible to being put on something barely related to the original event and exploited for commercial gain. Marketed – and how! – as history, his TV series “The War” ran for 15 seemingly interminable hours in September and October on PBS and was almost without interest in the past as it was before it was the past, which is to say, in the political or military realities of World War II, or the cultural reasons why people thought at the time that it was “a necessary war.” No, Ken Burns is only interested in why Ken Burns thinks it was a necessary war – and in congratulating himself and his subjects for having the right feelings about it now. All this retrospective emotion! All these weepy violins and plangent pianos! All this scolding of people long dead for their racial and sexual attitudes! It’s another imposition of the present upon the past, another manifestation of our increasing inability to see anything among the generations who have lived before us but less-perfect versions of ourselves.

2. “Ken Burns’s War“, James Bowman, The New Criterion, 30 November 2007 — Excerpt:

Moreover, Mr Burns presents the war through the lens of contemporary pre-occupations with race and ethnicity, the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans and so forth. Like the focus on emotion, this is a way of looking into the past and seeing only ourselves. To spend our time alternately raking up people’s retrospective feelings and scolding their contemporaries for not having the exquisite social consciences we have acquired over the last 40 years is nothing but a form of self-congratulation – the characteristic mode of liberal thinking in our time. It’s easy to say now, if not necessarily quite to believe it, that it was a necessary war, but it is also necessary to answer the question why people thought it was necessary at the time – which had very little to do with the reasons why we think so now. In other words, “The War” is presented to us as if people at the time thought they were fighting for the reasons why, in retrospect, we think they should have been fighting – partly because they themselves now think, being as much creatures of their culture as the rest of us, that they should have been fighting for these reasons. There is a kind of silent conspiracy between the film-makers and their interviewees to suggest that all that sacrifice was for the sake of more liberal racial attitudes or to oppose the Holocaust. But it wasn’t. Nobody outside of Germany knew about the Holocaust at the time. What was it for, then? The question doesn’t seem to interest Ken Burns very much.”The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions,” his voiceover narrator intones: “anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power.” Well, that’s that sorted out then. The screenwriter, Geoffrey Ward, says that this is “war as people experienced it,” but that’s that’s precisely wrong. It’s war as people now want to remember it, both morally and emotionally, even though they felt very differently at the time. Glimpses of the war as people experienced it are occasionally afforded by clips from contemporary newsreels and popular films such as Flying Tigers with John Wayne. In the Burnsian context, these are automatically and invariably provided with an ironic commentary. Their unfailingly upbeat, resolute, confident tone is jarring and so is made to look slightly tasteless by the funereal one so carefully cultivated by Ken, “The Undertaker,” Burns. But if we can get over our feelings of superiority and condescension to them, these snippets might remind us that there is another way of looking at things, and one which has room for more kinds of feelings than the three kinds – first empathetic sorrow, then moral indignation and finally self-congratulation for feeling the other two – that Mr Burns seems comfortable with.

3. Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom (1987)

Imagine a young person walking through the Louvre or the Urrizi and you can immediately grasp the condition of his soul. In his innocence of the stories of Biblical and Greek or Roman antiquity, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and all the others can say nothing to him. All he sees are colors and forms — modern art. In short, like almost everthing else in his spiritual life, the paintings and statues are abstract. No matter what much of the modern wisdom asserts, these artists counted on immediate recognition of their subjects and, what is more, on their having a powerful meaning for their viewers. The works were the fulfillment of those meanings, giving them a sensuous reality and hence completing them. Without those meanings, and without their being something essential to the viewer as a moral, political and religious being, the works lose their essence. It is not merely the tradition that is lost when the voice of civilization elaborated over millennia has been stilled in this way. It is being itself that vanishes beyond the dissolving horizon. {page 63} … Teachers of writing in state universities, among the noblest and most despised laborers in the academy, have told me that they cannot teach writing to students who do not read, and that is is practically impossible to get them to read, let alone like it. … The latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts is feminism. The struggles against elitism and racism in the sixties and seventies had little direct effect on students’ relations to books. The activists had not special quarrel with the classic texts … Shakespeare, as he has been read for most of this century, does not constitute a threat to egalitarian right thinking. And as for racism, it just did not play a role in the classic literature, and not great work of literature is ordinarily considered racist. But all literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. And this is particularly grave for literature, since the love interest was most of what remained in the classics after politics was purged in the academy, and was also what drew students to reading them. These books appealed to eros while educating it. So activism has been directed against the content of books … Never, never must a student be attracted to those old ways and take them as models for him or herself. However all this effort is wasted. Students cannot imagine that the old literature could teach them anything about the relations they want to have or will be permitted to have. So they are indifferent. … I began to ask students who their heroes are. There is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? {pages 65-66} … This is the first fully historicitzed generation, not only in theory but also in practice, and the result is not the cultivation of the vastest sympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves. {page 108}

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