A Man May Die, But A Myth Lives On

BRIAN: Nathan, Joanne, we spend a lot of time in the classroom. And I’m sure, as I do, you come up against a lot of myths. We’ve heard these myths built around individuals, Robert E. Lee, but what are the real macro myths? I’m going to put one on the table we could come back to, or not, later.

My students really believe in the story of progress in the United States. History is a never ending series of things getting better. Try to top that.

NATHAN: Well, I see your myth of progress. And it’s compelling. But I want to raise you an even more compelling myth, I think, which gets to an even more fundamental place in our own vocations, which is the myth of information. Education is the key. If you simply give people enough to change their hearts and minds, then all of our social ills will basically go away. Right? And yet, we see time and time again, it’s a lot harder than that.

BRIAN: I’m impressed, Nathan. You win.

JOANNE: Wait, a minute.

NATHAN: Uh-oh. There’s a third player at the table.

JOANNE: I got to get in the game. I got to get in the game.

NATHAN: OK.

JOANNE: OK.

NATHAN: What do you got, Joanne?

JOANNE: I would say, certainly in the classroom, that the biggest myth, and in a sense, this is not going to be surprising, is the idea of the founders. Right? All capital letters. That there is this group of people who came up with brilliant ideas by themselves, and together sort of marched into a room and wrote it down on paper, and ahh, there we had the American experiment.

NATHAN: Right, right.

JOANNE: And that’s, you know, that’s it. That’s America. And when I teach the founding, a lot of what I’m doing is unraveling this sense of inevitability, and unraveling the sense of superhuman capabilities, and unraveling the sense of unity, right?

I actually think thinking about the founders as this unified group of guys who all absolutely agreed does more damage than good, right, which suggests, somehow, that either you’re all supposed to agree, or that somehow disagreement is wrong? So I think– I think the founding is vital for a lot of different reasons for people. And I think, obviously, the way you think about the beginning is going to affect the way you think about the here and now.

NATHAN: Well, that’s the thing about myths though, right? I mean, they’re supposed to both explain and conceal. So if we can explain why the Constitution has had relatively few amendments when compared to other documents, on the world stage, we have to attribute that to the genius of the founders. Right?

JOANNE: The magical f– yes.

NATHAN: The magical document.

JOANNE: Yes.

NATHAN: But at the same time, that narrative conceals all of the debates at that time, and certainly the debates in the subsequent centuries about what it meant to maintain the power of the planter class, maintain the power of white man and the political culture, maintain the geographic boundaries of the country, and the displacement that went along there with it, the wealth of the country. Again, that’s a wealth generated by slavery, to be very clear, right? I mean, all of that has to kind of fall under this shadow of the great architects of the republic.

JOANNE: Right, right.

NATHAN: And I think, yeah, that’s critical.

JOANNE: Any form of exclusion gets excluded from our history with that kind of an outlook.

BRIAN: Well, Nathan, I hear a lot of ideas behind Joanne’s entry into the myth-a-thon. Why aren’t ideas enough?

NATHAN: It has to ring true in your ear for you to believe it. We have, for instance, this notion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, oftentimes played on repeat, as having done such amazing, kind of cognitive work in the American mind, about the evils of segregation, the evils of racism, the right of people to have kind of equal rights. And it is absolutely not the case that that speech changed the way that Americans thought about their country. Right? It took on another decade, at least, for there to be any real breakthroughs in terms of black political representation.

And so it’s important for us to kind of have, as our kind of narrative mythology, that a kind of great speech on the steps of a great monument are all the country kind of needs to turn the page on the worst parts of its history. But it also takes a very clear commitment from tons of people, often faceless people, to make any progress at all.

BRIAN: And I think we all need, in some ways, to believe that we’re moving forward. That we’re part of a collective progress that is going to leave our kids better off than we are. And this notion of history progressing is a very powerful source of that belief.

I urge my students to think about progress for who, or if they’re British, progress for whom. And that immediately gets them thinking, well, yes, certain technological changes, for instance, helped elite white men, but put a lot of lower middle class men out of work, if we’re talking about industrialization–

NATHAN: Sure.

BRIAN: –for instance.

JOANNE: So one of the interesting things about the founders is that some of them lived long enough to realize that they were kind of becoming the founders. They did begin to get letters from Americans, sort of with an awestruck, you know, tell us how it was when X, Y, and Z happened.

And there’s an amazing letter from John Adams in reference to one of these. He’s responding to one of these requests that basically says, tell us what it was like when you wrote the Declaration of Independence. What was it like? And Adams says, OK, let me tell you what it was like. Here’s what it was like.

I sat and I watched everybody go up and sign that document. And you know what I saw? People who didn’t want to sign it, people who were scared of signing it, people who really had to be kind of shoved up there to sign it. He wasn’t showing that from that moment, in a sense of inception, there was no great, wonderful unity. There were people in that room who weren’t all that excited about declaring independence.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: So here’s what unites, I think, all three of our myth moments, here. All three of us have talked about myths that essentially erase work. Right? Erase all of the effort, erase all of the real life aspect of it, in a very concrete kind of a way. So it’s not just a myth because it’s–

BRIAN: And all of the controversies, and battles, and conflicts–

JOANNE: Yes, yes.

BRIAN: –as your example shows, Joanne.

JOANNE: So here’s the thing. I mean, and this is particularly true of the founding. What’s fascinating about it is the struggle of it, and the humanity of it, and the messiness of it, and all of the ways in which wrong decisions were made. That’s so much more interesting than some glossy little shiny myth that has a bunch of perfect people coming up with a perfect little document.

I feel like when I talk about the founding to the public, in essence, that’s what I keep saying over and over again, is the truth is so much more interesting and has so much more to tell us than a myth does.