Light On Dark Water

Escape from Missouri

I intend to keep my resolution not to write about politics for the next four weeks, but I think I can justify the use of one reaction to the election as a segue into another topic. Novelist Jane Smiley, writing for Slate, tore into the people who voted for Bush with a ferocity remarkable even in a time of overheated rhetoric. The intellectual quality of the piece is made clear in its title: "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States." There’s no need for me to argue against it, as there is not much to be gained by arguing with a scream of rage. The gist of it is that the people who voted for Bush—the so-called red state people—are very bad, and aside from its ferocity it’s pretty much the same sort of thing we provincials are used to hearing from those who look down on us.

But here’s what I want to talk about: Jane Smiley is herself, she confesses, from Missouri, a red state, and is in at least enough contact with relatives there to know that they voted for Bush. She partially exempts them from her condemnation of the 58 million Bush voters, but only partially: “they’re not ignorant, they are just greedy, and full of…superiority”.

This is a familiar phenomenon: the person who rises (or thinks he has risen) above his roots and now despises them. I view this as a sort of cosmic bad form, and think less of anyone who seems to think and behave this way, at least if he is older than thirty or so and I can’t plausibly tell myself that he is likely to grow out of it.

Which of us has made himself? If one’s character and personality are determined by some combination of heredity and environment, how did Jane Smiley escape being the slave of the “ignorance and bloodlust” which she sees as dominating other Missourians? Other statements in her piece make it seem highly unlikely that she believes in God, and so would not attribute her lucky escape to divine favor or intervention. Perhaps she was just the beneficiary of a random mutation.

None of these possible explanations gives Ms. Smiley herself credit for her superiority. Yet those who despise the people and the culture that produced them generally leave the impression that they do give themselves such credit—as if they had in fact made themselves, and done a pretty darned good job of it. At the very least there is an implication that they rose above their origins as a result of some noble quality in themselves, for which they deserve credit. But surely it’s far more plausible to suppose that this virtue (if it exists) began with their genes, or their family environment, or both, and is in no way their own doing. The higher one rises, I would think, the greater ought to be one’s humility, for no amount of work can cause one to excel at anything that one is not equipped by nature to do. All achievement—even the achievement of rising above the hell that is Missouri—starts with some gift of potentiality which the recipient did nothing whatsoever to merit, much less to cause. We deserve credit for what we do with what we are given, but we can do nothing with what we were not given.

This idea of the self-determined individual is a common thread among outwardly dissimilar elements of the American mosaic. Jane Smiley would presumably locate her politics somewhere on the leftward end of the spectrum, but it would appear that she shares some basic attitudes with the Ayn Rand crowd. And I suppose it’s one of the reasons we really don’t, in general as a nation, take the past as seriously as we should, and suffer so much from the dream that we are superior to and untrammeled by the old incorrigible nature of the human race. We still want to think that we can just leap forth from the past like a waterfowl springing into the air. The belief that we can will ourselves out of the tragic cycles of history may itself be our tragic flaw.

That was one of the lessons I learned in the 1960s. Later on I learned that it is part of what is meant by the term “original sin.”