Editors’ Note: The teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools, and the reaction parents have had to it, was pivotal to the defeat of Democrats in Virginia. But it is being pushed by big corporations such as Wal-Mart and is being pushed by our own Federal government onto Federal employees. This is especially dangerous in the military where unit cohesion is so important to performance. Clearly, public money should not be used to push any particular agenda. However, it is unlikely such courses can be effectively “banned” since they will simply be camouflaged by the Left. In fact, many of these ideas were already prevalent in both high schools and colleges as part of the Howard Zinn curriculum. It is better for conservatives to understand the argument and be prepared to defeat it. It is simply part of the larger battle to get more viewpoint balance in our educational institutions. To that end, more parents need to be active at the school board level, more conservatives need to become teachers and professors, writers, and journalists. Legislatures need to see that elementary, secondary, and state universities cease their viewpoint discrimination against conservatives. School choice is important and well as homeschooling to keep children away from biased political and moral agendas so prevalent in public schools. Where possible, the free market can assist by customers taking their business elsewhere when corporations push this drivel. Our point is, as the Left controls almost all the nodes of communication in society, we must be prepared to defeat their arguments and create our own institutions.

Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society.

CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. A useful outline of the ideas involved is found in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s textbook Critical Race Theory, which is generally considered authoritative and has the virtue uncommon among CRT exponents of being clearly written. Slightly compressed here, Delgado and Stefancic list CRT tenets as:

1. Racism is ordinary, not aberrational.

2. Racism serves an important purpose. It provides “psychic or material” benefits for the dominant group in society.

3. “Race and races are products of social thought and relations [and] categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.”

4. Intersectionality. The idea that everyone has potentially conflicting overlapping identities based on gender, class, and especially on race.

Additionally, CRT emphasizes that “voices of color,” or the views of nonwhites, have a special value. CRT rejects equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. Considering that Delgado and Stefancic are lawyers, this is a remarkable statement!

Other than Delgado and Stefancic, notable exponents of CRT include Ibram X. Kendi, Derrick Bell, and Nell Irvin Painter, as well as Robin DiAngelo, whose book White Fragility is a poisonous mixture of error, arrogance, and self-abasement, and possibly the single worst product of the CRT school of thought.

An obsession with whiteness as inherently negative is a prominent feature of CRT ideology. “A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist,” DiAngelo writes. “White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.” Or, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in his foreword to White Fragility, “in the equation of race … whiteness is the unchanging variable.”

Apart from the interesting results should “black” or “blackness” be substituted for “white” and “whiteness” in such comments, we shall see just how wildly off these remarks are in relation to the history of ideas about race.

That there are many problems with CRT is obvious. Just a few are its hyperemotional, even hysterical, character; its presentism, reaching the level of utter inability to grasp the difference between past and present; and its constant guilt-tripping: whites are racist until proved otherwise, and maybe not even then.

CRT advocates generally write in appalling jargon, in which terms such as white supremacy, racism, equity, diversity, etc., are twisted and given a peculiar new meaning. They often employ pompous, dehumanized, bureaucratic language such as “people of color” for nonwhites (or more often only blacks) and “enslaved persons” for slaves.

Anyone who disputes CRT theory is painted as a racist; a particular evil is, amazingly, so-called color-blind racism, or the contention by whites that they don’t judge people according to race, which is a particular target of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book Racism without Racists. Anything deemed critical of the culture or attitudes of minorities is deemed “cultural racism.”

For CRT writers, racism must be everywhere. Where it is unobvious, they must repeatedly construct racist straw men to destroy. For them, race and racism is a monomania, with the familiar result of monomania: the monomaniac ends not only in being unable to see anything else but in being unable even to see the object of his obsession clearly, either.

CRT also includes the assumption that Karl Marx cribbed from Auguste Comte: that of a “necessary relation between all possible aspects of the same social organism.” In this way, CRT substitutes racism for the economic foundation posited by the more rational Marxists. The basic fallacy of all such thinking was observed by Karl Wittfogel in the 1950s: a comparison of the German part of Switzerland with Hitler’s Germany shows that societies can share many important features and yet be worlds apart in social structure and moral values.

Yet there is a basic flaw in the logic of CRT that has hitherto been little noted. Nominally, as we saw Delgado and Stefancic allude to, CRT sees race as a social artifact. Race does not really exist according to CRT. It is just a concept, a false consciousness that exists only in people’s heads. There is something to be said for this, as I will show. But in practice, CRT writers actually jettison this notion, treating race not as an ordinary, changeable idea but as a rigid, permanent part of the social structure. Worse, their presentism and grotesque telescoping of lengthy and sometimes complicated processes of historical development obscure the true history of the monstrous evil that they are so fixated on.

We will not be talking here about biological race, or race as a description of the actual physical differences between human groups, but the social definition of race—people’s perceptions of the differences between groups and their beliefs about the importance of those differences. The two must not be confused.

Many people nowadays get hysterical about using race as a biological classification. Actually, it seems that what we may call the family tree of humanity does split into five or six branches that fit moderately well into the traditional physical anthropological classifications of race: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, Australoid, etc.

But that is not what we are discussing here. There is in fact a good reason for getting rid of the term “race” entirely, though it seems an impractical goal. But that is not because, as seems to be widely believed, it has a single evil meaning that will cause us all to run around eating each other. The problem is that the word “race” has acquired too many different and confusing meanings over time, ranging from a synonym for nationality, ethnicity, and even social class, to a biological or pseudo-biological classifier.

Here we will discuss race as a social classifier, which often differs drastically from such biological classifications, and indeed from place to place, as well as over time. This is a point that, I have found, is something even quite intelligent people sometimes find hard to grasp.

A good example of this is given by looking at the example of a person not uncommon in our society, someone largely European in descent, but who obviously has some sub-Saharan African ancestry. An anthropologist, or at least a traditional anthropologist, would say that such a person is of mixed race, or a blend of Caucasoid and Negroid. But in America, they would ordinarily be described rather absurdly as a “light-skinned black.”

Elsewhere they would be classified quite differently. In the English-speaking Caribbean and in South Africa, such a person would be neither black nor white, but “colored.” That was the original meaning of “colored” in English—it was coined to describe people who were mixtures of European and African. It was not synonymous, as it was later, with “nonwhite.”

In Brazil, however, such a person would be viewed as white—albeit a special sort of white, a “white of Brazil” or a branco do tierra (“white of the land”). So when we talk about race in a social context, we are often dealing with a slippery, changing thing. That is worth keeping in mind.

There are two other possible traps in dealing with (socially defined) race that CRT writers can fall into. One is to project the attitudes and situations in the American South and South Africa onto other, past societies, especially onto the relationship between European rulers and their subjects in the empires of the 18th through the 20th centuries. Racial feelings, to use an unsatisfactory term, were less intense in places where Europeans were temporary sojourners, such as in Nigeria or Burma, than in places where different racial groups spent their whole lives side by side, such as the United States and South Africa.

The second trap is thinking that race relations involve something totally different from other hierarchical relationships between human groups, which can be dehumanizing in a comparable way. Feudal class distinctions, for example, could be as oppressive as racial ones. As a medieval German rhyme put it, “A peasant is just like an ox, only he has no horns.”

The CRT School’s thinking about the history of racial prejudice draws heavily on an older series of misconceptions, which is often described by its critics, as the 1492 thesis, also called the UNESCO thesis because it has been spread by the UN’s Economic and Social Council. It runs roughly as follows:

1. Up to 1492 or 1500—roughly the beginning of modern Western oceanic expansion—there was no such thing as racism in the Western world. This is usually, though not always, coupled with the idea that there was no such thing as racism outside the Western world, either. (That is false, but as we are dealing with Western ideas and attitudes, we’ll ignore it here.)

2. Racial beliefs then suddenly popped into existence. Racism developed toward all “nonwhite” groups, and was part and parcel of Western expansion.

3. Racism was “functional” in that it served the interests of people engaged in trading and owning slaves, the rulers of the European overseas empires, and white settlers coveting native lands. As Delgado and Stefancic solemnly explain, “Antiblack prejudices sprang up with slavery and capitalists’ need for labor. Before then, educated Europeans held a generally positive attitude toward Africans, recognizing that African civilizations were highly advanced with vast libraries and centers of learning.”

4. Racism is uniquely horrible and a cause of worse evils than, say, religious or political or class hostilities.

Aside from a grain of truth within the third item, these ideas are all false, or must be so qualified as to be almost meaningless.

It should be noted that some CRT writers, notably Theodore Allen, author of The Invention of the White Race, and Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, hold a more parochial American version of such ideas. As Allen puts it, the white race was “invented” as a “ruling class social control formation in the late 17th/early 18th century Anglo-American plantation colonies.” It was, in other words, just a device to split the white and black working classes. The full absurdity of this particular notion will become clear; we need merely point out here that the status of blacks as slaves was fixed by the 1640s, long before there was a lower class in America to split. Also, the number of slaves in early America was tiny until after 1675—in midcentury Virginia, there were just 300 slaves among 15,000 English.

In any case, the chronology of the 1492 thesis is wrong at both ends. Prejudice against some groups long predated 1492. In other cases, prejudices did not develop for centuries after 1492 and were a product, not a driver or accompaniment, of European domination. Above all, it is mistaken because the way Europeans saw or classified most non-Europeans in late medieval and early modern times differed greatly from how they did so later. Contrary to both the 1492 thesis and Allen’s claims, Europeans saw themselves as “white” long before the 17th century.

The belief in the inferiority of black Africans appeared in medieval Europe long before the Age of Exploration. We are not quite sure of its origins, but it seems to have been picked up from the North African Arabs, for whom blacks and slavery were associated much earlier than for Europeans. Later, the black race became associated in the minds of European Christians with Muslim enemies. This can be seen as early as The Song of Roland (written down about 1245) where the blacks are the worst of the Muslim foes of the Franks, and in the antiquated English and German words for “Negro”: “blackamoor” and “Mohr,” respectively.

It’s important to note that medieval Europeans did not necessarily think about black people the way a Kentucky slaveowner thought of his property in 1850. Some had very different ideas, as in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, one of the greatest works of medieval literature, and the few Europeans who had contact with Christian Ethiopians often had a high opinion of them. In fact, most of the slaves medieval Europeans encountered were white Muslim prisoners of war, people from the Caucasus, and Asians brought from the East via caravan. The close association of black Africans with slavery formed only later on.

In early modern times, when Europeans encountered other peoples from North Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, East and Southeast Asia, Polynesia, and Northern India, they did not perceive them as racially inferior because they did not perceive them as racially different. All these groups were originally regarded as white. Europeans noticed that Amerindians and East and Southeast Asians looked a bit different from them, to be sure, and sometimes described their skin color as “tawny,” but still viewed them as white. East Asians, by the way, were not described as “yellow” until about 1800.

Over time, European racial views changed. After starting out with respect for Chinese and Japanese, Westerners came, for a variety of reasons, to have a lower opinion of them. As a result of wars and the Spaniards’ easy domination over the Amerindians they conquered further south, they increasingly despised them as either vicious enemies, or as easily pushed around. Early on, the Spanish conquerors intermarried with the upper classes of the conquered Aztecs and Peruvians, and their offspring were accepted into the Spanish and Italian aristocracies, but such relationships tended to die out.

The designation of Amerindians as “Indians” has a strange and twisted career that has little to do with race. The word originally meant anything and anyone in Asia east of Iran. But thanks to the confusion of Christopher Columbus and others, it came to be applied to practically any newly found peoples. That usage was ridiculed as early as the 1520s, but continued, expanding so that in the 1760s even such brilliant observers as Captain Cook and his chief scientist, Sir Joseph Banks, referred to Polynesians, Melanesians, and Australian aborigines as “Indians.”

In the 16th and 17th centuries the English and French generally avoided “Indian” as a label for the natives of the Americas. They generally referred to the natives as “savages” (usually spelled “salvages”) which then meant merely “primitive.” The connotation of viciousness came later.

It was also widely believed by Protestants that at least some of the natives were actually of Jewish descent, whose ancestors came from the 10 lost tribes of Israel. A variant of this notion remains the doctrine of the Mormon Church. Alternatively, they were thought to be descendants of the survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis—or that the Americas were actually Atlantis itself, which had not sunk but had just been lost. Some also held that some Amerindian groups were descended from the Welsh colonists supposedly brought to North America in the 12th century.

Most Europeans of the period were attached to the notion that the Amerindians were closely related to Europeans. There was a remarkably stubborn resistance to the idea that they descended from Northeast Asian migrants, although some suggested that even in the 16th century.

English description of Amerindians as “red” did not exist until the 17th century and was not a description of their skin color. It came from encountering groups that painted themselves red when waging war.

None of these facts about the history of Amerindian and European racial relations are exactly compatible, to put it mildly, with the CRT School’s idea that Amerindians were seen as a different race, or that racial ideas were developed to suit the needs of evil settler colonialism.

Many have confused or ignored the real history of racial relations in the European conquest of India and other parts of Asia. In 18th century Bengal, the British often behaved ruthlessly, but they did not care about the color or race of Indians. They associated with their Indian collaborators socially, often marrying local women. As time passed, the British became increasingly arrogant and held themselves apart from Indians. Intermarriage became almost unthinkable.

By the 19th century, some of the great British families in India tried to hide their Indian ancestry. Only the lowest class of British men in India married Indian women, and their children were treated rather contemptuously. The changes that took place were paralleled and reinforced by the development of modern racial classifications starting in the late 17th century.

Eventually, especially in the latter part of the 19th century, there was a notable tendency to “shove down” some groups that had earlier been thought of as distinctly superior, and bracket them with the despised blacks. A tendency developed to degrade some groups earlier regarded as white, such as North Africans and Middle Easterners, and even Italians—or at least Southern Italians—and consider them as not white, or not quite white But they were never relegated to any other distinct category, either.

The idea that racial prejudice was “functional” was the only element of the 1492 thesis that had some validity, but even that is only partially true, and it is hard to make a clear connection between such ideas and those who profited from them. It was certainly “functional” for people dealing in slaves, for example, to convince everyone, including themselves, that their property was inferior.

However, it is more than doubtful that this was true in the European empires in Asia and Africa, especially in British India. No European empire ever officially justified its right to rule on the grounds that its subjects were racially inferior. The bigger empires—British and French—had substantial numbers of subjects who were white even by the most narrow-minded 19th century standards, the French Canadians and Maltese, for example. And few people, if any, believed that most of the peoples who came under European rule were inferior when those empires were acquired.

Furthermore, many at the top of British society perceived, quite early, that the offensive way the British colonials tended to treat Indians did not serve and sustain British rule, and was utterly disastrous. It could only speed and intensify the alienation of Indians, especially the educated ones. Historical research on this subject, by both British and Indians, has shown that they were right. In the imperial context, racism was a disaster for both sides. It was decidedly dysfunctional.

The 1492 thesis and the even cruder formulations favored by many CRT writers are, among other things, a classic case of telescoping the long, historical process that created racial prejudices into a short, artificially simplified formula. They are such a grotesque example of this common historical error that it is hard to understand why the CRT School has not gotten a much rougher academic reception than it has. Historians should have been automatically suspicious of it simply because in the real world, systems of ideas just don’t develop that way.

Curiously, the decline of racial prejudice since the 19th century is sometimes belittled and is rarely properly treated. It also suffers, probably for political reasons, from telescoping, so that, again, a long process is squeezed into a short one and pictured as starting later than it did. The decline of racial ideas seems to have started in the 1890s and, though slow, was already noticeable by World War I, especially in the anthropological profession and among liberals and socialists. In the interwar period the decline of racial prejudice accelerated and still more so after World War II. Despite this, the postwar period is sometimes portrayed dishonestly as the beginning rather than the decline of racial prejudice.

Critical Race theorists are unable to deal with the actual historical development of racial ideas. The entire “scholarly field” of CRT is rather reminiscent of the old scholarly joke, “The inaccuracies must have required tremendous research.” Or, perhaps, none at all?

*****

This article appeared in the November edition of Chronicles and is reproduced with permission.

There is no denying that we live in disturbingly anxious and contentious times. Apocalyptic assertions, profanity-laden tirades, public shaming tactics, and crude weapons of moral accusation have increasingly taken the place of rational discourse and the steadfast rule of law. There is something ominous in the air, a faint but unmistakable scent of dissolution. Even before the shamefulness of the Afghanistan debacle, still unfolding as I write, there has been a growing and justifiable disgust with the self-serving incompetence of our leadership classes, and a sense of resignation to a future of ever-growing polarization and irreversible diminution of our national self-understanding. Hard times give rise to troubled thoughts; and when the hardness of the times is in large part a product of our own folly and improvidence, the thoughts are likely to turn inward, like knives in the brain.

Hyperbole aside, though, this is far from being the worst such moment in our history. It is important to get a grip and remember that. We have experienced times like this before, even as recently as the 1970s. We can come back from this orgy of mutual recrimination, but only if we wish to do so. But this time around feels exceptionally perilous, if only because we are living through it rather than remembering it. And of course, that is not the only reason. In the Sixties and Seventies, the most radical and destructive influences in the culture were on the outside of the establishment, looking in. Now they are on the inside looking out, enthroned in university presidents’ offices and corporate executive suites and other centers of political and cultural influence, and able to use the awesome leverage of the law to do far more than just look.

It is hard to calculate the influence on the public mind of initiatives like the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which argued that the American experiment was founded upon slavery, and purported to find racism encoded in the nation’s DNA. The Project has been thoroughly discredited by a group of distinguished historians, has even been demonstrated to be a fraud by the intrepid investigations of Philip Magness, and yet it seems to march on largely unimpeded. It’s as if evidence no longer matters, and legacy institutions like the New York Times are confident that their line of cultural credit will turn out, as in the magic of Modern Monetary Theory, to be inexhaustible, no matter what they say or do. It’s nice to be part of the nomenklatura, and those who get there do what it takes to stay. But if the greatest danger to the future of our nation is coming not from the threat of external enemies or plagues or rising oceans, but from the loss of morale that comes with the collapse of national ideals, then the proliferation of such assaults, coming from many of our most prestigious institutions—the institutions that, more than ever before, serve as gatekeepers for our governing elites—shows that we are in big trouble. We cannot afford to draw our leaders of the future from such poisoned wells.

To speak of the loss of America’s story, then, is a fanciful but powerful way to get at this. The change is not a result of accumulation and dispassionate weighing of evidence. It proceeds from something almost a priori, the abandonment of a fundamental vision of the nation’s aspirational character, of its mythos, of the wind that has lifted our wings for two and a half centuries, and replaced it with….what?

Maybe by nothing at all. Why (it may be asked) do we need a story, after all? Maybe the need for an animating story was, like the need for fairy tales, a part of our national childhood, something we have now outgrown, just as we have learned to outgrow the need for heroes and exemplars, since we now know that no one in the past has ever deserved a statue in his honor. Presumably, we’ll get used to it.

Perhaps we have similarly outgrown the need for transcendence, since we have become so savvy, so clued-in to the way that human beings invent the transcendent in the image of immanent needs and desire, and then go on to exploit it as an instrument of power. So perhaps we should throw transcendence out the door too. Maybe the momentum of institutions and economics, or maybe the power of spontaneous organization, will be enough to carry us forward, and give us the staying power to raise the generations that will succeed us. Who knows? The only thing that’s clear is the imperative need to resist the very idea of the national mythos.

Yet there is something interesting, if obvious, about the 1619 Project that tends to be overlooked. Although the Project’s principal author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, famously declared that the national ideals were “lies” when they were stated, she made no effort to separate her Project from the truth of those ideals, let alone put forward an alternative set of ideals. It is one thing to say that the national story needs to be told in a different way—that is what the forever-revising work of historians is all about—but quite another to say that the story was a complete and utter lie that should be dispensed with tout court. The difference is enormous.

In other words, the moral critique offered by the 1619 Project is entirely dependent upon the moral heritage carried forward by the American story. No moral heritage, no cause for outrage. What was unfortunate about the Project, and what has made it such a costly missed opportunity for America, was its stubborn and spiteful unwillingness to connect the nation’s moral failings with a full account of its aspirations—the aspirations against which the gravity of those moral failings can be properly assessed.

Yes, we know: resistance to the mythos is all-important to the postmodern intellectual’s self-image, the equivalent of a white-collar union card. But the problem is that without the enduring normative presence of those aspirations, the moral critique loses its sting. Why bother to speak of justice, if justice is merely the interest of the stronger? No, one speaks of justice where there are kindred consciences in the room to be appealed to. There is a reason why the tactics of nonviolent resistance that worked so well against the British in India, and later in the American South, were not employed against the Nazis.

We are nothing more than flotsam and jetsam without the stories, the mythoi, in which and through which we find our life’s meaning.

A Support for Civic Virtue

So a great and powerful story is not so easily “lost.” It is likely to linger on, even if in semi-hibernation, persisting in vital if unacknowledged form in the calculations of even the harshest critics. (Much the same thing is true for what tries to pass for neopaganism, which is insensible to the Christian moral inheritance upon which it still draws.) Yet in the end, a shared conscience presumes a conscious knowledge of the American story, which is something we can no longer assume. I’m particularly aware of the problem as a teacher of American history, at a time when the general knowledge of our past is abysmally low and sinking. It’s profoundly important, as important as any issue before us as a country, for us to resist and reverse this tendency. For we can’t really appreciate the statuary of our country—our political and social and economic institutions—or know the value of American liberty and prosperity, unless we pay the price of learning the story. Otherwise, we are like children handling delicate artifacts, unaware of how precious and fragile they are, until we have broken them.

Such issues would have been consequential at any time in the nation’s history. But they’ve been given a whole new level of urgency by the demands of the moment. Never in recent memory has a knowledge of the American past been more imperative, and more useful. The novelist John Dos Passos expressed the reasons very well: “In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” Such words constitute the most powerful endorsement I can imagine for the usefulness of the humanities, which when rightly pursued are one of the chief ways our civilization retains its sense of connection to generations gone before, through the long-shared traditions of thinking, reading, listening, speaking, observing, and experiencing that they preserve. Which makes it doubly tragic that the humanities are not rightly pursued today, and are dying on the vine as a result.

Whenever any nation is faced with a deadly challenge to its institutions and its well-being, as we are today, it must find a way to draw upon its deepest sense of itself. That is the task before us now. In order to answer the question, “Why do we fight?” we must also answer the questions “Who are we? What binds us together? Why does our way of life deserve to persist?” Such questions might have seemed academic in the past. But they are far from being academic now. They are especially unavoidable for a great democracy, which depends for its unity and morale upon a foundation of shared convictions, broadly diffused through the population. It helps a great deal to know, and remember, that other Americans in the past have faced great challenges and prevailed. Sometimes, with nations as with individuals, the very act of rising to the occasion—and seeing how others have done so in the past—can reawaken strengths in us that might otherwise have lain dormant, or never emerged at all.

The Necessity of Storymaking

The central importance of story—a far better word than the colorless and suspect “narrative”—to the way we think is revealed in common speech. “What’s his story?” we ask when seeking insight into a stranger’s actions. (Or, if we’re exasperated, “What’s his story?”) This common usage amounts to a request that we be provided with an explanation of a person’s character or the motivating forces behind his actions, conveyed through a rendering in time of things or events that have shaped him. It can be a very short story: “He came from a working-class community in provincial Yorkshire, and arrived at Cambridge with distinct social disadvantages, which he would have to work assiduously to overcome.” That very short story tells you a great deal in a very short space about the historian Herbert Butterfield.

Not that we need to be told that stories are important. We would tell them in any event. The impulse to write history and tell stories is intrinsic to us as human beings. We are, at our very core, remembering and storymaking creatures. It’s how we find meaning in the flow of events. What we call “history” or “literature” or “biography” are merely highly refined versions of that basic human impulse. Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Stories are the way we remember things. Without memory, and the stories within which our memories are suspended, we cannot say who, or what, we are. Without them, all of life and thought is a meaningless, unrelated succession of events. And for human beings, meaning is not just a luxury. It is a necessity.

The stakes are nicely expressed in the words of the Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, “When a day passes it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.”

We are nothing more than flotsam and jetsam without the stories, the mythoi, in which and through which we find our life’s meaning. Ultimately that is what each of the world’s great religions provides. A story that organizes the world, and that stores all the things worth remembering, and those worth aspiring to. A story to live by—and to die by. Small wonder that the chorus of one of the most beloved of Christian hymns, “Blessed Assurance,” repeats the celebratory words, “This is my story, this is my song/ Praising my Savior all the day long.” One could say the same thing at a Passover Seder, which retells the same old story, of Exodus and salvation, of a night that was, and is, and will remain, different from every other night, as a way of affirming, “This is who I am—this is who we are.”

To use the word “story” in these ways is to gesture toward something far deeper and more aspirational than the mere laying out of a sequence of events. It is to draw water from a well to which one has gone before, and to which one will go again. And it is to acknowledge, implicitly, that just as a picture is worth a thousand words, so a story is worth much more than a thousand propositional statements. A great and powerful story is a seaborne vessel carrying many meanings in its holds, and able to acquire others in the course of its journey. Which is to say that it will be subject to varying interpretations. Ultimately its meaning will not be reducible to any of them, or to anything but itself. But it will endure because some of those meanings will endure with it, and in it.

The American story can accommodate instances of abject failure. The notion that all foundational stories are fairy tales is itself a fairy tale.

Reconsidering Our Beginnings

So the question with which we began does matter. The American story can and should have many disparate parts, including its shameful and disappointing elements. All of it needs to be there. But we need to regain a sense of perspective. We can do without the current disposition toward the past, at once guilt-obsessed and self-congratulatory in its relentless moralism and chronological snobbery. Perhaps such a disposition is inevitable, given that we have come to inhabit a post-Christian public world in which judgment is plentiful but forgiveness all but nonexistent. We used to know that the measure you give is the measure you receive, and that the judgments we aim at others, including those in our past, are arrows that can be turned back upon us as well. We need to recover that knowledge, and the humility toward the past that comes with it.

Regaining perspective also involves the recovery of a meaningful connection with the past. Knowledge is something different from meaning, and there are certain meanings that shine through in our story, and deserve to be considered independently. Let me conclude by drawing out two of them. Both are aspirational in character, as befits the aspirational character of the American nation.

First of all, what America began in 1776 has been and remains the world’s greatest experiment in large-scale self-governance. To say that we have not always been perfectly successful is obvious but also, in a sense, beside the point. The worthiness of the objective to which we have aspired remains undiminished. We do not abandon the aspiration to a more perfect realization of self-rule simply because the historical record is mixed in that regard. We do not erase the memory of imperfect men and women in the past, out of the delusion that we are so far superior to them, and would have lived differently and better had we been in their shoes. The American story contains too much richness to be reached back to, too much of a lifeline for the present, for it to be dispensed with, especially if done in response to the current binge of bizarre moral panic.

Second, there is the fact that America still represents, better than any place on earth, the conviction that no one’s life prospects should be held captive to the conditions of their birth. For millions upon millions, America has been a land of second chances, a land of hope. It offers a freedom that releases us from the unquestioned tutelage of our past, and the sometimes-crushing weight of our ascriptive status—race, sex, ethnicity, whatever it may be—and provides us with an Archimedean point from which we can scrutinize each and every one of the world’s givens, and consult our own consciences as a guide for living. Our current mania for racialism and identity politics works, perversely, against that conviction, and against that freedom. Identity politics narrows the complexity of the human person to a single imprisoning factor, a self-diminishment that may have political uses but comes at the expense of the rich and various interior life of the free individual. A similar loss has come out of the corruption and degradation of the once-noble ideal of public education, whose current deplorable condition in so many of our cities does so much to crush the life prospects of the disadvantaged young and deny them the freedom of the second chance.

The American story can accommodate instances of abject failure. The notion that all foundational stories are fairy tales is itself a fairy tale. What about the great Biblical stories of the Pentateuch, replete with the disreputable deeds of their imperfect and dissembling patriarchs, who pawn off their wives as sisters, deceive their fathers, cheat their brothers, murder, and commit incest—all while showing remarkable forgetfulness about God’s favor shown them? Or the Roman founding myth, the gruesome story of Romulus and Remus, full of deception, fratricide, and rape?

The American story does not have to carry such toxic baggage. Say what you will about the American Founders, even the occasional rogue like Aaron Burr did not sink to that level. But what the American story cannot survive is a loss of aspirational faith, the faith that is at the center of the story itself. It is not at all fanciful, even if it cannot be proven, to guess that there is a connection between the loss of the American story’s aspirational aspects and the alarming rise of “diseases of despair.” The health of the soul and the health of the polity are not entirely independent of one another; they rise and fall together. And when we see suicides among Americans aged 10 to 24 increased by nearly 60 percent between 2007 and 2018—which is to say, during years well before the current pandemic—then we can know that we are in the presence of something that is much larger than mere economics.

The morale of a nation is ultimately a question of spirit rather than matter. The great Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, observed that humans can bear almost any kind of deprivation—except for the deprivation of meaning. Those with a reason to live, a task or a goal toward which their strivings can be directed, a “why” that animates their lives—they can bear up under almost any hardship. But without that “why,” almost any “how” can defeat us.

Which is why we must not allow the American story to be lost. Such matters go far deeper than civics. A robust civic education, which seeks to impart that “sense of continuity with generations gone before” of which Dos Passos spoke and begins the process of locating one’s life in a meaning larger than oneself, is an important step back from the precipice.

Wilfred M. McClay is Professor of History at Hillsdale College. He was formerly the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent book is Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (Encounter, 2019).

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This article was published on October 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Law and Liberty, a project of the Liberty Fund.