Paul
Joined: 17 Dec 2008
Posts: 1
Location: Southeastern USA
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 Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 8:15 pm Post subject: Discussion of Pasley's “Midget on Horseback" |
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In the article “Midget on Horseback,” Jeffrey L. Pasley challenges some precious assumptions about America’s history, and does so with instructive simplicity. Pasley focuses attention on long-held assumptions by means of the rhetorical question concerning the American Indians: | Quote: | | “How could any scholar claim to have seriously interpreted the history of the American state, without foregrounding the experience of those peoples who were first, most frequently, and most punishingly targeted by government policy in the United States?” |
Similar questions occurred to me after reading John Ehle’s “Trail of Tears,” a historical account of events leading up to the forced march of the Cherokee to the Oklahoma territory in 1838. Those questions began to take on a more personal meaning to me after family research convinced me that some of the persons on that forced march may have been among my ancestors. It is one thing to learn that the Cherokee were forced to march to Oklahoma, but another thing to learn that great-great-Grandmother may have been on that march.
I would venture to say that how we tell our history heavily depends on the persons with whom we most identify. As long as I identified myself solely with Captain John Smith and John Winthrop, the story as told in most history books seemed fine. Once family research showed me the possibility that I may have more blood ties to Pocahontas than to John Winthrop, the points of emphasis in the story began to shift in my mind. Did I learn a bias? Or did I unlearn a bias? One thing is clear: history is told from a perspective. Or, as I said to someone recently: “To the victor goes the quill.”
Pasley is clearly correct in implying that American history as often told is grossly incomplete. Completeness require that a whole story be told, including persons who have been given short shrift by being portrayed as human debris that had to be swept out of the way before new construction could begin on the site. Such facts seem to touch on some persons’ emotions in an unpleasant and uncomfortable way. Some even publicly claim that it is gross distortion to imply that “our” forefathers were criminals or murderers, and understandably so: no sane person could conceivably want to embrace self-loathing as a way of life. Every normal person would prefer to maintain a healthy pride, not have it damaged by ugly assertion about one’s ancestors. However, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Somehow, in their pivotal 1979 work, pointed to research findings that showed clearly that awakening to honest self-loathing can be a doorway opening into a new and better way of life. Unfortunately, self-loathing seems to have taken on a life of its own during the postmodern era, apparently functioning somewhat like the medieval Christians’ self-flagellation for sanctity’s sake, or like some modern Protestant denominations that still actively practice regular guilt induction for spiritual cleansing. Ritual self-loathing performed as a routine act has little or no value in my opinion, but if there is any merit to Yochelson and Samenow’s work – and follow up studies and clinical experience clearly indicate that it does – then working through honest self-loathing as a temporary stage in one’s healthy development can be of enormous benefit.
The fifteen or so years in which I worked clinically with incarcerated convicted offenders taught me that the main difference between fleeing from self-loathing, wallowing in it, or working through it and moving on to the next stage depends directly on whether one can muster sufficient accurate self-esteem and honest courage to fuel oneself for the arduous journey. In a manner of speaking, perhaps a stage of self-loathing is a spiritual and a psychological trail of tears of its own, one that non-Indian persons must endure on the journey to finding complete healthy self-love and self-respect. Regardless of whether one accepts postmodernism’s precepts, recent neurological research findings have demonstrated that human beings do store memories in the form of narratives. The implication is clear enough: good mental health depends on a sufficient fit between one’s narrative and certain major facts in the outside world of reality. Or, as a staunch postmodernist might put it: one’s narrative is complete as long as it does not require the destruction of other narratives, or the destruction of people who have other narratives. Otherwise, the person suffers from what my field calls “paranoia,” which is a driving need to keep other person’s narratives far away from one’s own thinking and emotions.
Pasley’s biggest contribution in this article may be the clear way in which he separates simple historical reality from the need to wallow in, or flee from, the associated self-loathing. Indeed, it is possible to retain real empathy with persons on both sides of a historical conflict – even one with real present-day consequences – without getting permanently caught in a morass of self-loathing. I would even suggest that an accurate history of America requires it. One need only consider for a moment how a world history text might have been written by a victorious Third Reich to see it.
The goal of scholars since Descartes has been “objectivity.” However, physicists have been saying for decades that total objectivity is not possible, since everything is relative to one’s viewpoint. Indeed, one of the great cultural strengths of Shakespeare is that he views a wide variety of characters, from pirates to Puritans, all with clarity, but all with empathy. Perhaps historians could benefit from adopting my field’s concept of a healthy interpersonal boundary as another lens through which to view events. By definition, a healthy boundary allows individuals to define themselves as separate entities, each with separate ideas and emotions, with the crucial trait that a boundary allows information to flow back and forth across that boundary. Unhealthy boundaries exist in two forms: walls, which permit no information to flow across, and porous boundaries, which blur the distinctions between individuals so much that whatever one individual thinks and feels, the other is bound to think and feel also. Pasley’s article could be taken as a recommendation that historians can disassemble the wall inhibiting the flow of information between American Indians and white historians, erecting a healthy boundary in its place, without substituting a porous boundary and getting so overwhelmed with information and emotions that they then fail to document facts accurately. I would suggest that inasmuch as a culture is an entity of its own, historians are the culture’s counselors and therapists who allow us as a group to look inward accurately. Individual psychosocial development requires a person to work through a modicum of self-loathing that normal everyday life imposes, so therapists must work through that stage as a prerequisite to being able to assist other people through it. Perhaps it is also true for historians – to assist the rest of us on the path of seeing our history accurately, as a foundation for having a solid group identity, they have the difficult task of working through the stages of group self-loathing. It is an onerous task, but the view from the other side is well worth it.
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A ship in a harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.
- John A. Shedd |
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