DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
From nationalistic myth to culture wars
A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America
Richard Slotkin, 2024
This article is the sixth in the series, "Imaginative Worlds."
Previous articles included reviews of books about the dream life of animals, the cave art of early humans, changes in the meaning of 'human' in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, the importance of origin stories in developing social identity as reflected in the creation of the Old Testament, and ideas regarding the creation of personal identity from Hamlet and Jennifer Egan's, The Candy House. As with all cultural preoccupations, political identities are imagined, but unlike many cultural products, they depend on conflict, which always has the potential to erupt into violence. Politics is about power and about creating winners and losers. All politics is suffused with symbolic representations that unite or fragment social groups. The need for social solidarity conflicts with the tendency to fragmentation of interests, a polarity that creates and destroys societies and groups.
Richard Slotkin's book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (2024) summarizes themes from his trilogy: Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier In the Age of Industrialization (1985) and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (1998). In A Great Disorder, Slotkin applies his understanding of nationalistic myth to the great events in American history and to the culture wars of recent decades. Slotkin asserts in his opening paragraph: "Our country is in the grip of a prolonged crisis that has profoundly shaken our institutions, our structures of belief, and the solidarities that sustain us as a nation. The past forty years have seen a steadily intensifying culture war, expressed politically in a hyper-partisanship that has crippled the government's ability to deal constructively with the problems endemic to modern society ... (and) intensified our divisions and raised the potential for political violence." And: A Great Disorder turns to America's foundational myths to expose the deep structures of thought and belief that underlie today's culture wars."
What Is A National Myth?
One of the strengths of Slotkin's trilogy and A Great Disorder is his discussion of myth, and his exceptional ability to discern the creative use of powerful myths in movies, stories, novels and historical writing that capture public attention. Slotkin states:
"As I use the term, myths are the stories - true, untrue, half true - that effectively evoke the sense of nationality and provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action. Patriotism in this context is the political expression of nationality. It is not simply loyalty to the state, but the acting out of a particular understanding of why that state exists and for what purposes. .. . Nationality is the concept that defines full membership in the "fictive ethnicity of the nation state."
Nation states, Slotkin asserts, "began to replace to replace dynastic and feudal systems of governance in seventeenth century Europe. Until well into the 19th century, much of Europe was not organized into modern nations; e.g., the idea of a German nation may not have been intuitively obvious to many Bavarians, Prussians or Swabians prior to German unification under Bismarck. Nations as they exist today were once imagined into being, the cement of which was organized violence on a massive scale. Nations created through imagination become real in a way not easily undone when national enmities led to war and enduring hatreds. A main source of national memory is war and other organized violence. World War I revealed the power and virulence of nationalism around the world that led to the destruction of three empires (Austrian Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian) and many millions of deaths during the war and its aftermath in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
The same theme, i.e. what Slotkin refers to as "regeneration through violence," shapes the powerful American myths Slotkin has identified:
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Myth of the Founding
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Myth of the Frontier
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Three myths of the Civil War, the Myth of Liberation, the South's Myth of the Lost Cause, and the Myth of White Reunion through which White Americans healed the divisions of a war that killed 750,000 Americans out of a population of about 25 million.
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Myth of the Good War which united Americans after W.W.II and underpinned the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Movie genres such as the platoon movie in which a unit of combat soldiers overcome their racial and ethnic differences to defeat a ruthless and evil enemy served the Myth of the Good War, just as Westerns filled out the Myth of the Frontier.
According to Slotkin, various iterations of these myths appear before and during every war, and sometimes exert a powerful influence on policymakers, e.g., the movie "Black Hawk Down", a classic platoon movie set in Somalia strengthened the Bush Administration's resolve to invade Iraq, Slotkin maintains. He explains that making use of powerful social myths places the ideological values of American myths -- e.g., belief in individual rights, free enterprise, a positive attitude toward religion coupled with religious tolerance and libertarian instincts, especially re gun rights, "beyond argument. Myth does not argue its ideology; it tells a story and equates the story with history, as if it was undeniable fact." In political arguments, history is reimagined in mythical terms, and may therefore be viewed as embodying truth in a way historical facts are rarely regarded.
Slotkin asserts that national myths are "broad and consistent patterns in story telling, which directly address the fundamental character and purposes of the American nation-state." And. "Stories told by people become mythic through a process of repetition and accretion." In The Fatal Environment, Slotkin discusses Walt Whitman's poem, "Death Sonnet for Custer":
"But Whitman means it (the term "fatal environment") to suggest something more: the idea that Custer's death completes a meaningful
myth-historical design, a grand fable of national redemption and Christian self-sacrifice .... And it is essential to the illusion of this myth
that Custer's fate seem somehow implicit in the environment, a moral and ideological lesson which seems to emerge from the very nature
of things - as if Nature or God composed the story and assigned its meanings, rather than men. This is the essential illusion fostered by all
mythology ... An environment, a landscape, a historical sequence is infused with meaning in the form of a story, which converts landscape
to symbol and temporal sequence into "doom" .... The Frontier in whose real geography Custer moved and acted was already ... a space
defined less by maps and surveys than by myths and illusions, projective fantasies, wild anticipations, extravagant expectations. ...
(Regarding Custer): They (Whitman's readers) knew he had gone to conquer a region of darkness and an earthly paradise ... whose hidden
magic was to be tapped only by self- reliant individualists ... whose riches were held by a dark and savage enemy with whom White
Americans must fight a war to the knife ... "
According to Slotkin, the Myth of the Frontier is the oldest and most enduring American myth, with its origins in the colonial period, and greatly strengthened by the many Settler/ Indian conflicts of the 19th century, and renewed during the 20th century through colonial wars (e.g., in the Philippines, Cuba and Central America), space exploration, racial integration of public schools. John Kennedy named his Administration, "The New Frontier," which evoked a sense of adventure and of untold material and spiritual riches that required courage to discover and preserve. Perhaps even AI can be regarded as a new frontier in computing!
Slotkin discusses three myths from the Civil War: The Myth of Liberation (North), The Myth of the Lost Cause ( post-war South) and the Myth of White Reunion in which persons in both North and South remembered the bravery of combatants on both sides and their willingness to die for a cause they believed in. Ken Burns' PBS documentary on the Civil War made use of themes from both the Myth of Liberation and the Myth of White Reunion that celebrates the courage and self sacrifice of combatants in war.
A Great Disorder contains an outstanding chapter regarding "The Myth of the Good War," especially as reflected in movies such as "The Dirty Dozen" (1965), "Platoon (1986), "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) and "Black Hawk Down" (2002). Slotkin asserts: "the platoon movie became the basis of a new national myth, the Myth of the Good War, linking the embrace of ethnic and racial diversity to the transformation of America's role as a world-liberating Great Power. Its symbolism has spread well beyond war to characterize all forms of American striving and labor," for example after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. After the Challenger disaster, a reporter wrote: "The shuttle crew, spectacularly democratic ( male, female, black, white, Japanese- American, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant), was the best of us. ... The mission seemed symbolically immaculate, the farthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross frontiers."
In Slotkin's telling, the platoon movie, a creation of Hollywood, revised the Myth of the Frontier from an imaginary story of a White republic to a story of overcoming racial differences in a pluralistic society but "preserves the essential story structure of the Frontier Myth -- the American people are spiritually regenerated through a violent struggle against an alien and savage enemy in a wild or chaotic landscape." However, as Slotkin points out, the attempt to come to grips with new challenges and conflicts through tried and true symbolic representations is likely to limit the capacity to understand other peoples and countries and their idiosyncratic histories. The Vietnam War was not a replay of Settler/ Indian conflicts, as many American soldiers imagined the war; and was not another opportunity to resist Communism, as U.S. leaders (some of them ) believed. It was not the Communist beliefs of the North Vietnamese and their allies in South Vietnam that motivated their willingness to keep fighting whatever the cost - it was their nationalism, a motivation that ensured that North Vietnam would not become a willing satellite of Communist China or the Soviet Union. Myth creates imaginative worlds, which should not be confused with realistic appraisals of threats around the world.
Slotkin believes that "The making of national myths has proved to be essential to the creation of nation- states, and to the maintenance of that sense of historically continuous community that allows them to function. The danger of mythological is that it tempts to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past, and to sacrifice our future to that illusion," not to mention the inability to recognize and effectively respond to actual existential threats such as global warming, nuclear weapons and an unfettered AI. Political conflict depends on myths far more than on "facts," but governing through the mythological imagination is a formula for disaster.
The series "Imaginative Worlds"
When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness
The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists
Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins
Commentary: Imaginative Roots of Personal Identity
A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America
-- Dee Wilson