Tuesday, February 26, 2019
BELIEVING IN SMALLNESS
It
is a relief to study the facts, in any field, whatever the facts are. In a
world with so much injustice in it, so much fear and hatred, it is a huge
relief to be able to say: This is what I know. Doing more, like trying to
figure out what the facts mean, could be an added bonus, but only as long as we
stay close to the facts and do not leap to big conclusions. A good rule to
follow in all investigations is to keep it small. I don’t mean that the big
issues are out of the question. I just mean we should stay focused on telling
the details of the truth and not to be swayed by ideology. Don’t force meaning
on the evidence. Let it come naturally.
Maybe
this is a selfish way of thinking. When lies have become the standard way of
studying history, it is almost a joy to be able to say, Here’s what’s wrong
with that. The facts may or may not solve or rectify any injustices. But they
can be an escape from the turmoil of the day and that, I admit, is selfish.
It’s not all selfishness. The facts also offer some assurance that truth
matters. And if you believe that truth leads to justice, then some good has
been accomplished by just getting something right.
When
I see politicians spewing their hatred, I feel reassured when I surround myself
with solid facts. I feel even more reassurance when I see that many others also
relish the truth. “We are a nation of immigrants” I hear over and over. And
that is true. The fact is that this country was built on immigration. In an
early pamphlet, Thomas Jefferson said that the colonies were not created by
charters from the king of England, but by the universal right that people have
to leave the place where they were born and seek new habitations. Travel and
movement were considered basic rights. The great European experts on international
law said so. Emigration was seen as natural. That is a historical fact.
That
does not mean we are bound by such facts. Societies can change. We can say that
what was once accepted policy is no longer what we want to do. The past cannot
handcuff us. But if we are going to
change, we should be clear about it and why we want to change.
It
was a sound principle in Jefferson’s time that no generation had the right to
make laws which are eternally binding and a handicap to future generations. The
current generation may decide that it wants to put an end to immigration. It
has that right. But we should know that if we do this, we are bucking a
longstanding historical trend. Why was this trend in place for such a long
time? Why was emigration considered to be a God-given right of all human
beings? What were the benefits? What other rights was it connected to? We
should think about it before we willy-nilly change it. Or we can change it
blindly and react to the fear of the moment. When we do things out of fear,
does that generally lead to good results?
I
like saying simple facts. I like saying: I know this, that, and the other. Who
doesn’t like saying what they know? I know I like this pizza, this is good, this
flavor ice cream is great, this TV show is worth watching. Some of the things I
like are relatively simple, like pizza. Liking a TV show is a bit more
complicated. It’s funny, it’s dramatic, it reveals something about life. Some
of those revelations may not be so simple. Still, it did a good job. I felt
something, it moved me. That’s all I have to know. It moved me. Explaining why
may get very messy, but the fact of being moved is simple, maybe too simple. So
much evil in the world comes from being moved by inane slogans. Being moved is
no guarantee you’re moving in the right direction.
I
recently saw an episode of a German TV show called “Crime Scene Cleaner”, which
is as self-explanatory a title as you can get. It is a half-hour comedy series in
each episode of which our hero shows up at an apartment or house, after someone
has died, to clean up the blood, and after the police have finished collecting
the evidence. He always works alone, but he also always encounters someone (a
relative, a neighbor, etc.) with whom he gets caught up in the most hilarious conversations,
often bordering on the philosophical. In this episode, it is a neo-Nazi he
meets. The room he has to clean up is filled with Nazi memorabilia. He is
astounded that anybody could still believe this crap.
At
one point, our hero asks the other man, “Don’t you think it was insane to kill
six million Jews?” The man answers that maybe they went a little overboard
there, but so what? The French Revolution also went crazy with excessive
violence, but we still can discuss the ideas of the French Revolution and take
them seriously. Why can’t we do the same with Nazi ideas? Maybe we need a new
modern Nazism. Our hero fantasizes punching him in the face, but does not do
it. I won’t tell you the end, but he gets a small taste of justice; painting
the walls pink is part of it.
My
feelings about this show are very complicated. In a way, it is the opposite of
what I usually spend my time doing which is digging up the plain facts. For
example, I like reporting that at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
in 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania defended the illogical nature of the
three-fifths compromise (southern states would be able to count three-fifths of
their slave population towards how much representation they would get in
Congress)—illogical because each slave was considered as something between a
person and a piece of property, and arbitrarily given the status of
three-fifths of a person—illogical but necessary, Wilson argued, for reaching a
compromise with the southern slave states. But at his state’s ratification
debates over whether to approve the new Constitution, Wilson was convinced that
the new Congress would have the power to emancipate all the slaves throughout
the country. He called this a “delightful prospect” and the power to tax the
import of slaves he called a “lovely feature in the Constitution.”
When
you go carefully through the evidence of the Constitutional Convention, a clear
pattern emerges with respect to slavery. Varieties of James Wilson’s sentiments
were expressed. Another delegate believed, “Slavery in time will not be a speck in
our Country.” So they were in no rush to push the issue now. The people that
opposed slavery turned out to be mildly antislavery. These antislavery
advocates put off their hopes for an end to slavery to an indefinite future. In
the meantime, they conceded the strength of slave owners and gained few
concessions from them. It was like a game of poker in which one side held all
the good cards. The slaveholding states got much of what they wanted. There is
a satisfaction in understanding what happened in history. So this is how we got
to where we are today and this is why racism is so strong today.
There is a very different satisfaction
in watching something like “Crime Scene Cleaner”—or maybe not very different at
all, it just feels different. We can feel poetic justice at work in the episode
I saw. Given the crimes of the Nazis, that is trivial, very trivial in fact. It
is almost nothing. But we, or at least I, need the trivial to go on living.
Sometimes just the smallest thing is enough to give us reason to go on. A
flower, a fact, a punch in the nose against the right person at the right time,
even if only in our dreams or on a TV show. The smallness of gathering facts is
like that. It is such a little thing to do, but it is a relief against the
assault of lies and hatred.
© 2019 Leon Zitzer
