In a recent Psychology Today article by Toni Berhand, J.D., she describes a phenomenon she calls "Good Old Days Syndrome." As I read the article I started thinking about our current mess in Congress -- reminiscing for those good old days when we used to set aside our differences to come together and solve big problems.
Or did we.
Rancor.
That’s a good word. It sounds like it should. If you say it out loud, slowly, try it with me: Rrr-ang-kk-oo-rr. You really get the “rank” part of the word. Especially if you curl up your nose at the same time.
Here is thefreedictionary.com definition:
Rancor: Bitter, long-lasting resentment; deep-seated ill will.
Origins: Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin, rancid smell, from Latin rancere, to stink, be rotten.
I especially like rancor's fetid origins. I'm going to make it my word for today: Rancor. As in, “
The rancor in Washington, D.C., has become so thick I can barely breathe. Don’t they see how fed up the planet is with our deep-seated ill will? Please, please, please, get on with the governing of our nation for Pete’s sake.”
As Toni Bernhard observed, there is a tendency for us to long for the “good ol’ days.” And though my College English composition prof would have just dinged me a full grade for that grand sweeping generalization, I’m going to take my chances. Yet here is the thing: For some of us – those on the left of the aisle – we long for the “good ol’ days,” of, let’s say, the 1990’s. The Cold War had just ended, Clinton was President and, though Congress caused trouble with shutdowns and impeachments and the like, we could still get on with balanced budgets and welfare reform. Science was still something we thought was good and we invested heavily in information and communications technology and medicine. The rest of the world thought we were cool.
But for another segment of our fine nation, the “good ol’ days” are not the 1990’s. They are the 1790’s. We were a largely agrarian nation and our fledgling experiment in representative democracy was truly nowhere near as involved with our lives as it is today. People mostly just lived their “nasty, brutish, and short” lives, as Thomas Hobbes might say. Plantation life drove the southern economy while a mercantile class’s wealth drove the north's. It was what our founders wanted to create. That truth is self-evident for they were still living it and creating it.
And in those “good ol’ days” of the early republic we didn’t have rancor like we do today. We had something even better. We had Whiskey Rebellion’s and gun duels where the Vice President shot and killed a former Secretary of Treasury. There were slave revolts, and labor unrest. Running up to the Civil War a Congressman beat the daylights out of a Senator rendering him unconscious. This was no little fight. The senator’s injuries were so severe he was out of commission for three years. Three Years! That ain’t rancor. That's murder and assault.
Imagine, if you will, waking up one morning, flipping open your laptop and the headline on the Huffington Post shouts out “Paul Ryan beats up Chuck Schumer” on the Senate Floor? Or you turn on NPR and listen to the report of Vice President Joe Biden shooting and killing Henry Paulson for insulting his wife and is now holed up in Dover, Delaware with a band of loyalists trying to form a new country? Now THAT would be Representative Democracy!
All this is to say that our history of getting along and compromising is troubled. A couple weeks ago my friend Jim and I were musing about the current state of affairs. We began exploring the possibility that, perhaps, what is going on in Washington is actually our behavioral norm. If we look at the long sweep of American history, back to the founding, we tend to not treat each other very well. Our current history may trick us into believing we cooperate better than we really do. When we consider this more recent history, the one that currently living Americans have lived in, it only goes back to a little before World War II. Most of that time was spent in an existential battle against Totalitarianism. First Fascism then Communism. We could put aside whatever political animosities existed in the moment (think civil rights), just enough, so we could join forces against a common mortal enemy. Now, with the Cold War over, and 9-11 receding, we can get back to behaving in the way that is baked into our American genes. We are the heirs of disenfranchised fringe religious groups, economic opportunists, and thrill seekers who fled Europe to the “New World.” You could say we are regressing back to our mean. Our mean way of being: One that includes beautiful Enlightenment era oratory and literature, a belief in the ultimate destiny of humankind to freely seek life, liberty and happiness. And also a way of being that includes the destruction of a native population, slavery, ill-thought compromises, and a civil war.
Today, at least, fatigue will eventually overrun the rancor and one side will sue for peace. Siege warfare, as long and bloody as it is, eventually ends. But this one hopefully ends soon. Aside from the human pain and suffering our current government shutdown is creating, we have lots of work to get back to. We have an unfolding global environmental crisis with some scientists now describing our time as the 6th Great Extinction. Our hydrocarbon energy source will run out. Not tomorrow. But is it 50 years? 100? Either way its a small percentage of time when divided by the 10 thousand or so years of recorded human history. Those born today will live into that world. To solve this problem requires “all hands on deck” and the clever thinking and inputs from all sides. We need a functional system that can bring those best ideas together to form even better ones. To do that requires a level of tolerance for different thoughts we simply do not have. As the great Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire mused “What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.”
And the creation of our more perfect union was, in part, an attempt to structure a government that protected us from us. Protect us from our folly and tendency towards animal emotions. Those ideas are 250 years old now, and we know more about human emotion and motivations. But those of us in the liberal tribe need to watch our smugness. We Democrats are gleefully anticipating the apparent Tea Party implosion. I know I’ll be skipping and clicking my heals together when it happens. But we need to be ready to set that aside quickly so we can pardon their folly and work with our brothers and sisters on the big tasks at hand. I want to stay hopeful that we can get through this but some mornings I half expect to wake up and discover Joe Biden just shot another Treasury Secretary.