I have always enjoyed reading mythology; I especially like the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians which tried to explain important daily events (the sun moving through the sky) and the development of the society (the importance of giving help to travellers and strangers just in case they are gods, the dangers of hubris) through as an explanatory process or a threat from the gods (Niobe’s story is particularly compelling). However, myths as allegory or explanation are one thing; myths which inhibit an understanding of history or current reality are something altogether different.
Anyone growing up in the US has learned the myths of the country. The idea that anyone can work hard and become president is one of the most important; this contains the idea that it is not a country hindered by class and we can all get rich and become leaders irrespective of the circumstances of our birth (that class, racism, and gender do not hamper our ability to become leaders). As anyone living in the real world can tell you this is a myth; but it is a powerful one shifting responsibility for your failures onto you and not due to an unjust system. A corollary of that myth is that if you don’t work hard or don’t try, then your inability to succeed is your fault (as clearly if you had worked hard, you would succeed as that is what makes the US great).
This myth of bringing yourself up by your bootstraps is supposed to demonstrate that America is a land of opportunity unhampered by the legacies of class and aristocracy that characterised Europe. There are other myths that are part and parcel of the ethos or ideology of the US which also exist in the US … some of them are long-standing and are still used to justify racism or ignore its impact on people of colour. There are also myths that revive often in periods of growth of the power of religion over people and which offer (like the ones on racism, slavery and the civil war) an alternate view of the history of the US where the law is independent from the society and the power of the ruling class in which it is conceived, and where justice is literally set in stone with no relation to reality.
I happened upon the debates in the social studies curriculum in Texas over the past few days and what struck me most was the inconsistency between reality and the deeply held myths of the state of Texas. There were several things that struck me (yes, eliminating Helen Keller from the syllabus is interesting, but that may be due to the fact that she was a socialist; Hillary Clinton’s removal is also purely political, but think about what these removals mean for those with disabilities and for women) but I will concentrate on two of them: 1) the role of religion in the formation of the constitution insisted upon by so-called Conservatives; and 2) was the refusal to recognise the role of slavery and racism in the formation of the US and also the insistence on maintaining the elevation of the defenders of the Alamo as heroes.
Before I begin, I want to ask, yet again, what is a conservative? Is the religious right conservative or actually deeply reactionary? I would argue the latter. People that are Conservative are people that will seek to maintain a class and political system; specifically, those traditional relationships (political and economic) ensuring the continuance of the system. Advocating for the imposition of a religious basis on a legally secular society is not maintaining a system; this is reaching into nowhere land to impose a different system on society. This is not conservatism. If people cannot understand the difference between fascists, hard right, and conservatives, and think that liberals are socialists, who are of course communists and fascists, they probably cannot understand the basic idea that law develops and changes over time to reflect power relations in society, to reflect the changes in society and often to shift needed changes on society.
Moses as lawgiver and the person influencing the “founding fathers”?
Throughout the debate on Wednesday, the board also reversed a number of proposed revisions on standards dealing with religion and religious influences. Even conservative scholars have criticized the standards for grossly exaggerating those influences on American government and laws. Among the board’s changes:
- Restoring Moses to a list of major influences on the American founding documents
- Restoring language suggesting that separation of church and state isn’t a key constitutional protection for religious freedom
- Restoring language in multiple standards that exaggerate “Judeo-Christian” influences on the origins of democratic-republican government and the American legal system
“It clearly wasn’t good enough that the proposed revisions for all grades included at least 49 entirely appropriate references to religion and its profound influence in our history and society,” TFN’s Lopez said. “The board’s changes echo claims you might hear in Sunday school classrooms and certain political venues these days, regardless of what teachers and scholars say is accurate and appropriate for public school classrooms (http://tfn.org/texas-sboe-puts-politics-ahead-truth-curriculum-standards/).
This issue is extremely strange, that is, the insistence that Moses (of all people) influenced the writers of the American constitution and along with this, the insistence of Judeo-Christian themes as the basis of the laws of the US.
One may wonder how and in what manner Moses influenced the “founding fathers”. Was it their religious belief that lay behind their rejection of being subjects of King George III? There is certainly no evidence of this anywhere in the writings of the founding fathers or in discussions like The Federalist Papers on the framing of the constitution). In point of fact, the founding fathers went out of their way to keep religion and religious belief separate from the laws of the state; that this obvious thing is ignored is rather disconcerting as an understatement.
What makes this particularly strange is the lack of study of the most important ideological bases that enabled the foundation of the US: the Enlightenment. In the absence of the Enlightenment, the justification for the colonies rejecting the rule of the King George III would never exist. Moreover, it was the linkage between religion and the justification of the King’s right to rule that was rejected first by Locke and it is Locke’s argument that is then used by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense which served as an excellent piece of agit-prop to justify the separation of the colonies from the British Empire. Without a doubt, it can be correctly argued that Locke’s influence on the constitution was minimal (see slavery and property qualifications for voting as an obvious example), but his writings strongly influenced the Declaration of Independence and the ideological justification for the American Revolution. We should also note the obvious that Locke and Paine (literally) were jettisoned when they were no longer needed to justify the revolution anymore (Paine, as we know, went to France for more fertile soil where he wrote The Rights of Man).
While the Texas curriculum mentions Thomas Hobbes (the state exists to ensure safely and ownership of property that is never safe in the state of nature), it never mentions John Locke. In the absence of an understanding of Locke and the rest of the writers of the Scottish and French Enlightenment, how can one understand the rejection of a king as ruler or head of state? How, if one accepts the divine right of kings can you get rid of the king? Moreover, the idea of society formed by the consent of the governed (which forms the basis of the US constitution) is absent.
It is Locke’s rejection of Filmer’s Patriarcha and the divine right of kings that shifts away from religious justification for the right of kings to rule towards the justification of democratic norms to enable citizens (not subjects of the king) to choose the state which governs them. The state in this case is a social contract between citizens and the state guaranteeing the rights of citizens. The right to vote in Locke rejects property qualifications (such as ownership of land) in favour of the right of property in each person’s body. Slavery was a violation of the right of property in one’s own body as that property right can never be alienated or transferred. While these two issues were not recognised in the initial constitution (both property qualifications and slavery were incorporated into the initial document), Locke’s Two Treatises of Government forms the basis of bourgeois democracy and the right of bourgeois democratic revolution if the state is not performing guaranteeing and ensuring your natural rights, for example to life (existence, subsistence).
The reference to Judeo-Christian beliefs as the basis of law also confuses me. In the myth of the receipt of the Ten Commandments (which is what may be what they are referring to as the basis of law) given to Moses by god carved in stone, why is Moses being elevated as law giver rather than the distributor of god’s law? Did they come from god or did Moses develop them? Does the Christian interpretation of this event differ from that of Jews?
Moreover, can we understand the Ten Commandments without at least understanding the legal code in the Code of Hammurabi? Why is the Code of Hammurabi not the basis of these laws that supposedly were passed down to Moses from God? This is the first surviving human legal code that we know existed. Hammurabi developed his code not as given from god (his right to rule was granted by the god Marduk, but the laws were his), but as a basis for the way in which the society he ruled should be run. In other words, these were Hammurabi’s laws; is it that the Code is not god given which is the important thing according to these so-called conservatives? So, why Moses; why not be honest and say god? Can it be due to the supposed separation of church and state that they are pretending doesn’t exist in the constitution? Do they understand that the constitution did not establish a church in the US and that the church must be kept separate from the actions of the state? They understand it enough to babble about Moses rather than god; but not enough to keep god out of their education curriculum.
In many senses, this is yet another ridiculous attempt to claim “Judeo-Christian ideas” as the basis of law in the US. An additional issue is that Jewish law does not end with the 10 Commandments (the oral Torah), there is the whole of Halakha (laws derived from human origin from the study of the Torah) – these are not part of Christian law … so Jews and Christians diverge (then there is of course the reality that not all Jews follow Halakha completely, if at all – but that is another story). Where do all the laws that exist in the US come from?
Much of the law and the rights that are granted by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights derives not from the Ten Commandments but from English Common Law which derives from legal precedent and agreements by rulers and the ruled. Even if you (bizarrely) believe in the divine right of kings, you should understand that something like the Magna Carta was derived from the balance of forces between the king and the barony which forced the king to give up some rights in the context of a baronial revolt. So, where does poor Moses come into this picture (was he standing around glaring at people when the law relating to property was developed)?
So, one needs ask why does what is essentially myth trump known history in Texas? What is the purpose of education in the state of Texas? Is it to keep people ignorant? Is it to provide the tools to understand history and current reality? Clearly not, as somehow history and reality are completely absent from an understanding of the development of law. Most people don’t even understand that the eye for an eye thing in the Code of Hammurabi was a call for proportionality in punishment related to the crime (the punishment for theft of a coin must not be the same as the punishment for murder), how can they understand that law does not come from Heaven and instead was developed over millennia by human beings? Moreover, one of the most important points about the enlightenment was the fact that human beings themselves can interpret morality independently of the divine. In order to learn about this you would need to unlearn what you were taught as a child in the Texas school system. So, what use is an education that must be unlearned in order to understand where laws come from?
The use of the divine as the basis of these laws turns laws developed in a specific historical context into immutable things carved in stone … but the constitution is always reinterpreted, judges interpret laws and change them. One of my favourite NRA advertisements is the “they want to change the constitution” – as though the constitution has not changed since written as if they are not amendments to the constitution. The difference between something literally carved in stone and human law is that human law always reflects the power relations in the society and the development of society itself; not only does it protect the wealthy and powerful and it guarantees the safety of their property, it also reflects the changes in the society itself (or those changes that the ruling class recognises must be done to preserve society).
On Racism, Slavery, the Civil War and the Defenders of the Alamo
Scholars were particularly concerned by the board’s decision to perpetuate the myth that the defense of “states’ rights” was a cause of the Civil War. The board did change the standards to emphasize slavery’s central role in causing the war, but including “states’ rights” as a contributing factor is historically inaccurate, said Dr. Shirley Thompson, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin who has extensively researched slavery and its legacy in this country.
“’States’ rights’ is a fundamental aspect of the ‘Lost Cause’ myth that was promoted in the late-19th and early-20th century to erase the African-American experience and historical memory of slavery and the Civil War,” Thompson said. “This pro-Confederate interpretation of history also went hand-in-hand with and helped to authorize Jim Crow segregation, the disenfranchisement, lynching and terroristic violence, and the relegation of African Americans to second-class citizenship. This relic of early 20th-century thought has long been discredited by the historical profession.”
Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, also a UT-Austin historian and expert on slavery and African-American history, warned that the decision to keep the “states’ rights’ language “leans toward an historical distortion popular in some circles but not at all supported by trained scholars in the academy.”
“An entire generation of Texas schoolchildren is entering college classrooms with a narrow understanding of the American past,” Berry said (http://tfn.org/texas-sboe-puts-politics-ahead-truth-curriculum-standards/).
One would think that given the role of slavery in Texas’s history that a clear understanding of its impact and the impact of racism historically in Texas would be something that an education system imparts. However, one would be wrong.
From its insistence of the “heroic nature” of the defenders of the Alamo to the importance of slavery in its economic development and to the insistence that slavery was only one cause of the civil war, what we are seeing is a re-writing of history in a state where the importance of slavery was pronounced. Maintaining the fiction that state’s rights was a relevant cause of the civil war legitimises an understanding of the causes of civil war in which the problems (moral, economic, political and social) of slavery are diminished compared to the belief that states’ right to allow slavery and to treat human beings as property was guaranteed by the constitution as opposed to being under national control. The racism that enables slavery that allowed the creation and maintenance of slaves that had no civil rights as they were property is perpetuated in the states’ rights interpretation of the causes of the civil war. Initially laws in Texas never addressed slaves as they were property, the laws only applied to white people; it is only after emancipation of slaves that the law was turned towards freed black slaves using the black codes. In fact, the use of the law to keep freed slaves marginalised and working as slaves was an essential component of the foundation of the Texas penitentiary system.
Reading Texas Tough by Robert Perkinson, not only provides an understanding of the development of the Texas Penitentiary system, but the role of racism and the penitentiary system for maintaining the labour of freed slaves for use by the state and the private sector using this labour. Given, the history of the legal system (which has nothing to do with Moses and a lot to do with racism) in Texas, a coherent understanding of the role of slavery in the Texas territory and its “struggle for independence” from Mexico (due to the illegality of slavery in first Spain and then in Mexico and the dependence of the Texas economy on it) and then later in the Texas state and the role of racism in Texas is the least that can be part of a coherent education curriculum. The fact that Texas still incarcerates disproportionately larger numbers of people of colour than any other state, needs to be discussed and eliminated, but when the state insists on teaching the false myths of Confederate apologism as part of an educational curriculum what can we expect from this state? Again myths are more important than reality and history and like with religion, children in Texas will need to unlearn the myths they are taught before they can begin to understand the history of the state and the US as a whole.
All of this relates to what the role of education in our society is; especially for working class children. Shouldn’t children not be taught myths as fact or lies as history and reality. These arguments are so outside the ballpark that there is no scholarly support for them. If so-called knowledge needs to be unlearned for education to begin, why is this discussion about the social studies curriculum actually happening? There was a debate back in the 19th century about what knowledge should be available or taught to the working class: some argued that the ability to understand their situation and exploitation was essential, others maintained that knowledge imparted to the working class should be useful in their future lives. Texas’ curriculum provides neither of these aims … it seeks to undermine intellectual curiosity, to offer nonsense in the place of knowledge and to foster ignorance. How can this be called education?
h/t to my friend Mary who copied and pasted the article on this which due to EU privacy laws I couldn’t read, forget referring to in the piece!