Why This Reality Surprises: The History Problem is a Problem of Imagination 

The history of humanity is not…a vehicle which we board or get out of at random.  Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future.  Only then – but from that moment on – will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.  

– Hannah Arendt.

This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes;…Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent.

– R.W. Emerson

This is the ultimate fact …the resolution of all into the ever-blessed One.

– Ibid

Having attended Divinity School in New Haven, I was drawn to read the review of a book about Yale’s history of original enmeshment with the system of enslavement.  There I came across this thought: “Part of the challenge of our research and writing is to educate the surprise out of this reality.” (David W. Blight, Yale and Slavery: A History,  quoted by Vincent Brown, What Universities Owe, LRB  7/24/25).  I was reminded of the idea expressed by the young man, “Luigi,” who is teaching a  new “Peoples’ History” class at The Other Side in Utica: “If the study of history makes you feel proud and happy you probably aren’t studying history.”

Indeed there’s something missing in a history that causes our surprise when for instance Black Americans demand reparations, or Gazans strike back at their Israeli keepers with suicide bombs, or when Native Americans are pained by the removal of their children to American schools which, Heavens! We had not known even existed!  A heavy veil exists over large portions of “what really happened” for most of us, whether we lean left or right, as if, to keep afloat in this world, we must remain protected from truth’s torpedo at all costs.  I love the history projects that make important corrections in the record,with the potential they have for unsettling complacent liberal America.  For surely these projects of  “positive endarkenment” aim not only or even mainly at the MAGA people, but at liberal-minded readers and thinkers who are simply missing something in their understanding of the present. 

I too am committed to this goal of understanding the present in the way Hannah Arendt expressed it. Being neither a historian nor a philosopher, nor a socialist like Luigi, the project I take on against this tendency to repeat history’s barbarities over and over, is different in nature.  For me, the useful way to think of this problem of understanding the present is as the problem of conformity.  I also think of it as machinehood, a better word in some ways because it suggests an active loss of humanity, a disconnection from the soul. But I like conformity because it connects me to the thought of Emerson, America’s “spiritual father.”  Though his “Self reliance” could be – and I’m sure is – interpreted as support for the anti-government “revolution” of the right, he is in fact a defender of metaphysical reality – in which there is no left or right – as attainable solely individually, unmediated by religion.  To the extent I find/know my soul, I take support from his powerful vision that advises me to hold fast to its truth (i.e., my truth) of the “ever-blessed One.” 

Less than 100 years after the Revolution, Emerson saw the pervasiveness and the danger of conformity in a free society wherein people seek social acceptance over self-alignment.  Then as now, most readers of Emerson are unaware that in saying “Trust thyself,” what he directs to is the Unconscious, to the location of the original perception in one’s personal soul.  That truth, (even fully acknowledging the actual capitalist reality that demands a different self-reliance) is available to the extent one trusts the security attainable through creative work and self-reflection over that offered in career and material abundance. Connection with this truth still is largely evaded by people of left and right alike,  to our benefit neither individually nor as a whole:  Like history, the soul is not “a vehicle which we board and get out of at random,”  it carries that damnably inconvenient burden of the past.

Complicating the matter,  in a materialist reality there’s no such thing as a soul really.  Like poetry, talk about the soul points to something, yes, –  but the world’s problems cannot be addressed by someone speaking for something metaphysical, Rev. M.L King or Gandhi  notwithstanding.  However, this limitation on imagination drastically limits the grounds upon which one can live morally or, using Arendt’s terms, how one can live understanding the present as including its terrible burden of the past, the burden the soul carries within its all-connected understanding.  

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This subject – that is,  the extreme fragility of the truth-telling soul in materialist reality I found reflected this summer in reading An American Tragedy, the novel by Theodore Dreiser, based on the real-life drowning murder of a young pregnant woman (Grace Brown) by her ex-lover (Chester Gillette) just north of Utica in the Adirondacks in 1906.  Dreiser takes great pains to expose the larger, more complicated truth behind the murder in class-stratified America: the boy murderer, Clyde, raised in genteel poverty by evangelically-based missionizing parents,  was exposed through his job at a ritzy hotel – during vulnerable adolescence – to the society of the privileged, those who could accumulate fine things, reside in beautiful homes set in beautifully landscaped lawns, who could play all day, if it pleased, without worry about paying bills or falling into debt, or have to take what comes in the form of bosses or overseers who never ask for nor care about whatever true talents one might possess. 

Moreover, Clyde’s motivation to actually plot such a crime was directly inspired  by the beautiful socialite who planted in him his dream of a relationship,  innocent of the power she had over him from her wealth and social position. (Thus in a way not unlike the boy mass murderers of Columbine High School, the crime implicates America’s priorities, its beatification of wealth and of weapons, and not just, as in the Columbine case, two deranged kids who listened to too much Marilyn Manson.)  In the public mindset in rural upstate NY then, not so different from now, virtue = innocence; thus we will be perpetually surprised at acts of violence that represent to us an attack on the innocent but may rather, in understanding them, be an attack on our willed ignorance.

This failure to understand the present goes beyond even a Marxist or socialist interpretation like Dreiser’s.  To understand the present in the way Arendt speaks of it demands a capacity to protect oneself against the self-serving lies of official America coming at one in the present, 24-7 via all the means – mass media especially – of the rich and powerful in America.   These perpetuate the illusion that allows for  honest “surprise” at eruptions of “senseless” violence.  For this ignorance to be exposed  there must be  a different and more personal standard of truth than factual truth alone can provide.  The heart  alone keeps its unvarying standard but is all too rarely consulted in relation to hard-to-comprehend public events beyond the concern for abused animals.  

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What can Arendt mean when she suggests the present cannot be understood apart from the burden of the past becoming blessing, that is, becoming a weapon in the fight for a better future?   I find it helps, with the new understandings coming from trauma research, to recognize what Arendt refers poetically to as ‘burden,’ is ‘trauma,’ the scientific name for the intangible hard-to-define affliction of the soul. The case of Israel, with its clear history in the collective trauma of the Holocaust,  is instructive in this regard:  the burden of the trauma carried by that whole people has not – by most Israelis –  been turned into blessing; it is, instead, moral collapse.  This is why trauma, if it is to be means to transformation and not to repetition of history’s traumas, must be known directly and personally.  It must be known as one’s own darkness residing “down there” in the underground of the Unconscious; the long healing from trauma one’s personal responsibility.   

The consequences of  liberal reality’s denial of trauma for individuals suffering from PTSD has been well documented in contemporary research, including neurological research.  I wish to add to that list: denial of trauma-memory is a societally-sanctioned interference in the natural process of the soul, an abortion of its nature in becoming; thus it negates the possibility each person is born with, whether “religious” or not, for living heroically and non-conformingly (as other).  Loss of the inward capacity of individual human beings for unexceptional exalted living, (i.e., for living with meaning and purpose according to personal destiny), gives, at the collective level, carte-blanche to exceptionalism.   Buoyed by exceptionalism limits do not exist, the need for constraint and for virtue ( an important word for Emerson) is abolished.  One lives conformingly, for one cannot be free without the personal sense of freedom attained.  

Awareness of one’s trauma is to understand the present as endarkened, never innocent, never secure, requiring constant attention to one’s soul.   The “fight for the better future,”is more than a sacrificial liberal concern for the good of others that leaves one’s own reality innocent and untouched.  Oh no! The fight now includes a more intimate one for the sake of one’s own inward other, the harmonizing soul!  Erasing the false distinction between the good for me and the good for you, the soul makes it possible to live in the fuller truth of the “ever-blessed One.”

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Standing upon a less communicable terrain than history or socio-economics or investigative journalism, my critique of the modern corporate neoliberal zeitgeist reflects influence from the spiritual transformation movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s.  Generally discounted if not ridiculed by the liberal mainstream, this movement evolved partly out of the “hippie” counterculture of the 1960’s whose use of mind-expanding drugs made possible  knowledge of the soul’s otherness.   The counterculture showed it was possible to be directly accountable to the soul’s unwavering truth.  A way was opened to humanly evolve beyond youthful rebellion into the capacity for the long steadfast creative work of building the better world. 

In history, the Sixties counterculture and activism revealed that the establishment’s worthiest opponent, its aim as true and undivided for peace and love as capitalism’s for reckless growth, is the heart.  The implication was that imagination is capitalism’s natural nemesis, and  will be its unraveling if trust is placed in it.  Further, the tendency of 60’s counterculture toward ‘back to the land’ suggested that the aim of the heart is indigenous – non-materialist –  i.e., toward living within the limits given in nature, tangentially as possible to mainstream “grid” reality.  

Where the counterculture failed was precisely at that point wherein one must take Emerson (or Thoreau, who was more an icon in the counterculture)) all the way.  In that way, it mirrored and was vulnerable to the denial of trauma in the dominant culture.  Though one sincerely seeks the better world, without knowing/transcending  the psychic wounding,  one cannot bear the cost of “otherness” and therefore the burden will not become blessing. The safety of limits will be sought in the ready-made order of conformity, into which the hippie movement dissolved for the most part.  Thus it’s left to someone like me who was too emotionally insecure to take up the drug-inspired freedom of the counterculture, terrified by its formlessness, left out of the safety net of affluence, with only my own soul’s voice to back me up, to point this out. I tell myself this: Everyone has to work from where she is, with what she has; some of us are late-bloomers, but still, bloom we must.  

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Almost two centuries ago, Emerson attempted to remove the excuse of exceptionalism that allows us to recognize spiritual heroism in such historical figures as  Dr. King (minus his critiques of capitalism and war) or Dorothy Day (cleansed of her anarchism), but exempts oneself from the call to direct knowledge of the divine. Instead of pursuing self-trust as radical call to reliance upon immaterial reality and the indigenous soul,  Americans take their characteristic spiritual restlessness not to alignment with the soul’s destiny,  but with the expansive designs of Empire.  At the personal level, this  restlessness is a most effective egoic avoidance mechanism – culminating now in the continual and aimless “globetrotting” indulged in by those clinging to middle class optimism.  It can be seen also in continuous attention to screens;  another form of globetrotting. 

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In Dreiser’s book, which apparently stayed close to historical fact,  I’m seeing something pertinent to all this.  For the murderer Clyde, seduced by the materialist American Dream with its inherent class structure, that Dream became the lens through which he looked at his own parents with their non-materialist, honestly practiced  faith, and through which his own “prospects” appeared as dreary, everlasting drudgery. To the extent he rejected and despised his colorless, “loser” parents, ashamed of them and of himself for being of them, he lost the possibility of the “transcendence” which was his mother’s basis for living outside the powerfully attractive glitter and glamor of the materialist dream –  an “otherness,” presented by Dreiser – in sympathy with Clyde – as dreary and inferior.  Their way may have had little appeal, but to resist the siren of materialism, the only “betterment” America offers, a better “better” has to be found “outside” it, in imagination. 

Two not-easy ways exist for secular white middle-class liberals to release ourselves from the conformity that must continually be surprised  in “this reality.”  Neither way includes remaining a conforming liberal in materialist reality, both are ways of otherness. One is to gain an underclass perspective taking it all the way, i.e., aligning oneself as socialist or communist or anarchist.  In this country to do so in most places is as much as to wear a distinct yellow star of otherness.  Or, one can  connect via imagination with the divine reality in which all are one.  This act of radical self-trust, the direction in which Emerson pointed, and which he exemplified, is to apply oneself religiously, but to one’s art, going all the way with it, working it faithfully even when faith is battered. Taking either of these ways, one will be an outsider to liberal reality with the possibility, in agency,  of turning history’s horror into blessing.

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