Unlearning the American Myth

Introduction and Origins

                 To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.  —Ann Carson

I have no doubt that Trump’s reelection has led a lot of people to ponder some version of the question: How did we get here? It’s true for me and it can all seem so surreal (and so sad and discouraging).

I’ve long been interested in understanding and addressing root causes (that’s what Active Peace is all about). And now, studying the shadow side of American history has proven very helpful to me in understanding how we got here and how Trump and MAGA is just one chapter in the much larger story.

Critical history teaches us that racism and white supremacy, scapegoating and dehumanizing, and tremendous violence have always been foundational to the American project. And throughout it all, the ability to project a moral high ground and remain innocent.

It’s pretty common knowledge that Americans are about the most ahistorical people that ever existed. That I could be a poster boy for that has been clear to me since I landed in Sweden at the age of 22 and my friends and classmates knew a lot more about American history and the world than I did. And still, it was only recently that I decided I wasn’t okay with my own level of ignorance.

Reading about the American Myth in particular, has taught me much about myself and the beliefs and assumptions I still carry. It’s resulted in personal empowerment, broader perspective, and greater empathy since it just gets clearer that, ultimately, were all in it together.

It also relates directly to my work with Active Peace. This learning journey has brought a sense of solidarity with all kinds of people around the world as following one theme leads to another in the interconnected web of people joining together to protect and nurture life. It feels like an important part of active citizenship.

It’s helped me to understand how we got here and our precarious collective predicament, including the appeal of Trump and why it’s especially difficult for Americans to face the Great Unravelling.

Turning away from history means turning away from responsibility for past harms and opportunities to repair that harm, depriving us of the tremendous benefits associated with healing at that level. It means staying immature and continuing down the path of self-destruction.

So the purpose isn’t to focus on the negative or get depressed, but to be informed and empowered. Knowing the shadow aspects of our history is critical to not just understanding dominant worldviews, but shifting them.

Love Holds Us Here

Because it’s challenging territory, it helps to remember that the bigger picture always includes love. It’s love that makes it possible to walk through the darkness and not get lost in it. It’s what draws us to learn from history in the first place, to care and let ourselves feel and grieve, and continue to grow. Sprinkled throughout history are bright lights—the people and the movements—that shine all the brighter because of the darkness.

It’s love that will allow us to live past the end of our myth and explore the open fields of possibility that lie beyond it. I fully intend to keep writing about the American Myth as a way for me to learn (and unlearn) it more deeply — so consider this the first of a series.

Origins of the Myth

It’s hard to imagine a better place to start than The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Greg Grandin. As the title suggests, it’s a sweeping account of so much that goes right to the heart of the American myth.

And so, to take a first small bite, we can start with three of the founding fathers. In the 1750s Benjamin Franklin first posited what would become a compelling metaphor, that the continent’s bountiful land would function as a harmonizing political and economic safety valve, balancing supply and demand while diluting tensions.

In the 1770, Thomas Jefferson suggested that western movement and settlement wasn’t just a fruit of freedom, but the source of freedom itself. And it was “universal law” which “nature” had “given to all men,” that allowed them the right to leave their country of birth and go “in quest of new habitations.”

And James Madison, in Federalist Paper #10, published in 1787, put forward two ideas that upended conventional wisdom on political philosophy and republican governance.

The first was that, rather than suppress in the name of virtue, human passions, impulses, and desires that could lead towards excess, these very same passions were themselves virtuous because they created wealth. And it was government’s primary obligation to protect such wealth-producing ambitions.

Madison’s second idea challenged the accepted wisdom of the time that good republican government was best tended in small territories. Madison went in the opposite direction, countering that, for the United States, ever enlarging the raw size of the territory was the key to what he considered good government:

“Citizens spread thin over a wide territory would be less likely to join ‘common interest or passion,’ to become ‘united and actuated’ in their objectives, to ‘discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.’”

Madison believed that increasing the land base was the way to dilute and fragment factions, that the country could keep expanding rather than address social frictions.

In just this much we see the seeds of the American myth. Expansion across the vast continent, along with limited government interference, was freedom itself. And importantly, expansion and conquest were inevitable and divinely ordained. Greg Grandin quotes the historian Loren Baritz at some length:

“Lifted out of history, free from a limiting past, Americans were presumably more self-determining than any other national people had ever been.” Having defeated the Old World, they resisted the very idea of “old,” the thoughts that limits, decline, and death might pertain to them. The vast, open West “contributed its share to the notions that Americans swung free in seemingly limitlessness space unhampered by the dead and deadening hand of the past.”

The seeds of the myth would germinate, root, and grow in the conceptual and actual soil of “the frontier.” More than the physical space where actual human activity was contradictory and so often immoral, the frontier as metaphor focused attention on the ideal of freedom and the moral, civilizing mission America was presumed to represent.

I elaborate on “Frontier Mind” in post #2.