Literary Saturday: Moral Historians

Two things have me thinking about morality and historians this week.  First, I’ve been re-reading Livy’s Early History of Rome to prepare for this Monday’s class in Grand Strategy.  Second, Howard Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States) died this week.  Livy and Zinn were both wildly popular historians, both wrote about political conflict between rich and poor, and both believed that working historians had a duty to instruct the public about how states ought to be organized and how virtue was necessary for a healthy republic.

They were different in many ways.  Livy was a man of power–his history meshed well with the political project of Octavius Caesar, then busy remodeling the Roman Republic into the Empire of later times.  Zinn was a man of the opposition to power; Noam Chomsky called Zinn his favorite historian.

Both largely displaced earlier writers; Livy was the ‘safe’ choice for readers in Imperial Rome.  He was nostalgic enough for the lost freedom and dignity of the republican era not to sound like an apologist for the permanent dictatorship of Rome’s imperial master, but his analysis of the moral failures of the later Romans was unsparing enough to demonstrate the necessity for imperial rule.

Zinn similarly fit the moral fashions of his time and his work has supplanted many of his predecessors.  He retained enough of the old American faith in the future to write a forward-looking history in which the idea of popular struggle might one day result in the creation of a just and free society.  Yet he was also harsh enough about the nation’s past that he never sounded like an apologist for American reality.  Before Zinn ‘progressive’ historiography generally saw the American story as one of gradual improvement and celebrated the emergence of American freedom over time.  Progressive history was also patriotic history.  Zinn separated the belief in progress and justice from the American story and wrote about the growth in the power and might of the United States as the frustration of the popular hunger for change and for real progress.  What earlier writers thought of as patriotism becomes chauvinism and nationalism in Zinn’s account, and rather than a unifying force helping society as a whole to progress, patriotism becomes a divisive force used by elites to divide and rule the mass.

This, interestingly, is one of the points of contact between the two writers.  Livy also was keenly aware of the political nature of patriotism, and many of the stories he recounts involve the efforts by the senatorial elite to divert the plebeian masses from their political goals by invoking national security.  (Don’t fight with us about the powers of the tribunes; the Etruscans are attacking!)

Of the two, I greatly prefer Livy.  This is not because of his political sympathies; he made his peace with Augustus a bit too easily for my taste, and the heightened and sentimental contrast he paints between the putatively pure ancient Rome and the sordid mess of his own day not only had the effect of reducing any chance of a republican restoration in his own time; it has served as an apology for tyrants ever since.

Zinn’s sympathy with the little guy, his belief that there is a wisdom among the masses that the elites never quite understand, and his insistence that history’s losers still ought to be heard from all strike me as more decent and humane than Livy’s sleek, official point of view.  And of course Zinn is a careful historian in ways that would have been meaningless to Livy.  Livy seems to have made a reasonably responsible use of the documentary sources that he had, but living in a time when historical records were much scarcer than they are today and when standards of historical scholarship were at a relatively early age of development, much of Livy’s work consists of very rich and wide conjectures erected on a flimsy foundation of folktale with perhaps a few spare facts thrown in here and there.

Yet ultimately Livy is a more serious student of power and social conflict than Zinn.  Diagnosing the failure of the Roman Republic, Livy points to failures both among the elite and the mass.  The elite became greedy, shortsighted, and lost all sense of restraint in the competition for power and office.  The simple habits and manners of former times were replaced with every kind of decadent luxury; the strict personal sexual restraint and the pious worship of the gods which once characterized Roman elites yielded to a philosophy of immediate gratification and the pursuit of spiritual ‘ecstasy’ in various mystery cults from the east.  The collapse of personal ethics led to a collapse in the ability of Rome’s elite to lead their society.

The masses were also corrupted by success.  Their growing political power in the state did not make them more virtuous or wise.  They continued to follow demagogues who promised easy riches based on redistribution.  They did not acquire the habits of virtue and personal restraint that were being given up by the elites.  Instead they imitated their worst features and attempted to practice the vices of the rich.

Neither the people nor the elite would observe the restraints of custom or law in the quest for power and wealth.  Gradually, Rome’s institutions of governance broke down.  Without honorable men there could be no justice at law; judges and juries could both be corrupted.  Legislation increasingly failed to balance private and public interest and sought to enshrine the narrow goals of factions in the framework of the state.  Ultimately the private chaos and immorality led to anarchy, passion and bloodshed in the public sphere.  Rome tore itself apart in civil conflicts, each more brutal than the last, until Augustus Caesar imposed the peace of slavery on the broken fragments of the greatest republic, before ours, that the world had ever known.

This tragic story of the destruction of public freedom by private vice — whatever its relationship to the actual events of Roman history — remains one of the most compelling stories ever told.  It has certainly been a major force in American history; George Washington and his colleagues consciously sought to emulate the virtues of the early Roman republicans as Livy describes them.  In giving up command of the Revolutionary Army to return to his farm, Washington saw himself reenacting the story of Cincinnatus.  Overthrowing George III was compared to the overthrow of Tarquin the Proud, the last King of Rome.  The link between private virtue and public freedom was returned to over and over in the political debates of the revolutionary era and on down to modern times.

Patriotism, understood as the love of the state as the embodiment and guardian spirit of the hopes of all classes of the people, was the link between private virtue and public well being. Patriotism was the private virtue that led both nobles and common people to restrain their baser passions for the common good, and to subordinate their ambitions to the laws.  Livy did not take patriotism for granted or exalt it into a nationalism superior to any ethical restraint.  The power of Rome in the world, as well as the ambitions of powerful men in Rome, could be exercised in ways that transgressed moral limits and brought evil consequences to the perpetrators.  And Livy was also alive to the ways that domestic interests would periodically invoke the name of patriotism to cover cynical programs of their own.

But patriotism remained the chief virtue for Livy: the virtue which held the public and private spheres together, which channeled passions like ambition to serve the common good.

Livy was a pagan; that is, the only contact he had with monotheism was through the medium of Greek philosophy.  The concept that the philosophical absolute, the sum of all virtues that was also the source of all strength and both the cause and the ultimate goal of the whole universe, was a Person making personal demands of all people while seeking a personal relationship with them was not present in Livy’s thought.  These ideas, so basic to modern culture throughout the Abrahamic world, necessarily filter and condition our reading of Livy.  To place something temporal, even the state, at the center of ones value system is the sin of idolatry from the perspective of anyone with roots in Abrahamic culture.

One useful way to read Zinn is to see him as a Hebrew prophet denouncing the wealth and status seeking culture of elites in the name of transcendent ideals of justice.  “You sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes,” as the prophet Amos put it.  The elites who control the state use its power to oppress the weak.  From this perspective, Livy’s emphasis on dedication to the power and defense of the state can look like an ultimate profanation of virtue rather than its civic expression.  It can be either the way in which a selfish elite blinds the masses — or it can be the way in which the racist and chauvinist passions of the masses boil over to achieve the domination and subjugation of other peoples.

That patriotism has been used in both ways in American history cannot — and should not — be denied.  Patriotism cannot ultimately be separated from justice (to those without as well as to those within the state) without turning from a virtue into a terrible vice.  The worship of the state as an absolute value is one of the most dangerous and murderous mistakes that people can make.  Between the Nazis and the Communists the exaltation of the state over all other virtues and responsibilities killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century.  Insofar as Zinn’s history (and Chomsky’s analysis of international politics) are read as correctives to the dangers of patriotism in an age defined by the murderous excesses of states who had emancipated themselves from all other loyalties and limits, they serve as important and indeed indispensable sources of prophetic remonstrance.

But as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us, “the abuse of a thing taketh not away its use.”  Because Adolph Hitler took nationalism to idolatrous excess does not mean that nationalism as the expression of solidarity among people sharing a culture and history has no proper place.  Because patriotism in Samuel Johnson’s phrase is often the last refuge of a scoundrel does not mean that only scoundrels invoke it.

Patriotism remains, I think, a necessary virtue in all societies and most especially in republican and constitutional ones.  It is not the only virtue and it must make room for higher loyalties and duties than those to the state, but without it I don’t think we will see the rich acting more thoughtfully and respectfully tooward the poor or toward the common good.  I don’t think our politicians will respect the law more, or our judges interpret it more fairly, unless their ambition and greed is checked by a sense of duty, loyalty and even awe toward the majesty of the American republic.  Without the fear of God and the love of the republic, all we have to check our behavior is the fear of the police — and if the police themselves are ‘liberated’ from patriotism and religion — what do we have then?

In an age when freedom without restraint had led to slavery as the best possible outcome, Livy used the contrast between ancient virtue and contemporary vice to reconcile people to their chains.  We are not (yet) in his position; the institutions of our freedom still stand — even if we see all around us the consequences of their eroding foundations.

Zinn, I fear, by making patriotism unfashionable for a generation of students and teachers has endangered and undermined precisely the values he sought to promote.  Wall Street today is filled with people who neither fear God nor love their country.  I am afraid such people are also found in large numbers inside the Beltway.  (They are not all like that, of course, and I am not writing with particular individuals in mind.)  Zinn’s history has played a significant role in ‘unshackling’ our new elites from old fashioned values like patriotism and piety.  More often than not, Zinn succeeds as an iconoclast and fails as a moralist.  The values he inculcates lack the psychological power of the myths he attacks; the net result is the erosion of the power of the values and causes that Zinn hoped to promote.  As Livy would have predicted, the creation of an elite ‘liberated’ from patriotic and religious constraints is not making the mass of the American people, to say nothing of people overseas, better off or more free.  Nor will it.

Let us hope that Livy’s work will long be remembered and read.  Of Zinn it is enough perhaps to say that he was passionately in love with good things and that if he did not always succeed in advancing the good that he sought, this is the common fate of all of us — and the remedy must lie with that source of all healing and joy in whose gracious presence we may hope that Howard Zinn now rests.