It's Our Story and We're Sticking to It!

Pivoting off Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and drawing from the blog’s guru Norman O. Brown (Nobby), last week’s post advanced the theory that it’s myths, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, that shape and bind human cultures. All men are created equal is the organizing myth of American culture, even though it would be impossible to get a resolution through Congress today reaffirming it as our nation’s guiding principle. The challenges would begin with the word men, which would likely not get past the women in Congress. It would immediately be changed to people, so: All people are created equal. But then would come the problem with the word created, with many arguing from a scientific point of view that it should be changed to evolved: All people evolved equally. That would no doubt result in a bloody battle that would spill out of Congress and onto cable TV and social media and into living rooms all across America. That could be the end of it right there...before we even get to what “equal” means. Politicians anxious to avoid divisiveness, falling poll numbers, and unpleasant cocktail party encounters would just abandon this reaffirmation effort and let the sentiment spider crawl its way into the future as is.  
Our myths--though often long lasting--are remarkably fragile and cannot withstand too much scrutiny or testing before falling apart. So how do they ever endure as long as they do? They endure because they're built like a spider’s web--intricate and efficient in design with remarkable tensile strength and elasticity. Myths get woven into all aspects of a human society...its politics, education, economics, law, art and entertainment. In this way they are seamlessly passed down from generation to generation because everyone in the culture has bought into the ideal they represent even if blatantly hypocritical acts undermine it. Lip service is often enough to sustain an operational myth. When it’s not, enforcement may be in necessary, as it was with the American Civil War. At that critical moment in the nation’s history we had to put our money...and our blood...where our mouths were to uphold the ideal that all men are created equal. 
It’s no small matter that the president who made the decision to go to war over that principle remains the most highly regarded of all the nation’s leaders. And not just because he committed an army to defend the principle but because he also committed stirring poetry to its story:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

Arms alone are not enough enough to sustain a cultural story...a nation's self idealization. There was nothing lacking in Hitler's military might. But the myth of Aryan superiority led to elite disillusionment, national alienation, widespread hardship...and ultimately the prophet and very personification of that alleged superiority was revealed to be a complete military blunderer. 
The myth requires true believers and capable conduits. When subsequent presidents…Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, each to varying degrees...marshaled the might of the US government to integrate respectively our army, schools, and society at large they were passing on the torch from Lincoln. Whatever work each of them left to be done…and that was considerable across the board…the fact remains that they used their authority to advance equality for all rather than entrench superiority for the majority.
Our current political moment is so terribly roiled because we now have a president backed by a party that is openly and brazenly trying to destroy the myth of equality for all and supplant it with the myth of superiority—racial, ethnic, religious, economic. It is as serious a turning point as was the Civil War. If we fail to re-dedicate ourselves to the proposition that all men are created equal, then it will die. If that happens, from this time forward the new proposition will be that some people are more equal than others…that some people are above the law.

Our dear Madame Speaker Pelosi may really believe that she merely has a political calculation to make about how hard to go after the white supremacist sitting in the Oval Office, but it’s considerably more profound than that. Nancy may not think the man is worth it, but the principle sure is. Her leadership is now faced with another historic test as to whether [this] nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.