Because It Got That Way

The Author’s eldest child — himself a future author, if the tea leaves and the tarot readings haven’t conspired to falsehood — has reached the age at which children flee wildly from their homes to embrace a world of literature, philosophy, sleeplessness, processed food, and recreational drugs. Yes, that’s right: The Author’s son will soon attend college and, given the child’s 17 years of exposure to Authorial Thought, that college will likely be one of our nation’s most liberal liberal arts institutions, which serve as Pollyannaish havens in the sea of harsh reality that The Author’s progeny must one day navigate, as we all must, with a broken rudder, tattered sails, a bag half-full of winds, and a shapeless dream. The Author has spent the past several months visiting some of these liberal liberal arts bastions, swept along with the other pairings of bewildered-parents and silent-youths on institutional tours designed to maximize the desirability of the institution’s product (“education”) while hiding all of the flaws in the proverbial plumbing. For the most part, The Author has found these so-called tours depressing. The Author, after all, is employed by a liberal liberal arts college and is well aware of the distance between the institution’s language about itself and the realities of life for the young people who inhabit it.

But one thing that has surprised The Author, or at the very least brought a smile to his Authorial lips, is the frequency with which these so-called tours begin with a “Land Acknowledgment,” in which a sleep-addled tour guide recites a fawning and apologetic paean to whichever Native American tribe was centuries ago violently displaced so that today’s young minds could enjoy Heidegger, psychotropic drugs, and endless bowls of Froot Loops. These “acknowledgments” generally require that “we settlers” commit to redressing the wrongs perpetrated against the relevant indigenous people(s) and to “addressing inequities,” which is a little like asking a hurricane to reform in its own aftermath so as to return to the razed island and brush the fallen homes back into solvency.

The Author cannot make peace with the idea that we can somehow correct for our European ancestors — stoic seafaring men who took this land by force, driven by Christian righteousness and their own perceived innate superiority (and armed with some kickass weaponry). Applying our current moral calculus to the historical events that shaped today’s human world (and that very moral calculus) is a fool’s game. The entire planet was settled, in this Age of Humans (a very, very short age, as The Author has explored elsewhere in the Poets & Writers compendium), by righteous force. By carnage. By the various manifestations of manifesdestiny. We are only here today to lament this carnage because it happened. One might think that it could not happen today, if not for the most recent grab-bag of counter-evidence to that thought, e.g. the prolonged Russian invasion of Ukraine, the indiscriminate razing of Palestine in response to the indiscriminate slaughter and rape of Israelis, all to the tune of indescribable death and suffering, etc. Clearly we haven’t quite cleaned up our act as the latest species to hold dominion over this fragile Earth. But still, it seems obvious to most of the world, here in what we call “2024,” that these extant acts of nationalistic cruelty (bordering on genocide) are in fact “unacceptable” (though I suppose we do accept them) and horrific, in a way that would not have been obvious in, say, 1492, when The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria got all up in yo’ face, girlfriend. The morality dial has moved quite a bit during the intervening centuries and it will move again. The Author once thought that the dial bent or turned slowly (just as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. promised) in the direction of justice. These days he’s a little less sure about that. The dial seems more like the shaky needle on a dime-store compass shivering imperfectly in a direction that may or may not be north. But the point here, if there is a point, is that it seems vaguely ridiculous to apologize for acts 500 years in the past that, at the time of their occurrence, were just Business As Usual. Should we also apologize for the Big Bang? It displaced the living shit out of all that darkness, which now has to hide in the nooks and crannies of a brightly oppressive universe.

Well, maybe that’s an unfair comparison. The biologist D’Arcy Thompson once famously said that, “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” Nothing in biology, it seems, makes much sense except in the light of evolution, which isn’t pre-programmed to do x or y or z, but simply rolls along merrily. We have arrived at this point in space-time where the reading of Land Acknowledgments seems like a rational idea, but history has nothing to apologize for. Seen from high above (which is, sadly, the only vantage point from which The Author seems capable of seeing at all) we’re only able to stand here apologizing for the wrongs of history because those wrongs were a part of the vast causal chain that created this moment of apology. If you could go back and undo the wrongs you now seek to redress you would not (obviously) have arrived at this apology-point. But where might you have arrived? There is no way to say; that, The Author emphasizes, is the point. Removing a link from the chain doesn’t necessarily create a better chain, just a different one. Everything is the way it is because it got that way.

The insidious need to “correct” or “address” or “acknowledge” historical “wrongs” that were not really “wrong” at the time they occurred (morality itself being a moving target — just ask the Huns or the Vikings) seems to be at the root of many small-bore inanities that rankle The Author in his sad and silly everyday life. Do we need (to choose an example close to The Author’s heart and wallet) to “cancel” authors whose work might feature anti-semitism (Edith Wharton), sexism (Italo Calvino), or a host of other “isms” that have, over decades of social evolution, come to appear like egregious wrongs when, in fact, these authors (and countless others) were simply working in ordinary ways within the cage of their own present-tense? They were no less able to register the future wrongness of their opinions than “Columbus” (in quotes because it’s shorthand for the mechanism of colonial conquest itself) was able to second-guess his right-to-conquest here in what we call America (simply because that’s what we ended up calling it). Our desire to remake the literary canon and to brush certain morally and aesthetically dustier tomes from our shelves to make room for texts that more properly express The Urgency of Our Moment is itself a thing that is the way it is because it got this way. It’s the latest link in a chain that leads Who Knows Where. The link-building mechanism is blind. But The Author doesn’t think we need to apologize or correct for Willa Cather’s anti-semitism, Flannery O’Connor’s internalization of Southern racism, or Flaubert’s misogynism. We also don’t need to apologize for Columbus, or for William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, that bastard. (The further back you go the sillier the acknowledgments seem.) The Author wishes he could see the entire chain (which is known only to God). Without that ability, we’re all just tilting at windmills (if the non-reader of this ridiculous text will forgive the mixed metaphors). Still, it tickles The Author to imagine a future collegiate tour in which acknowledgments and apologies are issued for the behavior of those who once self-righteously acknowledged the sins of their ancestors while (e.g.) sanctioning widespread carnage and suffering through the consumption of meat, or sanctioning child labor through their use of smartphones, or sanctioning national violence through their tribal adherence to political “parties.”

Who knows how things will be? The Author would like to acknowledge that a whole lot of stuff is going to happen, that a fair percentage of it will be bad, and that it’s going to suck for all of us. In the meantime, The Author hopes that his brilliant scion will use his four years of higher education to develop strong views, to make connections, and to one day teach The Author that his own sneering take on these matters is, like colonial barbarism, a relic of the past. Not wrong, perhaps, but not relevant either, and certainly not in need of repeating. Until then, non-readers, Poets & Suicides will continue to serve as the microphone of Authorial thought, though we editors know better than to actually turn the mic on. Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.