Hello hello and Happy Friday to one and all. I’m grateful for your readership and hope that you come to this week's newsletter healthy and well. As regular readers know, I have been obsessing over spirituality lately. Two weeks ago I explored what it might look like were I to walk a more spiritual path; last week I discussed the less pristine, more profane dimensions of spiritual pursuits.
While I hardly plan to make the Sabbateur a weekly reflection on my jagged spiritual journey, I do plan to continue to write about whatever I have been obsessing about in a given week. So if you will pardon me, here goes…
Okay. So. In thinking and writing for the past weeks, I have tentatively concluded that:
Spiritual pursuits are worth pursuing if the pursuer feels an urge to pursue.
The journey is as important as the destination.
My vision for my spiritual life is simply pursuing joy and gratitude.
Community matters. Joy and gratitude are to be shared.
Rituals matter. So do practices. Sitting. Moving. Breathing. Lots of breathing.
Simple stuff. Should be easy. But y’all. Yer boy struggles with simplicity.
I crave complexity; I seek simplicity. I wholeheartedly embrace both. So here I write, stuck at the intersection of complexity and simplicity. It’s agonizing. But it makes perfect sense.
It makes sense because I have devoted my professional life to the pursuit of complexity and nuance. The work of doing history is simply not simple. My students and I tussle with complex and competing narratives. We wrangle knotty texts. We grapple with complicated historical characters. We juggle problems of polyvariable causation. Continuity and change. No heroes, no villains. Context context context.
I was trained well in the pursuit of complexity. Teachers. Professors. Mentors. Authors.
One such author is Michael Kammen who in 1973 earned the Pulitzer Prize in History for People of Paradox.
This book, and others by Kammen, shaped my thinking and my teaching. When he died in 2013, I wrote a lecture in his honor that marries his Pulitzer-winning work with my cockamamie extrapolations of his work. For a few years, I inaugurated my U.S. history courses with this lecture. Then I found another way to launch my class. But since this is the 50th year of the publication of his masterpiece and the 10th anniversary of his passing, I decided to resuscitate, revise, and share this lecture with my students.
The book and my lecture are BATTLE CRIES to revel in the complexities, contradictions, incongruities, and paradoxes of history.
Kammen urges us, as I urge my students, to embrace complexity. He matter of factly states that, “Americans have tended to ignore biformity because they feel that inconsistency is a bad thing.”
It’s not. Indeed, the goliath of American literature would have nothing to do with oversimplification, of ourselves or of our countries. Whitman is celebrated for asking and answering:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Leaves of Grass, 1855
Ralph Waldo Emerson shared his contemporary’s summary dismissal of the pursuit of congruency when he decreed that:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
-Song of Myself, 1841
This week, I channeled Kammen, Whitman, Emerson, and others in my mission to bring the requisite nuance and complexity to the study of American history. My talk begins at the beginning, with the paradoxical and incongruous attitudes of settlers towards Natives, too many of whom felt obliged to “civilize” the “savages” and to bring them the “blessings” of European life, knowing that to do so would mean their destruction. Or, as it was later put, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
Beginning with the paradoxes of colonial settlements—winding through paradoxically synchronous pursuits such as freedom and order, collective individualism, and e pluribus unum—my talk concludes with paradoxical expressions of patriotism in contemporary America.
From Mr. Snowden…
To the Tangerine Palpatine…
To this tongue-in-cheek and tongue-on-popsicle mess…
Whatever one might say about American patriotism–and my European comrades have plenty to say, I assure you–one would be foolish to say that it’s simple, unconditional jingoism. It too is complicated. Even the most patriotic Americans have a complicated relationship with America. They practice patriotism à la carte. They express “but for” patriotism (I love my country but for the libs, but for the urban or moral decay, but for the rednecks, but for the MAGA fascists). In my world and in my class, even prima facie simple expressions of patriotism are profoundly complex.
The battle cry of the transcendentalists and of Kammen seeps into my modern European history classes as well. In one class this week, we were exploring the promise and peril of the Age of Nationalism in nineteenth century Europe. Most students come to class with a simple view of nationalism. Things get complicated right quick.
Also this week, the second-year students of this European history class sought to make sense of complexities and nuances of the German, Italian, and Spanish experiences of fascism in the 1920’s and 30’s. To whom did fascism appeal and why? What might this suggest, if anything, about the 2020’s? Hardly simple stuff.
This week I am navigating how I can navigate my rekindled aspiration for simplicity—insofar as it is essential for spiritual enrichment—while remaining professionally committed to embracing historical complexities. I’m also navigating how to live the Life of the Mind while being mindful of the need to Get Out Ma Head. And to add a two-step to the dance I’m stumbling though, I’m also trying to be firmly in the present when my work demands that I clutch the dead hand of the past.
But, in my hopes to forge a path that embraces simplicity and complexity, mind and spirit, past and present, I’ve had some edifying conversations this week. And it helps to write about it. So thanks for reading.
Have a lovely weekend.
Yours,
-DL
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.