The last note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
Epilogue: “The Market Cross” No, I’m not going to address this in any detail at all, other than state that it’s annoyingly written, and the whole point is that things were so much better in 1901. Now, I am not saying that Mr. Stiles is a racist, sexist jerk. Now, wait, I am saying that. What I am not saying is that Mr. Stiles set out to write a racist, sexist book. I don’t think he did. I’m saying that if you write a book saying how much better things were in 1901 than they are now, you have to make some sort of affirmative effort to acknowledge, to explicitly acknowledge that women, blacks, Latinos of various kinds, Asians, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, homosexuals, bisexuals, blind people, deaf people, poor people, people of almost any kind of minority status were explicitly and often legally excluded from that good life. And if you don’t acknowledge that, you will write a racist and sexist book.
I’m going to go back to John Rawls for a moment, and the idea of the veil of ignorance. When we look at the market square in 1901, if we are at all honest about it, we will acknowledge that (a) things were in many ways a lot better for the people on the inside, and (b) things were in many ways a lot worse for the people on the outside. I have difficulty saying things were better, because things are complicated, and better is complicated, and people are different, one to another. But on the whole, within the range of generalities, it seems like a reasonable thing to say. Now, would we like to go back to that time? Mr. Stiles assumes that if he were to go back to that time, he would be on the inside. As a matter of temperament, I tend to assume that I would be on the outside. But Mr. Rawls reminds us that we don’t know who we would be. We might be the mayor, we might be the illiterate black railroad worker with twelve hour days and no voting rights and no worker’s rights and no pension and no respect. Given that we don’t know, Mr. Rawls suggests that we judge the society by the person we least want to be. I agree.
But, simultaneously, I do see that we lost something in all that. We pay for what we get, and we often don’t know the price until after we’ve paid it (if then). There was a certain set of social norms that were, I think, made possible by the homogeneity of the people who mattered, and that were in their way both pleasant and uplifting. Many of the norms were not so much pleasant or uplifting, but some were, and although perhaps there was no way to separate the lentils from the ashes, when we threw out the one we lost the other. Mr. Stiles, recognizing that we are hungry, seems to think we should have just made our soup from the lentils, ashes and all; I think that would have been far too bitter. But maybe there is a way to separate the lentils from the ashes. Doing that, though, means examining the ashes and the lentils together, and it will mean getting our hands dirty.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.