On Teaching the History of the Rebels

This is one of those pieces that makes me wonder:

I gave my students a history that was structured around the oldest issue in political philosophy but which professional historians often neglect - the conflict between the individual and community, or what Freud called the eternal struggle between civilization and its discontents. College students are normally taught a history that is the story of struggles between capitalists and workers, whites and blacks, men and women. But history is also driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires -- the "respectable" versus the "degenerate," the moral versus the immoral, "good citizens" versus the "bad." I wanted to show that the more that "bad" people existed, resisted, and won, the greater was what I called "the margin of freedom" for all of us.

My students were most troubled by the evidence that the "good" enemies of "bad" freedoms were not just traditional icons like presidents and business leaders, but that many of the most revered abolitionists, progressives, and leaders of the feminist, labor, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the cultures of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the flamboyant gays who brought homosexuality out of the closet.

I had developed these ideas largely on my own, in my study and in classrooms, knowing all the while that I was engaged in an Oedipal struggle to overthrow the generation of historians who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, controlled academic history, and had trained me. They were so eager to make the masses into heroes that they did not see that it was precisely the non-heroic and unseemly characteristics of ordinary folks that changed American culture for the better...

I grant the importance and necessity of the full range of humanity, of the full range of the world. And in the Christian understanding of the world, Christ came specifically for those outside of polite society, for the uncivilized, for those on the margins. Of course, the reason he came was for the salvation of their souls--and also to save the souls of the society prigs who wouldn't be aware of their own sin without being made radically uncomfortable. It's so much easier to be in denial when the world seems to be fully under your control, after all.

So the worship of either anarchy or order seems misplaced. God is not identified in classical philosophy with mere or strict order, after all--he is Goodness, and Justice, and Love, and Beauty, and Being, all of them boundary breaking (or making?) things, all of them fierce and strong. He is not a tame lion, but neither is he a lion who breaks the Father's laws. Then again, we come to Chesterton's great maxim: Break the conventions. Keep the Commandments.

So insofar as the people on the outskirts live according to the Commandments, great. Wonderful. Very Franciscan of them. So long as the people within the mainstream of society remember that their conventions are not commandments and do not expect other people to make such a world-ending mistake, great. Wonderful. Very Ignatian of them.

But everybody must remember--fallen human nature commits acts such that the Son of God died miserably on a cross. So all must repent and return, over and over again, so that we might actually ever sit in family unity around the wedding supper of the Lamb.

In short--yay for rebels, and yay for conformists, and hosanna in the highest in gratitude for the gift of Christ and the saints.