The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

Author:Marilynne Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374714314
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

MEMORY

It is interesting that this country could have transformed itself radically in the last one hundred years, and, after so much time and so much change, should still be divided along the same lines that divided us two centuries ago. The United States has drawn immigrants from the whole world, with all that has meant culturally and in terms of historical memory. It has rethought, and is still rethinking, the entire system of social relations as a consequence of the civil rights movement. It has entangled itself so deeply in the affairs of the world at large that its policies are as perplexed as the circumstances they are meant to address. Materially and technologically, it has outrun its own ability to appraise or to channel and discipline its transformations. We Americans are almost used to all this. We have phrases that go some way toward mitigating its centrifugal force, “dynamic equilibrium,” “creative destruction.” We have accepted it as an identity, and it works quite well as an identity. Scotland may sometimes drift out of Britain, the Flemish may divorce the Walloons. But, despite all the complexities of our economic and demographic life, the United States will still be the United States, in all likelihood. Should it fracture, as we have done once, and have seen other nations do, the fault line will lie along the old Mason–Dixon line.

Here is a hypothesis. Despite the fact of air-conditioning, of heavy industry and high technology, of the movement of Northerners south, of the redistribution to the South of Northern tax dollars, of the prosperity of the recent past, still the South as a region imagines itself to be an enclave in which the Good Old Ways persist, minus a few that have run afoul of judicial activism, of course. The threat to this enclave is the North, with its bad manners and godlessness and its materialism. Of course I exaggerate, I overgeneralize. But, like everyone else, I live with the consequences of there being a regional faction in Congress who will take needed help out of American hands, off American tables, no matter how disgusted I and my kind may be by what they do and the rationalizations they offer for doing it. Indeed, they seem to feel affirmed by our contempt. Populations are inevitably judged by the people they, or some plurality of them at least, choose as their representatives, and therefore as our government as well as theirs. Elections matter.

Other things matter, too, in much the same way. There is an implied religious rationale or impetus and obligation behind very deplorable trends in contemporary society. The arming of the fearful and resentful and unstable with military weapons, supported by the constant reiteration of tales that make mortal enemies of their fellow citizens and elected government, is pursued with a special passion in regions that claim to be profoundly and uniquely Christian, and well mannered, to boot. Biblicist that I am, I watch constantly for any least fragment of a Gospel that could, however obliquely, however remotely, cast all this in any but a satanically negative light.

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