View from the Precipice

FAMILY HISTORIES

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by Roman Sympos

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Part 1

 

Like Nature, retirement abhors a vacuum. Among the many things rushing to fill the spaces left by a vanished work-life—Medicare red-tape, RMD tax-withholding, failing infrastructures (body, mind, residence), postponed travel—there’s the family history. The closer we get to the end of our lives, my wife and I find, the more we feel the urge, if not the urgency, to preserve, perpetuate, and contribute to what we know of our ancestries.

 

My wife feels more urgency than I do, perhaps because she’s got way more ancestry to deal with. I’ve got only a thin network of connections going back maybe three generations and disappearing, like a frail cobweb, once it jumps the pond, to Poland.

 

Hers extends three centuries back on this continent, well beyond her great-great-grandfather’s Lake Erie fishery, on both her father’s and her mother’s side, and she knows the English villages from which they migrated (though not on the Mayflower). Geographically, we’re talking about a swath of American real estate stretching from Massachusetts to Ohio before it achieved statehood (when it was known as “The Western Reserve”). These folks left enough letters, diaries, and artifacts—photos, postcards, clocks, jewelry, silverware, books and prints, even two busted tombstones!—to fill a museum, and I have, only half-jokingly, suggested that she and her siblings pool their resources to create one.

 

She seemed like the perfect person, therefore, to ask a question that’s rushed into my retirement vacuum along with all the other swirling dust motes of concern: Why?

 

Why do we care about family history? I mean aside from the obvious reasons, like medical and financial (genetic diseases, lines of inheritance). I used to think it was pride. There are whole industries based on this assumption. You can find coats of arms online (or make your own!) and biographies of famous (or semi-famous) people sharing your father’s last name or that of someone in your maternal line, where there are many more to choose from.

 

But my wife, speaking for herself, said no. Pride didn’t enter into it. She was curious, yes, and found the material she was compiling and transcribing and copying fascinating, a “slice of life” portrait of bygone eras of American and even European history. A doll belonging to her great-great-grandmother, for example, and made in Paris a century and a half ago, came with holes in its scalp to accommodate the clipped tresses of its young owner. Blonde and silky, they’re still there.

 

When pressed, my wife pointed out the obvious. “Knowing where you come from is important for knowing who you are.” 

 

She has a point. Why should we take the least bit of pride in actions or accomplishments in which we had no part whatsoever? But ask any orphan, or anyone deprived of access to records of their ancestry, including much of this country’s Black population, how it feels, and you’ll soon realize that having a family history of any sort, however meager, is itself a privilege.

 

My wife’s reply put me in mind of Ross Macdonald’s detective novel, The Galton Case. In it, a rootless, fatherless young man raised in poverty comes forward claiming to be the long-lost grandson of a wealthy widow. Macdonald’s series PI, Lew Archer, who’s been hired by the widow to find her missing descendent, ends up accusing him of fraudulently playing on the old woman’s hopes just to get his hands on her money. To which the young man replies, “There’s more than money to a man’s inheritance. Above everything else, I wanted to be sure of my identity.”[1]

 

Turns out he’s right, and the rightful heir as well.

 

Looking into your family history isn’t always a gratifying experience, however. That’s a recurring lesson in Ross Macdonald’s oeuvre, beginning with The Galton Case, where the baneful consequences of one or another parent’s original sin are passed along unto the third generation, destroying the lives of the generation caught between. Typically, it’s Lew Archer’s job to bring these sins to light and help their surviving, third-generation victims heal, while making sure the guilty are, if not always punished (sometimes they’re dead), at least identified and, in a plot twist unusual in detective fiction, sometimes even forgiven. For Macdonld, who was abandoned by his father as a toddler and by his mother when he was five, forgiveness was crucial to the healing process.

 

So was revealing the truth.

 

A colleague of my wife’s—let’s call him Michael—with an ancient New World pedigree similar to hers, took it upon himself to look into his family history and found what many White descendants of our first settlers and colonists (but not my wife, thankfully, at least thus far!) have found in recent years: records of his ancestors’ ownership of enslaved people.

 

Michael’s story is not unusual these days. The story of Tom DeWolf, author, public speaker, workshop facilitator, and former Director/Manager for Coming to the Table, a non-profit dedicated to healing America’s racial wounds, is another case in point.

 

In 2001 DeWolf, then forty-seven, learned that his direct ancestor, antebellum U.S. Senator James DeWolf, not only had enslaved people working in his Rhode Island household, but also owned several plantations in Cuba where they toiled to enrich his family. He’d bought the plantations with the enormous fortune he’d amassed from the slave trade, continuing the traffic long after Rhode Island had declared it illegal. When he died in 1837, he was the second richest man in the United States.[2]

 

How do you come back from a discovery like this?  It’s on the same scale as finding out your great grandfather helped run Auschwitz. Tom, like Michael, did the right thing. He sought to make amends: to work for reparations; to uncover and disseminate the hidden as well as better known history of slavery in the U.S., especially in the northern states; to contact descendants of these enslaved people in order to understand the full consequences of slavery better; and to help other White Americans understand and, more importantly, acknowledge them.

 

But why should Michael or Tom or anyone with a similar family history have felt personally responsible for cruelties and crimes perpetrated long before they were born and in which they had no part? If we’re not entitled to take pride in what our ancestors achieved, why should their sins be visited upon their children and their children’s children to the umpteenth generation?

 

They shouldn’t—at least, not on anyone in particular. Michael and Tom are, however, White Americans, and there is a good case to be made for seeking amends, monetary or otherwise, from the members of America’s White population generally, which has, historically and as a group, benefited from the steep rise in standards of living, especially compared to that of non-Whites, that were the direct result of the expropriated labor of enslaved Black people. These benefits were compounded over many generations by the Jim Crow laws and de facto discrimination that followed immediately in the wake of Black slavery.

 

Bottom line: whether or not your forebears owned or trafficked in enslaved people, if you were born White in America, before or after Emancipation, or just came over on the boat, you were automatically given a leg up. Not because “life’s not fair,” but because so much of the nation’s wealth has flowed, undeservedly, into the pockets of the White citizens who preceded you, whether or not they were your direct ancestors, creating a class that had the means to look out for its own at the expense of those not like them.

 

And by God, they did.

 

In A Theory of Justice, philosopher John Rawls put forth what is perhaps the most often cited argument for the justice of group reparations, direct or indirect, and of special accommodations, such as affirmative action, as means to compensate for the injustices of the past by equilibrating their outcomes in the present. The case he makes depends on a fundamental notion of justice as fairness—a definition on which everyone will agree, I think—and it goes like this.

 

Fairness is, to put it simply, the Golden Rule: doing unto another what you would have them do unto you if your positions were reversed. It’s what we mean by “putting yourself in another’s shoes.”

 

The Golden Rule or something very like it has been endorsed by every major world religion[3], and it makes so much intuitive sense that we could call it axiomatic, that is, in need of no argument to support it. However, it does have one big flaw if, like Rawls, you’re using it to make a case for building a just and fair society, not just to figure out how individuals living in that society should behave.

 

Reparative justice, for instance, is doing what’s fair if I injure another, or what’s fair to their survivors if I kill that person. I’d want to be treated the same way if I were in my victim’s shoes or their family's. In practice, this usually takes the form of monetary compensation. As cumbersome as such calculations may be, it's difficult to think of any viable alternatives. Few of us are competent to re-set a broken tibia and no one can bring a dead person back to life. Imprisonment or execution might be gratifying to the victim or their survivors, but punishment alone is not reparative and we’re well beyond the days of eye-for-eye retribution, though not, in this country unfortunately, a life for a life.

 

By extending the logic of reparative justice, we reach the conclusion that White Americans owe Black Americans monetary compensation because the wealth of today’s White Americans is, in large part, the product of expropriated Black labor multiplied over many generations—in short, a form of inherited theft.

 

Distributive justice works in much the same way. If I were born in poverty, or with a severe physical or mental handicap, with few or no opportunities to get an education or accumulate wealth no matter how hard I tried, I would want someone to extend a helping hand. Thus, reasoning from the Golden Rule, I should extend a hand to people who were born disadvantaged by physical or mental impairments or by the current distribution of wealth in American society. By extension, therefore, a fair and just society would require all its better-off citizens to allow a portion of their tax dollars to be used to even out the relative shortfalls in other citizens’ opportunities and incomes. They would also support the passage of laws that would favor the less advantaged in hiring and in securing loans, at least until the day arrives when they will have achieved equity with their more fortunate fellow citizens.

 

The glaring problem with both of these arguments is that they seek to apply a rule of individual moral behavior and responsibility to society as a whole, present as well as past, regarding unfair actions for which no living individual can be held personally responsible. Am I my brother’s keeper? Did I have any share in the wrongs done him by other people, whether related to me or not? Am I somehow to blame for the unfortunate circumstances of his birth or upbringing, or the sub-par body or mind he was born with?

 

Clearly (unless he really is my brother, where family obligations come into play) the answer is “no.”

 

How, then, can we make the Golden Rule applicable to groups in such a way as to insure agreement on what constitutes a fair and just society, not just what counts as fair and just treatment of others in our personal behavior?

 

Rawls has an answer, and it involves a thought experiment.

 

First, you have to imagine yourself occupying what he calls “The Original Position.” This is a vantage point for deciding what constitutes a fair and just society that lies entirely outside your given life situation. Otherwise, you run the risk of individual bias in your judgment.

 

For example, having achieved a high income through hard work, you may think that only the working poor deserve a helping hand. Or, priding yourself on the accomplishments of your own race or nation, you may believe that people of a different race or nation don’t merit the same treatment as you and others like you. And, of course, if you occupy a lower position on the economic ladder or belong to a race or nation subject to discrimination, you’d probably feel the opposite.

 

The only possible vantage point that corresponds to a truly “Original Position,” as Rawls defines it, is the imaginary position of someone who has yet to be born.

 

Now, in addition to occupying such a position, suppose you have no idea of the life situation into which will be born? That you are denied any knowledge of your future parents or their ancestry or their family income or race or where they live, or your future earnings or accomplishments or natural endowments or opportunities, by what Rawls terms “The Veil of Ignorance.” Your situation when you begin your life will be the result of what amounts to a throw of the dice, a “natural lottery.” This means you might have a father who rapes you repeatedly beginning at the age of eight, or you might spend your childhood living in garbage dump, or both. It also means you would have no knowledge of the kind of body and brain you’d be born with. You could have the body of a future gold medal Olympian or an infant with spina fibida, a brain like Einstein’s or neurodivergent to the point of catatonia. In short, you could need a lot of help to survive, or even want to.

 

From an Original Position located, in this way, behind an absolute Veil of Ignorance regarding your real situation in society, a situation that would, in turn, be subject to the vagaries of a Natural Lottery, Rawls argues that any rational being, given the choice, will favor being born into a society that insures equality of opportunity and access to public benefits like education and healthcare, as well as equal treatment before the law. They will also favor tax and welfare systems that improve or ameliorate the starting position in life for anyone who has, as it were, “lost” the Natural Lottery of birth, whether physically, mentally, economically, racially, geographically, or in their family situation.

 

The Original Position, in short, puts everyone exactly in the same position. No need to imagine yourself in another’s shoes. All of you are wearing the same shoes. Or rather, having not yet been born, no shoes at all.

 

For Rawls, only a welfare state designed to even out, as far as is practicable, the natural inequalities of birth, counts as truly—which is to say, rationally—fair and just. Societies predicated on ideas like “life isn’t fair” or “devil take the hindmost” or “I’ve got mine, pull up the ladder,” including raw, unmodified laisse faire capitalism, are, viewed from the Original Position, inherently unfair and unjust.

 

What strikes me immediately about Rawls’s brilliant thought experiment is how it hinges, crucially, on an act of trans-positional imagination, like the Golden Rule itself. Rawls asks me to imagine myself in “The Original Position.” The Golden Rule asks me to imagine myself in the position of a person whom I’ve wronged or who’s disadvantaged by poverty or illness or the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The difference lies in that word, “person.”

 

Rawls’s “Original Position” has no room for persons. Anyone seeking access to it is required to check their name, rank, and serial number at the door, along with all the other items required to define an individual human being distinct from any and all others—traits of character, habits, idiosyncrasies, tastes and preferences, height, weight, gender, sex, inherited genome, family connections, body, life situation and experiences. Check your shoes, too. You won’t be needing them without feet. All these qualities, including shoe size, that define you as a distinct person depend on your having been born into the world as we know it. Take them all away and what’s left? A purely rational being, yes, but not a human being.

 

The most important thing Rawls is asking us to check at the door is human emotions, which are foundational to all our biases and, therefore, verboten in the Original Position. The most important of these, for the purposes of this discussion, is empathy.

 

I have a dear friend who has corrected me on my understanding of empathy, which is basically the ability to put yourself in another’s place. So I hasten to add that I’m talking about the emotional or affective variety, what’s also called “sympathy,” where you feel what another person is feeling, as distinct from the merely intellectual or cognitive or perspectival variety, where you imagine the world as they experience and understand it without necessarily feeling the corresponding emotions.

 

These two forms of empathy, emotional and cognitive, usually go hand in hand, but not always. For while you can’t feel what another person is feeling without, to some degree, imagining the world as they experience it, you can imagine the world as they experience it without feeling what they must be feeling. And I’m not talking about seeing the world the way Hitler saw it, either. We perform feats of cognitive empathy every time we approach a four-way stop sign. Our decision on when to enter the intersection depends crucially on our ability to see it from the perspective of the other people waiting to enter it, pedestrians as well as drivers.

 

This sort of empathy, empathy without sympathy, is the only sort welcome in Rawls’s Original Position: the Golden Rule reduced to a kind of emotionless moral geometry.

 

Well, ok, if that’s what’s required to imagine and come to agreement on a fair and just society, so be it. No sympathy allowed.

 

But wait. Even cognitive empathy is imperiled in Rawls’s thought experiment. For when we arrive at its conclusion in total agreement with his findings, it’s not because we’ve put ourselves, intellectually or emotionally, in the position of another human being. As just noted, there are no human beings in the Original Position for the simple reason that no human beings have yet come into existence. Moreover, the only human being that I’m being asked to imagine coming into existence, the only one whose fate in the Natural Lottery is of any concern to me, is . . . oh.

 

It’s me.

 

Even cognitive empathy can’t survive in the human vacuum of the Original Position. It’s a hall of mirrors reflecting an empty center that sees its own reflection in the one mirror positioned outside the hall, in the world as I know it and experience it every day: a world full of living human beings, including, inevitably, me, whatever hand the Natural Lottery of life deals me.

 

Beginning in the Original Position and viewing society from behind the Veil of Ignorance, we arrive at agreement with Rawls, ironically, out of pure self-interest.

 

Notes:

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1. Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, Tom Nolan, editor.  New York: Library of America, 2015. p.853 

 

2. See https://www.uua.org/ga/past/2008/slave-traders and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_DeWolf. Edward Ball’s National Book Award winning Slaves in the Family (Ballantine Books, 1998),which seems to have given the trend toward autobiographical accounts of slavery’s intimate family history its first big push, fundamentally reshaped how genealogies and family histories address slave ownership, using extensive archives and oral histories from both White and Black descendants to expose the brutal, systemic reality of generational slavery.

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3. You'll find a complete list at https://medium.com/universal-enlightenment-forum/8-quotes-on-the-golden-rule-from-across-religions-bc4ac545b1c

 

To be continued