[lbo-talk] Popular Consciousness and the City on the Hill, was Re: AP: Video

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue May 11 17:23:37 PDT 2004


Eubulides wrote:
>
>
> The 2nd 'law' of thermodynamics is the only agent of history. Let's just
> jump on the misanthrope bandwagon and steer the diesel fueled thing
> towards the cliff. After all, regress is our lot.
>

We're not talking about the laws of history, so far as I am concerned, but with the implicit assumptions which tend to structure the response to the world of a large mass of the u.s. public. In the past some have thought that Progress was a "Law of History," and while perhaps few have self-consciously held to that as theory since August 1914,* I think it still informs the consciousness of 10s of millions of those who dwell in the "City on the Hill" the pilgrim fathers aimed to build: and that aspect of american popular consciousness is perhaps the major barrier to conceiving of the u.s. as an aggressor nation.

Carrol

*Henry James comment was something like, "So this is what it was all leading to." I would have to read a few thousand pages of more recent James criticism, as well as reread 10 or 15 of his novels, before I would want to argue this very vigorously, but James _did_ perhaps think something like America = Progress and Civilization.



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