This week’s first two works were masterpieces whose relevance to our world taught me about us and our times:

A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition], by Eric Foner: I remember classmates talking about Professor Foner’s class as being one of the great classes when I was in college and he taught at Columbia. I watched and posted a bunch of his videos in Diving into Eric Foner Talks. I spoke to him in person at an event with podcast guest Jim Oakes at NYU’s law school a couple years ago.

This was my first book of his about Reconstruction, following up podcast guest Manisha Sinha‘s book on Reconstruction. She studied with Foner.

This book is masterful. It’s accessible. It starts by describing an old view of Reconstruction that I’d kind of heard before, that freed slaves couldn’t govern and wrecked President Johnson’s plan to rebuild the South. I should mention, I knew little about Reconstruction before Sinha’s book.

I’m reading it following my observation and principle that, “We study Lincoln because we want to be like him but we should study slaveholders because we are like them.” We at the top of a dominance hierarchy based on access to energy and power are hurting people as a class more than slaveholders did by orders of magnitude. We mollify our internal conflict by coming up with similar rationalizations and justifications as they did. We call theirs racism. I call ours pollutionism.

Here is my the passage from the book that resonated most. I almost edited into my book, but it’s too late in the publishing process.

For upholders of the South’s “peculiar institution,” the Civil War was a terrible moment of truth. The most perceptive among them realized they had never really known their slaves. “I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters,” South Caroline rice planter A. L. Taveau confessed two months after the war’s close. But if this were the case, why did the slaves desert their masters “in [their] moment of need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know?” Blacks, Taveau now understood, had, for generations been “looking for the Man of Universal Freedom.”

That is, slaveholders believed slaves loved the people who owned them enough to risk their lives and livelihoods based in hope they would help them. Looking back it seems bizarre that they’d expect people they whipped and separated from their families would help them. But we today think we are helping people we addict with cell phones, solar panels, and imperialist schools. How could they be so self-serving, self-indulgent, and ignorant? The more relevant question to us: how can we?

Can we learn from history that voluntarily giving up our status in favor of not taking and destroying others’ life, liberty, and property without their consent benefits everyone most? It benefits all of us no matter how much we think flying, takeout, and SUVs improve our lives, and no matter how much we think the worst hasn’t hit us yet or that we’ll act when it affects us.

The book still missed the cause of the dominance hierarchy in material conditions. I’ll write a separate post quoting part of the book that noticed differences in Southern white politics that the book doesn’t explain but that understanding how dominance hierarchies form explain simply.

On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee Cobb, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint: I re-watched this movie for the first time in years. Wow! It aged well. The more I learn and practice performance art, the more I appreciate great art. Brando’s performance is one of the most influential in the history of acting, surpassed perhaps only by his performance in Streetcar Named Desire.

I watched it this time because of my observation that people declining to act on sustainability in favor of vacations, regular jobs, and the equivalent of short-end money. Here’s the line.

Terry Malloy: It wasn’t him, Charley; it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, “Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.” You remember that? “This ain’t your night”! My night? I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in a ballpark, and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley; you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.

Charley Malloy: Oh I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

Terry Malloy: You don’t understand, I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody… instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. [Charley takes it in.] It was you, Charley.

I was amazed at how much this movie resonated with our situation today. The movie featured a mob dominating a dockworker’s union and all the people suffering not acting together and instead claiming honor in staying “D and D” (deaf and dumb). We have an unsustainable, imperialist, colonialist culture dominating all of us with our rationalizations to mollify our internal conflict to convince us that we’re good, honorable people despite knowingly hurting innocent people.

The “could have been a contender” cab scene describes what we’re doing to ourselves by giving into comfort and convenience instead of banding together and saving ourselves. The movie oversimplified, but illustrated the main swaths effectively.

I know people looking at the potential to change our culture and instead they’re doing short-end money stuff. When the movement I’m starting takes off, they’ll still be doing short-end money stuff. It’s tragic. They could change the world.

The scene where Malloy and Edie share their first drink is another relevant poignant scene. It illustrated how we deny and suppress compassion and humanity in favor of saving our skins: “Conscience… that stuff can drive you nuts!” Here’s some of that dialog:

Edie Doyle: Shouldn’t everybody care about everybody else?

Terry Malloy: Boy, what a fruitcake you are!

Edie Doyle: I mean, isn’t everybody a part of everybody else?

Terry Malloy: And you really believe that drool?

Edie Doyle: Yes, I do.

Terry Malloy: You wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.

Edie Doyle: I never met anyone like you. There’s not a spark of sentiment or romance or human kindness in your whole body.

Terry Malloy: What good does it do ya besides get ya in trouble?

Edie Doyle: And when things and people get in your way, you just knock them aside, get rid of them, is that your idea?

The Plow That Broke the Plains, by Pare Lorentz: One of the books I finished two weeks ago—the Worst Hard Time—described this documentary. That book followed Cadillac Desert. The US government produced it so it’s in the public domain.

You have to watch this movie with the mindset of the times. It’s not remotely modern, but it and the two books I just mentioned combine to tell a story we’re repeating. Believing we can conquer nature, we come up with a tempting philosophy like “rain follows the plow,” ignore signs and predictions that are almost too obvious to ignore, overproduce, and collapse. In the process everyone with status becomes corrupted from their values. Conservatives run to big government for aid they would normally call socialist. Liberals abandon banding together.

The result: environmental ruin and government programs that, for whatever intended help they provide in the moment, grow in their unintended consequences and ability to corrupt all involved, across the political spectrum. Today they seem impossible to overcome.

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