Posted on by Nicolette Gable

The Corporate Problem

I’ve been thinking lately about corporations. Part of what has sparked my interest is in watching (with, I admit, some glee) academia collapse in upon itself and reveal itself as hopelessly corrupt. The source of this corruption, as many more qualified than I have noted, is what is usually called the corporatization of the university. This model treats the university as a business, students are customers, professors are service providers, and the criterion of success is money and brand reputation. So, in this crisis, the first order of business is restoring business, not caring for the safety of the university itself and the people who comprise it. The fact that the corporate model forbids the use of endowments to cover the losses (what else are they for?), has been so widely asserted by most universities that it is the subject of satire.

I have also been drawn to the idea of corporations watching corporate responses to both the Covid-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police movement. Here too, corporations follow profit and branding by spending money on commercials advertising their “care” for us, their customers, and of course announcing their generous gifts to charity, while they force underpaid workers to continue to come to work in unsafe conditions and support the structures of the carceral and racist state. That many people find this persuasive is clear from the number of people who will comment that looting voids the morality of the protests. The property of Target or Walmart is more valuable than human lives.

However, my own response to the word corporate is not entirely negative. I first fell in love with history studying the Puritans. The project of the Puritans was, in fact, to form a corporation. They meant this not in the sense that we are most familiar with now ,“formed into an association and endowed by law with the rights and liabilities of an individual,” but in the older sense of the word. Corporate is drawn from the Latin for body, and refers to the forming of many individuals into a whole. In Corinthians 12 (a passage that was in the lectionary a few weeks ago, not coincidentally to my musings), St. Paul explains:

12:4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 12:5 and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 12:6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 12:7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 12:8 To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 12:9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 12:10 to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 12:11 All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. 12:12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 12:13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

In other words, as interpreted by most Christians and certainly the Puritans, all believers are part of the corporate Body of Christ. They are members (arms, hands, fingers), of one whole organism. In this sense, the Puritans were attempting to form a corporation, a whole Body, of true believers.

Of course, as Max Weber posited and many others have expounded upon, the fact that the Puritan experiment coincided with the rise of what would become corporate capitalism is no coincidence. Indeed the word itself transformed into its more modern meaning in the early 17th century, just as Winthrop was declaring the City Upon a Hill.

Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” very clearly hews to the older meaning of corporate, as he explains that God has put people into different stations in life and given them different abilities so that they must be unable to function alone, and must have need of each other and be knit together into a body. The ligaments of this body are love. However, the line that is circled and bracketed and underlined in my well-worn copy of The American Intellectual Tradition is the following:

“Thirdly, the end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord; the comfort and increase of the body of Christ, whereof we are members, that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world, to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances.”

In my annotations, I have two dark slashes between the phrase “to improve our lives” and “to do more service to the Lord”. Winthrop does not see the contradiction. He should know better, “comfort” is not a word usually associated with the literal body of Christ, “suffered, died, and was buried” come more quickly to mind.

It is this conflation, between the two sense of corporate, between a holy body made to serve and a legal entity created for profit, that doomed the Puritan experiment. It also set us on the course that led to the rise of corporate capitalism as a quasi-religion, as central to America as “Liberty”. Still, I cling to the beauty of the original idea, the comprehensiveness of Winthrop’s metaphor. Though individuals and groups are not fungible, not the same, the whole body risks death if we allow the mutilation of a limb. While being different, we are one.

So, I suppose this is a panegyric, as we work to create a history curriculum that is anti-racist, in favor of continuing to teach the Puritans and, while acknowledging the ways in which they enacted a genocidal plan against the Native Americans, leaving a little space for them and for what could have been. What has been done can be done again, done over. If now we are subsumed in a world in which legally “corporations are people,” we can return to a world in which people again will themselves to be one corporate body.

Posted on by Nicolette Gable

On Being in a Historical Moment

I often talk about my dissertation subjects as being very self-conscious that they were in an important historical moment. On one level this isn’t saying much, because most of us are aware, to greater or lesser degrees aware that we exist in a specific time. On the other, there is something out of the ordinary in constantly contemplating how, exactly, one’s time is completely new in history and that future historians will think it special. In our current crisis we seem to love announcing to one another that we are living in a historical moment. Perhaps it’s just a turn of phrase to acknowledge the difference in how we live now from how we lived a month ago, but I think it’s more than that.

There is a difference, I think, between thinking historically and thinking about the historical importance of one’s current moment. The former uses the past as a way to view the present, the latter asserts the ahistorical uniqueness of the situation. The latter is useful in as much as it forces us to remember that we are active subjects in the world, that our actions count, and that what we do will be known and recorded, but other than that I see little use in announcing that this crisis is unprecedented, that nothing like this has happened in living memory, that no one has ever experienced something like this. 

First of all, this simply isn’t true. Thinking historically, it’s easy to see that this moment is very much the same as many other moments. The history of epidemics and disease is not a new field of study and even a cursory reading of some of this history makes clear that people and governments act more or less as they did in 1347. Epidemics, pandemics, plagues, massive deaths of any sort, really, all cause governments to reach for more authority and also show the weaknesses in governments. The Yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia literally decimated the city. For context, that would now be 150,000 deaths in Philly alone (the number that is in many current projections for U.S. death tolls). This and other cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever epidemics expanded the authority of city officials to regulate water supplies, clean streets, oversee residential buildings, inspect food, and regulate many other avenues of public health and safety that we now take for granted. 

Epidemics also reflect public trust or lack thereof in government. The last outbreak of smallpox in the U.S. was in 1947 in New York. Within three weeks of the first case, federal and state agencies coordinated to vaccinate over six million people. The outbreak ended with only a dozen cases.  This was after the second world war, a moment in which faith in both science and the U.S. government ran high. 

In other moments, pandemics reveal deep distrust and divisions. Quacks and con artists thrive in moments of desperation. When allopathic medicine could not produce results quickly enough or reliably enough people turned to homeopathy, hydrotherapy, patent medicine, faith healing, and worse. 

Epidemics reveal social inequalities and minority communities and individuals are often targeted and scapegoated. The poor, immigrants, religious minorities, anyone really, who can be blamed will be blamed. Some scholars argue that the persistent belief that polio must be caused by the dirty living conditions of the poor and new immigrants delayed epidemiologists’ ability to understand the disease. The brutalities of capitalism, the deep inadequacies of healthcare systems, the crushing burdens of social and economic oppressions, are all made crystal clear in these moments. 

We see all these features in our current pandemic. Governments either inspire trust or reveal incompetency. They grasp illegitimate power or mobilize to protect citizens. The social elites are spared the worst while those on the bottom suffer. Conspiracy theories abound so that people blame others and grasp at fake cures. 

Yes, this is the first time that I have been told to wear a mask to the store, and yes, this is the first time I have worked from home, but this is not new. Even though for most of us crises like this do not exist in our own memories, we have weathered worse. It is not unprecedented. Telling ourselves that this could not have been predicted, that no one has ever borne something like this, that this has never happened before, that future historians will be obsessed with the novelty of this moment, lets us off the hook. It allows us to claim that there is nothing we can do, no lesson that we could have previously learned.

The one thing that could be unprecedented, that might make this a truly “historic moment,” would be if we changed our reactions to this pandemic. If, instead of telling ourselves that this has never happened before, we asked ourselves why this keeps happening, if we used this to reframe the way we think about money, work, and worth, if we used this to think about why the most essential workers are those who are treated the worst, if we tried to actually remedy, not just patch and paper over, the deep injustices of our world, then this might be a historical moment. 

Posted on by Nicolette Gable

Teaching Slavery

Teaching the history, and in my case this year, the literature of slavery provides a unique opportunity to make clear the moral and ethical purpose of doing the humanities.

Students are generally well versed in the horrors of slavery, but it’s important to make sure they’re thinking about the emotional and sexual labor enslaved people were forced to perform.

The humanities make us human. Learning the humanities is an exercise in morality. Slavery offers one of the most visceral ways to demonstrate this. I absolutely do not mean to suggest that the history of slavery is valuable simply as a teaching tool or is a sufficient exploration of Black History. As Teaching Tolerance notes this is tricky terrain and avoiding essentialism and curriculum violence is important.

Still, teaching slavery necessarily raises questions of morality that are inescapable. The easy way out is to let students have the natural reaction that slave owners were monsters, inhuman, insane, morally bankrupt. This is where most lessons stop. This is easy. It feels good. We know right from wrong, we know the good people from the bad, we study history to remember that there were bad people and to remember to be good people. This allows us to feel good about ourselves in the present while judging others in the past. It reeks of a Manichean, simplistic, and avoidant ethics.

The reaction to this facile morality is perhaps worse. This is the argument that the study of history is an objective, even scientific endeavor, and that our own feelings and biases should be suppressed as much as possible. This position would have us try to understand slave owners as simply members of a particular society in a particular moment, and thus exempt from our judgment. This is clearly morally untenable, and completely misunderstands the purpose of history.

My solution is to explore the moral possibilities of empathy. I encourage students to empathize with everyone in a particular historical moment, not to excuse or pardon, but in order to spark moral introspection. With the recognition that slave holders were not inhuman monsters, but humans who did terrible things and participated in a brutal society comes the recognition that we too are human and vulnerable to such horrific failings. I emphasize that the fact that slavery seemed to some to be “normal” does not exempt a slave society from our judgment, but it does demand an inventory of the “normals” in our society.

Eventually, students will start to think about economic inequality, homelessness, and perhaps the refugee and immigration crises. The ultimate goal is to get them to think even more globally. Once they start to bring up the carceral state, neolibaral globalization, human trafficking and other systemic injustices, they can start to understand the broadest point; not only do we continue to refuse to confront the legacies of America’s race-based, chattel, hereditary slavery, but we continue to live in a world in which the freedom of some depends on the enslavement of others.

-Nicolette Gable
Posted on by Nicolette Gable

Why

In fact, nothing is unconditioned; nothing carries the root of its own being in itself. [Subject and object, man and matter,] each is only relatively necessary; the one exists only for the other, and hence exists in and for itself only on the strength of a power outside itself; the one shares in the other only through that power’s favor and grace.

Hegel, “love”

Since I first read these words in college, I’ve often found myself muttering them to myself. Nothing is unconditioned. Nothing carries its own root within itself. It’s from Hegel’s “Fragment on Love”. While I am not a strict Hegelian, it has always been the shortest way for me to describe my understanding of history, as well as many other things

We tend, especially when we are young, to think that our consciousness and our experience of it is entirely self-sufficient. We exist, perhaps only we exist. This kind of solipsism is natural, but completely untenable for the historian.

Hegel suggests that consciousness depend on each other for existence. One cannot exist without an Other. Each is conditional, conditioned on the being of the Other. A consciousness floating in a void of objects would have no meaning, no being. We are entangled, dependent, rooted in each other for our own understanding of ourselves.

This applies not just to individual consciousnesses, but to history. Our moment is conditioned by other moments. There is nothing in history that exists sui generis. Nothing comes from nothing. To study history is to acknowledge our interdependence, to realize that nothing stands on its own, to see that Self and Other constantly create each other.

So, this is why I teach history. To push against the solipsism and individualism that fuels capitalism, war, and despair. To show that what is made can be unmade, remade into something better. To prove that we are bound together, inseparable.

-Nicolette Gable