I criticized some of Loren Goldner’s statements in a previous post, but now I want to praise his ideas for other reasons. I appreciate his explanation for why American radicalism differs from European radicalism.
America’s Unique Connection to the Old Testament
Americans have a different historical perspective than Europeans. In Goldner’s words, we have a different “mythical-historical self-understanding.” ((Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man, Queequeg Publications, New York, New York, 2006)) This has led to misinterpretations of American politics and political figures.
Analysts have assumed that both American conservatives and radical socialists lack a “pre-capitalist frame of reference.” This implies that they don’t have an imagined feudal idyll to look back to or a post-capitalist future to look forward to. According to this interpretation, it is impossible to see the present as a mere transition from one state to another as Marx did. But Goldner thinks this “misses something fundamental about America’s mytho-historical self-understanding. Americans do have a pre-capitalist frame of reference, but it’s not feudal. It’s “in the imagery of Old Testament prophecy, in the fundamental myth of the New Covenant in the wilderness. It’s in the relationship between Egypt and Israel and Babylon, in the perception of the peoples encountered in the New World as Adamic man in Paradise.”
In other words, America’s founders didn’t recognize the past of the Holy Roman Empire or Greco-Roman antiquity as being relevant to their experience. Their model was drawn from the Old Testament. It comes from a deep identification between early American experience and that of the Jews ‘going out of Egypt’.
This has had both positive and negative consequences. The most negative consequence has been the tendency to identify peoples of color as representatives of fallen man. The Europeans also projected the Adamic myth on other peoples, but they had no direct dealings with the ‘primitive’ element as the Americans did.
Europe’s Myth of the Cosmic King
[The European myth was] first the myth of the ‘cosmic king’ of the feudal and later absolutist state, culminating in the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, and then the pseudo-mythical resurrection of the shattered cosmic king, victim of regicide: the Napoleonic myth. In Europe, the centralist state haunted the ‘poetry of the past’ of the conservative right, but also, through the phenomenon of Bonapartism with its ambiguous legacy, an important part of the left, far more indeed than Marxists at the time or later cared to concede, particularly when, in the twentieth century, Bonapartism fused with the myth of the ‘Third Rome’ and appeared to many American and Western ‘Ishmaels’ to preside over the first ‘socialist’ state in history. (pp24)
This focus on the cosmic king is unique to Goldner and will be examined later. My focus here is the importance of the Old Testament in America’s mytho-historical ideal.
The Indo-European Myth
Goldner mentions additional sources and thinkers that I have used in this blog, for example he cites Melville’s mention of Sir William Jones. Jones is important to Goldner because in 1780 he demonstrated that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language. (pp 49) Indian scholars have objected to this claim. In fact they have objected to the entire Marxist view of India. But Goldner is trying to situate Melville in a broader historical movement of ideas with which he was obviously acquainted. To accomplish this Goldner sketches the history of what he calls the myth.
This is probably a good place to mention my use of Edward Moor’s book, The Hindu Pantheon. In previous articles I have discussed Hindu deities as described by Moor without providing his controversial background. Moor is controversial today because he worked with Sir William Jones in India when India was still a colony of the East India Company. On the other hand America’s understanding of Hinduism has had a Western bias from the beginning. Hindu symbolism, or an American interpretation of it, influenced American culture in a negative way when the medical profession adopted of the caduceus of Hermes. Now back to Goldner.
Georges Dumezil and the Source of Western Literature
Since the 1930s, figures such as Georges Dumezil have uncovered a remarkable coherence of myth within the Indo-European cultural sphere, and in world mythology generally. Dumezil’s work on Indo-Iranian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian mythology have amply confirmed the quip that ‘the first half of the nineteenth century discovered that all of modern English and French literature derived from German and Scandinavian folktales. The second half of the nineteenth century discovered that all German and Scandinavian folk tales were derived from Indian mythology.
For Goldner this illustrates the importance of India and Egypt–not just Athens or Jerusalem–for the origins of science, religion and art, (pp 87,88). For me it represents another source that I have in common with Goldner–Georges Dumezil.
All things considered, it was probably natural for Marxism to be part of the progressive conversation after all. Hopefully we can develop the ability to acknowledge our diversity, discover our similarities, and use this knowledge to build something better–something uniquely American.