Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

Literature and Psychology, Fall 1997 v43 n3 p1(23)

The fate of the earth: "each and all" or nothing?
(The American Atom: Post Nuclear Identities)

by Jerry Phillips.

 

Abstract: Human life and cultural identity can either be patterned after the myth of the machine or the mythology of empire, which suggests some cultures are destined to rule. The two myths are inextricably linked by the concepts of progress and the binary models of savagery and of civility. The Lewis and Clark expedition showed colonial mythology as social phenomenon. In 1997, the land they explored contains a nuclear arsenal that could give rise to multiple Hiroshimas. Perhaps humans can control or suppress what they have created.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 literature and psychology

The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine ... For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet the exigencies of war.

Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (255)

Introduction

This paper explores the controversy of cultural identity in the context of the twin pillars that shore up the (ideological) house of modernity: on one side, we confront what has been called "the myth of the machine," the patterning of human life after mechanical a process which reaches its apogee in the nuclear bomb (Mumford 1970); on the other side, we encounter the mythology of empire, the discourse which holds that some cultures are destined, even morally obliged, to lord it over others. The myth of the machine is wedded to the mythology of empire by leave of the rhetoric of "progress"--"the white man's burden," the triumph of "civility" over "savagery." I use the empirical referent of the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the institutionalization of colonial mythology as social experience. My specific theoretical measure of this broad activity is the part played by culture--specific ally, a colonial policy directive, a literary text and an educational treatise--in promulgating the ideology of "progress." I begin, however, with a discussion of fables of identity in the nuclear age.

The Bomb and the Human Future

The human future is always pregnant with complex possibilities that can be grouped (for purposes of moral instruction) into two broad tendencies: on the one hand, the forces which make for unity, peace, and human liberation; on the other, the forces which promise nothing but violence, cultural dissolution and greater social control. The latter have the capacity to negate the human desire for dignity, purpose, and meaning--but they cannot do so indefinitely. The face of history is indelibly marked by the various struggles of peoples against oppression. In this respect, the human future seems always to extend out as political possibility; however, in the second half of the twentieth century, the forces of barbarism have come into their own, damaging our ability to think beyond the present historical epoch.

Consider the preeminent image of dissolution and violence in our time:

Mr Tanimoto ... was the only person making his

way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds

who were fleeing, and every one of them

seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of

some were burned off and skin hung from their

faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held

their arms up as if carrying something in both

hands. Some were vomiting as they walked.

Many were naked or in shreds of clothing ...

Many, although injured themselves, supported

relatives who were worse off. Almost all had

their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were

silent, and showed no expression whatever.

(Hersey 1977, 38-39)

The passage has all the surreal quality of a nightmare. It is, however, a description, based on a witness testimonial, of an event that actually transpired on August 6, 1945: the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. The author of the passage, John Hersey, does not overly intrude upon Mr Tanimoto's memory of that fateful day: the unadorned images of bodily suffering, of human relations stretched to their breaking-point, make plain to the reader the irreducible physical reality of the exploded bomb.

The atrocious spectacle of Hiroshima bespeaks a possible fate of the earth in future time: the devastation of all human and organic life by nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons have emerged in our time as an authentic limit on the range of historical possibilities; should our leaders choose to deploy them in a general way, all other choices--about acting in history--will be rendered impossible. As Jonathan Schell observes:

[Nuclear bombs] were built as "weapons" of

"war," but their significance greatly transcends

war and all its causes and outcomes, They grew

out of history, yet they threaten to end history.

They were made by man, yet they threaten to

annihilate man. They are a pit into which the

whole world can fall--a nemesis of all human

intentions, actions, and hopes. Only life itself,

which they threaten to swallow up, can give the

measure of their significance. (Schell 1982, 3)

These deadly engines of mass destruction--only "life can give the measure of their significance." But what if life is reduced to the terms of that which it ought to measure? Which is say, what if the mythology of the bomb should colonize the moral imagination? Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen have noted that the doctrine of deterrence, which constitutes the official military policy of nuclear states, "gives rise not only to a genocidal system but to a I genocidal mentality,' which can be defined as a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations ... And that genocidal mentality can become bound up with the institutional arrangements necessary for the genocidal act" (Lifton & Markusen 1990, 3). As nuclear states give themselves over to the "genocidal mentality" implied in the very existence of nuclear weapons, the ideal of a human future, based on unity, peace, and liberation, seems ever more fantastic, even as it becomes ever more necessary. Schell points out that the mystique of the National Security State has made us susceptible to "a grim fatalism, in which the hope of ridding the world of nuclear weapons, and thus surviving as a species, is all but ruled out of consideration as `utopian' or `extreme'--as though it were `radical' merely to want to go on living and to want one's descendants to be born" (185).

No matter the end of the Cold War, the nuclear system of deterrence remains an absolutist politics of self and other;(1) but, ironically, because it threatens life in its totality, the system raises starkly to a global level the politics of unity, that is, the recognition of humanity as a species-being.(2) The inhumanity of the bomb directly implies an inhuman enemy; thus, the first step away from the genocidal mentality is the concession that whatever the cultural character of the enemy, his or her humanity is never less than one's own. This, then, is the fate of the earth as posed by nuclear weapons: dissolution or unity; Hiroshima or Utopia; the deadly finitude of the "megamachine" or the infinitude of human possibilities, which crucially depend, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, on the principle of "Each and All." In the light of this principle, which upholds the sanctity of all organic life, the power of the bomb is nothing short of obscene.(3)

The Matter of "Progress"

How did we arrive at this impasse, where our genius for technological innovation now threatens us with annihilation? In his The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford proposes an answer to that singular query:

Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries,

the New World opened by terrestrial

explorers, adventurers, soldiers, and administrators

joined forces with the scientific and technical

new world that the scientists, the inventors,

and the engineers explored and cultivated: they

were part of the same movment. One mode of

exploration was concerned with abstract symbols,

rational systems, universal laws, repeatable

and predictable events, objective mathematical

measurements: it sought to understand, utilize,

and control the forces that derive ultimately

from the cosmos and the solar system. The other

mode dwelt on the concrete and the organic, the

adventurous, the tangible: to sail uncharted

oceans, to conquer new lands, to subdue and

overawe strange peoples, to discover new foods

and medicines,...to sieze by shameless force the

wealth of the Indies. In both modes of exploration,

there was from the beginning a touch of

defiant pride and demonic frenzy.(4)

In their dialectical interconnectedness, the two modes of exploration demonstrate that the will to knowledge is but a synonym for the will to power. As the world came increasingly under the sway of scientists and engineers, adventurers and colonial administrators, complex discourses (of power/knowledge) were brought to bear upon the controversies of land, wealth, and cultural differences. In regards to the controversy of land, the ethics of dispossessing the native were squarely located in the claim that only "civilized" technics (the plough, the rifle, the railway) could realize the full potential of nature.(4) In regards to the controversy of wealth, the accumulation of capital by private individuals was proclaimed as the only real source of human freedom. And finally, as regards the controversy of cultural differences (specifically, the notion that said differences bespoke a natural human hierarchy) the chimera of "race" was made to stand as an "objective" explanatory paradigm.

The controversies of land, wealth, and cultural difference involve matters economic and political, spiritual and territorial. All was melded into an ideological formation that increasingly defined the historical sense of the modern: the doctrine of perpetual (evolutionary) "progress." Throughout the Age of Exploration, the rhetoric of progress was the key bridge between the myth of the machine and the mythology of empire: it made it possible to speak of the alleged universalism of one in terms of the alleged universalism of the other. Thus, the familiar scenario of the "civilizing mission": the triumph of knowledge over ignorance, art over nature. The discourse of progress holds as a measure of itself the utopian speculation that universal human unity is within reach--but only if the "backward" elements of humanity are made cognizant of this possibility. Hence the argument that they must be subjected to the "higher" elements of humanity for their own, and for the common, good. The ideal of a perfectible human future is thus reduced to a vulgar ideology of the "chosen": the notion that the especial genius of the colonizing "race"--for knowledge and power, technics and empire--makes it the authentic bearer of enlightened universal values. But in the real world practices of colonialism (which mythology would glorify), land is possessed at the expense of indigenous peoples, and wealth is drawn out of the land by ruthlessly exploiting native and migrant labor. As the logic of "race," cultural difference is then made to operate as an apology for dispossession, genocide and slavery. In short, the "universal" morality of empire typically leads to dissolution rather than unity--the real barbarous treatment of those deemed "other."

The false universalism of the civilizing mission--its predication on myths of superiority and the realities of violence--bespeaks the lie of absolute and inevitable progress. As W.E.B. Du Bois writes, "Progress means bigger and better results always and forever. But there is no such rule in life. In six thousand years of human culture, the losses and retrogressions have been enormous" (Du Bois 1971, 64). To appreciate the depth of Du Bois's insight, let us consider the meaning of "progress"--its hold on the moral imagination--as evidenced in cultural writings about the Lewis and Clark expedition. As measures of the social value accorded the two "modes of exploration," these writings can be framed as a kind of case-history.

Power-Knowledge-Empire

The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) into the newly-acquired territories of Louisiana was the first scientific enterprise sponsored by the United States government. This fact obliges us to recognize that the orientation of the natural and human sciences in the early days of the republic was decided in no small measure by the interested forces of expanding trade and expansionist colonial empire.(5) Consider the famous instructions given by President Thomas Jefferson to Captain Meriweather Lewis in June, 1803. As the appointed commander of the proposed expedition, whose object was "to explore the Missouri river &, such principal stream of it ... for the purposes of commerce" (Jefferson 1984a, 1127), Lewis was asked to bear in mind that contact with the Indian nations

renders a knolege of these people important. you

will therefore endeavor to make yourself

acquainted ... with the names of the nations &

their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions;

their relations with other tribes or

nations; their language, traditions, monuments;

their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing,

hunting, war, arts & the implements for

these; their food, clothing, & domestic accomodations;

the diseases prevalent among them &

the remedies they use, moral and physical circumstances

which distinguish them from the

tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs,

& dispositions; and articles of commerce

they need or furnish, & to what extent [sic].

(1128)

The exhaustive nature of the President's instructions is, to be sure, intellectually admirable; but, their intellectual soundness does not mitigate the fact that they are based upon the need to manage politically the controversies of land, wealth and cultural difference (the controversies that colonialism inevitably entails).

The matter of the "ordinary occupations" of the Indians in "agriculture, fishing, hunting" is of seminal importance to the colonialist discourse of property-rights, that is, the question of whether of not an indigenous nation has established an appropriate degree of "settlement" to gain title to the land. Jefferson's interest in trade--"what articles of commerce [the Indians] may need or furnish"--in volves questions about the kind of commodity-exchange that ought to prevail on the colonial frontier (barter for use, or "commerce" for accumulating profits). The controversy of negotiating cultural difference informs the majority of Jefferson's instructions. Lewis is charged with getting to know the Indian--as an historical, psychological, physiological and moral type. Lewis must develop a distinctly anthropological perspective on the differential quality of being that the nineteenth-century learned to call "race."

Throughout the nineteenth-century, the category of "race" was employed in ways that wreaked tremendous violence against the principle of "Each and All." Jefferson's instructions are revealing of this broad historical trajectory. Jefferson writes: "And considering the interest which every nation has in extending & strengthening the authority of reason and justice among the people around them, it will be useful to acquire what knolege you can of the state of morality, religion & information among them, as it may better enable those who endeavor to civilize and instruct them, to adapt their measures to the existing notions & practices of those on whom they are to operate [sic]" (1128). In his philosophical outlook, Jefferson was a champion of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. He firmly believed that "science is progressive," that the erection of "the standard of reason" is key to securing "the Rights of Man," and that "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind" (Jefferson 1984b, 1401). However, in the above passage, Jefferson's view of the instrumental value of anthropological knowledge could not be plainer. Stated simply: the knowledge that Lewis gathers will have the direct political function of making possible the civilizing of the Indians, who must otherwise remain barbarous.

In the colonial situation, cultural differences between the "barbarous" and the "civil" were typically arrived at through an ideological imagining of human development: the colonial "other" was held to be a child in need of instruction in civilization; thus, the colonist assumed parental status. Jefferson's liberal humanism and his anthropological curiosity were not opposed to, but rather provided the occasion for, a profound cultural arrogance, well on the way towards racism. That Jefferson regards "the authority of reason and justice" as being inextricably bound to the course of empire is in itself demonstrative of the powerful influence of the doctrine of "progress" on historical thinking--the sense in which the pull of the future (as an evolutionary value) is felt as irresistable. As befits a self-professed adherent to Enlightenment ideals, Jefferson views the claims of "reason" and "justice" as universal; the realization of universality resides in the future. Now, the white American self is the bearer of the future, and thus, by extension, it is the bearer of universal values that are necessary for the perfection--the full-humanization--of "Man" as a species-being. This train of reasoning (which took final shape in the form of Manifest Destiny) carries us from the mythology of empire to the myth of the machine. For if "reason and justice" are extended by the long walk of the adventurer, then it is also the case that the adventurer, as scientist and soldier, extends the reach of the machine. Jefferson informs Lewis that he shall have on his expedition "Instruments for ascertaining by celestial observations the geography of the country thro' which you will pass," and he shall also have "arms for [his] attendants" (Jefferson 1984a, 1126). After the technics of mapping and surveying the land, and the technics of killing fauna and deterring "hostile" Indians, comes the large-scale technics of the full mastery of nature, and the war machine that ruthlessly accomplishes native dispossession.(6)

The Lewis and Clark expedition was of world-historical significance. It facilitated, or at least helped to consolidate, a number of historical tendencies: the link between anthropology and colonial intelligence-gathering; the link between the conquest of nature and the degradation of non-statist societies; the link between the myth of the machine and the myth of the "white" American self as the absolute universal subject; and finally, the link between the ideology of progress and the genocidal mentality as a way of life (which becomes in our time the possible engulfment of the human future by the nuclear bomb). The concrete significance of these issues is manifest in the cultural value accorded the Lewis and Clark expedition by two texts, Edwin L. Sabin's Opening the West With Lewis and Clark (1917), and Charles A. McMurry's How To Organize the Curriculum (1924): the former is an historical novel aimed at adolescents; the latter is an educational treatise on developing the curriculum in middle schools. Both texts throw light on the controversy of cultural identity in the nuclear age.

Opening the West With Lewis and Clark

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Edwin L. Sabin wrote a number of boy's adventure novels: With Sam Houston in Texas, Gold Seekers of '49, Buffalo Bill and the Overland Trail, On the Plains With Custer, With Carson and Freemont, and Opening the West With Lewis and Clark. As suggested by their titles, these novels had as their subject matter the colonial westward expansion of the United States. Sabin's works thus provide an instructive example of how literature is directly implicated in the dissemination of the mythology of empire, which is to say, how texts represent the controversies of land, wealth, and cultural difference through ideologies of "progress" and rhetorics of "race." The text that is situated in the problematic of colonialism must needs confront the great moral question that has always shadowed the modern war machine: can there be a legitimate ethics of devastating, apocalyptic violence?

Note that Sabin dedicates Opening the West With Lewis and Clark to "the Western Red Man who first owned from the river to the sea, but whom the white men that came after Lewis and Clark treated neither wisely nor well" (Sabin 1917). The dedication hints at the history of genocidal violence that was integral to the United States's fulfillment of its "Manifest Destiny." It sets up an expectation that the novel will be tragic--less about the progressive gains of the Lewis and Clark expedition than about the losses suffered by indigenous peoples. However, as its narrative unfolds, it soon becomes clear that the novel is primarily oriented towards epic adventure not tragedy--and this because its center of human value is always the paternal "white" hero, the enlightened agent of universality.

In his foreword to Opening the West With Lewis and Clark, Sabin tells us that President Jefferson instructed Lewis "to make a complete record of his journey: noting the character of the country, its rivers, climate, soil, animals, products, and peoples; particularly the Indians, their laws, languages, occupations--was to urge peace upon them, inform them of the greatness of the white United States, encourage them to sell us their goods and to visit us" (26). Although accurate in the province of detail, Sabin's synopsis of Jefferson's text downplays its resolutely colonialist spirit. For as noted above, Jefferson's promotion of knowledge and "friendship" was always informed by the prerogatives of colonial power. His instructions to Captain Lewis amply demonstrate how the universalist pretensions of humanism were taken over by the interested concerns of empire. We see in Jefferson's text how the worldly reality of power encouraged the colonizer to monopolize the category of "Man," the subject of progressive history.(7) The narrative action of Sabin's novel obeys the logic of this colonialist conceit.

In its commitment to epic adventure rather than historical tragedy, Opening the West With Lewis and Clark lends moral prestige to the discourse of exploration. As we have noted, the discourse of exploration gives rise to a colonialist pedagogy of "Man"--that is, a pedagogy of comparative cultural knowledge which has as its absolute referent the firm control of the "other." To the extent that it has been linked to the ideology of "progress," the discourse of exploration has long provided the model for humanistic intellectual inquiry. In other words, humanistic education draws much of its moral authority from its grounding in what J.M. Blaut calls "the colonizer's model of the world" (Blaut 1993). When the humanistic educator claims that "Western culture ... is in fact a universal culture," he or she is only asserting a commonplace of imperialist discourse.(8) Then again, when we speak of "cultural illiteracy" as a kind of barbarism, in one respect, we are simply repeating a central myth of empire--that "civility" is a function of a specific cultural substance which must be given to those who have it not.(9) Thus the humanities have helped to translate "Eurocentrism" into "universalism"; indeed, one might reasonably argue that they have always been aimed at consolidating the subject position of empire: the "white" imperial self the "Man" of history.(10)

If Terry Eagleton is correct in his assertion that language is "a terrain scarred, fissured and divided by the cataclysms of political history strewn with the relics of imperialist, nationalist, regionalist and class combat" (Eagleton 1976, 54), then the study of literature is key to the ideological performance of the humanistic curriculum. For, the study of literature necessarily involves reflection upon the moral and aesthetic uses of language. The way we read the language of the text affects not only our understanding of cultural production but also our understanding of historical process. That is to say, it influences our thinking about the relationship between cultural value and lived historical experience. "The common justification for literature, both as a leisure activity and as part of the educational system," observes A.P. Foulkes, "is that it `expands the vision,' and while it would be pointless to deny that certain works of fiction can achieve this, or something like it, we must also recognize that fiction is equally capable of reducing the vision" (Foulkes 1983, 45). This is nowhere more true than in the context of the mythology of empire, where the reduction of moral vision might easily lead to the genocidal mentality as a way of life.

As might be expected of an historical novel for boys, Opening the West With Lewis and Clark contains a wealth of factual and near factual information. The implied (adolescent) reader is given lessons in cultural and natural history, geography and ethnology. All is informed by a "progressive" moral pedagogy advanced (implicitly and explicitly) by the narrator. For example, the narrator says of the executive decision to go ahead and purchase Louisiana from the French without waiting for congressional permission: "Little minds are afraid of responsibilities; great minds are not afraid. They prefer to act, rather than merely to play safe" (25). Insofar as he commmits himself to a discourse of moral pedagogy, the narrator gives voice to a perspective on the adolescent reader that resembles the educator's. For both assume the plasticity of the supine child. Note that if the savage was a child who needed instruction in the arts of living, then the humanistic educator--from Rousseau onwards--has been wont to see in the child a "savage" in need of uplift. Consider what Charles McMurray says in How To Organize the Curriculum: "A good reason for reorganizing the course of study is the need for bringing our practices in education into conformity with our accepted principles. We wish to make it possible for teachers to realize the generally accepted aim of instruction. We desire to lead the children into the ways of good citizenship and into a wise physical and social, or moral, adjustment to the world that surrounds them" (McMurry 1924, 1). The normative tendency of McMurry's ideal curriculum speaks volumes about the true function of humanistic education, which is to bring about citizenship within clearly defined, even rigid, parameters. The narratives we privilege in our cultural economy of value may not be wholly determinant but are surely massively influential in securing the child's passage from "savage" to "citizen." Let us consider Opening the West With Lewis and Clark as an ideological reflection upon the pedagogy of imperial selfhood.

The Louisiana purchase, which encompassed all or part of fifteen future states, more than doubled the territory of the United States. The acquisition (at three cents an acre!) of the vast and unexplored regions of Louisiana made possible the epic of American nationhood, the frontier western. In her study of nineteenth century educational curricula, Ruth Miller Elson points out that "the greatest use of the West in [school textbooks] is an illustration of the tremendous material progress unique to American development" (Elson 1964, 184). Indeed, as a literary genre, the Western has long served as a means of culturally engaging the imagination of the American child; it has aided in the reduction of the child's vision to the perspective of white imperial selfhood, the measure of citizenship. Little wonder, then, that Edwin Sabin regarded the Lewis and Clark expedition as a fit historical subject for adolescent readers.

Narrative treatment of colonial exploration inevitably involves reflection upon the controversies of land, wealth, and cultural difference. In Opening the West With Lewis and Clark, Sabin explicitly invites his young readers to identify with the colonizers rather than the colonized. The narrator informs us, "I should like to have been Captain Meriweather Lewis and Captain William Clark. They were true leaders: brave, patient, resourceful and determined" (6). The attribution of heroic qualities to the historical figure of the explorer should not be regarded as simply an exercize in encouraging adolescent wish-fulfillment; it should also be viewed as the promotion of a certain moral economy. The "heroism" of Lewis and Clark is, at bottom, a statement about the colonizer as the subject of history, the "Man" who bears the burden of leading the world towards a progressive future. Thus, by definition, the Native Americans, the "angry redmen" (23) of Sabin's novel, become pathetic creatures, doomed, by the course of history, to eventual extinction. In short, to the extent that its celebration of exploration presupposes the doctrine of evolutionary progress, Opening the West With Lezels and Clark must needs bespeak the callous vision of the "other" that has always accompanied humanism. The narrative makes of the pedagogy of "Man" a triumphalist and divisive pedagogy of the "civilized" citizen.

It primarily does this through the character of Peter, the European-American youth who had been a captive of the Osages and the Otoes for almost as long as he could remember. Peter is Sabin's invention; as an adolescent character he gives the adolescent reader a point of entry into the imagined historical world of the narrative.(11) For this reason we should take note of Peter's fortunes. Among the Otoes, Peter is known as "Little White Osage"; the language of his natal parents--English--he "well-nigh had forgotten" (46). Sabin assures us, however, that Peter "did not always feel like an Indian" (45). Thus the narrative implicitly argues for a given state of being that cannot be altered by specific cultural environments. It should come as no surprise (in a text which pays homage to the mythology of empire) that this essential identity is imagined, by Sabin, as "racially" based. When Peter encounters the Lewis and Clark expedition he immediately recognizes himself (as though looking in a mirror) as a "white" person who does not belong with "the Indians." "Me white; you white" (59), says Peter to the explorers. And the narrator supports his self identification: "They were white; he was white. They were 'Nited States; he was going to be 'Nited States, too ... Peter knew what he was going to do. He was going to stay with the 'Nited States" (61, 71). And so he travels with Lewis and Clark to the West Coast, and then back to the East, where he will eventually go to school (276).

The narrator informs us that Lewis and Clark were the leaders of "a glorious company, from which a boy might learn much" (153). Towards the end of the novel, we learn that, as a student of Lewis and Clark, "Peter had made great progress in reading and writing" (228). Indeed, the story of Peter might be read as a parable of the ideological biases informing humanistic education. Peter is literally a "savage" who becomes "civil"; in order to become civil he must submit to adult mandates (about wearing the right clothes, speaking the appropriate language, etc.). Peter accepts a national and "racial" identity. In short, he undergoes the pedagogy of "Man" as it feeds into imperial citizenship. Through the character of Peter, the implied adolescent reader vicariously experiences the liminal pleasures of the "savage state" (i.e., the Indian way of living); but, in the last analysis, these pleasures are firmly contained by the "reality principle" of schooling: the institutionalization of the developing child.

The process of schooling the adolescent subject in the mythology of empire (with its politics of self and other) is carried out at an ideological level by the very narrative action of Sabin's text. In other words, the progression of the narrative is itself a statement about the glories of developmental progress. By the close of the novel, there are two measures of the formal narrative commitment to an evolved human future: the implied fate of some Native Americans and the implied fate of the Western prairies. Because Opening the West With Lewis and Clark does not take up the historical tragedy of native dispossession, the impression is left in the mind of the reader that the assimilation of "the Indians" was ultimately for the good. Sabin's Lewis and Clark repeatedly assure the various indigenous nations that they encounter (the Sioux, the Nez Perce, the Mandans and the Arikaras) that the "great father" in Washington, President Jefferson, "has sent us ... to tell his red children that he wants them to be at peace with one another" (85). The myth of the benign white father is left unquestioned by the narrator. Indeed, the narrative fails to give the full context for the explorers's assurances: the adolescent reader is not made aware of the fact that the President's desire for "peace" among "his red children" derived in no small part from the mercantile desire for stable trade routes, particularly those that affected the lucrative commerce in animal furs. Opening the West With Lewis and Clark lends credence to the paternalistic ethics of the colonizer; and, in so doing, it strongly implies that colonialism brought moral order to what was effectively a Hobbesian state of nature. The end result is a moral inversion of historical fact: the adolescent reader is encouraged to think of Native American assimilation as eqalling progress not dissolution, and he or she is also encouraged to view the coming of "the white man" into the West as the advent of "universality" rather than chauvanism.

As regards the implied fate of the prairies, the novel's commitment to representing landscape as imagined colonial prospect inevitably presupposes the eventual disappearance of "the Western red man," and the triumphant apotheosis of the machine. The beauty and abundance of the land stir glorious vistas, in Lewis and Clark, of what could be; they habitually picture the landscape, in future time, as marked by forts, trading-posts, and, above all, farms. It is not insignificant that as the expedition nears the familiar settlements of the United States on the return leg of the journey, Peter is ready to believe that "the villages of the white men must be pleasant places" (275). Note that earlier in the novel, we are told that the Mandans marvelled at "the skill of the white men" in constructing log-cabins (116). The Mandans "admitted that these white men's houses were better even than the Mandan lodges" (116). At another point, we learn that the Mandans are astonished by the "great medicine" of a blacksmith's forge; they can only watch in awe as the blacksmith mends and manufactures "a marvellous variety of articles" (138). The narrative treatment of what is presumed to be white technological superiority brings into play the myth of the machine: the conquest of nature through technics, "the equation of mechanical with moral progress" (Mumford 1970, 201). In chapter one of Opening the West With Lewis and Clark, the narrator observes that Thomas Jefferson "had great dreams" for his country. Jefferson believed that the acquisition of the territories of Louisiana would lead to the consolidation of agrarian yeoman democracy. Thus, in Jeffersonian agrarianism, the domestication of nature--the very raison d'etre of the machine--takes on a teleological significance that is not unrelated to the course of empire. When Peter enters the United States and is bemused at the sight of a cow, he is told that a cow is "the white man's buffalo" (274). Now, extending the pioneer farm into the prairies necessitates extending the proper environment for husbanding cows; and this can only be done through the application of the machine--the technics of removing Indians, killing buffalo, and cultivating the soil. In short, Jeffersonian agrarianism presupposes a strong commitment to the civilization of mechanical progress, which, properly speaking, does not have a rational end when one considers the awful power, the absurd power, that has been realized in the shape of the nuclear bomb.

The narrative economy of Opening the West With Lewis and Clark implies that the gains of adventure outweigh the losses involved in historical tragedy; and to this extent the text gestures towards the normalization of the genocidal mentality. The overall effect of Sabin's novel is to reduce the moral vision of the implied reader by encouraging the view that "progress" is a sort of moral calculus, wherein benefits for some eventually become benefits for all, even if many should die along the way. The novel does not challenge the adolescent reader to comprehend, in all its complexity, the principle of "each and all"; instead, it leaves in place an ideal of the chosen people, "the white race," who bear, in their very activities, the burden of the fate of the earth.

"In the case of literary education, which deals with texts which may ... have mystified or demystified historical events and social relationships, the teacher / critic's role in shaping understanding is especially crucial (27)," observes A.P. Foulkes. In the educational setting, the appreciation of the literary text is bound up with institutional, cultural, and political values, which are inseparably linked to the controversies of socialization and social reproduction. These controversies are palpably felt in struggles over the nature of the curriculum. Thus we might consider how the Lewis and Clark expedition has been treated in at least one educational treatise: How to Organize the Curriculum by Charles McMurry. As regards the middle-school curriculum, McMurry proposes that "we should require variety and strength and bigness of thought, large active, constructive projects, into which children can throw themselves spontaneously and let out their full mental energies" (106). For McMurry, education is itself a kind of frontier adventure; the teacher and her pupils are essentially an expeditionary company trekking through the unmapped territory of intellectual potential. According to McMurry, "Teachers should learn in humility and wise adjustment to climb the hill of knowledge with children instead of coldly dictating to them the final matured results of their own previous explorations" (31). Which is to say, teachers should always be sensitive to the child's "efforts to explore the world" (62).

McMurry sees the Lewis and Clark expedition as the perfect historical event around which to build an interdisciplinary plan of study. In his view, the Louisiana Purchase was "one important stage in the steady movement for territorial expansion which is a marked feature of American progress" (295). McMurry blithely accepts the notion of Manifest Destiny. He writes admiringly of the "rugged and powerful pioneers," who relentlessly drove back "the fierce Indian tribes" (295) of the West. McMurry's pedagogical version of the West is deafeningly silent on what one historian has termed "the American holocaust" (Stannard 1992)--the systematic extermination of native peoples. Thus, a curriculum aimed at cultivating what McMurry calls "fruitful fields of knowledge" (82), only succeeds in cultivating the chauvanistic values of empire. The issue of the real moral complexity of American history is simply covered over by a triumphalist narrative of "progress." What Bill Bigelow has written of the celebratory version of Christopher Columbus applies equally well to McMurry's nationalistic vision of Lewis and Clark:

the discovery myth is not just bad history it's

indoctrination. For most children, the study of

Columbus and his voyages is their first curricular

encounter with two cultures encountering

each other, two races confronting each other. It is

also children's first classroom exposure to `foreign

policy.' Thus, Columbus is really a

metaphor for relations between people, cultures,

and nations today. And the shape of that

metaphor teaches children to accept racism and

imperialism as legitimate. (Bigelow 1993, 4)

As the twenty-first century looms before us, can we continue to accept the imprisoning of children's minds in past and present barbarisms? Is it not tantamount to allowing the engulfment of the future? Is it not the political and moral equivalent of the logic of nuclear bombs?

Conclusion: The Prospect Before Us

How to decide the ethics of apocalyptic violence--this remains the prospect before us. In Opening the West With Lewis and Clark, we see that the deployment of violence is justified on the grounds of cultural superiority and what is held to be the natural (progressive) course of human history. Thus, when the Lewis and Clark expedition is threatened by some Sioux warriors who are mightily suspicious of the explorers's intentions, Captain Clark instructs the interpreter to tell them that "We are not sqaws but warriors. Our great father has medicine ... that will wipe out twenty Sioux nations" (96). The "medicine" in question is a large cannon, mounted on one of the expedition's barges. The Sioux warriors take note of this powerful weapon, and sensibly retreat. "The `medicine' of the great father at Washington was, they realized, strong medicine" (97). The awful power of the apocalyptic weapon played no small role in advancing the course of empire. The moral claim made for this weapon has always been its remarkable efficiency as a genocidal engine. In other words, the ethical value of the apocalyptic weapon is that its very existence, as a principle of total warfare, deters the aggressor, and brings on the long reign of peace. In our time, the theory of military deterrence has assumed global, rather than local, significance: nuclear bombs have the capacity to "wipe out" twenty nations of twenty millions,... and twenty nations more.

Today, the land which bore witness to the travels of Lewis and Clark is home to a vast nuclear arsenal, dispersed across various underground silos. The process by which a land of beauty and abundance was turned into a land of death has been well described by Ian Frazier in his travelogue, Great Plains (1989):

This, finally, is the punch-line of our two hundred

years on the Great Plains: we...suck up the buffalo,

bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and

cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; ruin the

Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and

Kiowa and Commanche;...ship out the wheat, ship

out the cattle;..dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill

for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in

return we condense unimaginable amounts of

treasure into weapons buried beneath the land which

so much treasure came from--weapons for which our

best hope might be that we will someday take them

apart and throw them away, and for which our next-best

hope certainly is that they remain humming away

under the prairie, absorbing fear and maintenance,

unused, forever. (Frazier 1989, 209-210)

"Forever" is a long time to resist the temptation of using the nuclear bomb. But the choice is starkly clear: "Each and all" or nothing; the pedagogy of unity, diversity, and complementarity or Hiroshima multiplied. As Mumford puts it, the central problem raised by the existence of the nuclear bomb is that of "creating human beings capable of understanding their own nature sufficiently to control, and when necessary to suppress, the forces and mechanisms that they have brought into existence" (187). This, then, is the only task that properly speaks to the moral vocation of securing the human future: working to defuse those social and economic forces that extend the deadly reach of "megamachines" to the point where they effectively retard the promise of life.

Notes

(1) The nuclear system of deterrence was key to the geopolitics of the Cold War, but it cannot be reduced to the dimensions of that fifty year drama. As Michael Parenti notes, "From 1945 through 1990, the U.S. national security state exploded at least 950 nuclear bombs, or one detonation every eighteen days .... About 4,500 nuclear weapons are deployed with American forces overseas. This arsenal was supposedly needed to deter a Soviet attack. But it remains largely intact to this day" (Parenti 1995, 114).

(2) It is widely believed that genocide is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but the truth belies this perception. "Genocide has been a basic mechanism of empire and the national security state since their inception and remains widely practiced in `advanced' and `civilized' areas," writes Christopher Simpson. "Most genocides in this century have been perpetrated by nation-states upon ethnic minorities living within the state's own borders; most of the victims have been children. The people responsible for mass murder have by and large gotten away with what they have done. Most have succeeded in keeping wealth that they looted from their victims; most have never faced trial. Genocide is still difficult to eradicate because it is usually tolerated, at least by those who benefit from it" (Simpson 1993, 3-4). The recent horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina are a tragic testimony to the veracity of Simpson's words.

(3) In all his writings and lectures, Emerson emphasized the interconnectedness of all organic life. To uphold the intelligent vitality of Being was Emerson's desire. The concluding lines of his poem, "Each and All," express an holistic ethical vision that is antithetical to the philosophy of the national security state: "Over me soared the eternal sky,/Full of light and deity;/ Again I say, again I heard, /The rolling river, the morning-bird;--/ Beauty through my senses stole;/ I yielded myself to the perfect whole."

(4) The ironies and contradictions attendant to the notion of conquering "virgin land" by the force of a wondrous machine have been expertly analyzed in Marx (1964).

(5) For a lucid discussion of the material motives that informed and directed discursive knowledge of the colonial "other," see Pratt (1992, 15-37).

(6) This story has been well-described in Drinnon (1990), and Slotkin (1994).

(7) Compare Jean Paul Sartre's insight: "There is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters" (qtd.in Said 1993, 197).

(8) The words in quotation marks belong to John Silber, the notorious ex-president of Boston University. In his public pronouncements, Silber frequently made explicit the link between imperialist discourse and educational ideologies. For example, he has been quoted as saying: "We have not fallen into the clutches of the multi-culturists. We recognize that Western culture, so-called, is in fact a universal culture...This is part of the very meaning of Western culture and civilization--not to be parochial, but to be universal in one's concerns" (qtd.in Macedo 1994, 42). That a genius for universality is present in all cultures is a point simply beyond Silber's ken.

(9) The imagined kinship between the ignoble savage and the illiterate student is what makes possible the lament offered by Allan Bloom: "Sated with easy, clinical and sterile satisfactions of body and soul, the students arriving at the University today hardly walk on the enchanted ground they once did. They pass by ruins without imagining what was once there" (Bloom 1987, 136).

(10) For a forthright explication of this thesis, see Macedo (1994, 37-91).

(11) In a journal entry, dated 29 October, 1804, Captain Clark reported a prairie fire that killed two Mandan Indians. A boy "half-white" was "saved unhurt in the midst of the flaim, Those ignerent people [i.e., the Indians] say this boy was Saved by the Great Medison Speret because he was white. The cause of his being saved was a Green buffalow Skin was thrown oever by his mother...[The] fire did not burn under the Skin leaving the grass round the boy" (Bergon 1989, 73). The reference to the "half-white" boy is clearly the inspiration for the character of Peter in Sabin's novel. Peter is an unwilling captive of the Indians, thus the controversy of "racial" hybridity is completely avoided. This has two consequences: on the one hand, it establishes Peter as a clear point of identification for the implied white reader; on the other hand, it places the Indians at a greater human distance from the reader's moral world.

Works Cited

Bergon, Frank, ed. 1989. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. New York: Penguin.

Bigelow, Bill. "Once Upon a Quincentenary: The Curriculum Wars 500 Years After Columbus." Radical Teacher 44: 3-8.

Blaut, J.M. 1993. The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford.

Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of its Students. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Drinnon, Richard. 1990. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. New York: Schocken.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1971. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. ed. Andrew Paschall. New York: Macmillan.

Eagleton, Terry. 1977. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.

Elson, Ruth Miller. 1964. Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks in the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1955. "Each and All." The New American Pocket Anthology of American Verse. ed. Oscar Williams. New York: Washington Square Press.

Foulkes, A.P. 1983. Literature and Propaganda. London: Methuen.

Frazier, Ian. 1989. Great Plains. New York: Penguin.

Hersey, John. 1977 (1946). Hiroshima. New York: Bantam.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1984a. "Expedition to the Pacific: Instructions to Captain Lewis." Thomas Jefferson: Writings. New York: Library of America.

-- 1984b. "To Samuel Kercheval. " July 12, 1816. Thomas Jefferson: Writings

Lifton, Robert Jay and Markusen, Eric. 1990. The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat. New York: Basic Books.

Macedo, Donaldo. 1994. Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed To Know. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal. New York: Oxford UP.

McMurry, Charles. 1924. How to Organize the Curriculum. New York: Macmillan.

Mumford, Lewis. 1970. The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine Vol. II. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Parenti, Michael. 1995. Against Empire. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge.

Sabin, Edward. 1917. Opening the West with Lewis and Clark. Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott.

Said, Edward. 1993 Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Schell, Jonathan, 1982. The Fate of the Earth. London: Picador.

Simpson, Christopher. 1993. The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York: Grove Press.

Slotkin, Richard. 1994 (1985). The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. New York: Harper Perennial.

Stannard, David. 1992. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford UP.