DUCKPOND

The strange and compelling thing about the “egalitarian myth” in Australia is that even the real elite actually believe it. It connects us back to the world of the English Commonwealth, in particular to the then despised Levellers.

Myths as much as they contain truths, also can sometimes blind us to social reality and to historical truth. Myth are a frame of expectation, a formulation of a national soul, girding us to follow certain paths.

Much like Australia, the American myth, sometimes described as exceptionalism without qualification, was articulated in the minds and hearts of its founders before they had stood on it shore. John Winthrop, who was to be Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote while on board the Arbella while crossing the Atlantic in 1630:

For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.

There is now less that four weeks until what will turn out to be a landmark presidential election. The economy and the global financial crisis, whose effects will be felt acutely in the United States, is both determining the election, and the popularity of the incumbent. But there is a chance, which the Republicans are seeking to grasp, as Donna Brazile observes that Obama could lose:

It is useful for me (if nobody else) to recall the sequence of events that lead to the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson accompanied by a small group of people including Dr Martin Luther King:

Rosa Parks’ 1955 act of civil disobedience, in which she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, was a central event of the Civil Rights movement. Her action, and the demonstrations that it spawned, led to a series of legislative and court decisions that contributed to undermining the Jim Crow system.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which followed Rosa Parks’ action, was, however, not the first of its kind. Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. These early demonstrations achieved positive results and helped spark political activism.

Since 1964, the electoral map has not looked the same, as perhaps President Johnson knew when he signed the bill into law. The courage of the Civil Rights Marchers, often in the face of hatred and stones, and in the case of Dr King, the premonition of his death, was as great as an warrior of myth or reality.

So perhaps equally, if we deal falsely with our national myth might too ‘be made a story and a byword throughout the world”?

POSTSCRIPT:

Lyn observes at Public Opinion:

What’s more worrying for the US, its global decline or internal social disintegration? There’s not a lot for them to be cheery about.

Social integration, and national myths can play a positive role, is clearly important, no more so than in times of crisis. I suppose that myths are framed by paradigms. Kenneth Boulding, departing from the established dialogue, described three faces of power: threat, exchange and integrative. They could be viewed, and are conventionally as overlapping sets. Threat power represents forms of violence, including coercion and sanctions. Exchange power could be highway robbery or practice of trust. Integrative power goes beyond ideology and persuasion to a sense of connectiveness, reified as moral codes and practices for instance. A time of paradigm shift, if that properly addresses the current global financial crisis is perilous, the environmental crisis is catastrophic.