After surviving back-to-back hurricanes in August, Hawaii is now dealing with a volcanic eruption. Lava from the Kilauea volcano is seeping up through cracks in the earth, and will soon threaten a housing development.
At a recent meeting to discuss the danger, some residents of this development became angry at a proposal to divert the lava away from homes. According to traditional Hawaiian beliefs, Kilauea is the home of the volcano goddess Pele. To divert the lava’s flow, these residents maintain, would be to defy Pele’s divine will.
It’s been observed that one person’s religion is another person’s mythology; it’s hard for us to grasp how people could allow their homes to be destroyed rather than upset a mythological goddess. But traditional Hawaiians aren’t the first to see God’s hand behind the course of events; the unstoppable flow of white people across this continent was itself once seen as a manifestation of divine will.
Based on the Calvinistic belief that people were predestined by God to success or failure in this life — and salvation or damnation in the next — the conquest of the American wilderness came to be seen as the fulfillment of our nation’s collective destiny. And as the Hawaiians understand, God’s will is not to be opposed. Thus things like slavery and the dispossession of the Indians were justifiable because they were seen as part of God’s plan.
While the belief in Manifest Destiny served well as a rallying cry for national expansion, once America was settled the concept was relegated to the history books. Yet even from there it is causing problems, seeping up much like Kilauea’s lava is in Hawaii.
The problem is in how Manifest Destiny – and other chapters in our nation’s past – are being taught in the College Board’s advance placement history course that’s used in high schools across the country. This course is intended to help students prepare for college by teaching them “about U.S. history through the critical analysis of historical events and materials.”
Conservative critics, including Nebraska Board of Education member John Sieler, are crying foul. Sieler says this history course “portrays the United States as the bad guys.” Sieler particularly objects to the description of Manifest Destiny as being built “on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of cultural superiority.”
I touched on the conservative belief in “America the Innocent” in a recent column. Many on the right embrace the concept of “American Exceptionalism” – the belief that America is better than all other countries. They feel it’s wrong to take a critical look backwards at subjects like minority rights or American imperialism (it should be remembered that we seized possession of Hawaii from its native inhabitants in the late 19th century). Instead of discussing ‘exploitive robber barons,’ for example, Sieler thinks the course should focus on job creation through the investment of capital.
William G. Thomas, chairman of the history department at UNL, disagrees. “I think we’re a society that can take self-examination and critical analysis,” Thomas says, though he acknowledges that history serves different purposes for different people. Some people, Thomas acknowledges, believe “history is meant to boost American patriotism…and should be largely uncritical and accepting of the past.” But really, he says, history is for “deepening our understanding of the past in all of its complexity and contradictions.”
Facing the past may trouble those who prefer it be whitewashed, but our nation can’t afford to live in a false paradise of denial. Those who deliberately forget the past, after all, are particularly apt to repeat it…