During the presidential election year of 1988, Bill Moyers traveled the country for a series of half-hour interviews presented in "A World of Ideas" on public television. Moyers was riding high on his famed "Power of Myth" series with Joseph Campbell, which aired that same year, and this new venture was meant as another experiment in bringing philosophy to television. The idea was to engage in conversations with writers, historians, educators, doctors, scientists, and other thoughtful people about the evolution of American values and their place in global culture. Moyers later wrote that during the election season that year, "it had seemed to me that we were all institutionalized in one form or another, locked away in our separate realities, our parochial loyalties, our fixed ways of seeing ourselves and strangers" The "World of Ideas" interviews, it was hoped, would...
... liberate us from prisons we have ourselves built .... I went looking for what the veteran broadcast journalist Eric Sevareid has called 'the news of the mind.' I found a kingdom of thought, rich in insights into our times.
A year later, after the Reagen era came to a close and George H.W. Bush began his presidency, the interviews were edited into anthology published by Public Affairs Television, with the hope that the vitality of the televised conversations would translate into text. The out-of-print volume somehow ended up in my hands, and it is indeed a kingdom, peopled by the likes of Carlos Fuentes, Elaine Pagels, August Wilson, Derek Walcott, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Martha Nussbaum, Chinua Achebe, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Heller, and Isaac Asmiov (who spoke wisely and with generous sideburns, as you'll see in the video). A second volume was released -- the "World of Ideas" series was revived in 1990 -- with "public opinions by private citizens," including Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, and Jonas Salk. Who wouldn't want entry into this castle?
Leading up to the election this year, I am going to share excerpts from these interviews, bringing the ideas of 1988 into 2012, so that we might see their elasticity, encounter their provocations, and sort through what is true. For the journalists among us, I think there is also a lot to be learned by Moyers' questioning. Personally, I connect with how he is fueled by an utterly genuine curiousness, and I admire how he doesn't dance about -- his questions are direct and fearlessly broad. He engages on a personal level, but pushes back when he is skeptical. He brims with context, all that he has read of and about the person he is interviewing, but he handles it with a light touch; he is not overbearing with his research, he does not show off. Not all of his questions are questions: it is intriguing where he chooses to reflect back what he heard, or to put a statement forward. He is respectful of the expertise of those he interviews, but is never gullible. (Moyers, incidentally, continues to engage in election-year discussion on his show "Moyers & Company," which has recently aired episodes on the contradictions of America's racial past and whether or not labor is a lost cause.)
Here is Barbara Tuchman, the historian who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and once the National Book Award. She died about a year after her interview on "World of Ideas." Most well known for The Guns of August, her final book was The First Salute, about the American Revolution, which is where the interview begins.
MOYERS: I know that you are wary of drawing lessons from history, but can we learn anything from that period that might help us come to grips with American life today?
TUCHMAN: I think so. Somehow, now, we have a lapse in initiative and the exercise of activity toward a goal. When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
MOYERS: But of course the revolutionaries had the rare goal of being able to fight for the independence and to establish a new republic.
TUCHMAN: I don't think they thought that at the beginning of establishing a new kind of government, but very soon they realized that that was what they were doing -- and that was very exhilarating, the idea that they had the opportunity to create a new political system that eradicated tyranny and oppression by autocratic government, as it had existed for centuries. ... This is what is lacking for us. We have nothing that's exhilarating, nothing that's drawing us forward. A negative vision, like stopping or containing the Russians, doesn't get anybody very excited.
MOYERS: The public business commanded their allegiance and their time.
TUCHMAN: And this extraordinary opportunity to create a new political system was what seemed to them truly significant and truly adventurous.
MOYERS: But there is the paradox that these formidable men with extraordinary qualities of leadership were not able to solve the overriding moral dilemmas of their day -- slavery, for one. And you as a female were excluded from the Constitution. {...} In 1976 you said it was still an open question whether or not we can reconcile democracy with the idea of social order and individuality. What do you think about that today?
TUCHMAN: On the whole, the ruling groups don't truly govern in the interests of the underprivilaged classes. We see that now every day, for example, in this question of the homeless, which is not adequately addressed by our government. (Editor's note: here, I excise Tuchman's clumsy comparison with AIDS, saying homelessness is more important because AIDS 'is an acquired condition.' Ugh, 1988.) But the condition of the homeless, the necessity of living on an adequate basis, is something which government must concern itself with. Otherwise, we're going to feel the effects, just as the French did when the French Revolution occurred, through the same ignoring of the misery of the poor classes, and through the same financial irresponsibility. What really started the French Revolution was the condition of the deficit, which was owed because of their help to us -- which is again another irony.
MOYERS: You once asked the question, what's happened to the America of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson? In writing The First Salute, have you found the answer?
TUCHMAN: What's happened is the disappearance of a positive goal. The public as a whole is not concerned with solving the problems of the poor, of the homeless, though they should be, because these ultimately can be dangerous to everyone's ordinary life.
But something more seems to me to have happened, and that is the loss of a moral sense, of knowing the difference between right and wrong, and of being governed by it. ...
MOYERS: What do you mean by moral sense?
TUCHMAN: The sense of what is inherently right or wrong, and of following your belief in what is right. For example, it's not only true in white collar crime, as we read about every day, but in criticism, where critics of art and drama and -- I hesitate to say --
MOYERS: You may include journalists too, if you wish.
TUCHMAN: All right -- they will accept as great almost any damned thing that they think is funny or that they think will sell or will tickle the art dealers or that's got some attraction that appeals to the mass public, even if it is basically trashy. That acceptance of that kind of thing is an absence of moral sense.
{...}
MOYERS: But how different is that from any period of history? Take the Revolutionary period that you write about. Some of the movers and shakers of the country were guilty of the very conduct you find so alarming today. John Hancock profited from the privateer navy that looted during the Revolutionary War. Robert Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration, charged such high prices for food that people revolted against him. And couldn't it be that what you characterize as evils of the modern age are just endemic in every age?
TUCHMAN: I think they are. But when they become prevailing, that makes the difference. ... We get so used to it that we don't seem to get excited about it our resentful, nor do we realize its ultimate dangerous effects on public opinion and public activity. ...
MOYERS: You and I first held a conversation on television like this during the height of the Watergate scandals. I would not have thought that fifteen years later, we'd be discussion a similar manifestation of the extreme behavior of a government run amok. I would have thought we might have learned the lesson of history.
TUCHMAN: Well, history's lessons move very slowly. People don't put them into operation right away, when they've become visible, but only when they rise to the surface, and begin to flood the bottoms of your cellars, only when they affect your own living conditions. In the Middle Ages, the sewage wasn't properly disposed of, but people didn't pay attention to it until the waters of the rivers and the filth rose over their doorsteps. Then they had to. That's what is beginning to happen, it is beginning to rise over the doorsteps. It is already, isn't it?
MOYERS: One could certainly say the sewage is rising. Just in our time we've had the folly and deception of Vietnam. We had the White House crimes known as Watergate and the resignation of a Vice-President and a President because they were corrupt. A few years ago we had the Iran-Contra scandals. Now we have the Pentagon scandals, perhaps the biggest military swindle in American life. What does it say when we don't grow angry over this banality and stupidity in high office?
TUCHMAN: It says that we're becoming accustomed to and almost satisfied with people in government who are either venal or stupid. And with the emphasis on fundraising for all elections, which is ruining the electoral system, we will be accepting entertainers as our candidates, not those who have learned the processes and practices of government. ...
I was at a seminar a few weeks ago, down at the Smithsonian. They held a conference on the subject of the hero, because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Superman. I guess I should have realized, given the occasion for the conference, that what we would discuss would not exactly be my idea of a hero. The real hero of the discussion was the little girl who'd fallen down a well. She didn't do anything to make herself a hero, she was just in the news. Other heroes discussed were Elvis Presley and somebody whom I had never of, the Mayflower Madam. Who was that?
MOYERS: She was a woman who ran a brothel near my apartment in New York City.
TUCHMAN: Why was she a hero? Anyway, finally, I got totally fed up, and stood up and said that they were confusing celebrity and notoriety with the word "hero," and that this was not the definition of the word. Well, they said, these are pop culture heroes, what public opinion takes as heroes. But, I said, why should we accept what pop culture says about the definition of hero any more than we accept what pop culture says about grammar? ...
Fortunately, I had taken the precaution of looking up the word "hero" in the dictionary before I went down there. According to the dictionary, one of the attributes of a hero, apart from being originally half-mortal and half-divine and performing deeds of valor, is nobility of purpose. ... The hero must have some form of higher purpose in life. "Nobility of purpose" was a very good phrase, I thought, so I quoted it in this seminar, which everybody thought was rather extraneous to the whole problem of Superman, etc.
MOYERS: Does history tell us anything about the fate of societies that cease to make distinctions between right and wrong, between heroes and celebrities? I remember your descriptions of the Bourbons in France. You said the common people were so taken with the mystique of the court that they overlooked the decadence of the court until the French Revolution made it inevitable.
TUCHMAN: But they did not overlook the oppression and their own misery. ... (In Lyons) the weavers, who spent their lives creating gorgeous fabrics, silks and brocades, ... were paid one sou a day and simply could not live on that. But that was the way the employers made their profit, by the gap between what they paid their workers and what they sold the fabrics for. The merchants just refused to make a change, and there was an uprising. The leader was hanged, but this was the real beginning of the French Revolution. We haven't learned anything from this. We haven't learned that ignoring the evils of our society, the homeless and the deficit and such things, will hurt us.
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