What if they never meant to leave directions

I’ve come to realize that pretty much everything I’ve written over the last twenty years, all the research I have pursued, all of the philosophical backwaters I have wandered, has been about trying to understand the history of our flight toward origins, and to understand that history as a kind of extensively elaborated practical joke. In large part, this is because I have come to believe that most of what Americans take for granted as history rests upon a similar structure, that the structure of a joke, a narrative figure that turns upon the physical immediacy of tension and release, is fundamentally the structure of our most preferred stories about ourselves; because the structure of tension and release is also the structure of our other favorite national story, which is the story of sin and redemption. We are drawn to the story of sin and redemption because we all know we are sinners and because we crave some absolution, in part because the promise of absolution means we can go on with our sinning, but because it affirms our conviction that there is an end to this road, and at the end of the road, we will finally be allowed to see the map. We like to believe that here is a destination and there is a path, and that there is someone ahead of us who knows the way, even if they have not been able to share all the turns we are going to have to take. This is the rousing fiction we all crave, the thing that, even if we can sense its logical inconsistency, allows us to get out of the bed in the morning and go about our business, to act as if we are participants in some greater design. This is why we enjoy conspiracies, it is why we enjoy ghost stories, this is why we call our prisons penitentiaries: we like the idea of a plot because it suggests that someone is in charge, that there is logic in play, and if we look hard enough to uncover it, we will have a blueprint for right and wrong that turns on the question of what is correct. And that what is correct will inevitably be good. The answer to the question “What is correct?” can of course only be answered provisionally, and therein lies the problem. This is particularly so in a society based upon multiple overlapping genocides, and these peculiar ways we have of talking about work and social belonging, these things we call race and gender and sexuality; a society in which security is established through and guaranteed by institutions whose complicity with power is tempered by the barest pretense of democratic engagements. There is no doubt an end, but presuming that someone made it there before us, what if they do not know how they got there either; what if they never meant to leave directions; what if they remain as confused as we are now, here, in this moment, even with the benefit of all that hindsight? One of the unlikely points of commonality between the United States and Lebanon is the propensity to establish claims of moral rectitude through recourse to religiously-sanctified notions of conspiracy and origins. This is perhaps not all that unusual, especially so in a world in which we have long concluded that the nation-state is somehow the most reasonable framework for the negotiation of social and political relations. Nonetheless, the enduring and conspicuous plurality of these nations, historically and presently, as well as their relative youth among the global community of nations, has all but ensured that, for Lebanon and the United States, the question of origins has been endowed with an inordinate degree of significance, and that it is pursued with all the vigor of a contact sport. Within modern Lebanon–the nation of Lebanon being a somewhat modern contrivance in itself–there remains an enduring fidelity to the mythos of the Phoenician past, and all the glorious achievements of the Phoenicians’ commercial empire, their skill as sea-borne navigators, their facility in business. In this inordinately contemporary mythos, the relative successes of people who might claim some diasporic relationship to Lebanon speaks to an innate, almost genetic disposition toward achievement; we are born this way. Conversely, those who have not achieved some reasonable measure of success have no one to blame but themselves and their ancestors. They were betrayed by the blood long before any of us who presently walk the earth had deigned to arrive. One of course cannot deny that certain cities in modern Lebanon can trace their histories through the history of Phoenicia’s Mediterranean empire. At the same time, certain inconvenient facts about the history of the Phoenician empire disappear in the present-day retelling, and one can never quite escape the feeling that contemporary obsessions with the Lebanese-Phoenician past accord, all too comfortably, with certain less than palatable strains of Lebanese Christian nationalism, strains that are right-wing, sectarian, and abiding in their exclusivity. Contemporary Phoenicianism is a way of imagining and ideally securing a national patrimony that is distinctively non-Arab and non-Muslim, a turning away from the East to the West, which of course is where the political entity we call Lebanon finds its actual origins–in the Sykes-Picot Accord, the Balfour Declaration, the Wilsonian pretense of the League of Nations, and the map of the world drawn by the imperialist powers in the years immediately following the first World War. Contemporary Phoenicianism is a way of turning toward the West, but also a means to circumvent the history of contemporary Lebanon’s imperialist origins by transforming the history of Phoenicia into a story about Europe, at large; about Phoenicia as giving birth to Europe, shifting narratives of European patrimonies away from Rome, or Constantinople, or the Battle of Hastings, or the Mongols or whatever, and rooting the geopolitical fictions of the present in the soil of the eastern Mediterranean, at Saida and Tyre, and the material histories of the Alexandrian conquest. As is often the case with American obsessions over origins, the unavoidable plurality of these historical precedents is not effaced so much as it is marshaled into service as evidence by which to dismiss any claim that the story itself bears certain marks of an exclusionary purpose; that is, that the story is only ever really about the ways in which we ratify certain types of social hierarchy in the present, and the symbolic methods by which class domination is secured, and exploitation is excused. The particular element of the American mythos of origins generally draws upon the history of the immigrant past as a means to negotiate the plurality we find in the present, to understand how so many different people find themselves together in a place none of them necessarily started out, and what might have become of the people that were already here to begin with. Of course, the facts of this history are generally molded to suit different political ends, in different moments, as we seek some kind of negotiation over the terms of our plurality, what it means, and how to live together when none of us really like each other, or bound to any sort of injunction that we must like one another. The idea of the immigrant history of the United States is not wholly incorrect, but more often than not, it has all too often served as a means of affirming, if implicitly, the settler colonial trope of a nation born of emptiness, a place that people have come to as a matter of choice, a place that has received far more than it has denied, a place that is perpetually in the business of its own renewal. On its face, this is not a wholly unpleasant story, but it is one that speaks more to the megalomaniacal egocentrism that haunts the national psyche than it does that it does the heartwarming generosity of a people disposed to suffer and to the suffering, a nation founded to alleviate the hunger of the huddled masses, to give them the room to take a breath. As with Lebanon, the inconvenient details of recent history only serve to expose the holes in the plot. The legacies of ethnic cleansing go missing; the theft of Indigenous land, cultures, strategies for survival, are forgotten; to say nothing of the offense done to the descendents those who were brought here in bondage, those whose bondage was conditioned by, and formative of, enduring notions of race and racial difference, of sexuality, labor, and the extraction of labor power. Slavery appears in this story as our great and foundational original sin, and Lincoln assumes the place of the Savior. Through his sacrifice, we attain absolution. We now live in a state of grace. Except of course we do not. All of this is insane. And yet somehow, I’m the one with the diagnosis. I’m the one who is crazy.