The Rooting
There is no future without a past
As I launch Civic Fields, I keep on thinking to myself there’s no future without a past. A lot of what I am going to be trying to do with this outpost over the next year is thinking about the past so as to orient toward a future.
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It feels to me a bit counter-cultural. It’s hard to think about the future right now, but it may be equally hard to think about a past made obscure by a hyperactive media culture and distorting culture wars. As s a collective in the United States we are having a very hard time thinking well about the future, and I suspect that it is because we are so disconnected from the past.
As if to cope with this ahistorical condition, many these days are talking about “living in the present.” Not that long ago, breathing practices, meditation, and other techniques to aid “living in the present” were limited to the alt-provinces of newagers, sports psychologists, and a few scattered spiritual directors. Now, such techniques are encouraged in all kinds of places, from the grade-school classroom to the couches of professional therapists, from Instagram feeds to the slick stages of TED talks, from Glamour magazine to testosterone-saturated corners of the manosphere.
Of course, there is so much to be gained in learning how to be just be present to the “here and now”—with people, amid an activity, to a craft. So much. And its not easy to do this. But here’s the thing: collectively, in civic life, as citizens, we need to also learn how to be present to the past and future.
There is no future without a past.
Citizenship—and here I use the word broadly, not as a legal designation—is inherently future oriented. As animals, we are oriented to the “here and now” for our daily needs. As saints and believers (for those of us who aspire to such), we may be oriented toward the transcendent or eternal. But the distinct vocation of the citizen is always to the future. For citizenship, as the ancients taught, belongs to the future-oriented “active life” (vita activa). Contemplation (what they called the vita contemplativa) can complement citizenship, but it cannot substitute for it.
And there’s no future without a past.
I am here repeating a mantra that I learned from one of Civic Fields’s patron saints, the great French philosopher Simone Weil. Weil insisted that without a past, we cannot conceive of a future. Civic life calls for the capacity to transcend the “now,” to be present elsewhere, to dig into the past, so as to act toward a future. So, I want to sit with this civic saint for just a bit this week and reflect more on what she had to say about our need for the past.
Simone Weil was a French polymath, political activist, and mystic who died in 1943, at the ripe young age of 34, while holed up in London in exile from German-occupied France.
She was a political radical. She was associated with Left politics, devoting herself to working with and alongside the laboring poor of France. She read Marx. She was very critical of capitalism run amok.
But she was also critical of much that stood for Left politics in her day, particularly with regard to the Left’s “revolutionary” tendency to seemingly want to destroy all that is past and start over with an entirely clean and new slate.
Today this wish to break everything and start over persists in some corners of the Left, but its most pronounced expression is among the Right, especially among techno-utopians like the great gremlin spirit named Elon Musk. Whatever he is trying to do in D.C. right now, it is safe to say that Musk knows very little about the past that he is working to destroy. Ad astra! But you can be brilliant, and still stupid.
Simone Weil, by contrast, was a radical lover of the past. She saw in the desire to eradicate the past or totally move beyond it perhaps the greatest danger humans could face.
She loved the past so much that it may have killed her.
In a beautiful but very challenging book, The Need for Roots, written just before her death in 1943, she outlined a “list of obligations towards the human being.” Among them, of course, were things like food, water, shelter, clothing, security from violence, and medical care in case of illness. But the point of the book was that there were also “needs of the soul.” And one of those needs was for the past.
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” she wrote.
The “soul” for Weil was not a mysterious, timeless entity that we carry around like a treasure to be protected. It was rather that part of us that moves us, propels us into action, forming and informing our spirit.
Why does the soul need the past? The paradox, she argued, was that the soul needs the past because it needs a future. For individuals, as for groups of individuals, to live without a future is to hardly live at all. But the past, Weil wrote, is the very basis of “expectations for the future.” Without a past, we cannot conceive of a future. The past gives us a sense of the way that we, too, live in history, between past and future.
In the French language in which Weil wrote, The Need for Roots was titled L’enracinement, which can be translated as Rooting, or even The Rooting. I wish the English translation had taken that title, for it’s truer to what Weil is saying. The Rooting evokes an activity, a positive intention, and a way of digging down into the past.
But Weil warned that there are dangers, sometimes grave dangers, for communities as they turn to the past. What are those dangers?
She worried about how our need for the past can wrongly drive people, if they are not careful, to create an idealized past, which, though it is a figment of the imagination, becomes a standard of cultural, political, and even ethnic or racial “purity” that stands in judgment over the present, condemning it as unusually malign, corrupt, evil, fallen, or oppressive.
Weil, by contrast, was clear that when she talked about “roots” she meant it in the plural: “Every human being needs to have multiple roots.” There is no single source. There is no pure past. There is no historical ideal.
She also worried about approaches to the past that bring people to the resigned and sometimes cynical conclusion that nothing in history ever really changes. It’s just the “same ol’ same ol’.” This can turn history into a means of disengaging the world and despairing of actions that could change the future.
For sure, reading history can provide comfort for weary souls, especially as we map our present circumstances upon similar pasts. It’s good to know, for example, that other people too lived in very turbulent times, or that other leaders have risen only to fall. From their stories, we can learn lessons of patience, fortitude, resilience, and hope.
But the fact is that it is never the “same ol’ same ol’,” that each age is wildly new in the opportunities and dangers it presents. History, in fact, never repeats itself.
Rather, we need history to orient and secure us for uncertain futures.
Weil suggested that the past orients us by offering us a horizon of expectations: these people did these things at this time and they were able to accomplish those things, therefore we can do these things at this time and might accomplish similar things. This is how a child learns to act by looking at the adults in the room, but it is also how adults learn new things. The past can be there as a good parent, so to speak, or a good mentor and friend. It can model actions and intentions to us without scripting them.
Weil argued that the past secures us by giving us a sense of belonging and solidarity. Yes, this can and does go wrong, sometimes horrendously so. When the object of historical identification is a fiction, the stuff of propaganda rather than reality, attitudes and actions can grow violent, cruel, and oppressive. But misuse does not negate good use. It remains crucial to find people and movements, imperfect though they are, with whom we can identify if we are going to be able to act with purpose and integrity as citizens.
Weil in her own day worried about uprootedness, which she characterized as a “disease” infecting vulnerable people who had been uprooted by capitalism and war.
I worry about this too for the millions today in the world who are being uprooted for many of the same reasons. Being uprooted makes people vulnerable to lies, to noxious ideologies, and a deep despair.
But I also worry about a more general rootlessness, not as severe but still noxious. As I look around, many people seem to be without much in the way of “the rooting.” They have only very vague pasts with which to identify and by which they can be oriented. While not uprooted, they are thin on roots. They therefore become very vulnerable to the latest salesman or muscleman promising to fix the country’s problems and restore it to a more idyllic past.
So, I have been asking myself: Where are those spaces or places in our lives where we are intentionally learning about the past so as to orient and secure ourselves for active participation in civic life? With whom or what in history do I feel solidarity? Why? In other words, where and when am I doing “the rooting”?
Above, I said that Weil loved the past so much that it may have killed her. It's truer to say that she loved her people so much that it killed her. Her goal while exiled in London during World War II was to get back to France. What worried her most about what was happening in her country was how the physical starvation of the French people was being matched by a kind of historical starvation. In the war, the French poor were yet again having their past stripped from them, just as they had by the forced migration wrought by industrialism the century before. This was the reason she wrote The Need for Roots and talked about the needs of the soul alongside the needs of the body. As she wrote the book in London, in a great act of political solidarity, she refused to eat more than the minimal daily rations the poor were receiving in her homeland. Suffering from tuberculosis, this political act of self-starving could not keep her alive for long. She died on August 24, 1943.
To the future, with the past,
Ned