"Standard of Living"

Back to William Graham Sumner, "Forbidden Nostalgia" and Settler-Colonial Violence

Good day.

Last week I was in Bloomington and I found a copy of old Wm Graham Sumner’s “Essential Essays.” As I was buying the book (a handsome Liberty Fund volume),¹ I told the clerk “this guy is probably responsible for all the bad ideas circulating today.” Virtue signaling of the worst kind, I know, trolling for approval and so on. But I firmly believe this. We can shake our collective heads at the likes of Thiel or Yarvin, but there are deeper currents that are especially insidious for their capacity to establish norms over long spans of time, their architectonic capacity to form paradigms for later generations to inherit as frameworks for thinking. A lot of these American origins can be found in Sumner, or so I would argue.

I have written before about the Sumnerian argument for rethinking all forms of social insurance as a kind of a private racket, even as part of a vision whereby the classes don’t owe much to each other. Of course the modern idea of social classes as warmed-over secularized Calvinism is mostly correct, but someone had to do the transposition, to translate the old Unfortunate/Accursed/Wretched of the Earth and their counterparts in the Elect, into “scientific” terms. In the US, we have Sumner to thank for this: for him, though, classes in an economic sense don’t really exist. Rather, generations are nothing more than the inheritance of accreted good and bad habits, intergenerational wealth nothing more than the sign of world-denying discipline and self-abnegation understood in explicitly patriarchal terms (i.e. the father “doing without” for the sake of his male heirs). Almost as a side-effect of this self-imposed austerity, the secularized Elect develops as well certain expectations about material comfort, civilizational achievement, arts and letters and all the rest. In a turn of phrase that sounds like Marx, Sumner at least recognizes that the dominant class produces the dominant “culture” (or Kultur understood in the German sense) of any given age or epoch. In a casual sense, we call this the standard of living. Here is what he says about this issue, in an essay entitled, “Socialism”:

Capital is labor raised to a higher power by being constantly multiplied into itself. Nature has been more and more subjugated by the human race, through the power of capital, and every human being now living shares the improved status of the race to a degree which neither he nor anyone else can measure, and for which he pays nothing (“Socialism,” pp 161-162, my emphasis).

Let’s focus on the phrase I have emphasized. We need only make brief mention of Marx’s "primitive accumulation” to undermine the notion that humanity “pays nothing” for modernity’s achievements. As he put it, history is written in words of blood and fire. The Sumnerian answer to this is of course “That’s all in the past, and in any case, it makes sense in the struggle for existence.” This seems to use Hobbes (and Malthus/Spencer/Darwin) to try and answer Marx by simply positing society as a kind of boundary-condition that separates man from the state of nature. But there’s a twist: what happens when civilized man experiences that limit-condition? When the modern human being is placed in a peripheral position, actually encountering living examples of life outside the Hobbesian social contract, how does she feel? Does she experience her standard of living as something without cost? The clear answer is no. She feels resentment, anger, jealousy. She both longs for and hates nature. She realizes that the forms of austerity and repression imposed by civilization are a poor bargain. She sees freedom and realizes it’s out of reach.

---

I have written about this issue before, in the context of discussion of Michael Rogin’s fine book on Jackson and Native America, Fathers and Children. This awareness or sense of self-reflection breaks through and clearly becomes part of the consciousness of twentieth-century modernity (for example in Conrad and Freud), but it is present if obscured in earlier visions of the “noble savage” associated with Rousseau and before him Montaigne. This sense of self-awareness is especially poignant in the literature of sustained encounter, as part of the structure of Anglosphere settler-colonialism. As Rogin puts it, liberalism in particular represents a kind of experiment on human nature, isolating men from each other, individuating them while at the same time forcing them into repressive structures (cultural, economic, religious) that generate powerful forces of “forbidden nostalgia.” Indigeneity stands on the opposite side of this margin, outside this boundary. In a gendered sense, tribal life in its fusion with nature and its patterns becomes tied to the maternal and the feminine; its freedom becomes intolerable and clearly, overtly, in need of rigor and rule. Masculine, paternal violence finds an early catalyst here; longing generates (self) loathing, which in turn helps explain the vigor and energy with which programs of extirpation and assimilation are prosecuted by white populations.

Does this sound like something without cost? The construction and elaboration of whiteness becomes tied at the beginning to a sense of grievance and resentment. To use Trumpian language, whiteness feels “unfair.” Indigenous men and women get to live their lives in close and careful (maternal) communion with nature, seemingly without repression, without guilt, and without the confining strictures of individualism. The violence of settler-colonialism comes from this sense of comparison and grievance: its anger comes from an awareness of misery and isolation. From its beginnings with Jackson to the contemporary MAGA movement, white grievance nurtures resentment at the feeling of unfair obligation; it suffuses Sumner’s understanding of the so-called “common man” as well.

In our own time of course, we have long lost the sense of guilt that bothered the Puritans, let alone the men and women of Jackson’s generation. The repressive apparatus may be gone — at least in its theological form — but not Rogin’s “forbidden nostalgia.” The sense of grievance remains. It also goes far in illuminating the force and violence behind the genocide in Gaza. For in the Zionist project, we circle back once more to the old sense that Indigenous life is intolerably vital and vibrant, perhaps especially in its rebellious spirit, its capacity to resist and remain independent, its sense of durability and resiliency. I’m talking here about the political concept of sumud, which can be found in resistance to settler-colonial projects everywhere, despite otherwise profound cultural and geographical differences.

1. William Graham Sumner, On Liberty, Society and Politics (Bannister, ed., Liberty Fund, 1992).