usable past

Tonight I attended a Catholics for the Common Good event focused on organizing for November's elections here in Michigan. CCG works to promote civic action among progressive Catholics in Detroit. One of the evening's themes, locating a "usable past," echoed one of the prime reasons I began researching the histories of rhetoric and the rhetorics of history.

In theory classes back in grad school, Tom Miller used to emphasize the imperative to find alternative archives--texts, traditions, bodies of knowledge--that we can use to transform a particular rhetoric into a social praxis. For Miller, that transormation toward praxis involves avoiding the tendency to canonize as well as the tendency to vilify. So I took from Miller a vocabulary and methodology centered on locating usable pasts. The history of open-access education became a usable past for thinking through remediation and working-class encounters in higher ed. This summer, as I dig through the archives down at the Reuther, in the back of my mind: the words "usable past."

So I was struck tonight by the convergence. Speakers at the CCG event spoke about the need to make use rhetorically of the "usable past" of the Catholic social justice tradition, notably papal encyclicals like "Rerum Novarum," the influential 1891 letter in which Leo XIII critiqued the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the working classes (I'm using excerpts from this as well as John Paul II's early 1980s "Laborem Exercens," aka "On Human Work," in my honors working-class studies course in the fall).

Much of this corpus/archive/rhetorical tradition centers on the theological notion of the 'common good': civic duty, the sum total of all social conditions which allow all members of society to access resources that reach economic and social fulfillment.

So, how to turn this tradition into a usable past for defeating, for example, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, the euphemistically named anti-affirmative action bill in our state. How to turn this tradition into a usable past for slowing down the radical cuts in state expenditures to higher education in the state (since 2000, $226 million fewer public dollars to Michigan colleges and universities). How to turn this tradition into a usable past for resisting English-only and anti-immigration initiatives. Regarding the latter, we looked at John XXIII's Pacem in Terris tonight. Here's an excerpt:

every human being...must be permitted to emigrate to other countries and take up residence there. The fact that he is a citizen of a particular State does not deprive him of membership in the human family, nor of citizenship in that universal society, the common, world-wide fellowship of men.

Sounds an awful lot like a usable tradition.