Michael A. Smith Visits With The Empty Envelope: Three Words That Were Never Meant to Be Earned

 

The Empty Envelope:
Three Words That Were Never Meant to Be Earned

The terms were stated plainly, and the Cherokee met them

Beginning in the 1790s, under Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox, the United States adopted what it called a civilization policy. The offer was explicit and it was made in good faith by at least some of the men who made it. Take up settled agriculture. Learn letters. Accept the Christian religion. Govern yourselves by written law. Do these things, and you may remain where you are.

The Cherokee did them. Sequoyah completed his syllabary in the 1820s and a people became literate in their own language within a few years, which has few parallels anywhere. They founded a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in two languages. They wrote a constitution in 1827, modeled deliberately on the American one, with a principal chief and a bicameral legislature and a supreme court. They built farms and mills and schools. Some of them owned slaves, which was itself part of the performance, because the planter was what the Southern states meant by a civilized man.

Then Georgia moved to seize their land anyway, and they did the most civilized thing available to a people under a constitutional government. They hired a lawyer and went to court.

They won. In Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, the Supreme Court of the United States held that Georgia had no authority within the Cherokee Nation. Chief Justice Marshall wrote the opinion.

They were removed anyway. A treaty was signed in 1835 by a faction with no authority to sign it, and in 1838 the army came, and something on the order of four thousand people died on the road west.

Consider what had actually happened. A people had been given a set of conditions, had satisfied every one of them, had then satisfied the additional condition of using the legal system rather than the rifle, had won on the merits before the highest court in the country, and had been dispossessed regardless. There was no point at which they failed the test. There was no test.

And the terms kept moving after that. In 1879 Richard Henry Pratt opened the school at Carlisle, and civilization now required the child: haircut, language forbidden, name replaced, the whole program summarized in Pratt's own formula about killing the Indian to save the man. In 1887 the Dawes Act arrived, and civilization now required the dissolution of the common land itself into individual allotments, with the remainder declared surplus and opened to white purchase. Ninety million acres left Native hands under that statute. Each redefinition arrived at precisely the moment the previous one had been satisfied.

By the summer of 1893 the descendants of those people were on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago world's fair, arranged by an anthropologist from Harvard along a graded strip that ran outward from the white neoclassical core, exhibited to a paying public as specimens of what civilization had overcome.

I want to be precise about what that is, because the ordinary words for it are all slightly wrong.

It is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a real standard that the hypocrite fails to keep. The standard remains intact and the man is measured against it and found wanting, which is why the charge of hypocrisy is survivable and why hypocrites reform.

It is not a lie, exactly, because many of the men who administered the civilization policy believed in it. Knox appears to have meant it. A good many missionaries meant it and some of them went to prison in Georgia over it, which is how Samuel Worcester's name ended up on the case.

What it is, is a word that carries the full moral weight of a standard while having no test attached to it. It sounds like a measure. It functions like a door. And because nothing is actually being measured, the word can never be satisfied. It can only be conceded, by whoever holds the authority to concede it, at whatever moment and on whatever grounds he chooses.

Call it an empty envelope. It has the weight and the seal and the official markings of a genuine document, and there is nothing inside it, and that is not a defect. That is the design. A real standard can be met, and a standard that can be met eventually must be honored. An empty one never has to be.

The mechanism was not confined to Indian policy. Mississippi wrote it into its constitution in 1890 with the understanding clause, which required a prospective voter to read a section of the state constitution, or to interpret it when read to him, to the satisfaction of the registrar. Note the final phrase, because it is the whole apparatus. The white applicant satisfied the registrar.

The Black applicant, whatever he knew, did not. The statute never mentioned race and never had to. It simply declined to say what interpreting meant and left the definition in the hands of the man behind the desk.

Every empty envelope works that way. The virtue named in it is real and worth having. The authority to certify it belongs to one party. And the certification is withheld from whoever was already unwelcome.

The second envelope is more recent and less bloody, and I have been on the receiving end of it in a corporate setting, from a supervisor who meant something other than what he said.

The charge was that I was not a critical thinker.

Now, critical thinking is a real thing with a real literature. Dewey wrote about reflective thought in 1910. Bloom's taxonomy gave it a structure in 1956. Educators have spent a century specifying what it consists of: evidence weighed, sources examined and their reliability assessed, assumptions surfaced, alternative explanations entertained, conclusions held provisionally and revised when the evidence moves. Those are criteria. They can be taught, demonstrated, and assessed, and I have spent nearly forty years in college classrooms doing exactly that.

Observe, then, what is missing when the phrase is deployed as an accusation in a meeting. No evidence is cited. No reasoning is examined. No alternative account is offered. Nothing is measured at all, because measurement is not the purpose. The phrase in that setting means one thing, and everyone in the room understands it: you have reached a conclusion I did not want.

That is why the charge cannot be answered. A man accused of a factual error can produce the fact. A man accused of failing to think critically can only think harder, in public, in front of people who have already decided, and the harder he thinks the more he confirms that he is the sort of person about whom the question arises. The accusation is unfalsifiable, which is precisely what makes it useful, and the irony sits there unremarked: an appeal to rigorous thinking that is itself the least rigorous move available.

I did not understand at the time that I was watching a very old machine run. The vocabulary had been updated. Nothing else had.

The third envelope I will not define, because everyone reading knows the word, and because the argument does not require me to adjudicate it.

I will point out only what can be observed about how it operates. It began as ordinary language inside Black American speech, an instruction to pay attention to how things actually work. It was taken up broadly for a period. It is now used almost exclusively as an accusation, and it is used by people who do not accept the older meaning and would not use the word in any other sense.

Ask what it measures and you will find the familiar emptiness. There is no set of positions one can hold, or decline to hold, that reliably clears the charge. There is no argument that answers it, because it is not an argument. It attaches to a conclusion the speaker dislikes, and it attaches after the fact, and its function is to place the conclusion outside the boundary of serious opinion without the labor of engaging it. The authority to apply it belongs entirely to the accuser. It cannot be met. It can only be conceded.

Three words, then, across three centuries. Civilized in the nineteenth century. Critical thinker in the corporate twentieth. The third in our own. Each time the same architecture: a word naming a genuine virtue, the authority to certify it held by one party, and the certification redefined the instant someone unwelcome satisfies the terms.

Here is why this belongs in a religious argument rather than a political one.

A lawyer once asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and was sent back to the law, and answered correctly: love God, love your neighbor as yourself. He was told he had answered right. And then, Luke records, willing to justify himself, he asked one more question.

Who is my neighbor?

That is a request for an empty envelope, and it is worth seeing clearly what the man was after. He was not confused. He wanted a definition of neighbor that he already satisfied. He wanted a boundary drawn where he was standing, with the obligation stopping short of whoever he had in mind, and he wanted it certified by a rabbi so that he could go home justified. The question was not an inquiry. It was a request for a category he could pass.

He did not receive one. He received a story in which a man is beaten and left on a road, and two men with unimpeachable religious credentials pass by on the other side, and the man who stops is a Samaritan, which is to say a foreigner and a heretic, a member of the group whose religion the questioner considered a corruption of his own.

And then the question was taken from him and handed back inverted. Not who qualifies as my neighbor, but which of these three proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves.

He had come for a boundary and was given a road. He had come for a definition and left with an obligation. Every category he had brought into the conversation was dismantled in the telling, and the one thing the parable refuses to supply is the very thing he asked for.

This is worth sitting with, because it is the single clearest instance in Scripture of the mechanism I have been describing being confronted directly, and the confrontation is not gentle. The two men who pass by are not scoundrels. They are the men with the credentials. They are the ones who could have produced, on demand, a fully satisfactory account of what the law required. They knew what the words meant. They had the envelope, and they walked past the man on the road with it in their hands.

There is a word in current use for stopping on that road, and it is not a compliment.

I am not going to tell you what to conclude from that. Sheldon did not tell his congregation what to conclude either. He put a ruined printer at the front of a fashionable church and had him ask a single question, and then he let the people sit in it.

What would Jesus do?

#ChristianNationalism #ChurchHistory #FaithAndPolitics #AmericanHistory #PublicTheology

I'm always so grateful when I share and learn from this man... In this essay he forces us to think, doesn't he? So I wanted to support his words--you can listen or not to the videos I've added. It really is something that each of us must decide for themselves. Like the last video presenter, a retired Evangelical Pastor who got caught up in just how much has changed since his own group led the voting that got us where we are today... still trying to understand...

Gabby