Yesterday morning, I arrived in the UK. Rather than bore you with the details of a ten hour flight, moving into my flat, and fighting to stay awake to beat jet lag, I thought I’d just attach a few pictures.
With the rest of this post, I want to spend a little bit of time sketching out a plan for this blog and what I hope to do with my two years in Britain.
I named this blog “Escaping History,” paraphrasing lovely language from a speech by Abraham Lincoln. Addressed to Congress in the last few weeks before he officially issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln admonished: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.” The leaders of the day, Lincoln wrote, “will be remembered in spite of ourselves. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
Leaving for the UK felt like an escape from the fires burning in the United States. In a literal sense, I spent the last few weeks (between time in the Bay Area and in Beaverton, OR) surrounded by wildfires. In the more metaphorical sense, our politics feel rancorous and splintered; our institutions seem inapt in responding not only to present, ephemeral crises but also enduring, inherited crises. I feel like I’ve left my country in a momentous time, where profound change and rejuvenation could happen in light of these fires but where continued crisis also seems likely.
There’s a privilege with escape. It’s possible for me to leave and find peace. But I wanted to invoke Lincoln because I don’t think it’s a full escape. History traps us. Lincoln was writing in the forward sense: We, one day, will become history, and our actions will be judged by those who come after we’re long gone. But we’re also products of our history, bound inextricably to the past. Physically escaping to another country is partial escape when my communities tie me to the United States. There are few places where I feel like I was grounded, and I think I left parts of myself in them: the departments and town halls in Claremont, the church and office buildings in DC, the homes in Beaverton, and the high school in Austin. Attending an elite college — which, as Patrick Deneen once observed, selects for students who can thrive after uprooting their lives — helped me understand the importance of where I came from. One purpose of this blog, then, is to think through new experiences and new places in light of old memories. Perhaps it’s trite, but I’m hoping to compare the places I visit with the places I’m from. (I can’t help but wonder if this will be a silly endeavor; as one of my good friends recently joked (?) to me, “comparing things is never as fun as it sounds.”)
From a less personal perspective, societies, governments, institutions — they’re also trapped by history. In my politics classes, we read about Italian regions whose twentieth century economic trajectories were shaped by the presence of medieval social institutions hundreds of years earlier. We read compelling explanations of contemporary racial-partisan politics in the American South tracing to the location and population of slaves in 1860. This kind of path dependence is particularly important in the context of the law, which develops through accreting precedent. In the constitutional law of habeas corpus, for example, judges and scholars have looked to thousands of habeas writs issued between 1500 and 1800; they’ve written hundreds of pages on the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679; and they’ve analyzed the history of the Constitution’s framing — all to answer a decidedly contemporary question about law-of-war detention of non-citizen, suspected “enemy combatants” held on land formally owned by Cuba but leased to the United States. History flits throughout our law. As I continue to learn more about the American Constitution, I’m hoping to use this blog to think through the British history that came to be built into American institutions.
One last comment on the name of the blog, turning back to Lincoln: History is inevitably linked with morality. One reason might be that we often treat history as didactic. We study the past to avoid making certain mistakes or to gain guidance on how to live The Good Life. Another reason is that we’re constantly feeling history’s effects. In the imagined state of nature, we came from nowhere and feel no obligations beyond those which we derive from our decisions about how to coexist with others. Our reality, though, is plagued by decisions made before us. A life lived under the assumption that we can exist merely in private, tending to our own matters (“I have a right to do as I wish so long as I don’t infringe on others’ rights”), seems to me wrong given the duties imposed on us by our collective past, above and beyond our individual histories. A third purpose of this blog, then, is to help me think through those moral duties and my own place within them.
Those ideas are, I think, pretty lofty. But my hope is that those three goals — (1) comparing the UK with the US; (2) thinking through the relationship between history and law; and (3) reflecting on moral duties in relation to history — will push me to explore and maximize my time in the UK, both by reading more and traveling more.
Two other things in this already-too-long blog post. First, I figure I’ll do a “rose-bud-thorn” at the end of each post as a quick summary of my week beyond the more thematic blog posts. (Rose = something positive that happened, bud = something I’m looking forward to, and thorn = something not so great or a challenge.) Second, I think I'm going to note various questions I'm pondering for potential future blog posts; let me know if you find any of them particularly interesting, and I can make sure to follow through with writing it.
Rose: On the day before I left, my mom decided she wanted to do a high tea.* The basic premise (as I learned — apparently everyone else in the family had already done high tea before!) is to have sandwiches, scones/other sweets, and tea in the afternoon. The experience of preparing the meal was a great encapsulation of the family: lots of bickering, poorly coordinated cooking, and absurdities (according to my mom, high tea requires you to eat, continuously, for two full hours), but surprisingly good and fun by the end of it all. Here’s a picture of what we prepared:
*It turns out that what we did was “afternoon tea,” not “high tea.” But I've heard others calls the meal we had “high tea.” Perhaps it’s a North Americanism.
Bud: I met one of my flatmates upon arrival, and he seems very nice. My other flatmate, who’s also a Marshall, arrives later in the week; I already know him a bit and am excited to be living with him. Plus, I got to walk around the neighborhood park when I first arrived at the flat, and it’s absolutely gorgeous (see above). (Also, there was a guy with a strong Scottish accent playing with his dog, which was fun to eavesdrop on, if only because of the accent.) Lastly (I know I’m only supposed to do one — sue me), I started reading Alexander Bickel’s The Least Dangerous Branch. It’s a book that I’ve often read about because it’s highly influential in American constitutional scholarship, and Bickel is a wonderful writer, so I’m excited to dive in.
Thorn: Customs at Heathrow was . . . a bad time. I think the e-gates broke down for a bit, so it was a lot of waiting in line with a bunch of people in close proximity. Hopefully I didn’t pick up the coronavirus!
Potential future topics: In light of Constitution Day (September 17), should we celebrate the Constitution? What does it mean to be patriotic, and should we be patriots given America's history and origins? Is “progressive federalism” an oxymoron in light of the history of appeals to “states rights” and given the political science about who gets involved in local politics? What is “the public interest”?
That’s it for my first blog post! I hope you enjoyed it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts :)