Dr. Peter S. Onuf takes a humorous look at the topic of national identity
By Josh Hughes
“I’ve made a career out of using Thomas Jefferson — that’s what dead people are for,” Dr. Peter S. Onuf said in his talk at Fairhaven College last Wednesday. “I’ll be one of them soon!” he continued, to a low rumble of laughter in the packed auditorium.
Dr. Onuf spoke as the most recent lecturer through Fairhaven’s World Issues Form, a self explanatory speaker series in its 15th year of existence at the college. Talks range from environmental activism to immigration policy to last week’s topic: national identity. More specifically, Onuf talked about the ever pervasive, somewhat trite question of “why does history matter?”, a question that is often left answered by high school social studies teachers shouting into the void.
I like to imagine that’s a comparison Onuf would’ve appreciated; throughout his hour and twenty minute talk, the professor found himself on brief, amusing tangents that kept the audience under his complete spell. (A particular joke about kids getting stoned and running about the arboretum keeps going through my head, though I could not, for the life of me, explain what it had to do with Thomas Jefferson.) Yet even with his witty humor and conversational style of speaking, Onuf actively and effectively walked the crowd through a “two part therapy” about how we should look back on American history to engage with the present.
“I want you to feel bad about being an American!”
With this memorable one liner, Onuf meandered his way through the first part of his therapy, a device he set up to construct a palatable reason for history’s importance. The first stage of this talk focused on how we need to revise and reconstruct the way that our founding fathers (and the founding of America as a whole) have previously been perceived in the likes of high school textbooks and fictional portrayals. He wanted us to be aware of previous injustices, both obvious (slavery) and less obvious (Jefferson wanted emancipation, but he also wanted to expatriate Africans from the country).
After intentionally wearing the audience down and giving us quite a bit of sad origin politics, Onuf went into the second part of his “therapy,” which allows us to look back at these revisionist histories to both be good citizens and alter the direction of our future as a country.
“What we need is the spirit of 1776 to be constantly renewed every generation,” Onuf said, with a heavy emphasis on “generation” running throughout his entire lecture. Instead of speaking to some vague notion of originalism, he expressed Jefferson’s desire for the country to be in a constant state of revolution, eternally revising and editing both its past and present as a means of bettering the future.
“The first law of nature is self preservation,” Dr. Onuf said after prefacing the statement by asking no one write it down, because it would stick in their heads forever and ever after his lecture (I confess that, for means of this article, I did write it down). His point was that as a nation, the constant revision of history is necessary to provide a better, healthier future for the country; we cannot remain stagnant for preservation, but instead we must adapt and revolt.
While much of Onuf’s talk boiled down to ideas that pervade many different corners of current American society, he provided fresh insight by getting to the point in an unconventional, engaging manner. For a man who spent two minutes talking about the poor hygiene of our founding fathers, Dr. Onuf struck a chord that seemed to resonate with nearly the whole audience.
The World Issues Forum takes place nearly every Wednesday from 12 p.m. to 1:20 p.m. in the Fairhaven Auditorium. The next speaker will be Sarah Eltantawi, giving a lecture this week about women’s rights and Western attitude in Nigeria.