A popular concept of history is that, after the fall of the Roman empire, there ensued Dark Ages. However, in terms of the light or darkness of historical knowledge, that pattern does not follow with Britain.
According to the Encyclopedia Britanica, very little is known about Britain before the Romans came, and even from Roman times we have only a framework. "Britain emerged into the light of true history only after the Saxon settlements in the 5th century A.D."
England was itself a complicated ethnic and cultural mix. When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (the three who are said to have mixed to form the English people) invaded Britain, more than one civilization had come and gone before them. The Celts, some of them driven from Gaul by the Romans, had had a culture there. They had mixed with peoples who came before them. Then came the Romans themselves. The Romans no longer ruled in Britain when the invaders came, but their influence remained.
There were invaders after the ones who later became the English. The English were nearly overrun by Danes in the 7th century. They were conquered by Normans in 1066.
The Normans themselves were an odd mix. Scandinavians who had earlier conquered a northwestern corner of France (now called Normandy), they spoke French. The upper classes of England spoke French for generations after the Norman Conquest.
Who, then, were the English? They became an ethnic group in time, but they were a mix.
And they did not assimilate the whole island. Scotland remained culturally and ethnically distinct, as did Wales. Cornwall became part of England, but it had its own past and its own indigenous people--as did other parts of England. And of course, Ireland, the island next door, remained Irish. Ireland, Scotland and Wales remained refuges of the descendants of the Celts, who had once ruled Britain,Gaul and other nearby areas of Europe.
When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes entered England, they brought with them a culture of their own. They entered, however, a land that had recently been ruled by a more advanced, or at least a more organized civilization: the Roman Empire.
For those interested in political form and organization, or for those who beat a drum for democracy as opposed to monarchy, this could be construed to be a drama. Would the unschooled, unwashed heathen from the northern woods be beguiled into giving up their rudimentary, home-style democratic form of self government by the old and honored example of the Roman Empire and its Emperorship?
The Empire had undergone an evolution of its own over the past four to five centuries. The old Roman Republic, with its somewhat democratic forms, had long since been dispatched by the Caesars. In its place was an absolute monarchy. The Emperor was considered to be divine in pre-Christian days. After Christianity became the official state religion,the Emperorship was supported by the Church.
By the time the Germanic tribes arrived in Britain, Roman Imperial power had ceased to operate on the island. The Empire was devouring itself, drowning in its own blood. Coups and civil wars were the order of the day. But much of the Roman presence and establishment remained.
In general, the barbarians that came into the territories of the Roman empire--Gaul, Italy, etc.-- sought not to destroy the Empire, but to join it. Their greatest leaders sought to be Emperor. They sought to keep the empire intact, to rule it themselves.
The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, when they came into Britain, did not know that there had ever been a Roman Republic. To them, Rome was ruled by an Emperor, and that was that. And since they were so far from the seat of power--Rome--and were not seeking to move towards that seat in a hostile way, it is unlikely that they had pretensions to assuming Emperorship or any other form of rule over the Empire. They may have been seeking a place to live, or seeking to enter a place more civilized than the north woods they came from. They may have been seeking booty or plunder or a limited form of dominion in that out of the way part of the world. But it would seem that universal empire was not one of the things they were seeking at that time.
They brought with them a form of government that was very much at odds with the super-centralized form that characterized the Empire, and they did not rush to give up their old ways.
The Roman historian Tacitus decribed that form of government in his treatise, "Germania:"
"Affairs of smaller moment the chiefs determine: about matters of
higher consequence the whole nation deliberates; yet in such a sort, that
whatever depends upon the pleasure and decision of the people, is examined
and discussed by the chiefs. Where no accident or emergency intervenes,
they assemble upon stated days...
"From their excessive liberty this evil and default flows, that
they meet not at once, nor as men commanded and afraid to disobey; so that
often the second day, nay often the third, is consumed through the slowness
of the members in assembling. They sit down as they list, promiscuously,
like a crowd, and all armed. It is by the priests that silence is
enjoined, and with the power of correction the priests are then invested.
Then the king or chief is heard, as are others, each according to his
precedence in age, or in nobility, or in warlike renown, or in eloquence;
and the influence of every speaker proceeds rather from his ability to
persuade than from any authority to command. If the proposition displease,
they reject it by an inarticulate murmur: if it be pleasing, they brandish
their javlins. The most honorable manner of signifying their assent, is to
express their applause by the sound of their arms.
"... In the same assemblies are also chosen their chiefs or rulers,
such as administer justice in their villages and boroughs. To each of
these are assigned an hundred persons chosen from amongst the populace, to
accompany and assist him, men who help him at once with their authority and
their counsel."
Matters of guilt or innocence in criminal proceedings were also dealt with in such assemblies.
In this can be seen some germs of: (a)democratic government, (b)representative government, (c) the jury system, (d) administrative organization and delegation of duties.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
THE BARBARIAN CIVILIZATION
As a freshman in college I learned about the so-called pillars of western civilization. Those pillars were said to be Greek, Roman and Hebrew. Sometime later I realized that that litany leaves out a couple of vital elements: the Celtic and the Germanic.
The Germanic influence is particularly important to Americans, since (1) we speak a Germanic language, and (2) a very large proportion of us are descended from Germanic peoples.
The extent of Celtic influence is not easy to determine since the Celts left no written history, but they undeniably shaped the growth of the lands they occupied before the Roman conquests: Gaul, the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula. They left an incredible body of folklore that continues to echo in our imagination, and the cultures that grew in their lands centuries later became (coincidentally?) the most important and powerful countries in the early Modern Age.
In some ways, it is still not easy to talk about Germanic influence without conjuring up images of hatred and genocide. Indeed, violence may be a non-detachable element of our Germanic heritage. There is an undeniable strain of violence detectible in American history since the arrival of the first settlers. Violence also leaps off the page in the annals of the exploits of medieval kings, Renaissance despots and modern day nationalists. We may have painted ourselves with the hues and dressed ourselves in the clothes of civilization, but to what extent is our violent blood still waiting just below the surface, eager to exercise itself?
And it is not just the Germans, after all. The first great work of literature of our civilization is a story of a war that occurred back in the Bronze Age. There are detailed descriptions in the Illiad of how individual warriors died in battle: what body parts are cut or crushed and how. Although it is beautifully done and tempered with many fine elements, it is a story of valor, heroism, war and violence. It comes out of the barbarian past of the Greeks, our most ancient civilized antecedents.
And in a passage that occurs early in the next book, the Odyssey, Ulysses relates that as the Greeks, fresh from sacking Troy, set out on their return voyage home, they came upon a minor city along their way. And Ulysses says, “We sacked the city and put the people to the sword.” And that was all that was ever said about that city and the people in it. No remorse, no reason to ever think about it again. Never mind that in the present day, that would be considered the worst kind of atrocity.
The Celts, too, were warriors, once feared all over Europe. When Rome was just a little city on its own, Celts descended from the north and sacked it. The Celts were called barbarians by the Romans, who in turn had been called barbarians by the Greeks.
The death of the Roman Empire was caused by internal decay and by migrations of Germanic tribes. Mighty Rome had never been able to conquer Germania, though there had been many wars between Romans and Germans. Tacitus observed, even before the great invasions that spelled Rome’s doom, that more Romans had probably been killed by Germans than by any other people.
The invasions and migrations of those northern peoples swept in waves all across Europe, covering thousands of miles, down to the boot of Italy, to the far western shore of Iberia and into Britain. Germanic peoples and Germanic customs became the people and the customs of all of Europe.
Not completely, of course. In most places, the invaders became the ruling class, and the people who were there before were still there. In time, the language and customs of the invaders blended with and were to greater and lesser degrees absorbed by those of the native peoples.
Not so in England, where the indigenous peoples were pushed out, killed off and dominated sufficiently that English remained predominantly a Germanic language and the people were mainly Anglo Saxon. But that was true only in England, which occupies the largest part of the isles of Britain, not all of it. In Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Celtic peoples remained. The new Germanic peoples occupied most of the area where Rome had ruled. In the other places what remained was Celtic (while in Wales some ancient Britons remained).
Centuries later, new migrations came out of Europe, going across oceans to places all around the world. They poured across the Atlantic and pushed across the North American continent in a vast migration somewhat reminiscent of that earlier migration that overran Rome. As we read descriptions of people pushing west in their primitive wagons, with all their livestock around them and with a few simple implements, we could easily wonder how far removed they really were from the migrating barbarians of long ago.
But the point of using a phrase like “barbarian civilization” is to point up not only the barbarian but also the civilization.
To some historians, civilization as we know it in the West is essentially an Eastern phenomenon that has been learned by us. Many of the basic elements of civilization were developed first in the East. But the word civilization also connotes simply the culture and ways of a particular people or place. The ways of the West, while different from the ways of the East, have roots that are deep and strong. There is much that we have learned form the East, and in that process of learning we have struggled with differences in culture that have been difficult for us. The spread of more advanced cultural forms from the East to the West set up deep and lasting conflicts within Western culture. But Western culture demonstrated a strength and depth of its own, and in the modern age it has been the West that has made incursions into the cultures of the East.
Similarly, within the West, the northern, Germanic areas of Europe were at first far less culturally advanced than the southern areas. The southern areas, during the latter stages of the Roman Empire, began to take on some forms of Eastern civilizations. The Emperor had become an Eastern-style dynastic despot.
The collapse of the empire did not prevent the ideas of universal rule and the power of the Emperor from spreading to the conquerors. The Holy Roman Empire continued for centuries in northern and central Europe. Around the time of the Renaissance, power was consolidating more and more in the hands of kings whose governments tended to look curiously like Eastern despotisms. But the resistance to centralized rule continued in Germany, which remained fragmented into numerous principalities, and in some other northern areas of Europe, where traditions derived from old native ways carried on and gained a tenacious hold in the cultures of their peoples.
In England, Switzerland, the Netherlands and others, city councils and other representative bodies continued to have power despite the encroaching cultural force of the divine-right kings. The Magna Carta in England, rather than representing something new in the world, was a conservative document. It preserved time-honored traditions that tended to regard the king as a first among equals rather than a divinely ordained ruler.
The evolution of the divine-right king was something that was relatively new in that area of the world. It was something that began in Rome more than a millennium earlier, when Emperors began to demand that they be worshiped in the style of Oriental despots. It was a culturally powerful idea, one that had been slowly growing and spreading in the West, adapted slightly to Western style, but still basically very different from ancient Western ways.
In the end, the institution of the divine-right king could not overcome the native western cultural resistance to it, and it was mainly the strongholds of northern Europe, and the migration of people from there to America, that turned the tide. And once the tide was turned, kings were turned out of power not only all across Europe, but eventually all around the world.
And part of the point of all this is that in Britain and in some other areas of Europe there was a tradition of sufficient strength and maturity to resist the powerful cultural influences distilled in southern Europe from older sources in Asia. There was something sufficiently developed to remain unbroken—-though, true enough, it was a near thing. There was, in short, a barbarian civilization—-or, to be more precise, there was a culture that existed that was both barbaric, in the sense of its violence, and advanced in the sense of its distinct cultural formulation.
The Germanic influence is particularly important to Americans, since (1) we speak a Germanic language, and (2) a very large proportion of us are descended from Germanic peoples.
The extent of Celtic influence is not easy to determine since the Celts left no written history, but they undeniably shaped the growth of the lands they occupied before the Roman conquests: Gaul, the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula. They left an incredible body of folklore that continues to echo in our imagination, and the cultures that grew in their lands centuries later became (coincidentally?) the most important and powerful countries in the early Modern Age.
In some ways, it is still not easy to talk about Germanic influence without conjuring up images of hatred and genocide. Indeed, violence may be a non-detachable element of our Germanic heritage. There is an undeniable strain of violence detectible in American history since the arrival of the first settlers. Violence also leaps off the page in the annals of the exploits of medieval kings, Renaissance despots and modern day nationalists. We may have painted ourselves with the hues and dressed ourselves in the clothes of civilization, but to what extent is our violent blood still waiting just below the surface, eager to exercise itself?
And it is not just the Germans, after all. The first great work of literature of our civilization is a story of a war that occurred back in the Bronze Age. There are detailed descriptions in the Illiad of how individual warriors died in battle: what body parts are cut or crushed and how. Although it is beautifully done and tempered with many fine elements, it is a story of valor, heroism, war and violence. It comes out of the barbarian past of the Greeks, our most ancient civilized antecedents.
And in a passage that occurs early in the next book, the Odyssey, Ulysses relates that as the Greeks, fresh from sacking Troy, set out on their return voyage home, they came upon a minor city along their way. And Ulysses says, “We sacked the city and put the people to the sword.” And that was all that was ever said about that city and the people in it. No remorse, no reason to ever think about it again. Never mind that in the present day, that would be considered the worst kind of atrocity.
The Celts, too, were warriors, once feared all over Europe. When Rome was just a little city on its own, Celts descended from the north and sacked it. The Celts were called barbarians by the Romans, who in turn had been called barbarians by the Greeks.
The death of the Roman Empire was caused by internal decay and by migrations of Germanic tribes. Mighty Rome had never been able to conquer Germania, though there had been many wars between Romans and Germans. Tacitus observed, even before the great invasions that spelled Rome’s doom, that more Romans had probably been killed by Germans than by any other people.
The invasions and migrations of those northern peoples swept in waves all across Europe, covering thousands of miles, down to the boot of Italy, to the far western shore of Iberia and into Britain. Germanic peoples and Germanic customs became the people and the customs of all of Europe.
Not completely, of course. In most places, the invaders became the ruling class, and the people who were there before were still there. In time, the language and customs of the invaders blended with and were to greater and lesser degrees absorbed by those of the native peoples.
Not so in England, where the indigenous peoples were pushed out, killed off and dominated sufficiently that English remained predominantly a Germanic language and the people were mainly Anglo Saxon. But that was true only in England, which occupies the largest part of the isles of Britain, not all of it. In Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Celtic peoples remained. The new Germanic peoples occupied most of the area where Rome had ruled. In the other places what remained was Celtic (while in Wales some ancient Britons remained).
Centuries later, new migrations came out of Europe, going across oceans to places all around the world. They poured across the Atlantic and pushed across the North American continent in a vast migration somewhat reminiscent of that earlier migration that overran Rome. As we read descriptions of people pushing west in their primitive wagons, with all their livestock around them and with a few simple implements, we could easily wonder how far removed they really were from the migrating barbarians of long ago.
But the point of using a phrase like “barbarian civilization” is to point up not only the barbarian but also the civilization.
To some historians, civilization as we know it in the West is essentially an Eastern phenomenon that has been learned by us. Many of the basic elements of civilization were developed first in the East. But the word civilization also connotes simply the culture and ways of a particular people or place. The ways of the West, while different from the ways of the East, have roots that are deep and strong. There is much that we have learned form the East, and in that process of learning we have struggled with differences in culture that have been difficult for us. The spread of more advanced cultural forms from the East to the West set up deep and lasting conflicts within Western culture. But Western culture demonstrated a strength and depth of its own, and in the modern age it has been the West that has made incursions into the cultures of the East.
Similarly, within the West, the northern, Germanic areas of Europe were at first far less culturally advanced than the southern areas. The southern areas, during the latter stages of the Roman Empire, began to take on some forms of Eastern civilizations. The Emperor had become an Eastern-style dynastic despot.
The collapse of the empire did not prevent the ideas of universal rule and the power of the Emperor from spreading to the conquerors. The Holy Roman Empire continued for centuries in northern and central Europe. Around the time of the Renaissance, power was consolidating more and more in the hands of kings whose governments tended to look curiously like Eastern despotisms. But the resistance to centralized rule continued in Germany, which remained fragmented into numerous principalities, and in some other northern areas of Europe, where traditions derived from old native ways carried on and gained a tenacious hold in the cultures of their peoples.
In England, Switzerland, the Netherlands and others, city councils and other representative bodies continued to have power despite the encroaching cultural force of the divine-right kings. The Magna Carta in England, rather than representing something new in the world, was a conservative document. It preserved time-honored traditions that tended to regard the king as a first among equals rather than a divinely ordained ruler.
The evolution of the divine-right king was something that was relatively new in that area of the world. It was something that began in Rome more than a millennium earlier, when Emperors began to demand that they be worshiped in the style of Oriental despots. It was a culturally powerful idea, one that had been slowly growing and spreading in the West, adapted slightly to Western style, but still basically very different from ancient Western ways.
In the end, the institution of the divine-right king could not overcome the native western cultural resistance to it, and it was mainly the strongholds of northern Europe, and the migration of people from there to America, that turned the tide. And once the tide was turned, kings were turned out of power not only all across Europe, but eventually all around the world.
And part of the point of all this is that in Britain and in some other areas of Europe there was a tradition of sufficient strength and maturity to resist the powerful cultural influences distilled in southern Europe from older sources in Asia. There was something sufficiently developed to remain unbroken—-though, true enough, it was a near thing. There was, in short, a barbarian civilization—-or, to be more precise, there was a culture that existed that was both barbaric, in the sense of its violence, and advanced in the sense of its distinct cultural formulation.
Friday, May 21, 2010
The basic conflict
The first words we hear from the West are of a war (the Trojan War) in a time so long ago that archeology is needed to determine whether there is any truth to it at all. We know that it is a story, a work of art that was itself created at some unknown time in the past. Yet it seems to describe, with great detail and reality, a time and a culture that really existed.
Where these men came from who fought on those far shores of the Aegean Sea, we are not sure. They are counted as the ancestors of the Greeks, a civilization of such advancement and accomplishment that it seems incredible that it happened so long ago. For though it was first, many believe that it is still the greatest. The Greek language was (and is) a thing of beauty in itself, capable of sophisticated nuances of meaning and of expressions of beauty few languages in the history of mankind can match. We justifiably credit the Greek heritage with breathing anew life and inspiration into Western arts, culture, thought and politics nearly two millennia after that glorious time.
If the Greeks were so advanced, how can it be that we do not know where they came from? They came almost out of nowhere and flowered and bore fruit as though they had roots of incredible depth.
A few things have been pieced together by archeologists. There were peoples in the Aegean, on its many islands. There were peoples on the Greek mainland. And there were some people who came from the north at some point.
The first civilization on Western soil actually began in Crete. We call it a civilization because it had writing and palaces and a heirarchical society. But we can’t decipher their writing, so all we know about them is what archeologists can glean from their digs.
We do not even know if it could be called a Western civilization at all. We know that it was on Western soil, and that their written language was native to their culture, not imported from elsewhere. But are these facts enough to make it classifiable as a Western culture?
Crete is close to Egypt, which was already advanced in those days. Egyptian objects are found amongst their ruins, and references to Crete can be found in Egyptian writings.
The spread of civilization from its cradles in Mesopotamia and Egypt seems to have made its way to the island of Crete. The Egyptians had ships; they sailed out from the Nile. They traded with people in the region. The practice of writing things down is a thing that can be learned.
Civilization spread, and as it spread, people of many different cultural heritages came into contact with it. And it was adapted and used by them in their own ways.
But it may have been that there was a cultural area far from civilization’s ground zero which, though it did not use writing, was yet of considerable complexity and capable of intelligence usually considered to be reserved for literate peoples.
It is said of the ancient Celts that they preferred not to write things down, and it is because of that that their civilization is lost to us. It is also said that the songs of Homer are from an oral tradition that goes back far into prehistory, and that its forms are such that they facilitate memorization. There are such forms and stories in other Western traditions--the Germanic, the Irish, the Norse and others.
The Greeks may have come from a well that was deep, but of which we have no written record. They were on the eastern-most fringe of the Western world, and as they came into contact with people who wrote things down and built elaborate palaces and organized themselves into large political entities and studied ancient tomes of wisdom, the Greeks learned to do those things, too.
But the Greeks, because they were from a different culture which had grown and developed sufficiently to be aware of and confident in its own differences, did not copy but rather built new things with the new tools they encountered in the East.
They were a relatively small force against the power of the East. It was only by heroics of the most outstanding sort that they defended themselves against the might of Persia.
What is the essential difference between the East and West? I believe the difference is captured in a simple quote from the Greek historian Herodotus. A pair of Spartans brought before the Persian king, explaining why they refused to bow down to him, said, “It is not our custom to worship men.”
The first point about this is that it reveals a difference in custom. The Spartans were not necessarily asserting that it is absolutely wrong for anyone to worship men. They were saying that it was not their custom. The East has that custom; the West does not. There lies the essential difference.
In the Eastern custom, the king or emperor was thought to be a god. Western traditions generally hold that rulers are human, and while there is a realm of the divine, it is separate from this world.
Much of Western history, from the time of Xerxes’ invasion of the Hellenic world to the fall of the Third Reich, can be viewed as a struggle between the Eastern tradition of the divinity of the emperor and Western traditions of individuality, democracy and the rule of law.
The essential difference is in a Western tendency, present apparently from prehistoric times, to hold that authority stems basically from the people, not from the ruler or from on high.
Or, if it does come from on high, it is from an infinite authority that is not legitimately represented by any government, that can speak directly to any person, thus making the people sovereign rather than any earthly ruler.
Where these men came from who fought on those far shores of the Aegean Sea, we are not sure. They are counted as the ancestors of the Greeks, a civilization of such advancement and accomplishment that it seems incredible that it happened so long ago. For though it was first, many believe that it is still the greatest. The Greek language was (and is) a thing of beauty in itself, capable of sophisticated nuances of meaning and of expressions of beauty few languages in the history of mankind can match. We justifiably credit the Greek heritage with breathing anew life and inspiration into Western arts, culture, thought and politics nearly two millennia after that glorious time.
If the Greeks were so advanced, how can it be that we do not know where they came from? They came almost out of nowhere and flowered and bore fruit as though they had roots of incredible depth.
A few things have been pieced together by archeologists. There were peoples in the Aegean, on its many islands. There were peoples on the Greek mainland. And there were some people who came from the north at some point.
The first civilization on Western soil actually began in Crete. We call it a civilization because it had writing and palaces and a heirarchical society. But we can’t decipher their writing, so all we know about them is what archeologists can glean from their digs.
We do not even know if it could be called a Western civilization at all. We know that it was on Western soil, and that their written language was native to their culture, not imported from elsewhere. But are these facts enough to make it classifiable as a Western culture?
Crete is close to Egypt, which was already advanced in those days. Egyptian objects are found amongst their ruins, and references to Crete can be found in Egyptian writings.
The spread of civilization from its cradles in Mesopotamia and Egypt seems to have made its way to the island of Crete. The Egyptians had ships; they sailed out from the Nile. They traded with people in the region. The practice of writing things down is a thing that can be learned.
Civilization spread, and as it spread, people of many different cultural heritages came into contact with it. And it was adapted and used by them in their own ways.
But it may have been that there was a cultural area far from civilization’s ground zero which, though it did not use writing, was yet of considerable complexity and capable of intelligence usually considered to be reserved for literate peoples.
It is said of the ancient Celts that they preferred not to write things down, and it is because of that that their civilization is lost to us. It is also said that the songs of Homer are from an oral tradition that goes back far into prehistory, and that its forms are such that they facilitate memorization. There are such forms and stories in other Western traditions--the Germanic, the Irish, the Norse and others.
The Greeks may have come from a well that was deep, but of which we have no written record. They were on the eastern-most fringe of the Western world, and as they came into contact with people who wrote things down and built elaborate palaces and organized themselves into large political entities and studied ancient tomes of wisdom, the Greeks learned to do those things, too.
But the Greeks, because they were from a different culture which had grown and developed sufficiently to be aware of and confident in its own differences, did not copy but rather built new things with the new tools they encountered in the East.
They were a relatively small force against the power of the East. It was only by heroics of the most outstanding sort that they defended themselves against the might of Persia.
What is the essential difference between the East and West? I believe the difference is captured in a simple quote from the Greek historian Herodotus. A pair of Spartans brought before the Persian king, explaining why they refused to bow down to him, said, “It is not our custom to worship men.”
The first point about this is that it reveals a difference in custom. The Spartans were not necessarily asserting that it is absolutely wrong for anyone to worship men. They were saying that it was not their custom. The East has that custom; the West does not. There lies the essential difference.
In the Eastern custom, the king or emperor was thought to be a god. Western traditions generally hold that rulers are human, and while there is a realm of the divine, it is separate from this world.
Much of Western history, from the time of Xerxes’ invasion of the Hellenic world to the fall of the Third Reich, can be viewed as a struggle between the Eastern tradition of the divinity of the emperor and Western traditions of individuality, democracy and the rule of law.
The essential difference is in a Western tendency, present apparently from prehistoric times, to hold that authority stems basically from the people, not from the ruler or from on high.
Or, if it does come from on high, it is from an infinite authority that is not legitimately represented by any government, that can speak directly to any person, thus making the people sovereign rather than any earthly ruler.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Seeds of Revolution
The place in the modern world where kings were first turned permanently out of power and a strong alternative formed was in America.
What was it all about?
Democracy can be viewed either as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Today we often tend to think of it as an end in itself. If you have democracy, then you are free, we like to think. But that is not necessarily true. Democracies can easily become as despotic and intolerant as any tyrant. They can pass laws taking away the rights of citizens. We have seen it happen here in some our darker episodes.
The main thing the Founding Fathers were trying to achieve in establishing democracy was to prevent the institution of a tyranny. To them, the threat of tyranny came mostly from kings. Their interest was in setting up a system of government that was not dominated by any one person or group.
This was some of the thinking behind the Constitution. The Constitution came after the Revolution. The same thinking did not necessarily provide the impetus for the Revolution itself.
As for the Revolution, it came out of the broad sweep of Western history, and flowed mainly from the developments of the preceding couple of centuries.
There were conflicting cultural forces at work in the West. Among these was the conflict between the tendency of Western people to splinter into tribes and clans rather than unite, and the tendency of empires and rulers to expand and establish unified rules.
Ancient Germania had been composed of warring tribes and factions since time immemorial, and with brief exceptions it stayed that way till Germany was united under Bismarck and Kaisar Wilhelm in 1870.
Similarly, the Celts’ lack of unity was one of the things that enabled the Romans to defeat and conquer them in Gaul, Britain and the Iberian peninsula.
The Greeks had also demonstrated the splintering factor, being divided into city-states that were often at war. A long and devastating war between Athens and Sparta weakened them sufficiently to allow Phillip of Macedonia (Alexander the Great’s father) to conquer all of Greece and end Greek independence once and for all.
The Medieval world that replaced the Roman Empire in Europe was one that had no central control, but rather an intricate system of loyalties and allegiances. This was known as feudalism.
In the late Middle Ages, Europe seemed to be evolving towards a unified re-creation of the Roman Empire, this time under the spiritual (and incipiently temporal) leadership of the Pope. But growing nationalism, powerful monarchs and other factors destroyed the unity.
As the Middle Ages drew to a close and the Renaissance began to bloom, the fuedal system and the potential political unity under the Pope began to be replaced by the gathering power of central monarchs.
Though the parts into which Europe splintered were much larger than before, the overall splintering pattern can be discerned. The various parts continued their long tradition of warring against each other—a tradition that continued, with devastating effect, well into the twentieth century, and with minor intervals continuing into the present.
In the light of all this, it is not so remarkable that America split off from Britain. It was just part of the splintering tradition. What was remarkable was that the English-speaking world, including England itself, stayed together for so long. There were powerful forces threatening to break it apart, just as there were powerful forces working to keep it together. But England had found a powerful (and deadly) basis for unity: that of nationality.
England had been formed into a unified state earlier than any other European nation, by an act of conquest in the year 1066. When France was still largely feudal and Spain was still ruled by Muslims, William the Conqueror set up a unified state in which he was in control of everything. Not only did he conquer, but he also organized the nation as it had never been organized before. He did a full census and inventory of his realm and set up the system of officials that would govern it in all its parts.
England became the first nation-state in Europe. It underwent a significant adjustment in 1215 with the revolt of the barons, who extracted from King John the Magna Carta. But the unity of the realm remained. The War of the Roses in the fifteenth century also failed to break it up. It underwent a major civil war in the seventeenth century in which the monarchy was abolished and then re-established, but England remained a unit.
As happened eventually all over Europe, the English had become conscious of being a nation. A nation, in the original sense of the word, was a large ethnically similar group, like a super-sized tribe. It was a people who shared common origins, customs, history and language. The word itself is derived from the Latin for ‘race’ or ‘breed.’
Thus in a sense the Western world was still being true to its ancient way of forming itself into tribal units, which would then fight amongst themselves. The units had taken a step above the tribal level, but beyond that nothing much had changed.
The units then formed themselves into fixed states, with defined territories and established governments. Nation then became synonymous with country and state. That changed the game a little, but nationalism was still based very much on an ethnic quality.
England was also united by the monarchy, which was both a symbol and a real institution of power. The allegiance of the English people was not only to their nation and their land, but also to the Crown. This was another powerful rallying point. But it also became a major point to be attacked in the American Revolution.
There was another factor to be considered in America’s developing split with England. That factor was the Atlantic Ocean.
The Atlantic obviously forms a natural boundary of considerable magnitude, and it is one of the things that made it seem natural for the split to come. But oddly enough, oceans have been important unifying factors throughout Western history. With the exception of the Middle Ages, Western Civilization has tended to orient itself around seas and oceans: the Aegean for the Greeks, the Mediterranean for the Roman Empire and the Atlantic in modern times.
Oceans provide a medium of communication and trade. The people on opposite shores of oceans sometimes have more in common with each other than with people in the interiors of their own continents.
Since England was the greatest sea power of the day, the constant coming and going of merchant ships and naval vessels made the Atlantic as much a unifier as a boundary. It certainly gave the English military easy access to all the colonies.
Nevertheless, Americans began to be conscious of the separation between the English and themselves, and many of them began to think of America, or their own particular region, as their country.
The splintering factor discussed above, as it applied to America, did not mean at first that that America would split off as a whole from England. The early agitators for independence, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, envisioned each colony becoming an independent sovereign state. Patrick Henry in particular was appalled when the states eventually joined together into a federal union. To him, independence meant a real splintering—the creation of thirteen new independent countries.
Massachusetts was the troublesome colony that dragged all the rest of the parties—the other colonies and the mother country—into the war. The famous Shot Heard Round the World was fired just outside of Boston. A series of disturbances in the Boston area had led to the town being occupied by British troops, and one thing led to another. When Patrick Henry gave his famous “Give Me Liberty of Give Me Death” speech in Virginia, he remarked that “our brothers to the north are already in the field.” It took the Virginians a little longer to become involved.
Samuel Adams, one of the leaders of the patriots in Boston, had been agitating for independence virtually all his life. When he graduated from Harvard College, his final paper had been a justification of the right of a people to form an independent political unit. For many years after that he published a newspaper that tirelessly advocated independence. He was a leader of the Boston Tea Party. When the citizens of Massachusetts began to come to blows with the British, he wrote an endless stream of letters to leaders and legislative bodies in the other colonies, pleading Massachusetts’ case and begging for assistance. At the Continental Congresses that met to discuss the situation, he was constantly active behind the scenes and on the debating floor. His unswerving message: The colonies must be independent. Drawing on the philosophy of John Locke, he wrote treatises justifying the power of a people to form their own government.
Adams was a product of Massachusetts, which had had a stormy relationship with the British monarchy since its beginning. He did not create the direction Massachusetts traveled, but it is possible that he was instrumental in getting all the rest of the colonies to come along.
And what of Massachusetts? How did it come to be such a troublemaker?
Massachusetts was founded and settled by Puritans. There were Puritans in all the colonies, but they were strongest in Massachusetts. The Puritans were Calvinists who had a religious objection to the authority of the monarchy.
For example, in 1683, King Charles demanded that Massachusetts declare its absolute obedience to the King, or its charter would be revoked. The colonists refused on the grounds that they owed absolute obedience only to God. The charter was revoked. (It was restored later under a different king.)
The Puritans were a complex religious and quasi-political development. We know them now only in caricature. In their day they were probably among the most intelligent and dedicated of European people. There were many varieties of Puritans—some who advocated toleration of all types of religious views, and others who tortured and executed heretics. They loved learning of all kinds—Greek and Latin classics as well as the Bible. Many of them could read the New Testament in the original Greek. Cotton Mather, a famous Puritan of Boston, wrote over 200 books on subjects ranging from science to philosophy to moral essays.
The Puritans were also Congregationalists.
Congregationalism was an offshoot of Calvinism. It held that each congregation was an independent unit. There were no higher religious bodies. There were no bishops. No higher earthly authority could tell any congregation what to do.
Moreover, each congregation was run as a democracy (at least in theory). Leaders were elected. The congregation, not the ministers or any other leaders, was the basic source of all authority. Except…
Except that all law and authority ultimately rested in the bible and in God.
When Jean Morely, founder of Congregationalism, used the word “democracy” in describing his new form of church government, he was using what in the late 16th century was a negative word. Democracy was associated with chaos and discord. No serious person at that time advocated democracy for any kind of government. Morely acknowledged the potential for harm in democracy, but argued that a democracy coupled with the Roman concept of the rule of law would be an excellent form of government. As examples he cited Athens and the Roman Republic. In the church, the law would be provided by the Bible.
Let us pause here to consider what is happening in this development. It contains a number of factors. Let us list them:
1. The splintering factor: all congregations become independent of each other and of any higher earthly authority.
2. Democracy: an ancient Western tradition is picked up and dusted off.
3. The Renaissance : a knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman history is obviously necessary for the citing of them as examples.
4. The Reformation, religious inspiration and the Bible.
That sums up a backwards look. Looking forward from this point we
find what may be the germ of the Revolution.
The Revolution was preached from the pulpits of America like a religious revival. God had a hand in it, said all the great speakers and movers. Tom Paine, in Common Sense, said that God had put the American continent here to allow people to form a country that would correct the errors of the Old World.
The Revolution, then, was a splintering and a rejection of monarchy on grounds heavily mixed with religion. It looked back to ancient Western traditions of autonomy and democracy. It drew heavily on Christianity as interpreted by Protestants. And it was energized by a finely blended mixture of all the above—a mixture known as Puritanism.
What was it all about?
Democracy can be viewed either as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Today we often tend to think of it as an end in itself. If you have democracy, then you are free, we like to think. But that is not necessarily true. Democracies can easily become as despotic and intolerant as any tyrant. They can pass laws taking away the rights of citizens. We have seen it happen here in some our darker episodes.
The main thing the Founding Fathers were trying to achieve in establishing democracy was to prevent the institution of a tyranny. To them, the threat of tyranny came mostly from kings. Their interest was in setting up a system of government that was not dominated by any one person or group.
This was some of the thinking behind the Constitution. The Constitution came after the Revolution. The same thinking did not necessarily provide the impetus for the Revolution itself.
As for the Revolution, it came out of the broad sweep of Western history, and flowed mainly from the developments of the preceding couple of centuries.
There were conflicting cultural forces at work in the West. Among these was the conflict between the tendency of Western people to splinter into tribes and clans rather than unite, and the tendency of empires and rulers to expand and establish unified rules.
Ancient Germania had been composed of warring tribes and factions since time immemorial, and with brief exceptions it stayed that way till Germany was united under Bismarck and Kaisar Wilhelm in 1870.
Similarly, the Celts’ lack of unity was one of the things that enabled the Romans to defeat and conquer them in Gaul, Britain and the Iberian peninsula.
The Greeks had also demonstrated the splintering factor, being divided into city-states that were often at war. A long and devastating war between Athens and Sparta weakened them sufficiently to allow Phillip of Macedonia (Alexander the Great’s father) to conquer all of Greece and end Greek independence once and for all.
The Medieval world that replaced the Roman Empire in Europe was one that had no central control, but rather an intricate system of loyalties and allegiances. This was known as feudalism.
In the late Middle Ages, Europe seemed to be evolving towards a unified re-creation of the Roman Empire, this time under the spiritual (and incipiently temporal) leadership of the Pope. But growing nationalism, powerful monarchs and other factors destroyed the unity.
As the Middle Ages drew to a close and the Renaissance began to bloom, the fuedal system and the potential political unity under the Pope began to be replaced by the gathering power of central monarchs.
Though the parts into which Europe splintered were much larger than before, the overall splintering pattern can be discerned. The various parts continued their long tradition of warring against each other—a tradition that continued, with devastating effect, well into the twentieth century, and with minor intervals continuing into the present.
In the light of all this, it is not so remarkable that America split off from Britain. It was just part of the splintering tradition. What was remarkable was that the English-speaking world, including England itself, stayed together for so long. There were powerful forces threatening to break it apart, just as there were powerful forces working to keep it together. But England had found a powerful (and deadly) basis for unity: that of nationality.
England had been formed into a unified state earlier than any other European nation, by an act of conquest in the year 1066. When France was still largely feudal and Spain was still ruled by Muslims, William the Conqueror set up a unified state in which he was in control of everything. Not only did he conquer, but he also organized the nation as it had never been organized before. He did a full census and inventory of his realm and set up the system of officials that would govern it in all its parts.
England became the first nation-state in Europe. It underwent a significant adjustment in 1215 with the revolt of the barons, who extracted from King John the Magna Carta. But the unity of the realm remained. The War of the Roses in the fifteenth century also failed to break it up. It underwent a major civil war in the seventeenth century in which the monarchy was abolished and then re-established, but England remained a unit.
As happened eventually all over Europe, the English had become conscious of being a nation. A nation, in the original sense of the word, was a large ethnically similar group, like a super-sized tribe. It was a people who shared common origins, customs, history and language. The word itself is derived from the Latin for ‘race’ or ‘breed.’
Thus in a sense the Western world was still being true to its ancient way of forming itself into tribal units, which would then fight amongst themselves. The units had taken a step above the tribal level, but beyond that nothing much had changed.
The units then formed themselves into fixed states, with defined territories and established governments. Nation then became synonymous with country and state. That changed the game a little, but nationalism was still based very much on an ethnic quality.
England was also united by the monarchy, which was both a symbol and a real institution of power. The allegiance of the English people was not only to their nation and their land, but also to the Crown. This was another powerful rallying point. But it also became a major point to be attacked in the American Revolution.
There was another factor to be considered in America’s developing split with England. That factor was the Atlantic Ocean.
The Atlantic obviously forms a natural boundary of considerable magnitude, and it is one of the things that made it seem natural for the split to come. But oddly enough, oceans have been important unifying factors throughout Western history. With the exception of the Middle Ages, Western Civilization has tended to orient itself around seas and oceans: the Aegean for the Greeks, the Mediterranean for the Roman Empire and the Atlantic in modern times.
Oceans provide a medium of communication and trade. The people on opposite shores of oceans sometimes have more in common with each other than with people in the interiors of their own continents.
Since England was the greatest sea power of the day, the constant coming and going of merchant ships and naval vessels made the Atlantic as much a unifier as a boundary. It certainly gave the English military easy access to all the colonies.
Nevertheless, Americans began to be conscious of the separation between the English and themselves, and many of them began to think of America, or their own particular region, as their country.
The splintering factor discussed above, as it applied to America, did not mean at first that that America would split off as a whole from England. The early agitators for independence, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, envisioned each colony becoming an independent sovereign state. Patrick Henry in particular was appalled when the states eventually joined together into a federal union. To him, independence meant a real splintering—the creation of thirteen new independent countries.
Massachusetts was the troublesome colony that dragged all the rest of the parties—the other colonies and the mother country—into the war. The famous Shot Heard Round the World was fired just outside of Boston. A series of disturbances in the Boston area had led to the town being occupied by British troops, and one thing led to another. When Patrick Henry gave his famous “Give Me Liberty of Give Me Death” speech in Virginia, he remarked that “our brothers to the north are already in the field.” It took the Virginians a little longer to become involved.
Samuel Adams, one of the leaders of the patriots in Boston, had been agitating for independence virtually all his life. When he graduated from Harvard College, his final paper had been a justification of the right of a people to form an independent political unit. For many years after that he published a newspaper that tirelessly advocated independence. He was a leader of the Boston Tea Party. When the citizens of Massachusetts began to come to blows with the British, he wrote an endless stream of letters to leaders and legislative bodies in the other colonies, pleading Massachusetts’ case and begging for assistance. At the Continental Congresses that met to discuss the situation, he was constantly active behind the scenes and on the debating floor. His unswerving message: The colonies must be independent. Drawing on the philosophy of John Locke, he wrote treatises justifying the power of a people to form their own government.
Adams was a product of Massachusetts, which had had a stormy relationship with the British monarchy since its beginning. He did not create the direction Massachusetts traveled, but it is possible that he was instrumental in getting all the rest of the colonies to come along.
And what of Massachusetts? How did it come to be such a troublemaker?
Massachusetts was founded and settled by Puritans. There were Puritans in all the colonies, but they were strongest in Massachusetts. The Puritans were Calvinists who had a religious objection to the authority of the monarchy.
For example, in 1683, King Charles demanded that Massachusetts declare its absolute obedience to the King, or its charter would be revoked. The colonists refused on the grounds that they owed absolute obedience only to God. The charter was revoked. (It was restored later under a different king.)
The Puritans were a complex religious and quasi-political development. We know them now only in caricature. In their day they were probably among the most intelligent and dedicated of European people. There were many varieties of Puritans—some who advocated toleration of all types of religious views, and others who tortured and executed heretics. They loved learning of all kinds—Greek and Latin classics as well as the Bible. Many of them could read the New Testament in the original Greek. Cotton Mather, a famous Puritan of Boston, wrote over 200 books on subjects ranging from science to philosophy to moral essays.
The Puritans were also Congregationalists.
Congregationalism was an offshoot of Calvinism. It held that each congregation was an independent unit. There were no higher religious bodies. There were no bishops. No higher earthly authority could tell any congregation what to do.
Moreover, each congregation was run as a democracy (at least in theory). Leaders were elected. The congregation, not the ministers or any other leaders, was the basic source of all authority. Except…
Except that all law and authority ultimately rested in the bible and in God.
When Jean Morely, founder of Congregationalism, used the word “democracy” in describing his new form of church government, he was using what in the late 16th century was a negative word. Democracy was associated with chaos and discord. No serious person at that time advocated democracy for any kind of government. Morely acknowledged the potential for harm in democracy, but argued that a democracy coupled with the Roman concept of the rule of law would be an excellent form of government. As examples he cited Athens and the Roman Republic. In the church, the law would be provided by the Bible.
Let us pause here to consider what is happening in this development. It contains a number of factors. Let us list them:
1. The splintering factor: all congregations become independent of each other and of any higher earthly authority.
2. Democracy: an ancient Western tradition is picked up and dusted off.
3. The Renaissance : a knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman history is obviously necessary for the citing of them as examples.
4. The Reformation, religious inspiration and the Bible.
That sums up a backwards look. Looking forward from this point we
find what may be the germ of the Revolution.
The Revolution was preached from the pulpits of America like a religious revival. God had a hand in it, said all the great speakers and movers. Tom Paine, in Common Sense, said that God had put the American continent here to allow people to form a country that would correct the errors of the Old World.
The Revolution, then, was a splintering and a rejection of monarchy on grounds heavily mixed with religion. It looked back to ancient Western traditions of autonomy and democracy. It drew heavily on Christianity as interpreted by Protestants. And it was energized by a finely blended mixture of all the above—a mixture known as Puritanism.
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