from better mousetraps to lemonade seas

Reinvent and Relaunch!

2008-09-24T15:59:00.000-05:00

For a number of years, this blog has hosted my work on intellectual history outside the "libertarian labyinth," work posted for my students and posts on material that is simply interesting, without being particularly relevant to current issues and struggles. The long silence here suggests how little I have focused on those concerns lately. In part that is because I have been very focused on recovering material from the anarchist and libertarian traditions, but it has also been in part a result of my broadened sense of how for that "labyrinth" really extends. The next time I treat the struggles over Rhode Island's charter, or the antinomian crisis, or even the hollow earth, it is likely to be In the Libertarian Labyrinth, as part of my work on "anarchism and American traditions."

That leaves a space open, one marked with a title that always expressed more audacity than anything that appeared on its pages. Time to change that. If you're reading this, chances are you also read my post, in the aftermath of the RNC police riots, "Time to free ALL the political prisoners," but here, for the record, is the immodest proposal with which it ended:

It's the sort of thing you feel stupid saying out loud, but, once the bail is raised for protestors, we need to figure out how to bail each other out, of stupid jobs we hate, that only prop up a system that feeds off us. Once the pepper spray burns have been treated, we need to figure out how to provide for one another's daily health needs. After we feed the homeless, we have to tackle how we feed one another, globally, without being forced to take part in a food economy that depends of disrupting local agriculture and profiting while people starve. Once we reclaim the stolen pamphlets, we need to finish the work of making sure our written heritage is never "out of print" and beyond the reach of everyone. The things that stand between us and our own institutions would probably not withstand any sort of concerted assault, unlike the riot police lines guarding worthless functionaries and would-be despots, and they'll have to come up with new offenses if they want to beat us up for trading with one another, educating one another, supporting one another.

Despite all of the constant machinations, all the so-called "intelligence" at its disposal, all the money and power behind it, the state constant reveals itself as, well, sort of stupid, committed, with all of its force, to lying, cheating, killing, stealing, and then kidding itself about the whole bizarre, self-perpetuating routine. If there's a way off this roundabout, I would be happy to take it. I'm guessing, if you're reading this, that you would to.

There's very little reason, it seems to me, that we can't have our own economies, our own schools, libraries, media, churches if we want them, our own industries, etc., etc., and that the "us" is one that could grow and grow and grow, if once we could get off the suicidal track that most aspects of our lives are on. I must have a bright idea a day, to address some aspect of all of this, but, honestly, radical circles are pretty good at nitpicking bright ideas to death, when we don't smother them with indifference. But it's becoming clearer to me all the time that holding this stuff in does nothing but increase my indigestion (that has, of course, also often been the result of airing the ideas.) I'm contemplating remaking my old intellectual history blog, The Very Idea!, into a place for running mad, half-mad, even relatively sane and sober libertarian schemes up the proverbial flagpole. If nothing came of it but a collection of anarchist "Rube Goldberg" institutions, that wouldn't be the end of the world. So I guess I'll run that up the flagpole. There's a fine old tradition of anarchist inventors; who wants to join?

I've set up a discussion list, and I'm throwing the doors open to collaborators. But I've also redubbed this blog in a way that, I hope, suggests the way that I would like this particular space for counter-institutional invention to work. We have a grand old tradition of anarchist inventors, who have produced things as mundane and practical as Alfred B. Westrup's mop bucket, or as ambitious as Stephen Pearl Andrews universal language and universological science. At the moment, we probably need both better mousetraps and grander visions of the future, and a lot of practical-visionary work that hovers somewhere in the middle distance between those. What I would like to explore on the list and present on the blog, is projects, germs of projects and calls for projects, that seem to address present needs, but I would like, for a change, to unfetter the discussion a bit from a priori judgments about practicality. I expect participants and respondents to make their own judgments about which schemes are the best idea since sliced bread and which are pipe dreams. What I would like to suggest as an ethic for discussion is that we refrain from purely negative responses, that, if at all possible we try to expand, contract, remake, remodel, develop, simplify, amend one another's proposals, but always with an eye to moving forward. And those things which seem to have no forward-moving potential will be pretty quickly identified by their failure to "get a pulse." I'm suggesting more of a general ethic than hard and fast rules. I certainly don't want to discourage constructive criticism, or to encourage anyone to waste time. But radicals are pretty good at talking ourselves out of things. I would like to try to open up a different kind of discussion.

So. . . mousetraps to lemonade seas. . . I've got a couple of educational proposals that I'm putting together, and I'll be doing a semi-regular feature on radical inventors, but nobody has to wait for me to find time for that in order to get this thing rolling. I'm probably not the only person choking on ideas that I just haven't quite dared to float more broadly. All aboard!

1847 Debate on Abolition and Disunion

2007-12-05T15:18:00.000-05:00

Wendell Phillips. “Abolition Reasons for Disunion.” Young American’s Magazine of Self-Improvement. March 1847, 113-120.

Stephen Pearl Andrews. “Abolition Reasons against Disunion.” Young American’s Magazine of Self-Improvement. May 1847, 159-166.

[Here is a slightly "pre-anarchist" Stephen Pearl Andrews and a Wendell Phillips eager not to be taken as a "no-government man, debating the question of disunion in the context of abolitionism.]

ABOLITION REASONS FOR DISUNION.

By Wendell Phillips.

[A Reply to appear in our next Number.]

THE youngest of us can remember the time when it was thought an offence next door to treason, to calculate the value of the Union. Of late years, there are many who not only calculate its value, but openly declare that they would rather part with it than sanction the evil it upholds. Foremost among these are the Abolitionists. Disunion has been by no means a rare word in our history. Disappointed ambition has often, for a moment, longed for separate confederacies, in which there would be more Presidential chairs than one. Parties, in the hour of defeat, have talked of revolution, when revolution was their only chance of success. And sometimes even a State, thwarted in a favorite purpose, has seemed ready to shoot madly from its sphere. But the Abolitionists are the only men who have ever, calmly, soberly and from mature conviction, proclaimed at the outset their purpose to seek the Dissolution of this American Union: and this from no bitterness of personal or party disappointment, but solely at the bidding of principle, and from a sense of duty.

Their opponents, unable to deny the purity and disinterestedness of their motives, have sought to make the people insensible .to the weight of their arguments, by representing them as opposed to all government. "These men," say they, "hate the Union, because they would do away with all law. They are no-government men, and non-resistants."

The logic which infers that because a man thinks the Federal Government bad, he must necessarily think all governments so, has at least the merit and the charm of novelty. There is a spice of arrogance perceptible in concluding the Constitution of these United States to be so perfect, that any one who dislikes it could never be satisfied with any form of government whatever!

The Abolitionist is not opposed to government, but to this government, based upon and acting for slavery. We proceed to point out some of the reasons which compel him to oppose it.
"Instinct is a great matter," says Shakspeare: and it is remarkable how instinctively every anti-slavery movement, for the last fifty years, has found itself arrayed against the Union; and how instinctively, also, every such movement has been branded by the South as treasonable. Both tendencies were right. The Abolitionist finds no readier foe, no greater obstacle, than the Union: and the lover of the Constitution of 1789 knows that Slavery and the Constitution will die together. All anti-slavery men have felt this—most of them without being fully conscious of it. But the merit and glory of the American Anti-Slavery Society have been, that they have plainly seen, and as frankly confessed, that their warfare is with the AMERICAN UNION, and that they expect success only in its downfall.

We seek the dissolution of the Union, because the inhabitants of a country must either support or oppose the Government. They cannot be neutral. Their silence is sanction. But this Government we cannot support, because it requires of its citizens things which no honest man can do; and because its chief result has been, to give greater stability, strength and extension to the slave system.

Every legislative, executive and judicial officer, both of the state and national Governments, before entering on the performance of his duties, takes an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the United States. Every voter, who sends his fellow citizen into office as his representative, knowing beforehand that the taking of this oath is the first duty his agent will have to perform, does, by his vote, request and authorize him so to do. He, therefore, by voting, impliedly engages to support the Constitution. What one does by another, he does himself. Now the Constitution contains the following clauses :

ART. I, SECT. 2. " Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers ; which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons."

ART. 1, SECT. 8. Congress shall have power * * * to suppress insurrections."

ART. 4, SECT. 2. " No person, held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

ART. 4, SECT. 4. "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government; and shall protect each of them against invasion; and, on application of the legislature, or of the executive, (when the legislature cannot be convened,) against domestic violence."

The first of these clauses, relating to representation, gives to every inhabitant of Carolina, provided he is rich enough to hold five slaves, equal weight in the government with four inhabitants of Massachusetts—and accordingly confers on a slave-holding community additional political power for every slave held among them; thus tempting them to continue to uphold the system.

Its results have been, in the language of John Quincy Adams, to enable "a knot of slaveholders to give the law and prescribe the policy of the country;" so that " since 1830, slavery, slave-holding, slave-breeding and slave-trading, have formed the whole foundation of the policy of the Federal Government." The second and the last articles, relating to insurrection and domestic violence—perfectly innocent themselves, yet, being made with the fact directly in view that slavery exists among us—do deliberately pledge the whole national force against the unhappy slave, if he imitate our fathers and resist oppression ; thus making us partners in the guilt of sustaining slavery. The third is a promise, on the part of the whole North, to return fugitive slaves to their masters; a deed which God's law expressly condemns, and which every noble feeling of our nature repudiates with loathing and contempt.

These are the clauses which the abolitionist who votes or takes office, engages to uphold. While he considers slave-holding to be sin, he still rewards the master with additional political power for every additional slave that he can purchase. Thinking slave-holding to be sin, he pledges to the master the aid of the whole army and navy of the nation to reduce his slave again to chains, should he at any time succeed a moment, in throwing them off. Thinking slave-holding to be sin, he goes on, year after year, appointing by his vote judges and marshals to aid in hunting up the fugitives, and seeing that they are delivered back to those who claim them ! How beautifully consistent are his principles and his promises! Surely he ought not to lift a finger in support of the Constitution of the United States.

But for the fear of Northern bayonets, pledged for the master's protection, the slaves would long since have wrung a peaceful emancipation from the fears of their oppressors, or sealed their own redemption in blood. But for the countenance of the Northern church, the Southern conscience would long since have awakened to its guilt; and the impious sight of a church made up of slave-holders, and called the church of Christ, been scouted from the world.

But for the weight of Northern influence, Louisiana had never been bought, and then there never would have been a domestic slave trade; Texas had never been stolen, nor the Floridas usurped; nor any means of ease found for the serpent which, girdled with the fire of the world's scorn, was dying by its own sting.

The North supplies the ranks of the army. Witness the muster-rolls of the Revolution, when Massachusetts furnished more troops than the six Southern states together: witness Randolph's taunt, that all the South meant to do was to furnish officers: witness South Carolina's excuse in 1779, that her sons dared not quit home for the war, and leave their slaves behind: witness the South-Western press just now, dissuading from too free volunteering for the Texan war, for fear the slaves should seize the opportunity, and rise. Yet it was National troops, thus drafted, which put down the insurrection of Nat. Turner: National troops secured the Floridas, thus snatching from the over-stung sufferers of Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, their only refuge from our Vulture's talons: National troops cover Texas, without which, Mr. Secretary Upshur told the world, the institution of Slavery would not live there ten years.

To our shame, the South confesses that to us she "is indebted for a permanent safeguard against insurrection: that the dissolution of the Union is the dissolution of Slavery: that a million of slaves are ready to rise at the first tap of the drum—and, but for us, where is she to look for protection?" We are no advocates for supporting the slave in insurrection; but we loathe still more the supporting of the master in his tyranny. "Hands off," is the Anglo-Saxon motto. Let both parties have fair play; and then if the master, in his fear of blood, grants the slave his freedom, go home and blush to think how many years your guilty partnership has encouraged him to refuse this justice.

We seek the dissolution of the Union, because the temptation of Southern support is too much for Northern virtue, either in church or state. Hence the ambition of the great sects hastens to strike hands with the slave- trader, and trims its creed to suit the market : while Northern statesmanship is but a competition in baseness—a bidding for the town's poor—a trial of which party will be content with least for betraying their constituents.

We curse the Constitution of 1789, because it is a cunning device to evade the laws of God; a policy of insurance which the North gave her Southern sisters when they started on this mutual slave voyage. For Nature compels to freedom by making slavery burn up the soil on which she rests; and the slave grows burdensome as free labor presses on his heels. But the Union says to Virginia, "Not so; when your virgin soil is exhausted, raise men instead of tobacco, and we will protect the domestic market by that highest of all tariffs—the penalty of death against the foreign trader." But for this compromise, the whole Atlantic border would now be free.
God and Nature have made the master tremble lest his property in man take feet and vanish. The Union gives him her marshals and courts, her judges and laws, her army and navy, to quiet his fears, and bring back the fugitive, if found where the National Vulture flaps his wings.
Of this Constitution it is enough for us to know that, beneath it, the slaves have trebled in numbers, and slave-holders have monopolized the offices and dictated the policy of the Government; prostituting the strength of the nation to the support of Slavery here and elsewhere; trampling on the rights of the Free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. We have the highest authority for "judging a tree by its fruits." "The preservation, propagation, and perpetuation of Slavery," says Adams, "is the VITAL and ANIMATING SPIRIT of the National Government." Our connection with the Slave States has kept the colored race among us under the ban of a cruel and wasting prejudice.

Beneath the Stars and Stripes, the slave pirate finds shelter from the vengeance of Christendom. And this very hour, the Slave Power, trampling under foot the spirit of the age and the remonstrances of the. Free States, and scorning to observe even the forms of the Constitution, is using the whole force of the Nation for the acquisition of more territory, in order to blast it anew with the curse of Slavery, from which the higher civilization of another race and another faith had just redeemed it. Let no one say, these things need not have been, and we may reasonably hope for better times to come. Not so. We shall never launch on another era with a more glowing love of liberty and justice than that which pervaded the Nation's mind at the close of the Revolution. We shall never try the experiment of letting Freedom, with fettered feet, run a race with Slavery, furnished with wings, under better auspices than while the spirit of Wythe and Jefferson made Virginia tremble for her right to crush and kill; while Jay covered New York with his angel wings, and Samuel Adams thundered in Faneuil Hall. All that political man could do, chained to the compromises of 1789, has been done: and where is the statesman vain enough to ask our confidence in trying over again the experiment, in which Jay and King, Ellsworth and Strong, Martin and Wythe, Adams and Ames, have failed?

No matter what we may think of the character or of the provisions of the Constitution ; there are always beneath the parchment, elements of political strength and activity which overrule statutes; and these elements have been found such, in a trial of fifty years, that if you run your eye over the list of Northern statesmen, you will find them all either members of a defeated party or traitors ;—men who won success only by submitting to a baptism of treason—treason to their lineage, to their own principles, and to their birth-place ; who have lived only by speaking at Washington what they feared to say at home, and by whispering at home what they dared not meet at Washington—and whose political death has dated from the day when they were equally well known in both places. Witness Shaw of Lanesboro', Webster of Marshfield, Van Buren of Kinderhook, and Everett of Cambridge.

We abjure the Union, because we will not sail with Slavery at the helm ;—because our bayonets shall never shield the hearth, wife, or child, of any man, in order that he may safely trade in human flesh ;—because our hands shall never thrust back into hell the trembling fugitive, whom our example and the sight of our happiness has tempted to run from it;—and finally, because we believe that if the old men of 1776 could now lift up their heads and see the ruin they have wrought, they would curse us as bastards, if we did not do them the justice to believe they would have hated such a result, and if we did not do our utmost, in mere justice to them, to blot from history the memory of this, their only, but, alas! their momentous folly or crime.

-----

ABOLITION REASONS AGAINST DISUNION.

By S. P. Andrews.

THE relations of the Constitution of the United States to American Slavery, and the duty of American citizens as respects the Union, are daily becoming subjects of more intense interest. The last number of this Magazine has an article from the able pen of Wendell Phillips, displaying the argument, or perhaps, more properly speaking, stating the positions, (as little more could be done in the space occupied,) of the advocates of disunion. Mr. Phillips assumes, indeed, that all Abolitionists are such—which, in view of the facts, might be objected to as in bad taste. This assumption, however, is unimportant. The argument deserves attention.

It may well be doubted whether the dissolution of the Union, if it were effected, would prove adequate, as an instrumentality, to the overthrow of Slavery. This point need not, however, be discussed. Assuming that it would be effective, the writer of this would still object to the dissolution of the Union as an expedient, on the ground that it is more difficult, in his apprehension, to be attained, than the end itself for which the dissolution is demanded. To one holding this position, it is inconclusive to prove that if the Union were dissolved, Slavery would be abolished.

The question, however, still remains open, whether there be not something more cogent than expediency, pressing on the conscience, and demanding of honest men to dissolve their connection with the existing Government. Mr. Phillips, and those who think with him, believe that there is. They think they find it in the four clauses quoted from the Constitution of the United States, in his article.

ART. 1, SECT. 2. "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers; which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons."

ART. 1, SECT. 8. "Congress shall have power * * * to suppress insurrections.

ART. 4, SECT. 2. "No person, held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

ART. 4, SECT. 4. "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government; and shall protect each of them against invasion ; and, on application of the legislature, or of the executive, (when the legislature cannot be convened,) against domestic violence."

“The first of these clauses," says Mr. Phillips, "relating to representation, gives to every inhabitant of Carolina, provided he is rich enough to hold five slaves, equal weight in the government with four inhabitants of Massachusetts—and accordingly confers on a slaveholding community additional political power for every slave held among them; thus tempting them to continue to uphold the system."

This is denied on the following grounds:—The clause gives to the slave-holder nothing. It does not deal with an "inhabitant of South Carolina," in any form whatsoever. It deals with States, as such, and apportions their representation in the Congress of the United States. If an unequal portion of political power is given to one inhabitant within the State of South Carolina over another inhabitant within the same, it is not the Constitution of the United States which makes the gift, but the laws of the state. If it be said that the Constitution was formed in view of the existence of the fact that the laws of South Carolina were thus unequal, it is replied, So was the American Anti-Slavery Society. It is a great mistake not to distinguish between the recognition of a fact and the approbation or sanction of a principle. It is possible to couple, in the same document, the notice and admission of a fact with the repudiation of the principle to which the fact owes its being, and even with measures devised expressly to invalidate the fact, or to put an end to its existence. The illustration is found equally in the Constitution of the United States and in that of the Anti-Slavery Society. It is admitted, nevertheless, that the Constitution of the United States has been so administered as to foster the growth of Slavery; and it must be admitted that it is within the range of possibility, that the Constitution of the Anti-Slavery Society, even, should have been so administered likewise, and yet that such abuse would not have changed the essential character of the document.

In Massachusetts, the political power is vested, by the laws of the state, in the males, to the exclusion of females. Should this provision be found to work out some great political or social wrong, we should hardly charge such wrong upon the Constitution of the United States, on the ground that the Constitution was adopted in the face of the fact, while the fact owed its existence to a distinct system of laws, over which the Constitution had not, and could not obtain, the control.

The Constitution, so far from "conferring on a slave-holding community additional political power for every, slave held among them," as affirmed by Mr. Phillips, does precisely the contrary. It withholds a portion of that to which they would be otherwise entitled. Nothing is, clearer than this. The community of South Carolina would immediately obtain an additional representation upon the floor of the House of Representatives, in the Congress of the United States, by abolishing slavery among themselves. This fact settles the question. The individual slave-holder would, it is true, lose power thereby; but it would be power for the possession of which he is indebted to State laws, and not to the Constitution. The aggregate of the Slave States would at once become entitled to nineteen additional representatives, by abolition. The basis of representation, in the Free States, is the whole number of inhabitants of all classes. In the Slave States, it is the whole of one class and three-fifths only of another class; that is, less than the whole. Hence the Constitution imposes a restriction upon the Slave States, and tenders a premium on emancipation. It is contrary to the federative plan of the Constitution, to intermeddle with the internal laws and administration of the several states, or the personal condition of their inhabitants. But in favor of liberty, and against slavery, it has ventured to do so. Can a criminal collusion with slavery be deduced from such a hostile interference? Is the animus of such a transaction for or against the institution of slavery?

The error of reasoning upon this subject consists in confounding the quantity of power vested in a state with the degree of efficiency resulting from the mode of its application. The Constitution assigns the quantity. The state laws determine the mode of its exercise. The Constitution, hostile to slavery, assigns to Carolina less power, in proportion to population, than to Massachusetts. Carolina, friendly to the despotism of the few, vests this smaller quota, thus gained, in the hands of a single class, whose action is swayed by the impulse of a single combined interest; and by this concentration of the power, makes it tenfold more efficient in its operation than the larger quota of Massachusetts, which is distributed among all the conflicting interests of the state. Hence the result is an inequality in the working of the governmental machinery of the Union, not chargeable on the Constitution, but on the vicious laws and internal political order of the state of South Carolina. The argument, so far as it is good at all, bears not against this special compact with the Slave States, but against any compact whatever—against the possibility of any political federation on the part of real republics, with others whose internal political order is that of an oligarchy or a despotism. In this point of view, it has a degree of force, and is entitled to candid consideration in its own place. It is then an argument, however, based upon grounds entirely distinct from those involved in the question we are now considering, namely, the anti-slavery or pro-slavery phase of the Constitution itself. It is an argument likewise which, carried out to its logical conclusions, results in the no-government theory, which Mr. Phillips stops short of reaching.

That provision of the Constitution which curtails the amount of representation of the Slave States on account of slavery, is itself a departure from the democratic principle, which demands that all the population of each state should be equally reckoned. It is excusable only on the ground that the departure is made in favor of freedom, and against slavery; because the action relates to communities which refuse to apply the democratic principle within their own borders. If the Constitution had made no provision at all on the subject, the evils of the federation would have been greater than they are; while the opponents of that compact would have had a difficulty in finding fault with the terms, apparently so equitable, whatever they might have said of the essential evils of any compact or political union whatsoever between the parties. If, on the other hand, the Constitution had based representation exclusively upon free population, the departure from the democratic principle would have been carried still farther, while the recognition of the fact of slavery would have remained the same as now; and it may well be doubted whether much would have been gained to the Free States, in relative influence, since it has never been the want of numbers at the North, but of disposition and of concentration of will, which has prevented them from resisting the action of the slave-holding power.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Constitution gives a specific power to suppress insurrections. This power is inherent in all governments. What it does, is to empower the Congress “to call out the militia (in order) to suppress insurrections; " i. e. in order to exercise its inherent powers as a government.

The power to protect a state against domestic violence might be made a most valuable one in behalf of liberty. John Q. Adams demonstrated that the war power was adequate to abolish slavery in all the states, even in case of a foreign war. How much more so in case of a domestic war, caused by the oppressions of slavery itself. What more potent means of protecting a state against domestic violence, than a redress of grievances. It is no answer to say that such a measure was not contemplated. Neither was a railroad nor a magnetic telegraph contemplated as a "post-road." It is a better way of exercising the power given, and of attaining the same end, just as a Congress of Nations may be better than the battle-field for settling national disputes. The Constitution is not an iron shoe, nor a straight jacket, to compress the mind of the country to the growth of the seventeenth century. The Government of the United States cannot interfere with the troubles of a state, until called upon. When thus invoked, she does not act under the control of the state, but under her own control, with plenary powers. She must of necessity be entitled to use the same kind of means to effect the end, that the state government itself might use; and nobody doubts that a state might resort to abolition, to protect herself against domestic violence.

The clause relating to "persons held to labor and service" is only applicable to slaves, so long as a sentiment favorable to slavery guides the interpretation. 1. Because it is not, in strictness, sufficient language to describe a slave, and would not be held to be so in the courts of any slave-holding state, in matters of private contract. It is of the essence of slavery, that the slave be regarded as a thing, and not as a "sentient being." All language having reference to contract, obligation, or debt, has no application, therefore, as respects slaves. We have had abundant evidence that courts desirous of doing so, may stretch this language over the case of slavery. What is here asserted is, that there is nothing in the words to constrain a court to such an interpretation, if an opposite sentiment prevailed. On the contrary, such an interpretation can only consist with a liberal construction in favor of slavery. 2. Slaves are in law, things. In fact, they are human beings. Hence slavery is a legal fiction—and fictions of law are not to be extended beyond their settled limits. 3. It is a well settled canon of interpretation, that the construction of law shall be rigid against the restrictions of personal liberty, and liberal in favor of freedom. 4. To construe this clause in favor of slavery, makes it counter to the whole tenor of the instrument. To construe it otherwise, harmonizes the instrument with itself. 5. There is no proof that this clause was, as asserted by the Supreme Court in Prigg's case, "one of the compromises of the Constitution." It was introduced at the very heel of the session of the Convention, and adopted without debate, without being referred to any committee, without deliberation or contest, and was innocent on its face. 6. There is a strong presumption against its having been understood by the people as a compromise with slavery, at the time when the Constitution was adopted, arising from the fact that in none of the Northern State Conventions was it so much as alluded to, while the most strenuous exertions 'were made to get the Constitution rejected, under the charge of a pro-slavery character. It -was twenty years later, and after the watchful liberty- loving spirit of the people had been lulled to sleep, before a case occurs in the books of any application of this clause to slaves by the courts. Revive the love of liberty, and the construction will be reversed. The law of '93 has no words applicable to slavery.

The Disunion argument commonly assumes three false postulates:

1. That the Constitution is whatever the framers of it secretly intended that it should be.

2. That the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court of the United States may have decided it to be.

3. That the Constitution is whatever those who have administered it have represented it to be.

The space to which this statement is confined will not admit an argument upon these points. Strike away these assumptions, and apply the ordinary and rightful canons of legal interpretation, and we hardly need a better aegis under which to rally the people of the whole country for the overthrow of slavery, than the American Constitution. If the writer of this believed otherwise, he, too, would be a disunionist; and he honors the brave men who, true to their convictions, assail the morbid idolatry of the masses for a Constitution which they, in too many cases, neither read nor understand.

J. William Lloyd, The World's Future—A Prophecy

2007-03-22T17:29:00.000-05:00

J. William Lloyd, "The World's Future—A Prophecy," The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, 75, 4 (October 1882), 180-3.

THE WORLD'S FUTURE—A PROPHECY.

I BELIEVE that a time is approaching when terrestrial nature, at least, will be in almost complete subjection to mankind. Man will then indeed be "the lord of creation." The deserts will be turned into inland seas, or converted by irrigation into fertile and fruitful plains. The swamps will be ditched and drained until they become the very gardens of the earth, and the planting of malaria-destroying vegetation and other sanitary precautions will render them as healthful as the most salubrious locations. A similar plan to that so successfully pursued in Holland will reclaim vast areas from the grasp of old Ocean. Steep mountain sides will be terraced up to the very verge of the snow line and sustain a teeming population. Immense numbers of human beings will live on floating islands and boats on the surface of the lakes, streams and inland seas.

For a time will come in the history of the world when its population will be so great that every foot of available space will be utilized; and that, too, to its greatest possible capacity. This will be brought about by the abolition of war, of wide-spreading epidemics, by improved sanitary conditions generally, and by cooperative living and working by which the strain on the individual will be lessened, and communities will be made mutually supporting and helpful. The abolition of war will be brought about—1. By the improved moral sentiment of the world by which war will be considered a crime. 2. By the intercourse and admixture of different nations, races and peoples, by travel, commerce, emigration, intermarriage, and so on, by which the barriers to altruism, sectional ignorance and prejudice will be broken down and greater international harmony result, 3. By the invention of engines and methods of war so terribly destructive that men will desist from warfare in very terror of the awful means employed and their frightfully ruinous consequences to both sides.

The decreased prevalence of epidemics will be owing—1. To the improved general and individual health. 2. To the establishment of an International Board of Health, who will continually attend to this very matter. 3. To the even distribution of people over the face of the earth (arising from the improvements in commercial and traveling facilities, especially aerial navigation, thereby rendering the accumulation of human beings at certain favored points unnecessary), instead of their being crowded into close and unhealthy cities.

The improved health of the people will be owing to two principal causes—1. To the increased knowledge and application of the laws of health, both by individuals and communities. 2. To the general abandonment by the medical fraternity of chemicals and poisons in the treatment of disease; they having by that time discovered that far simpler means are efficacious therapeutically. Of course, all the other good things of that golden age will also increase the average of human health by increasing the happiness of mankind.

One of the most important of the social features of the world's future will be cooperation; not the co-working of individuals against corporations, nor of corporations against individuals, or against each other, but the confederation of all the conservative powers of humanity against the destructive powers of nature. Co-operation, and not competition, will be the first law of society in the future. The degraded and barbarous people of the earth will gradually die out, or become absorbed by the dominant—probably Caucasian—race. The different branches of this dominant race will become more and more fused and amalgamated until they are all gathered together under one central government. This government will be essentially republican in its form, and all officers will be elected directly by the voice of the people; not by representatives or electors. This central government will busy itself exclusively with plans for international benefit; mere local matters will be left to the care of local officers. Inventive genius will make wonderful advancement in the future. The rapidity with which passengers and goods can be transported from one part of the world's surface to another will be limited only by considerations of comfort, convenience and safety. Man will by that time have conquered the atmosphere, just as he long since conquered the ocean, and aerial navigation will be a fixed fact and the most popular mode of travelling. The whole world will be like a vast city, with splendid macadamized streets traversing it in all directions. Various cheap, safe and portable motors will be by that time discovered by which carriages and velocipedes will be propelled and animal power entirely superseded. Theoretical and practical science will do away with nearly all the dangers of ocean navigation, and a continuous system of moles and wharves will transform the entire coast line into one grand harbor. Ail impediments to river navigation will be removed, their channels deepened, and the banks defended by continuous levees and wharves. The rivers will be spanned by innumerable bridges, the mountains honey-combed with tunnels, and contiguous waters brought into relationship by deep canals. The weather and its probabilities will be so well understood and so thoroughly watched in those days that damage from storms will be comparatively rare. They and their courses and consequences will be predicted with as much certainty as eclipses are at present. Nothing will be easier, cheaper, or safer than travelling in the world s future. Messages will be sent round the globe with the rapidity of thought, and men will converse audibly with their antipodes. The art of writing will become obsolete. Men will talk, and a listening instrument will write down their messages. Speeches will be reported by the same means. Not only words, but pictures also will be sent by telegraph, that men can see, as well as converse with unknown correspondents.

Photography will make great advances in the future. Pictures will be taken on any kind of paper without special preparation in the natural colors of the object depicted. Books and periodicals will be illustrated in this manner, and hand-engraving will cease to be.

The English language will, in time, be the only one, but so thoroughly will it be revised, systematized and simplified that it would be hardly recognizable by the man of to-day. Pronunciation will be uniform throughout the world, and spelling will be uniform and phonetic. No person, place, or thing will be allowed to have more than one name, thus obviating all necessity for a special scientific nomenclature and for the vast amount of useless memorizing now necessary.

Gold and silver will be too abundant to be especially valuable, and the world's money will be exclusively paper; waterproof, fire-proof and non-tearable. The denominations will be expressed on a decimal scale, and only one kind of money will be used the world over. Its basis will be the assessed value of the property possessed by the world's inhabitants. The metric system of weights and measures will also be universally adopted. Cremation will entirely supersede interment as a means of disposing of the dead. Artificial light and heat will be mainly furnished by electricity, and by its use the nights will be rendered as luminous as day.

As man extends his dominion over the face of the earth the other members of the animal kingdom will be gradually exterminated. The dangerous carnivora will be the first to go, soon to be followed by the rest of the wild quadrupeds and the dangerous reptiles. Then the domestic animals one by one will join the funeral march, for when human beings fully realize that the same ground that will keep a cow or a horse will just as easily keep a man, the days of the larger domestic animals will be numbered. The foul and unwholesome pig will be the first brute to disappear, and as the motive powers before alluded to come into use, men will cease to keep draught animals. The elephant is too ponderous and unwieldy a brute to survive. Reclaiming the deserts will do away with the camel. The air-ship will climb mountains easier and faster than the llama. Sheep and goats because of their fine fleeces, delicious flesh, and the small amount of food they require will hold their own probably for a great length of time. But as superior vegetable fibres are discovered to take the place of wool, and human beings demand more land, they will be crowded out. Traps, poison and ferrets will exterminate rats and mice, and the untamable sleep-destroying eat having no further business in this world will leave it.

The larger breeds of dogs will disappear with the beasts they are used to hunt, and only the smaller kinds will be left. But the dog will never be entirely exterminated. Hydrophobia will be easily cured in the future, and their affection, intelligence and fidelity will always secure the preservation of the smaller breeds of dogs. In short, the time will come in the world's history when the dog will be the only surviving quadruped.

Fish culture will be enthusiastically carried on in those days, and all waters will teem with them. Harmless and insectivorous birds, too, will be protected and petted till they swarm to such a degree that their numbers will have to be lessened by legislative action. The habitat of various birds will be judiciously enlarged; thus, nightingales will be naturalized in North America, bobolinks in England, and canaries everywhere. The gayly-plumaged birds of the New World will be exchanged for the sweet singers of the Old till an equilibrium is established. Domestic fowls, too, will always be raised and kept for pleasure and profit.

After all this the reader will not need to be told that the man of the future will be a pretty strict vegetarian.

This same survival of the fittest will have its effect on the vegetable as well as on the animal world. As a matter of course, there will be no forests in the future; the world will be too thickly inhabited for that, and many of the common forest trees of the present will then be extinct, or will only survive in the botanical gardens. Trees valuable for their fruits, nuts, flowers, or ornamental appearance will be the only ones allowed to grow. Such being the case, wood will not be as much used in the manufactures of the future as in those of the present. Paper and various metallic and mineral substances will largely take its place. Houses will be made—those of the cheaper class —mainly of paper and glass; but brick, tiles, iron and artificial stone will be the usual materials of the best buildings. Furniture will be made of paper, artificial wood and metal. The popular use of tobacco will be entirely abandoned within the next two centuries; of alcohol within half that time.

Women—throughout the civilized world—will be admitted to equal political privileges with men within the nest fifty years. Crime in the future will be reduced to a minimum, for not only will the moral sense of humanity be greatly improved, but the efficient detective force and wonderful telegraphic facilities of that time will render escape from the law almost impossible. Society in that day will endeavor to reform and redeem the criminal, and not merely to protect itself against his assaults or to wreak its vengeance upon him.

Then, too, Phrenology will take its proper position. It will be taught in the schools as a branch of Physiology, and the phrenologist will be considered as indispensable a member of society as the pastor or physician. The mother with her child, the lover with his betrothed, the teacher with his pupil, the politician with his candidate, all will seek his advice, counsel, or support. In the church, the school, the sanitarium, the dissecting room and the laboratory; in the legislative halls of the nations, and in the sacred precincts of home, phrenology will be applied, taught and respected,

The religious creeds and sects of the present will fade away into indistinctness in the future, and men will be united in a pure monotheism. Atheism will be almost unknown, and a reverent practical faith the rule. Because of these surroundings and these influences the average men of the future will be such beings as the world nowadays seldom sees. Wise, healthful, pure and holy, beautiful in face and form, they will appear angelic rather than human, and the earth will seem a primary heaven.

J. WILLIAM LLOYD.

Mini-Canon Assignment: How-To posts

2007-03-18T18:15:00.000-05:00

[Here's an archive of the "how-to" posts for the Mini-Canon assignment, from a previous semester:]

We want to keep focused on the realm of "great ideas," even while we research stuff that more specifically interesting to us. The common oppositions help us start pretty high up on the ladder of abstraction:

Us / Them
Mine / Yours
Known / Unknown
Heaven / Earth

All of these oppositions involve drawing pretty basic distinctions. If we tried to get much more abstract than this, we would be looking at ideas like "unity" and "difference," "the one" and "the other," etc. When we're talking about our keywords, "liberty" and "tolerance," those very high-level abstractions are certainly important to us, but it's hard to say anything with much practical significance if we don't work our way down into the realm of the more specific and concrete.
Most of you have had some basic instruction in how to construct an argumentative essay: you start with a generalization, provide some specific support and analysis, and then return to the generalization. Your mini-canon assignment will be more narrative: you'll be showing me development and debate. But narratives still have a similar structure. A short story (for example) sets expectations at the beginning, hopefully delivers on them in a series of entertaining episodes, and then comes to some sort of resolution. One of the ways we judge literature is on the basis of how well it hangs together, whether or not the pieces of a narrative all seem to belong to one another. I want you to tell me a good story about great ideas. You're presenting a little slice of the Great Conversation, and have to act as the narrator of the more focused conversation. That means you have to make connections between the various "episodes" made up by your exemplary texts. And that will be easier if you have some very basic organizing principles to ground you. Hence, the common oppositions.

If you want to write about the history of ideas about "treason," for example, it's going to be a lot easier to orchestrate your narrative if you choose a basic distinction (us/them, for example) to provide the structure. If you want to write about religious issues, you have lots of options. Us/them, perhaps, for questions of religious tolerance or "holy war." Known/unknown for more general questions. Heaven/earth to explore conflicts between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious and secular authority.

I'm suggesting that you start with the common oppositions. Grab a piece of paper, and free-write. Draw pictures or diagrams. Do whatever it takes to get you thinking about Great Ideas, and exploring your own interests.

Just for fun, I'm going to go ahead and do the assignment with you, and post the results as we go. Look for the first "Example" post later this afternoon.

Looking at the four common oppositions, there are obviously plenty of options for an example paper. But I'm in the middle of some other projects that have me thinking about property issues, so I guess I'll go and ahead and pick mine/yours as my starting place. Anytime you can make class work advance other class work, or your personal researches, that's good. I'm trying to get a book outline together. I'm working on a scholarly, critical edition of two works on currency reform from 1849-50, and I know I'm going to be buried in early-19th century economics texts as soon as the Ohiolink requests arrive. I also know that I've got to translate that older stuff for a modern audience that is pretty unlikely to share any of the basic assumptions about property and its creation common in the earlier writers. So constructing some sort of conversation between the early sources and the current audience is absolutely necessary. For that narrative, I know I have a certain number of bases I have to cover:

The "Ricardian socialist" economists
Proudhon, author of What Is Property?
William B. Greene, author of the texts, who was influenced by Proudhon and the earlier economists
Kevin Carson, who claims to represent a modern version of the tradition of Proudhon and Greene, and who is known to many of my prospective readers
My potential readers, many of whom will consider the "labor theory" economics of most of these other figures antiquated or inadequate

There are others, of course. And, ultimately, there are too many others for me to work through this whole conversation with you. It's extremely important to be able to recognize when you've bitten off more than you can chew in the time allowed. So, how do I narrow things down to a workable project?

I keep a notebook in my back pocket much of the time, and scribble in it to clarify my thoughts in instances like this. After a lot of scribbling the other day, I decided that the toughest challenge I faced was the difference between basic assumptions between the figures I was writing and about and an important slice of my potential readership. Clear explanation is one way to at least give the readers a chance to alter their initial positions. But I'm also something of a partisan in the debate: I think Greene may be right about some basic issues, where some of the readers I would like to reach are, in my opinion, wrong. So I need to go on the offensive a bit, philosophically.

More scribbling. Vulnerabilities of "vulgar libertarian" position: denial of possibility of "exploitation," a priori reasoning, specifically "self-ownership" notion. . . Etc.

"Self-Ownership." Now, there's an interesting idea. It breaks down something like this:

I am me and I own me. "Am"="Own"? Weird.

I think I'll run with that.

I've got an idea what I want to look at, and, since I have a specific audience in mind, I know some things I really have to include. (You'll have a little more flexibility, but still need to narrow things down.)

At this point, I can start picking some texts to look at. I know that I will need to work with Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government, specifically Chapter 5, "On Property." It's the standard work on property, particularly for my intended audience. I also know I want to use the chapter "Solidarity" from William B. Greene's 1849 Equality (which reappears as "An Illustration" in his Mutual Banking the next year.) There's also a piece from de Cassagnac's book on the proletariat, where he says that there is no class conflict since everyone is a proprietor: you own yourself, so there's really no class difference between you and a big capitalist. (My own arms and legs = Standard Oil. Yeah. I'm not sure I buy it either.)

Beyond that, I go to the searchable sources online. Wikipedia has a "self-ownership" entry, and it seems to be uncontroversial enough that there hasn't even been a Talk page created. I'll come back to it later. Google Books gives me some search-engine glitches, telling me at first that there are no instances of the phrase "self-ownership" in the database, and then finally giving me a couple of pages worth of listings for "Full view" books. The earliest listings there are from the mid-19th century, and relate to the debates over slavery and women's rights.

Here's an important set of clues. I started by saying that self-ownership was a rather "weird" notion. Things look rather different in a historical context where people can be owned by other people, if they're women or of African descent. Similarly for any social system not based in the assumption of individual liberty. There are contexts in which it makes sense to ask "do I own me, or does someone else?"

Late-19th century uses tend to be more conservative, often appearing in the midst of defenses of the right to property. The usefulness of the term moves from one political camp to another, which is worth noting. Nothing here jumps out as essential to my mini-canon, but the context is useful.

The Making of America archives are a network of digital libraries. The UMich archive has a lot of very nice material on the slavery debates, which I will need to go back and look at seriously. I see essays by major abolitionists and public figures like William Garrison and Horace Mann. The Cornell archive, which has mostly journals, returns a couple of results, but then can't find them in the articles. One of the two looks worth paging through, but only if other things don't pan out.

Proquest's American Periodical Series Online is accessible if you are on campus, or at another subscribing institution. I find 61 articles, going back to 1838. Most of the early material is related to slavery. Some relates to religion, and questions of whether we own ourselves or whether God owns us. In some turn-of-the-century libertarian sources, I find "self-ownership" and "individual sovereignty" defined as synonyms. The latter term gives me another line to trace, and an interesting one, since "individual sovereigntyism" was one of the names for the individualist anarchist philosophy of a guy named Josiah Warren. Warren and Greene knew one another and debated.

This introduction of a supposed synonym gives me a little more to play with. Are "self-ownership" and "individual sovereignty" the same thing? Does one describe the relation of the self to itself better than another?
The Warren-Greene connection means I don't have to guess as much about what they would say to each other. I'll have to go out on some limbs elsewhere, but here I can play it a little safer.

A quick survey of web resources tells me that I won't have any trouble finding modern treatments and critiques of "self-ownership." I make a few notes: check von Mises, Hoppe. I notice with some amusement a couple of guys who claim to have coined the term "sovereign individual" a few years back. APS Online shows instances of the phrase as early as 1836. I find a couple of instances even earlier, plus a tantalizing note that Nietzsche used the term in On the Genealogy of Morals, and a reminder that Georges Bataille (a philosopher I've written about on a couple of occasions) also made much of the term.

I'm guessing that this much research gives me at least half of my texts. The next step is to read through a bunch of stuff, make a few preliminary choices, and see if I can see a master plan around which I can organize the essay.

OK. I've narrowed my "exemplary texts" down to about a dozen, and I've got a rough idea of how the "conversation" works. Here's a rough outline:

1. John Locke: 2nd Treatise on Civil Government. Locke sets up most of the modern interpretations of self-ownership, and his theory includes most of the potential contraditions and difficulties that arise later.

"Sect. 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others."

There are a numbers of questions raised here, not the least of which is how the assumption of property in one's own person is justified. This is that problem of making "is" and "own" mean roughly the same thing. Maybe persons are simply not something ownable, in which case everything else in this argument comes apart, the whole theory of property being based on self-ownership. (We can imagine other sorts of labor-mixing property theories without much trouble, but that may be outside the scope of the paper. We'll see.) The mechanism of gaining property by mixing one's person with "raw nature" is an interesting one, consisting of a kind of theory of property by prosthesis. We would expect a mixture to change both ingredients. How complex do we have to make the "self" that is involved in this self-ownership?

2. Count Destutt-Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy (1817). Destutt-Tracy argues that class-based social or economic analyses are incorrect, as they are based on distinctions that don't exist. According to him, everyone is a proprietor, everyone is a consumer, and everyone is a worker. As long as I am not a slave, then I own myself, so I "have means," and am in the same class as, say, my landlord, who owns a couple hundred properties. Hmmm. I guess that's one way of looking at it. Tracy makes a good example of the most conservative reading of self-ownership. It might provide an argument against slavery, but it is obviously capable of promoting a certain blindness about social inequality.

3. Gerritt Smith, "Letter to The Workingman's Advocate" (August 10, 1844). Smith, a prominent abolitionist, wrote a 52-page letter to Henry Clay in 1839, in which the right of human beings to self-ownership played a role in his repudiation of the slave trade. This single-page letter covers the basic claims against slavery, basing them in Christian doctrine as well as the natural rights tradition. In the broader context, this pulls a couple of ways: We can see why someone might ask whether they own themselves, but we can also see reasons why we might say that nobody owns a person (except God.)

4. A Childless Wife, "Why I Have No Family" (The Independent, March 23, 1905). This is a much later example of the self-ownership argument applied to women's rights. I've looked at a number of similar essays, some of which emphasize women's right to a place in the labor force or their right to equal standing before the law. This autobiographical piece has a little of all of that. In developing the "conversation," it's worth noting how concerns about freedom gradually expanded and the language of "slavery" was applied to the condition of all (women, children, wage-earners, etc) whose claims to self-ownership seemed thwarted to one degree or another.

5. William B. Greene, "Solidarity" (1849). This chapter from Equality deals with the question of property in terms of the division of labor, and the fact that very little property in modern times is simply extracted from raw nature. If human beings are necessarily social animals, then their labors are going to be interconnected in ways that make determining simple title to any particular good a fairly complex question. Do we ever pay off our debts to society, to our parents, to our teachers, to those who labored before us to create the context into which we were born? Greene ends up with a theory of "best title" for property, but he substantially undermines the simpler approaches on which libertarian property theory is based. Here, it would be worth mentioning the influence of Proudhon's What Is Property?, large sections of which are devoted to showing that "property is impossible," meaning that much of what we think of as property "free and clear" or "in fee simple" is more complicated than that. This is probably also the place to introduce Greene's social psychology, much of which he borrows from Pierre Leroux. The "doctrine of life," as he describes it, claims that "life is both objective and subjective." This is another affirmation of our social nature, but it is also a claim that we are only living when we are in relations with others. While Greene believed in a self-ownership of the "best title" variety (modified by his sense of God's ultimate sovereignty over humans) it would have been very difficult for him to construct a system as simple as Tracy's.

6. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855).

"I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

Whitman does all sorts of fascinating things with the notion of the self and of belonging. Although he was not an explicit partisan of any of the mid-19th century "religions of humanity," as Greene was, he plays with the complex problem of individual being vs species or social being as well as the best of them. His grounds are sometimes spiritual, sometimes scientific. And there is a very interesting implicit theory of property in this "every atom belonging to me. . . belongs to you" stuff. Here, it's time to introduce in greater detail a somewhat "decentered" notion of the self, which complicates the question of anyone owning it.

7. Stephen Pearl Andrews, "The Sovereignty of the Individual" (from The Science of Society, 1851). Andrews, himself known for some of the most mind-boggling social theories of the 19th century, helped to clarify and popularize the theories of Josiah Warren on "individual sovereignty." Warren's departure from the socialist experimental community of New Harmony, Indiana (around 1827) marks the beginning of the individualist anarchist tradition in the U. S. Warren and Greene mark two very different parts of that tradition. Warren insists on individualizing as a philosophical principle. This leads him to think of individual as "social atoms" much more than Greene or Whitman. But "sovereignty" also has a little different sense than ownership. It would be worth exploring some of the differences by a close reading of the text.

8. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (1844). Sometimes translated as The Individual and Its Property. Stirner was an influence on Nietzsche and on the individualist tradition in the U. S. This is a difficult book, but a careful reader of a couple of chapters is probably where I'll find the means to really open up the "conversation."

9. Stephen Kinsella, "How We Come to Own Ourselves" (Mises Institute blog, 9/7/2006). This is a good summary and analysis of the modern position, from the perspective of a follower of Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman Hoppe. It addresses some of the concerns I will have raised by this point in the paper, but not all. It is still no clear why we should think of "owning ourselves" as a logical relationship, particularly as the institution of slavery, which informed earlier discussions is now pretty universally dismissed.

10. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979). Baudrillard started as an unconventional French Marxist and gradually became one of the most prominent "postmodern" philosophers. Seduction is another difficult work, but it succeeds in sketching out a theory of subjectivity that lets us talk about whether or not the modern economic subject is possessive or possessed. Baudrillard knows his Marshall McLuhan (theorist of media as "the extensions of man") and has been one of the voices informing contemporary debates about the self and property in cultural studies circles. His beginnings in Marxist economics make him a little easier to tie to the earlier texts than a lot of contemporary theorists.

Where am I going with all this? The assignment is really to show development of ideas (if that's what you find) or continuing debates about key problems. I'm going to argue that the existence of institutions like slavery and inequality before the law for women made it easy for a notion of self-ownership to exist in circles where it might otherwise have been rejected. It appears to me that the relationship between the individual and his property described by Locke always had something in common with the complex, "seductive" relationship describe by Baudrillard, and that a concern about the interchangeability of subjects and objects in the realm of property has haunted the discussion right along.

The details are not clear, I'm sure. And you're not required to come up with some grand theory (though you're welcome to try.) But that's the skeleton of a narrative, which you can use as a guide.

Another nice collection of primary documents

2007-01-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

American Historical Documents 1000-1904, at Google Books. From the discovery of "Vinland" to the Panama Canal treaty.

John Cleves Symmes and the Hollow Earth

2007-01-05T11:15:00.000-05:00

In 1818, John Cleves Symmes (1779-1829), nephew of the Ohio pioneer of the same name, announced to the world that the earth was hollow, in habitable, and accessible at the poles. He was not the first nor the last hollow earth theorist, but he was certainly among the most interesting, in part because he advanced his theories during when polar exploration was an active concern.

Symmes presented the bare facts of his "theory of concentric spheres and polar voids" in a short piece (reproduced below) entitled Light gives light, to light discover—"ad infinitum." Responses varied from scorn to enthusiasm, even willingness to join his proposed expedition. Symmes' theory was debated in 1824 in the pages of the Cincinnati Literary Gazette—on his "home field"—and the editors of that paper noted that Symmes' local reputation and character added some weight to his speculations. The issue of March 20, 1824 contained the following introduction to a response by Thomas J. Matthews [coming soon]:

The very amiable private character of Capt. Symmes; the reputation which he acquired in the army as a brave and active officer, and the exclusive devotion of all his time, talents and property to the-propagation of his new doctrines, have excited a degree of attention and sympathy towards him in this city, which, in many instances, induces a belief of the truth of his theory; and that his opinions are treated with undeserved neglect and contempt by the learned, and by our government. Capt. Symmes' arguments are such as require no scientific knowledge for their comprehension; while those principles of science which have long been considered as the most firmly established, are in opposition to them—but are not generally understood, except by men of liberal education. For the purpose of exhibiting the real merit of Capt. Symmes' theory and making the reasons of the neglect of it intelligible to all, Mr. T. J. Matthews has been induced to deliver the lecture of which the publication is commenced in this number.

Matthews' rebuttal was not, however, the only series contributed in the Gazette in response to Symmes' theories. Three pieces also appeared, under the title "Symmesonian," purporting to be an exchange with one of the inhabitants of the Earth's interior. You'll find these posted further down the page. They're worth a look for a variety of reasons, some of which have very little to do with questions about the Earth's core. Note the concern expressed about the treatment of Native Americans (13 years after the Battle of Tippecanoe), and the humorous comments on English and American national character. But, first, here is John Cleve Symmes' (or Jno. Cleeve Symmes') 1818 announcement, as it appeared in Niles' Weekly Register, Jun 20 (pg. 294).

Light gives light, to light discover—"ad infinitum."

ST. LOUIS, (Missouri Territory,)

North America, April 10, A.D. 1818

TO ALL THE WORLD!
I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the worldwill support and aid me in the undertaking.

JNO. CLEEVES SYMMES
Of Ohio, Late Captain of Infantry.

N.B.—I have ready for the press, a Treatise on the principles of matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions, account for various phenomena, and disclose Doctor Darwin's Golden Secret.

My terms, are the patronage of this and the new worlds.

I dedicate to my Wife and her ten Children.

I select Doctor S.L. Mitchill, Sir H. Davy and Baron Alex. de Humboldt, as my protectors.

I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season, with Reindeer and slays, on the ice of the frozen sea: I engage we find warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 62; we will return in the succeeding spring.

J.C.S.

[Capt. Symmes is said to be a very respectable man, a man of intelligence, and really sane in mind. He is diligently employed in forwarding his scheme, and it is reported that “upwards of twenty persons have actually engaged in the expedition.”]

Symmesonian, No. 1. (1824)

2007-01-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

Symmesonian, No. 1.

Having been informed Mr. Editor, that your countrymen always require of every person when first introduced to them, a regular account of himself—including his name, his business, whence he came, where he is going, &c. &c. I shall commence this communication by informing you that I am desirous of concealing my name, and that all other matters concerning myself will be revealed to you in the course of several communications which I intend making. At present, I shall merely inform you whence I came, and my business here.

My country is that part of the concave surface of this sphere lately discovered by Capt. Symmes of this city, and named by him Symmesonia. I have been induced to undertake the dangerous and fatigueing journey from thence to this city, in consequence of a report by some of the red men of the north, (who have, as they say, been driven quite into the concave regions by your encroachments on their territory,) that an expedition was fitting out here under the command of Capt. Symmes for the purpose of visiting my country. From the character given of you by your red neighbours and their accounts of your conduct toward them, very great alarm has been excited in Symmesonia; and I have been deputed to undertake the journey to this place, in order to ascertain whether the character that has been given of you is correct, and if it be, what measures can be adopted to prevent the threatened expedition of Capt. Symmes; or if this cannot be done, what will be the most judicious course for the Symmesonians to adopt in order to ward themselves from the evils with which it threatens them.

The most difficult as well as the most important part of my business is to acquire a knowledge of the character of the Americans. Of this difficulty the contradictory opinions I have formed at different times on the same subjects may serve as exemplifications. Previous to my departure from Symmesonia, I was informed & believed that the most striking characteristic of your countrymen, was the desire of possessing lands; but long before I reached your city, I found that you I owned immense tracts of which no use whatever was made, and therefore, concluded that my information in this respect was entirely erroneous; in which conclusion I was confirmed by seeing how very small a part was cultivated of that which is settled. I was, however, soon driven back to my original opinions upon learning (soon after my arrival here,) that it is customary with your citizens, to buy and sell not only large tracts of land which they cannot possibly use, on earth, but also quite as large quantities in the moon, and these being more distant and not so valuable as those in Symmesonia, my fears were excited anew.

I was informed by your red neighbours that your government was in the habit of buying their lands, and paying for them principally by treaties,—things that they have no use for and know very little about, but which they consider as very dangerous articles, being liable to get broken; and when this happens, they say that you immediately send out armies to mend them by cutting the throats of those to whom they were given—a course of proceeding which altho' of a very quieting and composing nature, would not suit the taste of the Symmesonians. Since I have been among you, however, I have heard that your practice of exterminating your neighbours is a trouble you take merely from benevolence and humanity,—which is a thing I cannot yet comprehend.

I was told that attempt had been made: at a place called Zanesville, to dig a passage to Symmesonia through the earth, and first directed my course towards that place in order to ascertain whether they were likely to succeed; but before I arrived there, I was told that they were merely digging for silver,—since I arrived here, however, I have been informed that this could not have been the case, as it was impossible that so many people as live there should be ignorant that silver is never found in such places as that where they were seeking it. Thus I am kept in a state of doubt and uncertainty, and cannot acquire the knowledge respecting your country, which I am seeking, as fast as Capt. Symmes acquires knowledge of Symmesonia, although so far distant from it. This is the reason of my opening a correspondence with you, (for I consider it necessary to keep myself concealed, lest I should be seized upon and compelled to guide those invaders to my country, whom I am endeavouring to discover the means of keeping from it;) I hope that you will enable me to obtain correct information, without wasting too much of my time in search of it.

I perceive that I have little time to lose, for the expedition to the moon which is fitting out at Lexington, is an additional subject of apprehension with me. I suppose the object of that expedition must be to look after the lands that have been purchased in that quarter; if I am correctly informed, all that are contained in that planet, will not be sufficient to fulfil the contracts that have been made for them; those, therefore, who are disappointed in getting their supply, will naturally turn their attention to Symmesonia; the course to which country they will perceive on their route homeward.

The only circumstance that affords me .any consolation is the indifference towards Capt. Symmes and his project that prevails among all classes; should this continue, I shall consider my country safe, but if otherwise; I dread the fate prepared for her.

[Cincinnati Literary Gazette, Feb 28, 1824. p. 66]

Symmesonian, No. 2. (1824)

2007-01-05T11:11:00.000-05:00

Symmesonian, No. 2.

TO THE SYMMESONIAN.

As you seem desirous of concealing your name, and announcing only the country or nation from which you came, I am under the necessity of addressing you by the vague appellation which you have assumed. The primary object of your visit to these upper regions appears to be, to determine the truth or falsity of certain flying reports amongst the northern aborigines prejudicial to our character as honest men and good Christians; and moreover, the probability or improbability of our furnishing Captain Symmes with an outfit sufficient to enable him to pay your country a visit. This information you suppose may be obtained from the editor of this paper. Here you are probably mistaken; as this gentleman, having acquired his knowledge principally from colleges and books, must necessarily be imperfectly acquainted with the true genius, principles, and usages of his own countrymen; while I, on the contrary, having read a little and travelled much, am consequently somewhat better qualified than him to set you right (as your information has been egregiously incorrect) on the important objects for which you visited our country.

The report spread abroad by our tawny neighbours of the north, that the government of the United States are in the habit of paying them for their lands in treaties, or, which is the same thing, cheating them out of them altogether, is totally incorrect. It is well known that they receive from our government a stipend annually, for a given number of years, as full satisfaction for the soil, even admitting they had a good title to it. Either a blanket, a cotton shawl, or a butcher knife, though not of the most superfine kind, is surely adequate remuneration for a million of acres over which a plough has never passed. Besides, we occasionally give them a little cash for pocket money, out of pure good nature; and if they pay it back to traders authorized by the government, for whiskey at a dollar per gallon, why that is their own look-out; and if they get drunk on the aforesaid liquor, and commit assault and battery on the whites, they ought not to think hard when an army is sent out with orders to extirpate whole tribes. The evil is of their own seeking.

But I lay down the position that the aborigines of this country, have no just right to the soil. We have a book amongst us called the Bible, of great antiquity and much value, and by the precepts of which, some of the knowing ones have clearly proven (to themselves at least) that the natives, being heathens, and consequently exclude from heaven, may of right be expelled from this continent—nay, from the whole earth, by us who are the chosen favorites of heaven, and who of course are alone worthy to possess the fat things of the earth. We have moreover another book, written by one Knickerbocker of standard value, which though composed in a more recent period o time, is much more valued, and referred by our Scavans. In this invaluable work a vast body of irrefutable arguments are adduced, all which go to prove conclusively that the aborigines of this continent have (a the lawyers say) “No claim, right, no title whatever to the premises abovementioned." I regret that my present limit will not permit me to marshal before you this host of circumstances and arguments in order to convince you that the native have not, nor ever had, the shadow of claim to the soil of this continent—that therefore the government is not bound in duty to give them any thing in exchange for it—that they ought to consider all that we have given them, or agreed to give the in our treaties, as so many donations—and that we are perfectly justifiable in driving them whenever we choose to do so, not only from their present locations, but from the whole American continent. So much for the base aspersions on our character by you informants, the Arctic red men.

As to our purchasing and selling land which do not exist any where, or lands in the moon—the fact we do not pretend to deny; but clearly justify our conduct on the score, that we pay for them in funds that also have no existence—according to the old adage, “come easy go easy." If you have come amongst us a little earlier, you would have seen that all our land speculation were bottomed on Bank notes, which were any thing but money, and cost us nothing This was appropriately denominated moonshine, and was therefore a currency well adapted to pay for lands in the moon; and such traders might well be termed lunatics. This term, however, is not now used among us as one of reproach; as all our poets and lovers, to say nothing of millions besides, admit its applicability to them, and boast of the honor.

From what I have said you will perceive we are not that unjust, avaricious, and blood-thirsty people which those we have done so much to benefit have represented; and that therefore, you need not be alarmed for the safety of your nation when we shall have arrived amongst you, which, by the way, will be very shortly. We shall doubtless treat you pretty much in the same fair, humane, and religious manner in which we have treated your brother heathens, who, if different at all, are better than you—being above you on the globe, and therefore your superiors. In the first place, we shall probably offer you a few blankets, looking glasses, penknives, jewsharps, &c. &c in exchange for whole islands and continents, and if you do not see fit to accept this generous offer for lands to which, as I have shown above, you have no reasonable claim, we shall drive you from the whole at the point of the bayonet, an instrument with which you are probably yet unacquainted, but to which we shall introduce you in good time Meanwhile, as we shall be kindly packing you off very liberally to "another and a better world," we shall send a large supply of missionaries to convert you to the "true faith," (as yours is doubtless not orthodox) before giving you "he world to come" in exchange for a few dirty acres in this. This being the course we have pursued on similar occasions, we shall most likely pursue the same with you—a course in justification of which my reasoning has, I hope, convinced even yourself.
A consideration of the manner in which Capt. Symmes intends to discover your concave region—the way in which the means are to be raised—the correctness of his facts and reasoning, and the weakness of those of his opponents—together with sundry other relevant matters, I must postpone to another time, after barely premising that I am a true devotee to his theory, and the possibility of testing it by actual observations. S. R.

[Cincinnati Literary Gazette, Mar 6, 1824. p. 76]

Symmesonian, No. 3 (1824)

2007-01-05T11:08:00.000-05:00

Symmesonian, No. 3.

The reasonings of S. R. in your last, could not fail to convince me of the justice of the course adopted with respect to your Indian neighbours, and the propriety as well as probability of the same course being pursued towards the Symmesonians. I was aware that, in “extinguishing the Indian title” to lands, you always found it expedient to extinguish the Indians also; and expected no other course to be pursued towards us. But however just and proper this might be, we could never be brought to relish it heartily, and I have been endeavouring to devise some plan to avoid it. I could not discover any place to which we could make our escape, except the midplane space, where we might be employed at the blacksmith's business, at the forges of which your volcanoes are the chimnies—but this being not suited to our taste, I have relinquished the idea of it and have since discovered a plan of safety for my country, which I think will prevent the necessity of our emigration.

I observe that the British are fitting out an expedition by sea and another by land, which will undoubtedly penetrate to Symmesonia, and tho' at first I was led to fear them as enemies, I have since discovered the means of making them our friends and protectors.

I have learnt that when these people visit any foreign country, their minds are sure to be out of health and require the discharge of a great deal of ill humour before they can be recovered; this discharge generally commences by cursing the country they are in, for a d——d outlandish place, where nothing can be got fit to eat or drink, and where they have no respect shown them, on account of their being Englishmen. This checked, as it is very apt to be in this country by the resentment it excites; prevents their restoration to health and (very properly) makes them your irreconcilable enemies. But if it be encouraged by submission and flattery,—if you allow them to boast as much as they please, to tell how they have beaten the French and Spaniards at all times, and every other nation when they pleased, if in addition to this, you drink the porter they bring with them and declare it the best in the world—if you suffer them to show you how to cook your victuals, and after it is done, agree that it is the best possible mode—if you then acknowledge them to be the richest people in the world and ask to negotiate a loan from them, you will make them your firm friends, and if you wish to carry on a war against any other country they will furnish you with ships, armies, and every thing necessary, and money to pay your expenses, and if you want any thing belonging to any other people, they will rob them in order to give it to you.

I have therefore, only to instruct my countrymen as to the course they are to pursue on the arrival of the British expeditions, and after adopting it, we shall be so far from fearing any thing from this country, that we shall require of you such a course e conduct as we may please to dictate: as by stating it to be necessary to keep up the "balance of power" between the concave and convex surfaces of the globe, and by sending Symmesonian stocks to the British exchange for sale, we can not only get Great Britain, but all Europe to take up arms, and compel you to allow us whatever we please to demand.

My mind being now relieved from the fears and cares that have oppressed it ever since left home, I shall spend some time in your country, and make observations respecting such of your manners and customs as I may have opportunities of seeing, and perhaps may communicate some of them to you. I may also want some information, which I trust that you or some of your correspondents will furnish me: in return for which I shall communicate such information respecting the concave as I may think it safe to entrust you with.

[Cincinnati Literary Gazette, Mar 20, 1824. p. 90]

Google Books "Found Art"

2006-12-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

While using Google Books, I've been collecting particularly nice examples of either 1) pages scanned so badly that they become interesting as "found art" in their own right, or 2) images of non-book items, including hands, scanned with the books. There are some very peculiar pages tucked in amongst everything else there. I'm hoping to get a set of images together in the near future for a new online gallery project. If you happen to run across anything that seems likely, leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Parrington and more at UVa

2006-12-12T13:48:00.000-05:00

The American Studies program at University of Virginia has a number of nice resources on their website, including all three volumes of Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought:

Vol. I - The Colonial Mind [my students should bookmark this one now!]
Vol. II - Romantic Revolution in America
Vol. III - The Beginnings of Critical Realism

Parrington is rather old school but also very good. These volumes were one of the key influences on me at an earlier phase of my education.

While you're on the site, also check out Erastus Salisbury Field's magnificent The Historical Monument of the American Republic.

Iraq Casualty Estimates

2006-10-11T09:29:00.000-05:00

The Lancet is publishing a new study, which suggests that excess mortality in Iraq resulting from the US invasion and subsequent conflicts tops 650,000. The number is based on a survey. Iraq Body Count is currently showing a minimum figure of 43,850, based on incidents reported in major media. Check out the Wikipedia page on the earlier Lancet study for background and criticism. There is also a page there about Iraq Body Count.

"T)EAR SIR—Tn reply to the queries eoutaiiied tn YOur note of the 26th nIt.."

2006-10-05T14:41:00.000-05:00

Ah, the joys of the transitional library. Google Books, which obviously searches its "full texts" using raw OCR scans, actually returns 37 books with the phrase "T)EAR SIR." (When you do the search, it will tell you there are 50, but. . .) The full phrase, "T)EAR SIR—Tn reply to the queries eoutaiiied tn YOur note of the 26th nIt.." is from Self-paying Colonization to North America: Being a Letter to Captain John P. Kennedy by M. Wilson (A. Thom: 1848), which looks quite interesting, although at least one page-scan is entirely unreadable. That's sad, because this is a genuinely rare work.

Even more interesting is A woman's philosophy of woman; or, Woman affranchised. An answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and other modern innovators, by Madame D'Hericourt (New York: Carleton, 1864), but the copy in the Google Books archive was scanned sideways. Fortunately, this work is a little more generally accessible, and the roughly 80 pages of feminist response to Proudhon are entertaining enough that I've already scanned them and will post them as soon as they are proofread. The entire work looks worthy of web publication. It's too bad that it requires re-scanning in order to make it available.

I keep seeing commentary on the copyright issues involved with Google Books and other electronic archives. Clearly, Google has taken a rather peculiar tack in navigating those issues. By why doesn't "Google Books" + shoddy Google up a storm of criticism? Well, actually, you can try it. I'm not quite the only voice out there complaining about this stuff.

This makes me think a lot about the corporate model of the transitional, and ultimately, virtual library of the future. I work on the Libertarian Labyrinth in my spare time, with no shortage of distraction and no income resulting from the labor. And my quality control beats the corporations all to heck. What's up with that? And can we, perhaps, generalize towards a really useful, open virtual library which would serve us all?

Keywords: Libertarianism

2006-10-04T15:41:00.000-05:00

Since class members will be wrapping up their work for the semester with a response to Kevin Carson's "A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance," we need to spend a little time dealing with the two keywords: libertarian and green. Both terms are contested, and are claimed by significantly diverse political movements.

Wikipedia's disambiguation page for the term Libertarianism is useful, essentially dividing those who have claimed the term between libertarian socialist and libertarian capitalist traditions, while acknowledging that the two currents are united by a preoccupation with individual liberty. All libertarians are likely to be definable, positively, in terms of a commitment to the pursuit of equal liberty for all and some adherence to a non-aggression principle, and, negatively, in opposition to various forms of authoritarianism. That's a lot of important ideas in the mix already, many of them open to a range of interpretations.

At various margins of libertarians, you find anarchists. By itself, anarchism means nothing more than a belief that human beings can and should get along without rulers. Obviously, a commitment to anarchism is a commitment to political liberty, and it's a position individuals are unlikely to take unless they belive that human affairs can in fact be worked out between people, with a bare minimum of "government" of any kind. In fact, anarchist seem to agree on liberty, and disagree on pretty much everything else, including how to define their one key term.

Kevin Carson calls himself a "free-market anti-capitalist." It's an accurate description and a teachable scandal all at the same time. There is no contradiction involved, as long as you understand "capitalism" to be the economic system that has developed in history, rather than some abstract ideal to which actual market economies have conformed to some degree. We used to refer to "actually existing socialism," to distinguish what happened in "socialist" countries from the abstract systems they drew upon. Carson takes his inspiration from figures like Benjamin R. Tucker, who opposed existing capitalism, not by advocating communism or the like, but by calling for market forms that would be even more free. Poke around his site to see where that takes him.

When you're dealing with the rather extreme form of libertarian thought espoused by CArson, remember that it was Thomas Jefferson who said that the government governed best when it governed least, and Thoreau who took the next step and suggested it would be best to have a government which governed not at all. And remember that the potentially extreme nature of the position is why we are looking at it in this context. Taking things this far, perhaps too far, shows us something about our own commitments to liberty, tolerance, etc...

Colonial Economics and the "Land Bank Schemes"

2006-09-27T16:04:00.000-05:00

Readings:

John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630)
John Cotton, "The Divine Right to Occupy the Land" (London, 1630)
John Cotton, "On the Just Price" (1639)
"Severals relating to the Fund, Printed for divers Reasons..." (1681)
Prospectus of the Land Bank Company (1739/40) (As it originally appeared in The General Magazine)
Petition of London Merchants against the Land Bank (1741)

We're really just going to scratch the surface with this material: a couple of representative pieces of puritan economic thought, together with another cluster of texts on "land banks." But this ought to let us tackle some of the ideas that are most important in the realm of economics.

The work economics has roots that connect it to the household, a sense that is largely lost in a world where home economics appears to be a marginal offshoot of something more appropriate to the separate world of trade and commerce. Let's try to maintain some of that etymological connection, and let economics be the "science" of managing our interactions and our available resources. Let's try to keep the notion somewhat close to home. After all, most of the complicated stuff that normally associate with the term comes down, in the end, to what we have erected to meet very basic needs: food, shelter, security, etc.

Consider for a moment the situation of the New England pioneers. They lived in a face-to-face society, with few members. They had no scarcity of natural resources, but they did have a scarcity of the sorts of social resources we use to make nature readily usable by ourselves. Take a look at 17th century maps of New England. One of the famous Plymouth colony "maps" really consists of nothing more than the names of settlers, arranged around the main street. Then look at what a small speck on the continent the New England settlements were in the early 17th century. (University of Georgia has an excellent collection of colonial maps. Click on the maps to get the resizing tool to show up.) If you've ever been alone in the deep woods, you can start to get a little feel for what it must have been like to live on the edge of the virgin forest, with the North Atlantic at your back. (Check out the Plymouth Colony Archive Project for more original materials.)

As the colonists prepared to come to New England, and as they began to carve out a home, some basic economic questions arose: By what rights can we claim the land on which we will live? What degree of cooperation and mutual support is called for by our circumstances? What is a "just price" in a very limited marketplace? It was not necessarily the case that practices from England could be simply transferred, nor was it necessarily the case that simple transfer would be desirable, given other social changes the colonists wished to make.

We will return to some of these questions. . .

The three items regarding "The Fund" 1681 and the "Land Bank or Manufactory Scheme" of 174o concern a later period of colonial economics, at which point colonies and commerce had expanded a great deal. Taxes for Indian wars and government projects, as well as demands from England regarding government and economics were added to all of the transformations associated with enlarging markets, the beginnings of secularization, etc.

Once you have extended trading networks, some kind of currency is necessary. Taxes generally require the establishment of a "legal tender," a currency recognized by the government as legitimate for paying obligations. The earliest government currencies were issued against future tax debts, and given to those who did business with the government. Work for the state now and your taxes are that much reduced. This allowed colonial governments to work on credit. Precious metals were, of course, considered the best security for a solid currency, and were themselves circulated as money. But supplies of specie (gold and/or silver) were not dependable. Metals could be sold, or sent out of the colony, reducing the security and value of the currency. European nations competed over available metals, warring really, at times, in this manner.

The land bank tradition was aimed at providing a currency adequate to ordinary trade and improvement, generally alongside some form of government currency. The largely rural population suffered from shortages of currency, thanks to fluxuations in the supply of specie and various sorts of controls on the number of bills circulating which kept economic power in the hands of those with political clout. What the partisans of the land banks proposed was another form of "monetized credit." Land or other sorts of real property could be mortgaged to the Land Bank Company, and currency would be issued to the owners to the amount of some fraction of the appraised value. This is really a case of the members of the company extending secured credit to one another and formalizing the arrangement with bills of exchange and formal mortgage obligations. They would agree to accept the bills of all other members, or non-members using the land bank currency, for all transactions. Coin might be used for change. Legal tender dollars could be reserved for tax payment and trade outside the membership.

Land banks, sometimes called "mutual banks," have been pursued as a source of additional currency for rural communities into the 20th century. They have seldom had a chance to operate without government interference. Some claim that the suppression of the 1740 land bank, which involved the elder Samuel Adams (father of the famous brewer/patriot) in years of litigation, was a major contributor to revolutionary feeling in some areas.

Readings, Weeks 4 and 5

2006-09-19T09:56:00.000-05:00

God and Government:

John Cotton, Letter to Lord Say and Sele (1636).
John Winthrop, Essay Against the Power of the Church To Sit in Judgement on the Civil Magistracy (1637)
Samuel Willard, The Character of a Good Ruler (1694) [edited; note potential source biases]; biography
Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1740)

Science and Theology:

An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star (1665) [intro]
Increase Mather, Heaven's Alarm to the World (1692) [facsimile, skip intro]
from Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher: "On Comets" (1721)
Mather Bayles, The Comet (1744)
Jeremiah Newland's Verses Occasioned by the Earthquakes in the Month of November, 1755 [intro and large image]

Resources:

Signs of the Times, I: Comets - a very nice illustrated site showing puritan pamphlets
Massachusetts Historical Society Object of the Month [archives, full of great stuff]

The Dance of Science and Theology, etc

2006-09-19T09:50:00.000-05:00

We have become accustomed to thinking that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. Debates over school science curricula—to pick one recent example—play out in the mass media as if only two polar positions were possible. Without question, there are people—believers in the absolutely literal truth of the whole Bible on one end, and militantly atheistic rationalists on the other—for whom there can be no middle ground, but the vast majority of Americans do not seem to fall into either of these extreme camps. The statistics frequently quoted by both extreme camps suggest that a majority of Americans find some means to mix scientific and theological accounts in their worldviews.

One way to get at what's going on in contemporary thinking is to compare the thought of our colonial predecessors. We're fortunate to have accounts of comet activity from three generations of the descendents of our old friend John Cotton. Historians talk about a "Mather dynasty" in New England they're hardly exaggerating. Increase and Cotton Mather were both prolific writers, active observers and sharp intellects. They were important citizens as well, shaping opinion and policy.

For some, the Mathers are a name useful for conjuring up a picture of a New England gothic of witch hunts and persecutions. Members of the Cotton-Mather line participated in all the major "moral panics" that Massachusetts endured. Having noted early on the puritan mistrust of the imagination, and the in many ways profoundly rationalist character of puritan beliefs, it's a bit hard to account for the active participation of Cotton Mather, for example, in the witch trials. But even in those accounts we see a strangely "scientific" element, as when "experiments" are conducted on the bouyancy of witches.

The accounts of New England "wonders" may be opened up a bit for us by the comet accounts, in which fairly careful scientific observation, Biblical exegesis and theological speculation are mixed rather promiscuously (at least by contemporary standards.) When we read any of these accounts, we need to try to enter into a mindset which values the fruits of scientific observation, and believes that theological truths can be drawn from (or at least are intimated by) empirical study. God moves in the world according to his own principles, but those principles have something of the character of the laws of nature. They are at least partially explicable in the movements of comets, just as they are in Biblical accounts—and those accounts provide an early body of observations.

In order to shine a little more light on our current views, consider another moment in the history of the science-religion encounter. Darwin's work on evolution by natural selection reached the U.S. just as the Civil War was beginning, and its popular reception in this county was simply not separable from other developments in the country at that time. Nor was its impact separable from the various impacts of the war, which had forced the United States to confront the nature of the union, and radically rethink its terms. With so many political, economic, technological, social and emotional transformations occuring so quickly, with devastating loss of life touching nearly everyone in the nation, it's no big surprise that Darwin's theory, particularly in the simplified form of "survival of the fittest," became one of the great explanatory narratives of the post-war period. Think of the ways in which 9/11 has influenced a variety of kinds of public debate, or the ways that the Vietnam conflict shaped the '60s and '70s, and then think about how much more devastating a war at home must have been.

9/11 almost immediately led to a redefinition of "just wars," and to multiple revolutions in the realm of "due process." Consider that a "compromise" on our adherence to the Geneva Convention might be one of the more promising outcomes of the current debates on secret prisons, torture, enemy combatant status, imprisonment without charges and trials without the right to confront one's accusers. In five years, we have all learned to get used to preemptive military action and targetting killings as part of our national policy. There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of this, depending on what we think the nation stands for, and what ideas like democracy and liberty mean, but it is in many ways a radical departure from what has come before. Radical in this context means getting down to the roots of our society. (Really. The root of the word is the same as in radish.) Looking around, it is sometimes as if we had a revolution without quite being aware of it. And that, you might agree, is a risky sort of business.

Looking back, it would be interesting, having now seen a good deal of the best and worst that our colonial ancestors had to offer, to make some estimations of where and when we resemble those who came before. Is it in our generosity? In our dispassionate observations or our wild enthusiasms? In our tolerance or our intolerance? Avoiding moralism or simple, partisan solutions, I think we can do some of that analysis of our relation to our roots and traditions. It seems like too important a set of questions not to at least try.

A Look at Wikipedia

2006-09-13T14:25:00.000-05:00

Monday morning, as I was getting ready to head out the door to campus, NPR's Morning Edition aired a story about Wikipedia--mostly positive. The next day, the Wall Street Journal hosted one of their mini-debates, pitting the Wikipedia model against the traditional model of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is all over the news right now, and getting pretty good press.

That doesn't change the nature of that very strange beast.

You should always, with any research source, be prepared to double-check what you find there. That one of the basic, hard truths of research. It's why instructors demand multiple sources. It's why we think Great Ideas come out of a Great Conversation. And it is, at least theoretically, the guiding principle of Wikipedia. Lots of people pooling their knowledge ought to be better able to sort out the facts more effectively than a single expert. Research takes time, and each of us only have some much of that commodity. I'm more than a bit obsessive about my research, as the minutia and apparent trivia on my other blog might suggest. I put in long hours, and there are never, ever enough hours to get through the thing you need to read to understand the thing your were reading in order to figure out what to read next to translate that section of something you need to get through to finish a paragraph in an article you should have sent off a week ago. That's another hard truth. One of the most valuable resources I have as a scholar is other scholars and enthusiasts who can double-check me at times. So Wikipedia ought to be a huge help, since there are many, many enthusiasts out there working away, sifting facts. But that's not quite the way it works out.

Last April, I checked the state of the entry on William B. Greene (1819-1878), about whom I am currently writing a book. It was pretty awful. As I reported at the time:

the William Batchelder Greene page (as it then appeared) was full of incorrect facts and included a long quotation, attributed to Greene, that was actually by the editors of the 1946 Indian edition of Mutual Banking (later reprinted by Gordon Press.) There was not a single error on the page that I couldn't source by Wikipedia standards, and some of you have been around long enough to remember when I had the widely-reported-but-incorrect birth-year of 1818 (not, correctly, 1819) prominently displayed in the URL for my main Greene page.

Most of the work, which was good as far as it went, had been done by an editor (or groups of editors, perhaps, using a single account) who was otherwise known for controversial and combatative practices. I was aware of this fact, so I added an explanation to the "talk page" for the entry, explaining and partially sourcing my changes. And that was that. There were no subsequent reverts or edit wars. And the entry remains just as it has been since, give or take a few very minor edits, mostly in the links sections. You can look at the "history page" to see the whole story, and to visit the article in any of its states.

So is this a story of Wikipedia's success or its failure? Wikipedia makes much of the ability of its editors to correct errors in Encyclopedia Britannica. But it's clear that it is subject to just the same sorts of errors. My intervention into the situation was as an expert—one of just a few experts, if there are indeed even a few, on Greene. And I haven't added to the entry since. Why? Not because I'm saving all my research for publication. I publish lots of it on my own blog. But there I know that it will not be altered by others. I take responsibility for my work, which may be wrong. If you want to dig, you can find a couple of retractions on my blog. This seems to be a case for an expert. But the other reason is that Wikipedia doesn't really know how to deal with experts.

At first glance, you might think that Wikipedia was a functioning anarchy, or something very close. Everyone contributes with no distinction except whether they can convince others that their edits are correct. Conflict resolution aims at developing consensus. Moderators rise from the ranks of the editors by a roughly meritocratic method. "Jimbo" Wales, the founder, intervenes selectively, but that is pretty much inescapable when you have your utopia running on a particular somebody's computer. In fact, what we have is a kind of planned society where the right set of rules are supposed to generate the right sorts of interactions. For an expert, the most troubling and puzzling of these is the prohibition against what Wikipedia calls original research, and the elevation of citable sources over facts. Wikipedia wants to establish some criteria for the validity of material in its entries. It would be best to aim directly for factual material, but apparently faith in the ability of the editors doesn't really extend to their ability to separate wheat from chaff in that regard. Instead, the principle relied on is citability. You can make a claim in a Wikipedia entry as long as someone else has already made in it a "reliable source." Original research appears to have been initially an awkward way to talk about crankish, ideosyncratic stuff, but Wikipedia has actually developed a rather conservative streak. It may be democratic in the realm of participation, but the arguments and opinions in the articles need to have been vetted by particular standards before they can be incorporated into the Wikipedia.

No "partisan" websites. No self-published work. But also no very specific standards regarding how professionally published works are to be compared. Wikipedia seems to prefer secondary sources to primary sources. Even when the original sources seem quite clear, they are subject to concerns about interpretation—as if secondary sources didn't also need to be interpreted.

The result is that Wikipedia has developed a pretty serious conservative streak. I'll cut you loose looking at some very controversial stuff for your midterm paper, but the problem is subtler than you're likely to believe if you look at the really controversial pages. Wikipedia is stuck using the commercial criteria of publishers as a means of establishing the validity of sources—at a time when even university presses find they have to reach out for popular audiences at least as much as they can fall back on rigorous scholarly standards. (As the ex-proprietor of a recently failed bookstore, I could tell you a bit about market pressures in that business. . .) At a time when publishing is becoming less centralized—and this is after all the very phenomenon that Wikipedia is taken to be such a fine example of—they have stepped back from recognizing the value of alternative media. Their standards are narrower than scholarly standards, and narrower than the standards of the marketplace. The contradictions involved don't matter much if you just want to check a date or get a brief bio of a major figure, but they do undercut the radical claims made for the project.

Some entries to check out, to see how the process works:

While you're looking around, see what you can find about the "green" and "libertarian" constituencies to which Carson is proposing his "platform." Don't forget to look at the "talk" pages of entries to see if there are controversies.

Readings: weeks 2 and 3

2006-09-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

I know a few folks are following this who don't have access to the syllabus, so here are the relevant readings for the last two weeks:

A Model of Christian Charity (1630)
The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647)
Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641)
Green-Libertarian Platform (2006)

Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637) (biography)
Roger Williams, from The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644)
Samuel Rutherford, from Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649)
Massachusetts anti-Quaker law (1658)
Letters of Quaker martyrs Ann Dyer and William Leddra prior to their executions (read pages 187-188, 377-387)

The Problem of Tolerance

2006-09-07T13:41:00.000-05:00

At its limits, tolerance can be explosive, deadly. In our readings about religious conflicts in colonial New England, we've seen that the stakes of differences of opinion could be raised to the point where those outside the envelope of acceptable beliefs could be banished or even killed. Remember that one of the primary sparks for the American Revolution was the passage of the "Intolerable Acts" in 1774.

We generally think of tolerance as sort of a warm, fuzzy affair, but its flipside, intolerance, suddenly takes us into an entirely different terrain. There comes a point when we simply can't or won't put up with whatever it is that falls across the line—and completely different rules apply.

We've been talking about the relationship between tolerance and liberty. Some things we are free to do, because the society can tolerate them. The intolerable must be prohibited. And the "must" here is probably not to strong. The truly in-tolerable is truly more than we can bear. It's not a question of choice. We can take this as a sort of first axiom:

Within a given context, the truly intolerable will be opposed or avoided.

Now, we have to figure out what that gets us. We've been talking, perhaps unavoidably, about political freedom when we talk about liberty. In the US, where we are responsible as citizens to a strong legal system, and where other factors, such as religious sects or ethnic divisions, do not have the force they do in some other parts of the world, government is probably the first place we should look for clues to the limits of our freedoms. Our government, with its Bill of Rights and related laws, does something a little different than sift behaviors and conditions into the tolerable and the intolerable. Our freedom is actually define by through categories:

that about which the government has not ruled;
acts which are explicitly forbidden by law; and
freedoms which are explicitly guaranteed by law.

The last two categories extablish the circumstances under which the government will intervene in our affairs, effectively establishing the legal limitations of our freedom. We're all well aware that laws can change, and that the underlying social standards do in fact develop. That suggests that political toleration is not the same as the more-or-less visceral sort of tolerance we've just been talking about. As often as not, we're not really talking about what we, as individuals, can tolerate, but what our institutions can tolerate. Our institutions presumably represent our collective preferences, or compromises regarding them. Hopefully, they serve to stave off the things we really can't tolerate: starvations, widespread war, disease, disasters, catastrophic environmental degradation, etc. We hope as well that they contribute to the advancement of those conditions without which human life would be nearly intolerable—conditions we tend to call liberty or freedom, sometimes equality, equity or justice. Here, however, we are in the realm of choices, hopes, ambitions and aspirations. And we find that simple tolerance, laissez faire in its purest sense, may not get us all that we hope for.

This is important stuff: we are currently confronted with potentially conflicting impulses and discourses in the world. On the one hand, we are for breaking down barriers, "freeing" trade by eliminating impediments to the free flow of goods and capital, promoting regime change in nations with repressive governments. On the other hand, we're aggressively regulating health issues, the clothes you can wear at school, the means you can choose to treat diseases in your own body. We're promoting regime change in other sovereign nations, and only half-heartedly supporting democracy in regions where we might not like the peoples' choices. And if we board an airplane, we're all assumed to be potential shoe-bombers.

Security is one of the words we use to designate what we will tolerate, the degree of uncertainty we're willing to live with. Liberty, particularly civil liberty, vs. security is something we are constantly asked to weigh in the balance.

Guaranteed liberties, with the force of government enforcement behind them, generally involve the curtailment of some other potential liberties. This isn't by any means necessarily a bad thing. There are strong arguments, like Herbert Marcuse's famous essay on Repressive Tolerance, how "tolerance" applied without any guiding standard can be indistinguishable from intolerance. (Marcuse is perhaps attempting to make his own intolerance seem more tolerant, but you'll have to decide to what degree he succeeds.) In any event, even anarchist notions of "equal liberty" generally assume that people will have to work out limits, beyond which actions should be considered invasive of others' rights, or contrary to some principle of justice. Having recognized that liberties can conflict with and constrain one another, we need some principles for bringing liberty-in-general into some sort of harmony with our need for security and our needs and preferences in the realm of tolerance.

P.-J. Proudhon famously said the "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of Order." Plenty of conservatives have said exactly the opposite. You have to work your ways towards some general principle: do you value possibility, which comes always at the cost of "the possibility of the worst" (as Jacques Derrida has said) and freedom in its most general sense, which is a politically high-risk set of circumstances, or, do you value order and security? We work this stuff out in practical terms by deciding, for example, if the freedom to fly without fear of shoe-bombs is worth the imposition of taking off our shoes every time we board. And we scan the papers for information about whether or not TSA workers are actually doing their jobs, since, if they're not, all our calculations are for naught.

We'll return to all of this, but let's start by contrasting the very simple realm of the actually intolerable with the much fuzzier business of determining our comfort levels. Think about how distance influences all of this. Think about the mediated nature of our experience. Putting aside partisan issues and patriotism for a moment, think about what 9/11, or the war in Iraq, or the more recent conflict in Lebanon actually mean to you. At the risk of asking one of those questions: How does it make you feel? And can you tell what is making you feel? Take a look at iraqbodycount.org and this Iraqi mass graves memorial. Their appeals are rather different, as is the presentation of the material on each site. Can you cut through your first impressions to think about what is being represented, and figure out how to draw your own lines around the obvious horrors represented?

Politics of Tolerance in Puritan Massachusetts

2006-09-05T11:47:00.000-05:00

The materials we are looking at this week all revolve around questions of religious tolerance, and the more extreme consequences of stepping "outside the envelope" of what could be tolerated in Puritan Massachusetts. The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647) is the classic statement in defense of intolerance. Roger Williams' writings are generally taken as the model for a more tolerant approach. (See The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution; Williams timeline) The Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations - July 15, 1663, which grew out of the Rhode Island settler's conflicts with Massachusetts, incorporates the principle of religious tolerance:

noe person within the sayd colonye, at any tyme hereafter, shall bee any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinione in matters of religion, and doe not actually disturb the civill peace of our sayd colony; but that all and everye person and persons may, from tyme to tyme, and at all tymes hereafter, freelye and fullye have and enjoye his and theire owne judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments, throughout the tract of lance hereafter mentioned. . .

That document has personal significance for me, since one of the signers was Samuell Wildbore, the first Wilbur of my line in the colonies. Samuel was disarmed and expelled from Massachusetts with Ann Hutchinson, the Dyers, etc.

It's a long way, ideologically, from the Trial of Anne Hutchinson, in 1637, to the Rhode Island Charter in 1663. Traditionally, we have talked about what happened in that span in terms of a sort of failed revolution in Massachusetts, with the revolutionaries expelled and the reign of orthodoxy in Massachusetts unbroken until two more "moral panics"—the Quaker persecutions and the witch trials— brought everyone to their senses. There's some truth to that account, but there seems to be a fascinating counter-narrative developing which suggest that the revolutionary faction may have been the ones that did the casting out. John Cotton and Anne Hutchinson were certainly radicals from the point of view of orthodox forces in the English church. Cotton was a target of Archbishop William Laud, who became infamous for his persecution of Presbyterians and others outside the mainstream of Anglicanism. But there question arises whether those who became labelled "antinomian" were really as un-orthodox as we generally suppose. There seems to be a growing consensus that Hutchinson's party represented one orthodoxy, and a fairly traditional one within puritan circles, and that the tension in the community came from their clash with another, emerging orthodoxy. Shepherd and Winthrop split with Hutchinson over very fine theological points. Look at my discussion of justification and sanctification to review some of them. What's important for us is that Hutchinson embraced a very pure and uncompromising view of the way in which one is saved. Her judges embraced a kind of limited preparationism, which means they thought that certain kinds of acts could prepare an individual to receive salvation through God's grace. There are practical consequences to your choice of positions. For example, the missionary work among the Indians undertaken by Shepherd and John Eliot would have made considerably less sense if they took Hutchinson's position. What the revisionist view of the antinomian crisis suggests is that the expulsion of Hutchinson's party marked a radical break from religious belief proper as the guiding principle of the colony, and an accomodation of beliefs with political forces. On this view, Winthrop and Shepherd were the liberals, although they were obviously still authoritarian in their application of their new orthodoxy. The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 provides an interesting contrast to the Rhode Island Charter, if we view both as in some sense liberalizing moves.

Look at the Hawthorne account below for an overview of the Quaker persecutions. Mary Dyer, one of those killed in Massachusetts for being a Quaker, is of special interest to us because she was exiled with Hutchinson. She is in many ways the symbol of this phase of Massachusetts history, and there is a statue of her just off the Boston Common, in front of the State House.

Quaker persecution and general Quaker resources:

Nathaniel Hawthorne's account from Grandfather's Chair
Earlham School or Religion, Digital Quaker Collection
Quaker Heritage press hosts a nice index of Quaker writings in print and online.

Great Ideas: Possible and Minimal Definitions

2006-08-31T12:21:00.000-05:00

Now we tackle the most difficult of our preliminary questions: What is a Great Idea?

We've already talked a bit about "greatness," but the other half of the term threatens to get at least as complicated. My big old 1919 Webster's has the following definitions:

1. An archetype or pattern; a conception of any perfection; an ideal; hence, in a less exalted sense, a preliminary or imperfect conception or construction; a plan, outline, sketch, or draft;—now usually restricted to a plan or purpose of action; an intention or design.
2. The embodying form or exemplar of a conception, person, or thing; a real likeness or representation; [etc. . . obsolete form]
3. A mental transcript, image, or picture of an object. . .
4. A mental image or notion to which there is. . .no corresponding reality. . .
5. Broadly, any object of the mind. . .; a notion, thought, or mental impression. . .
6. A general notion. . .
7. A belief, opinion, or doctrine. . .
. . .
9. Idea as used to express Plato's [insert original Greek], is the most celebrated word in philosophy. . .

And part of what this "most celebrated" definition contains is the notion of the idea as "form-giving cause." We'll save more specific treatments of the major philosophers of "the idea" for another day, but we'll note that the notion of the idea played a key role in the thought of Kant, Hegel and Hume as well.

There probably aren't too many surprises here, and we can expect to deal with ideas in many of these ways, but we still need to know a bit more about what kind of thing an idea is, and what kind of work it can do in the world.

Mortimer Adler, one of the prime movers behind great ideas movement, takes an interesting approach to the question. His "What Is An Idea?" is worth reading carefully, but the heart of his position is that ideas are most properly considered as "objects of thought"—and when he talks about "objects," he really intends us to think of something objective, with an existence apart from our discussions of it. He compares an idea to a wine-glass on a table, and our various understandings of the idea to observations based on viewing the glass from various positions. There is a good deal that is useful about the wine-glass metaphor. It is almost certainly the case that we can benefit from looking at most ideas "from more than one side." And the notion of a realm of ideas apart from what going on in our Great Conversation gives us one way of thinking about what the conversation is good for. But there are certainly plenty of at least potential problems with this approach. We'll have a chance to see some pretty radical changes in common understandings of ideas like "liberty." But what are we actually seeing? On Adler's model, there is an Idea of Liberty, much like the forms in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and we're much like the blind men in Saxe's "Blind Men and the Elephant" (a very nice text on tolerance) seeing what our positions and prejudices predispose us to see. The Conversation allows us to compare notes and develop a better understanding of the total nature of the thing. This assigns human understanding to a relatively humble role, of course. We do not create concepts, and our best intellectual productions must still be considered "shadows" of something existing prior to and outside of ourselves and our societies.

The egoist Max Stirner rebelled against this sort of position in The Ego and His Own. He objected to the idealization of things that human being can't grasp, and he claimed that humans were in fact help down by their devotion to the realm of spirit, and to fixed ideas or "spooks" which haunt our thinking and limit our intellectual independence. (See the section on "The Possessed" for part of that argument.) Charles S. Pierce also talked about how ideas cause us to stop thinking, in his "The Fixation of Belief."

But, back to Adler. . . Maybe Great Ideas really do have an objective existence, and we should get used to our role regarding them. What would that mean about the universe and our relation to it? Are the Great Ideas something that reside in the mind of a god? That's certainly one possibility. Another is that they are somehow "hard-wired" into into nature, or human nature. Adler believes that his 103 ideas are pretty obvious and inclusive, if you give the matter some thought. He also believes that they are a common heritage of all human beings. They don't belong to specialized disciples. In some way, they belong to humanity itself. One way of deriving a system of idea that inhere in humanity would be to try to identify innate ideas or a priori concepts. These sorts of ideas are characterized by the fact that once you grasp them, you realize that they were in some sense there all the time, and you simply can't logically claim their opposite. We can actually derive quite a few of Adler's great ideas from a few more-or-less self-evident statements. Let's start with these:

I exist.
There are others like me.
There is death.

We might say that the concept "one" was already implied in the "I" of the first statement, and that the first two give us the distinction "same/different." Add 3 and we have "something/nothing" or "one/zero." We can derive an arithmetic and an increasingly complex set of ideas regarding social relations from these starting points. And the first stages of this process are likely to seem inevitable, or nearly so, if only because there is a high probability that similarly constituted beings would develop certain fairly basic ideas from the basic facts of their existence. Some of what Adler says seems to indicate that this is part of his vision of ideas, but, if so, he seems to be giving the "objectivity" of ideas a somewhat different meaning than he did in the essay linked above.

As our idea-systems become more complicated, the inevitability of any particular concept arising from the development of the system is likely to diminish. Adler includes quite a range of ideas on his list. Take a look: do all of these look like the same kind of thing? Mathematics and oligarchy and angel—all Great Ideas, but in some ways radically different in scope and in the likely means by which they were discovered or derived.

We need to tackle a couple of issues before we can go much further. The first is to present an inter-subjective alternative to Adler's account. At the other extreme from Adler's neo-platonic approach is social construction theory, which places heavy emphasis on the growth of ideas out of human effort. From this point of view, the Great Ideas exists only because of the Great Conversation. Our physiology and environment may give us a strong push towards certain ideas, but the work is ours, and it is a work of construction and reconstruction. We would say then, regarding the apparent evolution of "liberty," that it was indeed a different thing in, say, 1865, than it was in 1620, and it was human reasoning, debate, and various kinds of social interactions that made the change. Sometimes it was outright struggle and war, as happened several times in the interval just mentioned. This view complicates things. In practical terms, it means that there is not actually one "liberty" about which we disagree on the details. Instead, there may be nearly as many ideas of liberty as there are people thinking about the matter, and we have to think in terms of hegemony or "common sense" and look for rough aggragates of opinion.

How do we choose between the models? Ask yourself which model actually corresponds both to the conditions you see around you and to your needs as a thinker and social actor within that environment. When we read, for example, Mill's "On Liberty," or Jean-Luc Nancy's The Experience of Freedom, we can expect to get a pretty clear sense of what is meant by the key terms. When the President says that our enemies "hate freedom" it isn't as clear what is meant. Our practical solutions has to be something like this: whether or not you believe there is an Idea of Liberty "out there" somewhere, you can be pretty certain that we're dealing with something a little less uniform and ideal in our daily lives. That's why I've already begun to ask you to cultivate some of the tools of the constructivists. A Great Conversation where everyone just assumes they're all talking about the same thing may end up being not so great after all.

OK. We'll come back to some of this, including some theories that assign a more forceful role to ideas. But I want to present, once again, the sort of minimal definition of a Great Idea that I would like you to keep in mind.

Great Ideas are those ideas which we, collectively, can't seem to stop thinking, or thinking about. They are the ideas that have a hold on us, in large part because we find them structuring our conversations and our institutions. They are the ideas we encounter when we try to think about ourselves, our identities, values and goals.

We can, perhaps, measure the greatness of these ideas by imagining the cost of their disappearance. What would we lose if we simply stopped thinking about freedom? Are there circumstances under which we could do without a notion of tolerance? I think, if you give it some thought, you'll find two categories of ideas without which we would be in pretty deep trouble. There are the concepts without which we would hardly be able to think at all: one/other, singular/plural, difference, self-other-relation, hierarchy, etc. Then there are the immediate social extentions of these ideas: freedom, tolerance, authority, etc. It's the second class of more-or-less necessary ideas that we will focus on.

The Great Conversation

2006-08-28T13:55:00.000-05:00

As part of the process of tackling "great ideas," we'll be doing a certain amount of meta-talking—talking about what we're talking about, and why we're talking about it in the first place, or why we're talking about it in a particular way, when we could be talking about it in so many other ways. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most inescapable one is this: "Greatness" is a "great idea."

Those of you with a little background in critical thinking should have red flags appearing in that part of your brain that marks logical flaws and fallacies. Greatness is great—isn't that a perfect example of circular reasoning? or of simply stating the obvious? And, of course, the answer is YES. But that doesn't let us escape the dilemma.

More meta-talk: what is it we think we're up to, again? Last semester, I put it like this:

Great Ideas is an interdisciplinary course intended to give students 1) some
exposure to ideas that are already considered "great" by some widely-accepted
standards, and 2) to help develop and refine the intellectual tools required to make judgments about the "greatness" of ideas and texts. The course was initially the product of faculty discussions about "the loss of cultural memory" and the troubled status of "the canon."

The term "canon" refers to works considered to be exemplary with regard to a particular culture or tradition. When you hear traditionalists talk about "The Canon" it's already assumed you should know which "Great Books" they're talking about. If you don't know, then perhaps you are lacking in basic "cultural literacy."

The faculty members whose discussions led to our course weren't really traditionalists in that sense. One of the reasons that it's hard to know exactly what
texts ought to be "canonical" these days is that there has been a lot of attention paid
in recent decades to enlarging the range of texts and ideas we choose from when we go looking for the "essential" works. The Western Canon was largely the domain of "dead white guys," and our sense of Western Culture has undoubtedly been enriched by attempts to include representative works by women, people of color, popular authors, etc. But the expansion of the canon does undoubtedly detract from the importance placed on the additions. Shakespeare or Tom Paine is no less great because we also read Elizabeth Palmer Peabody or Malcolm X, but an expanded canon in an age where the "great ideas" are arguably not as important as they
have been in other eras poses particular kinds of social problems.

I'm not going to insist that "loss of cultural memory" is our greatest problem. I will insist - over and over again, no doubt - that, to the extent that it can be managed, and managed with an eye to tolerance and justice, a shared cultural legacy does make it easier for us to talk to one another about important subjects. And, even if you oppose the values embodied in some so-called "great" works, you're probably better able to do the things you want to do in a society based (however nominally or forgetfully) on the values embodied in those "great works."

OK. I hope you recognized that there are two kinds of "greatness" being touched on here. One is received, traditional. It is also contested. Shakespeare and Plato are great because greatness in the realms of western literature and philosophy can hardly be discussed without taking them into account. If you wanted to take Shakespeare out of the high schools or colleges, you can bet you would have to have a pretty good reason why. And even this traditional greatness is not simply the product of some social conservatism. Face it: Shakespeare could really write! There is a reason so many of his bon mots have entered the English language as truisms and common sayings. But what we're really saying here is that the first kind of greatness is not separate from the second kind, which is based in an ongoing evaluation. There may come a day when Shakespeare no longer speaks to us, though it's a bit hard to imagine.

The point for us is that we need to be a bit clever about levels of discourse, right from the start. Remember, for example, that it is possible to say mediocre things about greatness. Consider that the ways in which we judge the individual greatness of individuals or ideas might well change, and yet "greatness" might still mean more or less the same thing. Practice turning this stuff over and around in your head until your get dizzy. It will help later.

Models and metaphors help to arrange things. One of our key models will be The Great Conversation. Mortimer Adler, the primary promoter of the Great Books of the Western World series, to which all Great Ideas programs owe a debt, used the phrase. A colleague of Adler's, Robert M. Hutchins, said:

The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race.

This is a pretty bold claim, and one which may raise more red flags for you. Is it really true that in the West, "everybody is to speak his mind" and "no proposition is to be left unexamined"?

This is, after all, related to our guiding question. How much freedom of thought and expression do we really tolerate?

But, back to the Conversation. If we are part of the Civilization of the Dialogue, or of the movement towards its realization, and if it is possible that that Dialogue is being neglected, then that's Big News, and bad news. The Great Conversation is, by this reading, the central work of Western Civilization, on which all institutions of freedom and progress depend.

Stakes are, apparently, high—even if we don't accept uncritically the sort of characterization that Hutchins gives to the problem.

What should we say about The Great Conversation as we get started? We'll maintain a bit of skepticism about things, but let's acknowledge that there has been, in some sense, ongoing debate about certain key human concerns for as long as humans have been debating. And this conversation is a Great Conversation because:

it has been going on all of this time;
it marks certain ideas and concerns as capable of demanding our continued attention while the world changes dramatically around them;
its outcomes have shaped our political, social and economic institutions; and
its current state helps shape our current debates.

As a working definition, let's agree that the "great ideas" are those that won't let us go, and continue to demand attention in the Great Conversation. )Adler had his list of 103 such ideas. We won't adhere slavishly to his scheme, but it is an interesting list, and you should get familiar with it.) But who is in the Great Conversation? If you and I talk about duty or dialectic, is that part of the Conversation, or do we have to be the Platos of our day to count?

The Elite answer: We can, and should, converse, but we should be guided by the best and brightest history has to offer us.
The Populist answer: Everyone has their share of wisdom to contribute, though obviously some will take their responsibility in the affair more seriously than others.
The Real-Political answer: Questions of truth, authenticity and wisdom aside, some folks make an impact and others don't. Maybe the important thing is to focus on those who are shaping the world we live in now.

How does we choose? Do we get to choose? There's probably some truth in all those perspectives.

Some views really do seem to have "stood the test of time," and we would be silly to ignore them.
However, we do live in a world where sensational journalists, bloggers with perhaps a bit too much time of their hands, and best-selling pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore have as much to do with shaping our general sense of the world as individuals more renowned for wisdom and clarity. We can't, and probably shouldn't, try to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that we don't live in the midst of an extremely complex media environment, in which all kinds of voices vie to be heard.

Let's begin to tackle all of this simply be reading carefully, and always dragging our focus back to the realm of ideas. In any event, the first step in deciding to agree or disagree with any argument ought to be understanding of the position being advanced, and the safest road to understanding is the most dispationate analysis of what is being said, what ideas are being used, etc.

Resource: Melungeon Heritage Association

2006-08-24T12:11:00.000-05:00

I've had occasion in the past to reference the Melungeons, "tri-racial isolates" of the southern US. Reports of these groups, and others such as the "Tribe of Ben Ishmael," made up an important part of the eugenics literature of the late 19th century. Some important pieces of that literature are available on the website of the Melungeon Heritage Association. (Check out the left navigation menu or click on "Tools for Research. Thanks to Terry from the Left Libertarian list for the heads-up.)

Does the Peace Sign P*ss You Off?

2006-08-24T12:04:00.000-05:00

With Laundry Day fast approaching, I'm getting down towards the bottom of the t-shirt pile, so yesterday I wore the one with the peace sign. Honestly, it's always towards the bottom of the pile, mostly because—much more than most of the genuinely inflammatory shirts I own, more, perhaps, than the one featuring Subcommandante Marcos saying "Ya Basta!" with only one finger—it seems to actively enrage people. It's a post-9/11 thing, and I more or less understand. To fight or not to fight has come to be one of those Defining Questions. While the President has recently said that disagreement about the War on Terror is not unpatriotic, peace is still a bit disreputable.

The politics of it all are one thing—and not the thing we need to talk about. What's of interest to us is the way in which ideas—war and peace, freedom, security, and tolerance, to name a few key terms—have taken on surprisingly fluid, multiple, and sometimes contradictory meanings in our culture. We need to get a handle on that issue before we can really even get around to arguing about practical politics—at least in any very useful and meaningful way.

We're going to wade into the political debates that founded the U.S., and into the events in the newspapers—and we need to keep our focus on ideas and the power they possess to help us think and communicate, to act in the world, but also the power they have to stop us short, before we've taken everything into account. The ideas of "9/11" and "the war on terror" define all Americans (which means more than just all citizens of the United States) in ways that go beyond any personal impacts the terrorist attacks had on us. Not all of those effects are entirely rational, but even the non-rational effects are ultimately explicable, if we care to grapple with them. "Honor," for instance, is important. We understand it's positive importance when, for example, we saw the pitcher for Beaverton, Oregon's little league baseball team walk to first base to shake the hand of a batter he had just "beaned." And we can understand its potential down-sides when we contemplate the phenomenon of so-called "honor killings." Honor itself, apparently, is not a uniformly good or bad thing. Neither, perhaps, is peace. (You'll be hard-put to find any positive references, for example, to "peace at any price." Go ahead and Google it.)

As you're reading the day's news, look for key ideas—and try to figure out just exactly what is being invoked when those key ideas come into play. Try reconstructing the phrases you find with a sort of conscious naivete. What could "homeland security" mean? What would it mean to accept or reject "Israel's right to exist"? What is "choice"? "collateral damage"? Is it a "ceasefire" (as in Sri Lanka and parts of the Middle East) if both sides keep fighting just a little all the time? Were we "at peace" with Iraq before the second Iraq War started. (We had, after all, been attacking targets within Iraq right along.) Did the "kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah recently differ markedly from the seizure and imprisonment of Hamas officials in the Palestinian territories a few month's before? Try to tackle this stuff as logically and dispassionately as you can. How much spin is there in the language we use, and to what extent does our familiarity with the terms prevent us from thinking further about them?

If you want a fairly extreme example of this process of asking "what could this mean?", take a look at this book chapter of mine from a few years back, where I try to figure out if "virtual community" is a good way to talk about groups on the internet.