We find ourselves confronting an ancient madness inseparable from American sensibility.
Men are born for games . . . Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they in here in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
-- Judge Holden,
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
As a people we are creeping ever closer into believing in the natural isolation of human beings, to deny the very existence of responsibility towards each other and replace it with a deep sense of natural animosity.
From an early age, we are conditioned to falsely view medieval and early modern history with two biases irrevocably bound to American culture, that of the Protestants of the Reformation and early Modern era, and capitalism which rose during the same period. According to Richard Hooker at Washington State University, after the St. Bartholomew Massacre, Protestants, "no longer viewed Catholicism as a misguided church, but as the force of the devil itself." Consequently we may forget that Europe's religious intolerance only grew worse after the Reformation, circa the Thirty Years War of the 1600s, the Witch Trials, and the mass murder of Indians and Jews by Catholic and Protestant hands. Protestantism implicitly demands we, the historically protestant Americans, believe that times before the Reformation were the most oppressive in terms of individual lifestyle. What's more, our capitalist belief requires that we see with horror the lack of choice, consumer and personal in old Europe. After all, you couldn't just up and change your profession--except in Russia if you wanted to wander off to the steppe.
But when does this criticism become excessive? Here's an example of what-we-think-we-know about old social order than 1500s Moscow, with its Tsars and peasants. Geoffrey Hosking's Russia and the Russians: A History on the expansion of Muscovy (Muscow) in the 16th century during the reigns of Ivan III and Vasilii III:
The Muscovite political system represented in reality (though not in its symbolism) a compromise between the grand prince and his principle noble servitors. It is worth stressing this, since both contemporaries and historians have given the impression that by the sixteenth century the grand prince/tsar was an absolute autocrat, able to have his lightest whim obeyed throughout his realm... [Richard] Pipes [wrongly] construed it as a uniquely oppressive form of absolute monarchy, in which there is no distrinction between sovereignty and ownership, so that the monarch's subjects are literally his slaves.
It is true that the Russia term for the state, gosudarstvo, means literally "lordship," and so does not distinguish ownership from political authority. All the same, Pipes's understanding seems to me to rest on a misinterpretation of the term votchina, which Pipes translates as dominium, in the Roman sense of "absolute ownership excluding all other appropriation and involving the right to use, abuse and destroy at will." Actually the holder of a votchina had no such rights, especially not those of abusing or destroying. He was bound by a whole range of obligations to use the land to the benefit of this family, and the peasants who lived on it had certain customary expectations too. In general the concept of ownership was much more diffuse in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Muscovy than it became in later centuries, and was compatible with multiple intersecting rights."
...The term votchina, in short, was a complex concept and cannot simply be equated with freehold ownership. It was part of a religious, moral and customary order, one which lacked the explicit legal and institutional underpinning that characterized, say, French feudalism at its higher levels, but still one which had its own accepted restraints.
General medieval traits:
- a profound sense of place in the world spiritually, the importance of which cannot be understated because it did psychologically restrict what rulers generally could imagine about their power. (Natural law in the west)
- economically, a legal access for virtually all to what we call the commons, something so profound that the loss of it has troubled economists, historians and activists ever since. In the common land held by a steward such as a king or lord, all people accessed pasture or cropland that was a biblical right as children of God. It was only the place for the hierarchy to steward it.
Noblese oblige: do the rich today have to patron? Do their children enter service for the tsar or country? Do they have to do anything other than pay a very low nominal tax which in reality is often evaded and usually far less in actual consequence?
What we have in more recent times is far gorier, far more terrifying in a way, because the Russia of Hosking's book is a land of villages where the values of mir and pravda (a sort of righteousness and truth, respectively) are not mere religious code but vital to the survival of small groups of agricultural people facing harsh, snowy winters and hot but short summers. Instead we descend from Cormac McCarthy's wild west, exemplified in his 1985 novel Blood Meridian and its savage Judge Holden, Indian hunter, a literary descendent of Captain Ahab. McCarthy's novel features Southern whites, free blacks, Indians and Mexicans all treating each other with the brutality, racial prejudice and verbal hatred we all know did happen in American history, condensed into a kind of apocalypse of the plains, endless massacre after another:
With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight -- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.
A world where all are alone utterly, no king and no master but each man who rides loaded and ready to fight down to his last finger. As with the Russian freedom to move east into Siberia and survive on mushrooms and game, it is an American tradition to head west physically or mentally into a state of conflict, conquest and creation.
This is the world of the Tea Party. Inherent hatred and divisions, and a right not only to land and property but to do anything with it at any cost to all. Health insurance, pay-to-play fire insurance, ever-present guns, even vaccinations... all are up for grabs. Even the right to refuse education from ready and capable teachers all over this country, as written about extensively by Granny Doc over a week ago. And yes, when we strip down this movement to its essence of course it is racist, for it is descended from the history of people who left a bloody Europe, invaded bloodily a harsh frontier, scalped Indians for profit and nearly completed the greatest genocide in history.
Rather than feel hopeless in the face of something malicious that has always slept and stirred within us, we can confront the loss of deep responsibility found in American Indian cultures, European cultures, Asian-American peoples, Hawaiian culture and African-American cultures. A true sense of worth for human beings that is matched by a responsibility of us all to not harm each other--no more zero-sum games--and constraints on the rich and powerful. And furthermore, their obligation to contribute to not only a thriving and modern civilization, but one that's humane and just.
Conservatives are right that we must have a set of national values that make our nation somewhat coherent. But in the 21st century we need more than vendetta and outlaw justice.