Nowtopian

Seen on the street in San Francisco!

Almost as consistently as the Christian insistence on an unspoiled Eden from which humans have “fallen” is the notion that evil is an independent force with a will of its own. Given that common belief, it follows that there is a centuries-long project to determine where the “root” of this evil lies. The results of evil behavior, intentions, and institutions are plain to see throughout history: barbaric slavery imposed by some people on others is perhaps the most obvious. But the obliteration of countless species and lands—unique habitats wrought by creative interaction among multiple living beings over generations, is at least as shocking as the reduction of individual humans to slavery. Seeking to explain the recurrent horrors that beset the history of humanity, it’s understandable that we try to reach the ultimate cause, the best explanation, the switch that we could perhaps reverse to stop the madness.

Part of my ongoing fascination with history is finding the patterns that offer a glimmer of such explanations, even if I’m not convinced that we’ll ever settle on any one quality or institution or social dynamic that will explain everything else. Still, some recent readings, pieced together, seem to underscore a combination of money and property as compelling candidates to explain a lot about the wrong turns so-called civilization has made, going back a very long time. What follows is a peculiar trajectory through ten books that I’ve read in the past months… not atypical for this blog, but it does lead to a long post and perhaps some bewilderment about why I put these writings together under this title. By the end I hope it makes sense!

I read Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2006 Mayflower recently, after a friend gave it a strong recommendation. It’s an illuminating look at the first arriving English pilgrims, people who have been largely reduced to false clichés amid ridiculous tales of a Thanksgiving that never happened. The original Puritans were extreme religious zealots who embarked on the risky trip to North America in the early 1600s to establish a place where they could live according to their beliefs without repression. The original pilgrims recognized that they needed to make some kind of accommodations with the people who were already present when they arrived, though by fluke of fate they missed their targeted landing near the Dutch colony in Manhattan and ended up on the outer edges of Cape Cod. It turns out that preceding their arrival other European fishing fleets had visited coastal New England, and even an English raider who landed and forcibly captured some dozens of local people, carrying them off to slavery in the Caribbean. Locals were not entirely unfamiliar with Europeans, and some trade had already happened, and some had even learned some English. Disease had already decimated the population of the coast where the pilgrims landed, feeding the false sense of available land for settlement. But for my purposes here, the following quote gets to the issue at hand. Already, after one generation of complicated and fraught relations with the many tribes thriving in the area, the children of the first colonists were turning away from the religious focus of their parents to grab the opportunities they could see around them.

At the root of the trend toward town building was, Governor Bradford insisted, a growing hunger for land. For Bradford, land had been a way to create a community of Saints. For an increasing number of Pilgrims and especially for their children, land was a way to get rich. Bradford claimed that the formation of new towns was “not for want or necessity,” but “for the enriching of themselves,” and he predicted it would be “the ruin of New England.” Even Roger Williams, whose vision of an ideal community was very different from Bradford’s, shared his concern about land. Williams railed against the rise of “God Land” in New England and feared that it would become “as great with us English as God Gold was with the Spaniards.” (p. 185)

Back in England during the 1640s, King Charles I was overthrown and eventually beheaded by the religiously inspired New Model Army led by Oliver Cromwell. Some Puritans in New England returned to join the new society emerging in England at the heart of which was their own religiosity. But for Levellers and Diggers and other English radicals of that time, it was a chance to agitate for a new equality in the face of God, in defense of the commons and a common wealth. I have not delved deeply into the “Putney Debates” because they’re rather unreadable, but those public debates held over several weeks in Putney (now subsumed in London), were the opportunity in 1647 for the rank-and-file soldiers and their immediate officers of the New Model Army to debate the higher officers over the terms of the unfolding English revolution. They debated the role of commons, property, nobility, monarchy, republicanism, and more. A great many of the radicals of this period were millenarian believers in the End Times, and it was jarring when Christ did NOT return in the early 1650s, leading to the unraveling of the revolutionary fervor that carried the movement through the prior decade. By 1661 the monarchy was restored and many of the most radical agitators—some of whom had helped found Quakerism, too, during the ferment of the revolution—were in jail or already dead.

Cruising back to Emeryville after a CIIS Bay Cruise on October 5.

But the Quakers, originally partisans of the Army and the radical egalitarianism of the English revolution, turned to pacifism as a way to remove themselves from the political fray that accompanied the Restoration. And within the decade, Quakers were migrating in large numbers to the colonies in North America. William Penn was granted by King Charles II a sizable portion of land in the Delaware River Valley, north of the Chesapeake Bay, to establish the Quaker colony that eventually becomes Pennsylvania. Disputes with Maryland (and Lord Baltimore) lead Penn’s agents to seek out the Susquehannock leaders who traditionally controlled the lands on either side of the Susquehanna River that drains into the northernmost extension of the Chesapeake Bay. These same Susquehannocks were reaching the end of a ten-year period of constant war with the Virginia colony and the Maryland colony, described in eloquent detail by Matthew Kruer in his remarkable book Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Harvard University Press: 2021). The title of his book refers to the decade 1675-1685 in which a dozen conflicts raged between different indigenous cultures as well as between English colonists and surrounding societies. Various tribes became tributary to the Virginia colony or the Catholic colony in Maryland to seek protection from their vulnerability to raid and plunder from larger nearby societies, of which the most powerful in 1675 were the Susquehannas.

Continue reading The Root of All Evil