Where power seeks better it is productive of Liberty. Where power seeks greatness it is destructive of Liberty. If we had a choice we believe we would always choose that which is productive, but history shows that we are more inclined towards destroying first …. Until we learn an alternative.
The settlement of America was more than likely always based on destruction and not just going back to the unprecedented cultural and population devastation of humans from the “Old World” coming to the “New,” but even going back to the Paleolithic Asian Immigrants and the smattering of Polynesians and Europeans who came over 10,000 years ago. The most prolific of the bunch were the PAI. The PAI are the primary genetic ancestors of what are now called Native Americans. There
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| Rule #1 Humans Need Resources Rule #2 Human Migrate |
seems to be some evidence that Polynesians reached South America and that Europeans reached North America but the consequence of their DNA seems miniscule, at least as evidence shows at this point. It was the PAI who settled the Americas maybe as far back as 20,000 years ago, or more, across land bridges that opened and closed like a slowly swinging gate. The exact timing and movement patterns is still debated by scholars, but one thing that is certain is that they were humans looking for resources to survive …. And that is the number one axiom of life. Stay alive, today, and hope to stay alive tomorrow.
In the 21st century we hardly live by that axiom, and so are not really guided by some of the ugly corollaries of that rule. In nature, humans need resources to survive and perpetuate their DNA into the next generation. The Founding Generation saw this as Nature’s greatest law, but we should also get that it is, from our perspective, nature’s most brutal truth. In nature we will do whatever is necessary to save ourselves and our DNA. We protect our children, but if we have to kill someone else’s children to do so then so be it. We glory in power and live by the creed that “might makes right.” Because it is might, power, that keeps us alive. To think that the PAI did not live this way – when necessary – is a foolish thought. To think that nomadic hunter gatherers live by the reasonable assumption to do unto others as you would have them do is nonsense. And in the migration down two continents the friction between DNA groups would have caused killing to become a routine part of existence. Nature’s great law, Power is always right.
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| One possible mapping of the PAI Migration |
Nature is never wrong and it still feeds our contemporary ambitions. I never would have thought so until the Trump phenomena, but here is a man with little talent, with no forethought and without empathy. He is correct when he says that he could shoot someone and his followers would not care. Because they perceive him as powerful, and they lust after that power in their own lives, so much so that they are willing to throw out all reason to gain power through the supposed might of their hero. Very, very human.
Through that nature of humanity that immigrants from Europe began coming to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, and as Europeans did in Central America and South America before that they did so with epic consequences. Life seeks power, and power breeds destruction, destruction brings death, and death is life. That’s not Mufasa’s circle of life, but it is the same, just not all Disney-fied. There were two different types of destruction, however, each with the same consequences, the destruction of native American life, but markedly different in their outcome for both the arriving immigrants and the meaning that America would undertake in the 18th century. Might may make right, and power may seek to destroy liberty, but reason can temper both under certain conditions, but it can’t get rid of what nature has planted.
The Chesapeake society in Virginia and Maryland and the Puritan experiments of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were founded only about a generation apart, but in the evolution of those colonial “plantations” very different cultural models developed, and ones about which we in our 21st century world should take note.
Virginia and Plymouth were similar in their founding. Both Jamestown and Plymouth were established by people without a plan and without any knowledge of what they would need to do to stay alive – other than result in what we would call the savagery of murder and pillaging. The result was death, and mostly for the colonists. The descendants of the PAI in both areas died more to disease, even before the founding of the settlements in the case of New England’s native people -- thanks to randy fishermen who brought disease to shore decades before Plymouth Rock landed on them.
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| How can you not love the murderous Pilgrims? Look at how pious they are? But I always thought the Rock was bigger. |
Most of the dying was of the immigrants themselves. Ill prepared they were always short of food. They came in search of another Aztec or Inca empire. There were more soldiers than useful people – people to grow and procure food and work the land for what it could be, for what it would become. Pilgrims came to Plymouth and Pilgrims died. Adventurers came to Jamestown and they died too. But they kept coming, especially in the case of Virginia, but even in New England, at least, that is, when the Pilgrims lost out to the better supplied and financed Big Brother Puritan colony of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Big Brother works on two levels, one the obvious connection to 1984 that posits the Puritans as tyrants (who wanted freedom?), but also because they were an older and more mature (meaning not quite as rabid) co-Calvinists like the Pilgrims. The Puritans survived by replicating cultural and economic patterns that had developed in the eastern portions of England over the centuries – the Virginians survived by replicating the new patterns of the Atlantic Economy brought to the Americas by Columbus.
The “Starving Time” of Virginia’s first decade, where most of the population died from disease, starvation (maybe a little arsenic poisoning, too) and Indian warfare was abated by tobacco. One of history’s great ironies that tobacco once stopped dying, meh. With the introduction of a cheap grade of tobacco Virginia found a place in the Atlantic market and began the industrial production of tobacco – industrial in the sense of mass production coupled with mass consumption or industrial agriculture. This method was the same as that employed on sugar “plantations” in the Caribbean, where superior breeds of tobacco were also raised. The biggest problem was labor and where to get it. Virginians, being English, held on to the English abhorrence for slavery rather than adopting African slavery as the Columbian experiment of the Caribbean had … at least for a little while.
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If you asked Arthur C. Clark. "They tried and failed?"
about the earliest English Colonies. He would reply,
"No, they tried and died." Great line from Dune.
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Even after Africans were introduced in the 16-teens, the English favored English indentured servants for the next 5 or six decades. Servants signed themselves into a limited slavery (that’s an indenture) for 5-7 years with the hopes of reaping what they sowed – in almost literal terms. Indentured laborers worked in the hopes of surviving long enough to get their own piece of land to work and become their own boss (over other servants) – something that was hardly possible for the institutionally poor peasant population that was willing to sign the indenture in the first place.
Tobacco boomed and settlers came. When England’s Revolution in the 1640s changed the lot for those who supported the ill fated monarchy, which lost that civil war – they came to holdings in Virginia. And those who supported the King had maybe lost power in England, but they could find it anew in Virginia. And find it they did with all of its destructive consequences. The Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lees, Madisons and others like the Braxtons and Randolphs and Carters who are not part of the remembered founders – they all came at this time. They came with their coats of arms and capital resources to establish the Planter Class that would rule the South for the next 300 years. Their power, in pursuit of more power, bred destruction and within a generation of their arrival the legal corpus of institutional slavery was being put on the books that only this class of people could read. Another generation later, shortly before the turn to 1700, the deed was done and race based institutional slavery had overturned the incentive based system of labor, where even the poorest immigrant could own “Myne Own Ground.” (Myne Own Ground is a fantastic and short book about an African who rose from indenture to be a well regarded planter in the 1600s -- before slavery ended that possibility)
Power replaced the possibility of small landholdings, of Liberty, with the domination of land, government, society by the Planter Class. Now the 1% (which is really estimated at about 10% but that wouldn’t resonate, would it) dominated. Nearly a century later Adam Smith, the founder of theoretical capitalism, explained the error of their ways – that the adoption of slavery is economically stupid when compared to incentive based forms. This folly was especially made true because it also bore the cleavage of race, and there is no way to “Get Out” of that. By institutionalizing race based slavery the biggest problem would ultimately not be a diminishment of economic efficiency, but rather a culture based on man’s lust to control other men, and because freedom and slavery looked different, it was easy to tell who was superior in that equation.
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| Who says labor doesn't get credit. This Planter's Tobacco label featured the reason he profited. Slaves |
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