Origins

Lords and Peasants

~ John ~ 3 Comments

It’s cathartic to blame the state of the world on the current president – especially when he’s of the opposite party, and especially, if you’re liberal and the president is you-know-who.  But honest conservatives knew our problems didn’t begin with Barack Obama, and realistic progressives know their nightmares won’t end with this incumbency.  So this summer I decided to look further back.  WAY further back.

When I was in my first round of grad school, ostensibly pursuing a PhD in sociology but actually pursuing my soon-to-be spouse, I read a book called “The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World,” by Barrington Moore, Jr.  It compares the early modernizations of England, France, the US, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and India, in an effort to derive universal laws about what leads societies to become democratic or dictatorial.  A huge undertaking to write, and at 550 pages of close argument, something of a doorstop to read.  But it fundamentally changed my worldview.

Moore focused on the relationship between landowners and peasants as one fulcrum for the development of a democratic society.  In England, lords forcibly kicked peasants off the land to pasture sheep – so peasants moved to towns.  This “enclosure” movement, combined with 17th century English Civil War, broke the absolutist power of the monarchy, greatly reduced the number of people under the thumb of a rural lord, and put England on the road to parliamentary democracy.  We think of England’s democratic evolution as “peaceful”, Moore argues, only because they got their major violence out of the way in the 1600s.  The French monarchy, in contrast, kept absolute power, and French aristocrats kept absolute control over the rural peasantry.  So in order for democracy to take hold, there had to be a bloody social revolution – which there was, in 1789.  In Germany and Russia, the local aristocracy retained still tighter control over the peasants and crushed any revolts until the 20th century, leading to a socialist revolution in Russia and fascism in Germany in the 20th century.

Moore’s fundamental point – greatly oversimplified – is that you cannot have a democratic society where, in the countryside, a few people effectively control the destinies of all the others.  Call it plantation slavery, peasantry, peonage, sharecropping, latifundism, reservations, or colonization — the basic dynamic is the same.

Back in the 1960s when Moore was writing, and in the 1980s when I first read him, the book had a self-congratulatory aura, as in: “this is what we democracies did right, and all those bad dictatorships did wrong.”  But the book has sat on my shelf all these years, and I decided to take it on my summer vacation, because of my dim recollection of his chapter on the United States.  The voice of that chapter has been calling to me lately.  Not a voice of prophecy, exactly, but of prescience.

In that chapter, Moore focuses on the US Civil War as a “bourgeois revolution” imposed by one region on another, arguing that the system of plantation slavery in the antebellum South was fundamentally incompatible with the development of democracy in the United States as a whole.  Even though the war wasn’t driven by northern opposition to slavery, Moore argues that American democracy would ultimately have collapsed if the war not resulted in slavery’s abolition.  Still, the southern structure of land ownership mostly survived, after the North abandoned its Radical Reconstruction program.  As a result, southern plantation slavery morphed into a sharecropping system akin to the peonage that existed in Russia in the late 19th century, where landowners had almost complete control over the lives of sharecroppers.   The social structure of peonage sharecropping in both Russia and the United States gave rise to political movements towards “semi-reactionary dictatorship” in both countries.  Moore points out the similarities between the Ku Klux Klan and the marauding “Black Hundreds” who perpetrated pogroms on Russian peasants, even to the point of importing the American word “lynch” into the Russian lexicon.

So what do these analyses of lords and peasants have to do with today?  First, it is strikingly obvious that our most fundamental political divide, both in the US and in Europe, is between urban and rural.   Every nation’s recent electoral map now features polka dots of urban liberalism against fields of rural conservatism.   Though their current manifestations may be new, these cleavages are centuries old.

Second, the American south – and by an extension of the same logic the American west – has only comparatively recently emerged as a democratic society for people of color.  That process is far from complete, and it’s subject to reversal and retrenchment based on the same social forces that have shaped the development of democracy and dictatorship across centuries.

Third, the breakup of traditional social structure in the countryside can become an engine of democracy’s destruction, as local elites try to preserve control over land and power in the face of changing demographics.  In 16th century England, the engine of change was an invasion of sheep that converted farms to pastures and kicked the peasants off their land.  Today, the cultural squeeze comes from two directions – from immigrants changing the faces and power structures of rural communities, and from the cosmopolitan elites changing the faces and power structures of society as a whole.

The takeaway is that rural social upheaval is a fact that nobody who cares about the long-term health of democracy should ignore.  Currently, urban progressives tend to treat the concerns of rural voters with a combination of condescension and scorn – sort of an updated version of the old joke: “The peasants are revolting!  — I’ll say, they’re disgusting!”  This leaves the field wide open for conservatives to gain a monopoly on articulating rural concerns.  Concentrated media ownership enables broad zones of monolithic message saturation, stifling debate and reinforcing local power structures.  We vilify working people for failing to rise above generationally-ingrained — and cynically incited — prejudice. Stereotypes become reinforced to the point of dehumanization. This dynamic leads us in the direction of impending civil war, of city against country, state against militia, gang against Klan.  The predictable – from some perspectives even desirable — form of government to confront such a state of social breakdown is dictatorship.  Moore’s parallels between “semi-reactionary” tendencies in the US and Russia take on a curious and chilling significance.

Some might object that this 30,000-foot view fails to assign blame for the potential loss of democracy to the right or left.  But that’s actually my point.  To me the work of reversing the current slide toward tyranny is as much collaborative as partisan – one that involves more than voting Donald Trump out of office or chanting “lock her up.”  It requires new political alignments that cross the ancient cleavages dividing city and country.  This will require new ways of reaching across divides of class and color, forming new alliances, peeling back labels to find common interests beneath.  These are problems that have vexed European societies for hundreds of years.   Although the technologies of the eras are vastly different, the fundamental solution is the same – we have to look each other in the face.

Easier said than done, of course.  The question is, how?

What is my true point of beginning?

~ John ~ Leave a comment

The survey of an irregular parcel of land is said to proceed by “metes and bounds” – lengths of feet, at precise angles, defining the shape of its ground.  But from where?  A surveyor must derive, from established longitude, latitude, township and range, a universal pinpoint from which to start.  Every survey thus calls forth its “true point of beginning,” before chanting a runic round of metes and bounds, and inevitably returns there.

Every August I return with my family to a ranch in Montana.  I can’t claim to be a native.  Though I worked here one summer as a teenager, I make few physical contributions to it now.  I kill and eat a couple of trout, burn a little wood, and do my best to leave no other marks on the ground.  And yet I’m “from there,” in the sense that, every year, I begin here, and then follow the course of each year’s metes and bounds.

This is the first year since my mother’s death, and the nineteenth since my father’s.  You might say our parents are also a true point of beginning, and so were mine.  They set me out on terrains of privilege, duty, and freak occurrence that I still traverse today.  From my father, a legacy of land.  From my mother, a legacy of horse.

And now, from the late midlife of parents gone, kids mostly fledged, and a thirty-plus year marriage still standing strong, I’m about to begin again.  I’m struck by how, in our fragile, burning land, truth is increasingly defined by its negative, by what is not false.  Certainly it’s easier – safer — to decry falsity than to find truth.  To talk about actual “truth” sounds presumptuous, even arrogant perhaps.  And yet not to proceed from one’s own sense of truth is to get lost in a windy desert of argument, where one claim is as good as another, until the claims of the most powerful choke the sky and bury all the rest.

But then, to stay inside the yard of what we are convinced to be true makes for no journey at all. There’s a lot of that going around as well, as we fortify and police the boundaries of the known.  Leaving behind the enclaves of belief requires one to ask directions, trust strangers, be a guest. Sometimes, as you navigate contested ideas, you might even get shot at by your friends.  That’s where the accumulations of midlife come in handy.  At my age, a certain kind of risk is affordable.

So this year, in this blog, I’ll try to derive my own true points of beginning. From there, for my metes and bounds, I’ll just look around, and keep my eyes and heart open as I ask the way.

After Charlottesville

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I spent last Sunday reading condemnations of others’ racism after Charlottesville.  I read few investigations of self.

I’ve just returned from a road trip through Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – country I’ve traversed, and loved, for years.  Impassable red rock craters and spires.  Rigid fields of irrigated potatoes.  Windy plains evoking Mongolian steppes, dotted with antelope.

And every fifty miles or so, a town – sickening, dying, or dead.  I’ve watched these little towns over the years, stopped in their gas stations and eaten in their cafes.  I’ve seen how the movie house closed because it couldn’t afford a digital projector.  How the musty old hotel restaurant, where you could get a steak under the stare of a stuffed buffalo head, has become a Denny’s.  How a grocery store’s converted to an antique shop, as the keepsakes of a rural community bleed out through its last open orifice.  How the diner we used to stop at because of the row of pickups out front is now empty, its windows painted over with dust-covered bald eagles and American flags.  How it doesn’t take long, once the last business goes, for the buildings to bleach like bones.

Of course this is hardcore Trump country.  Businesses are festooned with “Make America Great” signs.  People’s country courtesy comes edged with resentment.  I’ve always been an outsider, and I’m still a customer.  But I’ve felt increasingly like an enemy.  This trip, a motorcyclist passing the other direction flipped us off – I guess just for our Colorado plates.

Still, even after Charlottesville, I carry these people in my heart.

It goes deeper.  My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery.  Its people faced a terrifying future.  My great-aunt wrote, in a memoir depicting our family’s struggle out of that awful shadow: “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  My great-uncle beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man refused to call him “mister.”

Outwardly, I am none of these things.  A professional, progressive Boulderite, I harbor no ideologies of racial separation or superiority. I have no trouble condemning the KKK.  But we do not live in the world of Indiana Jones, where good guys punch out cartoon Nazis.  The racism we must confront is not merely the tiki-torch variety.  It’s our own in-group out-group hard wiring, overlaid with the history, power structures and acculturation of our regional, familial, and personal roots.  By this standard, of course Donald Trump is racist.  But so am I.  When I meet a person, among the first things I notice is their race.  Also, a quick flash of wariness.  It has always been there.

The great damage wrought by Bannon and Trump is that they align such deep-rooted racism with our often legitimate sense of economic loss and cultural fear, and meld them into tribal resentment.  People thus incited do not experience themselves as haters.  What they feel is allegiance and safety.  So they deny being – or at least feeling — racist.  But the hatred and violence engendered are no less real.

Humans as a species are universally vulnerable to race-baiting like Bannon’s.  Democracy’s defenders should condemn and confront it.  But we — especially people of privilege — should also be honest about ourselves.  The therapy for racism is not righteousness.  It is understanding: of other, of self.

One morning last week we set out before dawn on Highway 50.  The Great Basin opened up ahead, a carpet of black sage stopping at silhouetted cliffs, thrusting to indistinct peaks and ridgelines and tumbling bruises of cloud, dark grey, burgundy, pink — then suddenly breaking into orange fire.  What had been a wash of soulful gloom abruptly turned every color, green, yellow, lavender, each proclaiming its particular self.  Oncoming headlights faded to twinkles, like morning stars.  Mary Chapin Carpenter crooned:

Oh my darling, oh my love,
The things that we are made of.