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2003-11-30

Albion's Seed

Four British folkways in America.

Today I finished yet another book recommended by James C. Bennett in his essay the Anglosphere: The Cousins' Wars by Kevin Phillips. Before I write about that book, however, I feel the need to record my thoughts on Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer.

Both of these are massive works of historical reflection (the former is 707 pages, the latter 946). Albion's Seed is a logical precursor to The Cousins' Wars -- while to my mind much of the latter book extends Fischer's work in certain directions, Fischer's historical research elucidates Phillips' analysis.

In Albion's Seed, Fischer investigates the English and British roots of the four main emigrations to America before the Revolution:

Puritans from East Anglia to New England (1629-1641)
Cavaliers and indentured servants from Wessex and Sussex to Virginia and the Carolinas (1642-1675)
Quakers from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley (1675-1725)
Presbyterians from the Scottish-English Borderland to the Appalachians (1717-1775)

Obviously there were other emigrations: of the Dutch to the Hudson Valley before 1664; of Irish and Germans in the early to middle 1800s; of Slavs, Jews, and Scandanavians in the middle to late 1800s. But Fischer argues persuasively that these four comprise the founding cultures of America. Part of what makes his exploration so persuasive is the detailed information he provides regarding each culture's social and regional origins, religious beliefs and behaviors, speech patterns, architectural styles, family ways (including child-raising and child-naming), marriage customs, gender relations, attitudes toward elders and toward death, educational approaches, food and dress customs, ways of working and of recreation, use of time, attitudes toward wealth, division of labor, societal orders and social rankings, patterns of settlement, and relations of power -- culminating in each culture's ideas about freedom and liberty. These details are fascinating and telling, providing connections both back to various British regions and cultures and forward to our own times and the regional and cultural tensions evident throughout American history. Having lived in all but the last of Fischer's founding cultures, I can attest to their historical influence even today.

The information amassed by Fischer is deep and wide, and there is no way I can summarize 900 pages in a blog entry. The ways of living I found perhaps most telling relate to child-rearing: the intent in Puritan New England was to break the child's will for the sake of social and religious conformity in the context of town democracies; the intent in Cavalier Virginia was to bend the child's will back upon itself for the sake of a kind of Stoical leadership in the "Squirearchy" of the coastal plantations; the intent in Quaker Delaware was to enlighten the will for the sake of personal and familial fulfillment in the context of strong meetinghouse communities; the intent in the mainly Presbyterian backcountry was to build up the will for the sake of a fierce, stubborn independence in the context of the shifting, warlike culture on the frontier between civilization and chaos.

These folkways, and much else besides, led to quite distinct, and often diametrically opposed, ideas about liberty. Fischer calls the New England idea "ordered liberty" (freedom to determine the course of one's own society), at worst exemplified in the stifling, moralistic conformism that we still associate with the word "Puritan", at best in the strong town-based democracies (and suspicion of anything but local power) still evident in parts of northern New England. The Virginia idea was that of "hegemonic liberty" (freedom to rule and not be ruled), at worst exemplified in the hierarchical "Slaveocracy" that valued freedom for those at the top but not for poor white trash or black slaves, at best in the aristocratic excellence of men such as George Washington. The Quaker idea was that of "reciprocal liberty" (freedom for me and for thou), at worst exemplified in the pacifistic pursuit of commerce without regard for nation or principle, at best in a quite modern-sounding respect for all human beings to pursue their own fulfillment. The frontier idea was that of "natural liberty" (a freedom without restraints of law or custom), at worst exemplified in the violent chaos and often-emotionalistic anarchy of life beyond the reach of civilized norms, at best in eternal vigilance with regard to the sovereignty of the individual.

These ideas about liberty, which find their roots in their respective cultures in England, live on to this day in American life and even in so small and seemingly monolithic a subculture as the libertarian movement. Most economic libertarians seem to be inheritors of the East Anglian commercial culture that took root in New England: respectful of the rule of law, acknowledging a need for some forms of social order deriving from custom and community consensus, relatively unconcerned about the absolute liberty of the individual. Some libertarians, often especially those of a Randian persuasion, value liberty mainly for the sake of those at the top of the "pyramid of ability"; while none of them today would attempt to justify slavery or indentured servitude, they seem not to care about the effects of freedom on those with lower levels of talent, intelligence, or attainment. Then there is a certain kind of pacifistic libertarian, who values a studied neutrality in all wordly concerns (quite similar to that of the early Quakers). Finally, the anarchist edge of the libertarian movement cleaves to the frontier concept of natural liberty, and proudly chafes at any least restriction on the right of the individual to do as he (or she) pleases.

Is any of these strands more valuable or true than the others? I'm not prepared to say at the moment; all I know is that each strand is in large measure culturally determined, and has origins deep in English history (or even before, in the cultures of the Angles, Saxons, Scandanavians, and Scots). Libertarians, and Americans in general, would do well to understand and reflect on those origins, rather than demonize those who come from a different tradition of thinking about freedom and society. Naturally, it's more work to try to understand and seek common ground with others, instead of dismissing them as evil compromisers; sadly, it seems that all too many otherwise intelligent people can't be bothered to make the effort. But for those who can be bothered, Albion's Seed is a great place to start.

Posted on 2003-11-30 at 20:22. File under society.

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2003-11-25

IP Redux

More thoughts on intellectual property.

The other day, I received an email from Pierre Lemieux, whose essay Of French Caryatids and American Rednecks I continue to admire, and who recently added me to his links page. From his links page I found again the website of François-René Rideau (a.k.a. Faré), with whom I corresponded a number of years ago about TUNES (a project for a free, reflective computing system). It turns out that Faré has written some powerful essays on topics such as the absurdity of patents and a libertarian view on Microsoft. His thoughts on intellectual property (he calls it "information protectionism") are quite congruent with my evolved perspective. One of these days I'll write a manifesto on the importance of the public domain to creative individuals...

Posted on 2003-11-25 at 20:09. File under publicdomain.

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2003-11-24

The Second Vermont Republic

Toward secession?

Only a few American states were once independent nations. Texas and Hawaii come immediately to mind. Another is Vermont; the Vermont Republic was independent from 1777 until 1791, when it voted to join the USA. Now a former professor named Thomas Naylor is advocating the establishment of the Second Vermont Republic. More power to him! Here's to a little rebellion now and then:

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." --Thomas Jefferson

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?" --Thomas Jefferson

Posted on 2003-11-24 at 20:31. File under politics.

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The Origins of English Individualism

The culture of capitalism.

Over the weekend I finished two more books recommended by James C. Bennett in his essay the Anglosphere: The Origins of English Individualism by Alan MacFarlane, and Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. The latter is 900 pages long and deserves dedicated reflections, so first I'll write a bit about MacFarlane's book (one of many he's written: The Culture of Capitalism and The Riddle of the Modern World look especially interesting to me). MacFarlane's thesis is that the traditional Marxian-Weberian analysis of English history is wrongheaded, because England did not progress neatly from peasantry to feudalism to capitalism. As far back as historical records go, England was not a peasant society. Its customs and laws of property ownership, inheritance, work, marriage, and the like were far too individualistic (even in the twelfth century) for medieval Englishmen (and women) to qualify as peasants. Indeed, England seems to have been positively capitalistic (though pre-industrial) at a surprisingly early date. The hard facts of English history prove troublesome to those who would seek in the English experience a template for modernization in other nations, for the culture in which English industrialism grew long pre-dates modernization. Unfortunately, MacFarlane does not answer the question posed in his title, for he does not go back far enough to discern the true origins of English individualism. Do they derive from earlier Saxon cultures? From the Angles and Jutes who settled in England? From the historical mixing of Picts, Romans, Celts, Saxons, Angles, and Normans? Why was the English brew so individualistic, when each of those groups was not (seemingly) individualistic on its own? Perhaps the answers to these questions are lost in the mists of time. But one thing is certain: English culture provided a distinctive breeding ground for modern society, which has been successful not only in England but also in the farther reaches of the Anglosphere -- especially in America. But more on American culture when I get a chance to write about Albion's Seed.

Posted on 2003-11-24 at 20:19. File under society.

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2003-11-17

Ideology and Individualism

You say you want a revolution?

In The New World of the Gothic Fox by Claudio Véliz, I found the following quotation from the Christian-Marxist sociologist-priest Camilo Torres:

The revolutionary struggle cannot be carried out unless there is a complete and integrated Weltanschauung. That is why it is difficult in the contemporary Western world for this struggle to be undertaken apart from Christian and Marxist ideologies which, for all practical purposes, are the only ideologies that possess an integral Weltanschauung. And for this reason it is difficult for uncommitted persons who do not belong to one of these ideological camps to assume revolutionary leadership.

Click. All of a sudden, I see a connection here to Ayn Rand, who once said that only three places understand the world today: the Kremlin, the Vatican, and the Empire State Building (at the time, Rand's newsletter had its offices in the last-named building). Rand, too, thought that revolution requires an integrated ideology in order to succeed -- except that her revolution was a libertarian one, and her integrated Weltanschauung was her philosophy of "Objectivism". And she thought that only those committed to her philosophy could possibly provide true leadership for a libertarian revolution. (Indeed, this viewpoint suffused my own early essay Why I Am a Libertarian, with which I almost completely disagree nowadays.)

What is the source for the view that only a consistent ideology can provide the foundation for (revolutionary) progress, and the concomitant notion that only revolutionary progress is true progress? Véliz finds it in the Jesuits' revival of Thomistic ideas about coherence and order -- the idea that there is one animating principle or intention behind all phenomena. He calls this "the Summa approach". In the later Middle Ages this view "was gradually displaced in favor of an Augustinianism that asserted the independence of the will from the intellect" (92) -- an independence that Rand disputed in her computing metaphors of philosophic ideas providing the "programming" for one's emotions. Related to the decline of Thomism was the opposition of Ockham's particularism to Thomistic universalism, captured by Peter Aureolus in the phrase omnis res est se ipsa singularis et per nihil aliud ("everything is individual by virtue of itself and nothing else"). (Interestingly, Rand's strong interest in the medieval problem of universals was triggered by a conversation with a Jesuit in the 1940s; see my paper Conceptualism in Abelard and Rand.)

The Jesuits resurrected Thomism and put its hedgehog holism to use for political and cultural ends. This holism was reflected in the art and architecture produced under Jesuit influence, in which truth and beauty were integrated only if the work was a unified body. As Véliz elucidates (75):

If there was movement, it affected the whole structure, and it was illusory; reality was bound up with a solid, immovable structure in which nothing could be changed without loss; nothing could be added or subtracted because it mirrored and was constructed to serve a well-ordered world in which any change was for the worse and in which sosiego, the aloof calmness exemplified by the monarch, was a virtue.

It is a sentiment we find also in Rand (The Fountainhead, 24):

Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose.

Véliz notes further that the need to present a unified vision of life, an integrated Weltanschauung, led to "the essentially modern transformation of art, especially the visual arts, into didactic devices or, more interestingly, into propaganda" -- "the recruitment of the arts, literature, and learning into the service of the faith" (75). Or as Rand said: "Art is the technology of the soul." (Or as Stalin said: "The writer is the engineer of the human soul.")

Naturally it can be objected that Rand was an atheist adamantly opposed to religious belief; yet even her prototypical hero Howard Roark is described by the author as "religious in his own way". Rand's faith was a secular "religion of man", but for all that it was no less a religion in its own way. And the religious aspects of Rand's thinking manifest themselves in the typical manner: a concern with intellectual hygiene and ideological purity, a hierarchy of philosophical insight (with mere "students of Objectivism" at the periphery and trusted leaders at the core), a belief that only those who are fully committed to her own system are worthy of respect, a messianic fervor that finds release in apocalyptic visions (cf. Atlas Shrugged) and exhortations to revolutionary progress (which in Rand's view can be brought about only through a specifically philosophic revolution that will lead inevitably to a cultural and political transformation).

Verily can we attest that Rand is at root one of Isaiah Berlin's hedgehogs, who "knows one thing" (her own philosophy of Objectivism). She has only disdain for those "pragmatic" foxes who know many things; yet her philosophic absolutism blinds her to the fact that the industrial and American revolutions evolved out of the foxlike culture of England and America, that the Renaissance delighted in the particular not the universal, and that Aristotle was not the fountainhead but the summa of ancient Greece, which was exemplified by Odysseus (the "man of many ways") rather than by some integrated philosophical system.

The more I read of Rand; the more I realize that she is deeply Thomistic (even more than she is Aristotelian, and often more than she is individualistic -- there is a fascinating tension in her thought here). And the more I read of history, the more I realize that Rand's philosophical determinism is deeply wrong. Yes, ideas are important; but they are not the sole motor of the world. To assert so does violence to the central role of culture and history -- and of individuality itself.

Omnis res est se ipsa singularis et per nihil aliud.

Posted on 2003-11-17 at 21:25. File under philosophy.

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2003-11-13

Patronage

How to commission a piece of music.

Thanks to a pointer from Marginal Revolution, I just found MeetTheComposer.org, which includes "An Individual's Guide to Commissioning Music". Patronage lives! I need to tell all my composer friends.

Posted on 2003-11-13 at 22:41. File under society.

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The Gothic Fox

Further thoughts on the Anglosphere.

The other day I stopped by my local library branch and picked up a big pile of books -- specifically, the books recommended as further reading in James C. Bennett's essay the Anglosphere. While I'm reading them all in parallel, the first one I've finished is The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America by Claudio Véliz. Fascinating. Véliz compares and contrasts New World cultures that are downstream from England (mainly America, but also Canada) and those that are downstream from Iberia (the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking parts of the Western Hemisphere). The differences are legion: Protestant vs. Catholic, forward-looking vs. backward-looking, change-loving vs. change-averse, industrial vs. spiritual, common-law vs. Roman-law, and much else besides. Véliz boils these down to an application of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between hedgehogs (who know one big thing) and foxes (who know many things). The hedgehogs in this story are the Iberians (who long for the protective shade of the cathedral dome), and the foxes are the English (who are comfortable in, even foment, the chaos and creative destruction of the economic and technological bazaar that is the modern world). Well worth reading and much to reflect on. More to follow...

Posted on 2003-11-13 at 21:12. File under society.

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2003-11-11

Klue-Aid

A silly word.

In conversation with Lisa Dusseault last night, I came up with the silly word "Klue-Aid" -- the beverage that someone must drink in order to get a clue. Much more friendly than a cluebat, that's for sure, and perhaps even a gateway to drinking the Kool-Aid of true enlightenment. ;-)

Posted on 2003-11-11 at 21:01. File under language.

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2003-11-10

IETFing

Report from Minneapolis.

Just a quick hello from Minneapolis, where Joe Hildebrand and I are doing the IETF thing this week. Network access is a bit spotty, and we're awfully busy with protocol discussions and negotiations at all hours of the day and night, so I'm probably even less accessible than usual. Will try to post as possible, but no promises.

Posted on 2003-11-10 at 23:24. File under jabber.

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2003-11-05

Back

Service restored.

Thanks to the great Justin Mecham, we are back in business after the recent hackage. Expect more blogging soon.

Posted on 2003-11-05 at 22:12. File under personal.

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2003-11-02

YMBTL

Yet more blogs to like.

I just found two new blogs of interest (well, new and of interest to me, anyway):

Marginal Revolution (a co-blog on the less dismal aspects of economics, produced by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowan of George Mason University)
Belmont Club (explorations of geopolitics and the culture wars)

Posted on 2003-11-02 at 14:38. File under politics.

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Post-Capitalism

Thoughts on the means of production.

First the Anglosphere, now the end of capitalism -- that James C. Bennett provides some fascinating insights. The latter essay has a bit of that breathless tone one associates with most thinking on "the new economy" (it was written in 1998-1999), but there's much to chew on here. Bennett notes that it was Karl Marx who coined the term "capitalism", the core meaning of which involves ownership of the means of production by someone other than the workers (thus the inevitability of class conflict between the capitalists and the proletarians, at least according to Marx). What Marx did not foresee was the decline of manufacturing and industrialism as a percentage of economic activity, and the rise of the information economy (and, I might add, the service economy). Bennett makes much of the fact that in the modern information economy, the means of production are fully within the grasp of many knowledge workers ("have laptop, will travel"). This turns Marxist class theory on its head: we are all capitalists now (or, looked at another way, we are all proletarians now). Well, not all, naturally; but in certain professions, the individual worker can personally own his or her means of production. At a minimum, this applies to programmers, writers, graphic artists, musicians, researchers, and other knowledge workers. Notice that all of these workers produce "intellectual property": code, words, images, music, information, and other output that can be encoded as bits on the wire. Bennett waxes rhapsodic about the development model inherent in the open-source software community, but he pays less attention to the fact that open source is, as Eric Raymond observes, a gift economy. Unfortunately, giving things away does not help put food on the table, at least not directly. This may be why so many open-source programmers are tied in one way or another to the service economy, either as individual consultants or as employees of large service organizations such as IBM and HP (and others are still tied to the industrial or manufacturing economy, since they are supported by commercial hardware/software companies such as Sun and Jabber Inc. (!) or work by day on proprietary software that is sold as "product"). We see something similar in creative fields: writers may give talks and musicians may perform (which are essentially "services"), but they still make money the old-fashioned way by selling books and recordings (the physical manifestation of their creative output). And next to their names we still find that special little symbol: ©. Yes, it is the government enforcement of intellectual property monopolies that protects the status of those individualistic knowledge workers. How else would free-agent capitalists make a living? That is the crux of the matter (it is especially interesting to me, since just about everything I do -- protocol development, documentation, writing articles and essays and poems, composing songs and music -- is knowledge work of one kind or another). Despite all the talk of new vs. old economy, the hard fact is that any economy is based on bringing a good or service to market and being paid for it by those who value it more highly than the money they have in hand. Yet my experience in the open-source software community indicates that most people just want their free stuff. They don't want to pay for code, for docs, for assistance, or for the valuable time of the many smart and dedicated people who create all the stuff they use for free. Similarly with MP3s, weblogs, articles, research results, images, and everything else that can be encoded as bits on the wire over this wonderful thing we call the internet: people just want to download it all for free, and never give a thought to compensating the creators in any way, even if they have tipjars prominently displayed on their websites. Some would say the problem is the lack of a good system of micropayments. I say that's hogwash. We're dealing with something more fundamental than that -- we're dealing with human psychology. People simply don't like to part with their hard-earned money, and no high-minded notions of a gift economy are going to change that reality. Can we continue to expect people to create "intellectual property" if they are not compensated, or will knowledge workers eventually go on strike like the industrialists in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged? Will old forms of compensation (such as patronage) reappear, and will new forms arise, accompanied by new forms of organization and networking among creative individuals? Will knowledge workers settle for less compensation from their creative work, or will they perhaps dedicate more time to services and therefore less time to creation? The answers will vary from individual to individual, but in aggregate the actions of knowledge workers will shape future markets for intellectual creations. May you live in interesting times....

Postscript (14:13): I just noticed that Doc Searls blogged similarly yesterday, albeit in a less worried tone. His conclusion: that everyone involved in creative markets -- each writer, musician, artist, coder, retailer, intermediary -- needs to learn how to work in the electronic tsunami of free information and networked markets, then take advantage of new opportunities therein (such as TidBITS perhaps). "Just 'cuz it's new water doesn't mean you can't learn how to swim in it." As always, Doc rocks.

Posted on 2003-11-02 at 10:56. File under politics.

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Crackers

Picking up the pieces.

The machine that hosts my website was cracked recently, and my friend Justin Mecham is still picking up the pieces. For recent weblog entries, go back to last month.

Posted on 2003-11-02 at 09:12. File under personal.

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