“Albion’s Seed”: Notions of liberty in the US

The eminent American historian David Hackett Fischer has written colossal tomes that are daunting to even look at. His classic Albion’s Seed makes the argument at great length that modern American culture has been fundamentally shaped by four successive waves of migrations from different parts of the British Isles. These migrations brought with them their own distinct “folkways”, which took root in particular parts of the (eastern) United States and in particular strata of society. The book is vast, but this excerpt from the book contains short summaries of the ways in which the four folkways differed on the notion of liberty. I shall summarize the four summaries here so as not to overtax my poor brain.

In Fischer’s own words:

These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World. 

The first of the migrations was that of the Puritans, from eastern England to Massachusetts in the early 17th century. Their folkway was marked by what Fischer calls “ordered liberty”, and indeed used the word “liberty” to refer to four different ideas:

• collective liberty: the ability of a community to make its own decisions
• individual liberties: particular rights granted to individuals or groups that liberated them from otherwise binding constraints
• “soul liberty”: the “freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other”.
• “freedom from the tyranny of circumstance”: guaranteeing everybody some level of protection from the worst that life could throw at them

The second migration, almost contemporaneous with the first, was that of a Royalist élite from southern  England to Virginia, who were accompanied by a large group of indentured servants. The most common notion of liberty here was a sort of “hegemonic liberty” that was available only to free-born Englishmen, which gave them not just dominion over themselves but also over others. It was thus possible to reconcile ideas of liberty with the practice of slavery in such parts.

The third was that of the Quakers from the northern Midlands of England to the mid-Atlantic, particularly around the Philadelphia area. This was a later migration than that of the Puritans, and thus exhibited a very different understanding of liberty. For the Quakers, what mattered most was “reciprocal liberty” that rested on their deep faith in “liberty of conscience”. As the Quakers had suffered greatly in England for their faith, they were willing to use the power of government to establish religious liberties in their communities in the Americas so as to prevent such tyranny from arising again. Their principle of reciprocity—fundamentally different from the Virginian Royalists’ hierarchical, hegemonic liberty—drew inspiration from the Christian Golden Rule. 

The fourth migration was that of the Scots-Irish (which seems a little bit too much of a catch-all to me, but then again I know nothing of this stuff), who came from different borderlands of Great Britain: the border between England and Scotland, the border between Northern Ireland and what is today the Republic of Ireland, and so on. These regions of the British Isles did not have strong centralized institutions, and the people living there were accustomed to “anarchic violence”. It was thus “natural” for them to bring to the Americas an abiding love of “natural liberty” accompanied by a deep mistrust of cultural outsiders. 

A quote from Niebuhr

A remarkably powerful quote from Reinhold Niebuhr, one of President Obama’s favorite thinkers and theologians, on the necessarily incomplete and imperfect nature of all human action:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

A long article from the New York Review of Books on Niebuhr’s work in international relations and on the dangers of nationalistic hubris can be read here.

On freedom, choice(s), and democracy

Snowed in, I spent all of today reading a very interesting book by Prof. Loren J. Samons II of Boston University, with a very provocative thesis. The book's not-so-subtle title, What's Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, belies its careful argument. Although the bulk of the book involves a close study of historical sources in order to examine the actual practices of the government of the Athenian polis, the author's overarching motivation is not the reassessment of contemporary perceptions of a long-extinct society merely for the sake of historical understanding. His point, rather, is to 

"present and foster criticism of modern democracy … [that is] aimed at the philosophical foundations of democracy, the popular conception of democracy, the practice of representative government through democratic elections, and the social and intellectual environment generated by democratic thought and practice in contemporary America" (p. 1). 

I hesitate to offer a summary of the book for fear of oversimplifying its complex, historically sensitive argument. Very crudely put, Prof. Samons: 

British architecture, urban planning, and decay

This is a powerful, hard-hitting essay by Theodore Dalrymple at the City Journal, describing the post-WWII destruction of Britain's stunning architectural heritage by urban planners who were high on Modernism and Brutalism and a whole lot of other "isms"s that promised utopias and kinda sorta underdelivered. Dalrymple uses his pen like a fine sword to slice and dice and skewer the grand plans of the postbellum planners. Worth reading in its entirety, but here are some quotable quotes.

On the energy with which post-war planners approached the reorganization of British cities:

"The Luftwaffe had been bungling amateurs, it turned out, compared with the town and city fathers of Britain. The Germans managed to destroy a few cities—though none utterly beyond repair, if a will to repair had existed—but the local authorities ruined practically everything, with a thoroughness that would have been admirable in a good cause."

On the typical attitudes of the planners towards the people, and on their opinion of themselves (this point is repeatedly made in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State):

"Intellectuals viewed British towns and cities as the antithesis of planning: like Topsy, they just growed. It didn’t occur to the intellectuals that these were places where successive generations, over many centuries, had produced an urban environment that had charm and was intensely social and livable, largely because those who built it had to live in what they built … [A]s rational men, the planners knew what people needed: roads and parking lots, so that they might conveniently get to and make use of their shopping and cultural centers."

A hilarious description of one such "successful" modernization project, the replacement of the library of Birmingham with a modern design:

"[T]he magnificent Victorian library of 1866 [was] pulled down in 1974 and replaced with an inverted concrete ziggurat of such ugliness and (now) dilapidation that it defies description, at least by me. Its environs serve now as a giant pissoir and, at night, as a safe haven for drunks and rapists; and thus the Albert Speers of Britain have converted the Victorian dream of municipal munificence into the nightmare of administered anomie."

Writing about the most recent architectural phase in Britain, Dalrymple notes first that people throughout the country have woken up to the necessity of protecting their architectural heritage, and that the new generation of architects is less drunk on the intoxicating wines of "ism"s, but then goes on to note:

"With few exceptions, no contemporary British architect believes that he builds sub specie aeternitatis; on the contrary, he expects what he constructs to be pulled down soon and replaced. That a building should be sound enough to last perhaps 30 years is the city council’s main demand, which is conducive neither to solidity nor to fine workmanship."

A remarkable essay, and worth reading in full, and absorbing.

States and "legibility"

I read a wonderful book by James C. Scott this summer, with the impressively long title Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book is about a lot of different things, and is difficult to summarize into one sentence, but if I simply had to do it I'd say: "The book is an examination of the systematic erosion of locally-generated, locally-relevant, practical knowledge by states over the course of time, and provides sobering historical accounts of particular schemes where human beings went too far with their efforts to superimpose a grand order from above."

Not all such efforts were entirely "bad", of course. The metric system, for instance, superseded a staggeringly diverse variety of measurement systems, each of which was relevant and usable only within a tiny locality. Undoubtedly it's far more difficult for humans to relate to an abstract measure of length like a metre than to a concrete measure like an armspan. But at the same time, this also makes trade and communication harder, especially over large distances. The metric system, imposed top-down, is equally abstract in all places and thus far more suitable for enabling trade.

But there were other cases in which such top-down efforts were not so benign in their unintended consequences.