America at 250.
Of course, it’s a sad story.
It’s an Epitome story. The farthest reach, the greatest extent.
. . . of problematic civilizational trajectories.
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Jefferson, 1776: His original vision was of smallholdings; within a confederation of decentralized sovereignties.
But after independence was achieved, the potential for a new country with vast resources to become a Great Power became the irresistible vision.
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Early human groupings depended upon collective cohesion and thus resisted individual Wealth and individual Power. But human cleverness and capability enabled the development of collective control of habitat environment (vide: pyrotechnology to actively shape local ecosystems) and collective power indicated by the creation of megalithic structures.
Agriculture, involving the general clearing of “pests” and “weeds” from the land, was a watershed in regard to control. Then, with individual ownership of the produce of the land came individual Wealth. Then the emergence of wealth/power elites.
Control, Wealth, and Power became cultural values (or, at least, cultural norms).
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By 1790 the Hamiltonian vision for America to become a Great Power started to become prevalent. It wasn’t long until Jefferson et. al. got onboard. Thoreau, a generation or two later, was a notable but ineffectual resistor.
On the basis of vast resources harnessed within, exploited by an aggressive socio-economic megamachine, the United States developed into the most powerful and dominant imperium in world history.
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Toward the Greening of America.
“Greening” means rejuvenation/regeneration by attaining cultural sophistication and ecological awareness. It involves a Great Turning away from civilizational trajectories that date back to the emergence of states and empires.
States and empires as the manifestations of Control, Wealth, and Power. America as the Epitome. Hard for the populace to resist; but geopolitically, ecologically, and culturally horrible in consequence.
No one can say how long it will take our movement to effectuate what Edward Goldsmith called The Great U-Turn for Humanity. There’s little chance that the United States will lead the way. Sad, enervating, frustrating for us residing within the belly of the beast. But it’s our job to try to use the oversize influence of America to advance the global movement for Ecology, Extended Democracy, Social Justice, and Nonviolence.
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On the origins of the United States of America
[excerpted and adapted from a 1984 essay by Fredy Perlman, “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism”]
In the New World during the 18th century the settler-invaders on the northern continent’s eastern shore needed George of Hanover no more urgently than Lope de Aguirre [the Spanish conquistador who was active in South America] had needed Philip of Hapsburg. Or rather, the rich and powerful among the settlers needed King George’s apparatus to protect their wealth, but not to gin it. If they could organize a repressive apparatus on their own, they would not need King George at all.
Confident of their ability to launch an apparatus of their own, the colonial slave-holders, land-speculators, produce-exporters and bankers found the King’s taxes and acts intolerable. The most intolerable of the King’s acts was the act that temporarily banned unauthorized incursions into the lands of the continent’s original inhabitants. The King’s advisers had their eyes on the animal furs supplied by indigenous hunters; the revolutionary land-speculators had theirs on the hunters’ lands.
Unlike Aguirre in South America, the federated colonizers of the north succeeded in establishing their own independent repressive apparatus, and they did this by stirring up a minimum of cravings for justice; their aim was to overthrow the King’s power, not their own. Rather than rely excessively on their less fortunate fellow-settlers or backwoods squatters, not to speak of their slaves, these revolutionaries relied on mercenaries and on indispensable aid from the Bourbon monarch of France who would be overthrown a few years later by more virtuous revolutionaries.
The North American colonizers broke the traditional bonds of fealty and feudal obligation but, unlike the French, they only gradually replaced the traditional bonds with bonds of patriotism and nationhood. They were not quite a nation; their reluctant mobilization of the colonial countryside had not fused them into one, and the multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and socially divided underlying population resisted such a fusion. The new repressive apparatus was not tried and tested, and it did not command the undivided loyalty of the underlying population, which was not yet patriotic. Something else was needed. Slave-masters who had overthrown their king feared that their slaves could similarly overthrow the masters; the insurrection in Haiti made this fear less than hypothetical. And although they no longer feared being pushed into the sea by the continent’s indigenous inhabitants, the traders and speculators worried about their ability to thrust further into the continent’s interior.
The American settler-invaders had recourse to an instrument that was not, like the guillotine, a new invention, but that was just as lethal. This instrument would later be called Racism, and it would become embedded in nationalist practice. Racism, like later products of practical Americans, was a pragmatic principle; its content was not important; what mattered was the fact that it worked.
Human beings were mobilized in terms of their lowest and most superficial common denominator, and they responded. People who had abandoned their villages and families, who were forgetting their languages and losing their cultures, who were all but depleted of their sociability, were manipulated into considering their skin color a substitute for all they had lost. They were made proud of something that was neither a personal feat nor even, like language, a personal acquisition. They were fused into a nation of white men. (White women and children existed only as scalped victims, as proofs of the bestiality of the hunted prey.) The extent of the depletion is revealed by the nonentities the white men shared with each other: white blood, white thoughts, and membership in a white race. Debtors, squatters and servants, as white men, had everything in common with bankers, land speculators and plantation owners, nothing in common with Redskins, Blackskins or Yellowskins. Fused by such a principle, they could also be mobilized by it, turned into white mobs; lynch mobs, “Indian fighters.”
Racism had initially been one among several methods of mobilizing colonial armies, and although it was exploited more fully in America than it ever had been before, it did not supplant the other methods but rather supplemented them. The victims of the invading pioneers were still described as unbelievers, as heathen. But the pioneers, like the earlier Dutch, were largely Protestant Christians, and they regarded heathenism as something to be punished, not remedied. The victims also continued to be designated as savages, cannibals and primitives, but these terms, too, ceased to be diagnoses of conditions that could be remedied, and tended to become synonyms of non-white, a condition that could not be remedied. Racism was an ideology perfectly suited to a practice of enslavement and extermination.
The lynch-mob approach, the ganging-up on victims defined as inferior, appealed to bullies whose humanity was stunted and who lacked any notion of fair play. But this approach did not appeal to everyone. American businessmen, part hustlers and part confidence men, always had something for everyone. For the numerous Saint Georges with some notion of honor and great thirst for heroism, the enemy was depicted somewhat differently; for them there were nations as rich and powerful as their own in the trans-montane woodlands and on the shores of the Great Lakes.
As the celebrants of the heroic feats of imperial Spaniards had found “empires” in central Mexico and on top of the Andes, the celebrants of nationalist American heroes found [looking at the Indian tribes] nations; they transformed desperate resistances of an-archic indigenous villagers into international conspiracies masterminded by military archons such as “General Pontiac” and “General Tecumseh”; they peopled the woodlands with formidable national leaders, efficient general staffs, and armies of uncountable patriotic troops; they projected their own repressive structures into the unknown; they saw an exact copy of themselves, with all the colors reversed — something like a photographic negative. The enemy thus became an equal in terms of structure, power and aims. War against such an enemy was not only fair play; it was a dire necessity, a matter of life and death. The enemy’s other attributes — the heathenism, the savagery, the cannibalism — made the tasks of expropriating, enslaving and exterminating all the more urgent, made these feats all the more heroic.
The repertory of the American nationalist program was now more or less complete. This statement might baffle a reader who cannot see any “real nations” in the 18th century field. The United States was still a collection of multilingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural ethnicities, and the French nation had overflowed its boundaries and turned itself into a Napoleonic empire. The reader might be trying to apply a definition of a nation as an organized territory consisting of people who share a common language, religion and customs, or at least one of the three. Such a definition is not a description of the phenomenon but an apology for it, a justification. The phenomenon did not adhere to a static definition but was a dynamic process. The white blood of the American colonizers, along with the mythos of common languages, religions and customs, were mere pretexts, instruments for mobilizing armies. The culmination of the process was not an enshrinement of the commonalities, but a depletion of identities; the inhabitants of the burgeoning new nation spoke the language of capital and worshiped on the altar of the state.
