Monthly Archives: October 2025

8th Grade Civics: Machiavelli, Watergate, and Getting Good at Being Bad(?)

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings Everyone,

This week we continued our look at Machiavelli, and paired up chapter 8 of The Prince with the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Nixon is best known for the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation during his second term in 1974. This is a fair verdict of history. However, we do well to remember that Nixon had a variety of foreign policy successes during his tenure, such as

  • Initiating a policy of detente, and the SALT treaties signed with the Soviet Union which contributed to easing the nuclear arms race.
  • Assisting in peace negotiations between Israeal and other Arab nations duirng the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
  • His historic overture to China and our opening of diplomatic relations. While we may wonder today at the ultimate legacy of our shift in China policy over the last 50 years, at the time it was a revolutionary move that likely helped hasten the end of the Cold War.

Domestically, Nixon had several initiatives that may surprise some who know him only through the prism of Watergate:

  • He started several new government agencies, such as the EPA, OSHA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
  • He took the US economy off of the gold standard
  • He reshaped financial policy by creating the Office of Management and Budget*
  • He passed the Clean Water Act

Some of these policies were popular, some not, but we cannot question that for a time he was an effective political leader and easily won reelection in 1972. But the Watergate scandal, and Nixon’s actions during the scandal, unraveled everything very quickly, and we should consider why this was the case. For that, we turned to Machiavelli’s insights about rulers who exercise “villainy.”

Machiavelli begins chapter eight of The Prince discussing two infamous rulers, and begins with Agathocles of Sicily, writing,

The son of a potter, he led a life of the utmost wickedness through all the stages of his fortune. Nevertheless, his wickedness was accompanied by such vigor of mind and body, that having joined the miltia, he rose through its grades to become praetor of Syracuse. . . . He [then] called together the people and Senate of the city, having imparted his design to fight Hamilcar the Carthaginian, . . . at a given signal had the senators and all the rich men of the city murdered, [eliminating all who could oppose him]. . . . And although he was twice beaten by Carthage and ultimately beseiged, he was able not only to defend the city, . . . but also [expand its territory into Africa] and [eventually] brought the Carthiginians to terms. In the end, he maintained his position as prince by many courageous and perilous expedients.

It cannot be called virtue to kill one’s fellow citizens, betray one’s friends, be without faith or pity, and without religion, by which methods one may indeed gain an empire but not glory.

Machiavelli goes on to cite the example of someone contemporary to his own day, who used many of the same methods as Agathocles. Later in the chapter, he continues,

Some may wonder how it came about that Agathocles, and others like him, could, after infinite treachery and crueltry, live secure for many years in their country without being conspired against by their subjects; although many others have, through their cruelty, been unable to maintain their position in times of peace, to say nothing of the uncertain times of war.

Machiavelli then answers his query, writing,

I believe this arises from the cruelties being used well or badly. “Well” used may be called those (if it is permissable to use the word of evil) which are committed once for the need of securing oneself, and which afterwards are not persisted in, but which are exchanged for methods as useful to the citizens as possible. Cruelties ill used are those which , although at first few, increase rather than diminish with time. Those who follow the former method may remedy in some measure their condition with God and man, as did Agathocles. As to the others, it is impossible for them to maintain themselves. . . . a conqueror must arrange to have all his cruelties come at once, so as not to have to resort to them every day . . .

We can first note that almost no political leader follows his advice, and indeed, in a democratic system, following his advice (supposing that one should do so, a different question entirely) becomes almost impossible. To get elected, one must promise good things, and certainly not state that one will begin their term by doing various evil deeds. To get elected, one must at least give the appearance of either a) healing the harms done by the previous leader, or b) prevent the harms that the challenger will introduce should they be elected.

The elected leader usually then enjoys a honeymoon period, an era of good feelings, where people assume the best and enjoy the change. Then, later, when the leader makes missteps, they are judged harshly for them. Among other things, these missteps go against the grain of their earlier cultivated image.

For presidents that serve two terms, the second term usually brings crisis and controversy. Truman’s second term had the Korean War, Johnson’s second term had violence in cities and the escalation in Vietnam. Nixon had Watergate, and Reagan the Iran-Contra scandal. Clinton had the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment. Bush had to face increasing difficulties and costs in Iraq, as well as the financial crash of ’08. The good feelings engendered by Obama in his first term disappeared during his second. There appears little escape from this pattern.

Perhaps one problem modern political leaders have is that they have little chance to exercise physical courage in any direct way. This limits their chances to win the favor of the people and renew their mandate, so to speak. Agathocles, for example, didn’t just take political risks that paid off, he regularly risked his own life.

Crtics of Machiavelli assert that he encouraged rulers to do evil things, or at least, gave them a pathway for doing so. This is possible, but I think we have to think more deeply about his words. Machiavelli does not say one can be a great ruler by doing evil, but q successful one. There is a difference. If one regards politics as an inevitably dirty business, then one needs to be aware of how to use the dirt. The divide, I think comes between those who think the dirt cannot be avoided, and those who think that it can. Machiavelli would tell us that the problem with modern leadership is not the dirt on their hands, but that they tell us that their hands are clean.

Dave

*I would suggest that the “throughline” for understanding both his foreign policy successes, his domestic policy initiatives, and the Watergate scandal is that of control. Nixon was not process oriented but idea oriented. He was suspicious of collaboration and had a hard time trusting others. He believed he was the one who best control events and outcomes. So, taking the economy off the gold standard gave the Fed more control over the economy, his budget reorganization put more power into the executive branch, and perhaps he created other federal agencies to extend executive power even in areas traditionally not managed by government. As for Watergate, rather than come clean at first and accept minor damage, he believed he could control the messaging and prevent problematic fallout. His miscalculation on this (in addition to his actual obstruction of justice) led to his demise.

A Culture of Victory, a Culture of Collapse

by Dave Mathwin

The evaluations of the historically minded often move like a pendulum.  I see this throughout my own life. Initially, like everyone, I thought Napoleon a great genius.  But then you think again . . . after all, he lost.  And what about what happened in Egypt, to say nothing of Russia?  And what of all those armies he beat from 1799-1809–nothing more than decrepit, out-dated Enlightenment entities destined for the trash-heap anyway.

After a while, however, I thought again and gave credit where due.  Sure, his armies were the perfect foil for the Austrians and Prussians, but he helped create the French army that formed that perfect foil.  Like any great leader he imprinted himself all over his army.  And we say that the armies he faced were bound for trash-heap only with the benefit of hindsight.  Napoleon put them there, after all.

But . . . he lost.

Writing about The Civil War comes with similar pitfalls.  As the states began to come together in the Progressive Era (ca. 1880-1920) we looked for unity and healing from our past, and we lionized Lee as a romantically doomed warrior, who nevertheless, performed heroic feats.  Lee’s generalship for that era stood second to none.  Beginning in the 1960’s historians swung the narrative.  They focused on Lee’s irascible temper, his huge losses, his weak opponents, his strategic failures at Antietam, Gettysburg, and so on.

Joseph Glatthar’s excellent General Lee’s Army brings balance back to this narrative.  He studies the army of Northern Virginia in depth and concludes51tuzkutcjl that of course, Lee was a great commander.  He helped forge a great army with a great record in the field.  He deserves much of the credit he receives.

But . . . he lost, and we do well to remember this. Lee’s ultimate defeat may well have had something to do with Lee, and the army he commanded.

Glathaar shows us how the strengths and weaknesses of Lee and his army come from the same place by looking at culture, demographics, the life of the common solider, and those directly under Lee’s command.

We do have to take into account Lee’s frequent opponent, the Union’s Army of the Potomac.  From a pure match-up standpoint, it would have been interesting to have Lee, Longstreet, and Jackson oppose Grant, Sherman, and Thomas for the duration of the conflict.  As it happened Lee only faced Grant towards the end of the war, and then Grant had to work with the Army of the Potomac, where he inherited a completely different, and vastly inferior, operational and command culture than what he worked with out west.

In  A Savage War, the authors point out that the Army of the Potomac inherited a disproportionate number of soldiers recently graduated from West Point.  A West Point education tended at that time to over-emphasize math, engineering, and organization (something that U.S. Grant lamented in his memoirs).  Such skills have their place, but should not have pride of place in officer training.  Those that drank from the firehose of this approach would inevitably give way to excessive caution. Meticulous organization takes a lot of time.  In addition, once you have built something so “pure” and pretty, one might not wish to do anything that might get it dirty. This helps explain why McClellan (tops in his class at West Point) could think himself a great general even though he couldn’t actually win a battle.  He was excellent in doing what his education, at least in the narrow sense, trained him to do.

The plodding, rigidly organized Army of the Potomac gave Lee and his men a perfect target given their particular strengths.

Glaathar points out that the men in Lee’s army fully believed in their cause and came with the strongest of motivations.  Ante-bellum southern society had the duel influences of the aristocratic planter and the Appalachian border-settlers.  Both of these cultures emphasized honor and courage.  Both of these cultures preached a vision of manliness that gave way to no one.  Letters home from top officers on down the ranks show a constant desire for combat and to prove themselves.

Lee both understood and embodied this himself.  Many other accounts of his generalship focus on his ability to psychologically assess his opposite number on the Union side and devise the proper approach accordingly.  Glaathar adds to this, showing how Lee knew how to use his men expertly.  They proved superlative in the counter-attack, and could march quickly and fight hard back-to-back.  We see this at Bull Run, in Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign, and at Chancellorsville, as at other times.

But both the aristocratic planter and border settler culture had its weaknesses, and these too had a significant impact on the war.

Organization:

Appalachian border culture emphasized freedom of initiative and eschewed “systems” like tight and itchy collars.  Lack of formal structure gives one great freedom.  But an army of tens of thousands needs tight organization to act as a unit.  Without this organization, large scale offensives could never be undertaken.

Discipline:

Many in the south seceded because they did not want to be told what to do by anyone they did not like or respect.  They tended to run hot and cold alternatively.  Sure enough, Lee had a hard time enforcing discipline.  We hear a lot about Union armies looting in the South, but Lee’s army at times looted the Virginia countryside for supplies, stole from the bodies of dead Union soldiers,** and had a hard time maintaining equipment.  Many went AWOL unexpectedly not necessarily out of cowardice but because “they felt like it.”

Honor and Ego:

The aristocratic nature of the army came through in the upper echelon of the officers.  The bickered for position and rank.  At times they disobeyed directly if they felt insulted.   Some at times seemed to prefer maintaining their honor to winning a battle.

All of these weaknesses would make coordinated action over a large distance difficult.  Perhaps this is why Lee spread out his armies in his invasion of the north in 1863.  It gave each commander more independence. But . . . when the time came for coordinated action, invariably Lee’s forces could not pull it off.

Shelby Foote wrote that, “Gettysburg was the price the South paid for having Lee command their army.”  I’m guessing that he meant at least that no one is perfect.  But I surmise that he meant more.  The weaknesses of Lee’s army, and of much of southern culture, outed themselves at that battle.   There the Confederacy fought a weaker opponent, but in ways that favored Union’s strengths.  The good ground and interior lines of the Union forces at Gettysburg played right into the laps of the North’s slower, plodding, yet more bull-headed nature.^

Lee’s 1863 invasion may have been a mistake, but he intuited correctly that the South could not win a long and protracted war.  He emphasized the Confederacy’s logistical shortcomings, but the army had cultural shortcomings as well.  Perhaps Lee had read and recalled Tocqueville’s thoughts on aristocratic and democratic societies at war.  Tocqueville comments that,

In aristocracies the military profession, being a privileged career, is held in honor even in time of peace. Men of great talents, great attainments, and great ambition embrace it; the army is in all respects on a level with the nation, and frequently above it.

We have seen, on the contrary, that among a democratic people the choicer minds of the nation are gradually drawn away from the military profession, to seek by other paths distinction, power, and especially wealth. After a long peace, and in democratic times the periods of peace are long, the army is always inferior to the country itself. In this state it is called into active service, and until war has altered it, there is danger for the country as well as for the army.

It may be remarked with surprise that in a democratic army after a long peace all the soldiers are mere boys, and all the superior officers in declining years, so that the former are wanting in experience, the latter in vigor. This is a leading cause of defeat, for the first condition of successful generalship is youth. I should not have ventured to say so if the greatest captain of modern times had not made the observation.

A long war produces upon a democratic army the same effects that a revolution produces upon a people; it breaks through regulations and allows extraordinary men to rise above the common level. Those officers whose bodies and minds have grown old in peace are removed or superannuated, or they die. In their stead a host of young men is pressing on, whose frames are already hardened, whose desires are extended and inflamed by active service. They are bent on advancement at all hazards, and perpetual advancement; they are followed by others with the same passions and desires, and after these are others, yet unlimited by aught but the size of the army. The principle of equality opens the door of ambition to all, and death provides chances for ambition. Death is constantly thinning the ranks, making vacancies, closing and opening the career of arms.

. . . An aristocratic nation that in a contest with a democratic people does not succeed in ruining the latter at the outset of the war always runs a great risk of being conquered by it.

Dave

*Interesting parallels exist between Lee and Napoleon’s armies.  Both faced stiff, rigidly organized opponents.  Both emphasized movement, speed, and capitalized on the energy and spirit of their men.  Both had great success early, but both also suffered significant setbacks as their respective wars dragged on. Each faced manpower issues, but also, their opponents got better over time and neither Napoleon or Lee made the necessary adjustments based on the improvement in their opponents.

In fairness to the Army of the Potomac, the soldiers displayed extreme courage at Fredericksburg, and were stalwart in the defense at Gettysburg.

**Many southerners decry the actions of Sherman.  Glaathar demonstrates that Lee’s army did many of the same things, albeit on a smaller, less organized scale, as Sherman’s army.  And . . . they did this not just in Pennsylvania but in Virginia as well.

^Fredericksburg might serve as a good example of these qualities, with a negative outcome.

8th Grade Civics: Machiavelli Explains Vietnam

by Dave Mathwin

This week we continued our look at the Vietnam war. The fall of South Vietnam has many causes, but given our limited time with this period, we need to try and find the “core” of why our policies and military intervention failed to prevent North Vietnam from absorbing South Vietnam.

Machiavelli’s speciality involves viewing different events through a few key principles, one of them involving how states get created and how people come to rule them.

He writes,

Those who solely by good fortune become princes from being private citizens have little trouble in rising, but much in keeping atop; they have not any difficulties on the way up, because they fly, but they have many when they reach the summit. Such are those to whom some state is given either for money or by the favour of him who bestows it; as happened to many in Greece, in the cities of Ionia and of the Hellespont, where princes were made by Darius, in order that they might hold the cities both for his security and his glory; as also were those emperors who, by the corruption of the soldiers, from being citizens came to empire. Such stand simply upon the goodwill and the fortune of him who has elevated them — two most inconstant and unstable things. Neither have they the knowledge requisite for the position; because, unless they are men of great worth and ability, it is not reasonable to expect that they should know how to command, having always lived in a private condition; besides, they cannot hold it because they have not forces which they can keep friendly and faithful.

States that rise unexpectedly, then, like all other things in nature which are born and grow rapidly, cannot have their foundations and relations with other states fixed in such a way that the first storm will not overthrow them; unless, as is said, those who unexpectedly become princes are men of so much ability that they know they have to be prepared at once to hold that which fortune has thrown into their laps, and that those foundations, which others have laid before they became princes, they must lay afterwards. 

Machiavelli goes on to cite examples of men who gain power through nepotism, such as Cesare Borgia, who demonstrated enormous energy and creative drive. Borgia had the respect of some, and the fear of most. He had many successes. And yet, as Machiavelli notes, even a man of such ability as Borgia had his power eroded almost the moment his father died. If Cesare Borgia failed, we can count on almost everyone failing in some way in such a position.

We will understand Machiavelli better if we understand his terminology, especially the word “Fortune.” For example, a person might get into Harvard not because of their achievements but because of a large contribution from their parents. A king might place his favorite in charge of a conquered province, regardless of his connection to the people there or his experience. All this would be an example of Fortune at work.

Very few places in Machiavelli’s day made political decisions via elections, so his advice may seem outdated. But if by “princes” we take “rulers” more generally that will help us understand his words more clearly.

When looking at South Vietnam, we should first realize that in many ways, the state was created by “Fortune” artificially. True, the Vietnamese people had existed for centuries, and Vietnam as a region had existed for centuries. But after the French lost control of what was then called Indochina in 1954, Vietnam was partitioned into North and South Vietnam by treaty. The US had a heavy hand in making sure this happened, and we had good reasons for doing so. We wanted to stop the spread of communism, for one (the North was basically communist controlled) and we wanted to preserve the long southern coastline for shipping, trade, and other security reasons. But South Vietnam was essentially created by “Fortune” and its president, Ngo Diem, was in power at least partly due to our influence.

Machiavelli would have said that the fall of South Vietnam 1975 had a lot to do with the circumstances of its founding in 1954. It would have taken extraordinary leadership to overcome the inherent problems involved in its somewhat artificial creation. Unfortunately, President Diem displayed some of the worst characteristics of leaders created by Fortune.

To be fair to Diem, he was an intelligent man and a staunch anti-communist. He likely also held sincere Christian beliefs. He had a real desire to see South Vietnam succeed. He showed courage in the war for independence from the French, for in eschewing both communism and colonialism, he made himself vulnerable to reprisals from both parties. He wanted a democratic Vietnam, and had well thought out ideas of how to map democracy onto Vietnamese culture and history.

Having said this, many leaders created by Fortune can forget that they did not truly earn their position. This can lead them to overconfidence, which in turn leads them to isolate themselves from the populace.* Diem made several missteps, among them

  • He was a Catholic in a largely Buddhist part of Vietnam. Historians debate the nature of his treatment of Buddhists as democratic equals, but his policies towards them failed to connect. Eventually, he ended up cracking down on the civil liberties of Buddhists.
  • He held elections, but almost certainly rigged them in his favor, or at least, significantly exaggerated the extent of his winning margins.
  • He practiced nepotism, giving family members key governmental posts. If these family members had great ability, this could have mitigated the political cost of nepotism. As it was, his family members were corrupt and unstable. One of his brothers, for example, was a professed admirer of Hitler.

When the US finally decided to withdraw its support of Diem in 1963, a successful coup attempt happened almost immediately. But one coup can lead to another, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government. After hearing about the coup Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, reportedly stated that, “I can hardly believe the Americans would be so stupid.” The North Vietnamese government wrote that,

The consequences of the 1 November coup d’état will be contrary to the calculations of the US imperialists … Diệm was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Diệm. Diệm was one of the most competent lackeys of the US imperialists. Among the anti-Communists in South Vietnam or exiled in other countries, no one has sufficient political assets and abilities to cause others to obey. Therefore, the lackey administration cannot be stabilized. The coup d’état on 1 November 1963 will not be the last.

Indeed, this unfortunately proved prescient. South Vietnam experienced many other changes in leadership over the next several years, and no regime ever had anything like stability. In such an environment, American military efforts were akin to pouring water into a sieve. South Vietnam crumbled as the US inevitably withdrew its support, and US culture crumbled as well, with the domestic and foreign scene mirroring each other in some ways.

Dave

*The story of South Vietnam partially foreshadows what happened in Afghanistan in 2001-2020. Our invasion helped install Hamid Karzai in power, and he began his term in office with significant international acclaim and support. Based on my very limited knowledge it seems to me he was a better leader than Diem, and smarter about how he tried to unite different factions. Karzai was intelligent and courageous. In time, however, his relationship with the U.S. soured, and he was accused of corruption from different facets of the Afghan and international community. Afghanistan could not maintain the momentum of the early 2000’s, and in time the Taliban returned. This quasi-democratic interregnum lasted about 20 years, roughly the same amount of time South Vietnam existed.

8th Grade Literature: Mobilis in Mobili

by Dave Mathwin

We continued with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea this week and got our first introduction to Captain Nemo.

I hope that the students in the class will not only understand the events of the stories we read, but also understand the meaning of events within the story. That is, the students will hopefully learn to see how literature can entertain them but also challenge them to potentially think and see the world differently. This means learning how to read, in the sense of learning how to discern authorial intent within the text.

So, for example, the characters of Professor Arronax, Ned Land, anmd Conseil assert that the crew of the Nautilus are “pirates” multiple times after entering the vessel. Clearly, Verne means to ask the question as to whether or not Nemo should be considered among likes of Blackbeard. The story may reject this notion, but Verne introduces it to us for a reason. He wants us to entertain the possibility.

No one questions that Captain Nemo is the most important and enigmatic character of the story. The fact that Nemo has lived on in our cultural parlance, and that his character has been adopted into other stories, shows that Verne hit the mark with his creation. Before the characters formally meet Nemo, they are introduced to his motto, another clue to its importance in unlocking the meaning of the story. Around the ship the characters see the letter “N” surrounded by the words

Mobilis in Mobili

The phrase can be translated literally as “Moving in a Moving Thing,” but is better captured more colloquially as “moving within motion,” or some also suggest, “changing within change.”

Verne could be described as a writer of popular fiction, but there is a lot to unpack in this phrase as it relates to the story.

Not coincidentally, the phrase is associated with a submarine and a crew that never touches land. They are always within water, which is continuously fluid and changing its shape. So, from a metaphysical point of view, the Nautilus and her crew must always “change within change,” but this continuous flux becomes in itself a new stasis. Land represents stability, and without land, they will need to continuously adapt. This continuous adaptation still produces recognizable patterns.

This lends insight into Nemo’s later assertion that he is bound by no law other than his own. Without the stability of land, there can be no fixed law of conduct. Yet, this continuos change does produce something resembling stability within Nemo’s personality. His law resembles that of civilization, but it still stands slightly askew, and hopefully the students will see this.

The fact that Nemo’s super submarine is called the Nautilus also reveals much. The word choice has several levels of meaning:

  • In Greek, the word nautilus means simply, “sailor.”
  • The nautilus is a sea creature within a shell. It is the sole living creature whose bony structure is in fact a shell. The submarine becomes the skin of the crew, an extension of themselves.
  • Metaphorically, the grooves of the shell spiral downward continuously, a foreshadowing of the end of the book, as well as a metaphor for Nemo’s life. Under the sea, enclosed in the sub, there would be no natural way to measure the passage of time. Without the ability to mark time, one will be in danger of not being able to discern meaning from experience.

The Nautilus offers a kind of luxury and temporary interest for the scholar, Professor Arronax. But for the more normal Ned Land, the sub is nothing more than a prison. Here again Verne wants us to consider not only if meaning requires time, but also if meaning requires stability. Is the world Nemo built enough to sustain him psychologically and morally, or will it leave Nemo only to the whims of his moods?

We will continue to explore these questions as we get into the meat of the story in the following weeks.

Dave

“The Civil War as a Theological Crisis”

by Dave Mathwin

The Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon pointed out with some ridicule that in the Arian controversy, Christianity got into a kerfuffle over the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet — the iota.  At the Council of Nicea Arians wanted the word “homoiousios,” meaning “similar substance” inserted into the creed concerning the nature of Christ.  They were comfortable thinking of Jesus in divine terms, but not as an equal to the Father in His essence.  Led by Athanasius, the orthodox contingent objected, insisting on the word “homoousious,” meaning “same substance.”

For Gibbon and other Enlightenment oriented thinkers, this all seemed too much.  Such minutiae, such trifling, would upset things so unnecessarily.  Given that Gibbon liked nothing better than a well-oiled worldly machine, he saw the controversy as so many wrenches in the works.  Of course Gibbon missed the point entirely.  The difference between viewing Christ as fully God as opposed to merely “God-like” changes one’s conception of the entire universe, creation, and history itself.  When it comes to our theological understanding, what we worship will have dramatic consequences.

I’ve always believed that understanding religious belief formed the key to understanding any event in history, be it great or small.  Often this is more easily seen in the ancient world, where religion showed on the sleeves much more so than today. But men are men, and as a man thinks, so he is (Prov. 23:7).   Mark Noll  points out the religious roots and the religious mistakes of both North and South in his excellent The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.  Noll’s analysis gets to the heart of the real differences between North and South, and shows how these religious differences formed the roots of the political disagreements that led to war.  Both sides professed belief in the authority of the Bible, and both sides reached different conclusions.  That’s obvious to anyone, but Noll’s approach shows these different interpretations came from the same source American/Enlightenment source, and that makes this brief work a real treasure.

By 1850 America experienced a deep political crisis, but astute observers of the day saw that the roots went deeper. A Protestant ethos merged nicely with Democratic principles in America quite easily.  The individual should be able to read, reason, and think for himself.  Both Protestantism and Democratic government rest on the idea that truth always has a “plain” and obvious character.  It could be argued that an agreed upon “atmosphere” of sorts existed between Protestant denominations despite their differences (Noll takes this for granted and does not argue the point).  But in 1844 both Methodist and Baptist churches (the largest in the U.S. at that time) experienced deep schisms.  A broken Church will lead to a broken nation, and leaders from the North and South predicted this. Henry Clay opined that, “this sundering of religious ties . . . I consider the greatest source of danger to our country. In 1850 John Calhoun of South Carolina warned that if the great Protestant denominations finally broke, “nothing would be left to hold the States together except force.”*  Noll writes,

If we keep in mind that it was never only a matter of interpreting individual biblical texts, but always a question of putting actively to use the authoritative Book on which the national culture of the United States had been built, then we are in a position to understand why in 1860 battles over the Bible were so important, why divergent views of providence cut so deeply, and . . . why the Civil War illuminated much about the general character of religion in America.

First, the South.

Southern arguments in defense of slavery had the advantage of simplicity and (the apparent) strict fidelity to the Biblical text.  They pointed out that . . .

  • God allowed Israel to have slavery
  • Abraham and other luminaries owned slaves
  • Jesus never condemned the institution of slavery
  • Nowhere in the epistles is slavery ever condemned.  In fact, slaves are repeatedly told to obey their masters.  Paul, after finding Onesimus, an escaped slave, has him return to Philemon.

Thus, to argue (as abolitionists often did) that anyone who practiced slavery could have nothing to do with Biblical Christianity flies in the face of the entire and obvious biblical teaching on slavery.  The case was open and shut.

Northern arguments also strove for stark clarity and simplicity.

The most common arguments usually had the following characteristics:

  • Slavery had inextricable links to tyranny and moral abuses that the ethic of the Gospel strenuously opposed
  • Slavery contradicted principles of justice, love, and mercy found throughout the Bible
  • Slavery went against the general spirit of the “brotherhood of mankind” propounded by certain texts, like Galatians 3:28.

In other words, anti-slavery arguments inevitably used first principles but tended to avoid textual rigor and so failed to deal head-on with what pro-slavery advocates said.  Furthermore, many anti-slavery arguments wedded themselves to “natural reason,” “self-evident truths,” and “republican practices” and at times relied on these ideas more than Scripture itself.  Thus, as Noll comments, “The primary reason the biblical defense of slavery remained so strong was that biblical attacks on slavery were so weak.”  Again, Noll doesn’t dispute that slavery was wrong.  His point is one rarely made, that Northern arguments against slavery had some of the same flaws as pro-slavery arguments.  Thus, the two ships were likely to pass in the night.

Much better arguments against American slavery existed from some Protestants, and interestingly, some Catholics as well. Such arguments pointed out that . . .

  • Using Israel as an example for American slavery made the mistake of conflating Israel with America, a mistake Americans had been making for generations.
  • If the South could used ancient Israel for support, they should be informed by their practices.  For one, slaves had rights in Israel, and they did not in the South.  For another, Mosaic law prescribed years of Jubilee every 7th year and again at the 50th year in which all slaves were freed and all debts canceled.  The South never practiced this.  And again, slavery in Israel was not racial, perpetual, or hereditary. The South condemned themselves by asking to be judged by the law.
  • Certain biblical principles of justice, mercy, and love certainly applied to arguments against slavery.  But these more careful Protestant and Catholic voices applied them differently than most abolitionists.  For starters, they kept such principles clear of democratic ideology — on which Scripture remains silent at least directly (and pro-slavery arguments pointed this out).  The goal for the Christian, according to these arguments, was not so much to live in light of specific texts, but in light of the flow of history itself.  If God’s Kingdom is not just coming but is already here in Christ, we have to live in light of the “now” reality of God’s Kingdom. In God’s Kingdom we will not/do not enslave one another.  Evidence exists for this not just in Scripture, but in the early history of the Church.  Christians worked to liberate slaves and medieval civilization stood as the first major civilization in history to essentially eliminate slavery.  It got reintroduced only in the Renaissance, when pagan, Roman concepts of property and ownership tragically got transported back into Europe’s bloodstream.
  • The Roman example of slavery also condemned southerners, at least to an extent.   For one, Roman slavery lacked the racial character of Southern slavery.  In one of the best chapters in the book, Noll pulls from numerous sources that show that the real problem for the South was not slavery but race.

So whatever one might say about slavery in a general vacuum, no good arguments existed for slavery as practiced by the ante-bellum South.

Unfortunately such arguments never made it into the mainstream of American cultural life.  As to why, we might assume something along the lines of a “short attention span,” but this fits modern times more readily.  In fact, audiences flocked to hear discourses and debates of all kinds in the mid 19th century. Lincoln and Douglas in 1858 spoke for many hours at a time to packed audiences.  One debate on slavery lasted for multiple hours over multiple days to an audience of several hundred.  Rather, the reason lies in the common roots shared by mainstream arguments about slavery on both sides.

The mainstream arguments for and against slavery before the Civil War had the following characteristics:

  • They involve no more than a 1-2 step reasoning process
  • They insist on the “plain” character of truth.  Neither side could be described as anti-intellectual, but arguers for both sides seemed to show an exasperation with the need to develop arguments at all.  The truth was so obvious!
  • Anti-slavery arguments relied on “simple” principle, pro-slavery arguments on isolated small texts.  Both arguments only functioned along one track, one line of thought.

Whichever side won the argument (i.e., the war), the future for having the Church influence culture looked bleak.  The Enlightenment had done its dirty work.

Subconsciously perhaps, we reject oversimplifications because reality and our experience have more complexity and mystery than the Enlightenment can fathom.  Rejecting this truth condemned us to search aimlessly for generations hence to fill the void with politics, “The American Dream,” sex, and the like.**  Obviously western theologians could and did make nuanced and complex arguments, but western culture as a whole failed to notice or heed them.

As a buttress to his observations about slavery arguments, Noll includes a section on the idea of God’s providence as debated before and after the war.  True to form, both sides found obvious answers to the results of the conflict.  For the Southerners, even their defeat showed the rightness of their cause, for “God disciplines those He loves” — i.e. — “We are experiencing discipline, showing God’s love for us, showing the rightness of our cause.  For it is often true that the godly rarely prosper in this world.”  For the North, their arguments had a simpler character, though no doubt the South would have made them had they won the war.  “We won.  God was and is on our side.   Therefore we were/are right.”  Lincoln understood better, and pushed back on this simple approach.  We may always know that God has events in His hand, he agreed, but the particular application of His providence often remains a mystery to us.  Not even someone of Lincoln’s stature could get others to embrace this more nuanced view.

Noll’s work has great value for his illumination of the state of religion in 19th century America.  What makes it even more intriguing is how he reveals what may be the central problem of American political and educational life.  Our problem really resides not in short attention spans, not in one political party or the other, not the sexual revolution, or other such movement. Rather, Americans need to grapple with how our democratic ideology meshes with the nature of truth itself.

Dave

*Noll includes some interesting statistics showing the decline of religion and growth of government.  This should not surprise us, as Calhoun (not someone I’d like to agree with very often) foretold.

  • In 1860 about 4.7 million people voted in the presidential election, but in that same year between 3-4 times that many regularly attended church  on Sundays.  In 2004, about 115 million went to the polls, which equaled the number of regular church attendees in 1860 (Noll should take into account, however, the fact that women and many minorities did not vote in 1860).
  • In 1860 the number of Methodist clergy alone equaled the number of postal workers.  Today the ratio of postal workers to Methodist clergy approximates 9-1.
  • Before mobilization in 1860 the number of active duty military was about 1/2 the number of clergy in the country.  In the early 21st century, before mobilization for the war in Iraq, the ratio of military to clergy was about 3-1.
  • In 1860 the total income of the churches and religious organizations nearly equaled the federal budget.  Today the ratio of federal income to annual religion-related giving is about 25-1.
  • In 1860 about 400 institutions of higher-learning existed, with nearly all of them run by religious groups.
  • In 1860 there were 35 churches for each bank.  Today there are four churches for each bank.

**In an interesting digression, Noll points out that warfare and dramatic social change have often produced great works of lasting theological depth.  One thinks immediately of Augustine’s The City of God, but numerous other examples exist (St. Bernard during the Crusades, and St. Francis experienced a dramatic shift after fighting in a small war.  In the modern era, Bonhoeffer comes most clearly to mind).  By that model, the Civil War should have, but failed, to produce any significant theological insight, and this reveals a thin theology throughout North and South at that time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the great storytellers of the 20th century, MacDonald, Lewis, Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy — all came from liturgical and historical traditions.  Lewis and Tolkien both fought in W.W. I, and O’Connor and Percy both suffered from lifelong illnesses.

8th Grade Literature: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings all,

This week we mostly took a break from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as students finished their rough drafts of their Song of Roland essays. In the syllabus I handed out at Orientation, I mentioned that we would be seeing two movies this year that fit with the themes of our particular unit. Both Old Man and the Sea and The Song of Roland have similar characters and ask some of the same questions. Both Roland and Santiago

  • See their life almost wholly through their job/vocation (knight and fisherman)
  • Dedicate themselves to their task with great courage, risking their life for their “calling.”
  • Avoid “thinking too much”–analysis leads to paralysis for both men. For both men, the truth of their lives comes in their actions.
  • Achieve greatness, but they could also both be accused of having too narrow a focus. They have to sacrifice a great deal to become who they are.

Our movie for this unit is Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary about the man many believe to be the greatest sushi chef in the world. His restaurant is small, nestled in the midst of a metro train stop. But foreign dignataries have come to dine at his establishment, and there is a now such a long wait list for diners that one must call long in advance to get a seat.

The movie has a great to reccomend it. It immerses one into the world of sushi and the personality of Jiro. While obviously no documentary can explore every area of anyone’s life, one gets the sense that the film captures the essence of Jiro the man. One can admire a great deal about Jiro:

  • He has worked with sushi since he was a little boy. He has no real formal training and everything he knows he gleaned from his own experience.
  • He could have easily grown rich through various means involving franchising, promotionals, etc. but he keeps a low profile. Sure, he is reasonably well off as an individual, but one immediately senses that it is not money, but the craft that drives him.
  • He has a wholehearted dedication to perfection in his craft. Only a small percentage of what he and his staff make actually gets served.
  • Critics say the key to his success is the simplicity and purity of his dedication. He serves sushi, and only sushi. There is no music, fancy lights, or even conversation in his restaurant. Nothing is there to distract from the food.

Jiro is probably more evocative of Santiago instead of Roland, but as you can see, he shares similarities with both of them. Both Hemingway and the author of The Song of Roland have a great fondness for their main characters. But their admiration for Santiago and Roland, respectively, is not uncritical. Great literature knows how to ask questions of itself. Jiro Dreams of Sushi also has great admiration for its subject. But it would not be such an influential documentary film if the movie only involved hero worship.

A closer viewing of the film reveals the costs of Jiro’s life and achievements. Like Santiago, he seems a bit of a loner. The movie shows him visiting with friends and family, but this seems added on merely as an attempt to show him as “well rounded.” Jiro does not get that gleam in his eye from visiting family. Like Roland, his dedication to his own sense of calling leaves little room for other voices. As one restaurant critic says, no truly great chef is interested in collaboration. One senses that perhaps he should have retired some time ago and let his son take over, but this seems an impossibility for him.

My hope is that the students will notice some of these shadows around Jiro’s bright sun, and that this might help him understand what we have read so far this year.

10th/11th Grade: Who Owns the Past?

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings,

This week we brought some of the  events leading up to the Civil War to a close, and examined a few different issues.  Studying the Civil War usually brings strong political passions to the fore, and this class has been no exception.  I wanted to try and cut to core of what divided the country, and reduce the argument to its essentials.

The past formed a key battleground between the North and South.  Both sides claimed sonship from what it meant to be an “American,” and both had different ideas on the meaning of liberty.

The South claimed to be the “heirs of the American Revolution” because

  • Our founders feared strong central authority, and set up a government designed to give primacy to the states.  Lincoln’s Republican administration would (in their view) upset this balance by restricting slavery and inserting themselves into their private lives.  The federal government had no right to arbitrate moral questions like slavery for the states.  For them to do so amounted to tyranny.  “Don’t tread on me,” might have been their motto.
  • The founders had a vision that was primarily political in nature.  They spent a great deal of time discussing the structure of government, and much less on its purpose.  If the structure of government changed, what it meant to be an American changed.

The North countered with

  • The founders vision obviously had political overtones, but primarily had a moral character.  The phrase, “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” gives birth to our nation.  The founders did not fully follow through on that vision.  Therefore, a political system that seeks the perpetuation and extension of slavery can have nothing to do with what our country should be about.
  • The American Revolution did not fully finish until we found a stable government in the Constitution.  The Constitution, ratified by all southern states, sought to form “a more perfect union,” and increased the power of the federal government.
  • While many founders owned slaves, most of them believed (erroneously) that slavery would die out on its own.  The Northwest Ordinance of 1789 banned slavery in the newly created mid-western states, showing that the Federal Government did have jurisdiction over slavery in new territories, and showing that even slave states understood that slavery would not expand into new territory.

These differences have their resonance in many hot-button issues of the day.  Should the federal government make you wear a helmet on a motorcycle?  Should the federal government have the right to ban gay marriage or abortion?  What role do we want to give them in our private lives?  How much power should they have to stop evil?

Classical theorists on government like Aristotle drew rationale for the state based on the family, so an analogy of the family might help us.  We can imagine the parents as the originators of the family and those most interested in preserving family unity and harmony between siblings (i.e., the federal government).  We can put states in the role of grown children.  Some children seem to be leading wayward lives.  But what control should parents still have?  They might urge a child to stop doing ‘x’ behavior, but what if the child did not listen?  What power should the parents have?  Should they have access to a means of force to compel their 30 year old children to come to a family reunion or face punishment?  What kind of punishments can a parent of a 30 year-old mete out anyway?

Obviously the analogy breaks down at points.  But for the federal government to assert that slave-owning states must not own slaves sounded to southern states, “You do not have the ability to govern yourselves.  You are not equal to us, who have that ability.  You are lesser, and therefore we can dictate to you.”

Those against slavery might have used a different analogy.  Perhaps here the children are teens, not independent adults.  Independent adults are akin to separate nations with their own families, but the U.S. is still a family of 50 states.  Parents grant their teens a certain measure of independence.  But parents would grant their teen so much freedom that the integrity of the family unit gets jeopardized.

In the excerpts from Democracy in America that we discussed this week, De Tocqueville talked about how the ideals of liberty and equality ultimately compete against each other.  We cannot have equal amounts of liberty and equality, so we must choose where the balance lies.  Different people would give different priorities to either liberty or equality.

Scholars have debated for years the cause of the war.  Some say that war was about slavery, others say that slavery had nothing to do with it, and instead the war centered on the rights of the states.  I prefer to split the horns of the dilemma.  In 1861 the issue boiled down to Union v. Secession, but slavery formed the vast majority of the subtext related to this question.  It lurked underneath most every significant political debate from at least 1846 on, and in some ways, dominated discussions decades before that going back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820.  Economic issues did play a part, but they too had a lot to do with slavery.  The map below shows the concentration of slaves in the various states.  The darker the color, the higher the concentration.

We see how slavery concentrated near water, or in low lying tidewater areas (i.e. Southeastern VA and MD).  This in turn led to the predominance of labor intensive cash crops like cotton or tobacco.  Below is a map of how various southern counties voted on the secession question.  Obviously, not all wanted secession.  The South was not monolithic.  But there is a striking link between the counties who voted for secession and the presence of slavery.  Clearly, the moral question of slavery and the political issue of slavery went hand-in-hand in 1860-61.

Slavery was a national issue in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, in 1820, 1848, 1850, 1854, 1856, and 1859. It was the main topic of discussion in the Lincoln/Douglas debates of 1858. Why did the various compromises on the issue fail?  In fact, could they be said to have made things worse? As time went by and slavery became more prevalent, their attitude went from ‘necessary evil’ to ‘positive good.’  What can explain this shift?

I think we can say the following:
  • Industrialization in England and the north gobbled up cotton produced in the deep south and helped solidify the power of large plantation farms.  The North implicated themselves to a degree in this and did not mind getting cheap cotton from the South.
  • I don’t think we should miss the psychological/moral component.  Shakespeare’s line of “Methinks he doth protest too much,” applies here.  Those of you have (or remember having) smaller children know that when you say, “It’s time for bed,” and they immediately whine and shout, “I’m not tired! I’m not tired!” are in fact showing how tired they really are.

This hardening of their views on slavery covered over many contradictions.  Masters supposedly civilized their slaves, but they constantly feared slave insurrections.  Masters claimed to “enlighten” their slaves but often actually educating them was forbidden by law.

As I mentioned earlier a “North=Good, South=Bad” paradigm will not help us understand the period or the war itself.  Many northerners differed little in their view of blacks from the South.  Had the North treated blacks better, some of the evils of slavery might have been exposed sooner.  Of course, there were those in the south who respected blacks and treated them with dignity.  But it is still true to say that the North had an anti-slavery bent even if many had ambiguous feelings about abolishing it.  And it is still true to say that many in the South wanted not only to preserve, but extend an institution that broke up families and and allowed masters to use other humans as they saw fit.

These differences over slavery also had links to broader cultural differences rooted in the typical differences between urban and rural societies.  Generally speaking. . .

Urban areas

  • View change as a positive
  • Believe that we “should not stand still”
  • Look more to the future than the past

and Rural areas

  • Seek to avoid change whenever possible
  • Like to be guided by tradition
  • Look more to past than the future

These different values form different priorities, and this may also help explain the conflict.

The Frontier Garden City

by Dave Mathwin

I am no fan of the “Woke” but a few years ago Ross Douthat wrote a piece entitled “A Crisis our Universities Deserve,” which showed me that at the core of this movement lay something admirable. At some point in the 20th century, college lost its emphasis on ennobling the soul, the great virtues, ideas, etc., and became a means to make more money in life. Certainly in the early 90’s, most of the encouragement from society to go to college came in this form. Students today rightly rebel from this, want more from their education than this, and more from life in general. Many “woke” students seek something moral, something transcendent. Douthat commends them for this, at least.

My public school education left me with the impression that the arc of American History bent towards the good, but of course we had x,y,z, and 1, 2,3, things wrong with us. The list of wrong things had grown since my dad’s day, but still stopped just short of overthrowing the basic arc. Subsequent generations have had the scales tipped. Manifest Destiny, the idea that History/God/Fate/Benign Providence wanted/needed America to span the continent, stood very near the core of our things wrong with us, and seemingly impossible to redeem in any way. After reading Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth I had the realization that the Woke and the various champions of Manifest Destiny have a great deal in common, including a highly idealistic goals and a bent towards rebellion against the status quo.

This comparison may surprise some, but makes at least temperamental sense to me. My first reaction to the Woke and Manifest Destiny comes from the gut: “Ick . . . it’s just too much work, too much angst and yearning, too much of everything. Enough, already.” I feel Jerry Seinfeld should have a bit on this–he would agree with me, I’m sure. But one needs more of a foundation to denigrate these two major epochs of our country’s past and present, and one has to admire the energy and drive in both movements.

Smith shows that Manifest Destiny had no direct racial motivations. When race entered into the discussion from some, it usually involved spreading “free labor” across the continent to help limit and eventually squeeze out slavery. Manifest Destiny’s sharpest critics in fact often came from pro-slavery camps, who poured cold water on all of the messianic expectations of free labor across the continent. I found it curious as well that the native Indians got little mention. It strikes me not that they were discounted, but rather not counted from the start. Maybe promoters of expansion automatically assumed that the natives would go along with it. More likely, thoughts of overland Asian trade routes, the fusion of independence, wealth, and power, the sweep of empires throughout time–left no room to see particular people such as the natives. Certainly one could critique the impact of the idea on native peoples, but harming them seems absent from the original intent.

At its core, then Manifest Destiny

  • Believed firmly in America’s unique role in world history
  • Allied with many of the progressive causes of the day–causes that today would certainly look progressive–grants of free government things (not $, but land), the belief that the hand of government should engineer certain social and political ends.
  • Believed strongly in unity–national unity, but also a more expansive international unity, for which the United States could hold the standard. Walt Whitman wrote in his A Passage to India that

The people [are] to become brothers and sisters,

Their races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands welded together.

Whitman being Whitman, he waxes rhapsodically about how Man and Nature shall once again fuse together under the “true Son of God”–not sure whom this was supposed to be. We conclude, then, that Manifest Destiny involved not just our national greatness, but

  • A grand union of all humanity, abolishing all national differences and dismantling the hierarchies of the old, worn out traditional world.

All of these are strongly progressive causes.

The progressive Woke have their virtues, but their virtues lean so far in one direction that they have to overcompensate, consciously or no, towards the other pole. So while they talk of abolishing all forms of difference in some grand human unity on the one hand, with the other they proclaim a certain kind of radical individuality. We see this in their insistence that anyone can do anything they like with their body, sexuality, etc. On the one hand, the Woke can be fiercely anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional, but on the other, as Patrick Deneen has pointed out, they need Government writ-large to protect them from local, more traditionally minded majorities. And, while the Woke encourage a general sort of mixing, they have a hard time mixing in a fruitful manner, i.e., with relationships, marriages, and families.

With the heroes of expansion west, real or fictional, we see the same motifs. Civilization requires cooperation, but Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Whitman’s rhapsodies, and the real Daniel Boone can never settle and build. The unbounded horizon calls more strongly to them than any particular place. They decide things for themselves on the fly. Their freedom from the shackles of civilization gives them a newfound moral clarity and moral authority, for they are freed from all bigotry of place. They see with universal eyes. In his novel Old Hicks the then-famous Charles W. Webber (a product of Princeton), declares of the Texas Ranger that,

With them the primitive virtues of a heroic manhood are all-sufficient, and they care nothing for reverences, forms, and duties, as civilization has them, but respect each others rights and recognize the awful presence of a benign God in the grandeur of the mountain, forest, plain, valley, and river. . . . Such men do not look to society except with disgust . . .

Interestingly, as part of the plot, Webber has the head mountain man romantically pursue the wife of the villain, and marry her despite she actually being the wife of the evil Count. The “Laws of Nature” here easily become the Laws of God, which trumps the laws of man. Similar arguments today justify ditching traditional sexual ethics. For example, those that transition, or “come out,” are granted a carte blanche in their decisions regardless of its impact on those around them, for their very distance from society with these decisions grants them supposed insight and authority.

Webber wrote fictional characters, but life imitated art in some respects with the foremost advocates for the frontier. Francis Parkman, another ivy-league grad (Harvard) traveled west in the summer of 1842 following his sophomore year. In his journal Parkman showed disdain for most of the actual people he met, especially the livestock farmer, a foreshadowing of sorts of the frayed relationship between coastal elites and flyover country. After passing beyond civilization further into the forest, Smith notes that “[Parkman’s] tone changes completely.” The independent woodsman garners immense respect: “He is a remarkably intelligent fellow . . . resolute and independent as the wind.” Smith writes,

Parkman’s antithetical attitudes towards farmers and the hunters of the wilderness illustrate the fact that . . . two distinct “West’s” existed in the minds of many [advocates of the frontier from the east]. The agricultural west was tedious. Its inhabitants belonged to a despised social class. The Wild West was by contrast an exhilarating region of adventure in the open air. Its heroes . . . were in reality not members of society at all, but noble anarchs owning no master, free denizens of a limitless wilderness.

Advocates for Manifest Destiny could, like the Woke, see civilization in sweeping terms, and they could see the heroic individual. They both have a harder time with groups in between these categories, the basic societal building blocks of villages, farms, towns, etc.

A competing mythos, that of the west as paradisal garden, also informed America’s westward push. This motif had more to say for it, as it usually involved families, but still had its rose-colored glasses. Timothy Flint wrote against attitudes like Parkman’s, and gloried in farm life, writing in 1827:

Thousands of independent and happy yeoman reside [in the west], with their numerous, healthy, and happy families about them, with the ample abundance that fills their granaries, with their young orchards, whose branches must be propped to sustain the weight of their fruit, beside their beautiful rivers and beech woods, in which the squirrels skip, the deer browse, and the sweet red-bird sings, and with the prospect of settling their children on any of the dozens of farms that surround them.

James Lanman echoed such ideas in the 1830’s . . .

If, as has been remarked by distinguished statesman, cities are the sores of the political body where the bad matter of the state concentrates what healthful attitudes of mind and body are afforded by agricultural enterprise. The exhilarating atmosphere of rural life, the invigorating exercise afforded by its various occupations, the pure water, the necessities supplied for daily existence, leading to early and virtuous marriages, all point to this pursuit as best adapted to the comfort of the individual man.

I do not like to agree with the anti Free-soil crowd (often, though not always, secessionists and pro-slavery) on much of anything, but the “Messenger” was on to something in 1856, when it opined that

Farming is hardly a pleasant occupation, and the idea that it is comes from dreamers and poets. The actual, manual operations of farming are irksome and repulsive to the great mass of mankind.

Alas, reality set in for the devotees of the garden myth shortly after the Civil War. Smith writes,

The yawning gap between agrarian theory and post-war reality . . . comes out in the farmer’s crusades of the last 25 years of the 19th century. The western farmer had been told that he was not a peasant but a peer of the realm; that his contribution to society was basic, and all others peripheral or parasitic, in comparison cities were sores on the body politic. . . . He had been told that he was compensated for any austerity in his mode of life by receiving shelter from the temptations of luxury and vice, and against the ups and downs of the market. His outstanding characteristic was his independence of character and condition.

But after the Civil War Republican policy obviously favored the city against the country, the merchant against the farmer. And the western farmer found that instead of being independent, he was at the mercy not only of the Chicago and New York and Liverpool grain pits, but also of the railways and steamships lines that he must rely on to get his crop to market

I have read most of the volumes of Toynbee’s unabridged A Study of History. I think him a great master and I owe him a great debt, but I found the central theme of Volume III, which describes the growth of civilizations after their infancies, so annoying I stopped reading about halfway through some years ago. I have yet to pick it up again. Toynbee rightly reacted against material measures of progress. A civilization surely must be able to advance in more ways that territory and GDP. Toynbee developed a different approach, which meant a good start. But he ended with what he called “etherealization.” The idea seems to run along the lines of

  • A civilization develops an idea or technique that works for them, but that idea/process, has a limited growth potential because it is anchored to its locality
  • The civilization then extracts the core of the idea, removing it from its trappings, thus making it more transferrable across space.
  • This allows for more sharing of ideas, etc. which aids growth. The process is essentially cooperative and other oriented.

He takes, as an example, the alphabet as an etherealization of language, as opposed to ideograms. Alphabets transfer across cultures relatively easily, but China’s writing, among other things, will not allow for this, keeping them isolated.

Toynbee often nods via anecdote and analysis to “the old ways are best.” He wasn’t always consistent in his ideas, but this is not a fault. He usually explored possibilities as opposed to asserting things absolutely. But etherealization shows Toynbee’s weakness for too much generality, too much “Platonism” (but only in the worst sense of that word). Lifting something too far off the ground tends to make it dangerous and destabilizing to society, like a steroid. Supporters of Woke politics, and mid-19th century supporters of Manifest Destiny, have this same problem. What masks itself as “progress” in fact only abstracts what in embodied form might actually be good, though less dramatic, ideas.

American history mashes together so many competing concepts. Sometimes this results in great creative tension. We get into trouble when succumb to the lure of the unbounded everything America has always foolishly promised.

We should note that the Old Testament takes a dim view of cities. Cain builds the first one, from which evil and violence come, and then you have Sodom, the cities built by Hebrew slaves for Pharaoh, Babylon, Ninevah, and the like. But the end of the New Testament shows the final restoration taking place with a garden within a city–even cities get redeemed in God’s providence over history. So, the frontier, the farm, the city–every civilization that actually functions needs all three.

Dave

8th Grade Civics: Machiavelli on Having it Both Ways

by Dave Mathwin

Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia provides the backdrop for one of Machiavelli’s more insightful observations about how countries are composed and hold together.

Persia had a vast army and a vast amount of territory. Furthermore, the Persian empire was comprised of different ethnic and tribal groups, as well other assimilated civilizations such as Egypt and Babylon. Yet, with an army of between 40-50,000, within ten years Alexander had destroyed all resistance to his control over most of Asia. Alexander died without having the chance to consolidate any of his gains, and we might then expect that Persia would revolt against the Macedonians and reclaim their freedom. But this failed to materialize. In fact, the Macedonians fought amongst themselves for control of the region, and still Persia did nothing. How could this be?

Machiavelli writes:

Considering the difficulties which men have had to hold to a newly acquired state, some might wonder how, seeing that Alexander the Great became the master of Asia in a few years, and died whilst it was scarcely settled (whence it might appear reasonable that the whole empire would have rebelled), nevertheless his successors maintained themselves, and had to meet no other difficulty than that which arose among themselves from their own ambitions.

I answer that the principalities of which one has record are found to be governed in two different ways; either by a prince, with a body of servants, who assist him to govern the kingdom as ministers by hisfavour and permission; or by a prince and barons, who hold that dignity by antiquity of blood and not by the grace of the prince. Such barons have states and their own subjects, who recognize them as lords and hold them in natural affection. Those states that are governed by a prince and his servants hold their prince in more consideration, because in all the country there is no one who is recognized as superior to him, and if they yield obedience to another they do it as to a minister and official, and they do not bear him any particular affection.

The examples of these two governments in our time are the Turk and the King of France. The entire monarchy of the Turk is governed by one lord, the others are his servants; and, dividing his kingdom into sanjaks, he sends there different administrators, and shifts and changes them as he chooses. But the King of France is placed in the midst of an ancient body of lords, acknowledged by their own subjects, and beloved by them; they have their own prerogatives, nor can the king take these away except at his peril. Therefore, he who considers both of these states will recognize great difficulties in seizing the state of the Turk, but, once it is conquered, great ease in holding it. The causes of the difficulties in seizing the kingdom of the Turk are that the usurper cannot be called in by the princes of the kingdom, nor can he hope to be assisted in his designs by the revolt of those whom the lord has around him. This arises from the reasons given above; for his ministers, being all slaves and bondmen, can only be corrupted with great difficulty, and one can expect little advantage from them when they have been corrupted, as they cannot carry the people with them, for the reasons assigned. Hence, he who attacks the Turk must bear in mind that he will find him united, and he will have to rely more on his own strength than on the revolt of others; but, if once the Turk has been conquered, and routed in the field in such a way that he cannot replace his armies, there is nothing to fear but the family of this prince, and, this being exterminated, there remains no one to fear, the others having no credit with the people; and as the conqueror did not rely on them before his victory, so he ought not to fear them after it.

The contrary happens in kingdoms governed like that of France, because one can easily enter there by gaining over some baron of the kingdom, for one always finds malcontents and such as desire a change. Such men, for the reasons given, can open the way into the state and render the victory easy; but if you wish to hold it afterwards, you meet with infinite difficulties, both from those who have assisted you and from those you have crushed. Nor is it enough for you to have exterminated the family of the prince, because the lords that remain make themselves the heads of fresh movements against you, and as you are unable either to satisfy or exterminate them, that state is lost whenever time brings the opportunity. 

Essentially Machiavelli points out that

  • Some countries are hard to conquer but easy to hold once defeated. They have greater unity from the top-down, but once that unity is shattered, it cannot make itself whole again. We might think of such countries akin to a brick wall. It is very hard to put one’s fist through a wall, but once you break the wall, it cannot reconstitute itself.
  • Some countries are easy to conquer but make it quite difficult to maintain the conquest. Their internal divisions open the door to the invader, but those same internal divisions will guarantee you will have problems in the future. Such countries resemble water. One can easily put one’s fist through water, but the most one can do is move or scatter it. Given the right conditions, that pool of water can easily return.

We can use Machiavelli’s framework to help explain historical events closer to our time.

During WW II, Germany and Japan functioned much like Persia or the Ottoman Empire of Machiavelli’s day (though it is important to remember that Machiavelli’s categories are not moral categories–one can be bad or good and have strong unity). After their military defeat, both Japan and West Germany rebuilt themselves with extraordinary speed. Neither Nazism or military dictatorship made even a pretense of returning to Germay or Japan, respectively. Their (extreme) unity, once shattered, disappeared into the ether, with an entirely new society emerging.

Our experience recently with Afghanistan highlights Machiavelli’s second category. With its many tribes and difficult geography, we were able to quickly defeat the Taliban and establish a new government. However, all we really accomplished was the scattering of water. In time, the Taliban reemerged and regained control. Our experience mirrored that of England in the 19th century, and Russia, both in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I wanted the students to consider whether America resembled more of ancient Persia, or if we are more like medieval France. The students had different arguments for both sides, which was great to see.

For centralized unity defining America, they argued that

  • While a few “weird” states exist (such as Florida and Alaska) for the most part most states function in the same way and have similar cultures.
  • We have unified executive control over the military from top to bottom.
  • We share common political and cultural events, such as elections, political debates, the Super Bowl, etc.
  • We share enough of a common vision of what it means to be an American, such as agreement over our rights as citizens.

For the “water” analogy fitting America, they argued that

  • There are a variety of states, scattered throughout the country, that may have similar poltical systems, but very different cultures (Texas, California, Lousiana, etc.).
  • We have a great deal of political disagreement. While we technically have one president, a strong minority of Americans will not support him.
  • While we agree on our rights, such as the right to vote and free speech, these rights are generally used to divide us and not unite us.

I enjoyed the students’ thoughts on this important question.

It is possible that a country can change its identity. The France Machiavelli mentioned went from the “water” model to the “brick wall” starting in the 17th century under King Louis XIV. By the time of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, what happened in Paris determined everything in France. America may have gone through periods in our history when we functioned in a more centralized or de-centralized manner, and we may change again.

One of Machiavelli’s talents involves letting us know that one can rarely if ever have it both ways. Strong unity, or strong disunity both have their advantages that are somewhat exclusive. We have to own our choices, and understand their consequences.

Enjoy the weekend,

Dave

8th Grade Literature: Introduction to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

by Dave Mathwin

Next week we will start our next book for the year, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Verne’s stories captivated the people of his time. Many of his books have been made into movies, which is one measure of cultural resonance. His stories had straightforward plots and generally stock characters, which aided their serialization into the popular magazines of the day. So on one level, I hope that the students enjoy the story as an adventure tale.

But like any great author, a particular worldview informs the work, and the story raises interesting questions for us to consider.

The Relationship Between Technology and Freedom

Verne wrote in the mid-late 19th century, a time of enormous technological change, perhaps a shift greater than what we have experienced the last twenty years or so. The Industrial Revolution not only remade the economy, it shifted how we worked and lived as a society. This period saw the spread of democratic ideals throughout Europe and America as well, and the casting off of traditional institutions and ideas. Elites across the western world lost a great deal of status, which culminated in World War I. So one the one hand, the growth of political freedom and technology went hand in hand.

Yet in our day, we see that the relationship between technology and freedom is not so straightforward. Our phones give us immediate access to information everywhere, but they also track us and have a way of fixating our attention. Computers allow us to be more creative and productive at work but this also means that work can follow us anywhere at anytime. Cars allow us to roam with more speed and flexibility than at any previous time in history but they break down frequently and require us to work long hours to maintain them.

This paradox is not confined to our day. For example, most saw the obvious benefits of the Industrial Revolution in the abundance of goods at cheaper prices for a great mass of people. In very real ways, the standard of living went up. To achieve this, millions of people had to work menial, robotically repetitive jobs in factories for 12-14 hours a day.

In Verne’s story, Captain Nemo consciously sought to free himself from the constraints of civilization’s laws and mores, and takes to the sea . . . where he spends his life confined in a metal shell. The Nautilus gives and takes away from Nemo and his crew in equal measure. We shall explore this relationship as we read.

The Relationship Between Man and Society

We often define freedom as the absence of constraints, i.e., no one tells me what to eat for lunch, or what movie to see, or who to vote for. In this respect Nemo and his crew are “free.” But as already noted, this form of freedom comes with a price. Philosophers and theologians outline another view of freedom, one where the constraints put upon us actually aid us in achieving our proper ends as men and women. For example, a train is certainly constrained by the tracks on which it moves. Yet those very constraints help the train be what it what it was created to be. Without tracks, a train cannot fulfill its proper “end,” or (to use Aristotle’s phrase) “telos.” A train sitting in the woods has no freedom to be a train.

So too, our families, communities, and our country certainly put constraints upon us. Children and adults alike resent them at times. We might rather play the video game than do our homework. We might rather finish our movie than clean the kitchen or change the diaper of a crying child. On a societal level, our politicians can annoy and disappoint us, and we may pine for other lands where the grass seems greener. Captain Nemo is the classic “tortured soul” that our culture has trained us to admire. We can certainly appreciate Nemo’s courage, intelligence, and devotion to his crew. But we need to see how Nemo’s separation from civilization has also warped his sensibilities. Our connections to those around us shape who we are, and without them, we are left with the freedom of the void.

Many business leaders, politicians, and the like, reflect that it is “lonely at the top.” I remember my pastor in college confiding to me that most all of his truly good friends were other pastors. They shared a common bond that others cannot quite relate to. So too, a ship’s captain will likely find the highest level of kinship with other captains. But because Nemo has severed ties with the world, he cut himself off from the possibility of that kinship. He has his ship, his books, and his studies, to comfort him.