The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (39 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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More words we cannot stomach; but the alternative is ceaseless change, breaking the tacit bonds of duty that link past generations to our own, and:
 
hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers.
 
 
The Pilgrim Fathers
 
How, then, in this political welter, and among the uncivilized natives of the New World, did the victory of the founding of America occur? Why did America, that nation with the soul of a church, avoid the bloodshed of France, the cultural stagnation of Spain, and the continued disintegration of Germany and Italy?
 
The politically correct tale is easily told: It was all a matter of English imperialism. The English invaded. They were bigoted and ignorant, but they had superior firepower. They spread smallpox; and that was that.
 
But the truth is more interesting, more human, and more important to remember now, as we yield our freedoms up to an all-swallowing State.
 
You’re an Englishman living in the Dutch city of Leyden, long one of the hot spots of the Reformation. You don’t feel at home. You stumble about in the language. The Dutch drink beer and skate on the frozen streams on the popish thing they call Christmas Day. The Calvinists baptize their children, a practice you consider unwarranted by Scripture. You have no desire to convert them to your ways. You’ve only moved to Holland to enjoy your own community, separate from the bad influences of the pompous Anglicans in your homeland, and free of harassment by government officials.
 
But you won’t be staying in Holland, or returning to your native Kent. That’s because your pastor, John Robinson, has conceived a grand and fearful plan. He has organized you and your brother Puritans into a joint-stock company, to cross the ocean to the New World, to farm and fish and trap, or hew lumber, or do whatever will make the company modestly profitable for the financiers on this side of the water. But you’re not traveling to make money. Mainly you want to be a free community. You want to raise your families in a godly way, with no one near to corrupt them, and no bishop or lord to toss you in prison for worshipping in the wrong way.
 
So you set sail. Let’s be clear about what this voyage was
not.
It was not undertaken to convert the natives to the gospel. Some journeys were undertaken for that, though they are not now celebrated. The young Jesuit Matteo Ricci sailed to Macao after having mastered mathematics, astronomy, and clockmaking. There he studied all he could about Mandarin Chinese and the culture of China—the writings of the wise men, the delicate etiquettes of the imperial court, the Chinese reverence for tradition and notable suspicion of outsiders. Finally, Father Ricci traveled to China, and eventually was brought in to the Forbidden City, where he presented the emperor with an object of fascination and wonder: a clock. Ricci was honored as a Mandarin. Essentially, he became a Mandarin, so that the mandarins and the people might be won for Christ.
17
 
 
 
A Religious Nation
 
If any hold that the religious spirit which I admire is the very thing most amiss in America, and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the human race on the other side of the ocean is to believe with Spinoza in the eternity of the world, or with Cabanis that thought is excreted by the brain, I can only reply that those who hold this language have never been in America and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation.
Alexis de Tocqueville
,
Democracy in America
(ch. 17, 318)
 
 
Tocqueville was a conservative liberal, that is, a tradition-minded, devout man who believed passionately in political liberty. Noting the
accidental and temporary
association of the Church with the royalists in Europe, he saw that Christian “habits of the heart” (310) protect liberty, granting spiritual force to the law, and restraining those who would overturn the social order for their own gain.
 
 
But you know little about the natives. You’ve heard stories from sailors, but sailors are not the most reliable sources. You have heard of gentle and peaceful tribes, like those who met Columbus when he first struck land. You have heard of the cannibals of the Caribbean. You have probably heard of the hated Aztecs of Mexico, who exacted a tribute from the neighboring peoples: human hearts, cut hot and steaming from the bodies of young men at their chief temple to the war god Huitzilopochtli. You have no special affection for the natives you expect to meet, and no special affection for the Europeans you are about to leave.
 
You are also not the ambassadors of a great nation thirsty for gold. England is still relatively poor. Its forays across the ocean have been few. Long ago, Henry VII scrambled up some cash to send an Italian, John Cabot, to scout the coasts of North America. Cabot landed in Nova Scotia, and “claimed” it for England. But, though English fishermen did commence to harvesting the rich Grand Banks off Newfoundland, England had established only one colony in North America, the failed Jamestown. She could hardly afford to keep the Scots subdued, let alone natives thousands of miles away. It is true that some freebooting patriots, more pirate than patriot, had scoured the waters to pick off a Spanish ship here and there, or to set up some kind of outpost in the Americas: Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Walter Raleigh. But your leader is no Cortez with his five hundred soldiers, capitalizing upon the native hatred of the Aztecs to storm Mexico City and bring down the emperor Montezuma.
18
No government grants you money, nor will you return money to any government. It is, in more than one sense of the word, a
private enterprise.
 
You are not sailors, not fishermen, not soldiers, though there are a few of each among you. You are ordinary farmers and artisans, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters. Some of you have brought along wife and children. It is a new thing in the world.
 
William Bradford, the wise and pious first governor of Plymouth, describes in patient detail the voyage, the terrible first winter, and the perseverance of the pilgrims who survived exposure, hunger, and disease. He also gives us a close look at the establishment of an ordered community, self-governing, attempting in critical matters to harmonize the laws of man with the law of God, and in things indifferent to give men a decent measure of freedom, though not as much freedom as colonial Americans would later enjoy. Here he tells of how the few healthy persons among them, including the elder William Brewster and their military commander Myles Standish, tended to the sick in a way that would have been unheard of in the Old World, for they
 
. . . spared no pains night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them. In a word, did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren. (
Of Plimoth Plantation, 1620–1647
)
 
 
So assiduous was their charity that the sailors themselves, not members of the religious community and not always kind to their passengers, were moved by it, particularly when they fell ill and the Pilgrims tended to them too. Like the pagans in the time of Julian the Apostate, those sailors looked to the faithful for assistance rather than to their own. Said one, “You, I now see, show your love like Christians indeed to one another, but we let one another lie and die like dogs” (87).
 
I relate the story for several reasons. First, it helps to correct the slander that the Pilgrims were foolish and violent, and the Indians, by contrast, were wise and peaceable. In fact, the Indians were no different from the Europeans or from human beings anywhere. They were prone to wickedness. At Cape Cod Bradford found a web of enmities among the Indian tribes, exacerbated by the presence of French trappers and the depredations of English slave traders. One of those traders had kidnapped Squanto—the English-speaking Indian who taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, and whom the Pilgrims once had to restrain from stealing the fur coats from Indian women to whom they had come for trading (
Mourt’s Relation
, 60). But the Christian love evident in the story of the sickness also characterized the Pilgrims’ dealings with the natives. They made a compact with the chief Massasoit, stipulating fair play and mutual trust between the two peoples. The Pilgrims kept that treaty faithfully, from the time of its seal to Bradford’s written account twenty-four years later. It is not remarkable, in human history, that a people should come to a land and drive out its inhabitants. What is remarkable is that, despite the hard weather, the scarcity of food, and their superior firearms, the Pilgrims did not steal from the Indians, and flogged any vagabond who tried to. Their friendship was genuine.
 
The second reason I mention it is to note the beginnings of a Christian commonwealth—a brotherhood of equals that yet orders itself by a hierarchy. Myles Standish, the diminutive soldier without whom the Pilgrims would not have lasted one year, is not too proud to clean the limbs of the sick, like the lowliest nurse. Yet he is their commander, too, and knows when and how to exact discipline. It is this practical piety that Bradford and his brethren tried to incorporate into the daily government of their community. And this corrects another misconception, namely that the Pilgrims lived under a communist rule. Not exactly, and never for any ideological reasons. As I’ve said, they had left Europe as a joint stock company, and that meant they would share the profits (they never made much) equally. But Bradford soon saw that when it came to family and community life, the model of the company was not workable. Nor was it scriptural. It smacked too much of Plato’s
Republic
.
 
A rigorous insistence upon equality pleased nobody, motivated nobody to work hard, set the hale and industrious on a par with the weak and lazy, commandeered young men to work for other people’s wives and children, reduced the aged to the indignity of youth, compelled women to cook for men who were not their husbands (which, says Bradford, they deemed “a kind of slavery”), and diminished, if it did not destroy, the natural relations that God had established among men. So Bradford and the elders parceled out equal shares of land to each family to work for themselves, and assigned each of the boys and young men (for there were many more males than females) to a family, so that none might complain of the need for another pair of shoulders and hands.
 
It worked, said Bradford, who understands that he is bucking a political movement of his time. His people presented communism with its best chance for success, years of effort “amongst godly and sober men”
 
 
Rousseau’s Eden
 
From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.
 
 
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
,
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
 
 
Rousseau’s vision of the blissful life of the savage before agriculture and metallurgy owes more to the classical poets than to any observation of primitive tribes. He should have been in the company of John Smith at Jamestown or Father Marquette among the Hurons. But his vision still exerts a strange power over the politically correct. Feminists, who have over a thousand stone-age tribes to join if they please, often entertain lovely dreams about the “matriarchy” we all enjoyed before agriculture. Tell it to the aborigines.
 
 

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