Tag: history

As vague as this memory was, I have the sense that it had such a finely tuned emotional choreography that I think it must have been staged. Perhaps it came at the end of some epic movie, say about World War II, and I was remembering a voice-over by an actor reading from a speech by Churchill or FDR as the screen went dark. I remember most the use of the verb “eat”–​not exploit, oppress, take advantage of, or terrorize. The word seems so straightforward, and yet so evocative, that the phrase stuck deep in my memory ever since. 

The memory was brought near the surface when I read The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion by Jonathan Haidt, which I’ve mentioned before (here). To explain why he thought conservatives and liberals think the way they do, he described his search for the funda­mental building blocks of social morality. One block was the principle that all people in the community are treated fairly, and even the weakest are protected from undeserved harm. He described how this principle had been around since the dawn of recorded morality.

The very first sentence of the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE) includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.” (p. 167)

Haidt described half a dozen universal building blocks of morality, and posited that different cultures make use of these in different amounts to construct their moral codes. Liberals, he said, put a very great emphasis on the principles of avoiding harm and treating all people fairly. As a card-carrying liberal, I can confirm this. I find that a powerful person or group using their power to take advantage of someone weaker can get my outrage up like almost no other situation. 

I share this feeling with the famous Pirates of Penzeance, the good-hearted if ineffective protagonists of Gilbert and Sullivan’s great comic opera of the same name. At one point, the pirates try to understand why they are not more successful:

SAM.  Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us.  We don’t seem to make piracy pay. I’m sure I don’t know why, but we don’t.
FRED. I know why, but, alas! I mustn’t tell you; it wouldn’t be right.
PIRATE KING. Why not, my boy? It’s only half-past eleven, and you are one of us until the clock strikes twelve.
SAM. True, and until then you are bound to protect our interests.
ALL. Hear, hear!
FRED. Well, then, it is my duty, as a pirate, to tell you that you are too tender-hearted. For instance, you make a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger party you invariably get thrashed.
PIRATE KING. There is some truth in that. (https://gsarchive.net/pirates/pirates_lib.pdf)

I read another book recently, Nature’s Mutiny: How the little ice age of the long seventeenth century transformed the west and shaped the present, by Philipp Blom. I expected it would mainly be about that period of rapid climate change, but there was very little about the climate (other than a description of large-scale repeated crop failures). The book was mostly about the societal changes that took place in the 1500s to 1700s that transformed European culture from a largely agrarian feudal system to one of competing mercantile states driven to philosophical and technological advances and global conquest in pursuit of commercial interests. The concept of the strong eating the weak came up repeatedly in this book, and not in a good way. 

In medieval agriculture Europe, even the lowliest peasants had a rightful place in society. The landowners knew that their power came with a responsibility of care over their vassals, defined by centuries of tradition. The shift to a colder climate and resulting crop failures triggered a revolution in culture, commerce and technology that largely destroyed the subsistence lifestyle of the peasants. The powerful landholders changed and adapted their own culture to immense financial gain, and unilaterally severed the bonds of care and service with the no-longer-useful peasants. They redefined their own morality to justify their own opulent wealth, and the extreme destitution that the former peasants had been cast into, as the natural order of things:

“the pomp of Buildings, Apparel, and the like, in the Nobility, Gentry, and other able persons, cannot impoverish the Kingdome; if it be done with curious and costly works upon our Materials, and by our own people,…” This blessed vision, however, was endangered by the serious character flaws exhibited by the monarch’s subjects, especially the poorer ones, who appeared sadly unable to cope with even the most modest trappings of wealth…. The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: “As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious.” Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it….(p. 133)

If I was surprised to find stories of the strong eating the weak in a book I thought was going to be about climate, I was fully expecting it in the next book I started: Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States. This famously subversive history, first published in 1980 and updated many times since, is about American history from the side of the “losers”. Howard Zinn elaborates:

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. (p. 9)

The book has so many examples of what could be considered the strong eating the weak, from the 1490s up to the 2000s, that I hesitate to try to pick one or two to describe. I’ll instead commend this fascinating book to the reader. Many of the stories can induce indignation, in a helpless, it’s-too-late-to-redress-that sort of way, but some are inspiring, even optimistic. You can read a copy of it online at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html.

Having an early memory of my moral ideal awakened in one book, and then promptly squashed by reality in two more, I wanted more than ever to find that memory of mine. The stories I read were horrifying to me not only for their calculating brutality, but also for their familiarity. From the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, I could not find a time or place where I could say, “Here is the point at which we made the turn, and started to create a world where the strong do not eat the weak.”

I very much wanted to find that memory, that quote, that event which was the turning point, so I started searching the internet. The search wasn’t completely straightforward, because I wasn’t even sure I was remembering a speech that had occurred in real life–it could have just been some screenwriter’s tear-jerky conclusion to a sentimental but fictional movie.

I was encouraged when I found a quote by the nineteenth-century Chancellor of Germany and quote-factory Otto Von Bismark: “It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong”. This was so close to my memory’s opposite that it seemed plausible that a real person might have made the counter-statement, especially to mark a wartime defeat of Germany. But maybe I had my quote a bit wrong. Was it not “eat”, but “devour”? Maybe it wasn’t “strong”, but “powerful”? I kept looking, trying different word combinations, and concentrating on Germany and the World Wars. 

I finally found what might be my remembered quote somewhere else entirely, at a press conference by John Kennedy in 1961 to mark the opening of a conference of non-aligned nations in Belgrade: 

We believe that the peoples represented at this conference are committed to a world society in which men have the right and the freedom to determine their own destiny, a world in which one people is not enslaved by the other, in which the powerful do not devour the weak. 

I was only seven in 1961, so if I actually heard Kennedy say this, on the news or something, I’m surprised I remember it at all. But if this is the source of my memory, I’m glad it was a real promise by a real person, and not just a movie line. 

But was what he said back in 1961 true? Were people and governments so committed to this ideal? If not then, is it true now, or will it ever be true? Will the meek ever inherit the earth? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but as long as they continue to be asked, and self-serving rationalizations of oppression and exploitation of others continue to be challenged, I have hope. 

Thanks,
Dorn
8/12/2019