Ideas

by Peter Watson

  ‘Tradition’ has a fine ring to it, especially in the Old World. But another way of looking at it is as a principle by which the dead govern the living and this was not the American way. Early Americans wanted their new world to be open and malleable and so they wanted tradition in its place. That is why the Founding Fathers allowed for revision and amendment of the constitution.78 In practice, this facility has been used conservatively.

  Arguably the most brilliant, and at the same time the most fragile, part of the American politico-legal system was federalism. The creation of a genuine union out of thirteen states, each asserting its own independence and sovereignty, took some doing. Was the new United States a confederation or a nation? The issue would be tested more than once, most famously in the Civil War. James Madison, fourth president and as thorough as ever, prepared himself with a comprehensive study of other confederations, including the Italian, Hanseatic and Helvetic leagues, the confederation of the United Netherlands and the history of the Holy Roman Empire. All of them, he concluded, had suffered the same fatal defect: they were too weak to protect themselves against foreign aggression or internal dissension. For Madison and his colleagues, the central problem was always how they could create a federal government strong enough to defend itself against a foreign enemy and contain domestic dissension. At the same time the government must not be too strong to threaten the liberty of its citizens or the prosperity that derived from local government.79

  In the division of authority between the federal government and the states they managed just fine. Where they were less successful was in the measures they devised by which the central government could insist recalcitrant states abide by the terms of the division. The solution the Founding Fathers worked out, which was threatened by the Civil War but worked well enough at other times, was to vest all authority in the people of the United States. They, in their sovereign capacity, apportioned appropriate powers between the states and the nation. Conflicts between the two were to be resolved, not by force but by law.80 And here a ‘nice’ distinction was to be made: ‘Force was not to be used against state or nation but only against individuals who violated the law.’81 This balance of power between the states and the nation was arguably the most brilliant element in the constitution, placing checks on government (at a time when absolutism was paramount in Europe). This was the concept of federal domination.82 But a second brilliant achievement, that ran the balance of powers close, was the Bill of Rights. There were precedents, of course, particularly in England: Magna Carta, as long ago as 1215, the Petition of Rights of 1628, the immortal Bill of Rights of 1689.83 Massachusetts had introduced a ‘Body of Liberties’ in 1641, also inspired by Magna Carta, but the American Bill of Rights, attached to the Constitution, was of an altogether different order.84 In England rights were never ‘inalienable’ and it was by no means unknown for either the Crown or Parliament to rescind them. And so here are the essential differences between Magna Carta and the American Bill of Rights. Magna Carta guaranteed due process of law, the proscription of cruel and unusual punishments, excessive fines or bail; later, a standing army was also proscribed without the consent of Parliament; interference in free elections was likewise outlawed, and Parliament’s control of the public purse was established. The American Constitution and its Bill of Rights guaranteed: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and of assembly, and many other freedoms. Five states forbade self-incrimination; six specifically asserted the supremacy of the civil over the military. North Carolina and Maryland prohibited the creation of monopolies, which were pronounced ‘odious and contrary to the spirit of free government’. Delaware abolished the slave trade, others soon followed and Vermont, newly opened up, abolished slavery altogether.85 Jefferson had insisted on the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration, and the sentiment embodied in these few words influenced American freedoms profoundly.86

  Watching these events from afar, the Reverend Dr Richard Price in London wrote that ‘The last step in human progress is to be made in America.’ He was almost right. But in fact it was to be France that benefited most immediately from the American genius. The Declaration of the Rights of Man of August 1789 was largely the work of Lafayette, Mirabeau and Jean Joseph Mounier, ‘but it derived philosophically from the American Bill of Rights’. (While he had been in Paris, Jefferson was constantly consulted in secrecy by Lafayette: the ‘pursuit of happiness’ became, in Lafayette’s French, la recherche du bienêtre.)87 In many ways the French Déclaration went a good deal further even than the American version. It abolished slavery, removed primogeniture and entail, eliminated honorary distinctions and the privileges of the clergy, and emancipated the Jews. It guaranteed the care of the poor and aged and education at public expense.88

  And it was a Frenchman who delivered the first, and what is still in some ways the most thoughtful and least partisan, verdict on this ‘last step in human progress’. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris on 11 Thermidor in year XIII of the French revolutionary calendar, or 29 July 1805. The son of a Normandy count, he became a magistrate, with an abiding interest in prison reform, and looked forward to a career in politics. However, because of his father’s allegiance to the deposed Bourbon monarchy, Alexis found it expedient to travel to America with his friend and colleague Gustave de Beaumont. The ostensible reason for their visit was to study prison regimes in the New World but they travelled widely and on their return both wrote books about America.89

  They remained in the United States for a year and took in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Canada and Philadelphia. They travelled the frontier, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and back up through the South to Washington. They sampled all the different Americas and Americans. In Boston they stayed at the Tremont Hotel, the first large luxury hotel in the United States, where each room had a private parlour and each guest was provided with a pair of slippers while his boots were polished.90 ‘Here luxury and refinement prevail,’ wrote Tocqueville. ‘Almost all the women here speak French well, and all the men we have seen so far have been to Europe.’91 It made a change, he said, from the ‘stinking’ arrogance of the Americans in New York, where they had stayed in a boarding house on ‘fashionable’ Broadway, and encountered ‘a certain crudeness of manners’, when people would spit during a conversation.92

  To begin with, and until they reached the frontier, they were disappointed by the lack of trees in America, and by the Indians, whom they found small, with thin arms and legs, ‘brutalised by our wines and liquors’.93 They visited Sing Sing, a prison on the banks of the Hudson, met John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston (the founder of Texas, who brought his stallion aboard ship on the Mississippi), and were entertained by the American Philosophical Society (where Beaumont was bored).94 As their journey progressed, although their creature comforts didn’t improve (one of the steamers they took on the Ohio river struck a reef and sank), Tocqueville’s admiration for America grew and on his return to France he resolved to write a book about the most important feature which he felt distinguished America: democracy. His book appeared in two editions, the first in 1835, which concentrated on politics, and a second, in 1840, which added his thoughts and observations on what we would call the sociological effects of democracy. The latter was darker than the former, as Tocqueville addressed what he felt was the main problem with democracy–the danger that it would make men’s minds mediocre and in that way damage their ultimate freedom.

  But in almost all other ways he was full of admiration for the democratic spirit and structure of America. Americans formed a society, he found, in which classes were much less distinct than in Europe and where even the ordinary sales clerk did not have the ‘bad form’ of the lower classes in France. ‘This is a commercial people,’ his colleague Beaumont wrote at one point. ‘The entire society seems to have melted into a middle class.’95 Both men were impressed by the advanced position of women, the hard work, the general good morals, and the absence of military force. They were furt
her impressed by the sturdy individualism of the small landowners, whom they saw as the most typical Americans.96 ‘The Americans are no more virtuous than other people,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘but are infinitely more enlightened (I’m speaking of the great mass) than any other people I know…’97 In the Democracy, Tocqueville made much of the stability of the American system (though he drew attention to the danger of rising expectations), which he contrasted with France and, to an extent, Britain (which he had also visited).98 He put this down to ordinary Americans being more involved than their European counterparts in (a) political society,(b) civil society and (c) religious society, and to the fact that America operated in ways which were almost the direct opposite of those in Europe: ‘The local community was organised before the county, the county before the state, and the state before the union.’99 Tocqueville greatly admired the role of the courts in America, where they took precedence over the politicians, and the fact that the press, though no less ‘violent’ than the French press, was left alone: no one even thought of censoring what was said.

  He was not blind to the problems of America. He thought the issue of race was insoluble. In the ancient world, slavery had been about conquest but in America, he saw, it was about race and he thought there was no way out. He concluded that democracies tended to elect mediocre leaders, which would in time hinder progress, and he thought majorities too intolerant of minorities. He gave as examples the fact that laws against bankruptcy weren’t passed in America because too many thought themselves liable, and it was the same with liquor, though the link between alcohol consumption and crime was even then self-evident.100

  In the realm of pure ideas, he felt that democracies would make more progress in practical than in theoretical sciences, he was impressed by the architecture of Washington, particularly its grandeur in a city that was, after all, ‘no bigger than Pontoise’. He expected poetry to blossom in America because ‘there was much nature’. He found families more intimate and more independent-minded than in Europe, and was heartily in favour of the trend whereby marriage was based more on love and affection than on economic or dynastic considerations.101

  Despite his caveats, Tocqueville’s admiration for America and its obsession with equality (part of the French revolutionary trinity) shone through his text and, when it was published, his book was well received. In France it won the Montyon Prize, worth 12,000 francs, and in Britain J. S. Mill described Tocqueville’s book as ‘the first great work of political philosophy devoted to modern democracy’.102 Since then, other books have tried to emulate Tocqueville’s but his has become a kind of classic. In a sense, of course, such books, though fascinating, are irrelevant. The most infallible verdict on America was the vast number of immigrants who left Europe, and then other countries across the world, to find freedom and prosperity in the United States. They are still voting with their feet.

  PART FIVE

  VICO TO FREUD

  Parallel Truths: The Modern Incoherence

  29

  The Oriental Renaissance

  To Chapter 29 Notes and References

  At the very time the Portuguese were exploring the west coast of Africa, and then discovering Brazil and the Far East, the invention of printing was transforming the intellectual life of Europe. Though the growth of literacy represented considerable progress in a general sense, it also made it more difficult than ever for the Portuguese to keep to themselves the news of their momentous discoveries.

  There seems little doubt that there were concerted attempts to keep the news secret. In the time of King John II (1481–1495), for example, the Portuguese Crown used oaths and all types of punishment, including death, to ‘dissuade’ people from leaking the news. In 1481, the Cortes petitioned the king to forbid foreigners–Genoese and Florentines especially–from settling in the kingdom because ‘they stole the royal secrets as to Africa and the islands’.1 A little later, in 1504, King Manuel reaffirmed that complete secrecy be maintained in regard to south-eastern and north-eastern navigation–offenders would be put to death. ‘Thereafter, it would appear, all the charts, maps, and logs concerning the routes to Africa, India and Brazil were housed in the royal chartroom and placed under the custody of Jorgé de Vasconcelos.’2 Several historians have argued that more than one official Portuguese chronicle of discovery was deliberately left uncompleted so as to preserve crucial information. Donald Lach, in his survey of Portugal’s control of information, says that a policy of suppressing news about African discovery and trade was almost certainly carried out by the Portuguese: ‘It is hard to believe that chance alone is sufficient to account for the fact that not a single work on the new discoveries in Asia is known to have been published in Portugal between 1500 and mid-century.’3

  Such an embargo could not last. Portuguese cartographers peddled their services and their information on the overseas world, selling their inside knowledge to the highest bidders, as did navigators and merchants who had been on such voyages. Some people appear to have felt guilty about this and, very often, military details were omitted. But, gradually, as the sixteenth century lengthened, the discoveries became common currency. Tantalising hints were dropped in the general pronouncements of the Portuguese kings, who sent official communications to their fellow monarchs around Europe, and to the papacy. Another way information circulated was via the many Italian merchants in Lisbon, some of whom at least were Venetian spies. In this way, the route to India, although classified as a state secret, was the subject of several early accounts written by foreigners from inside Portugal. A general–if hazy–picture could be reconstructed by those interested in doing so.4 The Portuguese policy of secrecy, says Lach, was largely successful for about fifty years, but broke down around mid-century, when it became clear that Portugal could not maintain a monopoly on the spice trade. After about 1550 there was a great vogue for travel literature and it was also about now that the Jesuits began publishing their famous ‘letterbooks’. These provided the most comprehensive description of the Far East for many years.5

  A series of papal bulls issued in the sixteenth century enabled the Portuguese Crown to create something that came to be called the padroado (not unlike the Spanish patronato). The Crown was granted the use of certain ecclesiastical revenues in Portugal for exploration and the right to propose to the papacy a number of candidates for the sees and ecclesiastical benefices of Africa and the Indies.6 In this way, in the Indies, Goa became established as the headquarters of Jesuit activity and, in 1542, four months after his arrival there, Francis Xavier addressed a letter to the father of his order in Rome in which he referred to Goa as already an ‘entirely Christian city’.7 (Its original name was Ticuari, which meant ‘Thirty Villages’.) With Xavier’s arrival in India, the Jesuits became the acknowledged leaders of the Christian missionary effort within the padroado.

  Each of the early explorations had included missionaries or ecclesiastics of one kind or another, and many of them had written accounts of their experiences. But it was not until the Jesuits became active in overseas missions that a comprehensive system for correspondence was established and the dissemination of information became virtually routine. Ignatius Loyola explicitly ordered members of his order to send letters to him in Rome. Important matters were to be sent in a formal letter, while less important or more private concerns were included on a separate sheet known as hijuela. All such correspondence was to be written out in triplicate and sent to Rome by three different routes.8 ‘These reports were to be prepared with great thought and care, for they were to be used for the edification and guidance of the Society and for the inspiration of public interest in its far-flung enterprises.’9 An office was established in Rome that was responsible for communicating with the missionaries and for receiving the incoming letters, editing and translating them and then circulating them throughout Europe. In this way information on the peoples and cultures and ideas of India were first spread. With Goa being used as the administrative centre, all information, wherever
it was gathered–China or Japan, say–became known as ‘Indian letters’. About this time, a Jesuit college was established at Coimbra in Portugal and this too became a repository and clearing house for Jesuit letters sent to Europe, and then passed on to Rome.10 There were five types of letter–the hijuelas already mentioned, hortatory letters, designed to stimulate interest in the East among the brothers back home, accounts for public distribution, which were more restrained in tone, personal accounts, and ‘allied documents’, in effect appendices, such as histories of specific tribes, or chronicles about specific matters or issues about which the missionaries thought that people back home would require further detailed knowledge.11 Eventually, as the letters became stabilised, the Jesuits in Rome and Coimbra stopped translating them into all the different languages of Europe and instead published them in Latin, as Epistolae indicae.12

  The writings of the Jesuits, unlike the secular authors, of whom there were several, were not concerned with trade. They do refer to military action, but in general they cover cultural matters, the ideas and practices, the institutions and customs of far-off peoples. For example, in so far as Malabar was concerned (the Malabar Coast was the western coast of India, below what is now Bombay or Mumbai), the Jesuits reported the death of a ruler, showing how the mourners gathered in a field, for the cremation, how they shaved their bodies completely, ‘saving only their eyelashes and eyebrows’ and, after cleaning their teeth, refrained from eating betel, meat or fish for thirteen days.13 Their accounts likewise show how the administration of justice varied according to the caste of the offender, and how trial by ordeal was not uncommon, some offenders being required to plunge the first two fingers of their right hand into boiling oil. ‘Should his fingers be burnt, the accused is tortured to force a confession of what he has done with the stolen goods. Whether he confesses or not, he is still executed. Should the accused’s fingers not be burnt, he is released and the accuser is either executed, fined or banished.’14 Bengalis were described as ‘sleek, handsome black men, more sharpwitted than the men of any other known race’.15 But they were also denounced for being ‘overly wary and treacherous’ and the reports noted that elsewhere in India it was an insult to call someone a Bengali. The accounts further report that the government of Bengal had been taken over by Muslims about three hundred years before the arrival of the Portuguese–substantially correct. And it was from Portuguese Jesuits that Europe first learned in some detail about the advent of the Mughals in India, and the struggle for supremacy between them and the Afghans.16