What Are Revolutions?
THE ROMAN GODDESS OF THE DAWN WAS ALSO A GODDESS OF battles, so that down through the infamous history of warfare the great battles have begun with sunrise: Shiloh began at 6:00 A.M. (April 6, 1862) with Confederates bayoneting Union soldiers in their bedrolls. The first Battle of the Somme, in which one million and 265 thousand men were killed or maimed for life, began at dawn. And at dawn on April 19, 1775, seventy men stood in a line on the commons at Lexington, Massachusetts, awaiting the British troops Paul Revere had told them were marching to Concord, seven hundred of them, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith.
On this same common, sixty-two years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn was sung on the Fourth of July, 837:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
This was our revolution. It lasted until 1781, when at Yorktown Cornwallis surrendered on October 19 — the British, company by company, marching to a jaunty little tune called “The World Turned Upside Down,” gave up their flags and stacked their arms before General le marquis de Lafayette and General George Washington.
“The revolution,” John Adams remarked later, “was over before a single shot was fired.” He meant that our independence had evolved as a historical process. In some sense the French Revolution was also over before it began. Both these revolutions happened in and were the result of a time called the Age of Reason. A French historian has recently argued that their revolution was unnecessary, a tragic waste of two million lives. A million is a thousand thousand. One of the horrors of facts is that they are abstract. “Wars,” Melville said in a poem, “are fought by boys.” Consider one young Frenchman, the son of a family, with brothers and sisters, with a girlfriend or wife. He is healthy, he is of a height, or he isn’t eligible to die of gangrene at Jena or have his legs blown off at Austerlitz. Now multiply him by two and think of this second soldier with his face blown away at Waterloo. Now multiply him by three. If we stand here and count two million young Frenchmen — plain, handsome, curly-headed, lively, dull — one a second, it would take us twenty-three days and nights to count all two million of them.
What, then, is a revolution, that it should murder two million Frenchmen in the Age of Reason? The historian I mentioned feels that the real tragedy of the revolution was that it established the formula “If you want peace, make war.” If you want fraternity, kill your brother; if you want equality, decapitate the nobility; if you want liberty, enslave the young in an army. Listen to a fervent revolutionary, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, “We shall turn all France into a cemetery rather than fail in her regeneration.”
One of the battle hymns of the Bolshevik Revolution, which enslaved the Russian people with a power beyond the wildest desires of the cruelest czar, was “La Marseillaise.”
A revolution, then, is a way of putting power in different hands.
They have happened over and over down through history. One is raging at the moment in Haiti, another in Nicaragua, another in Honduras, another in Ecuador, another in Chad. There has not been a single minute of peace in the world since the Battle of Waterloo. Wars have gotten worse and worse, and will continue to get worse. We can even look back on battles that struck terror into the imagination and, by comparison with what we have done since, think them almost idyllic. The awesome battle of Lepanto, when Spain and Italy destroyed Turkish naval power for all time, lasted two hours. The battle of Lexington fifteen minutes or so. Greek, Roman, and biblical battles lasted a few hours only.
Is this, then, what revolutions are? Well, history is not wholly a Grand Guignol of blood and suffering. The British became a constitutional monarchy over years of evolution, with incidents of revolution thrown in. One should always think of Iceland, which lived more or less happily and successfully for five hundred years without any government at all. It has one now to be up with the times. The head of it is a tidy Lutheran woman with advanced ideas, and the big national concern is how strong beer should be. But no one has equaled the ultracivilized Danes in their revolution. This occurred with a petition to the king for a constitutional monarchy and an elected parliament. The king invited the revolutionaries to tea, where the matter was discussed favorably.
Revolution and evolution are perhaps like fire and rust, which are different speeds of oxidation. Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C. discovered that many different things are the same; the philosopher’s task was to find what is too fast or too slow to see; too small and too large. Evolution and revolution are the same process, one very slow, the other fast.
Of the evolutionary clock we can say little — it is out of our hands. But of the revolutionary clock we can ask: Is it in our hands entirely? Is it controlled by our desires and passions, our hope and restlessness? Or do we want to ask if evolution and revolution must cooperate? The United States freed its black slaves in 1865 with revolutionary violence, but the evolution of their freedom is a very long way from being complete. The communist revolution happened, in Russia and elsewhere, and is still happening with the understanding that its evolutionary stage is a long process.
Our political problem now in the United States is that we are a long way from our revolution. Congress proves daily that it is incompetent. It collects our taxes and throws them into a bottomless pit of debt. The last project we have been able to pay for was the building of the Panama Canal — from that point forward we are still in debt, and the interest is compound. Our revolution was fought because of a penny tax on paper and a two-penny one on butter. We are now taxed for every movement we make, every exchange of a nickel from citizen to citizen. That tyrant against whom we rebelled would not have dared to tax his subjects’ incomes and was innocent of the diabolical idea that one can collect taxes on income not yet earned, which all of us now pay.
We cannot communicate with our government; I asked the Internal Revenue Service a few years ago a very serious question and am still waiting for its answer. I know very well that I will never hear from them.
I do get messages from them, however, about other matters. My most recent one said: “Estimated Income Tax overpaid. Over-payment will be applied to next year’s return. There is no penalty for this.”
If there were a human mind behind that message I could join a revolution and express my displeasure, while hoping for the government I like, the one designed by Jefferson and Adams in 1789. But my message from the IRS was generated by a computer. That snide remark about no penalty for overpayment, which would have widened the eyes of Franz Kafka and George Orwell alike, is a phrase built into the machine. This machine has no manners, no wit, no heart.
When I am tempted to join whatever revolution holds out some hope to my and your condition, the temptation will come from my having, without doing a thing, managed to demote myself to second-class citizen. I have no driver’s license, which means that I have to use a different mode than drivers to get a passport. A driver’s license is citizenship. It is our carte d’identité. I know this painfully when I try to write a check, or when I must give evidence that I am me. I am, in our society, incomplete. I do not have a body. My body, at this moment, should properly be in your parking lot, if permitted. The body of an American has four wheels, drinks gas and oil, and eats cities.
The strangest revolution of our century is this perverse and invisible evolution of the human body into the automobile. Which brings us to the real subject of these remarks — the Heraclitean discovery of a hidden process, and what to do about it.
Evolutions, with their revolutionary bursts of speed that we call invention and war and discovery, most often happen, as Heraclitus said, unseen and undetected until long afterward. Greek city-states, with no idea of ever congealing into what we call a country, one by one, to help themselves in their eternal wars with one another, became client cities of the Romans, who willingly took their sides in th
eir petty forays and greed. Until one morning it dawned on the Greeks that they had become Romans and that they were a country, the province of Greece, with tax collectors and an emperor to rule them.
That’s an example of the slow process. We know all about the fast. Ask people in the Czech Republic or in Hungary. But what we are interested in here is the slow and the invisible. When we wake up from our myths we will discover that we Americans do not live in Jefferson’s republic but in a technological tyranny the likes of which has yet to be described by political scientists, who have slept through it all.
The prophets warned us. There were many of them: John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, Buckminster Fuller, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Booth Tarkington, Ezra Pound, William Morris. You will note that it is a strange list, these prophets. I want to take one of them and look at his outrageous ideas. He is Samuel Butler, Butler the Second, as we must say, not his namesake whom Darwin read with interest, but Darwin’s contemporary, the author of The Way of All Flesh (1903) and several cranky objections to Darwin, some delightful travel books, and an amazing satire called Erewhon (1872).
Butler’s Erewhon is a satire about Victorians and what they really believed beneath their sophistication and official religion. They believed, Butler said with a wicked smile, that to be ugly is a sin, that to be sick is a crime, and that to be luckless is punishable by a prison sentence. Like us, they worshiped money, and their true church was the bank. To be rich and fortunate, good-looking and healthy was the state of grace the Bible was really alluding to, not all that soppy stuff about brotherly love, compassion, and salvation.
The satirist takes a man at his deed, not at his word. Bernard Shaw built a career on a few of Butler’s ideas; he is an awfully good author to steal from. Ask Joyce. Butler’s greatest satire, however, is in those two brilliant chapters of Erewhon called “Darwin and the Machines.” Machines, a great Erewhonian philosopher discovered, have an evolutionary destiny precisely like that of organisms. In fact, they are organisms. They mate and beget offspring. We are shown how human pollinators, calipers and blueprint in hand, work at a factory to assist in a nursery of locomotives. As the bee assists in the propagation of plants, so the machinists assist at the lying-in of locomotives, the breed of which all of Butler’s readers had seen improve in their lifetimes, from the archaic Puffing Billy and Tom Thumb to great eight-wheelers that could chug from London to Edinburgh overnight. The evolution of the pterodactyl to the robin took millions and millions of years; from eohippus to the Belgian draft horse, again, millions of years. But from Puffing Billy to the locomotives of the Great British Southern Railway, the process had taken scarcely fifty years. Wilbur Wright lived to see his wood-and-wire flyer of 1904 evolve into the jet airliner. I grew up with people who liked to compare their first sight of an automobile. My grandmother, like Alexander Graham Bell, would not have a telephone in her house — she said it was a vulgar invention. (Bell, its inventor, did not have one because it was a damned nuisance.) I like better the objection of Edgar Degas, who did not have a phone because there was a great likelihood that the party calling might be someone to whom you had not been introduced.
The technological evolutionary scale, Butler’s Erewhonians figured out, was so much swifter than the biological that it was clear that they would very soon be enslaved by machines. One would spend most of one’s day behind the wheel of an automobile, taking it where it wanted to go. One would have to ransom it from a bank and work one’s fingers to the bone to keep up the payments it demanded and to feed it petroleum. One would have to build roads for it and tear down cities for its parking lots. It might even become a treacherous master and turn on you and kill you, as it does more than forty thousand Americans annually, injuring at least two million more.
The Erewhonians had not gotten as far as the automobile when they staged a revolution and killed the machines before it was too late. They slaughtered the locomotives, the power stations, the bicycles, the power looms.
And they were free. Not of their prejudices, for they are a wonderfully silly people, the Erewhonians. They devote their freedom from machines to sending people with measles and influenza to jail, along with the poor and the ugly, the luckless and the dull.
When we Americans wake up, we will see that we are an Erewhon that did not have a revolution that killed the machines. The philosopher who can tell us what has happened has not yet written a word. We did not listen to the prophets and now we do not even have a diagnostician to specify the name and nature of our enslavement. Nor do we have the technologist of Darwin’s genius to write the history of the evolution of the machine. Of all the creatures, the fish is the one that cannot define water for you. It can only say, “It’s what is. It is the way things are.”
If we had this imaginary Darwinian technologist, he would say something like this: As in biological evolution, where the liver fluke learned over a million years to take over, cell by cell, a water snail that sheep like to eat, and thus enter the sheep; so the automobile, to take but one machine, got us to believe that it is our body. The principle was laid down by an astute street philosopher 2,500 years ago: “A man who owns a lion,” Diogenes said, “is a man owned by a lion.” He was talking about slavery and noting how clever slaves frequently seem to own their owners. “Masters!” He also said. “Obey your slaves, and all will be well.”
Anybody can see that the automobile owns us, not we it. We are its slaves. It takes sharper eyes to see the more insidious process: the car swallowing up our soul in its metal-and-glass body. But it has happened and it is so.
This is an example of evolution as revolution and can be studied and demonstrated. The first place to look is at our bodies, which are now obsolete.
Never before since the Manichaeans raged have we so diligently criminalized all affection that involves the body. Our system of taboos is so charged with fear and suspicion that in the newspapers daily we have Ann Landers counseling parents to call the police because Uncle Jack has hugged his nephew upon entering the house. Will not the nephew grow up to be gay? Ann Landers always says yes. Is Uncle Jack normal? Obviously not. A normal Uncle Jack would explain his new car to his nephew and urge him to pet and caress it like a normal American male. Because, you see, the nephew cannot reach puberty and find a mate without an automobile. He cannot be thought of as masculine and properly American. It is, as Ann Landers has no way of knowing, his body and his destiny. He must, for instance, have one to go to high school; what is education without a car?
In Villiers de l’Île-Adam there is an arrogant but ultra-civilized aesthete who lives for the arts and their sensations only. He is accused of letting life pass him by. To which he replies, “Living? Our servants will do that for us.” We can now say, since we failed to stage the Erewhonian revolution, “Living? Our machines do that for us. We have an automobile for a body, a TV set for our imagination, a CD player for our musical expression.”
But these things, we can object, are labor-savers, and they are necessary. Necessity is the first argument of all tyrannies. Ask Hitler; ask all architects of totalitarianism.
Technology is our glory; it is the shape our brilliant civilization has taken. We are advanced in a miraculous way, and we will advance further and further. With technology the surgeon can laser away the cataract and restore our sight. We can enlist the artificial intelligence of the computer to perform engineering and mathematical exercises that would have taken Isaac Newton months of calculation.
And so on. We cannot, we do not want to turn back. An Erewhonian revolution makes no sense. There are, we know, romantic and quirky people who have declined TV and the automobile, the refrigerator and the personal computer. They are, in some strange sense, both advanced and retrogressive. The most strenuous prophet of the machine was R. Buckminster Fuller, who said that in the machine we have utopia (that’s the Greek for Erewhon, which is “nowhere” spelled backward) in our hands. We will not need to work. All of our time will be leisure. And then what do we do? Why! said Fu
ller, we devote all our time to the delights of the mind. If he had not been a New England transcendentalist, he would have added the delights of the body.
Well, what if we lost the delights of the mind and the body when we constructed a wholly automatic technology? Fuller said of politicians that they are people who couldn’t do anything else. We don’t need them in a technological paradise. They’ll go away in a generation. Businesspeople? Bankers? Financiers? What about them? Pirates! said Fuller. They will have no place in the new world. Instead we will have poets and painters and novelists, philosophers and scientists.
Fuller had an answer for everything. To a question about overpopulation, Fuller once pointed out that the population of the world could forgather on the island of Manhattan. There’s room there for all of them to stand — shoulder to shoulder, on every inch of floor and ground and underground space — but it can be done. So much for overpopulation. Fuller was not so much the only serious Erewhonian we had among us, in his own way — an Erewhonian who wanted to govern rather than obliterate the machine — as a ’Pataphysicist. This latter kind of scientific thinker, you remember, was imagined by Alfred Jarry, in the person of one Dr. Faustroll. His was the science of demonstrating that the opposite of all scientific truths is true. Water does not seek its own level. Gravity is grossly misunderstood. Time flows both backward and forward.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 34