A Thousand Shades of Grey

No, it's not a friggin' sex novel, fawned over by lonely suburbanites -- just the weather here in Old Matakeesett:
    Thick fog, light winds from the NE, 71.9 F (22.17 C). Pressure: 29.89", rising. Dewpoint: 71 F (21.7 C). Humidity: 96%.

    A fine maritime day.

What is Community? #1: Wendell Berry

 I talk a lot about communitarian ideas on this blog; I think that would have surprised the 2003 version of myself. Maybe not.
 At any rate, if I am to go on talking in such a fashion, I ought at least to give some tolerable definitions of what I mean. Now, I don't wholly endorse really any of these definitions; but each one contains what I consider a good starting point. The first is from Kentuckian, farmer, novelist, philosopher, and activist Wendell Berry (for whom I am indebted to my good friend, one Chuzzleby, of the Hudson Valley). 

 Berry writes:

  "The indispensable form that can intervene between public and private interests is that of community. The concerns of public and private, republic and citizen, necessary as they are, are not adequate for the shaping of human life. Community alone, as principle and as fact, can raise the standards of local health (ecological, economic, social, and spiritual) without which the other two interests will destroy one another.

   By community, I mean the commonwealth and common interests, commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so. To put it another way, community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature. (Community, of course, is an idea that can extend itself beyond the local, but it only does so metaphorically. The idea of a national or global community is meaningless apart from the realization of local communities). Lacking the interest of or in such a community, private life becomes merely a sort of reserve in which individuals defend their 'right' to act as they please and attempt to limit or destroy the 'rights' of other individuals to act as they please." 

   (Wendell Berry, "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community", p. 120, in Berry, W., Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, Pantheon Books, 1992).

   Berry reminds me of the fact, that, most viscerally, I feel "at home" in the place I have -- not always, but for most of my life -- lived. It feels right, the way your own parents' home smells right, when people don't pronounce most of their "r"s, when they use the long flat nasal vowels of New England, so that "orange" and "foreign" become "awwrunge" and "fawrin'", "worry" is pronounced "wuhrry", "four" and "sure" become "fow-ah" and "show-ah".

    But I do wonder where this leaves not only national and global communities, but even regional ones -- my own New England, or Berry's own Bluegrass Country, Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta? Much to think about here.

    But what Berry gets truly, absolutely, just spot-on correct is his assessment of where our neoliberals leave us when they have at last realized their mad dream: that "there is no such thing as society" (Maggie T). Berry describes Paul Ryan's and Mittens Romney's vision of the country perfectly when he writes that, in the absence of "interest ... in such a community, private life becomes merely a sort of reserve in which individuals defend their 'right' to act as they please and attempt to limit or destroy the 'rights' of other individuals to act as they please."

     Against all this, we are still, as the Mayflower Compact held, "a civil body politick"; and that which was wrought over centuries shall not be undone by corrupt Reaganists in the space of decades.

Civic Patriotism and Town Meeting

 Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote recently about contemporary American liberals' discomfort with civic forms of patriotism, the patriotism of Lincoln and FDR, of citizen armies -- and, let us not forget, that Lincoln and FDR were about as left as you can get and still be elected President; I guess in national emergencies, we often make the right call in our leaders (yes, McClellan and Hoover, I'm looking at you, you perpetual jackasses -- and let us hope that soon we may add Mittensthwaite von Romney to your ranks!).

   But it occurs to me just now that this lack of civic nationalism doesn't occur only on the contemporary center-left; its also a persistent feature of their cultural confreres on the far Right, the Libertarian movement, which eschews not only civic patriotism, but the very idea of the polis whatsoever -- as though we were only so many disaggregated individuals, contracting with one another in a beautiful, rationalistic, and utterly fantastical ballet.

   Just what do I mean by a sense of civic patriotism? Let me explain.

   In New England we were blessed by the radicalism of our forbears, and the wisdom of their descendants, with the most directly democratic form of local government in the United States, if not the world, the Town Meeting (do I proclaim us a City on Hill? Perhaps -- but with the admonition not to seek our monsters!). The Town Meeting is the government of each of the Towns constituting the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or the State of Vermont, or any other Town in the six New England states (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island); unlike other parts of the country, county government is almost non-existent in much of New England, and nearly all functions of local government are left to the several Towns, themselves possessing an ancient sovereignty, from their 17th and 18th century origins, that precedes the constitutions of the six states. In fact, unlike states further west, there is no "county land" in New England (with the exception of Maine, where its northern wilderness is organized as the vast "Unincorporated Territory", where there is nominal county government, though this has little meaning in the North Woods). Instead, the entire territory of Massachusetts, for instance, which is typical, is divided up between 351 Towns (and 14 cities, which are defined as possessing a mayor-council type of government). If you leave the jurisdiction of one Town, you have by definition entered another Town; you will notice the difference in street signs, for instance.

   Most Towns are governed by the directly democratic Town Meeting (though some larger Towns that don't want to become cities have instituted the novelty of the representative Town Meeting). The Town Meeting, in which any adult voter can take part, is the legislature of each Town. It is run by a popularly elected Moderator, who is in many senses the Head of State for the Town; it is the most "elder statesman" of the various Town offices, above the more earth-bound and political world of the Selectmen. The agenda of the meeting is determined prior to the meeting: articles are added to the the agenda, or Warrant, by both the Board of Selectmen, who are the multi-person, popularly elected executive of the Town (usually three or five positions), and other Town boards and commissions, which are a mixture of elected (e.g., the School Committee) and appointed (e.g., the Alternative Energy Commission) positions. In addition, articles may be added by citizen petition. There are usually around fifty articles, and they deal with all aspects of a municipality's government in any given year: finances, the institution of new bylaws on everything under the sun, resolutions condemning nuclear power or praising the Red Sox, whether to replace the fire station -- just anything, really. The judiciary is represented by the Town Attorney, who advises the Town Meeting on legal matters. It is run according to standard parliamentary procedure, and motions can be brought from the floor. Debates are lively and to the point, as in the Athenian assembly. Votes are by voice; if the Moderator cannot determine whether the "Yeas" or "Nays" have it, he will send out the counters, who will count by section (many votes are unanimous, like "Will the Town consent to allow the beach to be opened this summer?", etc.) and give him the totals. To prevent skullduggery on the moderator's part, any citizen can call for a reconsideration of a vote, or can move that a previous vote was illegal. Because they were the product of an agrarian society, the meetings occur in the early Spring, when the snow was melting and travel became easier (many New England farm families were isolated from November through March, and the children did not attend school during these months), usually at the end of March. Usually the annual Town Meeting in March is the only one; special Town Meetings may be called for certain emergencies or pressing questions.

    This, as you can no doubt see, is a complicated system, and yes, sitting at Town Meeting for the two or three days it usually takes (meeting 9-5 with a lunch break in the high school auditorium or gymnasium, usually) can be boring. But, like church, which can also be boring, you leave -- after all the parliamentary maneuvering, after the impassioned debate, after either hard-won victory or a close defeat -- after all this, you leave with an uplifting feeling, also like church. Why, you think, we have just governed ourselves; we did not massacre anyone, we sought imperfect agreement over the just government of the public things (res publica), and no delegate or senator or president did it for us: we did it. And if we don't like it -- there's always next March.

     This is the feeling I mean by civic patriotism. And it is absent entirely from those liberalisms, of the left and of the right, that foolishly assert that we are the masters of our own stories, that we are individuals unmoored from communities, and that the highest end is, respectively, one's own pleasure and self-realization, or, the untrammeled tyranny of market economics. These are not what people bleed and die for -- they bleed and die for one another, for home and family and for actual and experienced liberties, not the abstract liberty of the Brooklyn set or the Chicago School Friedman types. For peace and bread, not for the gold standard or organic food. It is this abstraction in politics, and its takeover by sniping petty lawyers, mere solicitors of political sophistry, that makes it detestable to the common people, for they feel no part in it.

   But this need not be the case. Jefferson famously suggested the division of the country into units the size of New England towns, to be directly and democratically self-governing; he called it "ward democracy". And here, at the edge of a tragic and burning century, is it too late to move towards the realization of this seemingly distant vision?

    No! It is not! Indeed, it might be our only hope: for there is no power like the power of what Melville called "the kingly commons", and Jefferson was correct when he remarked that, in matters of morals, 'tis better to ask a common farmer than the most learned of metaphysicians. So, embracing democracy and our love of democracy, of our selves as a communitas, let us take back our land and fortunes from what Jackson so rightly called "the Money Power". It is not too late to dream a newer world.

A little Walt

Poets to Come

by Walt Whitman

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!

Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,

But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than

before known,

Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,

I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a

casual look upon you and then averts his face,

Leaving it to you to prove and define it,

Expecting the main things from you.

Old Colony vs. Bay Colony I: or, Newe-England Terminology

   Recently, I've noticed that even among my colleagues who are American historians, there is very little sense of the niceties and quirky particularities of early New England history. So I thought I'd provide a brief primer.


   So, early New England, or, Norumbega, to the eastern Algonquian peoples -- Wampanoag, Narragansett, Massachusett, Abenaki, Nipmuc, Pequots, and many others -- who lived here during the Era of Contact, did not resemble the current system of six sovereign, though federally united, states. Instead, a patchwork of polities, English and Indian, along with outposts of New France and New Amsterdam, covered this rocky, hilly, and chilly land (and almost preternaturally abundant waters).


   So, when I refer, in my profile, to my homeland as being "the Old Colony", this does not mean Massachusetts Bay. The Old Colony is Plymouth Colony, which was an independent colony from 1620 through 1691 (thus being a decade older than Massachusetts), with its own governor, its own legislature, its own legal system, and its own military. Today, the region commonly known as Southeast Massachusetts -- the counties of Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable -- is essentially the Old Colony. The only thing it lacked was a legal charter. The Pilgrims, after being blown off course by an autumn gale (probably a hurricane), had landed outside the area patented to them from the Plymouth Company, which was at the mouth of the Hudson. Instead they landed on the hospitable shores (irony alert) of Cape Cod in late November. The most important thing was to get a settlement started immediately, as it was already wintry. However, the fact that they were in lands over which no European state ruled made the colonists nervous; thus, the signing, in Provincetown Harbor, of the famous Mayflower Compact, agreeing that they were "a body politick".


   The only problem was that this had no legal force in the eyes of their sovereign, the English Crown. But, isolated for most of the 17th century by the British Isles' epochal political upheavals, the small colony made relatively lackadaisical effort to obtain a charter. It was poorer and far less populous than its immediate neighbor, Massachusetts Bay, so it had fewer resources to invest in such an effort. Moreover, it lacked internal coherence and the expansionist spirit of its Puritan -- as in, purifying the Church of England -- neighbor. Interesting enough, though, the more radical Protestantism of Plymouth dominated its colony far less than the marginally more moderate Puritanism of Massachusetts Bay. There were demographic realities behind this somewhat greater pluralism: the "Pilgrim Fathers" were actually a mixture of ultra reformed Protestants, on the one hand, called the Separatists (so called because of their belief that the Church of England was so wicked that only full separation from it was acceptable), or "the Saints" as they called themselves; and on the other hand, a motley crew of adventurers, rolling stones, weirdos and young men on the make, labelled "the Strangers" by their more religious confreres. This forced a kind of de facto pluralism in the colony that was absent in its more orthodox neighbor from 1630, Massachusetts Bay, or the offspring of Massachusetts, Connecticut, from 1636.


    However, after the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688, the new regime sought to regularize the colonial order. Plymouth's lack of a charter now became a major problem, and the colony lacked the influence to successfully obtain one. For a time, even ethnic and religious polyglot New York (an English possession since 1664) made a play for the Old Colony and its valuable offshore islands, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard (both a kind of Quaker-Algonquian borderland). However, the strong affinity of the Plymouth settlers for their ethnic, geographic, and religious  neighbors meant that the colony was incorporated into a new Royal Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, with a governor directly appointed from London, but with a legislature that remained the most democratic in the New World. Thus, not only did Plymouth never obtain its Charter, but Massachusetts lost its original Charter, by which it had elected its own governors, along with other ancient liberties.


     Of the then 12 colonies in British America, only Rhode Island and Connecticut kept their original charters (cf. "The Charter Oak", where it was hidden from Stuart absolutists, on Connecticut's state quarter.) Indeed, Rhode Island kept going under its original 17th century charter into the 1840s (!), when a political revolution, Dorr's Rebellion, forced radical change.


     Well, if you've stuck with  me this far, you'll be excited to know that the next installment will cover the differences between the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven, which were separate in the 17th century.