Romantic backlash? Or new beginnings?

For a long time, The Guys Upstairs have told us that whenever we move into a new era, it will be made up partly of new elements, partly of elements previously rejected and thought of as superstition, or error. We’re seeing that now, I think. The attached article from The Guardian makes the point. (If the link doesn’t work, copy-paste this URL and go to it directly:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/28/new-romanticism-technology-backlash

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/28/new-romanticism-technology-backlash

You will note that the author of this somewhat thoughtful piece seems to assume that astrology, for instance, is a bit of leftover superstition that is now making its way back into the  mainstream. Perhaps I mistake his bias. But if I am right, all I can say is, Carl Jung used it to obtain valid insights into patients, and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

The piece is worth reading if only for whatever new associations it may raise in your own mind.

Some statements of truth

I will do for Matthias Desmet’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism what I am always wishing someone would do for my books, particularly The Cosmic Internet. A few quotations from a little book I read in two days with that sense of delighted recognition one gets so few times in a long lifetime of reading.

& & &

“Truth-telling is a way of speaking that breaks through an established, if implicit, social consensus. Whoever speaks the truth breaks open the solidified story in which the group seeks refuge, ease, and security. This makes speaking the truth a dangerous endeavor. It strikes fear in the group, and results in anger and aggression.” (p. 13)

& & &

“That’s how most people eventually become certain. Very certain. Yet of the most opposing things. Some people were convinced that we were dealing with a killer virus, others that it was nothing more than the seasonal flu, and still others believed that the virus did not even exist and that we were dealing with a worldwide conspiracy. And there were also a few who continued to tolerate uncertainty and kept asking themselves: How can we adequately understand what is going on in our society?” (p. 6)

& & &

“The ultimate achievement of science is that it finally surrenders, that it comes to the realization that it cannot be the guiding principle for man. It is not human reason that is at the heart of matter, but man as an individual who makes ethical and moral choices, man in relation to fellow man, man in relation to the unnamable, which, at the heart of things, speaks to him.” (p. 16)

& & &

“Mechanistic ideology always lives on credit! In the future, once perfect knowledge has been achieved and perfect technology has been mastered, it will translocate the man-machine into paradise. Yet for now, it mainly makes people sick and depressed.” (p. 46)

& & &

“With respect to the leaders, mass-formation gives rise to two opposing attitudes: Either one trusts the leaders blindly (and disappears into the mass), or one completely distrusts them and sees them as people who knowingly carry out an evil plan (i.e. conspirators). In a certain sense, both extreme perspectives are based on a similar misunderstanding: They fallaciously endow the leaders with a virtually absolute knowledge (and power); the first group does so in a positive sense, the second group in a negative sense.” (p. 105)

& & &

“The Enlightenment man, too, was brought up in a myth, a story that tells something about his origin, that makes him take a certain perspective on life and links his negative and positive emotions and affects to specific situations.” (p. 172)

& & &

“The end point of science is not reached with a perfectly rational understanding and control of reality; instead, it lies in the final acceptance that there are limits to human rationality, that knowledge does not belong to man, but has to be situated in the wider system of which man forms a part.” (pp. 177-8)

& & &

“The ultimate knowledge lies outside of man. It vibrates in all things. And man is able to receive it, by tuning his vibrations, like a string, to the frequency of things. And the more man is able to set aside prejudices and beliefs, the more purely he will vibrate with the things around him and receive new knowledge.” (p. 184)

& & &

“Literally: To the degree that we can connect with what is outside ourselves, we are able to transcend our own boundaries and our own world of experience gets expanded to an existence that extends endlessly in time and space. Through resonance with the greater plan, we participate in the timelessness of the universe, like a reed rustling in the eternal air of life.” (p. 186)

& & &

And finally, this, which is the first time I have ever been moved to quote form an “Acknowledgements” page:

“We cannot describe in words where words come from. But we do know where words go – they are always on their way to Another. Man is a narrow passage through which words pass on their journey from source to Other.” (p. 189)

& & &

It was a great refreshment, reading this book. I doubt that Matthias Desmet makes a practice of talking to his guys upstairs (at least, if he does, I doubt he does so knowingly). He has a scientifically trained mind, which I do not have. Yet his life has brought him to conclusions quite compatible with what the guys have been telling us for more than 20 years..

I can think of no experience more delightful and encouraging than to read an honest man’s careful and skillful attempt to lay out the plain truth, as best he can, knowing that truth may be offered freely, but can by transmitted only to those able to receive it.

 

All good things …

For months now, every Sunday, I have been posting on Facebook excerpts from my uncompleted history of the United States. Those who followed the plan remember that it started at the year 2000 and worked backwards. Well, we haven’t come to the end of the trail, but we’ve come to the end of what I have written. In the immortal words of Porky Pig, that’s all, folks.

As to whether I shall ever complete it, that’s in the lap of the gods. My primary work is not this history, which was begun at the instigation of my friend Charles Sides, but my conversations with various non-physical entities that i lump under the name The Guys Upstairs.  There’s plenty of work to do, going back over years of communications and posting the most important ones. This I do on a daily basis on this blog, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future. But maybe at some time I will be able to return to the history. The difficulty is that as I see it now, it requires pretty much a total rewrite, and I’m not sure I’m up to that.

In any case, onward and upward.

The Albany Congress of 1754

It isn’t always easy to tell success from failure, even long after the fact. The Albany Congress made specific proposals. The British Colonial Office turned them down. So did every one of the legislatures from the seven colonies that had sent representatives. Nothing proposed was ever implemented. And yet Benjamin Franklin, much later, said that had its proposal been implemented, the Revolutionary War probably wouldn’t have happened.

Pretty extravagant language for a conference of only 21 delegates, representing only the northern seven of the 13 colonies, meeting for only three weeks. Justified?

Well, that conference eventually became seen as the colonists’ first attempt at continental unity, and many elements of the plan it proposed were implemented in the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution.

The summer of 1754 was the beginning of the French and Indian War in North America. Washington’s encounter in May made it clear that war with France was likely. Even if it didn’t come to that, there were other matters of common concern, most particularly how to achieve better relations with the Indian nations on the frontiers of the colonies.

The legislatures of the (then) four New England states, plus those of New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, sent representatives to the meeting in Albany, which convened June 19 and continued to July 11, 1754. The Carolinas, Georgia, Delaware and New Jersey did not participate, presumably because they were not on the front line of any potential conflict. For some reason not at all clear to me, neither did Virginia, which had the largest territory to defend against the French and Indians.

“The Conference of Albany” was supposed to be talking about coordinated actions and attitudes toward French and Indians. Perhaps it was natural for the conference to be dominated by Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan.

Franklin, ever the combination of practical man of affairs and visionary thinker, proposed that the colonists create a “grand council” that would have jurisdiction over Indian affairs. As matters stood, each colony dealt with various tribes, and so the Mohawks, say, might sign a treaty with New York that ignored or contradicted a treaty signed with Pennsylvania. The jumble of competing jurisdictions made everyone’s life complicated. Franklin proposed that the various legislatures create the council and cede it sole power to deal with the Indians. He wasn’t thinking of a federal government (as far as anybody knows), but of a sort of specialized supra-colonial legislative agency confined to one set of problems.

The King would appoint an executive, who together with a Grand Council selected by the colonial legislatures would be responsible for Indian affairs, military preparedness, and enforcement of laws regulating trade and finance. An equivalent today might be one of those compacts of states that deal with the problems of a multi-state river system, like the Colorado or the headwaters of Chesapeake Bay. A different analogy might be the Coal and Steel Community that was set up in Europe after World War II, that grew to become the Common Market and eventually the European Community.

(Some think that the example of the Iroquois confederation inspired the Albany Plan. Mainstream historians tend to credit English precedents, instead, as more familiar to colonial legislators.)

In any case, it never got off the ground.

The delegates approved a plan calling for a grand council with jurisdiction over Indian affairs, consisting of delegates appointed by each colonial assembly and a president to be appointed by the Crown. The colonies’ legislatures rejected the plan, since it would encroach upon their powers. The Colonial Office rejected the plan, perhaps because it had been hoping for some kind of unified military command. The British Board of Trade turned it down, too.

And that was the end of the matter. Or – was it?

The Albany Congress marked the first time that various colonies had met to discuss a common concern. Even though the Southern colonies were absent, it was a beginning. It would become the precedent for the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and, much more importantly, the First Continental Congress in 1774, which as we have seen led directly if not immediately first to the Articles of Confederation and then to the Constitution.

Franklin, in 1789:

“On reflection it now seems probable, that if the foregoing plan or some thing like it, had been adopted and carried into execution, the subsequent separation of the colonies from the mother country might not so soon have happened, nor the mischiefs suffered on both sides have occurred, perhaps during another century. For the colonies, if so united, would have really been, as they then thought themselves, sufficient to their own defense, and being trusted with it, as by the plan, an army from Britain, for that purpose would have been unnecessary: The pretences for framing the Stamp Act would not then have existed, nor the other projects for drawing a revenue from America to Britain by Acts of Parliament, which were the cause of the breach, and attended with such terrible expense of blood and treasure: so that the different parts of the Empire might still have remained in peace and union.”

Maybe so, maybe no. In any case, that isn’t the way it happened.

The French and Indian War

North America before the French and Indian War: British settlement confined to the Atlantic seaboard.

What North America called the French and Indian War, the rest of the world called the Seven Years’ War. It was a global war, fought from Europe to the subcontinent of India and elsewhere, but here we will concern ourselves only with the war in North America. (The war in North America extended from 1754 to 1760; the war in Europe continued from 1756 to 1763.)

The North American part of the war was fought from the Virginia frontier to Nova Scotia. Each side had its colonists, soldiers from the parent country, and Indian allies.

The French particularly depended on Indian allies, because they were so heavily outnumbered. They had few settlers on the ground (about 75,000, mostly along the St. Lawrence River valley) and were defended by about 3,000 colonial troops, and no French regulars.

The British colonies outnumbered them 20 to one, about a million and a half people strung along the Atlantic coast from Georgia to Newfoundland, and continually moving inland. Most of the British colonies had only ill-trained local militia, but Virginia, being by far the largest colony, with the longest and most exposed frontier, hosted several companies of British regulars. And oddly enough, the first battle in what became a global struggle was precipitated in May, 1754 by a 22-year-old Virginia militia Colonel named George Washington.

Years before, British activity in the Ohio territories had prompted the Governor-General of New France to dispatch a force of 300 men to the area, with the objective of punishing the Miami tribe for continuing to trade with the British. In 1753,  a mixed 2,000-man force constructed and garrisoned forts in the area. As the force moved south, it drove off or captured British traders, thus alienating the Mingo Indians.

The Iroquois sent to the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the New York region and beyond, William Johnson, whom the Iroquois called “He who does great things.” (Must have been an interesting man. He spoke their languages, had been made a colonel of the Iroquois, as well as a colonel of the Western New York Militia.) The Mohawks insisted that the British block French expansion.

The French began building Fort Duquesne, near the site of present-day Pittsburgh. (At issue was the control of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, and ultimately the Ohio.) The Governor  of Virginia ordered 21-year-old Major Washington to warn the French to leave. Washington’s party surprised them on May 28, killing many of them, including their commanding officer, at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.

On July 4, however, Washington was forced to surrender Fort Necessity to a French force. When England heard of the battles, the government sent an army expedition to dislodge the French. The British plans leaked, and France sent New France six regiments. Naval engagements led to formal declarations of war in 1756.

The year 1755 was a year of disasters for the British, with four operations against the French all failing. The worst defeat came to British General Edward Braddock at the Battle of the Monongahela. Braddock lost 1,000 killed or injured, and died of his wounds a few days later. Young Washington led the remaining 500 British troops to safety in Virginia. In preventing defeat from turning into a rout, Washington immediately became famous throughout the colonies. (In 1774, delegates to the First Continental Congress, meeting the man they had read about 20 years earlier, were surprised to see not some old greybeard but a young and vigorous man of 42.)

Military matters didn’t go much better for the British in the following two years, except in Canada, where forces from Nova Scotia overcame the French in Acadia (present-day New Brunswick). British commander in chief William Shirley, acting without orders, expelled the French from the area, thus dispersing the Acadians (or ‘Cadians, and eventually Cajuns) as far as Louisiana.

. In 1757, a mixed French force of Canadian scouts and Indians besieged Fort William Henry, which finally capitulated with an agreement to withdraw under parole. When the withdrawal began, some of Montcalm’s Indian allies, angered at the lost opportunity for loot, attacked the British column, killing and capturing several hundred men, women, children, and slaves. And, since smallpox was present within the fort, the siege may have helped spread smallpox among the Indians beyond the Mississippi, as returning warriors unknowingly carried it with them.

The turning point of the war came after William Pitt became Prime Minister. He committed large numbers of troops and ships to the struggle in the New World, which France was unable to match, partly due to the British blockade, partly due to France’s military entanglements on the European continent.

In 1759, which the British called the year of miracles, the British captured both Ticonderoga and Quebec city. In September 1760, the French Governor-General negotiated a surrender that guaranteed French residents religious freedom, security of property and the right to remain if they chose. And that was more or less the end of the fighting on the North American continent. The war in North America officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, a few days before another treaty ended the Seven Years’ War.

Now, notice this. The British offered France a choice: surrender either its continental North American possessions east of the Mississippi or the two Caribbean islands that the British had occupied, Guadeloupe and Martinique – and the French chose to keep the islands, for the value of their sugar production. Inexplicable to us, logical to them.

So, the peace treaty gave the British everything east of the Mississippi, handed over the rest of French possessions to their Spanish allies, and left France with only the Caribbean islands plus a couple of fishing islands in the St. Lawrence.

The Seven Years’ War nearly doubled Britain’s national debt, which as we have seen led to attempts to impose taxes on the colonies. The French debt increased as well, and they handed over some of the richest and most productive farmland and hunting territories in the world. The Indians, regardless which side they had allied with, found that the British now faced no counterweight to expansion. British takeover of Spanish Florida prompted most of its population to leave for Cuba, and sent Indian tribes westward to avoid the British, leading to rising tensions between the Choctaw and the Creek. The war changed everything.

 

Proclamations versus land-hunger

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 began the process of turning the British Empire’s total victory over the French into the loss of the American colonies. But why?

Once I would have said something like this: “The British government, in its blindness, totally disregarded the legitimate interests of the American colonists.” That’s the way American history often paints it. But from London, each disastrous move seemed reasonable, even logical. The frontier problems King George tried to address were much the same as those that faced another George – Washington – thirty years later.

* * *

The Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War in 1763 expelled the French from North America, leaving the British in uncontested possession from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the northern and western limits of settlement in Canada. But of that vast territory, the British American had settled only the areas between the ocean and the Appalachians, and that sparsely. From the mountains to the Mississippi, and throughout most of what had been French Canada, those actually in possession were American Indians.

British North America regarded the Treaty of Paris as the green light for expansion . But their imperial leaders weren’t so sure that was a good idea. The French had considered the Indian nations centered on the Great Lakes to be valuable allies. Could those Indians be reconciled? It had to be considered. In October, King George surprised the colonists with his Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement beyond the mountains.

In those days, Indians were not remnant peoples. In 1763, and into George Washington’s presidency 30 years later, they were nations, and although they were outnumbered, the technological gap was not so large (that is, they were not so impossibly outgunned) and they were neither desperate nor helpless. In fact, the Indians helped precipitate the proclamation.

While the king and his ministers were wrestling with the problem of reorganizing the governing of North America, they learned of the outbreak of the rebellion led by Pontiac, an attempt to prevent the British from occupying the lands formerly claimed (but not settled) by France. Pontiac’s War would continue for three years and end in defeat, but its largest impact may have been the impetus it provided for the Royal Proclamation.

King George decreed that for the time being, no more settlement would be allowed west of the Appalachians. Any lands whose rivers flowed into the Atlantic were open to colonial settlement. Lands whose rivers flowed into the Mississippi were reserved for the Indian nations. Furthermore, the act prohibited purchase of Indian land by anyone other than Crown officials, not colonial officials.

That proclamation, like so many temporizing acts of statesmanship, sought not to prevent change but to delay it, in the hope of making it more manageable. With time (London hoped) the Indians would learn to live with the British as they had lived with the French.

But the land-hungry colonials had fought hard against the French. They had been raised to fear the French-Indian combination that had resulted in so many backwoods massacres. Were they now to be deprived of the fruits of their victory? King George, like his royal predecessor King Canute, was able to command the tide to halt, but was unable to enforce it.

The clamor for revision or withdrawal of the proclamation began pretty fast, encompassing not only settlers who were already beyond the mountains, but prominent public men and land speculators both in North America and in the home islands. It wasn’t long before the boundary line was moved westward, first in the Treaty of Sort Stanwix (1768), then in the Treaty of Lochaber (1770), until the area open to British American settlement extended Virginia into what later became the states of Kentucky and, still later, West Virginia.

But the damage to relations between mother country and its American colonies had been done. The colonists (particularly colonial land speculators, which in those days meant nearly anybody with a little extra money) resented the British government’s refusal to permit new settlements. The proclamation ignited suspicions that the actions that seemed eminently reasonable to the Crown officials were evidence of a deep-laid plot to suppress and oppress them for the greater good of the home island.

Suspicion usually trumps reason, and so it proved in the 1700s. But after the American Revolution, the new government found itself confronting the sme problem that the proclamation of 1763 had tried to address. A series of laws and court decisions attempted to protect Indian lands from encroachment, and declared that only the federal government could buy Indian land, but in the end hunger for land and resources trumped governmental regulations every time. In the long run, the United States government’s policies were not much different from those of King George, and not much more effective.

 

Through the Cumberland Gap

[“Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap,” George Caleb Bingham, 1852]

For a few generations, English colonists continued to think of themselves in relation to the ocean, with all its connections to home. But with time, the settlers of western Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and North Carolina, increasingly looked not east, but west. For decades, pioneering families settled the long Shenandoah valley, moving from the Pennsylvania Dutch country down through Maryland and Virginia as far as North Carolina. (In this way, North Carolina, a state with few good natural harbors, was actually settled as much west to east as east to west.)

The settlers wanted to stay in the latitudes they were used to, but the mountain chain kept funneling them southward. The way westward was blocked by the Appalachians, far too high and too rugged for the technology of the day to run roads through. For that, you’d need to find a chink in the wall, an interruption in the mountain chain.

Surely there was such a way over the Appalachians. There had to be!

There was, and it became the gateway to the West. Located more or less where the modern-day states of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee come together, the Cumberland Gap was found in 1750 by a Virginia doctor named Thomas Walker, who gave it the name by which we still call it.

Walker found the gap, but the man who did more than anyone else to open the way to Kentucky was Daniel Boone.

He was born of Quaker parents on the edge of the Pennsylvania frontier in 1734, two years after George Washington. The Pennsylvania Quaker had good relations with the Indians, and the Lenape Indians taught young Boone as much about woodcraft as did the local white settlers. (He was given his first rifle at the age of 12 to provide food for the family.) In 1750, when Daniel was 16, his father moved the family to western North Carolina.

Like Abraham Lincoln two generations later, Boone grew up on the frontier and so had little formal education. Like Lincoln, he became a lifelong reader. (In later years, he would bring books with him on his long hunting expeditions, sometimes entertaining his companions by reading to them around the evening campfire.) But unlike Lincoln, Boone never had much to do with cities or even towns. Instead, he became an unexcelled master of the woods. (Late in life someone asked him if, in his extensive solitary travels,  he had ever gotten lost. He said, no, he wasn’t ever lost, “but I was bewildered once for three days.”)

In 1755, during the French and Indian War, Boone was a wagon driver with the same expedition that Washington narrowly saved from total disaster. (We’ll come to that.) Oddly enough, one of the most important results of that failed expedition was that a wagon driver’s imagination was caught another driver’s tales of his travels across the mountains, trading with the Indians in a place they called Kentucky.

Nothing happened just then. Boone went home and the following year married. But the seed had been planted. For years, he supported his family as a commercial hunter, going alone or with a few others into the wilderness, hunting and trapping for weeks or months along what were called the Medicine Trails (buffalo migration trails), then returning to sell the hides and pelts. But by the mid-1760s, colonial immigration into the Yadkin valley area had made it harder for a hunter to find enough game to make ends meet. Time to move.

Dniel Boone thought about moving to the Pensacola, Florida area, and actually bought some land there, but his wife refused to move so far from everything she knew. Not Florida? Well, where? And then fate stepped in, and here again was John Finley, still with his tales of Kentucky.

Boone first reached Kentucky in the fall of 1767 while on a long hunt with his brother. After he learned that the feared Iroquois Indians had signed the Fort Stanwix treaty, ceding Kentucky to the British, he Boone began a two-year hunting expedition in Kentucky, but in December, 1769, he was captured by Shawnees, who had not signed the Fort Stanwix treaty, and regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground. They confiscated the skins and told Boone and his companion to leave and never return.

But Boone continued hunting and exploring Kentucky. In September, 1773, he led a group of about 50 would-be emigrants to establish a settlement in Kentucky. But the attempt was abandoned after one of Boone’s sons, and another man, were captured by a band of Delaware, Shawnees, and Cherokee Indians, and tortured to death.

That massacre led to what was called Dunmore’s War between Virginia and the Shawnees, which ended in the Shawnees relinquishing their claims to Kentucky. And in 1775, a North Carolina judge named Richard Henderson hired Boone to blaze what became known as the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. Boone led a party of 30 into central Kentucky, marking a path to the Kentucky River and founding Boonesborough. He brought his family there on September 8, 1775. He was 49 years old.

The road he marked, and the settlements he founded and protected, are the reason that Kentucky had enough inhabitants in 1792 to be admitted to the Union as the first state west of the Appalachians, eleven years prior to the admission of Ohio.

He had a lot more life to live, but the story is too long to tell here. He served as an officer of militia in the Revolutionary War, fighting in the 1782 Battle of Blue Licks, fought after the surrender at Yorktown. He continued pioneering, and became a legend in his own lifetime, famous not only in America but in Europe. Daniel Boone died of natural causes on September 26, 1820, nearly 86 years old. By the time he died, the wilderness road had enabled an estimated 300,000 men, women and children to get past the mountain barrier.

 

Map from Wikipedia