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#2: The Frontier Was Always Closed (To You)
702 Plays2 years ago
Some thoughts about Albion’s Seed for the Fourth of July, and why this incredibly fractious group of (by modern standards) patriarchal authoritarian illiberals all got together to design a system of government with freedom of speech, religious toleration, due process, separation of powers, etc.
Also why, if they could see our current situation, they would be grossed out, but would not be remotely “blackpilled”, and if you explained the meaning of that word to them would laugh at you and tell you to nut up.
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Transcript
Introduction and Reflections on American Values
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, once again it's Dr. Bennett, and once again I am turning the microphone on and not turning it off. It's July 2nd, 2022. Coming up on the 4th of July, which is a great day. Beautiful day to be an American. And I want to talk about specifically why the American system of government is good.
00:00:37
Speaker
You know, we're on this illiberal right wing train, most of us. And I think we're all doing that primarily because we've become aware that these institutions that we've regarded as sacred have become.
00:00:54
Speaker
essentially hollowed out by people who despise them and they're now wearing those institutions like a skin suit and demanding the deference that those institutions used to command and so we're just refusing to be manipulated in that way we're saying we're not going to be
00:01:11
Speaker
told that we're unpatriotic because we don't defer to this corpse just because it's wearing the red, white, and blue.
Founding Fathers and Factionalism
00:01:22
Speaker
But I'm going to say that actually freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, the right to a trial by jury, separation of powers, popular sovereignty,
00:01:34
Speaker
Federalism, these are all really good things that were worth doing. And a lot of these reactionary commentators will say, well, it all has fallen apart and therefore it was a rotten system.
00:01:50
Speaker
But the idea that just the act of writing down all these rules was supposed to protect the country forever against subversion would have struck the Founding Fathers as ridiculous.
00:02:04
Speaker
And also, like, pathetic. Like, oh, you want to be free and comfortable in this beautiful country forever because of something that your great, great, great grandparents did and you never want to fight for it. Like, give me a break. They didn't think they were at the end of history. They didn't think that they were trying to engineer this autistic puzzle box just right, and then they would never have to do it again. Government would just stop being a problem. Tyranny would stop being a problem.
00:02:34
Speaker
they pretty much knew exactly how things were gonna collapse in terms of faction and sectionalism and the people voting themselves benefits from the public treasury. That was always anticipated, assumed would happen.
00:02:48
Speaker
You don't get to take these rights won by strong, courageous, violent men and just hand them to weak and spineless men and expect them to hang on to them. Everything's like this, whether it's wealth or faith or power or culture or prestige. If your heirs aren't worthy, it doesn't matter how much you stack the deck in their favor. And now that
00:03:15
Speaker
Progressives have more or less jettisoned the founding fathers as exemplary, or the American project as something admirable. We can finally have an honest conversation about who they were. If you want to keep Washington and Jefferson, you have to keep them as they were, not this fake, bolderized version that your normicon
00:03:45
Speaker
uncle wants them to be, or the kind that you were raised on in social studies in the 1990s.
Historical Interpretations and Modern Views
00:03:52
Speaker
And then these were guys who ruled their households with patriarchal authority, including their servants. They fought duels, they castrated sex offenders, extra legally, extra judicially, and particularly for a Latter-day Saint.
00:04:10
Speaker
um the the the normie latter-day saint who believes the constitution was divinely inspired and now you know
00:04:20
Speaker
He's sort of trying to figure out for himself whether or not that includes like trans rights. He has to confront who these men were that he believes to have been divinely inspired to write the Constitution that they did, which restricted the franchise to white landowning males. And he has to confront the fact that the the Imperium
00:04:44
Speaker
that is now twerking in America's skin that he is squealing over at the Super Bowl would have been disgusting to those men and that it practices every tyranny that they fought to abolish and a bunch of others that they couldn't have even imagined. And that'll be a healthy thing for him to have that confrontation.
00:05:07
Speaker
is sort of dialectic, right? Like they were uncomplicated heroes and then it goes, oh no, they were, they were villains. And then it's like, well, they were heroes who don't share your value system. And what does that say about your value system? At the Salt Lake Meetup, we talked about Albion Seed, which is a fantastic book about four folkways of the English settlers that came to America.
Puritan Influence on American Democracy
00:05:35
Speaker
So there's the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Quakers, and the Border Reavers. Puritans settled New England, the Cavaliers settled Colonial Virginia, the Quakers settled Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the Borders settled the backcountry. Primarily because they weren't welcome anywhere else and nobody else wanted to live near the Indians.
00:05:59
Speaker
You get the Puritans, who came over from East Anglia to New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who were extremely literate, educated craftsmen and traders building cities.
00:06:15
Speaker
basically the ones who brought industrial civilization to the new world. And their contribution to founding stock in the American system of government was this very intense, invasive, localized, direct democracy. So we're going to get together and we're gonna vote on what color your house can be and how long your wife's dress can be.
00:06:44
Speaker
and what days you can dance on if you're allowed to dance at all. And basically that is the sense in which they are Puritan in the sense that people make fun of Puritans about. But that phenomenon of like everything should be put to a vote, everything should be subject to the democratic process is almost entirely a progressive phenomenon now.
00:07:11
Speaker
And the Puritan model of freedom, their version of what it meant to be free, was that you get to be free as a group. Your tribe, your church should be absolutely unfettered in establishing the rules within its sphere.
00:07:33
Speaker
And so the idea that freedom meant that you as an individual got to do whatever you wanted to do, that's alien to the Puritans. But they did have this intense sense that nobody was above the law, that we're going to write everything down and we're going to be obedient to that. Everyone's going to be held to it. And frankly, when you think about what they went through to get here, the Puritans and the Separatists were run out of England
00:07:58
Speaker
had basically all of their property confiscated and went to live in a slum in Holland, which I think was called like Stink Alley. I'm pretty sure it was called Stink Alley. And they were getting these backbreaking industrial labor jobs. And after several years of that, the leader of the colony, William Bradford, said that his congregation was aging so rapidly that they would soon scatter or sink under their burdens.
00:08:27
Speaker
And not only that, but their people were assimilating to the liberal customs of the city because it was one of the first modern metropoles with all of the decadence and squalor that comes with that. So in 1620, in exchange for the ship Mayflower and enough provisions to cross the Atlantic, the Pilgrims made a pitch to the merchant adventurers of London
00:08:54
Speaker
that they could have an equity stake in this new Jerusalem, this city on a hill that the pilgrims are going to build. And they agreed to bring along some secular settlers. So already they're kind of having to compromise their separatist deal. And they promised to send fur and timber and fish back to England to repay the investment.
00:09:16
Speaker
And they knew that the English colony at Jamestown had just been wiped out or essentially wiped out by disease and starvation 10 years earlier. And they were going to a harder, colder, rockier part of the country. They knew they were going to have to deal with hostile natives, but it was either that or go extinct in Leiden, either through death or through assimilation.
00:09:43
Speaker
So they get in the boat, and the caulking fails pretty early on, so the passengers are soaked through day and night for 10 weeks, violently seasick. They didn't find a suitable settlement until December 7th, by which time the ground was frozen, you couldn't plant anything. Their scouting party had to sleep on the shore, on the beach, with wet shoes and stockings that froze to their feet.
00:10:10
Speaker
and the rest of the party stayed on board the Mayflower with the failed caulking soaking and freezing and I think like half of them on the boat died of scurvy and pneumonia and tuberculosis finally they find this Indian cache of corn and beans and they use that for the spring planting and the celebration of that harvest in the following autumn was the first Thanksgiving and
00:10:37
Speaker
So first of all, if, if a group like that, who has gone through that much to get here is to say, we're going to decide what the rules are and your abstract notion of individual Liberty, what you think people ought to be allowed to do. Um, we don't really give a shit like familiarize yourselves with the code of conduct, please.
00:11:02
Speaker
Now it's really freaking obnoxious when it becomes this universalizing, all-consuming national project, which is clearly what the intent is now. But for that colony of settlers who had gone through what they'd gone through,
00:11:20
Speaker
you can respect it. And ultimately there's a case to be made that you can't really have freedom unless you're free to make constraints, unless you're free to set rules. The best analogy that I've heard on that topic is the nude beach, right? If I live near a family beach and I take my kids there and we shop there, we go to the restaurants,
00:11:43
Speaker
And then someone comes along and says, we're going to turn this into a nude beach. And you know, you're still free to use it as a family beach. Like you can still do what you want to do, but we are going to expand freedom. And the set of things that you're allowed to do on this beach now expands to having your tits out. Well, freedom is really a question of what you want to do, right?
00:12:08
Speaker
what you want to do is enjoy the beach with your kids without exposure to exhibitionists, then your freedom has been substantially curtailed. And so there's a real sense in which your freedom is not just the freedom of everyone to do what they want reciprocally, it's the freedom to decide what goes on at the beach. And that ultimately is the kind of freedom that I want for my guys. Not the absence of rules, but us making the rules.
00:12:35
Speaker
And what do you learn from the Puritans on that score? Well, you learn that one of the problems they have is infinite faction, infinite schism. Because when you want to define a heuristic for all human behavior, the odds that you're gonna have substantial agreement across the board, and that that agreement will persist across time, across generations, is basically nil.
00:13:01
Speaker
And the Puritans have faded into sort of the background radiation of American mainline Protestantism.
Nietzsche, Quakers, and Moral Dynamics
00:13:08
Speaker
The Congregationalist churches, which as far as I know are the only successor to the Puritans, are, you know, lady priests and rainbow chasubos and everything else. Ultimately they lost the battle.
00:13:26
Speaker
to hold on to their barriers, their borders, what made them who they were, what made everything is defined by what it excludes, what makes us us and what makes them them. And like with any other social engineering project, you can say, was that a flaw in the design or was that just entropy? You know, how long should these things be expected to last?
00:13:50
Speaker
They were obviously wrong from the perspective of their divine commission that didn't work out the way that they expected it to. God wasn't in it. But just from the perspective of living the way you want to live and raising your kids the way you want them raised and inculcating that culture to the next generation and basically a society replicating and sustaining itself. How much is that possible? How much is desirable?
00:14:16
Speaker
I was talking to a friend of mine who's a student of Nietzsche who said that Nietzsche's problem with the image of the patriarch, which I've always assumed to be an uncontroversially positive masculine ideal, at least for guys like us.
00:14:32
Speaker
is that the patriarch is dedicated to holding on to what he has, to maintaining stasis, to holding things together. And there's a kind of a death in that image. And that's not how I see patriarchy, either individually or in general, but I can see the problem that he's trying to address there, which is that you need dynamism.
00:14:58
Speaker
you need transformation you need change and that i think is probably why i don't call myself a conservative and most of us those of us who don't call ourselves conservative i think that's probably the reason is we recognize that the institutions that have failed have failed for a reason they need to be replaced by something new one of the most interesting things about this book in general is
00:15:25
Speaker
using all of these four folk ways to calibrate your own intuitions about what's right and wrong, what's freedom, what's slavery, what's tyranny, what's the right way to live. Realizing that you would be strange to all of your ancestors and in other ways not strange. You clearly have
00:15:51
Speaker
It's not the way that progressives would argue that, like, everybody born prior to, say, 1940 was a moral monster, but the things about your morality that strike you as obvious would not be obvious to your ancestors. Anyway, so much for the Puritans.
00:16:11
Speaker
Next comes the Quakers. And basically, if there is any element of your psychology that you feel is kind of a modern prison, whether that's your attitude toward spirituality or your distaste for hierarchy, basically all of the instincts, the moral instincts that animate progressivism
00:16:37
Speaker
and that make it challenging for you to resist that, or to explain why it ought to be resisted to others, or that make it difficult for your family to understand why you can't get down with pride parades, et cetera. Black lives matter. Most of that probably comes from the Quakers.
00:16:55
Speaker
More than any other of these groups, the Quakers have essentially vanished as a coherent cultural group, while their worldview has become the dominant cultural paradigm across the West. And if you dig their style, there's a Christian metaphor to be drawn there that they sort of died out and in the process of the seed dying and breaking open, the plant grew.
00:17:23
Speaker
Of the four folkways, they were the most enamored with reciprocal liberty, meaning I'll leave you alone, you'll leave me alone, we'll all act in accordance with our conscience. And a lot of them are merchants and that's probably a partial explanation for that. It works very well if you're planning to do a lot of traveling and a lot of sales. It's an easy moral structure to live by when you have to deal with lots of different people all the time.
00:17:51
Speaker
Now that's not to say that they weren't judgmental, but they didn't believe in coercion. So all of their moral strictures, which were pretty deep. I mean, they were, they were extremely uncomfortable about sex and the body and having fun. Um, arguably they were more Puritan than the Puritans in terms of their behavioral ideals and what they thought was the right way to live.
00:18:19
Speaker
they just enforced it through essentially nagging you know the the light of your superior example and nagging and like if you were to ask most christians in an unguarded moment how they're supposed to interact with non-believers they'll basically give you the quaker answer that you know we just uh we just love them and we teach them and we preach and
00:18:49
Speaker
Yes, there's exceptions for the civil law, like there's things that we have to stop coercively like crime, but there's not a great, deeply considered theory about how that violence should be used. Because it kind of shouldn't be used, and we don't feel great about it, but it's like the reality of the situation, and if you juxtapose that against, you know, turn the other cheek, and you really hold a Christian to the fire on that,
00:19:19
Speaker
It's anybody's guess what answer you'll get. It kind of depends on the person. Because there isn't a coherent answer that they've been sort of trained to give. And I say, I mean, that includes us too, Latter-day Saints. One of the stories in this book, in 1690, a gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and went up and down the Delaware River
00:19:40
Speaker
robbing and the Quakers got into this debate about whether it was okay to use violence to stop them and Like here you are you're the rubbers meeting the road and there was a schism in the faith over that and that's basically the stuff that they schism about was where does our Principle bow to reality if it bows to reality at all
00:20:00
Speaker
And just the existence of the Quakers in a territory like that with hostile Indians and other strident religious groups, it's indicative that that way of living is maybe more practicable than it would seem to be at first glance.
00:20:19
Speaker
They lucked out in the character of the local Indians, but they also had this buffer of extraordinarily violent border reavers who essentially did all the fighting of the really rough Indians on the frontier.
00:20:34
Speaker
And there's a well-worn argument about whether that's hypocritical or not, that we do that with the Europeans now. They hate how violent our culture is, but we're the one guaranteeing their defensive umbrella.
00:20:50
Speaker
And the Quakers I think would be considered modern, even progressive by like 1950s standards in terms of the ways that they raise their children and maybe even to a certain extent in their attitudes toward women. Very permissive parenting.
00:21:08
Speaker
not sexually permissive for women, but definitely like behaviorally permissive and egalitarian in marriage. And they had lady preachers way back then. So like basically you get someone to read this book and you can more or less divine their attitude toward modernity by how do they feel about the Quakers? Were the Quakers the good guys in this like in the grim darkness of the 17th century there is only war except for the Quakers?
00:21:37
Speaker
Or do you view them as like a foretaste of everything that went wrong? And you know, I'm sort of theatrically upset about the Quakers when I read the book. I'm annoyed by their pacifism and their self-righteousness. But if I'm being honest with myself and I'm not like straining to inhabit a reactionary headspace,
00:21:59
Speaker
you know, they're as close to the way that I raise my kids and the way that I actually in real life treat my wife as, you know, as you get in those times. And so my frustration with them has more to do with them being this like voice in my head that I can't get out rather than me like experiencing real intuitive revulsion at what they stand for.
00:22:24
Speaker
And like I don't believe that there's any sense in which, you know, the world saw the superiority of Quaker life and decided to consciously emulate it, or even unconsciously emulate it. I think the Quakers were just the vanguard of reconciling religious belief with cosmopolitanism. Like what way of life works if you're gonna be surrounded by that kind of
00:22:53
Speaker
diversity of
00:22:55
Speaker
thought and belief and behavior and that's maybe why i find it so frustrating because they were so strident and self-righteous about it and it's like easy it's easy to to you don't actually have to stand for anything and the fact that you're refusing to stand for anything like physically like with your body or even with your words the fact that that becomes indicative of your moral superiority
00:23:24
Speaker
That's the part that disgusts me like oh mom says that I'm not allowed to fight like Jesus I'm being obedient to Jesus and that's why I'm not gonna stick my neck out
00:23:36
Speaker
It seems like basically the inevitable consequence of A, not taking religion very seriously and B, being in a captured, controlled environment where being really strident about your beliefs is just too costly.
00:23:57
Speaker
So yeah, I don't think that the modern condition is actually reflective of Quaker influence on politics. It's just entropy, more or less. But if you guys have theories on the grand Quaker conspiracy, Quaker occupied government, I'm all ears.
The Cavalier Legacy and Authority Structures
00:24:19
Speaker
So then you've got what seems to be framed as the unambiguous bad guys of the story, which is the Cavaliers. And the Cavaliers were English elites fleeing the Cromwell regime, which was basically a Puritan revolt against the religious persecution that the Puritan colonists were fleeing from. And it's interesting because, at least in my mind as a kid growing up, Jamestown and
00:24:48
Speaker
the massachusetts bay colony i always viewed that as one phenomenon basically the the buckles on the hats and the white thing on the collar that that was just sort of the pilgrims the first thanksgiving basically the first americans but these were in fact
00:25:05
Speaker
two groups that were violently at odds with each other in England and so that totally changes the color of everything you understand about like the constitutional conventions where these groups are getting together to like hammer out a government or even
00:25:20
Speaker
you know, fight a revolution together. It's kind of remarkable. And as far as I can remember, Fisher doesn't say a ton about who was more loyalist or who was more on the side of the Patriots. And I mean Cromwell had been dead for over a hundred years by the time of the revolution. So maybe some of those animosities had cooled, but when you listen to Fisher talk about the way they lived and what they believed,
00:25:48
Speaker
The fault lines that would make those kinds of people not get along are super obvious. Cavaliers were absolutely unregenerate aristocrats. They were not interested in the divine value of hard work. They were not believers in the equality of men under God.
00:26:09
Speaker
church was 20 minutes long on the dot and like it's easy to imagine everyone in prior dispensations being sort of hyper religious by modern standards but the type of culture that would produce like an expurgated slave bible that has
00:26:30
Speaker
socially unhelpful parts stricken from it, is a culture that views religion in a pretty instrumental way. In fact, like, I know you're not supposed to draw these kinds of direct comparisons, but if you were looking for, like, if you were trying to find the Baptist faction of colonial America, it would clearly be the Cavaliers. These guys are the reason for the Greco-Roman larp in colonial America
00:26:55
Speaker
And their understanding of liberty was basically synonymous with like prerogative or privilege. That freedom was the ability to rule. It was the ability to control your household and to conquer space. I mean, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I really feel like if you explain this concept of dominion, the conquest of space, to
00:27:20
Speaker
Washington or Jefferson right out of Bronze Age mindset, they'd be like, yes, that's what liberty is. And so liberty by definition is not something that could be reciprocal. The concept of reciprocal freedom would be incoherent to them. Freedom is the freedom to rule, to rule other people and assert your will. And I almost, I wonder if the similarity is because they're both kind of reading the same sources, but they definitely
00:27:45
Speaker
believe in the paterfamilias with the power of life and death over his dominion, his patriarchy, that the lord of the estate is the father of that estate. And so like when Washington talks about his family, he's referring to his wife and children, but he's also referring to
00:28:05
Speaker
relatives, poor friends, tutors and clerks, servants, slaves, even strangers who fall under his roof. The family is not a static set of people connected by blood. They are the patriarch's sphere of authority.
00:28:24
Speaker
They're the people who have placed themselves under or been placed under his protection. And like in most places in the Tidewater or the Chesapeake colony, the primary geographic unit, like instead of in New England, you'd have like a township, the primary unit of geography was the plantation. And some of these plantations
00:28:45
Speaker
I think he says they went through like 27,000 pigs and 20 bulls. Just outrageous amounts of food because of the number of people who were considered to be part of that household. And this social structure predates the slave trade. And so Cavalier, Virginia, was more of a confederation of absolute monarchies than like a single state or a single society.
00:29:09
Speaker
And you could see the way they identify as part of these households rather than nuclear families because they'd call each other cuz or cousin. And that's if you were actually related, if you were part of the extended kin group. And you'd call your friends and your acquaintances and everybody else brother. So the membership in the clan was your most emotionally salient way of understanding your place in the world.
00:29:38
Speaker
and your relationship to other people rather than I'm his brother. She's my mother.
00:29:44
Speaker
And partly that seems to have been because disease was so rampant that you'd almost certainly lose some children. I think it's like half of kids lost at least one parent before they reached adulthood. So you'd be farmed out to close relatives and the father would often be a father figure like an uncle or a new husband, a new wife. And because those relationships were so uncertain,
00:30:12
Speaker
It was sort of necessary to give people this dynamic structure in which they could find a place. So it's not like if you lose your parents, you have no place. Because if that was the case, then a huge fraction of the population would be adrift, including among the elites because they died along with everybody else.
00:30:34
Speaker
Now you really can't have any discussion of cavalier morality and power dynamics without talking about William Byrd. So William Byrd was a planter in Virginia and what modern historians love about William Byrd is that he wrote this
00:30:52
Speaker
incredibly shameless, incredibly detailed tell-all memoir of all of his raping and beating slaves and servants and throwing shit at his wife and chasing around other men's wives. And his wife was a sociopath too. She's like beating slaves with hot tongs and branding their skin and stuff. And then they'll like go have sex. And it's this very,
00:31:22
Speaker
It's a Tarantino movie waiting to happen. Like, I'm shocked that Django wasn't more like...
00:31:27
Speaker
the story of William Byrd. There's a houseboy who wets the bed and this guy makes him drink a pint of piss and he'll write these diary entries where he's like, oh yeah, and then I kissed this girl and then I raped her and then went and said my prayers, God forgive me. And it literally goes on like that one entry after the other for months.
00:31:53
Speaker
And he's just a classic, like you couldn't make him more villainous if you wanted to. And when I say you can't discuss Virginia without discussing William Byrd, I mean like they literally won't let you. Every single source on like cavalier morality is basically just like, well, let's talk about William Byrd. And some of these sources will even be like, oh, William Byrd was like a moral exemplar. He was one of the best and you know,
00:32:20
Speaker
Washington and Jefferson were just as bad as him and everybody, you know, every male aristocrat in the Chesapeake Bay was a serial rapist. And, you know, I'm happy to be disproven on this, but I just don't buy it. Like if it was so abundantly attested, why are we always talking about just this one guy?
00:32:43
Speaker
And when they tried to nail Washington with that stuff, they're like, well, he flirted with Sally Fairfax. And then Jefferson, when he was single, does appear to have chased another guy's wife. And of course, there's the Sally Hemings thing. And fair enough, those are bad things. But they're not a new rape in every journal entry from a guy who does daily journal entries.
00:33:10
Speaker
and they're not like waterboarding a little boy with piss, like I don't know. So when these historians tell me like William Byrd was typical of the culture or was even exemplary, I'm like that's kind of an extraordinary claim.
00:33:25
Speaker
Now, whatever you can say about the personal constraint or morality of these cavalier gentlemen, it is clear that William Byrd was acting within his legal rights. There was nobody to stop him. People were aware of what he was doing and they didn't do anything about it.
00:33:42
Speaker
And in a society like ours where there is so much, where so many things are circumscribed by the law, it's easy to look on what the law tolerates as like a moral stain on the character of that society. It's just like God, you know, how could God allow this to happen? Like, if God is all-powerful and he clearly could step in and stop this, why didn't he? And when you live in a big state,
00:34:11
Speaker
an invasive state your frame of mind when something bad happens is why where were the police but again this is this is not a society composed of citizens acknowledging accountability toward a central state these are essentially fiefdoms and you have the same impulse operative today when you see atrocities happening in
00:34:38
Speaker
Africa or the Middle East. It's like, oh, we have to go stop it because we have the power to stop it. And there's babies getting thrown out of windows and we have to do something. What are we going to do? And of course I'm cheating a little bit because we're right at the tail end of like 20 years of catastrophe based on that exact type of thinking.
00:35:00
Speaker
But it just is the case that going out in search of monsters to slay is complicated. And I think you see that with the Puritans. I mean, the Puritans as a maybe proto totalitarian state, they at least have the advantage of building their state in the service of the good and in the service of reality. Like there's not a lot of things that they're trying to get done
00:35:25
Speaker
that are obviously destined to fail. They're not trying to dethrone God, in other words. But this quest for the perfectibility of man leads to the kind of derangement that you see in this hyper-moralistic society. Now,
00:35:51
Speaker
Again, I'm playing extremes here, like this guy was somebody's neighbor. And you know, so William Byrd was extraordinarily powerful, like his size relative to the House of Burgesses or the state to the extent that it existed. He was huge relative to that state. So like, it wouldn't be a simple thing for the cops to just come arrest William Byrd.
00:36:17
Speaker
But maybe there's a case to be made that there's a monster worth slaying and it's right there and they should have done that.
00:36:28
Speaker
Like that's a conversation that's at least supportable, but like this idea that, oh, you know, the Chesapeake Bay colony just loved cereal rapists and was just so excited to produce maximum rape and piss torture. Like again, I'm, I'm a dilettante here, but it just strikes me as kind of unserious.
00:36:49
Speaker
Now, regardless of the particulars, these gentlemen, good and bad, whatever range you think they occupied morally, they ruled over their wives and their children and their servants and slaves, okay, but also their friends and people who were under their roof with the same patriarchal authority. Now, it doesn't mean everyone was treated equally, but it means that the patriarch's authority in his domain
00:37:16
Speaker
was the same and like that'll pretty much give you fits if you're any flavor of liberal or even just not having deliberately deconstructed modern western morality in your own mind.
00:37:29
Speaker
And like clearly it's not, you know, they're not making up that propensity for abuse. The abuse for sure happened. But like consider your relationship with your children. Could you abuse your children right now and pretty much get away with it? Like you could seriously mistreat your kids in all sorts of ways. And the courts would essentially say, uh, you know, we really don't agree. Like the judge might say, I personally really disagree with the way that you're raising your children. And I think it's reprehensible.
00:37:58
Speaker
But our system of law acknowledges huge benefit from giving parents, in all but the most extreme cases, the right to decide how their kids will be raised. And you can imagine, and I think some progressives today do imagine, a future world in which parents are far more circumscribed in their liberties toward their children
00:38:26
Speaker
there's that word, that's the cavalier definition of liberty, their freedom to say what will be with their kids. And this future society looks back through the historical record and says like, oh, we're kids? Parents love their kids and the law
00:38:46
Speaker
didn't tell them that they couldn't be horrible to their kids, but were parents pretty horrible to their kids? And they'll be able to find just reams of examples of child abuse, some of which rises to the level of being illegal today, but that doesn't get prosecuted just because we don't acknowledge law enforcement's right to investigate
00:39:10
Speaker
parents that closely. Even the standard of, hey, it's time to look into your business is fairly high. And then beyond that, you'd have another order of magnitude or two of cruelty and spitefulness and unfairness, injustice in family relationships.
00:39:32
Speaker
that virtually everyone today would acknowledge to be, you know, a pretty screwed up way to treat your kids. But that we would also say like, you know, if we let the police knock down your door for that kind of thing, then we're all going to be in a lot of trouble. And this future society may look back and say, well, how could you let that stand? How could you let that abuse continue? Why wasn't that illegal?
00:39:56
Speaker
And a parent like me would say, well, because I have the right to raise my children and I'm not cruel to my children. And in order to crusade against all of these wrongdoers, who we both agree are wrongdoers, you would have to abrogate my rights as a parent. And basically, so far, as a culture, we've decided that that moral calculus doesn't require us to abrogate the rights of good parents to chase the bad ones.
00:40:24
Speaker
And so that's one realm, maybe the last realm, where modern Americans still hew to this concept of hegemonic liberty. And that basically is the war that's happening right now over CRT and sex ed and drag queen story hour in the schools.
00:40:43
Speaker
the essence of the argument is who do your kids belong to and as obvious as that question seems to us there are in fact two sides to that argument and their side is well what if your kid is gay or trans then your refusal to expose them to people like them
00:41:06
Speaker
your overt distaste for who they are fundamentally as people rises to the level of abuse and the state has an interest in curtailing that, preventing that, investigating you for that. And we disagree both on the level of what types of behavior, what types of parenting decisions rise to the level of abuse, and we also disagree on the more fundamental question of who gets to decide. And I've seen people
00:41:35
Speaker
say basically with a straight face that your parenting decisions don't involve the democratic process.
00:41:44
Speaker
like nobody voted and made you your kid's parents. And therefore, your authority over them is not legitimate or not fully legitimate. And it should be subject to, you know, democratic norms and processes. And like that's obviously frigging bananas to you and me, but that is a belief that is sincerely held at least by, well, by people who don't have any kids of their own.
00:42:11
Speaker
And so not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe you can imagine people from another part of the country coming and telling you, hey, we heard some stories of people being mistreated and therefore you don't get to be in charge of your household anymore and how you might respond to that. And I know you can relate to that because you are currently responding.
00:42:33
Speaker
in that way to that. No, I'll be honest, I'm making them a lot more relatable than they are in the book. I mean, it's their assessment of what constitutes bad behavior or tyranny is pretty different from mine and probably yours. I mean, violence was pretty common. Violence against
00:42:54
Speaker
your social inferiors, violence against animals, all of it was pretty common. And it's interesting to me that there are a lot of right-wing commentators who will discuss human refuse and the need to cleanse the world of filth, but at the same time will be very sensitive around cruelty toward animals.
00:43:17
Speaker
And I just think that there's a there's a dishonesty about claiming that you would have been at home in Sparta or you would have liked to live in one of these societies that was truly hierarchical, truly
00:43:32
Speaker
the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Because a dog is like the ultimate agreeable, weak target for oppression. And if oppressing and doing violence to an innocent dog boils your blood, then
00:43:53
Speaker
I'm not saying that you're like a modern person because I don't think that's a modern impulse. But I think that you are more humane in your fundamental nature than maybe you're trying to be. Or I don't know, I might just be missing the point there. I just don't get it. But one of the things that you notice about the Cavaliers is they really do have this capacity to create extraordinary leaders. And they do it very systematically and deliberately. They raise these young men
00:44:21
Speaker
Like every parenting decision is about maximizing thumos. Like they never restrain aggression. They never restrain pride or initiative or ambition. That's always encouraged if it's a virtue and overlooked if it's a vice.
00:44:41
Speaker
And it really does seem to produce these extraordinary people. Washington, Jefferson, Lee, even Roosevelt had Scott's Irish ancestry, but the way that he was raised was very consonant with this Cavalier ideal, which was
00:44:59
Speaker
you encourage children to pattern their lives after the most heroic figure from the past that they can identify, the most inspiring figure. And this, you know, again, this feeds into what Bap says about autobiography being the most effective way to learn from history. They were very strongly encouraged in this very direct, unironic hero worship. And the idea that you were supposed to like,
00:45:27
Speaker
carve your own authentic path would have seemed absurd to them. You're supposed to go try to be Alcibiades or Achilles or Caesar and the way we currently do history especially for children where it's like
00:45:43
Speaker
all about, you know, what kind of sorghum paste did the peasants eat? And it's all about these big socioeconomic movements and factors would have struck the Cavaliers as absolutely ridiculous and repulsive. Like how do you produce great men when you feed them a diet like that? When you teach them that that's the way the world works?
00:46:09
Speaker
And it seemed to have been a society that created a lot of extremes. Like there were clearly some deranged people and like just tons of murder and rape. And basically as I'm reading about the Cavaliers, I'm wondering, is there a way to learn from this like hero factory that they built?
00:46:30
Speaker
and accomplish some of the same purposes without simultaneously flooding the zone with sociopathy. And maybe there isn't. Like, maybe those are two sides of the same coin. But I think if that's your guess, if that's what you believe, that you have to create monsters in order to produce these heroes, and therefore we have very little to learn from Cavalier Pedagogy,
00:46:57
Speaker
I think you have a responsibility to be really sure. And I'm not really sure. I think there's probably a lot we could learn from these people.
Border Reavers and American Libertarianism
00:47:05
Speaker
So I've saved the best for last. The boarders. Border Reavers. And this one's funny because I was just reading a post on Reddit about how David Hackett Fisher clearly made the Border Reavers the villains of his story. And how they were just the breaks on progress and
00:47:27
Speaker
and basically savages who prevented America from becoming what it might have become or could still become. And the reason that's funny is because when I read this book, I just absolutely fell in love with the Borders. They're incredible fun. Fun to read about, fun to imagine being one, maybe not fun to imagine like living around them, but
00:47:48
Speaker
The Borders are basically like a Europeans idea of America. They're violent, ungovernable, crass, savage, adventurous, funny, ignorant, and they come from this incredibly violent, lawless region of Northern Ireland and Scotland.
00:48:10
Speaker
that basically no civilization could exist there for hundreds almost a thousand years because of these constant border skirmishes between Scottish and English warlords and so if your entire culture grows up
00:48:28
Speaker
under the specter of constant war and you are scratching a living out of the dirt but you don't want to save any crops because they'll just be stolen you don't want to build a nice house because it'll just get burned down so these people were essentially living in sometimes literally holes in the ground and
00:48:52
Speaker
basically the way Hackett Fisher frames it is these are people who learn to enjoy the simple pleasures of life particularly sex and violence and when you've spent centuries with no ability to appeal to organized law for protection you become a extraordinarily skeptical of government because every form of government that you've ever known or that your ancestors have ever known has basically been
00:49:21
Speaker
a pirate a robber and be you develop social systems that allow you to protect yourself and basically the way you do it is by becoming convincingly legibly insane in the event that you are insulted across.
00:49:41
Speaker
Like I might not be able to stop you from robbing me or killing me or whatever, but I can promise you that my children and my children's children will pursue you to the ends of the earth. And it absolutely will not stop until my family line or your family line is utterly terminated. And so maybe there's a pretty substantial power differential between you and me, like you could on the surface level, take me for everything I've got. And if I'm rational.
00:50:11
Speaker
I will acquiesce to that because acquiescing is better than being murdered or enslaved, but by becoming irrational, that power calculus changes pretty dramatically. And I mean, you could see that in Iraq and Afghanistan. The way those wars were won was by being just absolutely irrationally hostile to the occupation.
00:50:34
Speaker
And it didn't matter. You couldn't hurt those people enough. You couldn't make them poor enough. You couldn't make the rubble bounce enough to bring them to heel. And so it didn't matter that our soldiers were better trained. It didn't matter that we had better equipment. It didn't matter that we had better battlefield awareness. Like these are people that you couldn't defeat. You would have to ethnically cleanse them.
00:50:58
Speaker
just remove them from the geography. And that's basically who the boarders were in the border country of England and Scotland. So they come here, and obviously they originally come to the coastal areas, they come to areas populated by the Puritans and Cavaliers and Quakers, and a lot of them come over as indentured servants, but they tend to die on the plantations of malaria and various other swamp diseases that afflicted the warmer areas of the colonies for
00:51:28
Speaker
you know a century or more after the revolution and literally the the cavaliers the the planter aristocracy tried to bring over a white servant class for decades before realizing that like they just die too fast they're it's not worth bringing them over which is why they were replaced with african slaves who came from
00:51:49
Speaker
a West African environment that was more tropical, and so they had more resistance to some of these diseases. Besides which, as you might imagine, they just weren't great servants that, you know, wouldn't do well at a Chick-fil-A franchise, for example. So they can't live in the Old Dominion, and they try to go up north, but obviously the Puritans won't have them. And even the Quakers sort of hem and haw about, like, should we tolerate these people, because we tolerate everybody. And even they were like, no, we can't tolerate these people. So they send them to the back country.
00:52:17
Speaker
and back there the boarders just have the time of their lives they love to fight and now they get to fight an enemy that they can win against and win permanently it's not like they just get conscripted into some warlord's ban and then some other stronger warlord comes in and wipes them out and they got to start all over again
00:52:38
Speaker
This is they get to conquer this frontier and hold it and it's theirs. And so maybe even more than the Puritans who had this like city on a hill idea of America, the borders fall in love with America as a land. And you can see this on census documents, basically from the beginning, if you ask them what their ancestry is, they don't claim English or Irish or Scottish, they call themselves Americans.
00:53:05
Speaker
And so they go off into the backwoods and pretty much disappear and are happy to disappear. Because like, what could you possibly have to offer me? What do I want with your government? What do I want with your laws? Why do I need you? And it's pretty clear that that's the birthplace of the libertarian strain in American politics.
00:53:27
Speaker
the like when you get that meme of the guy asking how many kids need to die before you'll accept some gun control and the answer is all of them that's that's your inheritance from the boarders and you can see the value in that approach when you look at like the canadian charter i think it's called the charter they're equivalent of the bill of rights they have all these rights that are like you know as long as it makes sense as long as it's reasonable you know we
00:53:57
Speaker
Like yeah, you should have rights. Of course you should have rights, but like there's exceptions and we should be careful and be sensible and all this stuff. And you've watched as that's just eaten them alive and turned them into effectively a police state, especially over the late unpleasantness. And like we're not different from the Canadians because we have a second amendment because we wrote that down. Except in this meta sense that the type of culture
00:54:24
Speaker
that would write down an amendment explicitly intended to arm the population for a rebellion against the government, that kind of tactical irrationality is what preserves rights. Because your ancestors couldn't guarantee that you would always be in a position of strength over
00:54:45
Speaker
people who might want to tell you what to do but they could basically teach you to strap on a vest you know and and be willing to burn everything down and that does make you more powerful that does even the odds and that's going to look from the outside like
00:55:02
Speaker
poor impulse control, immaturity. And maybe it needs to be, maybe it needs to be something that you can't, you can't be bluffing, right? You can't be consciously saying, oh, I'm gonna act nuts and then my enemy's gonna back down.
00:55:18
Speaker
Like on a certain level, you have to actually be nuts. And does that exist anymore? Are people still like that? I mean, I can think of a handful of demographics. The true heirs of the border throne, the true guarantors of American liberty. It seems to work for them, seems to scare people. And what's particularly interesting about that thought is that the border and their descendants have always been wildly overrepresented in the American military.
00:55:45
Speaker
They were always the ones who most liked to fight. They were always the ones who were the best at fighting. In the Civil War, what gets described as the Elon, the morale, the incredible leadership of the Confederacy,
00:56:00
Speaker
That's mostly the work of the Cavaliers. That's the aristocracy, the planters who are producing these incredible men that people are willing to follow. But when they talk about Union troops being frightened by the aggressiveness and
00:56:17
Speaker
accuracy and woodsmanship of the Confederates. That's the borderers. Because they just lived to fight. They fought each other all the time. They fought Indians all the time. When they would have a wrestling match, you could take your pick of either a quote fair fight or a rough and tumble. And a fair fight was a more or less standard like nothing below the belt type of a fight.
00:56:43
Speaker
But a rough and tumble was no holds barred, gouging is fine, biting is fine, head-butting is fine, kicking is fine. And so men would be routinely blinded or lose fingers or be maimed, crippled, you know, broken legs and things because of these fights. They also had bride kidnappings, which, you know, maybe you've heard about in Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries being fairly common. There's a lot of
00:57:13
Speaker
commonalities, probably having to do with the steppe also being this place that was constantly burned over by various conquerors. But each of these bride kidnappings was essentially a raid where they would form an armed party, a posse, to go over to the bride's house and either sneak her out or demand that she be
00:57:37
Speaker
relinquished and they would fire volleys at the house and stuff and the the the bride's brothers would fire back and and you know maybe the bride's family knew they were coming so they would knock down trees and set ambushes and traps to slow the advance or they would do it after the bride had been kidnapped they would run out ahead and try to stop them on the road
00:58:01
Speaker
And obviously, in most cases, this was a game. It was a pantomime. But in a lot of cases, it wasn't. There's some evidence that Andrew Jackson, for instance, kidnapped his wife in an actual kidnapping from her family.
00:58:14
Speaker
And the truth about this honor culture is that it's not like there was no way to make things right if there was an offense like that. He probably had to come back and pay some kind of a dowry, and he probably had to treat her okay by the standards of the time.
00:58:32
Speaker
I can't remember where I heard about this. Somebody was talking about Afghanistan and how the young men have this role in the society of like it's their job to kind of be crazy in that sense of having a chip on their shoulder, being willing to defend their honor and the family's honor by force. And then it's the older the tribal sheikhs, the tribal sheikhs whose job it is
00:59:00
Speaker
to take them aside and temper their anger and
00:59:06
Speaker
figure out a proportionate response and and something to go to the offending tribe with and say like you know here's how you can make it right so in that way you get some of the game theoretic advantages of tactical irrationality without having to go nuclear every time someone's feelings get hurt and you could sort of argue that the border is themselves fill this role in america that they are you know like nixon
00:59:34
Speaker
drunk in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear button. At least that has historically been the case. When there have been rebellions against government, rebellions against, you know, even rebellions against industry, the mining rebellions. 100 years ago. That was all. Appellations, border stock.
00:59:52
Speaker
And like I said, those guys are dominant in the American military to this day, and every one of those guys that I talk to, I have some friends, every one of those guys that I talk to that's in combat arms is feeling pretty irrational these days. I think there's probably a buffer of comfort as long as people's basic bills are getting paid, as long as there's somewhere to go to, you can still homeschool your kids, you can still get a different job,
01:00:21
Speaker
you can still technically say what you want. So I'm of two minds about it. There's a part of me that thinks maybe that fire has just gone out and we don't have that honor culture anymore and we're not capable of reviving it. But another part of me thinks that we just haven't tripped that breaker yet.
Founding Fathers' Diverse Inspirations
01:00:41
Speaker
Anyway, there's tons you can go into. It's a great book. Totally recommend it. But maybe the most important intuition that I got from that book was that the people who started this country were not just like you and me, and they weren't even like each other. But they were men of action of this kind that's not supposed to exist anymore, not supposed to be possible anymore.
01:01:01
Speaker
But I hear both progressives and right-wing guys talk about them, or at least about the institutions they created, as if it was intended to create this, well, the situation that we're in right now. That, like, in their heart of hearts, they were, like, secular, globalist, moralistic, therapeutic deists or whatever. And yeah, that's just, like, obviously silly to me, but you do have to ask.
01:01:28
Speaker
What did these guys who were trying to larp as Romans see in like popular sovereignty and separation of powers and due process and all these rules?
01:01:41
Speaker
And particularly, how did they all come together? How did you create agreement between these enormously divergent cultures that this was something that needed to happen? And I think if you place yourself in their time, these are all reasonable responses to a stultifying, decrepit, decaying aristocracy founded on a narrative that no longer works.
01:02:08
Speaker
Like they all wanted out from under this arbitrary and nakedly self-serving power. And the Puritan answer to this was this sort of, we will all get together and make a fist. This proto-fascist impulse of apes together strong, right? And the border said, we'll go out and fight the Indians and carve out a space.
01:02:33
Speaker
and make the rivers run red if anybody screws with us. Quakers obviously depended on the violence of others to defend the space that they carved out, but if you want to take their
01:02:50
Speaker
self-image at face value, they were saying, we're going to be so totally obedient to God that God will protect us. And the Cavalier notion was basically, we're going to defend our ancient English liberty the same way that the nobles who subdued Prince John did when they signed the Magna Carta. And a lot has been made of the fact that they had a frontier to run to. And that's why this experiment with liberty was possible. And now the frontier is closing.
Frontiers and Modern Opportunities
01:03:17
Speaker
And that experiment is coming to an end and we are turning back toward old world notions of unchanging hierarchies and economic stagnation. But I actually think that that undersells the possibilities today and it also doesn't give our ancestors enough credit for
01:03:36
Speaker
the challenge involved in seizing the opportunities that were before them. So my family and I have recently moved to Northern Virginia, and as far as I knew up until recently, all of my family was potato famine migrants in the late 19th century, or Mormon pioneers in the Mountain West, so comparatively shallow roots in America, certainly by Virginia standards. But I had occasion to look back through my
01:04:05
Speaker
Genealogy a little bit and it turns out that in my mother's mother's line I've got ancestors who were either born or married or died in Orange County Fairfax County Prince William Albemarle and Fauquier County all of which are within 20 minutes of my house
01:04:26
Speaker
I also found out that I've got ancestors who settled in the backcountry of North Carolina. So I've got the boarders and the Cavaliers covered. I had Dutch ancestors in New Amsterdam and Puritans in Boston, and they have all the naming conventions that you'd expect and the family sizes that are right here in the book. I even think I have one or two Delaware Quakers, but I'd rather not know for sure.
01:04:52
Speaker
And in every one of those lines, you've got with the Puritans, you've got deaths from starvation, you've got murdered by Indians. In Virginia, you've got deaths from malaria, murdered by Indians. In the backcountry, you've got murdered by other white people, murdered by Indians. And if you consider the opportunities
01:05:14
Speaker
and the frontiers that would be available to you right now in 2022, if you were willing to take on a comparable risk profile to spending 10 weeks at sea, maybe starving to death, maybe dying of typhus, maybe getting murdered by Indians.
01:05:34
Speaker
Then the frontier isn't as closed as maybe you think. And when you think about all the people back in Europe who didn't take those opportunities, there's a rationality to that. And so to compare yourself to the set of people who had already braved these existential dangers to secure the space that they made for themselves and for their children and grandchildren,
01:05:58
Speaker
and say like, oh, it's not fair that I don't have those kinds of opportunities. It's like, well, what would be comparable to that today? Who are the types of people who were doing that kind of thing? Are they soldiers of fortune in Africa? That's probably comparable in terms of risk profile. I mean, they're probably at least guys like entrepreneurs. The frontier in a certain sense has always been closed.
01:06:21
Speaker
They didn't come to an empty country. They came to a country full of hostile Indians who would rape their wives and scalp them and enslave their children. That was the wide open country. That was the promised land that you are envious of them for having access to. And even after they took it, the lawlessness of the frontier
01:06:42
Speaker
created its own challenges and its own constraints on their practical liberty. And you know, I'm not trying to tell you like, because we have computers and TVs and Xbox and abundant processed food that you're better off than they are.
Celebration of American Freedom and Prosperity
01:07:01
Speaker
our wealth does create opportunities that were not open to them, if you were willing to deploy it in the kinds of extreme high risk opportunities that they were deploying their resources in.
01:07:14
Speaker
And you know what? This thing they did had a pretty good run. 200 years is pretty good. 200 years of extraordinary abundance and freedom for their posterity. And maybe that has nothing to do with the particulars of the system that they built.
01:07:33
Speaker
us being who we are but you look at canada you look at the uk there's something different about this place there's something different about what we've got here and if i could build something half as durable for my children and their descendants and then they had you know in a hundred years or 150 or 200 years if they had to take some responsibility for that and fight for it and maybe build something new of their own i wouldn't view my effort as wasted
01:08:02
Speaker
So we went out and grilled and went down to the river and I took my kids shooting and I just felt incredible gratitude for the people that brought us here and built this place that we get to live in. So God bless America. Hope you had a great fourth. See you next time.