| Thursday, March 2, 2006 |
16:07 - The road to hell
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I'm not sure where I'm going with the following train of thought—it's just some disjointed stuff I've been pondering, so bear with me.
My brother recently sent me Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, a biographical account of the Lewis & Clark Expedition that I devoured with the book open in one hand and my other hand obsessively driving Google Earth as I followed every step of the journey up the river and over the mountains, authentic three-dimensional views and all. The book is mostly a portrait of Meriwether Lewis and doesn't much extend beyond his life and how it related to the expedition—for example, it doesn't cover the leg of the return journey where Clark struck out on his own side mission down the Yellowstone River, and instead focuses on the formative and ill-fated mission up the Marias River where the small detachment Lewis was leading had an armed confrontation with some young Blackfoot Indians who tried to steal their guns, and which no doubt set the stage for decades of insoluble political strife in the West between America and the various tribes that occupied the land, and without which the tragic tale of Indian history in the 1800s might have taken a far different course.
One thing in particular that Ambrose stressed in the book, though, was Thomas Jefferson's philosophy regarding the Indians. To Jefferson, the Indians represented nothing less than a modern nation in the making—thus far hampered only by a lack of exposure to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the technological advances of Europe and the young America, Jefferson saw the Indian nations not as a nuisance and an obstacle to be overcome (as so many infamous military commanders in later years viewed them), but as an opportunity to build a trading relationship, an exclusive economic empire from which both sides would benefit. The fur trade being as all-important as it was in the early 19th century, the Indians had things the Europeans badly wanted; this was no simple matter of an advanced culture clashing with a primitive one, but—as Jefferson saw it—a balanced and equitable symbiosis between two nations equally capable of thriving in the modern world under the rule of European-style law and the laissez-faire trade market.
Jefferson, who oddly enough (yet exactly like almost every other Virginian landowner of the day) believed that blacks were somewhere between beast and man, incapable of thought or action on par with white people, nonetheless saw the Indians as every bit as human and worthy of respect and honor as his peers in Washington. It was his hope that the whole of the newly acquired American territories west of the Mississippi could be set aside as a vast Indian sovereignty—under the auspices of the Great Father in Washington, but with the land and rights thereto belonging to the tribal nations on an equal footing with the confederated States along the eastern seaboard, and closed to white settlement except by agreement. It turned out that this view was naïve in the extreme—Jefferson far underestimated the vigor with which wealth-seeking Americans and recent immigrants would charge up the Missouri as soon as they heard they could, so quickly that Lewis and Clark met the first private trappers heading upstream as they came back down the river on their return trip. No force on earth could have kept the white settlers out of the Indian territories. But Jefferson's dream was otherwise: to bring the Enlightenment to the tribes, to give them the keys to the modern world, but otherwise to leave them their borders and their dignity intact.
I've found myself wondering: how different would the world be if Jefferson's dream had been realized? What factors prevented it from coming true?
And most importantly: how can we keep those factors from causing the same dream to fail in Iraq and the Middle East?
There philosophical parallels between Jefferson's attitude toward the Indians and Bush's attitude toward the Arab world are striking, and far more compelling to me than "eerie similarities" between Bush and Hitler. Hitler had no dreams of uplift for the historically disadvantaged peoples of the world; his dream was for such people to be culled entirely, so they wouldn't trouble the Chosen People any further. Jefferson saw himself as the head of his own Chosen People, it's true—an envoy of the Enlightenment, which his cohorts discussed in the same terms with which we today speak of Western Civilization, Freedom, and Democracy—but he had no interest in denying it to the people with which the American settlers were bound to clash; rather, he wanted to provide the blessings of modern technology and law, like any other trade good, to the Indians in exchange for the economic benefits (in the form of beaver furs as well as such things as medicinal plants and mineral resources) they could provide. To Jefferson, it seemed a no-brainer that when they saw what the whites could offer, they'd jump at the chance; they'd become agrarian, they'd settle into cities, they'd elect themselves consensual governments, and they'd become Americans through the truest means of all: by adopting the ideas that underpin the Constitution as their own.
Perhaps it was hopelessly naïve of Jefferson to believe this would happen, even in the best of circumstances, even without white settlers scurrying up the get-rich-quick trails, even without a hostile British economic force north of the 49th Parallel or a hostile Spanish military force south of the Arkansas River all playing the various Indian tribes off each other with supplies of guns with which to exterminate each other as much as to gain a hunting advantage among the buffalo of the plains and the elk of the mountains. Perhaps our hindsight should tell us that he was a fool to believe that the philosophical tradition that he embodied would be embraced so readily by every tribe that saw an iron-frame boat or a brass-buttoned military jacket coming up the river. But can we blame ourselves for thinking that maybe, if handled properly, such a vision as his might have become reality?
If the Indian nations had succeeded in leaping forward into the 19th century in a few short years after their first contact with Lewis and Clark, if they had made peace among themselves as Jefferson and Lewis implored them and created cohesive national units, and if they had as a result been able to maintain their own borders and become an equal partner in the American experiment along with the other established States in the East, America would naturally be a far different place today—just imagine everything from the Sierra Nevada to the Mississippi divided up on state lines based on the boundaries of tribal coalitions and governed by Indian representatives of native majority populations, but otherwise sporting interstate highways and modern cities just like today—but on top of that, we would have a marvelous case study on which to base our approach toward the Middle East now. We'd have a first-hand example of enlightened, altruistic nation-building having worked. And we wouldn't have to keep making the case without evidence about democracy being the path to peace, and facing snide comments from high-school geography teachers who don't differentiate between democracies who go to war against dictatorships and democracies who go to war against other democracies, the latter of which is unknown in history.
All this is by way of saying that I have no deep conviction that our nation-building efforts in Iraq and the greater Middle East will bear fruit. We've tried this before, under conceptually very similar circumstances, and we screwed it up royally.
But what I'm wondering is this: Is the failure of Jefferson's vision any fault of his own—or any reason not to hold to his values in present and future situations where they apply? Can't we learn from the experience in the Indian wars, to recognize the factors that caused his plan to fail, and to mitigate them if at all possible? Aren't the benefits of success so compelling as to make it at least worth trying again?
(I realize that this same argument could be used to justify trying Communism again, and other philosophies that promise such great dividends even though they've been proven failures in practice. That's why I've approached this topic with such uncertainty, and why I think it's so disjointed at this stage.)
The factors that caused Jefferson's vision to fail had to do with human nature, unfortunately—petty politics on the personal, tribal, national, and international levels; individual greed; primitive medicine; the realities of supply and demand, especially when it came to things like modern weapons available from any willing supplier that meant tactical advantages over rival tribes; age-old warlike traditions that died hard; and the desire to keep settling old scores rather than put past grievances aside for the sake of the future. (Many tribes that Lewis and Clark met did jump at the proffered chance of inter-tribal peace and alliance with a powerful trading partner, just as many in the Middle East see what's to be gained by democratization; but these tribes quickly forgot Jefferson's grand, distant promises when the much more pressing issues of approaching Sioux or Hidatsa or Blackfoot war parties appeared on the horizon.) The only thing that could have prevented these problems, it seems to me, was despotic centralized government ruling with an iron fist, overcoming the impulses of human nature just like in every country that has tried to change the nature of reality by asserting that the sky is green and there are five lights in the torture chamber. And we know that would never work, if the goal is—in the uniquely American conception of "empire"—the establishment of a long-term ally that likes being at peace with us just because we're all democracies and people all want the same thing in the end: freedom.
Or, perhaps, the only thing that it makes sense for us to do is keep trying to realize Jefferson's vision, even if it's doomed. Just because that's simply who we are. Isn't it better to try and fail than to fail anyway out of not bothering to try? Shouldn't we at least try to plant a pennant, be it on the loneliest hill, of having given freedom-for-its-own-sake a shot? And if we don't do it, who will?
UPDATE: Kenneth H. writes to point out one key difference between then and now: Our interest in the Arab world pretty much begins and ends with oil, which can be extracted with hardly any direct impact on their internal culture; whereas our interest in the American West was for farming and ranching, which by their nature changed the face of the land beyond recognition and quite naturally sparked Indian resistance. (Jefferson himself showed little interest in the land for farming purposes, incidentally; he charged Lewis with bringing back specimens of medicinal plants and new-to-science animals to fuel their mutual passions, botany and zoology. Jefferson wanted things out of the land that could be extracted through trade, much like oil today. But it wasn't his priorities that prevailed among the greater populace.)
This might undermine the argument; then again, it might not, because I'm just as interested in seeking differences that might make today's experiment succeed while yesterday's failed as in finding more reasons to claim the two situations are identical. :)
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Brian Tiemann
