In his book Democracy in America, Alexis, comte deToqueville was inconsistent in his observations of the North American Indians. On one hand he praises them for being above the Europeans in culture and individual independence, then he says their vices and uncontrolled passions doomed them. There is always a trail of the inevitable in a fait accompli, and you can quote me on that.
First the praise: “The social state of these tribes differed also in many respects from all that was seen in the Old World. They seemed to have multiplied freely in the midst of their deserts without coming in contact with other races more civilized than their own.” DeToqueville is traveling America in 1840s, yet he calls the Eastern Biome a ‘desert’. I want to slap him for that, but his comment about not coming into contact with other civilivations underlines an essential equality about these people, an equality which we now know is reflected in their very DNA.
He continues, “Accordingly, they exhibited none of those indistinct, incoherent notions of right and wrong, none of that deep corruption of manners, which is usually joined with ignorance and rudeness among nations which, after advancing to civilization, have relapsed into a state of barbarism.” Does he mean France? Europe? Being from Michigan, I’d say, ‘Both.’
Ponder, if you please what it means to not have “incoherent notions of right and wrong.” Where do our notions of right and wrong come from? The church? Our political allies? Our family traditions? The friends we value? All of the above and more, especially in this day of the electronic signal, infinite information, and that bane of the sane, advertising.
Think what it would be like if these all too often contradictory razzmatazzes were ironed flat of their incoherent notions of right and wrong? Each of us with independent thought, but with the unity of a social platform of coherent notions of right and wrong. It seems impossible, but Count Alexis said it was so. That’s what he saw in the Americans he met. That’s what the European invaders destroyed. Here’s another reminder of the scale of that destruction.
On St. Thomas we have an expression which sounds phonetially like ‘Quail bay’ but is spelled differently. It means all is copacetic (also ‘copasetic’) I like to think of it as everything working in dynamic equilibrium. That’s my vision of societal life where we all have an underlying and unified notion of right and wrong. Is that what it boils down to, all this social unrest since at least the Industrial Age and certainly intensifying as the Electronic Age ages, notions of right and wrong? It seems so simple and yet it’s so complex.
Did DeToqueville really see what that meant? If so, how could he not fight for it? Answers are: ‘No’ and ‘Null after first question’.
Here DeToqueville paints a finer picture. “The Indian was indebted to no one but himself; his virtues, his vices, and his prejudices were his own work; he had grown up in the wild independence of his nature.” Here’s another phrase exploding with meaning; “the wild independence of his nature” conjures up a very advanced state of being. It suggests completeness, as though he’s saying, ‘This man in this nature is complete.’ To DeToqueville, the Indian he speaks of had grown into the essence of his wild freedom as he grew into manhood in this place of larger equality, a place that expected it of him, a society set up assuming that success, a society that depended on it as part of the mesh.
Were there oppressed Indians, that is oppressed by other Indians? Yes, the Shawnee and the Deleware were greatly oppressed by the Iroquois. The humans who were sacrificed in such large numbers at Cahokia were not all martyrs. The slaves among them were stricken with the ultimate oppression, death by hierarchy. So dash all the notions of a paradise on Earth, but not entirely.
I don’t know if De Toqueville met any oppressed Native Americans, but I think what DeToqueville sees is a character deeper than oppression. There are many stories where captured captives would taunt their captors to show they could not kill their spirit. It’s something of that spirit. In this example there is bravery which is a temporary response to a particular situation. The source of that bravery is the thing I think DeToqueville described as well as he could. It’s reflected in these words:
“The Indian was indebted to no one but himself, his virtues, his vices and his prejudices were his own work.” We are being instructed that this is the result of not having incoherent notions of right and wrong? You make yourself who you are in “the wild independence” of your own nature with “none of that deep corruption of manners” that comes from “incoherent notions of right and wrong.”
But as I said, after the praise for their character and social grace, DeToqueville gives them a pinch or two. I’m not sure they are justified.
“Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction.” Here’s the phrase I so cleverly alluded to earlier. DeToqueville makes the mistake of saying because we know what happened to the original inhabitants of the New World—their destruction, it was naturally inevitable. That, me’sahn, is prejudicial thinking in form and function.
I think I know what he meant by ‘implacable prejudices’? I think he means they did not bend to his expected view, they did not bend to his prejudices. But if, as he implied, they were already superior to the Europeans whom he says had once attained civiliation (he probably means under the monarchy) but now have fallen back to barbarism, then would he have the Indians abdicate their ‘implacable prejudices’ so they can eat from the tree of incoherent notions of right and wrong?
I think the uncontrolled passions he speaks of would not have been on display two hundred years before that. He knew the Indians when they were wracked with whiskey and riddled with rum. I know from experience, that’s where the uncontolled part comes in.
It’s not surprising that he claims their vices will do ‘em in, but it is a surprise when he says “and still more perhaps their savage virtues consigned them to inevitable destruction.” He’s talking about the clash of cultures and what it means to the culture with virtue when it meets one infamously without. He is saying it’s inevitable these people, their culture and all they’ve ever known of how to live in this world would be sheered down like wheat before the ‘inevitable’ sigh of the grim reaper dba European settlers.
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