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“They Become Disgusted With our Manner of Life”
Some of us on Ricochet have been wondering how to teach people to prefer the liberty of free markets to the security of socialism. Others have been lecturing us about how capitalism has made life fantastically better for humans.
Each time one of these discussions comes up, I wish people here knew more about Indian captivity narratives — the true ones, that is. These stories have been popular in North America since the late 1600s, though not always been viewed as essential knowledge.
I learned of a new one today while working in the archives of the historical library in a small town in Texas. I’m following up on the three stagecoach owners who operated a line between Detroit and Chicago, and then all went to Texas following the 1832 Black Hawk War. It turns out that a descendant of one of the three, a woman who did a lot of research on her family history, was the granddaughter of a man who had spent his formative years as an Indian.
Keep in mind that to most Indians in North America, your DNA or blood lineage isn’t what made you Indian. Your biological parentage isn’t what made you Indian. We might say your upbringing is what made you Indian. That isn’t the way Indians would say it, and it doesn’t exactly cover all situations, but we can consider it close enough for present purposes.
In this case, the young boy had been captured at the age of two. There was no information about how he was brought back to his Anglo family as an almost-grown young man, but apparently it was not his own choice, because he tried at least once to swim across a river to escape back to his Indian family. He eventually adjusted, more or less, and raised a family. I learned, approximately, where he’s buried, and someday will try to go there by bicycle to visit his grave, if there is a marker for it.
It’s a sketchy story without the detail of some of the better-known stories in Texas, such as those of Herman Lehmann or Cynthia Ann Parker, whose stories have been told at book length. And there are many similar stories in the Great Lakes region, such as those of John Tanner, Jonathan Adler, and Frances Slocum. (Tanner’s book, by the way, is claimed to be the only one that is much liked by Native Americans.)
But these stories all have in common a captive’s reluctance to go back to Anglo society and a difficult readjustment, or in Slocum’s case, a successful refusal. Parker died unhappily in white society. Many of the captives who were forcibly repatriated to their original Anglo families attempted to escape back to their Indian families. Many of them who finally acquiesced to life in their Anglo families maintained a lifelong relationship with their Indian families, with visits taking place in both directions.
Benjamin Franklin famously remarked on this phenomenon, writing in the mid-18th century:
when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
Franklin also pointed out, correctly, that this was a one-way phenomenon. It never worked the other way around. Indian children never learned to enjoy life among the English or stay with them.
But I think he was very wrong about one thing. The Indian way of life was not carefree. It had less of a hierarchical regimentation than the American settlers had, and was less structured around the clock. (Indians even today usually start their public meetings and celebrations late, with somebody sure to make a joke about running on Indian time. I have learned to be relaxed about getting to such events on time — where non-Indians are welcome, as they often are). But in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a brutal, care-laden existence.
John Tanner’s book told in stark detail of the marginal existence of Indian life. Starvation,
especially in winter, was often one hunting failure away. There was great joy and pride when he was able, with much exertion and risk, to provide for his Indian family. He formed strong bonds with his adoptive Indian mother and siblings, who went through these tribulations with him. Later in life, after he went back to visit his English family, a brother wanted to join him in his return to the Indians. But John didn’t let him, knowing that someone who had not been brought up in that life would be unable to take it.
By the way, John Tanner finally went back to white society voluntarily (though unhappily). And so did Jonathan Adler, perhaps more happily. It seems they did so for health care. Then as now, it was a destroyer of freedom. These two men started to feel their age, and it seems they knew they would not live as long in Indian society. They had been captured when they were old enough to remember their Anglo life, too.
But if Ben Franklin was wrong about life as an Indian being free of care, what was the attraction?
My hypothesis is that you develop strong bonds with other people when you depend on each other for life and death. You can develop bonds with others just by working with them at the office or the food bank, but even more so in matters of basic existence.
The opportunity to experience these bonds is destroyed by modern life. There was still some remnant of it in earlier agricultural life, where the family was an economic unit. But there is less now when work and family are usually two separate things. And there is even less where there are left-wingers who try to keep people from making any consequential decisions that leave them depending on each other rather than on the welfare state.
People are torn between a life of rich personal relationships on one hand, and on the other the conveniences and ease that modern capitalism or socialism offers.
So back to the original topics: Yes, capitalism has made some things better, but it has not necessarily made life better. It’s important to realize that life doesn’t consist of GDP, life-saving drugs, and ever-cheaper smartphones. Those things are certainly desirable on the one hand, but don’t expect your moralizing on this topic to keep people from coming out with torches and pitchforks to overthrow the regime that created them. Try to find some balance.
And for inducing people to prefer free markets to welfare socialism? Help them to observe the joy of taking risks together with loved ones. This can only be done in a society where we can still make decisions and choices. But if we run to government to make uniform regulations each time families make choices we don’t like, we’re not setting much of an example.
[The photo is of my bicycling destination on Labor Day 1998, where I was learning about the first of a number of Indian captivity narratives.]
Published in Culture, General
What a wonderful post, Reticulator! I think you are spot on: when we share the most basic challenges of life and death with people we care about, when the relationships are most important above all else, that is what binds us. And when we do those things together and for each other, we don’t need government, and we relish our interdependence. Thank you!
Excellent. Thanks.
We often decry the disintegration of family bonds and the shift of responsibilities from private loyalties (family, friends, neighbors, workmates, fellow parishioners, etc) to impersonal governments. This post highlights the function of need in dependable relationships.
Poverty threatens us with violence. Affluence threatens us with blindness and corruption. No life is without challenges that can destroy the soul.
Incidentally, this post fits the Catholic season of Lent. This is a time when we focus on uniting our pains to those of Christ and grow closer through hardship.
Ok. Edited out the typos and awkwardnesses of my comment about the Pope above. (I had been rushing, as so often.)
The thing about the Pope, Tom, is that insofar as we can derive economic prescriptions from his words (which I doubt), they’re not the important part of what he’s saying. Really, they don’t matter at all. He’s not an economist. He doesn’t pretend he is. His authority is moral and religious, not political and economic.
He is saying human beings are not reducible to economic units. Particular persons and societies are suffering under a global economic order that is indifferent to the rights and dignity of the poor, and that pays inadequate attention to the spiritual miseries of acquisitiveness and excess. We need to pay better and broader attention to what is “good for man”, not merely what grows the bottom line.
I was always under the impression that the main reason those white people raised by native Americans were unhappy back in non native society was due to that society never truly accepting them back in as one of their own. They were always looked at as somehow damaged or outright savages.
I realize that may be from a Hollywood representation of those days, but it does seem likely.
If I was trying to explain capitalism versus socialism to a teenager, I might put it this way:
Wealth is opportunity. We all want opportunities to help our fellow man. Socialism only focuses on distribution of gifts, but capitalism best enables the creation of gifts. Free markets don’t just take the world as it is; they add to it.
Peehaps you could express it better.
The reason being that young people are especially interested in achieving an ideal world through grand strategies and bold actions. So you have to present free commerce as the best means of helping people, not just materially but spiritually.
For men in hunting societies, time is divided into periods of intensely physical activity interspersed with languor. However, the phenomenon I described applied to both males and females. And while I suppose the Commanche society in Texas could be classified as hunter-gatherer, the native people of Indiana, Ohio, and lower Michigan were very agricultural. The winter hunt was still important, but the way George Washington’s armies subdued them was to first destroy their agricultural fields, much like General Sherman did elsewhere. Then there would be battles, after which there would be treaty meetings, which usually included a requirement that Indians give up their captives. And except for those who had been captive only a short time, there were large numbers who resisted going back to their white families.
I wish he was more clear that it is our role as individuals to do so.
I have not heard of an actual story where that was the case. Maybe one will turn up somewhere.
Frontier societies that were in contact with native peoples tended to be a lot different and more open than the generations that followed. I see this in reading the earlier county histories in which those who actually lived with Indian neighbors had their say, compared with those written in the societies that came later, and knew about Indians only from what they had heard. The latter are sometimes more enlightened according to modern sensibilities, and sometimes less, but usually more clueless about their cultures.
On the other hand, consider today’s migrants to Europe. What could be more bonding and more meaningful than war? And why do Mexicans leave their less civilized nation to settle here?
On the other hand, consider all the modern Westerners who are anxious to perform meaningful work in poor nations around the world.
Most people prefer some middle ground between meaning and comfort.
I think that would be and has been a common choice.
It’s worth considering the Amish, though. They adopt modern technology all the time, but they are very deliberate about it. They examine each change for what it would do to family life and spiritual life, look at what it is doing to others, and then decide as a local community whether to adopt. (They might explain to you that they forego things because the bishops won’t let them have them, but they choose their own bishops.)
You fail to cite any internal polls amongst the Cherokee. I realize such data re the Comanche might have been difficult to obtain.
Seriously, thank you for the beautiful, thoughtful post. Would make a fascinating book discussion group. Personally, politics and sociology started simply as comparative advantage/free labor markets/legal weed and has been a twenty-year effort to fill in the blanks (and there are a lot of blanks).
As I read your piece, pictures of young second generation ISIS recruits and Baltimore gang members flashed in my head.
Thanks again.
There was a lot of this in addition to those New England praying Indians. The Cherokee Indians, while not exactly like these praying Indian groups, had adopted a lot of modern technology, economy, and material possessions. It did them no good. They were forced out anyway.
Some of the praying Indians were slaughtered when some of the more unruly settlers took it upon themselves to kill Indians in general. They were easy targets. It did have an effect on the willingness of other Indians to adopt Christianity.
Thank you for providing that term and your example. I hadn’t known the term. I wanted to reply to more of this, and was saving the best comments for last (although I’m pleased to see there are so many good ones). But now I have to get in a bicycle ride related to the story I learned about yesterday, and we need to check out of our hotel and move on to a different story elsewhere in Texas.
Well, that’s because he’s not only addressing us as individuals, but as societies, as peoples, and as segments of societies (e.g. the powerful v. the powerless; the “first world” v. the “third world”). That’s what (true) social justice is all about.
His critics misunderstand him because they tend to read “society” as “government” and a moral call for justice as a political demand for more government control.
There was quite a bit of moving back and forth between worlds. Sam Houston spent a good deal of his youth among the Cherokee, and after the spectacular failure of his first marriage–while serving as Governor of Tennessee!–he threw over white civilization for good. Of so he thought. The simple life was no match for his ambition. I never read of his Indian-lovin’ tendencies hurting his reputation much, but he could have been a large enough character to carry it off.
Another thought: It is unclear to me how the preference of some individuals in the early 19th century for the subsistence poverty pagan lifestyle in which they were raised rather than the puritan Christianity of pre-industrial America in which they were not raised serves as an indictment of 21st century post-industrial secular society (let alone the industrial society of the 20th century) .
Nobody is suggesting that all the tribal cultures of the world who are still living stone age lifestyles should be forcibly moved to apartments in Brooklyn (or to early 19th century farms, for that matter).
I wouldn’t want to be forced to live on a 19th century farm either.
That sounds an awful lot like most of the 21st century entrepreneurs and tech workers I know. They too divide their time between periods of intense productivity and periods of sublime leisure.
It’s not just about ease destroying trauma bonding. We conservatives, who can never really shake the suspicion that suffering ought to be good for us, are very quick to blame ease, and I think that leaves us vulnerable to overlooking other factors.
It’s also, in the case of modern capitalism, that access to expanded, life-improving choices, destroys fatalism.
Now, if we suffer, we no longer look at suffering as something that “just happens” to us. We have the burden of knowing that we might have avoided it if we had chosen any of several different paths available to us.
Prospectively, this is a good thing: it allows us to minimize the risk of suffering going forward by choosing wisely. But it’s always minimizing a risk: in a risky world, there is no guaranteed relationship between “good choices” and good outcomes. Retrospectively, this can be tough to deal with, because we know our suffering wasn’t entirely a matter of fate, but resulted from some combination of chance and choices that we were partially (not zero and not fully) responsible for.
We should remember survivorship bias, too. Modern life makes it much easier to avoid death. It’s quite possible that those who didn’t die in primitive societies got a lot of satisfaction out of their lives, but we can’t poll the many who died prematurely and ask if they were satisfied with that outcome.
That said, it’s also true that modern life can keep someone alive, but perhaps at a price where life is not worth it. Yet because of social expectations, those who might privately believe they’d have been better off in a more primitive environment that would have allowed them to die earlier if they weren’t robust enough, might feel quite obligated to avoid expressing – much less acting on – the belief that it’s possible they’d be better off dead.
Interesting ideas, MFR. I just don’t quite understand or necessarily believe that conservatives believe suffering should be good for us. Do you think that’s a conservative idea or a Christian idea? It doesn’t resonate for me, even having read the rest of your comment.
In my experience, there’s no shortage of atheist and agnostic conservatives expressing the sentiment that the main problem with life today is that folks have it too easy.
Had that been the extent of his remarks, he would have found little opposition to them.
To the extent that this is true — and it is true to an extent — it’s not particularly true of the modern age. Indeed, there’s no prior age in which more people (both in absolute numbers and as a pecentage of the population) have had more rights and dignity than we do currently.
Is there an age or society in which we were better at this? If so, can we integrate its values onto our current conditions without undermining our ability to feed, clothe, and care for billions? I’d be happy to learn I’m wrong but the answer to both seems to be an emphatic “no.”
(Again, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to address the real problems and shortcomings of modernity.)
Thanks for clarifying. I didn’t understand what you were saying.
Why do you keep bringing in comparisons?
If my doctor says I am anemic (as mine did today), would it make sense for me to dismiss her diagnosis on the grounds that I am less anemic now than I was during pregnancy 25 years ago? Or that anemia isn’t cancer? Or that I’m far healthier than most human beings on the planet or in history?
All that is completely beside the point.
It’s like the people who say you should live every day as if it’s your last.
If you knew today was your last day, would you really go to work?
The evolutionary psychologists seem to think that our basic operating system is designed for a smallish group size (which is believed to be why we find the personal relations people have been talking about so satisfying.)
Smallish being a few dozen, maybe 150. That’s DOS, so to speak. Larger and more complex societies involve elaborations as in Windows releases of increasing complexity and kludginess.
This comment makes me think.
The business about suffering being virtuous or some sort of tonic for the soul has some merit… up to a point. Beyond that point, suffering leads to embittering. At the very best, suffering produces drastically diminishing if not negative returns.
What I would say about life today is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Human nature itself hasn’t really changed that much since ancient times, and I just think it is an immutable truth that humans tend to appreciate more what they earn through struggle than what is given them.
It is arguable that my life has been privileged in certain regards. I have loving parents who encouraged me to work hard. I’m also fortunate to not be a complete dullard. However – I really did nothing to earn these gifts. That’s not to say that I’m ungrateful for them (I’m hugely grateful) but the things that I cherish the most in my life are the things that I had to fight for, red in tooth and claw to earn.
We live in an age of unprecedented material comfort and wealth. In most cases, children in our world grow up without having to struggle to get any of these gifts. This warps their perspective. There’s no struggle, so they make one up in order to feel like they have meaning.
Because a number of Francis’ arguments — including some of the ones you mentioned earlier — are predicated on the idea that some problems that are endemic to human existence are specific to today.
Specifically, poverty is the normal state of human affairs and fewer people are poor today than ever before, both in terms of percentages and raw numbers. That’s hugely important* and Francis has, unfortunately, specific and explicitly claimed that the opposite is happening.
* Which is not to say that there’s nothing more to be said!
I realize this is not necessarily your view -but it strikes me strange. I have the world’s libraries in my hand. Doctors can defeat death a thousand ways. Our engineers have tamed the world, they claim. Our professors can explain all human behavior, they claim.
And yet a tornado could rip through my city, and what would I do about it? The people we love hurt us -sometimes badly. We grow up with cuts and scrapes and scars and declare that it will never happen again -just as we trip scrape our elbows once more.
All this power and we can’t prevent pain – shouldn’t the lesson be that a certain amount of fatalism is proper? For all our illusions of control, the peach still lands on our head, and it is some other force or being that makes it grow into a tree.
It isn’t ease that bedevils us. It’s arrogance.
I am inclined to think that the matter isn’t just about optimum amount of suffering, but the optimum kind of suffering. Suffering is satisfying when you believe it gives you an empowering opportunity to exercise your moral agency. Suffering is dissatisfying – even infantilizing – otherwise.
Conservatives do not generally regard the suffering of citizens crushed by overweening bureaucracy as good. We’re sometimes guilty of talking as if all suffering “builds character” (and is therefore good in some sense), but none of us think this kind of suffering is good.
If we thought it was, then we should rejoice in each added bureaucratic burden for strengthening the moral fiber of our citizenry. But we don’t, and maybe it’s because being crushed by bureaucracy is tremendously disempowering. Stoically enduring it seems undignified; fighting it often seems impossible: either way, we feel disempowered.
Part of maturity in the modern world is learning to manage debt. Showing that you’re a responsible enough person that you can take out a loan and pay it back on schedule, and so on. Managing debt can be an empowering experience. I’ve found medical debt, on the other hand, disempowering: more than once, a bill I could not even have known I was responsible for has ended up in collections, and the first news I’ve gotten from it has been from a collections agency (this is a particular hazard of ER visits, it seems – so another reason to avoid the ER if at all possible). Usually, these things can be straightened out after the fact if you’re just persistent enough, but at the time, it’s incredibly infantilizing – you were completely helpless to prevent this “dereliction of duty” which was “your responsibility” in name only.
You called it. We have been so successful at easing pain that many now feel that any pain is due to failure of science or government or someone. Every illness that isn’t immediately cured is seen as an injustice rather than those that are cured being seen as exceptions and blessings.
We have come to expect food, heat, shelter, health, love, happiness, etc as a birthright, and thus, we have little or no appreciation for them. We are just angry when we don’t have what we consider our due share of them all.