Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
“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
Yes. A certain amount of fatalism is proper. What bedevils us (or me, at least) is not knowing what that “certain amount” is.
No matter which level of fatalism you choose, whether it’s much or little, it seems like there’s always someone chiding you for using it as an excuse for passivity and irresponsibility, and someone else chiding you for your arrogance and delusions of control in not being even more resigned to your fate. Or at least that has been my experience. Being a conservative – someone who’s supposed to value individual responsibility and stoic resignation – means getting it both coming and going.
We can model the world as if an optimum amount of fatalism exists. Risk-analysis, trade-offs, etc… But often we know too little to say with much confidence where that optimum is. Of course, we can invoke rational ignorance, too: often, trying to know with much accuracy just isn’t worth it. But rational ignorance itself is subject to the same chiding from both sides.
At some point, maybe it’s best to resign yourself to fatalism, even if it isn’t “proper”. But in modern life, there are more hoops to jump through before you get there.
I don’t think this is peculiar to conservatives. I think it’s really very American, and that both chiding impulses are basically healthy, in the right dosage. I mean, think about the AA serenity prayer. AA is the closest thing to a national religion as we’ve got. (I may not be totally up-to-date with AA culture; my view of it comes pretty much entirely from David Foster Wallace and from talking to my alcoholic friends, but last I heard, it was still authentically non-partisan.)
True, it’s very American, and, I think, basically healthy for most people most of the time. I think it’s also true that American conservatives are committed to “being American” in a way others aren’t, especially with regard to traits like this one.
And yes, it always boils down to the Serenity Prayer.
Well, of course, only you and me have the proper level of fatalism -and I’m not sure about you. ;)
But should it surprise those with the proper level of fatalism that they get it coming and going? Aristotle tells us there is only one virtue, but an infinite number of vices of both surfeit and deficit. Yes, many who get it wrong will also get it coming and going -but that’s not a sign of anything.
Look at the virtuous man (or woman) for guidance. Which is why, when CS Lewis spoke about grief, he said not to consult yourself but to consult Job (and I realize that his own account of his grief reveals as much failure on his part as success).
There is a liberating power in a God who asks “where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations.”
You’ll have to be more concrete if you want to convince me that the Pope doesn’t know that poverty is the normal state of human affairs in history.
But he’s not talking about history; he is speaking of the poverty of today and its causes (including especially the kind caused by the injustice and inhumanity of the super rich global power brokers, which is of a different moral order than the kind caused by, say, natural famine.)
Meanwhile, your idea that “fewer people are poor today than ever before,” is another comparison that makes no sense in relation to the Pope’s diagnosis, especially his concern with the spiritual and moral poverty that can go hand in hand with certain kinds of economic development.
What Majestyk said about the importance of leisure strikes me as correct (see #14). And on this point, see Alexis de Tocqueville’s chapter in Democracy in America on why enslaved Africans were able to adapt to American life and, in general, survived, while Indians were not and, in general, died.
(I can’t post the link right now, but its title is “The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States,” and it appears immediately if you run a search. Or you can find it at Book I, chap. 18, if you are a reactionary who prefers to turn pages rather than scroll.)
Except that many of us believe that following this Pope’s prescriptions will lead to greater overall economic poverty/suffering rather than less.
Consider Charles Murray’s Fish Town. Consider what I just read somewhere this week (if I weren’t so lethargic with anemia, I would try to find it) about how rampant drug abuse is decimating what was once America’s heartland. Consider the rise of out of wedlock birth and fatherless children. Consider the millions upon millions being killed through abortion. Consider the scale of anti-depressant prescriptions in this country. And so on.
There are millions of people who aren’t poor in the historical sense of economic deprivation, but who are suffering terrible poverty nonetheless—poverty that is in some ways worse and more destructive.
Again, you’d have to be more specific, MWM. My interpretation of the Pope’s prescriptions is very different from others’.
For instance, when he speaks about “re-distribution” many around here assume he means it in a socialist sense. He doesn’t.
He’s not calling for government-run redistribution of wealth, but for more just and fair laws and markets, so that economic systems benefit all (as they’re meant to), not just a powerful elite (as they too often do these days). See Argentina for good example.
Agreed, but I’d say that this could be explained by those atheists and agnostic conservatives as being raised within Christianity and Christians do sometimes fall into the fallacy of “If someone isn’t trying to throw us to the lions, then we must be doing something wrong.”
That attitude doesn’t exist within, say, Judaism in quite the same way (and Muslims often have the opposite problem of assuming something must be wrong because they’re not in charge).
#ArmchairPsychologicalAnalyizationOfLargeGroups
Oh, I am quite sure I don’t.
Obviously, I cannot know with 100% certainty (hey, maybe I did just get unlucky), but I would bet that a person with the “proper amount” of fatalism would be either happier or more virtuous. When the vices you’re prone to don’t even bring much temporary happiness, that’s probably a sign of misjudging the world in some way.
Rather than discussing Catholic social teaching, which is not completely unrelated to the idea put forward by the post, it might be more relevant to discuss how many ways the federal and state govts have made it difficult to live a subsistence life today.
Ricochet discussions tend to go where they will go, especially when they touch on perennial themes around here. This post illustrates beautifully a point I’ve been failing to get across to fellow members for years. So, it was irresistible.
This was a really excellent post, I agree. It’s had me thinking all day and in a very new way. Thanks again, Reticulator — it really helped put words on something that’s been vaguely gnawing at me for a while.
I liked the discussion, Mrs. VS, and am glad you raised the point. I didn’t mean to slight it. Nor should you stop until you’re good and ready. In fact I propose making reference to Pope Leo XIII and the living wage.
I think there is even more to discuss for those interested in the question of Indian vs. American life.
Professional athletes tend to intersperse intense physical activity with languor. Sometimes they court danger, too. And somehow they are greatly admired in our society.
Usually I think it’s the life of intense dependence on each other that matters, and which modern governments work overtime to destroy on account of its constituting competition for their role. But it’s probably worth thinking about in terms of subsistence, too. Thanks.
It’s a complicated subject, one that I’m not prepared to expound on very well. There were Anglo societies that experienced anxiety about which culture was becoming which: Were the American-English going to be like the English who invaded Ireland and became more Irish than the Irish?
These days some Americans try to find enough Indian ancestry to become eligible for government handouts, but it’s not an entirely new phenomenon that Americans take pride in having some Indian ancestry. There used to be cases where people of mixed ancestry from Indian cultures tried to pass as white. More recent generations do just the opposite, and not just for the welfare benefits.
Euro-Americans wanted the Indians’ land; they also wanted to inherit some of the Indians’ “wildness,” though usually after having safely conquered and subdued them. Maybe it’s not entirely unlike the cases where Indians killed their enemies and then ripped out and ate their hearts to inherit their strength.
Yes, I think that is the one. It was done by Tanner himself, and I don’t know of any others.
Yes, part of my reason for writing about it is to remind us to maintain such types of bonding as you describe as are possible in modern society, rather than surrender them to the welfare state or to those who measure the success of capitalism solely by the material benefits it provides.
I think it was missionary Samuel Pond’s book about Dakota Life in Minnesota that made me realize that the Dakota society of his time had no way of investing for 6 months from now. It didn’t have storage facilities for wealth, or for symbols of wealth. So everything the people had was invested in each other. If there was a successful hunt, throw a big feast. Maybe someday it would be someone else’s turn to help you.
It wasn’t something that was just done, though. It was something that was thought about. Pond told of overhearing a young couple discuss whether they should throw a big party; the wife thought it would be extravagant, and her husband explained why they should do it.
That’s how I remember it; it has been 20 years since I read it.
BTW, about 1/3 of the students in my first high school were descendants of some of these Dakota who ended up in Nebraska after the 1862 Dakota war. My parents were partisans of keeping our local country schools under parental control. This was somehow tied up with my mother thinking the local high school was a bad influence, so they sent me to a different school next to the reservation. No one else in my family had an experience like that.
Axtell’s paper was very influential in my thinking about this topic. I second the recommendation.
Yes, adaptation flowed both ways. As you probably know, Richard White’s book, The Middle Ground, Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 has been very influential on this topic.
That is an excellent point. I sometimes think that the Brave New World might come about because those of us who can’t stand to live that way will be dead and gone or too few to bother about by then.
I’d be interested in knowing how they come to these conclusions. I’m not disagreeing; it sounds plausible. Do you have a paper or book on this topic to recommend?
I think it’s fair to conclude that the Pope often argues explicitly for policies that many on Ricochet consider economically unwise. For example, he’s said that any harm to the environment is harm done to humanity. I think most of us would argue that this is not true, and that sometimes, even often, in fact, we must put our own welfare ahead of what’s commonly called “the environment” — although naturally we wish to minimize that harm, and we should. But it’s a simple fact that we can’t share our cities with bobcats and cougars, even if they’re native to the environment. And we don’t yet know how to produce energy on the scale required to sustain societies in which no one starves without doing any environmental damage; nuclear power is so far the best solution we’ve come up with, but even that produces environmental damage, albeit much less than, say, that from fossil fuels. (And possibly catastrophic damage, too, in the highly unlikely but not absolutely impossible event of a containment failure.) So these kinds of comments strike many here as either unaware that these tradeoffs really exist and must be made, or perhaps aware, but weighing in, on a significant and ongoing global debate, on the side of “more environment, less humanity.” It can be very vexing to hear this from someone of great moral authority, because our public debate is very divided, and the decisions we make about these issues will have real consequences with real cost in lives. A policy of “do no damage to the environment” would entail, for example, a passive approach to mosquito control in the face of the Zika virus, which in my view would be harmful to humanity.
But I agree with you completely that this isn’t the whole of his message or even worth much of our energy; he’s repeatedly made it clear that his overarching call is as you describe it: to appreciate that a life focused entirely on wealth and consumerism is an empty and impoverished one. And who could possibly argue, in an era where a candidate for the American presidency really is running on a campaign the essence of which really is, “Trust me, I’m so rich,” that this message is an unimportant one right now? I would have argued until recently that this idea of American culture was a caricature and a joke, that of course we didn’t value money only for its own sake, but I’ve been chastened and humbled by the Trump campaign, and learned something important about us. I’d generally thought the argument that we’d gone morally off the rails with greed and materialism was hugely exaggerated and mostly leftist agitprop, but confronted with that kind of evidence, you have to entirely shut your mind to ignore it. We’re now literally, not metaphorically, worshipping mammon. This is where you’d hope the Pope would step in and remind people that it’s embarrassing not even to make a pretense of serving the other master, as well.
But he’s most enduringly earned my respect not for his views about the environment or greed, but for this. At times like this, it’s very important that there to be a man with a greater-than-usual authority to speak for the Christian faith.
Again, thanks everyone, for all of the good comments.
The above is the first photo I took this morning after responding to some of the comments, perhaps without reading them carefully enough.
I hoped to meet a homeowner who has a distant family connection to the man who had been captured by Indians, though that is not the reason I hoped to meet her. And I didn’t. I’d like to tell the story of what happened at my destination, but to explain it right now could be an unwanted invasion of some peoples’ privacy, so I’m not going to put it here.
Sigh. I’d never make a good journalist, because I do run into some good stories that I refrain from writing down so as not to cause problems for people.
I notice you leave out of account faith entirely. Are you sure that’s unimportant?
Now, as to the one-way ticket, it’s not hard to see that the Indians were free in a way Americans are not; almost no one is. I don’t suppose most people even want to understand in what that freedom consists. These days, there’s always some conservative or socialist telling you about the evils of romanticizing or objectification or what have you. It’s always, no other life than mine is worth living, with them…
You’re right that it was a harsh life, but it was also all about self-reliance. Americans used to get this–there would be no Westerns otherwise. Americans had stories about mountain men, too. The opinion in some that they stand firm in face of the world or the chaos leads to those lives.
Americans are obsessed with survival skills even now, although they have this head-scratching American way of going about it–the end of the world is a matter of taking it all like good professionals with them… But of course, what’s at stake is always god-like self-reliance.
I do too. It’s why I sometimes write fiction …
And see, I think it was all about deep friendship and trust. I guess we see this as we want to really. A shame we can’t invite people from the past to join us on Ricochet to explain what they were actually thinking.
And yes, the language around some of the survival stuff is strange: Yes, of course you should keep stuff around in case the power goes out, you know? But if it’s the Apocalypse, the Swiss Army knife and the waterproof matches ain’t gonna help.