Look Towards the Revolutions

If you ever want to see a man or woman in true, unfastened anger, look towards the revolutions, be they big or small. Look toward the lands were people have been mangled, chained and abused. Look toward the lands were dogs, creatures and man have been turned shy and forced into a corner. These are the lands were the dogs, creatures and men bare their teeth and kill.

Haiti, former Saint Dominique, is one such place. Slaves were brought from their homes in Africa and forced to work in meager, brutal conditions. Most slaves died after being in Saint Dominique for about three years. If slaves did anything wrong, they were whipped, had a limb cut off without medical care or hung onto a tree to die. Some slaves were freed, of course, based on their talents, but that was granted that the slave would even make it that long and their Master was one of the few kind fellows on the island. It was cheaper, and thus automatically better, to kill and practically torture humans than to treat them with any care. This was what it meant to be a slave in former Haiti.

The slaves had an up-Mt. Everest battle, both the whites and the free people of color wanted to keep slavery for money related reasons. The free people of color wanted more equality with the whites, but not with the slaves, and the whites wanted to oppress everyone else. Ironically, like in the French Revolution, the top two classes, whites and free colored people, started the fight and everyone else joined in later. The fuse was quick and the bullet deadly. When the slaves started to fight, they had years of pent up anger and hatred stored in their bones. In August 1791, one thousand slaves rose up against their masters, killed them and burned all of the most profitable plantations. After four years of blood letting, and some more pressing matters concerning foreign countries, all slaves were emancipated throughout France.

However, since it takes old humans a long time to learn new tricks, slavery started to be reinstituted to parts of the French Empire by Napoleon. If Napoleon could bring slavery back to other parts of the country, there was nothing keeping him from bringing slavery back to Saint Dominique. The outrage was tremendous and within a year only 14% of the French Forces in Saint Dominique were left due to both slaughter and plague. The furry was so absolute that the former slaves used a scorched earth tactic, burning their own land to forcibly get rid of France, and forced every single white person out of Saint Dominique. The fires were supposedly large enough for one to read their mail at night miles away. Without any troops left to defend Saint Dominique, France had to relinquish control of one of the most prosperous sugar colonies in the world at that time – a rather embarrassing defeat, especially after spending so much effort trying to make sure Saint Dominique stayed French. Once the slaves had tasted life outside their prior brutal corner, any possible threat to it was taken as an extreme affront. The matter of these men and womens' freedom had become not only a life or death thing as far as their bodies were concerned, but a life or death thing as far as their minds were concerned. They were willing to do whatever it took, be it turning their entire environment to rubble or killing other human beings in order to secure their liberty. Anger, ferocious anger, is the wind under a revolution's wings and will force someone to do all in their will to end the revolution once the cause of their anger is sated.

What do you think? Is anger a key component of a revolution, or not? Can you have a revolution without anger, and thus without will? Can there be a revolution without there being something wrong with a society?

If there have been revolutions going on for thousands of years, each time to change something wrong in their society, will there one day be a time when people have learned from all of the mistakes in life and made a society were revolution is not needed? Only if we make it so.

Thoughts to Actions

Sitting in the middle of a library, it is hard not to think about books and all of the billions of ideas encompassed by them. A small library, say maybe only 200 or 300 books, would have been an extreme rarity back before the Enlightenment. Before the enlightenment, the occupation of thinking was something reserved for the few. The people, the peasants, had to work from before dawn until sunset. A century after the fall of Rome, the contents of more than one or two books was practically unavailable in a village. I mean, transportation was terrible, so very few ideas were moving from one place to another, and the majority of the masses were illiterate. People did what they were supposed to do by force, and simply ideas weren’t passed around enough for a large scale revolt. Evidently, this wasn’t the case with the French Revolution.

The French Revolution, like all revolutions, was based on ideas and spread by ideas. For example, gossiping books on Louis XV’s personal life were what originally undermined the French government around and after 1750. Today, people still spread gossip about their leaders. Possibly most related to Louis XV’s issue was the Clinton affair, but then there are still the people that believe Obama is a Muslim, despite the Obama’s-pastor fiasco. Is this right? Is it fair? People do believe what serves their purposes. What is truly significant about a group making fun of their ruler, though, is that it a) makes them more human, b) makes them into a sort of joke, and c) suggests that they are slightly better than the ruler and thus brings the ruler’s ego down a notch. By making fun of their ruler, the people are noting their ruler is not perfect, and thus open the door for protest and change. It is a small action with big results. Think about it. Before the French Revolution, nothing had changed since the Middle Ages. The sovereign ruled by divine right. Like a grandfather clock about to need to be rewound, each minute, each minor defiance to the king, brought France closer to a Revolution. The storming of the Bastille, the capture of Louis XVI by the angry mobs of women in 1789, even books reflecting on the French Revolution helped spread the revolution. All of these things were based on ideas and stories passed around. All of these things were catalysts for more of the revulsion. Books such as Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France were written arguing European conservatism and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman enacted the first truly feminist movement. Both of these caused debate, and thus more flow of ideas. Ideas weren’t just exported with the increased transportation of ideas, but they were also imported. In the American Revolution, the colonists were far enough away from the main of Europe to be able to cultivate their own ideas. These ideas were carried back to Europe with the newly made Americans, where they were bought by French rulers of the time, and accidentally “stolen” by the masses. The swell of ideas and knowledge became so great and dangerous that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette tried to escape their own country. So the question is, how good is an increase in ideas? How much risk are new ideas worth? Are they worth a violent revolution? Personally I think that we live in a day and age where to live without new ideas is like living without bread and water. Our entire industry-based society requires the new to obsolete the old, whether or not the old should actually be obsolete. For example, our American society requires that we protest our government to help keep it swinging like a pendulum. To stop coming up with new ideas could turn into forgetting the old ideas, such as much of Europe before the Enlightenment. Ideas may just be the kinetic energy of life’s Newton’s pendulum.


* Original Artwork

The Extreme Classic Tale of 13 Preteens and their Mother

The Colonies, at only 150 years old are like 13 preteen children. Not smart enough to know the parent (Britain) has some good points, a little scared to go out on their own, but brave enough to cross town. Most importantly though, the preteens are starting to get really annoyed at their parent and don't know quite what to do.

A Quick Disclaimer: For the purposes of this post, the Colonies will be referred to as a single entity of preteens. I, as the writer of this post, do recognize that each Colony has a different attitude and thus acted slightly different from one another. If any member of the Colony family happens to read this post, please know that I can tell you apart, just it would make this post so much more confusing for everyone than it already is.

Britain is like the mother of the colonies for multiple reason. The most simple one is because that is what everyone always refers the base country of a country: the "Mother Land" or "Mother Country". Britain, like a mother, created the colonies, the thirteen preteens.

Like most mothers, Britain seemed to wish for the colonies to be relatively happy. Britain only had the colonies pay about 1/30th of the taxes the rest of Britain had to pay; they repealed multiple acts for the colonies; and created Acts that would help both Britain's company's and America's taxes and therefore a compromise. After the Stamp Act was repealed, like some parents who try get the last word after losing an argument, created the Declaratory Act. The Declaratory Act was an act simply stating that is had supreme power over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever". Also like a mother, after Boston the preteen had the Boston Tea party, Britain not only punished it harshly but tried to make an example of it so that its siblings did not follow suit. Of course, the other preteens started to feel bad for Boston and worry about being "grounded" themselves for speaking against Mother. But it is the similarity that counts.

Some of the biggest preteen moments for the colonists were in their temper tantrums. The Preteens were mad at Britain for not listening to their request for "no taxation without representation" and thus not allowing their democratic wish. Like a piece of clothing or cellphone that a mother does not want her preteen to get, so it was like with Britain and the Colonies. Instead of spite, one of main reasons that Britain did not grant the Colonies democratic representation was because the majority of Britain didn't have that sort of representation either. If one brother asks his mother for something and is told no, and then his sibling asks the same thing, the answer, like here, is still no. However, the Colonies couldn't grasp this ideology and threw a temper tantrum when told no. When told no, the Bostonians had the Boston Masecure, and the media pumped out the propaganda to help raise the level of anger of the colonists. Then, after Britain gave a discount on Tea (the coffee of the age), the colonists got so mad they wasted tons of tea just to show up Britain for trying to help them* . On top of that, members of the Sons of Liberty would pour hot tar on the flesh of tax men, but feathers on them, and then torture them some more by pouring hot tea down their throats. This thus burned the messengers of the Mother both inside and out. If that is not a temper tantrum (if not worse), who knows what is. On top of all of this, when the Preteens couldn't take it anymore, they hurt their Mother's feelings more than their Mother hurt them. They did this with "the shot heard around the word" and by killing three times more British soldiers that day than the British did American.

The Colonies, as its own entity, was a very young "country" compared to its neighbors. In that sense it was most certainly a child. However, a child has innocence, and the actions taken from the colonies as a whole were certainly not done with innocence.

Do you think the Colonies are like preteens and Britain is like the Mother? Can the Sons of Liberty, as only one small group, sway your answer on that?

*Why is it that this is what the Boston Tea Party was about, but we grow up thinking favorably about the Sons of Liberty who did the Tea Party and now people are priding themselves by calling themselves part of the "Tea Party"? The more I think about it, it makes less and less sense.

Stereotypes

Personally, I find it interesting that the great stereotypes of the modern western world started in the thinking of the minority in the Enlightenment, while the form of government the majority of the Enlightenment thinkers thought was best was benevolent absolutism. The two stereotypes (racism and increased gender stereotypes) our society is still trying to get over, while benevolent absolutism is no longer in America. For that matter, benevolent absolutism was no longer in America in 1776, the same year David Hume died, because of the British Civil War (American Revolution). Why is it that when an one old thing goes (benevolent absolutism) another two new things are carved in stone (the idea of racial difference and increased gender stereotypes)?

Voltaire views that men are "equal when they perform animal functions, and when they exercise their understanding" but that "the poverty connected with our species subordinates one man to another" (Voltaire, “Equality” from the Philosophical Dictionary). Voltaire believes that it is one's wealth that differentiates one person from another. Out of Voltaire's conversation about subordinate beings, not once does he mention skin color. However, he does, in a way, touch on gender inequality issues. If two "men" are equal when they preform animal functions and learn together, would not a woman also be equal when she works and learns with other men (“Equality” from the Philosophical Dictionary)? With the great salons, to a certain extent, this was the case. Since, at the time, a woman couldn't go out and join the great thinking circles, a good saloniere could bring the circles to her home. For a society that didn't smile on women in the least, why did the great scholars agree to go to a woman's salon for the woman to mediate if they did not respect her ideas in the least? Even more so, how ethical is it for the Thinkers to go to the womens' salons and learn from the women's ideas and talents and then reaffirm that woman "were inferior to men in the crucial faculies of reason and ethics and so should be subordinated to men" ( Bonnie S Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser "Women in the Salons", Sherman 49)? Could one even say that this falls under Hobbes theory that everyone is out to help themselves alone?