The Pacifist William Penn's Treaty With The Indians
Now I’ve taken a look at one of Mark Anthony Jones’ essays on his new “China Discourse” site, titled, “Chinese Governance and Society”.
I won’t parse and fisk the entire article line by line. I do agree with many of Mark’s observations, even if not with his general approach to the topic. But my main criticism is, “Mark, I think you – along with some whom you criticize in this article –overstate the equation of “The West” (especially the Anglosphere, including America) with the Enlightenment. How much does the Enlightenment REALLY inform the civic, popular and political cultures of the West, or of the Anglosphere, or even more specifically of America?”
Very little, I think, and the American case is one of the most complex, and not quite what it seems on the surface. And as I (even as an Australian bandit) have considerable personal experience and expertise in American culture and history, I’d like to focus on that detail and “enlighten” Mark a bit:
Mark, you wrote:
Without (certain kinds of counterbalances), Reason itself simply becomes a question of power: the object of Enlightenment knowledge simply subjects the Other to itself. When, for example, English farmers occupied Native American lands upon arrival at Plymouth, they stripped away from Nature its aura of mystery, the sacredness with which Native Americans invested in it – values which we today could benefit greatly from, as many of today’s environmental scientists now argue.
My responses:
1. First you need to learn, or to acknowledge, that most of America’s first colonial settlers from England (and later from Scotland and Ulster in the 1700s) were not Puritans. The Puritans settled mostly in the far Northeast, collectively called “New England” – today those are all the states northeast of New York. (New York is not part of it.) The Puritans left a profound cultural stamp upon New England, but NOT upon the other two thirds of the original 13 English-American colonies. The first English settlement in America was in Virginia in 1607, and THEY were ANTI-Puritan! The nickname for Virginia (named after Queen Elizabeth, the so-called “Virgin” Queen) is “Old Dominion”, because Virginia was a haven for Royalists/Cavaliers during the English Civil War. The same is true of North and South Carolina (both founded in 1661), both Royalist, mostly Anglican and ANTI-Puritan settlers!
