My Ancient Family
It's being said around town that war with Russia or China may be permanently off the table; according to the latest straw poll taken recently by an unaffiliated acquaintance here in Los Osos, nine out of ten residents report having "no plans to participate.”
As Racquel Arnolfini, a well-known local Dog Groomer and popular person of interest puts it, "Politics isn’t “ my thing. And while high-school kids know that twenty-five centuries ago Aristotle observed that Man is essentially a Political Animal, Racquel disagrees, "I've got dogs scheduled through September," she explains "and anyway, it will be a short war."
We recall too that Aristotle did not use "politics” in the apparently universal chity-chatty way the Los Osos Groomer and many like-minded neighbors do. Indeed, some few, following the philosopher, use it in the somewhat more sober recognition that in order to survive and live pleasantly together in whatever tribe or clan one lived in and, even more importantly, in order to maintain enough civility not to tear one another apart when offended, political relationships had to develop.
Long before Athens or Aristotle, before the faintest glimmer of an imaginable civic society, daily life, throughout the eons of prehistory was, as Thomas Hobbes later characterized it, a lawless state of perpetual fear and violence; in his words, a condition of "war of all against all," a war of everyone against everyone else.
As the Aristotelian Humanists of earlier centuries understood it, "politics," by contrast, was a word for the ways and means of eventually making peaceable relationships between inherently volatile people possible and lasting.
"Politics" was not what most of us, Racquel and the guys at the lumber yard, and my grandson, think of it at all. And rightly so.
Out of the evolutionary transition from the brute state of nature to the first tentative feelers of community, came the earliest tribal protectors, Courageous Brothers and Cousins, Brave Hunters, Heroic Warriors, Divinely Appointed Kings and Dictators, and Absolutists; in our time, Hitlers and Stalins, and Pol Pots and Pinochetes and all the big-mouth bosses who do so intrigue Mr. and Mrs. Average Absentee: not to forget such provisional perpetuals as Xi and Biden and Trump and Putin.
We might reasonably wonder how it is that so many obviously unpleasant people came into such awesome power. Well, maybe on mature reflection they aren’t all equally unpleasant; but considering the ones we know best, the answer couldn't be more obvious.
In days past, and as in ours as well, too many polite and affably well-intentioned citizens were much too self-absorbed to really give a shit.
If no middle eastern anarchist is holding a gun to your head, how much easier and more comfortable, just to turn and look away.
With all I have on my plate, who has time to pay attention? I've got places to go, things to do, and people to see. I'll just stick my happy little head in the sand, and tell all the moralistic finger pointers, that "by the short hairs of Jesus, I can eat and drink and dance and sing and say for sure the world is fine.".
And thus:
From the slow, centuries-consuming, transformations of the jungle-bound, savanna-based family, on and on, century after century, on through the eons and on into to the early modern centuries -for tens of thousands of years, the mass of men and women throughout the entire known world, endured year after dreary, grinding year of hardship and struggle, hunger, and debilitating malnutrition, exhaustive feudatory subjugation, body and spirit and soul-breaking labor and, early death.
That's how you and I would have lived and died, miserably, knowing nothing else, had we been born even as recently as three or -four hundred years ago.
That's how everyone -every "average" work-with-your-hands-and-back person in England and France, and throughout Europe lived until a very few obsessive eccentrics were brave enough to take themselves seriously.
They were those who had enough self-respect to find a way to somehow get to that country across the Atlantic. There was land enough there, and work enough, and psychic space enough for everybody. Much of the time, almost nearly for free.
Before that, and much, much worse, was the universal history of the "average man and woman," not for the last two thousand years since Aristotle, but for tens of thousands of years, from the caves and mud huts swamp rafts, and eventually from the teeming, pestilential cities such as 16th century London and Dublin and Glascow, crowded, filthy and violent, and from the enslaving country-sides owned by very few fat and rich until, in the 1600s and on into the 1770s in America, it was then, as never before, when a hand-full of uniquely dogged, American colonists and, following soon after, several thousand more, began to think seriously about what it might take to build a country of equally free untethered men.
They began to think about the possibility of a country free of class stratification, free of oligarchs and aristocrats... a country whose governance was organized and run by the people themselves; it was then that our possibilities, yours and mine, were born.
It wasn't without its ugly, selfishly dug-in, often resolutely genocidal, contradictions and cruelties: rights for white men only; but even so, it was an incredible start.
It was only then as those very exceptional third-generation Americans began to develop the idea of the possibility of political independence, that Tom Paine could write,
"We have the opportunity to start the world anew."
Those thousands of people for whom Paine wrote, from Rhode Island to Georgia to the Carolina back-country, were beginning to act and think like free men.
Not merely thousands, but tens of thousands, crossed the Atlantic in those years intending to live a life that could be imagined nowhere else on the planet.
The people we call the Founders, who, by the way, must have actually numbered more than two thousand, those guys, two hundred and fifty years ago, spent months debating what had taken others months to plan, in order to guarantee, that's right, "guarantee," -that every citizen would have unequivocal equality and full representation under the law.
That took months of individual reading, thinking, planning, discussing, re-evaluating, before the delegates to the Philadelphia convention ever even came to the point of debate. Then, from mid-May to mid-September, they elaborated and debated, six days a week and argued again most every night; and those were not always gentlemanly debates, sometimes far from it. Some left early in fuming anger or disgust, or despair. - and that was just the beginning; state by state full-public debating and voting on ratification had yet to come.
Not just rich guys. The people of the streets and farms, boat yards and back-county frontier stomped their feet and raised their voices.
That time, and that people at large, wasn't without its murderous cruelties, its sometime instantaneous mob violence, its selfish narrowness nor its bigotry or hypocrisy; but considering the sprawl and horrors of real time history, it was a long overdue.
It was the ancient Scotts members of my family... -distant great, great, grand-parents and great-uncles and cousins of my mother's brothers and my father's, loud, boastfully illiterate, spitting-the-chewing-tobacco-on-the-floor-boorish, drunken, brawling, crude, rude, inflammatory and ruinously ignorant KKK bullies and cowards from the Ozark hill country, who taught me why paying attention is important.
And that Constitution not only guaranteed a better life, but inspired the revolutionary hope of better lives for hard scrabble men and women in every quarter of the globe
Even those people in Somalia, Yemen, Argentina or Palestine, who know -beyond any doubt- that present-day-America is their dedicated enemy; those people in Hanoi or Kiev who know that we've made a ugly joke of our constitution; those who know that our badly botched work is coming down around our ears.
After all they’ve had to endure, Iranian and South African and Lebanese can still, also, thank whatever gods may be for that Constitution -and for the encouragement of those comfortably white men two hundred and fifty years ago who struggled to define it and then inspired and informed it.
Too bad so many nice, pleasantly polite, intentionally uninformed, self-obsessed, moral absentees don't have a clue about the world they will never inhabit. Too bad for you and me too.
