Myth as History: Seeds of Destruction

Edward J. Dodson

[Reprinted from Land & Liberty, January-February, 1991]

If we are ever to learn from history we must recognize that understanding history demands that facts be placed in their proper context. History is neither an aggregation of a series of events nor merely a description of actions taken by individuals or groups; rather, history is a continuum of how people behave within their socio-political and natural environments.

The earliest hunter-gatherer societies were universally cooperative in structure. Technology improved their ability to hunt large game animals, and an increased food supply yielded larger populations which, in turn, decimated the food supply followed by the break-up and migration of tribes into smaller groups.

When, some 8-10,000 years ago various groups discovered the secrets of horticulture and settled into fixed communities, hunters became warriors and then chieftains; this elite group eventually came to practice systematic extortion on their own people as well as any outside groups they could dominate by force.

When history is viewed as a continuum, a considerable degree of relevance comes through in any discussion about recent events and those of antiquity. All agrarian-based societies came to be ruled by hierarchies of non-producers who relied on coercion to sanction and entrench their positions of privilege.

Some societies achieved critical mass sooner than others (often aided by even only minor advantages in technology or strategy), resulting in the rise of their dominance over others.

The French historian Ferdinand Lott (even more than Gibbon) leaves no doubt by the example of Rome that all empires contain the seeds of their own eventual destruction. Romans during the empire period produced almost no wealth; what they gained they gained by conquest or extortion. Eventually, the more cooperative tribal societies hastened its decline, then fought with one another for the next 1,000 years for control of Eurasian territory.

These tribal wars have never really ended. For sometimes brief or relatively longer periods certain tribes allied with one another and achieved a degree of hegemony over others.

The Moslems, Byzantines and Franks filled the gaps left when the western empire dissolved. What we think of as modern Western civilization began when Spanish power consolidated into a strong monarchy and pushed the Moslems from the Iberian peninsula.

The centralization of power was next achieved in France; however, what had the most profound influence on both the indigenous people and immigrants to North America was the inability of the monarchy to consolidate its power in Britain.

The socio-political arrangements that arose in Britain were more effectively balanced between the landed and commercial interests than in either Spain or France. This is not to say that Britain was not dominated by a privileged aristocracy. As bad as things were in Britain, they were much worse in Spain and France. Moreover, British colonial policy was driven by commercial interests; large land grants brought profits to their recipients only when enough colonists had arrived to bid against one another for farmland or business sites and quasi-monopolistic trading licenses.

Britain established settlements and new markets for its manufactured goods; the French and Spanish chose to exploit furs and precious metals because their productive capacity to produce manufactured goods was severely underdeveloped and discouraged by gross maldistributions of wealth and crushing taxation of producers at home.

For nearly 150 years the colonists in North America functioned without any real central government. They experienced self-government and the nearly universal ownership of landed and other property. Thus, when Britain finally got around to challenging this arrangement of salutary neglect, the conflict that followed was conservative in the sense that Americans were trying to protect the individual liberties they in practice enjoyed.

In France, the people were revolting against the despotism of the monarchy but had no practical experience at participatory government or widespread ownership of property to guide them in forming a new highly decentralized system of government. As history shows, the greater the centralization the greater the probability of government by tyranny. The French and Spanish were only the first societies formed in the modern era to experience the crushing weight of centralized power.

In North America, the final break with Britain set the stage for a tragic and ongoing drift toward centralized authority and the loss of individual liberty. Adoption of the Federal Constitution forged a national government at the expense of a Confederation of sovereign states. The power to raise a national army made it very much easier for the Americans of European descent to acquire new lands at the expense of the indigenous tribes, lands promised by the nation's political leaders as payment of the government's war debt.

Thus, national government shifted the burden of paying for independence from Britain to the vanquished. In the process, the concept of voluntary association was thereafter destroyed; force, rather than the inherent justice of positive law1 would become the means of holding the United States together.

What is so troubling to me is that not only have we ignored the true lessons of history, most of what is taught in our public schools that passes for history Is either half-truth or myth. For example, very few of the framers of the U.S constitution believed In democracy or widespread participatory government; they were elitist and conservative, anxious to preserve and expand the privilege they had for so long enjoyed. When the North American frontier was settled a century later, the true extent of these privileges brought misery and poverty to millions of immigrants -- often worse than what they had left in Europe or Asia or Africa.

The social democracies have engaged in 45 years of centralized intervention. This has had a socialistic flavour in many of the European states; in the United States and Canada the experiment is thought of as Liberalism. Decades of massive government spending and heavy taxation of those who produce the wealth in these societies have only pulled us closer than ever before to becoming societies of haves and have nots -- despite an increase in productive capabilities that could provide a level of material well-being undreamed of two generations ago.

We have no one but ourselves to blame.