Page 10 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY or French. Neither, we think, would anyone who has ever learned a truly alien language deny that doing so takes a great deal of imaginative We will examine early missionary and travel accounts from New work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts. We also know that mission- France- especially the Great Lakes region - since these were the accounts aries typically conducted long philosophical debates as part of their Rousseau himself was most familiar with, to get a sense of what its professional duties; many others, on both sides, argued with one another indigenous inhabitants did actually think of French society, and how they came to think of their own societies differently as a result. We will either out of simple curiosity, or because they had immediate practical argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong criti- reasons to understand the other's point of view. Finally, no one would cal view of their invaders' institutions: a view which focused first on deny that travel literature, and missionary relations - which often con- these institutions' lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more tained summaries of, or even extracts from, these exchanges - were familiar with European social arrangements, on equality. popular literary genres, avidly followed by educated Europeans. Any One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so middle-class household in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or Grenoble popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this would have been likely to have on its shelves at the very least a copy of kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the Jesuit Relations of New France (as France's North American col- the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since - as onies were then known), and one or two accounts written by voyagers to these books showed - there were clearly societies in existence that did faraway lands. Such books were appreciated largely because they con- things very differently. We will suggest that there is a reason why so tained surprising and unprecedented ideas. 10 many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of indi- Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still vidual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are sources and examples. Because it was true. borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It's all just supposed to be some IN WHICH WE CONSIDER WHAT THE kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of INHABITANTS OF NEW FRANCE MADE pre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when they appear OF THEIR EUROPEAN INVADERS, in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some ESPECIALLY IN MATTERS OF Western archetype of the 'noble savage' or sock-puppets, used as plaus- GENEROSITY, SOCIABILITY, MATERIAL ible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for WEALTH, CRIME, PUNISHMENT presenting subversive ideas (deism, for example, or rational material- AND LIBERTY ism, or unconventional views on marriage)." Certainly, if one encounters an argument ascribed to a 'savage' in a The 'Age of Reason' was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was European text that even remotely resembles anything to be found in rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafes and salons. Many Cicero or Erasmus, one is automatically supposed to assume that no classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; most culti- savage' could possibly have really said it - or even that the conversa- vated an easy, transparent, conversational style clearly inspired by the tion in question never really took place at all.12 If nothing else, this salon. (It was the Germans, back then, who tended to write in the habit of thought is very convenient for students of Western literature, obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous.) themselves trained in Cicero and Erasmus, who might otherwise be Appeal to 'reason' was above all a style of argument. The ideals of the forced to actually try to learn something about what indigenous people French Revolution - liberty, equality and fraternity - took the form thought about the world, and above all what they made of Europeans. they did in the course of just such a long series of debates and We intend to proceed in the opposite direction. 37 36LIVE Page 12 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY conversations. All we're going to suggest here is that those conversa- tions stretched back further than Enlightenment historians assume. Twenty years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar, 's Let's begin by asking: what did the inhabitants of New France make wrote similar things of the Wendat nation. Sagard was at first highly of the Europeans who began to arrive on their shores in the sixteenth critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was century? obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on sedu- At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was cing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian and their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following passages he was clearly echoing Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters Wendat opinion: 'They have no lawsuits and take little pains to and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment our- (Huron), " concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing selves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and French observers attached little importance to such economic distinc tranquil dispositions.' Much like Biard's Mi'kmaq, the Wendat were tions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: women's work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in 'They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the 'noble savage' can be indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn't refer to nobility very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely." largely the business of noblemen. Wendat cast a similarly jaundiced eye at French habits of conversa- But if French assessments of the character of 'savages' tended to be tion. Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts' eloquence and decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public dis- distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former the- cussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get ology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cut- French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi'kmaq, but reported ting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and that the feeling was mutual: 'They consider themselves better than the overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be French: "For," they say, "you are always fighting and quarrelling particularly bright. People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are refused to share it; it is hard to avoid the impression that Americans covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a saw the French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of 'war of all morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour." They are saying against all'. (It's probably worthy of remark that especially in this these and like things continually."4 What seemed to irritate Biard the early contact period, Americans were likely to have known Europeans most was that the Mi'kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as largely through missionaries, trappers, merchants and soldiers - that a result, 'richer' than the French. The French had more material pos- s, groups almost entirely composed of men. There were at first very sessions, the Mi'kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: few French women in the colonies, and fewer children. This probably ease, comfort and time. 39Page 14 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY had the effect of making the competitiveness and lack of mutual care among them seem all the more extreme.) popular sovereignty - or even, for that matter, theories of depth Sagard's account of his stay among the Wendat became an influential psychology's - indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far bestseller in France and across Europe: both Locke and Voltaire cited closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones. Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons as a principal source for their These differing views on individual liberty are especially striking. descriptions of American societies. The multi-authored and much more Nowadays, it's almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democ extensive Jesuit Relations, which appeared between 1633 and 1673, racy to say they are against freedom - at least in the abstract (in practice, were also widely read and debated in Europe, and include many a simi- of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lar remonstrance aimed at the French by Wendt observers. One of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French most striking things about these seventy-one volumes of missionary Revolutions. Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual field reports is that neither the Americans, nor their French interlocu liberty - one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons or any tors, appear to have had very much to say about 'equality' per se - for sort of apparatus of coercion - would instantly collapse into violent example, the words egal or egalite barely appear, and on those very few chaos). Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this occasions when they do it's almost always in reference to 'equality of assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic. In the sexes' (something the Jesuits found particularly scandalous). 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi: This appears to be the case, irrespective of whether the Jesuits in question were arguing with the Wendat - who might not seem egali- They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of tarian in anthropological terms, since they had formal political offices wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except and a stratum of war captives whom the Jesuits, at least, referred to when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we as 'slaves' - or the Mi'kmaq or Montagnais-Naskapi, who were ear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the organized into what later anthropologists would consider egalitarian authority of their chief is in his tongue's end; for he is powerful in so bands of hunter-gatherers. Instead, we hear a multiplicity of American far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and har- voices complaining about the competitiveness and selfishness of the anguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages. 19 French - and even more, perhaps, about their hostility to freedom. In the considered opinion of the Montagnais-Naskapi, however, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that superiors. Such criticism appears regularly in Jesuit accounts; what's Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these more, it comes not just from those who lived in nomadic bands, but exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on equally from townsfolk like the Wendat. The missionaries, moreover, was whether or not individual liberty was desirable. were willing to concede that this wasn't all just rhetoric on the Ameri- This is one area in which early missionary or travellers' accounts of cans' part. Even Wendat statesmen couldn't compel anyone to do the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers anything they didn't wish to do. As Father Lallemant, whose corres- today. Most of us simply take it for granted that 'Western' observers, pondence provided an initial model for The Jesuit Relations, noted even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of our- of the Wendat in 1644: selves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever - authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores orLIVE Page 16 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no products were largely disposed of by women's collectives - and the punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not kind of "wealth' being referred to here, such as wampum (a word sure that his life and property are in no danger . . . 20 applied to strings and belts of beads, manufactured from the shells of Long Island's quahog clam) or other treasures, which largely existed Lallemant's account gives a sense of just how politically challenging for political purposes. some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Neither in fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even mur- the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and derers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of resources into power - at least, not the kind of power that might justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do any- Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit's entire thing they did not wish to do. At best, the accumulation and adroit lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone's responsi- distribution of riches might make a man more likely to aspire to polit- bility to keep their kindred under control. 'It is not the guilty who ical office (to become a 'chief' or 'captain' - the French sources tend suffer the penalty,' Lallemant explains, but rather 'the public that to use these terms in an indiscriminate fashion); but as the Jesuits all continually emphasized, merely holding political office did not give must make amends for the offences of individuals.' If a Huron had anyone the right to give anybody orders either. Or, to be completely killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled accurate, an office holder could give all the orders he or she liked, but to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, 'to stay the no one was under any particular obligation to follow them. vengeance that they might take'. To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their atti- Wendat 'captains', as Lallemant then goes on to describe, 'urge their tude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it principle, freedom is an altogether admirable ideal. Father Lallemant, seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of though, was willing to admit that in practice such a system worked their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for quite well; it created 'much less disorder than there is in France' - but, the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.' More remark- as he noted, the Jesuits were opposed to freedom in principle: able still, he concedes: 'this form of justice restrains all these peoples, This, without doubt, is a disposition quite contrary to the spirit of the and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal Faith, which requires us to submit not only our wills, but our minds, our punishment of criminals does in France,' despite being 'a very mild judgments, and all the sentiments of man to a power unknown to our proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that senses, to a Law that is not of earth, and that is entirely opposed to the they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that laws and sentiments of corrupt nature. Add to this that the laws of the of their own will'.21 Country, which to them seem most just, attack the purity of the Chris- There are a number of things worth noting here. One is that it makes tian life in a thousand ways, especially as regards their marriages .. . 2 clear that some people were indeed considered wealthy. Wendat soci- ety was not 'economically egalitarian' in that sense. However, there The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized mission- was a difference between what we'd consider economic resources- aries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried like land, which was owned by families, worked by women, and whoseLIVE Page 18 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage. Such sinful conduct, they believed, (Eurasian) notion of 'equality before the law', which is ultimately equal- was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted ity before the sovereign - that is, once again, equality in common in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious. The subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were 'wicked liberty of the savages', one insisted, was the single greatest equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic impediment to their 'submitting to the yoke of the law of God'.23 Even governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the inding terms to translate concepts like 'lord', 'commandment' or 'obe- same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such dience' into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh intpossible. persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus. Here we return to the matter with which we began: the European Enlightenment as the apotheosis of the principle of open and rational IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW EUROPEANS debate. We've already mentioned Sagard's grudging respect for the LEARNED FROM (NATIVE ) AMERICANS Wendat facility in logical argumentation (a theme that also runs ABOUT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN through most Jesuit accounts). At this point, it is important to bear in REASONED DEBATE, PERSONAL mind that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. FREEDOMS AND THE REFUSAL Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, Jesuits had OF ARBITRARY POWER learned the Americans' languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. In political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the equality but about freedom. About the only specific reference to polit- quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with. ical equality that appears in the seventy-one volumes of The Jesuit How could such rhetorical facility have come to those with no aware- Relations occurs almost as an aside, in an account of an event in ness of the works of Varro and Quintilian? In considering the matter, the 1648. It happened in a settlement of Christianized Wendat near the Jesuits almost always noted the openness with which public affairs were town of Quebec. After a disturbance caused by a shipload of illegal conducted. So, Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the liquor finding its way into the community, the governor persuaded 1630s: 'There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or rea- Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and soning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge. published an edict to that effect - crucially, the governor notes, backed The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, records the matters, improve their capacity for talking.' Or, in Lallemant's words: I can say in truth that, as regards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior story. For him, this was an epochal event: to Europeans and to those who dwell in France. I would never have From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Sav- believed that, without instruction, nature could have supplied a most ages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to ready and vigorous eloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet manage- each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; ment in things to which they are accustomed.2 Some Jesuits went and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them."24 further, remarking - not without a trace of frustration - that New World Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expres- savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to sion. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar dealing with at home (e.g. 'they nearly all show more intelligence in theirLIVE Page 20 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France').26 circles - around the time, indeed, that the first French missionaries set Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic rela- out to evangelize the inhabitants of what are now Nova Scotia and tion between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political Quebec.27 Europe's reading public was growing increasingly curious debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It's true that Native Ameri- about what such primordial societies might have been like. But they can political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel had no particular disposition to imagine men and women living in a anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for State of Nature as especially 'noble', let alone as rational sceptics and their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing champions of individual liberty.28 This latter perspective was the genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported them- product of a dialogic encounter. selves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness As we've seen, at first neither side - not the colonists of New France, need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily nor their indigenous interlocutors - had much to say about 'equality". involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic Rather, the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism. We should be clear metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; about what we mean by the latter term. Since the early nineteenth cen- and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to tury, there have been lively debates about whether there was ever a thing that might legitimately be referred to as 'primitive communism'. At the do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the centre of these debates, almost invariably, were the indigenous societies presumed dispositions of their audience. of the Northeast Woodlands - ever since Friedrich Engels used the Iro- It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wen- quois as a prime example of primitive communism in his The Origin of dat, or the five Haudenosaunee nations to their south, who appear to the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Here, 'communism' have placed such weight on reasoned debate - even finding it a form always refers to communal ownership, particularly of productive of pleasurable entertainment in own right. This fact alone had major resources. As we've already observed, many American societies could be historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this considered somewhat ambiguous in this sense: women owned and form of debate - rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in worked the fields individually, even though they stored and disposed of tone - which before long came to be identified with the European the products collectively; men owned their own tools and weapons indi- Enlightenment as well. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment think- vidually, even if they typically shared out the game and spoils. ers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected However, there's another way to use the word 'communism': not as with the rejection of arbitrary authority, particularly that which had a property regime but in the original sense of 'from each according to long been assumed by the clergy. their abilities, to each according to their needs'. There's also a certain minimal, 'baseline' communism which applies in all societies; a feeling Let's gather together the strands of our argument so far. that if another person's needs are great enough (say, they are drown- By the mid seventeenth century, legal and political thinkers in ing), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are Europe were beginning to toy with the idea of an egalitarian State of asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent per- Nature; at least in the minimal sense of a default state that might be son would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be shared by societies which they saw a hey saw as lacking government , writing , considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one's religion, private property or other significant means of distinguishing bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just themselves from one another. Terms like 'equality' and 'inequality" how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend. were just beginning to come into common usage in intellectual In many societies - and American societies of that time appear toPage 22 of 51 THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING have been among them - it would have been quite inconceivable to WICKED LIBERTY refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North impoverished French aristocrat named Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline commun- Baron de la Hontan, and an unusually brilliant Wendat statesman ism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food named Kandiaronk. and shelter - something which scandalized Americans. But just as we In 1683, Lahontan (as he came to be known), then seventeen years earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts old, joined the French army and was posted to Canada. Over the of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very dif- course of the next decade he took part in a number of campaigns and ferent concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling exploratory expeditions, eventually attaining the rank of deputy to for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, the Governor-General, the Comte de Frontenac. In the process he guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life - or at least became fluent in both Algonkian and Wendat, and - by his own ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as account at least - good friends with a number of indigenous political we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in sup- figures. Lahontan later claimed that, because he was something of a port of individual freedom. sceptic in religious matters and a political enemy of the Jesuits, these The same could be said of indigenous political systems that Euro- figures were willing to share with him their actual opinions about peans encountered across much of the Great Lakes region. Everything Christian teachings. One of them was Kandiaronk. operated to ensure that no one's will would be subjugated to that of A key strategist of the Wendat Confederacy, a coalition of four anyone else. It was only over time, as Americans learned more about Iroquoian-speaking peoples, Kandiaronk (his name literally meant Europe, and Europeans began to consider what it would mean to the muskrat' and the French often referred to him simply as 'Le Rat') translate American ideals of individual liberty into their own socie- was at that time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to ties, that the term 'equality' began to gain ground as a feature of the play the English, French and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee discourse between them. off against each other, with the initial aim of averting a disastrous Haudenosaunee assault on the Wendat, but with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE advance.29 Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a WENDAT PHILOSOPHER-STATESMAN truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator KANDIARONK, AND EXPLAIN HOW HIS and unusually skilful politician. He was also, to the very end of his VIEWS ON HUMAN NATURE AND life, a staunch opponent of Christianity. 30 SOCIETY TOOK ON NEW LIFE IN THE Lahontan's own career came to a bad end. Despite having success- SALONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE fully defended Nova Scotia against an English fleet, he ran foul of its governor and was forced to flee French territory. Convicted in absen- (INCLUDING AN ASIDE ON THE ia of insubordination, he spent most of the next decade in exile, CONCEPT OF 'SCHISMOGENESIS') wandering about Europe trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a return to his native France. By 1702, Lahontan was living in Amsterdam and In order to understand how the indigenous critique - that consist- very much down on his luck, described by those who met him as pen- ent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely niless vagrant and freelance spy. All that was to change when he voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century published a series of books about his adventures in Canada. onwards - evolved, and its full impact on European thinking, we Two were memoirs of his American adventures. The third, entitled first need to understand something about the role of two men: an Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled 48THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY (1703), comprised a series of four conversations between Lahontan and Kandiaronk, in which the Wendat sage - voicing opinions based speaker, 'he was not less brilliant in conversation in private, and on his own ethnographic observations of Montreal, New York and councilmen and negotiators] often took pleasure in provoking him to Paris - casts an extremely critical eye on European mores and ideas hear his repartees, always animated, full of wit, and generally un- about religion, politics, health and sexual life. These books won a answerable. He was the only man in Canada who was a match for the wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become something of a [governor] Count de Frontenac, who often invited him to his table to minor celebrity. He settled at the court of Hanover, which was also give his officers this pleasure."33 the home base for Leibniz, who befriended and supported him before During the 1690s, in other words, the Montreal-based governor and Lahontan fell ill and died, around 1715. his officers (presumably including his sometime deputy, Lahontan) Most criticism of Lahontan's work simply assumes as a matter of hosted a proto-Enlightenment salon, where they invited Kandiaronk course that the dialogues are made up, and that the arguments attrib to debate exactly the sort of matters that appeared in the Dialogues, uted to 'Adario' (the name given there to Kandiaronk) are the opinions and in which it was Kandiaronk who took the position of rational of Lahontan himself." In a way, this conclusion is unsurprising. sceptic. Adario claims not only to have visited France, but expresses opinions What's more, there is every reason to believe that Kandiaronk on everything from monastic politics to legal affairs. In the debate on actually had been to France; that's to say, we know the Wendat Con- religion, he often sounds like an advocate of the deist position that federation did send an ambassador to visit the court of Louis XIV in 1691, and Kandiaronk's office at the time was Speaker of the Coun- spiritual truth should be sought in reason, not revelation, embracing cil, which would have made him the logical person to send. While just the sort of rational scepticism that was becoming popular in the intimate knowledge of European affairs and understanding of Europe's more daring intellectual circles at the time. It is also true that European psychology attributed to Adario might seem implausible, the style of Lahontan's dialogues seems partly inspired by the ancient Kandiaronk was a man who had been engaged in political negotia- Greek writings of the satirist Lucian; and also that, given the preva- tions with Europeans for years, and regularly ran circles around them lence of Church censorship in France at the time, the easiest way for by anticipating their logic, interests, blind spots and reactions. Finally, a freethinker to get away with publishing an open attack on Christi- many of the critiques of Christianity, and European ways more gener- anity probably would have been to compose a dialogue pretending to ally, attributed to Adario correspond almost exactly to criticisms that defend the faith from the attacks of an imaginary foreign sceptic - are documented from other speakers of Iroquoian languages around and then make sure one loses all the arguments. the same time.34 In recent decades, however, indigenous scholars returned to the mater- Lahontan himself claimed to have based the Dialogues on notes ial in light of what we know about Kandiaronk himself - and came to jotted down during or after a variety of conversations he'd had with very different conclusions.32 The real-life Adario was famous not only Kandiaronk at Michilimackinac, on the strait between Lakes Huron for his eloquence, but was known for engaging in debates with Europe- and Michigan; notes that he later reorganized with the governor's ans of just the sort recorded in Lahontan's book. As Barbara Alice help and which were supplemented, no doubt, by reminiscences both Mann remarks, despite the almost unanimous chorus of Western schol- had of similar debates held over Frontenac's own dinner table. In the ars insisting the dialogues are imaginary, 'there is excellent reason for process the text was no doubt augmented and embellished, and prob- accepting them as genuine.' First, there are the first-hand accounts of ably tweaked again when Lahontan produced his final edition in Kandiaronk's oratorical skills and dazzling wit. Father Pierre de Amsterdam. There is, however, every reason to believe the basic argu- Charlevoix described Kandiaronk as so 'naturally eloquent' that 'no one ments were Kandiaronk's own. Lahontan anticipates some of these arguments in his Memoirs, perhaps ever exceeded him in mental capacity?' An exceptional council 50THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING WICKED LIBERTY IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW CRITIQUES that followed Europe's sudden integration into a global economy, OF EUROCENTRISM CAN BACKFIRE, where it had long been a very minor player. AND END UP TURNING ABORIGINAL In the Middle Ages, most people in other parts of the world who THINKERS INTO 'SOCK-PUPPETS' actually knew anything about northern Europe at all considered it an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside In March 1754, the learned society known as the Academie des Sci- from occasional attacks on their neighbours ('the Crusades'), were ences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon announced a national essay largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics.' European intel- competition on the question: 'what is the origin of inequality among lectuals of that time were just rediscovering Aristotle and the ancient men, and is it authorized by natural law?' What we'd like to do in this world, and had very little idea what people were thinking and arguing about anywhere else. All this changed, of course, in the late fifteenth chapter is ask: why is it that a group of scholars in Ancien Regime century, when Portuguese fleets began rounding Africa and bursting France, hosting a national essay contest, would have felt this was an into the Indian Ocean - and especially with the Spanish conquest of appropriate question in the first place? The way the question is put, the Americas. Suddenly, a few of the more powerful European king- after all, assumes that social inequality did have an origin; that is, it doms found themselves in control of vast stretches of the globe, and takes for granted that there was a time when human beings were European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civil- equals - and that something then happened to change this situation. izations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously That is actually quite a startling thing for people living under an abso- unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of lutist monarchy like that of Louis XV to think. After all, it's not as if this flood of new ideas came to be known as the 'Enlightenment'. anyone in France at that time had much personal experience of living in Of course, this isn't usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. a society of equals. This was a culture in which almost every aspect of Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something human interaction - whether eating, drinking, working or socializing - largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great was marked by elaborate pecking orders and rituals of social deference. thoughts, but these 'great thinkers' are assumed to perform both these The authors who submitted their essays to this competition were men activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants. They even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were lived off the patronage of dukes and archbishops, and rarely entered a getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher building without knowing the precise order of importance of everyone Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt inside. Rousseau was one such man: an ambitious young philosopher, he Chinese models of statecraft), there's a tendency for contemporary his- was at the time engaged in an elaborate project of trying to sleep his way torians to insist they weren't really serious; or else that when they said into influence at court. The closest he'd likely ever come to experiencing they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas social equality himself was someone doling out equal slices of cake at a these weren't really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at dinner party. Yet everyone at the time also agreed that this situation was all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to somehow unnatural; that it had not always been that way. exotic Others.2 If we want to understand why that was, we need to look not only These are remarkably arrogant assumptions - as if 'Western thought' at France, but also at France's place in a much larger world. (as it later came to be known) was such a powerful and monolithic body of ideas that no one else could possibly have any meaningful Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in influence on it. It's also pretty obviously untrue. Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion 29THE DAV/N OF EVERYTHING refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the am of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would hay made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all trule important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning elf time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their ow\" intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans. blistory, in Renaissance Europe of the fteenth to sixteenth cen~ tunes, was not a story of progress. It was largely .. series of disasters, Introducing the concept of a State of Nature didn't exactly flip all this around, at least not immediately, but it did allow political philoso- phers after the seventeenth century to imagine people without the trappings of civilization as something other than degenerate savages; as a kind of humanity 'in the raw'. And this, in turn, allowed them to ask a host of new questions about what it meant to be human. What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recog- nizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregari- ous, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion? But the question still remains: why is it that by the eighteenth cen- tury, European intellectuals had come to x on the idea of primordial freedom or, especially, equality, to such an extent that it seemed per- fectly natural to ask a question like 'what is the origin of inqul'l'y among men?' This seems particularly odd considering how, prior '0 that time, most did not even consider social equality possible- First of all, a qualication is in order. A certain folk egalitarianism already Existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during POW\" festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a 'world turned upside down', where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mOCke'Y f'i' 'Oftenfthe celebrations were framed as a return to some Primordl: 33 equality - the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of C09 aygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in p01?\"lalr \"Wm" True, it's never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals 3'9 :'z:z:a:d;::ctoof hierarchical social arrangements that 01mg; . ur notion that everyone [5 equal 1'95\"\": t e 34 WICKED LIBERTY for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as 'the Lord'. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mor- tals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points ofcreating a 'carnival king' or'May queen' is that they exist in order to be dethroned.\" Europeans educated in classical literature would also have been familiar with speculation about longago, happy, egalitarian orders that appear in Greco~Roman sources; and notions of equality, at least among Christian nations, were to be found in the concept of res pub- lira, or commonwealth, which again looked to ancient precedents All this is only to say that a state of equality was not utterly inconceivable to European intellectuals before the eighteenth century. None of it, however, explains why they came almost universally to assume that human beings, innocent ofcivilization, would ever exist in such a state. True, there were classical precedents for such ideas, but there were classical precedents for the opposite as well.\" For answers, we must return to arguments deployed to establish that the inhabitants of the Americas were fellow humans to begin with: to assert that, however exotic or even perverse their customs might seem, Native Americans were capable of making logical arguments in their own defence. What we're going to suggest is that American intellectuals we are using the term 'American' as it was used at the time, to refer to indi- genous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and 'intellectual' to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas actually played a role in this conceptual revolution. It is very strange that this should be considered a particularly radical idea, but among main- stream intellectual historians today it is almost a heresy. What makes this especially odd is that no one denies that many Bumpcan explorers, missionaries, traders, settlers and others who sOJ-ourned on American shores spent years learning native languages and perfecting their skills in conversation with native speakers; just as i"filigemms Americans did the work of learning Spanish, English, Dutch 35 Tut. DAWN (ll [VFNYI'HING European governments gradually canne to adopt the idea that ev goveminent should properly preside over .1 population of largely uni- form language and culture. run by .1 bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competive minis. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history, Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China, Are we really to insist that the advocacy of Chinese models ofstage. craft by Leibniz, his allies and follmvers really hIId not/ling to do With the fan that Europeans did. in fact, adopt something that looks very much like Chinese models of statecrnft? \\Vlmt is really unusual about this case is that Leibniz was so honest about his intellectual inuences. When he lived. Church authorities still wielded a great deal ofpower in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might nd themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offence} It is much the same with the question of inequality. If we ask, not 'what are the origins of social inequality?' but 'what are the origins of die question about the origins of social inequality?' (in other words, how did it come about that, in [754, the Academic de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with along history of Europeans arguing with one another , u about the nature of faraway societies: in this case, particularly in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. What's more, a lot of those conversations make reference to arguments that took place betwwl WW and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedomi' equality or for that matter rationality and revealed religion 4114094 ' most of the themes that would later become central to Enlightenme' " political thought. Many inuential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim mt ' tom: of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from NW\" American sources even though, predictably, intellectual historll today insist thir cannot really be the case. Indigenous PPl9 ' WW have lived in a completely different universe, inh'bl ' Went reality, even; anything Europeans said about them my?\" gm gwplay projection, fantasies of the 'noble savagely, ropean tradition itself.' go i WICKED LIBERTY Of course, such historians typically frame this position as a critique of Western arrogance ('how can you suggest that genocidal imperialists were actually listening to those whose societies they were in the process of stamping out?'), but it could equally well be seen as a form ofWest ern arrogance in its own right. There is no contesting that European traders, missionaries and settlers did actually engage in prolonged con- versations with people they encountered in what they called the New World, and often lived among them for extended periods of time even as they also colluded in their destruction. We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles offreedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound inu- ence on their thinking. To deny any possibility that they were right is, effectively, to insist that indigenous people could not possibly have any real impact on history. It is, in fact, a way ofinfantilizing non-Westemers: a practice denounced by these very same authors. In recent years, a growing number of American scholars, most themselves of indigenous descent, have challenged these assump- tions.' Here we follow in their footsteps. Basically, we are going to retell the story, starting from the assumption that all parties to the conversation between European colonists and their indigenous inter- locutors were adults, and that, at least occasionally, they actually listened to each other. If we do this, even familiar histories suddenly begin to look very different. In fact, what we'll see is not only that indigenous Americans confronted with strange foreigners gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but that these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself. Just how seriously can hardly be overstated. For European audi- ences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, Could hardly be ignored. Indeed, the ideas expressed in that critique Came to be perceived as such a menace to the fabric of European soci- ety that an entire body of theory was called into being, specically to [Cfute them. As we will shortly see, the whole story we summarized in the last chapter our standard historical, meta-narrative aboutthe ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms arelostvas THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING societies grow bigger and more complex was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critiun. The rst thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve. 'Social equality' and therefore, its opposite, .nequality simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact nds no evidence that the Latin terms aequali- ms or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. 50 one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.6 In fact, the terms 'equality' and 'inequality' only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the inu- ence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe's discoveries in the New World. It's important to remember that Spanish adventurers like Cortes and Pizarro carried out their conquests largely without authorization from higher authorities; afterwards, there were intense debates back home over whether such unvarnished aggression against people who, after all, posed no threat to Europeans could really be justied.7 The key problem was that unlike non-Christians of the Old World, 'f'h" could be assumed to have had the opportunity to learn the reachlflgs 0' Jesus, and therefore to have actively rejected them it was fairly obvious that the inhabitants of the New World simply never had any exposure to Christian ideas. So they couldn't be classed as indels. r' The c