Rethink.

I googled Mr. Lud­low sev­eral times, but didn’t find any­thing par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant. If any­one has any infor­ma­tion per­ti­nent to these reflec­tions, paste links or ref­er­ences in the com­ments. The let­ter below is from here:

Sir -

The idea which you present in your let­ter of July 30th, of the progress of soci­ety from its rud­est state to that it has now attained, seems con­formable to what may be prob­a­bly con­jec­tured. Indeed, we have under our eyes tol­er­a­ble proofs of it. Let a philo­sophic observer com­mence a jour­ney from the sav­ages of the Rocky Moun­tains, east­wardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the ear­li­est stage of asso­ci­a­tion liv­ing under no law but that of nature, sub­scrib­ing and cov­er­ing them­selves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our fron­tiers in the pas­toral state, rais­ing domes­tic ani­mals to sup­ply the defects of hunt­ing. Then suc­ceed our own semi-barbarous cit­i­zens, the pio­neers of the advance of civ­i­liza­tion, and so in his progress he would meet the grad­ual shades of improv­ing man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our sea­port towns. This, in fact, is equiv­a­lent to a sur­vey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of cre­ation to the present day. I am eighty-one years of age, born where I now live, in the first range of moun­tains in the inte­rior of our coun­try. And I have observed this march of civ­i­liza­tion advanc­ing from the sea coast, pass­ing over us like a cloud of light, increas­ing our knowl­edge and improv­ing our con­di­tion, inso­much as that we are at this time more advanced in civ­i­liza­tion here than the sea­ports were when I was a boy. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Bar­barism has, in the mean­time, been reced­ing before the steady step of ame­lio­ra­tion; and will in time, I trust, dis­ap­pear from the earth. You seem to think that this advance has brought on too com­pli­cated a state of soci­ety, and that we should gain in hap­pi­ness by tread­ing back our steps a lit­tle way. I think, myself, that we have more machin­ery of gov­ern­ment than is nec­es­sary, too many par­a­sites liv­ing on the labor of the indus­tri­ous. I believe it might be much sim­pli­fied to the relief of those who main­tain it. Your exper­i­ment seems to have this in view. A soci­ety of sev­enty fam­i­lies, the num­ber you name, may very pos­si­bly be gov­erned as a sin­gle fam­ily, sub­sist­ing on their com­mon indus­try, and hold­ing all things in com­mon. Some reg­u­la­tors of the fam­ily you still must have, and it remains to be seen at what period of your increas­ing pop­u­la­tion your sim­ple reg­u­la­tions will cease to be suf­fi­cient to pre­serve order, peace, and jus­tice. The exper­i­ment is inter­est­ing; I shall not live to see its issue, but I wish it suc­cess equal to your hopes, and to your­self and soci­ety pros­per­ity and happiness.

My guess — and it is only a guess — is that Jefferson’s later let­ters have to be read with an eye to their imme­di­ate audi­ence. I want to use the above to argue that Jef­fer­son is pro­vid­ing the rudi­ments of a gen­tle­manly response to what would be some sort of extrem­ist nowa­days, either right-wing (cer­tain home­school­ers) or left-wing (unschool­ers, as they like to call them­selves). I am going to have to read too much into this let­ter to make that case, but hey, I’ve got time. Take a look at the end of the first sentence:

…the progress of soci­ety from its rud­est state to that it has now attained, seems con­formable to what may be prob­a­bly con­jec­tured.

I’ve ital­i­cized “may,” “prob­a­bly” and “con­jec­tured” for an obvi­ous rea­son: does Jef­fer­son actu­ally believe man pro­gresses in the stages he sets forth? “Tol­er­a­ble” isn’t a vote of con­fi­dence in a “proof,” I don’t think [Jef­fer­son would know a lot about more about the vocab­u­lary of proof than I do, I con­cede this isn’t the great­est argu­ment of mine]. Still, Jef­fer­son doesn’t say what he puts forth about sav­ages, the pas­toral, “our semi-barbarous cit­i­zens” and “the most improved state” of man is “self-evident,” not at all. We note that the “most improved state” is clos­est to Europe! See Jefferson’s Travel Notes for Messrs. Rut­ledge and Ship­pen to see why I’m very skep­ti­cal about Jefferson’s invo­ca­tion of an “improved state,” and if you don’t want to look that far, keep look­ing in the let­ter. Jef­fer­son places him­self in the “inte­rior” of the coun­try, in moun­tain­ous ter­rain; one won­ders where the ani­mals that were killed and tamed have dis­ap­peared: are they now more promi­nent within man himself?

Some­what of the same ten­sion that is in Rousseau’s First Dis­course is at work here; man’s more sav­age self under the law of nature, as bold and admirable as it is, can­not be divorced from “civ­i­liza­tion.” Things are a bit ambigu­ous here too — “cloud of light?” Not light part­ing clouds? The “cloud” is respon­si­ble for “increas­ing our knowl­edge and improv­ing our con­di­tion,” and it has improved every­thing, includ­ing the moun­tain­ous ter­rain Jef­fer­son says he was born upon. I think the key to this part of the let­ter is that early Rousseau — and an ear­lier Jef­fer­son — cite indi­vid­u­als they admire, Fran­cis Bacon and Issac New­ton for exam­ple, as advanc­ing knowl­edge. Here, Jef­fer­son has kept the indi­vid­u­als from being named, and given what Lud­low wants to do — start his own tribe [per­haps with its own com­pound at Waco and a radio show and a heck of a lot of guns] — I think we can under­stand why Jef­fer­son is giv­ing agency to the “cloud” as opposed to any par­tic­u­lar per­son or group.

Jef­fer­son is truly a gen­tle­man in this letter:

Bar­barism has, in the mean­time, been reced­ing before the steady step of ame­lio­ra­tion; and will in time, I trust, dis­ap­pear from the earth. You seem to think that this advance has brought on too com­pli­cated a state of soci­ety, and that we should gain in hap­pi­ness by tread­ing back our steps a lit­tle way. I think, myself, that we have more machin­ery of gov­ern­ment than is nec­es­sary, too many par­a­sites liv­ing on the labor of the indus­tri­ous. I believe it might be much sim­pli­fied to the relief of those who main­tain it. Your exper­i­ment seems to have this in view.

Jef­fer­son cites gen­tle­ness — “the steady step of ame­lio­ra­tion” — as the rea­son why bar­barism has declined. He then cites com­mon ground with Lud­low: peo­ple should work and not leech off of oth­ers, gov­ern­ment should be a bit sim­pler. But that com­mon ground is a bit mis­lead­ing; Ludlow’s exper­i­ment is con­ceived entirely in terms of “fam­ily,” or “tribe” — I’m sure Jef­fer­son knew Aristotle’s Pol­i­tics, Book 1, when writing -

…it remains to be seen at what period of your increas­ing pop­u­la­tion your sim­ple reg­u­la­tions will cease to be suf­fi­cient to pre­serve order, peace, and justice.

Leo Paul de Alvarez has argued that in Aris­to­tle, the fam­ily is nec­es­sary for polit­i­cal soci­ety (polis), but the polis is in a sense prior to nearly every­thing: it is the asso­ci­a­tion that aims at the fun­da­men­tal human good, hap­pi­ness. In other words: if you try to cut gov­ern­ment out of the equa­tion when con­ceiv­ing of the fam­ily, you end up with a fam­ily that is noth­ing but a straight-up tyranny. Don’t ask how many times I’ve seen this per­son­ally in my own life: try dat­ing girls that have those sorts of parents.

Any­way, I don’t think I need to express my cyn­i­cism about “suc­cess equal to your hopes:” it’s a way of say­ing “you deserve what­ever you get,” but I don’t think Jef­fer­son means badly in say­ing this — you can wish some­one “pros­per­ity and hap­pi­ness” even while being a bit miffed at what they are ulti­mately aim­ing for. One thing Jef­fer­son, as a child of the Enlight­en­ment, is pretty sure about is that peo­ple need to explic­itly accept Enlight­en­ment and progress, oth­er­wise they could be aim­ing for “monk­ish igno­rance” (his phrase, not mine). And if I were Jef­fer­son, and I was hear­ing about this retreat from civic affairs when the coun­try is so young, I prob­a­bly would have thrown fire-irons at a ser­vant or some­thing. What exactly did we go through a war for, and sign that Dec­la­ra­tion thingy? So that way every­one could go “gov­ern­ment sucks” at any old time and live out in the mid­dle of nowhere?

Again, if I’m right, Jefferson’s being a gen­tle­man. Early on when I was blog­ging, some­one who was pretty knowl­edge­able and very kind called me a philoso­pher. If I want to take that com­pli­ment seri­ously — it was meant as high praise — I have to say this: I’m no gen­tle­man; I don’t have to be any­where as nice to the rad­i­cals I’m deal­ing with now. It’s their job to show all of us they appre­ci­ate what we’ve got, and aren’t just a bunch of ungrate­ful, whiny babies.

• Thomas Jef­fer­son On the Nature of News
• Does the Earth belong to the Liv­ing? On Jefferson’s Let­ter to Madi­son, Sept. 6, 1789
• A Short Note On One Response to Mansfield’s Jef­fer­son Lecture
• Self-Interest Rightly Under­stood: On Har­vey Mansfield’s 2007 Jef­fer­son Lecture
• Pro­fes­sor William Ayers and the Cor­rup­tion of the Academy

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