Column: Part two -- Our long hierarchical history, and reconciliation
By Charles Jeanes
The Deep Past of European commoners: organized institutional religion
Rome is more than a city, more than an empire, and more than a model of politics and war-making. It is also the focal point and taproot of one religion, Christianity. Religion organized as institutions produces religious specialists, i.e. priests, theologians, monastics, bureaucrats, academics, ascetics – in short, a collective of individuals with a special status in society but not in itself a single “social class”. Christianity made an alliance of Church with State in Rome 1700 years ago: after persecuting Christians for three centuries, the imperial State itself became Christian, and in 390 CE the emperor decreed a monopoly for the Church over the souls of all imperial subjects. One could not be anything other than a Christian as a Roman subject – all other creeds were forbidden and all other temples and places of worship and practice were illegal in imperial law.
[The State Church allowed one exception; Judaism was not outlawed, reduced to a scorned minority faith subject to occasional violence and State-authorized persecution. Christianity recognized that Judaism was its “fore-runner” but Jews were deeply disliked for “killing Christ” and rejecting the new covenant.]
The imperial State collapsed in west and north Europe, defeated in long wars by people from beyond the frontiers, invaded, its provinces taken as kingdoms of barbarians both pagan and Christian. The ‘New Rome’ at Constantinople ruled only half of what Rome ruled before 400 CE. The old Rome acquired a new form of emperor – not the commander of a unified State and army, but the spiritual ruler of all Christians. His title was Pope. This authority is a unique and ingenious human cultural invention, in my opinion, despite numerous valid criticisms to lay at its door. That’s an argument for another day, however.
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/8/8/323
The take-away from the Roman, Catholic, Christian, papal, Latin church – which had authority over all Europeans no matter the secular prince who ruled them – is this: it was a quasi-theocracy and a corporation of immense size with effective instruments of governing no other polity could hope to equal. China had extensive imperial organization, yes, but the papacy was unique in power to rule over secular force with spiritual intangibles, and concentrate administrative institutions in one place, Rome. Its clergy were indispensible to preserve culture.
https://phyliciamasonheimer.com/the-rise-to-power-how-the-early-church-gained-political-influence/
The Deep Past of European commoners: State
One needs to know general historic facts about the State in European history far back into the past. The State is an abstract, immaterial idea is the force and organization of ruling to which people of the social order turn for leadership. Also the State is a practical, material thing, it’s a mighty engine or machinery or apparatus or institution: courts, armies, law, assemblies, bureaucracy, are instruments of a State. A State is both idea and thing, and quite real for us.
A society without a State, meeting people ruled by a State, is at a major disadvantage if war is the result of the encounter. Rome perfected State-construction, which had been in development since Sumeria and Egypt. Rome also perfected its military institution, the citizen-legionary army without which conquests were impossible. Full citizenship meant being able to join the ranks.
It needs to be said that at the very time Europeans were encountering stateless aboriginal folk in the New World, the State in Europe was emerging from a long era of feeble institutional power in the feudal Middle Ages, and again starting to resurrect authority in the persons of Sovereign Monarchs – who would exert their expanding power to rule colonies, armies, navies, and administrations in a way not possible since Rome fell. Modernity and newly-effective States arrive together in Europe. By 1600, Europe’s organization equaled classical-era levels.
Indigenous peoples in the New World were not organized for successful resistance to such vast State power as the Spanish conquistadors, French military governors of New France, and British colonial, naval institutions were about to erect and employ to crush native freedoms.
The Deep Past of European commoners: property
Again, in foregoing paragraphs I have outlined the vast significance of the Old World concept of private property in land, and how that supported aristocracy. The lordly, noble, aristocratic landowning class of Europe was founded on the wealth of property in agrarian land. This class was immensely self-confident in its superiority to humans with common blood. No commoner had legal, civic rights or privilege equal to the nobility. No commoner could hope to match aristocratic wealth. The State was owned by the aristocracy, and its armies, its religious institutions, and its offices of law-and-order, were noble monopolies.
Indigenous people were not merely without a State, they were not in large measure people who believed that land could be owned by one individual. In Europe, landed property was normal and few did not understand private ownership of the surface of the earth, its forests, waters, mines. In the New World (excepting the great imperial peoples of Mesoamerica and the Incans) the notion of private property was alien, and collective possession of territorial resources – hunting grounds, small cultivated areas, waters – was the tribal norm. Europeans simply assumed the land was without owners, only users.
The English political philosopher John Locke insisted that Europeans had the right to appropriate land because natives did not perceive it as property. https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/ailj/vol10/iss1/4/
Europe’s indigenes: Neolithics and Celts before ‘civilizing’ empires
Indigenous north-americans without agriculture might have been similar to the aboriginals of Ireland (later submerged by Celtic cultural immigrations) and not separated into social classes. Land was communal, never private. Law among the Irish was sacred, profoundly shaping society. A special elite class of law-keepers (brehons, ollaves, and sennachies) who memorized vast amounts of law without written texts, flourished. It was a proud feature of this ancient society. Ireland was spared Rome’s rule, and Celtic folk developed a class society. Celts were civilized — yet without States or cities. Celts were advanced in technology a long way beyond Neolithics: they used iron, farmed, rode chariots, made war.
https://gteccanada.ca/reader/western-and-indigenous-worldviews/
It was people from the Mediterranean – Greeks and Romans – who transformed cultures of people to north, west, and east. They brought ideas and practices of the State, armies, property, and hierarchy, to the “primitives” they met there.
In many ways it is simply not very productive of understanding indigenous folk as analogue of ancient Europe’s stone-using aboriginal populations, or of Celts. To view Romans as the archetype of an imperial, colonizing people is also not always valuable, either. But it is never valueless to know Europe’s cultural status at the time of contact with New World natives. The mind-shape and consciousness of the invaders and colonizers absolutely determined much of the unfolding of the encounter of Europe with the indigenes of the New World.
Conclusions: amends, reconciliation, democracy
Canadians who have Europe ‘in their genes’ seriously ought to know more about the past that has made us what we are. Just as important in my opinion is that we know what we were when we met the indigenous folk who lived in Canada for ages before our ancestors got here.
Our forefathers and foremothers were more often commoners than nobles, and were heirs to a long and unenlightened tradition of social-class hierarchy, great inequality of rights and freedoms that gave the few on top of society much, much better lives than the lives of peasants, artisans, workers, urban poor, and better lives than the small middle class of bourgeois with commercial property rather than being serfs of landlords. Nobles flourished in this order.
We should not be proud of the fact that European society was miserable in terms of rights and freedoms for the large majority, and we commoners endured it for centuries, millennia, before democracy finally forced the ruling class to relent its hold over us. That hold endures in many places outside the West today. Capitalism is not egalitarian either; democracy fights for equality.
Their miserable human condition for Europe’s masses led them to dream of a better life for themselves in new colonial land where the power of nobles, kings and priests was much reduced. One can certainly empathize with the settlers’ aspiration to escape the manifest injustice of the social order in the Old World.
Escaping miseries in Europe was a potent motivator for the masses of settlers who came to Canada, the USA and other colonized lands in the New World. One cannot blame settlers for the dream; but aboriginal rights are real too.
Monarchs ruling over the colonies, after imperial Spain first claimed the territory and a pope authorized it (1494), had no intent to create a society where aristocracy would decay, but their hope to keep the inequalities of Europe in place in Canada ultimately failed. That struggle for democracy is another tale, not the story of settler-native encounter I am examining.
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Here in conclusion to today’s Arc, one can merely recognize, name, and not deny the injustice of natives losing land so colonists can have that land and improve their own lives while immiserating the aboriginal people.
My purpose in conclusion is to state clearly these four propositions:
1) The Euro-Canadian quality of life in this country is founded on massive wrong in our appropriation of indigenous land and destruction of their lives and culture, and for that we descendants of the settlers must make amends.
2) We can understand the colonial settlers, and I think we must. We can know their minds and why they acted as they did, and not judge them as beings of lesser moral attainment than we. They fail to meet the moral standard of 2026 for justice, and fail on the measure of their “wrong ideas” about their ethnic and cultural superiority. They were, however, not unlike us in doing their best with the education they had. They were not intentionally out to annihilate natives. Guilt and shame does not attach to us, their descendants, for acts of our ancestors that fail to measure up to “what’s right” in 2026.
3) Deep reasons for why Europe’s encounter with the New World eventuated in catastrophe for indigenous populations, in massive loss of life and culture, in violation of human rights we now cherish, are historical reasons. I have been trying to sketch the mind of European people at the time of the encounter.
4) I have myself no doubt that the potent rulers of Europe must be held far more accountable for what happened, because it is the ruling class and its culture that formed the prejudices and cruelties of common settlers, the ruling class that articulated law and policy and intentionally set the commoner-colonists against indigenes.
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Reconciliation between native and colonist-descendant can only move to peace in real democracy. It tests Canada’s democratic culture to atone for past injustice. Any failure in making restitution to natives, and ensuring they enjoy all that Euro-Canadians enjoy in our lives, will prove our democracy a very hollow ideal.
Democracy may just not be strong enough to stand these tests
– creating full restorative justice for indigenous people –
that I aspire for us to undertake.
Appendix:
“Land-title Acknowledgment – an American professor’s analysis.”
Note: the author is using perspectives from American history, and there is no Truth and Reconciliation process in the US.
