On Revolution, Part 1
“Human desire for freedom is a powerful and inherent drive”
-Simone de Beauvoir
My oldest son was born on July 14th, otherwise known as Bastille Day. Whenever I tell anyone above a certain age his birthday, they immediately say “Bastille Day!” I’ve asked him if this happens to him and he told me, “just old people like you.” Something must have changed in the way American schools teach history. It seems that Bastille Day made quite an impression on many of us.
The storming of the Bastille is so much more exciting than the dumping of tea in a harbor and a bunch of old guys sitting around arguing about the constitution. As much as I love Benjamin Franklin, he does seem very provincial. And really. who can resist the bloodthirsty excitement of the guillotine - they actually killed the royalty oppressing them! Talk about Power to the People!
Not only did the American and French Revolutions happen one after the other, they were linked together in many ways. Without France’s material support, the American Revolution might not have succeeded. Benjamin Franklin went to France shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed to arrange for and ensure the shipment of French weapons for our Revolutionary War. It’s really quite remarkable, the French aristocracy, by supporting the American Revolution, essentially caused the demise of the system that gave them power.
France did this for two reasons. First, France and England have been enemies since the mists of time, it was an excellent way to poke the Brits. And second and most importantly, many French nobles were engaged in the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. America was seen as the embodiment of the social and political ideals of the Enlightenment, such as natural law, liberty, tolerance, constitutional government and the separation of church and state.
In her first major work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt describes and analyzes both Nazism and Stalinism as the first expressions of totalitarianism. Arendt believed that totalitarianism is an attempt to solve deeply rooted problems in the modern system. Another 20th Century philosopher Karl Popper believed that political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism, which originated in humanism, which emphasizes individual and social potential and agency of human beings.
Arendt wrote “On Revolution” as an analysis of the American and French Revolution and saw that the solution for the problem of totalitarianism would be peaceful rebellions. In his introduction to On Revolution, Jonathan Schell explains how this book was inspired by the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets in 1956. Although it was unsuccessful, it had a powerful impact on the Cold War, highlighting the limits of Soviet power in Eastern Europe.and representing a solution to the problem (oppression) of totalitarianism.
In fact, Arendt’s work in this area predicted the wave of nonviolent movements in the late 20th Century that brought democratic governments to power in dozens of nations on all continents, from Greece to South Africa to Chile to Poland and, finally, to the Soviet Union itself. As she put it herself “even in the absence of all teaching and the presence of overwhelming indoctrination a yearning for freedom and truth will rise out of man’s heart and mind forever.”
In “The Dawn of Everything”, David Graber posits that the Enlightenment came out of encounters between Europeans and Native Americans in the 17th century. Prior to the 15th century, when Portuguese ships began exploring the Indian Ocean and the Spanish conquered South America, Europe had been an obscure backwater disconnected from world trade. Suddenly European intellectuals were exposed to a flood of new social, scientific and political ideas, which fueled the Enlightenment.
According to “The Dawn of Everything”, the source of most of the Enlightenment’s ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality are discussions that Europeans and indigenous Americans had about the nature of freedom and equality. Indigenous Americans had developed a critique of European society and their critiques were taken very seriously in Europe. We know all of this because European thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources.
It’s hard for us to understand the radical transformation in peoples’ conception of themselves that originated in the Age of Enlightenment. As Graeber says, “When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.”
When the transformative inklings of our current worldview were forming, about 300 years ago, the idea that individuals have inalienable rights was completely shocking. And yet, even though not everyone on Earth can be said to act as if its true, it is accepted as true by the dominant culture. It’s important to see that, although it feels like forever from the vantage of a human lifespan, in historical, evolutionary and geologic time, it is a blip. But also, this transformation in our species’ understanding of the world and self awareness has some momentum. The idea that we could go back before wokeness is absurd. You can’t unsee something you’ve already seen.