Timeless western ideas

When I learned at school about the feudal and Georgian eras in England, I was relieved to be living in a nicer time. But no matter how much the world has changed in the last few hundred years or so, there are many western assumptions which have not changed over those years, for example:

·         Land is something which can be bought or sold but ultimately belongs to the Crown;

·         God told Adam and Eve they owned and should control plants and animals, and that they should be farmers;

·         Man is in charge of the landscape. It makes sense to drain swampland, divert rivers, or cut down forests (sometimes);

·         The law is English law;

·         Laws change;

·         Personal gain flows from personal effort;

·         A lack of personal gain must be caused by a lack of personal effort;

·         Personal success leads to a higher status;

·         We have to work hard both to survive and to save;

·         Our duty to ourselves is stronger than our duty to our community;

·         Saving is good; [Not saving is bad.]

·         Some goods are consumed instantly when we use them. Some things like land can be used repeatedly to increase wealth;

·         There are only four certainties in life: Birth, death, taxes and warfare.

Few of us, in Australia or anywhere else in the west, would have much trouble following the potted history above, whether we agree with its opinions or not. 
I doubt many early settlers questioned these assumptions which would make it difficult to ‘civilise’ Australia’s indigenous people. Beyond curiosity or fear, many seem to have given little thought to Australia’s first people at all. 
Certainly, none of these ideas we take for granted would have made any sense to Aboriginal Australians: Many Aboriginal Australians today still have no frame of reference which could help them follow these ideas. But when Australia was colonised, these ideas were neither questioned nor negotiable.

A new set of obligations

With the breakdown of reciprocity, the new economy built on price, supply and demand, took over the job of sharing out resources. What was missing from this new system was the element of absolute interdependence: The privileged classes didn't suffer greatly if those lower down the food chain struggled to survive. 

A hint of mutual obligation remained in the form of noblesse oblige – the belief that people born into a life of privilege had obligations to those less fortunate than themselves. While some customs continued, these did not necessarily help the people who had moved to towns or cities in search of work. Noblesse oblige did extend to charitable works as well, but charitable institutions provided relief under harsh, discouraging and emotionally cold conditions.

If the idea that Kings ruled with God's approval - by divine right - could make sense, it followed that people born to a high social rank also had god’s stamp of approval. If the lower classes had lower life expectancies, or were more likely to engage in criminal activity it was obviously the way they were born – the way God made them.

It was even widely believed by the upper classes that only the lower classes were inherently criminal or base – that higher classes never committed crimes. (Denial is not just a river in Egypt).

Poverty implied a lack of effort or responsibility and was no excuse for crime.

During the reign of King George III, there were as many as 300 offences for which a person might be hanged. A system of reciprocity which once valued everyone to some degree had been replaced by a system in which life was cheap; people had become a commodity rather than an organic part of a living community.

Good behaviour no longer guaranteed subsistence in the new industrial world, while even petty crimes by today’s standards were a one-way ticket to disaster. Prisons overflowed, unable to meet the escalating demand for punishment.

One alternative to hanging people for their crimes was forcing them to join the army or navy. This didn’t help reduce the prison population very much in between wars because even officers who had paid for their place in the higher ranks of the army or navy could find themselves unemployed. When there was some ‘war work’ around, officers didn't want the discipline problems caused by having convicts forced into their companies. A further complication was that military service was a business – no one wanted to share the spoils of war with unreliable soldiers or sailors who were criminals. The prison population kept growing.

For a while, convicts were shipped to America where they might be auctioned alongside black slaves, but convicts did not fetch the price slaves could: Unlike slaves, convicts had to be freed after serving their sentences, and their offspring did not become assets.

After the American Revolution, and after some dismal attempts to export convicts to Africa, England finally settled on Australia as the dumping ground for those it didn't want - primarily convicts, and members of the upper classes who were an embarrassment to their families.

In Australia, as in America, the competition with indigenous peoples for land was fierce. In former colonies all over the world, settlers fought the indigenous peoples and the indigenous peoples, in turn, fought back. Wherever this happened, we might reasonably conclude that some non-indigenous individuals were more noble or caring than others, but all were very much a product of their time and background. Where people are brutalised – as many of Australia’s first whitefellas were – they can they become brutal themselves.

There is no reason to assume our first settlers had any deep philosophical commitment to making informed decisions to be kind to the natives: It has been estimated that when Australia was first colonised, the literacy rate in Britain was about 30% (and the people arriving in the first fleet undoubtedly had an even lower literacy rate).

From farmer to factory-hand

By the mid-18th century, as the Industrial Revolution got underway in Europe, the feudal system was unravelling, soon to be replaced by a completely different system for solving the economic problem.

In Britain, just one of the changes was that common land, once shared by all, was progressively enclosed for the exclusive use of those with a higher rank in the system. With these enclosures of the commons, villagers lost access to pastures for the few animals they kept to supplement their crops and provide enough to live on. 
Those who could no longer survive in a village as a result of change, drifted towards ever-growing cities. 

In the cities, workers became increasingly alienated from what they were producing; little of what they made was for their own personal use, and they made little of what they did use.

Before moving from a village to a city, a person might 

• plant wheat in a field
• harvest it 
• see a miller produce flour from the same wheat
• make their own dough from the flour, and 
• see the dough turned into bread by a baker.

With the drift to the cities, people might know how to find a baker but have no part in the wheat growing, harvesting, milling or baking processes. They might eventually not even know what steps were involved in producing bread.

This alienation of labour from a finished product carried with it no system of obligations about the distribution of what was made. People unable to swap their labour for money were faced with the prospect of starvation or homelessness.

Where once people believed ‘If you do the right thing you will survive’, privileged people came to believe ‘If you cannot survive it's because you are not doing the right thing.’

However hard village life had been, it had once provided some sense of security, purpose and responsibility. In the cities, there were no systems in place to guarantee anyone a living or a sense of purpose. For the lowest classes, work had changed from a necessarily cooperative endeavour to a competitive one. 

One need not be a lefty, pinko, communist radical to see that the drift to the cities and the beginnings of industrialisation created an underclass – a pool of spare labour from which entrepreneurs could hire or fire at will.

The chains of reciprocity; the mutual obligations which had once ensured everyone would survive, had been broken.

One economic solution

One type of solution to the economic problem is the feudal system. Feudal systems have been around in one form or another from as early as ancient Greece, until as late as 20th century, pre-revolutionary Russia. 

Feudal systems helped answer the problem of deciding what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute what was produced, by sharing out the jobs of production, protection and distribution. Social or religious obligations were as important as money for deciding how produce would be shared out.

Many of us schooled in Australia would recall learning about the Norman system of feudalism as it worked in medieval Britain.

·         The Crown [or the King] rules Dei Gracia; by the grace of God. The King has a divine right to rule because he has been chosen by God. To prop up his rule, he therefore relies on support from the Church. The Church tells the peasants God wants them to respect the Crown;

·         In return for its support, the King protects the Church.

·         In return for their [agricultural] support, the Crown protects the peasants.

·         In return for their faith, the Church helps peasants by participating in the legal system, doing charitable works, and providing mortgages to get around the Bible’s rules against charging interest

The feudal system was a system of reciprocity, or mutual obligation. Systems like this – however imperfect – provided a broad set of rules about the production and distribution of what was needed for survival. So long as people were willing to do the right thing they were guaranteed some kind of existence.

In the west today, reciprocity takes on different forms:

·         ‘Good manners’ require us to give birthday presents to those people who give birthday presents to us.

·         The Crown is now represented by government, which provides us with services in exchange for our tax funds.

·         The role of the Church is no longer a central role, religions function largely in a support or advisory capacity. People choose a set of rules – religious or otherwise – for determining right from wrong. These values find formal expression in our legal duty of care to each other, through the ballot box and in our day-to-day behaviour.

Savings essential to survival

In Europe’s western world, apart from the odd blizzard, flood or earthquake, the seasons have been fairly predictable and reliable since long before agriculture became a way of life. The shift to a life built around agriculture was possible, in part, because there was a season for planting, a season for growing, a season for harvesting and storing, and a season for staring at the snow outside. 

The surplus stored after harvest might have been grain, onions or anything else that would keep during the unproductive months of a year. Putting food away for later, or deferred gratification, was neither optional nor some superior intellectual breakthrough; it was necessary for survival. It was taken for granted that saving is good, not saving is bad. To westerners, saving is as natural as the seasons. 

Also as natural as the seasons was the probability of regular invasion. People’s goods and savings were often taken by invading armies to feed themselves, or to send ‘back home’. Certainty about seasons, and uncertainty about the weather had required saving; uncertainty about the next invasion made it even more important that people accumulate savings and wealth.

With the development of agriculture in the west, anyone powerful enough to take ownership of land gained control of the means of producing food or other essentials. This, in turn, reinforced their power over others.

Wealth could accumulate from several sources:

·         from a leftover surplus;

·         from raids on other peoples, such as the raids conducted by the Vikings;

·         from the accumulation of more and more land and labour through establishment of an Empire, such as the Roman Empire or the British Empire.

The accumulation of wealth was considered a natural human goal, for wealth and power provided security and certainty about the future.

In the west, barter and trade were an integral part of life. Money, where it was used, provided a way of making the exchange of different types and proportions of goods more practical. Money also provided an excellent way of storing and carrying wealth and future purchasing power.

Agriculture and land ownership in the west

Early European man lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle that was different from the hunter gatherer lifestyle of Aboriginals. Europeans lived in a completely different environment from Australia's desert nomads, with different resources, seasons and needs.

Our worlds diverged even further with the development of agriculture, a major turning point in western history.

Agriculture represents an answer to the economic problem which assumes, for the first time, man has the power to control nature. Where once the earth had been quite literally Mother Nature and the source of sustenance, Mother Nature would now be demoted to the role of servant. With the development of agriculture as a way of life, people no longer belonged to the land – the land belonged to people.

This is reflected in the very first book of the Bible, where we are told that God gave man dominion over the plants and the animals.

The Western Worldview

There is quite a gulf between what we sometimes think all people take for granted, and what Aboriginals have traditionally taken for granted.

Most of us have suffered through – or enjoyed – lessons in basic history at school. The potted (possibly potty) history in this chapter is not really about the details of Anglo-Celtic Australian history so much as it’s about the source of many of the ideas most westerners take for granted.

Our Daily Bread

Since the beginning of time, humans have developed complex, interdependent social and spiritual systems which helped to solve ‘the economic problem’, which has three parts:

• What to produce

• How to produce it

• How to distribute what is produced

Aboriginals have lived on the Australian continent for 40,000 years or more. For most of those years, they lived in relative isolation from the rest of the world. Most indigenous Australians lived in environments far different from those of the people who would later invade and take control of their country.

Because Aboriginals and the rest of the world developed separately and with different resources, they developed completely different [but equally valid] ways of solving the economic problem. 

The complex, interdependent, social and spiritual systems of Aboriginals were matched to the resources they had available for survival.

When the First Fleet arrived in 1788, the British and their guests brought with them a way of living and thinking that was appropriate for Europe’s geography and history, but which took quite a while to adapt to local conditions. 

The conflict between our two ways of seeing the world led to a physical conflict that was ugly. Today, we must not only deal with the results of that ugliness, we still have to acknowledge the differences in our world views if we are to close the gap.