The Effect of Native Americans on European Thought: The Indigenous Critique

There was a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe when scientific knowledge began to emerge, along with questions about the nature of humans and their societies that initiated a challenge to the orthodoxy demanding submission to church and monarchial state powers.  This intellectual and philosophical era is referred to as The Age of Enlightenment.  It was also the age in which colonialists learned about the American continents and the natives who had been living there.  The American natives would provide the European intellectuals with plenty to think about as they provided an alternative path to forming effective and efficient societies that focused on protecting individual liberties, a concept at odds with many centuries of European history.  The Americans would provide not only examples, but also criticism of how the Europeans mismanaged their societies.  David Graeber and David Wengrow refer this body of dispute as the “indigenous critique” in their massive book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 

One of the questions the authors continually ask as they review human history is “how did human societies end up with hierarchical structures requiring religions, police forces, and prisons to limit personal liberties so that society could function.”  They summon new archeological and anthropological data that are emerging to show that there is plenty of evidence that early societies were more complex than once thought and they often seemed to have had structures that did not require a domineering hierarchy.  The native Americans encountered by the French and English colonists would introduce Europeans to such societies. 

What the Europeans discovered were societies that had no prisons and no laws except those that the individual people decided to obey.  Leaders were those who were most capable of convincing others that they had the best proposals.  Their terms in office terminated when that status ceased to exist.  Punishment for an action that harmed another was imposed not on the offender, but on his extended family.  That family and that of the persons abused would negotiate compensation sufficient to eliminate any desire for revenge.  The Jesuits had to admit that this peculiar system worked rather well in keeping the peace.  Males and females had specific responsibilities within a society, and each had control over their tasks.  Women also had control over their bodies.  Unmarried women had sexual liberty; married women could easily gain a divorce.  The natives did not use money.   They were not strictly an egalitarian society; wealth could accumulate to the most industrious, but it could not be used to purchase power over another; rather, it was used to acquire praise for the generosity shown in sharing it with others.  People in need were to be assisted.

Much of the documentation of these encounters comes from reports of Jesuit missionaries sent over to Christianize the natives.  Consider this description from a missionary in 1642.

“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like.  They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.  All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.”

Converting such people to Catholicism would not go well.

“…scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will.  This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage.  Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious.  ‘The wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.  Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.”

The authors report on the findings of Brother Gabriel Sagard.

“Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright.”

Consider the comments of Father Lallemant on his dealings with the Wendat (Hurons) from 1644.

“I do not believe there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjugation of their wills to any power whatever—so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except insofar as each is pleased to submit to them.  There is no punishment that is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”

“After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good Father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective.  Actually, it worked surprisingly well.  Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation.  This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.  ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’  If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance they might take’.”

The American natives had no interest nor any tolerance for the type of lives lived by the French, and they had the eloquence to make the case that their way of life was superior.  The authors illustrate the indigenous critique with this insight.

“…the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.  That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest.”

This kind of input would be of great interest anywhere people would gather to discuss human existence.

“In the years between 1703 and 1751…the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought.  What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom.  As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values—organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves—they reacted in a variety of ways.”

“Some like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright…In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.”

Philosophers get to talk as much as they want but rarely get to take any action.  The church and the state did not like their power being questioned.  An effective counter argument would be provided by an economist named A. R. J. Turgot.

“Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’—in principle.  But we must consider a larger context.  In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and therefore, where everyone is equally poor.  As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances.  Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour.  We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some—however lamentable it may be—is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of the society as a whole.”

Turgot would go on to propose a theory of human social evolution in which humans progress from a stage of hunter-gatherer to a pastoral community followed by an agricultural phase before finally emerging into this “commercial’ stage.  This logic pleased the powerful because they could view their power and wealth as being a result of a meritocratic process that rewarded their obvious superior talents.  It also cast shade on those who were on a different path, relegating them to dwellers in an earlier stage of social evolution.

“Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food.  ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal partners to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.”

This attitude would serve the European nations well as they rushed to colonize , dominate, and extract wealth from as much of the world as possible

Perhaps Turgot should have included an even larger context and considered where his beloved technical advances might take us.  The Wendat told the French that they possessed more things than them, but they exceeded the French in “ease, comfort and time.”  Can we really claim that our society has provided us with increasing ease, comfort, and time—or are those things intended to disappear?  The authors relish reminding us that for most, we submit ourselves to indentured servitude, if not outright slavery, at least eight hours per day and for at least five days a week—yet we claim to be living in the land of the free.  We claim to live in a democracy, but our only influence on society comes when about half of us have the energy or knowledge to cast a vote.  And on those occasions, only about half of that half have taken the time to try and understand what they are voting for.  For many, the motivation is merely “What’s in it for me.”  Would the indigenous critique change any if the Wendat encountered our twenty-first century society?