356 years ago today:

[Minstrel Boy]

"You poor take courage, you rich take care"



"In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another."
- Gerrard Winstanley, "The New Law of Righteousness", 1649

Here I've been thinking about April 4 and the Lorraine Motel, and I almost forgot about April 3 and St George's Hill.

I suppose I have a lot of heroes, but Gerrard Winstanley holds a special place. On this day in 1649 he and about 30 Levellers, or "Diggers," marched on the commons of St George's Hill in Surrey and "sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots and beans." Other Digger groups reclaimed land from the gentry in Kent, Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. The gentry was, let's say, nonplussed.

Oliver Cromwell reportedly said, "What is the purport of the levelling principle but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces."

Response was swift: the Diggers were ordered beaten; their homes, crops and tools destroyed. Within a year, the Diggers were finished. Or maybe, just biding their time. And you know what? That time may be now.

Because if things really are this bad, then the Diggers' philosophy may be humanity's best last chance to salvage something like a sustainable culture, even on a local level.

Here is an account of the march to St George's Hill, now a private golf course, on the 350th anniversary in 1999:



If you don't know Leon Rosselson's song, "The World Turned Upside Down," you really ought to. And you can here, as interpreted by a number of artists. It's a versatile little number. Attila the Stockbroker's version is a bloody operetta, and incorporates Winstanley's own "Diggers Song" ("With spades and hoes and plowes, stand up now, stand up now...")

In 1649
To St George's Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers
Came to show the people' s will
They defied the landlords
They defied the laws
They were the dispossessed
Reclaiming what was theirs

We come in peace, they said
To dig and sow
We come to work the land in common
And to make the waste land grow
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it can be
A common treasury for all.

The sin of property
We do disdain
No one has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Rise up at their command.

They make the laws
To chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven
Or they damn us into hell
We will not worship
The God they serve
The God of greed who feeds the rich
While poor men starve

We work, we eat together
We need no swords
We will not bow to masters
Or pay rent to the lords
We are free men
Though we are poor
You Diggers all stand up for glory
Stand up now

From the men of property
The orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers' claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn
They were dispersed -
Only the vision lingers on

You poor take courage
You rich take care
The earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share
All things in common
All people one
We come in peace
The order came to cut them down

[carnie_sf]

1. The greastest sin of the industrial revolution

was the fencing of the commons. In the immortal words of Jean-Paul Proudhon - "Property is theft."

[rogerashton]

2. Not a free people

as long as one class rules over the other, directing and profiting by their work, because the ruling class controls the means of production.

BUT land is no longer the main means of production -- agriculture is among the least sustainable of economic activities in the world of the twenty-first century.

[starroute]

4. That's why IP issues are the real pivot point

Copyright, patents, file-sharing, open source. It's no accident that Richard Stallman is the greatest radical of our era. That's where the real battles are taking place, and they're only going to get nastier.

[rogerashton]

16. Well, they're important.

Machinery might still be important too.

And money. Always important.

[starroute]

3. The modern era took several wrong turns in the 1600's

One had to do with maintaining the traditional ownership structure of land. One of the great advantages of America in the last few centuries has been that the original colonization of New England was on the basis of each family owning just enough land to sustain them -- a system that held out against later attempts by the British crown to impose a traditional top-down system, ultimately climaxing in the American Revolution.

In contrast, the South has always been dominated by an aristocratic class of large landowners and an underclass of indentured servants, slaves, or sharecroppers. That regressive social system was one of the root causes of the Civil War -- and its recent takeover of the Republican Party is the underlying issue tearing the United States apart today.

A second wrong turn in the 1600's occurred when the natural decline of traditional religion was artificially arrested by partitioning existence into separate domains for faith and science. Religion was guarded from challenge by freezing its doctrines in place and increasingly cutting it off from new scientific ideas. Science was restricted to investigating questions of material cause-and-effect, and then vilified for concluding from its studies that the universe is only a machine and human beings are merely animals.

The result is that instead of enjoying a single vibrant belief system that draws equally on reason and intuition to tell empowering stories of human origins and destiny, our society even today is bitterly divided between two incompatible systems, both of which diminish us and limit our ability to imagine who we are and what we might become.

I do understand why these things happened in the 1600's -- the rulers had the guns and the think-tanks and were able to convince the middle class that the rabble was their greatest enemy. Same as it ever was. The real question is how to make things turn out differently this time.

[EFerrari]

7. 'Morning, starroute. A couple of questions about WT #2

What are you meaning by the "natural decline of traditional religion"? (Scratching head and trying to figure out what kinds of tradition that would be.) Am also not sure why you assign this to the 1600s? I would put it much earlier, lol, like in ancient Greece? Really curious.

Also, you seem to be equating faith/science with intuition/science unless I'm misreading. Which I don't understand as faith and intuition seem to me to be very different, nearly opposite qualities or categories.

I guess I'd point to a different "turn" and that would be the earlier increasing centralization of government (Tudors and ff, including the melding of Church and State) and, the subsequent struggle in the populace with the expansion of government in every sense. (Do I benefit from it or do I not benefit from it?)

A process that led to convulsions, mirrored in both the secular and religious realms.

:)

[0007]

11. I'm in the same boat scratching my head also!

[starroute]

13. Okay, a few responses

"Natural decline of traditional religion."

We're so used to thinking of religion and science as independent or even opposites, that we forget that the norm over human history is for religion to take the best contemporary science as a starting point and then go beyond it. The paganism of the ancient world was built on late Neolithic and Bronze Age science -- specifically, the discovery that the stars and planets moved in regular paths and could be taken as governing events on earth. Christianity, in contrast, was built on the Ptolemaic system of celestial spheres, with the earth in the center being considered as fallen and corrupt (and Hell in the center of the earth) and Heaven located beyond the sphere of the fixed stars.

In the ancient world, people understood that the very shape of the heavens could be radically redefined from time to time, and a large part of the success of Christianity -- at least among the educated classes -- was based on their recognition that it incorporated the best new science in a way that the old polytheistic cults did not.

In the same way, once Copernicus destroyed the Ptolemaic system, the cosmological basis for Christianity evaporated. It took a little while for this fact to sink in (Milton's "Paradise Lost" represents an interesting attempt to reconcile Biblical and Copernican cosmologies), but effectively by the late 1600's, traditional Christianity was reduced to pretending that nothing had changed in order to keep on with the old creation/fall/redemption/Judgment Day scenario.

Normally, that game of pretend might have lasted for a couple of generations. But instead -- and largely for political reasons -- a sort of gentlemen's agreement was arrived at in the 1600's whereby the scientists promised not to challenge religion in any way that really mattered. Darwin's great sin was that he broke the gentleman's agreement by taking science into areas (the origin of life and of man, the forces responsible for maintaining the natural world) that were essential to religious dogma.

Yes, of course politics had something to do with it. The top-down Ptolemaic cosmology was (and had been since its inception) a justification for aristocracy. It presented peasants as lower, more earthy, cruder, more fallen and aristocrats as higher, more spiritual, more refined, and closer to God. The Copernican chronology did go through a brief heliocentric period when it was used to justify the pretensions of monarchs like Louis XIV. But as it became clear during the 1600's that every star was a sun which might have its own planets. the result was radically democratizing. Darwinian evolution and even Einstein's relativity have only added to the intensely levelling nature of modern science.

Mere political struggles can be settled by wars. Science, which is a matter of ideas, is far more dangerous. Peasants' rebellions in the 1600's could be suppressed. Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation (which said that even the stars were governed by the same laws of nature as the fall of an apple) couldn't.

(Moreover, ever since Newton, we've been living a world where "fall" and "apple" have more to do with science than with Adam and Eve and original sin. Metaphors can be even more powerful than ideas alone.)

Finally, I suppose my use of "faith" is fairly idiosyncratic. To me it doesn't mean putting yourself in a reality tunnel or accepting unproven assertions without critical thought. Instead, it describes the sort of inner assurance necessary to risk our lives for the sake of intangibles, like love or freedom, or to proceed toward a goal that we can't clearly describe to anyone else or even prove is possible. It's a matter of inner knowledge, and that's why I might use the word interchangeably with "intuition."

[EFerrari]

14. Interesting reading of PL

I picked it up after Longgrain's Shakespeare thread the other day. Milton did make himself into a pretzel trying to reconcile (or weigh) the two systems -- along with every other contradiction that ever cross his mind. lol

Your proposition makes me want to track "science" as a notion, in particular its trajectory from "knowing" through its demonization (thinking here of how the word is used in the late 16th C to pretty much equal various heresies - there's someone's dissertation :))

What I didn't understand about intuition vs faith: intuition is something we know without having thought, while faith is something we don't know but risk believing. That's clunky and approximate.

B.

[starroute]

17. There's intuition and then there's intuition

The word has gone through a lot of changes. I once read through all the definitions in the OED and it was fascinating to see where it had been.

In the Middle Ages, there was a notion that angels knew everything automatically, without having to learn things or figure them out. The word "intuition" was invented to describe that.

In 18th century empiricism, where it was assumed that all knowledge came through either sensation or reason, there was a problem with accounting for the kind of knowledge that we would now call holistic. For example, you step outside and you immediately know it's a nice day. Or you look at your friend and can tell they're feeling sick. So "intuition" got pressed into service to mean instanteous apprehensions of the everyday world.

In the 19th century, with its learnings towards transcendentalism and occultism, "intuition" got extened to include a grab-bag of hunches, mystical intimations, flashes of creative insight, and visionary expectations. That's pretty close to the way most people still use it today. The thing is, though, that those sort of intuitions mostly can't be proven -- it takes faith to follow them, whether that means investing your money in a certain stock or devoting five years of your life to trying to bring an invention to fruition.

You seem to be using "intuition" in the 18th century sense and "faith" as something related to the 19th century sense. But for me, it's all the same thing. The only difference is that certain intuitions can be backed up rationally almost immediately while others demand a long-term commitment before you can tell for sure.

[EFerrari]

15. Speaking of the destruction of the Ptolemaic System, cf these:

:)

[Itchinjim]

5. Ah, Oliver Cromwell; "God's Englishman".

These "Christians" have been waging class warfare for quite awhile now haven't they?
Bloody bastards.

[acmejack]

6. Interestingly, that song was played in Yorktown

Whilst Cornwallis surrendered his sword.

[rockymountaindem]

8. Do you have a link for that?

That's very interesting.

[EFerrari]

9. Diggers

I wonder if there will be something in the Haight today:

The Mime Troupe's founder, R. G. Davis, have moved his opposition from foundation support from the level of personal example to organized resistance by forming an Artists' Liberation Front (ALF) to circumvent official art presentations, such as those of the San Francisco Cultural Board. A third of the forty-five ALF member were Mime Troupers, the remainder unaffiliated artists and a few allied figures including Bill Graham, Ralph Gleason and Hunter Thompson . . . .

But, internally the Mime Troups was more polarized than ever. Davis had always encouraged serious political discussion--such as "rap sessions" about Mao Tse Tung's book of quotations--so open factionalism was nothing new. But the most recent was a particularly deep rift, a group referring to itself as Diggers after a seventeenth century English sect of religious communists were in effect advocating throwing all the Mime Troupe's energies into the Haight-Ashbury community as the place of greatest revolutionary potential.

Haight Ashbury, a history. Charles Perry (Vintage, 1985: 81)

[chlamor]

10. Kick-And a brief history of purposefully demonized Luddites

In 1812 England was in turmoil--Napoleon ruled Europe and English troops were engaged in a far flung, confused, and fruitless war in North America. At the same time in the cities, towns, and countryside of England the industrial revolution was drastically reshaping the fundamental nature of traditional economic and social relationships. In Nottingham, Lancashire, Leeds, and a few other parts of England, these changes met with bitter, and sporadic well-organized resistance.

For at least three hundred years the weavers from in and around the central English town of Nottingham, though commoners, enjoyed the status and rewards accorded to fine craftsmen. The weavers of Nottinghamshire produced lace and stockings that dominated the English markets and were prominent items in export trade. These products were hand made, often in the weaver's home. Today, it would be called a cottage industry. The weavers worked mainly as independent contractors, not as employees of a factory owner. Apprenticeships, family tradition and community values insured a product of high quality. The weavers of Nottingham could afford to practice their craft with care; prices for their products, as well as for their expenses and the support of their families did not vary with the market conditions, but were governed by tradition. And the weavers had the additional protection of an ancient royal charter restricting certain kinds of textile production in England to within ten leagues of the town of Nottingham. The weavers and their families were reasonably secure in their modest lifestyle.

In the first years of the 19th century stocking frames and the early automation of the power loom threatened this long-standing way of life. Because the new equipment was expensive, the weavers could not afford to purchase it themselves and the balance of power shifted away from the weavers to the factory owners. Simultaneously the Tory government adopted a laissez-faire economic policy. For the weavers, this meant that they were asked to endure a drastic decrease in income and to submit to the regimented and unpleasant atmosphere of a factory, while the price for their food, drink, and other necessities of life increased. The weavers complained bitterly that the machines made mass produced products of shamefully inferior quality. Naturally, the weavers saw the new technology as the most powerful tool of their new oppressor, the factory owner. A vulnerable tool.

During a short period climaxing in the spring of 1812, inspired perhaps by the French Revolution and the writings of Thomas Paine, the weavers formed into something akin to a guerrilla army and took substantial control over the territory near Nottingham and several neighboring districts. Their army was a secret army. They controlled the night, they knew the back trails between villages. If threatened by government troops they would simply disappear into the same hills and forests that fostered the legend of Robin Hood. Most of all, they enjoyed almost universal support of the local people.

The Luddites often appeared at a factory in disguise and stated that they had come upon the orders of General Ned Ludd. These demands included restoration of reasonable rates of compensation, acceptable work conditions, and probably quality control. Faced by the intimidating numbers and the surprisingly disciplined actions of the Luddites, most factory owners complied, at least temporarily. Those that refused found their expensive machines wrecked. At the outset, the Luddites scrupulously avoided violence upon any person.

The non-violent period of Luddism ended at Burton's power loom mill in Lancashire on April 20, 1812. A large body of Luddites, perhaps numbering over a thousand attacked the mill, mostly with stick and rocks. The mill was defended by a well armed privately hired group of guards. The guards repulsed the attack, and the Luddites instead burned the owners house. They were met up with by the military and several were killed. A government crackdown ensued, and many suspected Luddites were convicted, imprisoned, or hanged.


Lessons from the Luddites

By KIRKPATRICK SALE
1. Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful.
2. Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destroying the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain.
3. "Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines."
4. The nation-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism, will always come to its aid and defense, making revolt futile and reform ineffectual.
5. But resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary.
6. Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate.
? What purpose does this machine serve?
? What problem has become so great that it needs this solution?
? Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end?
? Who are the winners?
? Who are the losers?
? Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage or discourage self worth?
? Can society at large afford it?
? Can the biosphere?
7. Philosophically, resistance to industrialism must be embedded in an analysis--an ideology, perhaps--that is morally informed, carefully articulated and widely shared.
? Anthropocentrism must be opposed by the principle of biocentrism and the spiritual identification of the human with all living species and systems.
? Globalism must be opposed by the empowerment of the coherent bioregion and small community.
? Industrial capitalism must be opposed by an ecological and sustainable economy built upon accommodation and commitment to the earth.

http://www.usu.edu/sanderso/multinet/luddite.html

[EFerrari]

12. The 'Way Back Machine is on this morning: Wat Tyler

"When Adam delved, and Eve span
Who was then a gentleman?"

The Peasant Revolt. In Edward III's dotage John of Gaunt (Ghent, in modern Belgium) was virtual ruler of England. He continued as regent when Richard II, aged 10, came to the throne in 1377. Four years later a poll tax was declared to finance the continuing war with France. Every person over the age of 15 had to pay one shilling, a large sum in those days. There was tremendous uproar amongst the peasantry. This, combined with continuing efforts by land owners to re-introduce servility of the working classes on the land, led to the Peasant's Revolt. The leaders of the peasants were John Ball, an itinerant priest, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler. The revolt is sometimes called Wat Tyler's Rebellion. They led a mob of up to 100,000 people to London, where the crowd went on a rampage of destruction, murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, and burned John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace. More

http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Richard_II_to_Henry_V.htm

[anarchy1999]

18. I'm looking to South America, 1st is Venezuela, go Chavez, and then on

to Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and so on. Stand up and finally they are against "American" imperialism. Go and read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". We will survive!

[chlamor]

19. Kick - The Peoples Garden Project

in Ithaca,NY held a benefit tonight. I read the intro to this post at the gathering and a woman knew the song and sang it for us. Community gardens popping up all over.