Civilization and Violence
“In these early French enterprises in the West, it was last degree difficult to hold men to their duty. Once fairly in the wilderness, completely freed from the sharp restraints of authority in which they had passed their lives, a spirit of lawlessness broke out among them and a violence proportioned to the pressure which had hitherto controlled it. Discipline had no resources and no guarantee, while those outlaws of the forest, the courveurs de bois, were always before their eyes, a standing example of unbridled license. La Salle, eminently skilfull in his dealing with Indians, was rarely so happy with own countrymen; and yet the desertions from which he was continually suffering were due far more to the inevitable difficulty of his position than to any want of conduct on his part.” – La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, Francis Parkman, 1869.
La Salle and the French are lost to American history, but then really, what isn't? Parkman's tale of La Salle's late 17th century journeys to the Mississippi River is quite extraordinary. It is the story of Europeans' first interactions with large sections of the United States' Midwest. Using letters and documents of La Salle and his contemporaries, Parkman tells the story of Europe's agrarian culture's nascent steel era meeting the largely hunter and gatherer stone cultures of the Midwest. Unfortunately, like many European interactions with the established civilizations of the US, there is a lack of interest in understanding or describing in depth those cultures, most especially their organization.
One extremely unhelpful organizational role the French did bestow on these cultures was that of “chief,” giving the notion, both then and today, that these societies were hierarchical power structures with a single person in charge, like the then established European monarchies. However, Parkman repeatedly reveals this was not the case. The peoples La Salle encountered would continually meet together before any decision making, and all gathered could and did make comments or ask questions in meetings with the Europeans themselves.
However, Parkman does extensively report how established European hierarchical authority constantly broke down in the great “wilderness” of the Americas, where immediately outside La Salle's small groups of voyagers, such order did not exist. Most importantly, as Parkman states, established European order utilized violence as an integral method of discipline. Social hierarchies across human history, whether the Pharaonic Egypt, Imperial and post-Imperial China, or the great agrarian civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas further south in the Americas, all used violence as a major organizational component.
Today, the US is more hierarchically organized than any time in its history. Government power is massively centralized in DC, while the most dominant societal organization is provided by leviathan corporations, which are as hierarchically and non-democratically organized as any former European monarchy. The organizational violence of systems today might be somewhat less evident than in the past, though easily apparent when looked for, and glaringly obvious in all sorts of police force actions. While the foundation of the much praised half-century corporate globalization system, supply chains and all, was laid with centuries of the greatest mass violence in human history.
Both the mid-20th century sub-continent Indian Independence movement and the following United States Civil Rights movement taught exposing the violence inherent in any social system, also lays bare the inequity of the power system. If democracy were to reappear in the 21st century, exposing the violence at the foundation of so many present societal structures would be a necessary process.
Parkman describes the land of the Illinois people, 1681, at confluence of the Kankakee and Illinois Rivers:
“When last La Salle passed here, all was solicitude, but now the scene was changed. The boundless waste was thronged with life. He beheld that wondrous spectacle, still to be seen at times on the plains of the remotest West, and the memory of which can quicken the pulse and stir the blood after the lapse of years. Far and near, the prairie was alive with buffalo, now like black specks dotting the distant swells, now trampling by in thunderous columns, or filing in long lines, morning, noon, and night to drink at the river, – wading, plunging, and snorting in the water; climbing the muddy shores, and staring with wild eyes at the passing canoes.” Ibid.