Photo credit: en.wikipedia.org
Republished from this blog site in 2013:
What Thanksgiving really means To Americans
A couple
of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the
real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among
the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended
the early settlers.
In 1620,
the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic,
a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality.
But the communal model didn’t work for them. After over two years of failing
harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the
pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property.
The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.
Their
Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and
incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims were guilty because they
were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the
devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and utopian
collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism
produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the
principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing
self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder of the
Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today.
Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.)
It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In
fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from
their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably
most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony,
founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve
outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original
colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor.
As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been
known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources
were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass
starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague.
After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist
mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived
and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that
iconic Thanksgiving feast.
As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series
of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history
and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human
gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision
makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed
commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students.
But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into
obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated
establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.
I’m often
asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so
often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that
collectivism will fail?
No, they
don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the
principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the
ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders
learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely
geared to its acquisition. All of their neurons are trained on that one
objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for
later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments
is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them
personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the
limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to
rule, not the self-anointed.
That’s
how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth
Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious
thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed
in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property,
centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal
family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child.
This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of
Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers,
mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions
should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated
and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the
1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not
create a private property system.
But the
Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we
fade. Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public
squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True
Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred.
And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic,
colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of
history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always
failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is
failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.
Happy Thanksgiving!
