Giving Thanks for All the Wrong Reasons
Posted by Alex R. Knight III on Nov 27, 2009 in Commentary • 1 commentMost Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving this year as they have done most every year in modern times – by family gathering to socialize, eat turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy – with perhaps a brief thought spared for the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when a small group of colonists from England broke bread with some Wampanoag indians in celebration of their survival a year after arriving at Cape Cod in their sailing vessel, the Mayflower.
Many present-day Americans have a kind of idolatry associated with those events and that time, and indeed such an untapped, almost entirely uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness has its appeal in an era where we now deal with an IRS, property taxes, the PATRIOT Act, a drug war, overflowing prisons, baseless hyper-inflating currency, overseas conflict, and the looming menace of government-mandated health care. However, here is a document drafted shortly after the pilgrims’ arrival, near what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts (I’ve long-since taken to calling it Marxachusetts) in 1620:
“In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are under-written, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc.
“Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November [New Style, November 21], in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.”
The document is known historically as the Mayflower Compact, and was signed by 41 men who, presumably, assented to its content. It needs no explaining to point out that this cryptic statement demonstrates a reprehensible shortcut to clear thinking. It endorses submission first to an invisible metaphysical entity, then to an arrogant regent thousands of miles away across an ocean, then to a fictional collectivist concept known as a “country,” then to each others’ mere opinions in the form of government “laws” under the rubric of a “civic body politic” – whatever that actually means. Thus, was most of North America doomed to the scatalogical fate we suffer today. Government, and its onerous, illogical presence, was here born.
We may be thankful for family, loved ones, friends – and even a certain degree of material prosperity. However, when we examine the origins of America, and the inadequate intellectual and philosophical concepts that later fueled a senseless and failed “revolution” (it only served to replace one government with another), it is clear to anyone of cogent thought that we are directing gratitude towards that which deserves only our condemnation. Thanks, in fact, should only be given to those who actively seek government’s dissolution into the ashcan of history.
C4SS News Analyst Alex R. Knight III is an author of horror, science fiction, and fantasy tales, living and writing in rural southern Vermont. He is the author of Victoria's Place and Other Tales of Terror (BareBones Publishing, 2008), and numerous other works, including non-fiction and poetry. He is also a regular contributor to the libertarian journal Strike The Root.
This is tendentious.
"invisible metaphysical entity" — No, they compacted with each other With other human beings. This was an act of forming a real compact, a real contract, among oneself and one's neighbors, in the state of nature. I thought anarchists respected private contract!
"then to an arrogant regent thousands of miles away across an ocean" — It's not like they had a choice in the matter! Do you really think the king would have allowed them to entirely spurn his rule? In fact, the reason why the Massachusetts Bay Colony took so long to write the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, was that Governor Winthrop was afraid that if the king saw the way they were actually running things, he would crush the whole endeavor. Better, thought Winthrop, to avoid writing down their laws, so that the king wouldn't know of the revolt (against English law) they were engaged in.
And the same reasoning is largely behind the banishment of Roger Williams. John Cotton, William Bradford, John Winthrop, and others were actually on quite good terms with Williams. But they knew that it was hard enough to keep their limited government from the attention of the throne, and they were afraid that Williams's anarchism was just too much. They liked Williams, but they thought he'd get the king's wrath called upon them.
(And by the way, Williams was himself a Puritan. He himself was educated according to Calvinism, and never renounced it. His arguments for religious tolerance and liberty and the separation of church and state, actually followed upon Calvinist lines, appealing to Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms, the same doctrine that James Madison cited in his letter to Schaeffer. The difference between Williams and John Cotton was not in the religious principles themselves, but only in how to apply them. Thus, we should not be surprised that eventually, it was the intellectual descendants of the Puritans themselves – the Reformed Baptists – who advocated for religious liberty, following the Great Awakening.)
The fact is, the Puritans were the heirs of the Reformed Christians who invented federalism and social contract, and thus minarchist libertarianism. Now, I understand the fact that anarcho-capitalists such as yourselves might not agree with minarchism. But I'd at least appreciate it if you distinguished the Puritans' minarchism from the monarchism and totalitarianism of everyone. Contemporary government evil owes itself to Rousseau, not to Locke (who was an heir of the Puritans).