Thomas Massaro reading: Living Justice

I must acquiesce that I had a brief moment of confusion with this scheduled reading. While there were some class notes taken on some of the terms in the reading, mentally I didn’t relate them to the reading due to some fatigue at the time. So, I am looking at this with fresh eyes. Thomas Morrow talks at some length about human dignity. He says that under Catholic doctrine all should be accorded diginity whether well, sick, the unborn, those who might be euthanized, or a social pariah. He also talks about equality from the standpoint of the Catholic Church, that all deserve equality, but it reminds me more of the words of Thomas Jefferson when he penned the Constitution, that we’re garranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness et cetera. Marrow doesn’t say it’s bad for one to have more wealth than others perse, but just because you’re born into the right family or social circles doesn’t mean that the pursuit of wealth and power should outweigh the pursuit of equality, even though he admits that the playing field isn’t level. A person can be of nobility, but that doesn’t make him or her noble by virtue in other words. Marrow upholds the example of the Pope John XXIII, who listed a series of human rights as “universal, inviolable, and inalienable.” Again, very Jeffersonian in nature. Massaro seems to disagree with secular human rights traditions, that man cannot give other men human rights as much as God leds the way in being an example of what human rights ought to be accorded to men. I do remember vaguely in class discussion that there was a brief distinction made between ought and should because “ought” indicates a moral imperative, i.e., what one has a moral obligation to do, whereas “should” implies the world of the mundane, like you should pick up your laundry, or you should tip a certain percentage on a bill, for example. Of course, I learned that distinction in philosophy courses, although I suspect the distinction is sometimes lost on others.

I think that Massaro strategically mentions both the term Solidarity  and John Paul II on page 84 because he’s alluding to that the late Pope was from Poland and supportive of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland during the Cold War that helped foster the end of Communism there as and example of what idea of the concept can do when put into practice. And it’s as if Massaro is alluding somewhat to the notion of the Buttefly Effect when he talks about John Paul II emphasizing, “God not only allows people to depend upon each other, but absolutely wills that humans share themselves in the context of intimate as well as larger groupings of our neighbors. To be human is to be a social being, one whose very life is and should be bound up with those in close proximity and even distant strangers.” But, Massaro also says the concept of Solidarity must begin with in to transcend outwardly.

Strayer: CH 20: Identity and Culture during the Colonial Era

Education seemed magical to people who’d been previously illiterate. For them it was a way to break the bondage of Colonialism.  They had few alternatives literally. It was either education or possibly being culled into forced labor, especially in Africa. It also meant that natives could get the education to get better pay. It allowed a certain amount of social mobility and elite status, but perhaps this was also a kind of collusion or collaboration for those natives who attained higher paying jobs via education, especially if they were administrative jobs in nature. The natives felt so seduced by European culture and what upward mobility within it could afford them. In India for example, Bengalis ignored their Hindu faith’s prohibition against consumption of beef because to consume western foods felt more sophisticated. European religions such as Christianity were especially spread strongly in Africa where confidence had been shaken in their pagan religions for a multitude of reasons, but mainly, missionaries were providing the bulk of education opportunities in the colonial world. Although, there was certainly syncretic elements carried over from their pagan religions in the form of medicines and chants. Christianity, however didn’t make much inroads in India. Interestingly, Hindu mystics and scholars such as Swami Vivekananda seem to have integrated some of Christianity’s tenents into Hinduism, but re-fashioning Hinduism to be both militant and charitable. Hindus decided that they ought to make Hinduism a more respected religion by committing to charity, feeding the poor, things that their Christian colonial rulers would both respect and admire. They felt the best way to preserve Hinduism was to have it’s scholars go west and share some of it’s wisdom with intellectuals. For Africans and Indians, they began to look at their history and accomplishments to find achievements on par with European innovations. It seems that the idea of a pan-tribalism was an artificial creation by European colonial powers. There probably were tribes, but not to the extent that they were tribes after Europeans forced them to be defined due to asking Africans to state their tribe and family groups on legal documents, and work applications et cetera. It’s really been a major problem in African history in modern times because this lead to national states in that post-colonial era, which conflagated into conflicts between peoples that both hadn’t existed as tribes in the past or they didn’t get along to begin with.

 Some hoped living a European lifestyle would somehow afford them more equality with whites, but not a clear cut equality. Some felt that by embracing European culture that they could somehow uses the tools of European laws and culture to reinvigorate their own sense of nationalism. Some Vietnamese leaders like Nguyen Thai Hoc, who was executed for crimes against the French believed until the end that they could will the colonial system to achieve their own political ends. The leader who would later lead North Vietnam, Ho Chi Min actually attended the Post-World War I peace talks hoping he could use European political venues to legally petition the European powers to grant Vietnam independence, long before he was ever a communist:  http://isq.sagepub.com/content/12/1/133.extract

Strayer: CH 20: Colonial Encounters:pp. 589 - 606

I was somewhat surprised to open this chapter and see it begin with a first person perspective. But, who decided to write this narrative in first person. Perhaps Strayer, himself? The author doesn’t say for sure. It seems odd that some Kenyans wouldn’t speak their native languages with their fellow Kenyans where Europeans were around. Apparently colonial authorities had fears and prejudices about teaching English to Africans because they were afraid that they’d learn how to seduce White women and corrupt their virtue. Of course, you don’t have to look to Africa to find these kind of irrational fears. The 1915 film, “Birth of A Nation” propogated these same fears. It is perhaps a holdover from slavery when there were fears about slaves having education. Instead, the British like Americans employed segregation in their African colonies, in which there was an insolated world for Whites and a separate world from natives.

There was also a second wave of colonialism in Africa and Asia after the European powers had their way with the New World and had decimated the native populations there. Now they turned their eyes eastward. Europeans found with their newfound industrial wealth and powerful, modern armies to secure more resources that they could annex and conquer more territories. Perhaps the simply wanted direct access to the resources rather than go through the whole trouble of the triangle trades to get spices and raw materials from Asian and African middlemen. So, but conquering territories in Asia and Africa they were cutting the middlemen out of the picture. The Europeans had just begun to develop primitive automatic machine guns that decimated their Asian and African advisories. Africans were however reduced by 75% in population by European diseases. They like Native Americans had relatively few if any immunities to European diseases introduced into their respective areas. It wasn’t necessarily easy for Europeans to conquer new territories in Africa and the Asia, but it wasn’t really difficult either these new forms of munitions. Tribal groups became dominated and Hindus in India, for example simply saw the British as one empire taking the place of their Mughal overlords of times past. The Europeans in some places practiced similar divide and conquer tactics that the conquistadors had employed in the new world by getting rival states that hated the empires dominating them to join Europeans in toppling the empires they were trying to conquer, such as the case in Indonesia, for example. In places like Australia and New Zealand, the British employed a philosophy of “Terra Nellius,” meaning “no man’s land” because the British didn’t recognize the Aborigines as having any property rights analogous to European ideas of land ownership, so they took land with the belief that it never belonged to anyone. Aborigines themselves didn’t even make significant gains in acquiring lands back that had been taken from them until the case of Mabo in Australia during the early 1990’s: http://www.nfsa.gov.au/digitallearning/mabo/tn_01.shtml

Of course, some Asian powers were doing their own imperialism. Japan in this era also began to annex territories in Taiwan and Korea, for example. U.S. and Russian expansion also brought many Asians under the influence of European dominance.

Strayer, Marx

There were a variety of ways that the working class addresses the monotony of industrial life. By 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Era, about one million workers, mostly artisans had created a series of societies that acted as self-help groups for workers. These organizations seem to be the framework for the notion of unions that would come about legally a few years later. The first labor unionists were mostly artisans. These unions at first weren’t fighting for labor rights, but merely helping the defray the shared costs of such things as insurance and paying for funerals. Others within the political spheres of influence joined to achieve lasting change in the areas of better working conditions and better wages for example, once the laws of England permitted unions to be legalized by 1824. Local strikes were fermented, but ultimately, national strikes in Britain were aimed for. The British upper classes were quite alarmed and not really understanding the union movements, first the newspapers perpetuated the believe amongst the upper classes that the unions were a threat to society even though the unions became more respectable organizations over time. Socialist ideas don’t seem to have began with Karl Marx interestingly. A textile mill owner named Robert Owen seems to have promoted the idea of a cooperative, in which the workers decided collectively by vote what the means and mode of production were in terms of conditions, hours and pay et cetera. He established a 10 hour work day, housing for workers, standardized wages, and even education for the workers children.

Marx, however would have a more last impact the trajectory of labor rights. Although he was German by birth, most of his life experience that dealt with the consequences of the industrial revolution occurred while he lived in England. He wrote extensively of these labor conditions that he witnessed as well as economic ideas and economic critiques that he formulated in his books such as the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. For Marx, religion had to be removed from the equation to realize that man’s trajectory wasn’t in God’s hands, but rather if there was no God then mans existence must therefore be based on the idea of class struggle. The hostilities began between the bourgeoisie who owned the industrial capital and the proletariat, his term for the industrial labor class. Class struggle was at the heart of socio-economic problems in society according to Marx. Marx felt that capitalist societies could never deliver utopian ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality that the working classes yearned for because in capitalism societies the division of labor, resources, property rights could never be equally distributed amongst the classes, which created hostility between the classes. He felt that capitalism was doomed to collapse inevitably. Marx thought that once revolutions overthrew the capitalist societies that the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution would be implemented to serve the best interests of the entire labor force. By the later part of the 19^th Century radical trade unionists, intellectuals, from the middle class embraced Marx’s ideas. And as other European countries like German caught up with the Industrial Revolution, his ideas spread to those countries. And soon labor rights parties sprung up to address the problems of the industrial age, workers rights along the lines of Marx’ ideas. 

Strayer: The Industrial Revolution

It’s interesting to note that Gandhi said that he thought “Industrialization was a curse” and that he was concerned that adopting western style Industrialization would be bad for India. As if he thought that rapid industrialization would somehow encourage India to want imperialistic ambitions in which they might imperialize others as the British had imperialized them. Of course, India was also an industrial wasteland that looked like something out of a Charles Dickens novel due to the air and industrial pollution according to Strayer.  India had long been a center of cotton production and where the sugar industry originated in the past. But, China was were at least a proto version of the Industrial Revolution began circa 1200 A.D. But, it’s an enigma by many historians why the Industrial Revolution receeded into Chinese history nor spread beyond its borders. However, by the Industrial Revolution it began to spread to Japan, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, but not at the same times, and not equally distributed in terms of innovation and wealth. Britain was the place where it had all began. Amazingly between 1750 – 1900 there was a fiftyfold increase in industrial output and wealth that couldn’t have been imagined in previous eras. There were several innovations, especially in the textile industry that allowed the Industrial revolution to occur when it did. There was a large increase in the production of the telegraph, pottery, rubber, printing, and even a lot more agricultural production. The Industrial Revolution was coupled with charters and private enterprise contracts given by European powers to take trade expedition to the far reaches of the known world. Holland, England, Portugal, France, and Spain were some of these players on the world stage. Missionaries also went along with the trade expeditions. In the Americas Europeans exploited a lot of raw materials such as cotton, gold and silver. Britain was the most commercialized country in Europe at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Technological innovations such as crop rotations, selective breeding of animals, lighter plows increased food productivity, which in turn increased population growth and demand for raw materials. Because England was an island and hadn’t been invaded since the Norman Conquest, technological innovations weren’t halted. I hadn’t thought of that reason for the Industrial Revolution occurring in England before, but it makes sense because similarly, Ireland for a period during the Dark Ages had isolated islands with monasteries where the only books were being reproduced while the rest of Europe was under siege from barbarians. A decline in landownership aristocracy and the rise of power and influence of businessmen within the aristocracy also contributed to the increase in strength of the Industrial Revolution. The Middle Class also saw a rise in their stature, and could gradually join the aristocracy. They were shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, intellectuals, that were liberals. Not liberals in the sense of Democrats vs. Republicans, but in the European sense, liberals who favored a stronger constitutional monarchy. Whereas, if one said they were a “conservative,” it meant they favored a stronger monarchy.

507 - 524 Strayer: Haitian and Spanish/Portugese New World Revolutions

It’s amazing that the French colonists in Haiti only numbered 40,000 compared to 500,000 slaves. It’s a wonder that the slaves didn’t overthrow their French oppressors sooner than they did. Like in the U.S. there were also couleur libres (‘mixed race’) or what we once referred to as mulato. Strayer implies that the timing of the revolution in Haiti coincided with the events of the French Revolution. Perhaps the African slaves felt with all the chaos in France that the French couldn’t send reinforcements to put down the revolt. I knew the revolt happened. I just never made the connection of the Haitian revolution with the events of the French Revolution. The poorer whites weren’t very supportive of the richer white aristocracy in Haiti, who held most of the wealth and the slaves.  But, the richer whites and the poorer whites in Haiti didn’t believe in the freedom of the slaves in Haiti. I recall that the U.S. put trade and travel restrictions on Haiti because they saw the thousands of plantations destroyed and whites massacred in Haiti, and feared the Black Haitians might inspire similar revolts in the United States. The Haitian blacks redistributed what was left of the infrastructure and lands amongst themselves, but in the malee they had destroyed so much of the plantation system, it’s crops such as coffee, sugar etc., that there wasn’t much left for the freed slaves to use to bring themselves up out of poverty..

The Spanish revolutions began in earnest between 1810 – 1825 mostly because there was a lack of fair and equitable land redistribution and inheritance rights amongst the creoles, the Spanish citizens born from  peninsulares heritage. The peninsulares tended to always get the best land rights, always going to them first in legal matters of inheritance. Unfortunately the Spanish inhabitants had little in the way of experience in that of self-government to create democratic institutions. The Creoles didn’t at first strongly desire revolutionary movements. The revolutions were events taken advantage of by Napoleon invading Spain and Portugal in 1808. The Portugese and Spanish monarchies either chose to be collaborators, in the case of the Portugese, they moved their royal court to Brazilia for a time. A lot of the revolutionary zeal amongst the Spanish colonies tended to relate to hunger for more land and high food prices. In other revolutions in history land and food prices often play a strong role in these movements. The Haitian and French Revolutions made the Spanish elites and Portugese elites more wary of it getting out of hand, so they didn’t support the revolutionary movements as emphatically as the poorer classes. 

Strayer, Part 5, pp 504 - 508: The French Revolution

The French Revolution can be thought of as a consequence of the American Revolution; if the American Revolution hadn’t occurred, maybe the French Revolution wouldn’t have transpired the way it had. Jefferson was sort of passive about the affair. He didn’t goad the French masses to overthrow the monarchy. He stayed out of history’s way. Ironically, if the French monarchy had known the American Revolution would inspire a revolution at home, one wonders if they’d have been as keen to support the American cause? The Third Estate met as a last hurrah to stave off the revolution, but they didn’t have the consent of the majority because the first two estates, the clergy & nobility left the peasantry out of the political process in writing a new political future for France.  Although, they still managed to come up with the Declaration of The Rights of Man, which was loosely based on American revolutionary codices. The French Revolution was a much more violent and bloody affair because unlike the American Revolution, the nobility were attacked closer to home rather than the peasantry attacking an incoming force they saw as invaders. The peasants, aside from being aggrieved by the lack of political representation were also angry about strict controls upon their movement that resembled Russian serfdom, and that they had to pay crushing taxes to the church and state. At first there was an attempt to keep the monarchy under constitutional authority, but once the king and queen were caught fleeing to Austria to get military help, they were seen as traitorous to the French people. So, that idea was pretty much taken off the table. Thus, much of the legal prohibitions and heavy taxation that permitted the serfdom to exist were swept away by measures undertaken by the national assembly. Perhaps one of the most profound changes from the old feudal order was the implementation of male suffrage (although women didn’t get the right to vote in France until 1945). There was also several regions or “departments” established to give areas more regional autonomy within the country, to weaken the absolute strength of the state. Streets and monuments were renamed and noble titles practically vanished overnight. A lot of citizens joined political clubs. And for a time the state replaced the church as the ultimate authority for registering births, marriages, and deaths. It was almost like a state-mandated Atheism; for example, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was for a time renamed “The Temple of Reason,” for example.” Although, the Catholic Church wasn’t completally cast out of society. It just became more subservient to the revolutionary ideals of the French Enlightenment. Napoleon didn’t start out trying to be an emperor, but rather he came into the foray of French politics by attempting to quell riots and social unrest. He was responsible for introducing things such as the Napoleonic Code, which was secular in nature, but he also suppressed some democratic elements of the French Revolution. He was instrumental in eliminating feudalism, and called for religious tolerance amongst many of the measures he implemented.