Nancy's War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part six. Thomas Jefferson and the Origin of Democracy

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels (Nancy's War) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. The first novel is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

 

One of the great white admirers of the Cherokees was Thomas Jefferson, long before he was president, long before he wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, back when he was a student at the College of William and Mary. He heard the Cherokee leader Ostenaco giving a speech to his tribe. He was a surveyor like his father Peter, and Ostenaco had been a frequent guest at his house. Jefferson was deeply impressed by the way Ostenaco commanded the assent of his tribe without the use of force, but just persuasion. If the Cherokee tribe can do this, why can’t European colonists create a democracy in North America?

Is it too much to say that the Cherokees inspired the concept of democracy in the mind of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson admitted as much in his writings, and Rice champions this viewpoint in his novel. Jefferson really said most of these things that Rice put into the novel. In particular, I found an almost word-for-word excerpt of an 1810 Jefferson letter to Governor Langston online. I am glad this quotation has been saved from historical obscurity. Apparently Rice just made up the part about Henry VIII, who was so fat that Dr. Newton should have taken his mass into account when calculating the orbit of the Earth; “but I digress,” Jefferson ends. Rice got into Jefferson’s mind.

To Nancy Ward, Thomas Jefferson was just Peter Jefferson’s little boy who had grown up and done something or other, she wasn’t sure what.

Some Thoughts on July 4

July 4 is when Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, even though they know very little about it.

In the weeks leading up to July 4, 1776, white European or European-derived men met together in Philadelphia to figure out a system of government that, it must be admitted even by its critics, had not been seen before in Europe, Asia, or Africa.

One characteristic of this system of government is that, the Founding Fathers claimed, it was based on the laws of nature. Thomas Jefferson was particularly clear on this point. Democracy is essential for a healthy nation. Jefferson pointed out that, in Europe, many centuries of inbreeding (though he did not use this term) had produced a nobility and royalty that consisted of defective people. In other words, we would say today, the scum rises to the top. Jefferson was personally acquainted with at least a dozen European rulers who were mentally and physically defective. The fresh water of democracy must be allowed in to flush out defective rulers. Not necessarily all of them, but most of them, by putting them in competition with the superior men (they still ignored women) who worked their way up from the middle and perhaps even lower class. This was almost a century before Darwin and natural selection, but the rudimentary idea of natural selection was well understood by almost everyone: rulership by the superior white men who had proved their superiority, not just inherited it.

But in other fundamental ways the Declaration was profoundly flawed. One of these ways was that the Founding Fathers pretended that they got their ideas from European philosophers. To them, the Native Americans were just savages who had essentially no organized government. However, it was clear to them, though they rarely admitted it, that the kind of government they wanted to create was already in existence among Native American tribes, who made their decisions based on (as close as they could get to) consensus among the villages that made up the tribes or even entire coalitions like the Iroquois Confederacy. Jefferson and Franklin admitted it in writing.

The Founding Fathers created a form of government that was new to whites, but already existed among Natives. But it started with a strong momentum of violent racism which we are, even today, trying to eliminate.

Another major flaw is that the system is more fragile than we normally admit. When someone asked Franklin whether America would have a democracy or a kingdom, Franklin answered, “a democracy, if you can keep it.” Today, about half of Americans are worried that the other half will support a presidential candidate who is poised to destroy constitutional democracy. Trump will not recognize the legitimacy of any election—even before it has occurred—that does not choose him as its winner.

Science and Democracy: Confusion

I read a pre-publication copy of a book about attacks on science and on democracy, to be published soon by a company that has published two of my books. Because I do not want to give bad publicity to this publisher, I will give no further identification of the book.

The book has no overall theme, because it is a collection of essays from different authors, each one writing whatever he or she wants. The essays contradict one another. That is fine, and is part of the appeal of a multi-author edited volume. One possible theme is that both science and democracy are being attacked by the same people and for the same reason: the so-called conservatives want to control the world, and they want to brush aside or destroy any criticism they may receive from scientists. Another possible theme is that science is essential to a functional democracy: citizens without access to reliable knowledge cannot make the right decisions for running their society. Along these lines, essays range from the extremely pedantic (e.g., John Dewey would not have approved of the modern attacks on science) to leftist pot-shots, with which I agree but I would prefer to make my own rather than to read someone else’s. I may throw potshots into this blog but I try to leave them out of my books.

I see two major problems with all of the essays in this volume. First, there is the assumption that science is essential to democracy. This is true. It was certainly what the Founding Fathers envisioned, especially the very scientifically literate Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The first presidents, all Enlightenment figures, governed with the spirit of scientific reason, even though they were sometimes wrong. But, starting with Andrew Jackson, everything got messed up and has remained messed up ever since. Andrew Jackson despised scientific knowledge, or any knowledge at all. Even when he was shown that the Cherokee tribe had adopted the advancements of civilization, he continued to call them savages and insist that their land be taken by white people. He simply would not look at the facts in front of him. That is exactly what Donald Trump does today. Trump has a painting of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. To discuss the importance of science to democracy is so Enlightenment and has been an irrelevant topic in American politics for almost two hundred years.

A more important problem is that all of the warring approaches to the relationship between science and democracy, whether positivism or Popperianism or Deweyanism or post-modernism or whatever, totally ignore the evolution of the human brain. As I point out in my new book Scientifically Thinking, the human brain did not evolve to reason. It evolved to rationalize in such a way as to promote the evolutionary success of the person with that brain. The human brain creates illusions that may or may not bear any resemblance to the real scientific world. That is, without science, the human brain is open to infection by any and every kind of delusion, whether from the right or from the left. Ideas live in human brains as organisms live in habitats, and the successful ideas are not necessarily the ones that are right but the ones that, for any reason or no reason, people like.

As I plowed through all the approaches to science and democracy in this book, I wondered, which approach is right? Probably none of them.

Seeing Fossils

My wife and I spent part of July 4 the way Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would have approved of: we went looking for fossils. We walked on the Quaternary alluvial bed of the Arkansas River in Tulsa. We have been there many times, but all we saw, or thought we saw, was sand, smooth stones, broken glass (some of it smoothed by abrasion), ultraviolet-bleached plastic, shopping carts, and miscellaneous embarrassing items. But this time we looked for, and therefore saw, things we had previously overlooked.

One thing we found was coal. Just a few fragments of it. We do not know if it washed down from coal deposits no longer being mined, or from piles of coal. That’s the think about alluvial deposits, especially for a major river: you know almost nothing about where they came from. And we saw a few fossils, such as this one of crinoids.

But another experience we had was the opposite of seeing what we had previously overlooked. We saw some rocks that we might have imagined to have fossils in them. Just the day before, I had examined fossil deposits along Lake Oologah north of Claremore, Oklahoma, and I saw what I thought was a fossilized stem. It was a different color from the surrounding matrix and had parallel ridges that looked like wood grain. Then I noticed that the ridges extended past the differently-colored region. I also found what looked like a weird animal fossil. What a strange shape! I’m not going to tell you what it looked like, but it was something that it most definitely could not have been. What we saw among the rocks in the riverbed were structures that we imagined might be fossils. One of them looked like stromatolite layers, with just the right waviness that could not be explained as ripple marks. Were we just imagining this to be a piece of stromatolite? And the thing that looked like a fragment of fish backbone and ribs. Well, isn’t that what we expected to find?

This brings up, again, the important point that the human mind sees what it expects to see, whether (in this case) the absence of fossils or their abundance. Once we started looking for fossils, I wanted to find at least one every ten minutes or so, in order to feel that I was having a good time. Fossils have always been a good medium for observer bias. Today we laugh at medieval people who thought that cephalopod shell fossils were actually thunderbolts turned into stone. But we are no different from those people in seeing what we expect to see. It is sort of like e e cummings who said, so whatever we lose like a you or a me it’s always ourselves we find in the sea, or in this case, the sand of a river bottom.

Thomas Jefferson's birthday

Thomas Jefferson may well have been the president that most strongly supported scholarship in general and science in particular. He was just as proud of being the founder of the University of Virginia as of being the third president. The Lewis and Clark expedition, which Jefferson organized and funded as president, was primarily a scientific expedition to explore, rather than a military expedition to conquer, the Louisiana Purchase. He kept copious notes of a scientific nature (though science in its modern form did not yet exist), and his reputation as an inventor is or should be well known to everyone.

When President Kennedy hosted Nobel laureates at the White House, he said that event was the greatest concentration of brain power that there had ever been in the White House, except when Jefferson dined there alone. But it is not just that Jefferson was smart. There were lots of other smart people involved in the founding of our nation. But he had a zeal for getting new and reliable information upon which to base human activities, especially farming, which was and is the basis of the world economy. He had trouble letting go of precious theories—he probably never quite believed that mammoths really had become extinct, and was hoping the Lewis and Clark expedition would find some—but was more open to new information than nearly anyone else then or now. It was this attitude of openness that led scholars, decades after Jefferson’s death, to finally accept evolutionary science. Jefferson did not accept evolution, because during his lifetime the evidence for it was not very good.

Conservatives do not like Jefferson. I believe that this is partly due to the fact that, to conservatives, it is not important what you know, but just what you believe. Conservatives generally think that you should impose your beliefs on the facts, rather than letting the facts lead you to your beliefs. They fear new information and, in many cases, attempt to suppress it. They also strongly resent the fact that Jefferson did not believe in conventional Christian theology, although he was by no means what we would today call an agnostic or atheist. This is the principal reason that the Texas Board of Education attempted to expunge much of the information about Jefferson from the educational standards in high schools. Conservatives are threatened by Thomas Jefferson and people like him.