`Ping Pong 8 - Ode to Winstanley
A question which haunts history is whether or not the English Civil War really matters to the development of the modern state, and if it did not, then why does it still matter? The problem here is a very complex one. On the meta level, one might think that a series of events that lasted the best part of twenty years, in which time a king was defeated twice in open battle, then tried and executed; in which Britain moved one step closer towards empire and union; and in which for a time at least parliament seemed supreme, really ought to matter. And yet the settlement in 1666 which saw Charles II restored to his throne was a profoundly negative one. It merely set the constitutional clock back as if the Civil War had never happened. - As if it did not matter. The revolution that then shaped the English (and therefore American) constitution was not the one of 1640, but that of the far more measured aristocratic coup of 1688. So it remains a real question, what did the English Civil War really achieve?
Perhaps to answer these questions, one cannot do worse than look at the reactions of the generations who either lived through or immediately following after, the Civil War. One can detect three clear and deep influences in these reactions.
Firstly, and most noticed at the time, the English Civil War was very much an ‘Iraq moment’ for the Seventeenth Century. That is, it was the moment at which a policy which might have worked, becomes unthinkable because the one time it was tried it produced anarchy. This move allows one to understand exactly what it was about the English Civil War that was so very different. There had been rebellions, by what might loosely be called the urban classes before. Moreover these rebellions had been tied to religion. The obvious two examples being the protracted Hussite Rebellion in Bohemia in the Fifteenth Century, and in the Dutch Rebellion of the Sixteenth Century. These rebellions had been long and bloody affairs, which pitched armies of well disciplined co-believers against a centralized state.
On the face of it then, this is very much the case in the Civil War. The New Model Army was after all, moved by a quasi religious zeal, and fought under the banner of religion. And yet there the similarity breaks down, in that there is little evidence that the New Model Army were a religious army before the context of the war; that is, they were radicalized, within the fight. This was not then the rebellion of a religious minority against oppression, nor yet the action of a few devout believers determined at all costs to get their way. It was rather a conversion in the context of the discipline and death of a war of a large group of individuals who might otherwise be expected to have quite disparate beliefs and thoughts. What made the New Model Army so very different, was that it was an army whose members were gathered from any and every walk of life (the Regicide Harrison began life as a drayman’s man), all of whom were drawn together in the context of the anarchy of a war, and who then looked to religion for their social glue.
And yet, coming as they did from such different backgrounds, the religion which they found, was far from orthodox. On the contrary, the Army allowed (and Cromwell at times encouraged) many different religious sects, and so many different voices, to emerge. Everyone might then be drawn to religion, but that drawing produced not an orthodoxy, but rather an evolving and quick-fire conversation. A factor that was made possible, both because the Army had a very high degree of literacy, and by the sheer numbers of different pamphlets (more than at any other time) that were published in those days.
Here then was a real difference. In the previous rants, the issue of law versus tender conscience has been examined in detail. In rebellions loosely inspired by the Reformation, the initial inspiration was a movement of conscience. The world was suddenly felt to be wrong. And yet an answer was immediately found to answer that tender conscience, and a new orthodoxy imposed. In the case of the English Civil War, almost the opposite move was made. The New Model Army was inspired in the late 1640’s to unpick orthodoxies and laws. Tender Consciences were then pitched against a settlement of church and state; they were allowed their voice.
The result was a Babel howl of different voices, in which any and every plan could be unpicked and reworked, of other voices. No clear settlement could then emerge. The importance of this numerous cacophony was not lost on its contemporaries. Hobbes in his great book researching the origins of the Civil War – ‘Behemoth’, makes the slip into the anarchy of definition, the driving force behind the war. Once law and order had collapsed he says, then everyone was free to pull arguments towards their own interests (and for Hobbes, according to local petty calculations of self advantage), and the result was anarchy (an anarchy which only the ‘Leviathan’ of Cromwell or the monarchy could suppress or contain).
However it is clear in this account that something is missing. Hobbes can only understand the anarchy in terms of local self interests. He makes no attempt to understand how and where those interests came from. The reason for this is itself clear. Hobbes is aware of how much these interests shift and change in time, and in the climate of the debates, and the actions that surround those debates. And yet, opposed as he was to this anarchy, he makes no attempt to understand these shifts and changes of thinking. Rather, in imposing the censure of ‘self interest’ he not only discredits these changes, but also allows for, and naturalizes one particular self interest (that of a powerful robber chief or monarch) to take over. There was nothing special then in Cromwell’s usurpation of power. Cromwell, in following his interest was merely doing what all the rest were doing, and doing it better. Hobbes is then interested in understanding how this act of self interest by Cromwell had universal and by and large benign effects.
The subtext in this is very clear. The kind of anarchy which typified the Civil War was not, Hobbes is saying, of itself creative. Anarchies are merely the expression of self interest, and boring. What is interesting to the state at least, are the leaders that emerge out of those anarchies, and the order that these leaders naturally impose. Hobbes creates then, an opposition between the well ordered state that emerges in the context of a ‘strong man’, and an anarchy, which is theoretically uninteresting and destructive. In setting up this opposition, Hobbes inaugurates the sad history by which the modern state refuses to understand anarchies, and therefore either dismisses them (as too horrible to think of for long, as in Dafur or Somalia), or tries to solve them by the imposition of a ‘strong man’ (which was the point of Saddam Hussein, and the first American appointed prime minister to follow him). Modernity has therefore followed the Hobbesian lead of refusing to understand anarchy (and the creatures that inhabit it) in any other terms than self interest or evil (Bin Laden is evil, etc). A move which then of course prevents any serious engagement with the melting pots that such anarchies present.
Here then was the first great lesson which the Civil War taught its generation, and it is unfortunately a negative one: Do not meddle with anarchies, do not allow too free a debate, as one will never like the result. Or rather, one will never be able to engage with, or understand, the results.
The second serious engagement is one which will be returned to in subsequent rants. It revolves around attempting to use the Civil War as a paradigm to be picked over and dissected. Locke (but also Hobbes) therefore attempts to understand what went wrong and why, and how one might understand the nature of a revolution which might not dissolve into anarchy. The task of understanding the revolution was then for such thinkers, one of stripping out the order from the anarchy, and then allowing for how that order within the anarchy, might be given its own autonomy.
The import of these arguments was that anarchy was like a virgin territory to be exploited. It mattered then not at all whether that territory was North America (which appeared to lack government), or Ireland or England or Iraq for that matter. Anywhere where there was not a government (as one understood it) was open territory to the forces of law and order. Those forces had then the right to pitch up camp, and develop that anarchy. This ‘development’ took two main forms. On the one hand they had the right to transmute that anarchy into one likely to produce a more settled form of government. Capitalism or at least mercantilism was then always introduced as the natural heir to anarchy. On the other hand, the elements within that anarchy (be they chiefs or religions) that were akin to the ordered and settled institutions of the colonial power, were actively encouraged, while every other facet of the anarchy was suppressed.
The result was of course the creation of that Codex of political alchemy which formed at once imperialism and the sanctimonious beliefs that our actions were all for ‘their’ own good; which accompanied it. That is the belief which has ripped through the world from Locke to Bush, that we simply have a right to pitch up in any and every ‘anarchy’, and transmute it into capitalism, while suppressing what we do not like, and encouraging what we do. A process which we call (apparently without irony) freedom.
The third great lesson which the Civil War taught is the oddest of them all, and the one that was hardest to digest, both then and now. The real challenge of understanding the Civil War lies in the complex interaction between arguments and events. The twin arguments of Coke and Bacon discussed in the last rant were reformed and split in two main directions.
On the one hand there was a very creative temporal split. In this argument, events play the key role. At various times, elements of the New Model Army and / or parliament would attempt to thrash out what was going on, and who was in power. These debates were distinctly asymmetric. The party associated with Cromwell (and therefore the party that straddled the parliament-army divide) tended to use its position to dominate the debate. However the other side ensured that this usurpation was itself undermined, as they were the ones who published their own accounts of the affair. The result was acrimony and dissention, with one side ensuring that it won every debate (and so ending the matter) and the other out-evolving every imposed solution. What then holds together these parties, and makes the debates so interesting (and problematic) are a series of events, that bring together these elements in a sudden violent (and self interested) union. What is important here is the Second Civil War. The army, its officers, and the Parliament, suddenly realize that if they carry on debating, then the Royalists will again seize control. They come together, to fight (and again win). It is then these events, which drive the arguments on: As after the end of the Second Civil War, the position of the king cannot ever be what it was. His trial, while not inevitable, became more possible (and given his own intransigence even likely, although Cromwell probably does not personally decide on its necessity until three weeks or so before it is actually carried out).
Arguments are therefore swept along in a series of events. The events see the series of ‘solutions’ which at each and every time, the Grandees of the army seek to impose on the country, being dragged in the direction of the Babel howl (that is, the more radical voices which they had shouted down but not suppressed). However this adoption of radical policy was not a simple acceptance, but rather a usurpation; in becoming Regicides (and so accepting the radical’s argument) Cromwell (and Ireton) also remained Grandees. The Grandees therefore annexe the policies of the opposition. That is, in the best tradition of modern politics, the opposition is gradually turned into the stalking horse of the government. Its role is to throw up ideas, for the government to pick over, and take up as it wishes. And yet this taking up is never a simple adoption, but rather an act of usurpation, and corruption. In taking up elements of the opposition’s policies, the Grandees make those policies their own, and so destroy their radical heritage. The opposition thereby divide, as their policies are simultaneously taken up and destroyed.
The Civil War pilots that most modern of political phenomena; Event-driven politics. Events that then allow, under the rubric of a journey (for Cromwell, this was God’s will, for us it is a personal journey) which sees individuals gradually absorb the arguments associated with the other side, which they then take up as a response to events; and yet in taking up, destroy. New Labour was both the heir to and the destroyer of Thatcherism; whilst Cameron hopes to do the same to Brown (who of course retaliates).
On the other hand, the Civil War piloted another far quieter, and yet far more radical move. It discovered the principle by which an argument can, in the context of a series of different situations, be split up and used for diverse purposes. The arguments of Coke or Bacon only need say what their authors intended to, if they are tied to a fairly particular set of circumstances. When those circumstances are changed, the same words can become fiery, and burn a new light into the world. Moreover this process of transmutation allows the evolution of numerous small scale communities, each associated with a certain set of debates, and practices. A single theory can split off into numerous different inter-related sects. These sects will then communicate to one another across the lines of that theory (that is, through their differing interpretations of it), and in that communication can cross fertilize with one another, and so produce new ideas in each.
This is then the world which Winstanley hoped for: a World of numerous voices, and many separate Digger communities. Each such community could be run in their own way, and yet each was able to inspire and change the others, and be changed by them. The theories they shared at once divided them (in the particular application of it) and showed how they were different, and yet made those differences an inspiration to others. In this system, practice, that is, ways of life really matter. A theory is set as it is by the way that it intermeshes with the practice of one’s life (hence Diggers live in separate communities, all working for the same goal). In infusing this practice with theory and theory with practice, one enshrined one’s own difference from others, and one’s own method of creation, and yet, in the context of that theory, allowed this creation to be vivid and creative for others (who responded to it in their own ways).
What is more, Winstanley deserves credit for facing perhaps first in Human history, the problems of this viewpoint. It is all very well to envisage a community (in the true Marxian sense of the word), and all very easy in limited circumstances to create it. And yet it is difficult to keep the radicalness of ideas and beliefs alive in the context of people’s lives. That is radical communities make sense only as long as the people in them remain collective in their nature, and will to respond as a community. Once they do not (for whatever reason) the entire community becomes unpicked. It will tend to either resolve into the competition between individuals, or into a series of rules and regulations: That is, it will have to choose between laws or tender conscience. Or to put it another way, one does not have to be an acolyte of (imbecilic) human nature (we are all selfish don’t you know?) to understand that any community must always also allow for the fact that individuals are caught up in having to lead but a single life. A life which will pitch that individual’s interests at rather a different rhythm to that of the communities, whose life is always collective (and is, as it is collective, eternal). It is to Winstanley’s eternal credit that when faced with this problem, he does not try to impose his vision of order, but rather argues that one must stop at this point, and start again with a new community, in the hope that if only one tries again, one might produce a formula capable of squaring his particular circle. Of course three hundred and fifty years on from those joyous days of 1649, we are still looking for this magic formula. But the young Winstanley for one, urges us not (yet) to give up hope.
The Civil War is then, in its mystery and unclarity a very deep resource or rather partially obscured forge. It is the point at which the arguments which have been followed in the previous rants were melted down, and made something rather other than they were. Exactly what one thinks happened in that war, what it was about, becomes then always (also) about the products which one wanted it to produce. Different arguments look to it for different products, that is different amalgams of the previous arguments. It is then to these arguments that the next Rant turns.
