I *think* I get it, now...
When I was in high school, we basically learned one or two lines about Americaâs early experiments with government, before the 1789 Constitutional Convention. And it could be boiled down to:
We tried to emulate the Iroquois League of Five Nations (not their name for themselves. Their own name for themselves in Mohawk, is Haudenosaunee). But that ended up in near civil war between the states. So we had to start over with our Constitution.
But there was no explanation or discussion about why the Articles of the Confederacy didnât work, as the early Americans tried to implement them. Now that Iâm reading KayanerenkĂł:wa: The Great Law of Peace, by Kayanesenh Paul Williams, Iâm starting to get an inkling as to that âwhyâ.
The Great Law of Peace was a codification and extrapolation of already accepted and understood family relationships. But the family structures in the Haudenosaunee nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy are very different from those of the European diplomats who came to meet with them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The relationships within families were not the same as they were in European society. Children and wives were not property in any sense, and whereas in a European family of the eighteenth century the primary obligations were the childâs obedience and the parentâs providing, in a Haudenosaunee family that duty to obey was singularly lacking. Just as traditional Haudenosaunee government was not executive, and had no coercive power over the people, parents would not exercise authority over their children.
Kindle Edition.(location 5114 12241)
The Peacemaker understood that, for peace to exist, people must not only be rational but must also accept that other people are capable of rationality, for rational minds will seek, create, and maintain peace. The story of the making of the Great Law is thus also about ways of restoring people to rationality. It charts a map for a healthy society, not just for healthy individuals.
So: The European (mostly English) settlers on North America, who
they were emulating the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in their new form of government really were very much
Because A) their family structures were hierarchical and authoritarian, and the presumption of rational thought was restricted to a small fraction of the population (I.E. only wealthy, white, land-owning, adult men were thought to be capable of rational thought, instead of all of all humans, by the very nature of being human).
So â yeah. No wonder that fell apart. We tried to build our own longhouse without the first idea of how the architecture was put together.
Oh, and in case anyone tries to tell you that there is no way that a truly non-authoritarian, non hierarchical system of government can last more than a generation or two, you can just point out that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is still fully functioning after about 400 years. (Ibid location 255)
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