What’s Really Happening?

I have a number of remarks to make about David Brooks’s most recent NYT column, “The Great Affluence Fallacy”:

In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.

This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way.

The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.

Sometimes the Indians tried to forcibly return the colonials in a prisoner swap, and still the colonials refused to go. In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.

Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”

I first read about this history several months ago in Sebastian Junger’s excellent book “Tribe.” It has haunted me since. It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

What I have to say is not so much critiques as observations.

First, I think that any generalization about the relations between European settlers and the descendants of pre-Columbian Americans (called “Indians” in the remainder of my remarks) is suspect. They remind me of nothing so much as the old joke about the drunk searching for his lost keys under a lamppost rather than in the darkness of the stoop where he dropped them because the light was better there. Previous to about 1900, the records just aren’t good enough to support generalizations. Instead what you’ll get are judgments colored with political bias.

The Indians were divided into nations. Lumping these nations together and drawing broad conclusions is too reductive. The Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee tended to adopt European manners to a greater degree than, say, the Huron or Erie.

Second, I don’t think the wall dividing the descendants of the European settlers from Indians is quite as high or solid as Mr. Brooks apparently does. By the 18th century interactions between the settlers and the Indians had been going on for 200 years—eight generations. Let’s consider a single example.

When Columbus’s ships sighted land in the western hemisphere, as well as we can determine the horse had been extinct in the Americas for millennia. By 1700 the horse was an important part of the culture of the Indians in western North America. That means that by 1700 even in the far reaches of the West, the Indians had already adopted European manners to some degree.

Note, too, that the cross-pollination of cultures went both ways. By 1700 Americans had adopted Indian agricultural practices, ways of war, governmental structures, and, possibly, religious beliefs. If white Americans considered the Indians “savages”, so, too, did the Europeans consider white Americans.

Until the 20th century most Americans lived in small, rural, agrarian communities which were much more, well, community-oriented than cities in the 18th century let alone the 20th century. To whatever degree whites were impelled to join the Indians, I suspect it was more to find wives than because they hankered after a way of life that wasn’t as different from the one they’d left as Mr. Brooks seems to believe. Other than, possibly, it was less work. Any number of anthropological studies have found that hunter-gatherer-horticulturists spend less time working than agriculturists do.

Third, I think Mr. Brooks’s observations about millennials are suspect. That life in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is isolating has been noted frequently. That’s what the book Bowling Alone is about. Millennials have grown up in an environment of great isolation but also one of great choice. With 150 varieties of toothpaste and as many kinds of juice they could have what suited them. Or play The Little Mermaid for the 500th time.

I would also note that it’s a lot easier to be skeptical of or even hostile to affluence when you’re living in your parents’ basement.

My observation of businesses that consist largely of millennials is that they are not so much an attempt at building a community as they are like a gathering of Facebook friends. A self-selecting group of people who share common experiences, attitudes, and beliefs while heretics and non-conformists are driven out—unfriended. More The Midwich Cuckoos than Our Daily Bread.

Finally, I don’t much care if millennials find groups with diverse attitudes and beliefs uncomfortable so long as they allow me the same discretion.