ecospirit

Among the many interesting connections for me at Geeta’s 50th Stanford Reunion last weekend was the "aha" moment I had during a lecture by the Stanford historian Priya Satia on “Samuel Galton, Quaker Gunmaker.” In 1795, Birmingham Meeting admonished Galton and his family for being gunmakers, after a quietist century of tolerating them. Galton was a central figure in the meeting, and a member of the Birmingham Enlightenment. He published a broadside in response, pointing to the naivete and hypocrisy of his Quaker peers in criticizing him for taking part in an activity in which all of them were complicit. He refused to be excommunicated, and continued to sit at his accustomed bench, coming early to Meeting and greeting his peers. He continued to give large donations to Birmingham Meeting, and they were accepted.

Satia’s analysis of the process of gunmaking in industrial Birmingham clarified anew for me the insidious nature of industrial capitalism. Galton’s foundry made several metal parts for the guns, as well as toys and sewing tool parts, nails, etc. But craftsmen made the gunstocks and others assembled the guns. The Quakers, like everyone else in England, were swept up in the “civilizing” effect of guns, which were not all that effective and mostly just brandished until they became more efficient late in the eighteenth century. Highwaymen, who would formerly cut one’s throat, were seen as “gentlemen” when they merely accosted travelers at gunpoint. Guns were just one manifestation of the bristling, burgeoning industrial revolution, and the many wars of the century were generally experienced as part of British national civilizing effort. Everything changed with the the Napoleonic Wars, and it became quickly clear aftter the British became involved in 1795 that guns were actually being aimed at living beings with the purpose of killing them, rather than ritualistic orderly firings in the general direction of the enemy. Murderous intent with more advanced weaponry made Birmingham Friends wake up to the truly non-pacifist nature of the tool.

What I realized from the historian’s careful analysis of the process of gunmaking over the eighteenth century was that the alienation of labor, as Marx put it, and its division into many different parts both removed the satisfaction of crafting one’s work s well as subtly displacing moral responsibility for one’s productions. This was true both for producer and consumer. We have inherited a hyper-evolved version of the early industrial model, with more and more steps and players, with both the sourcing of materials and the making of finished products now a worldwide web of material interactions. The process of making running shoes comes to mind, with a dizzying number of players all over the planet making a single shoe.

Galton, an intelligent and experienced factory owner, understood this process, while his fellow Quakers did not, making it much easier for them to blame Galton for his part in a process which the government had deliberately broken into many different components so this key industry could not be sabotaged by enemies. Even after 225 years, we still look at the tools of war as if they were separate from the rest of the industrial process, through which humankind is making war on the Earth (and using trade to periodically make war on others). We oversimplify, because we want to feel good, washing our hands of evildoing. But these evils are a multitude thoroughly intertwined with our entanglement with the capitalist machine.

At the end of the lecture, Geeta stood up to reaffirm Satia’s point about the complicity of all members of society in the creation of a nationalist citizenry entrained within the nascent industrial complex. She quoted John Woolman’s prescient words, “Let us look upon our treasure, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try to discover, whether the seeds of war are nourished by these our possessions.” The host for the lecture said to me afterwards that Geeta had perfectly summed up the lecturer’s point.

Woolman was a moral genius, seeing the implications of every separate action and pattern of economic behavior, and addressing those involved: Quaker slavers, Quaker owners of whaling vessels (Woolman calculated the rate of kill and said that it would not be too many decades before the whale population would be endangered), wearers of died clothing, users of whale oil. The list goes on and on. But Woolman’s life was only a small degree as embedded in the industrial complex as our own. To have the same degree of moral perspicuity as he would require us to be saints, if not avatars of moral insight, which would lead to lives very difficult to construct without a large local workforce (a large family, a good sized plot of land, and probably some animals, even if we had vegan inclinations).