FROM THE CARPATHIANS TO VIRGINIA / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

George Friedman’s Thoughts: From the Carpathians to Virginia

By: George Friedman


Last week, I wrote about two brothers who lived as enemies and stopped speaking to each other. They believed, and others concurred, that the breach between them was political because they were loyal to opposing political parties.

On the surface, this explanation for their rift seemed reasonable, but when you step back, you realize that the situation would have required intense debate but not a silence that lasted for decades.

And the silence was punctuated by extremely risky acts to save each other’s lives. One saved his brother from the communists; the other tried to save his brother from the anti-communists. If the silence between them was really about politics, why would either not only take such great risk to himself but also betray his fundamental beliefs?

This led me to think about other forces at work, the forces generated by the tensions that build up in families and create rifts not over issues but over one’s existential reality. In the case of the two brothers (my father and my uncle), it was a rift that derived from such primordial forces that neither appeared to me to be aware of them.

The political explanation overlaid this deeper one and had the virtue of making sense and relieving the brothers from the need to confront the unbearable pain that both endured in a childhood of loss and uncertainty. The political explanation was true but self-evidently insufficient to explain the agony and the acts of love and betrayal of political principles that took place.

I chose this very real example from my own childhood to make the case that understanding most human things requires an archaeological dig into the soul of humans, whether embedded in sub-Carpathian villages or in modern nation-states. The most important point is that neither brother chose the life they led. They were born where they were born.

The sense of jealousy and betrayal was produced by the nature of things. And neither understood fully why they lived as they did, nor why they risked so much for each other at a crucial moment.

Free will exists but only in those sunny and simple places where it is all comprehensible. It cannot exist in the dark corners of your life, when forces you barely sense compel you, because you are human and therefore live with the burdens that you barely remember.

Free will requires awareness, and all humans live in a world that gives them many things but rarely clarity on the question of how they have come to be who they are. We therefore live our lives propelled forward by forces barely remembered and poorly understood, making choices of lesser things.

Consider the founding of the United States, for the moment through one man: George Washington. Washington’s great grandfather, John Washington, arrived in Virginia in 1656.

John Washington’s father was a well-to-do Royalist and a don at Oxford who lost his wealth and his position as senior vicar to the Puritans during the English civil war.

After struggling in England, John Washington chose to go to Virginia, where he struggled to buy land and create his estate. His only vision of success was that of the landed aristocracy in England.

He wanted to own land, farmed by serfs or peasants bound to the land. There were no such peasants in Virginia so he used Africans instead. John and his descendants sought to emulate the life he had lost to the English wars.

They built a grand house, grew tobacco and cotton, and had overseers to handle the slaves.

They were reasonably educated but not so much as to be inappropriate to an Englishman.

John Washington came here with the bitterness of all of those who came to America. No one came to America because they were triumphant where they were born. They all came in a search, a risky one, for something better. But for all their bitterness from the place of their origins, their need to prove themselves always traced back to their homes. They wanted to show the world that they could capture the triumph that they deserved back in England or wherever they came from.

George Washington was born to the not-quite aristocracy of Virginia. With the service of African slaves, he lived, in his mind, as an English aristocrat would. He thought of himself, as his father and grandfather thought of themselves, as an Englishman and a nobleman without title but with all else. Washington was made a colonel in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War and was appalled to discover that the English officers, particularly Gen. Edward Braddock, had utter contempt for him and treated him as unworthy of all things he aspired to be.

The entire generation of the Virginia gentry was drawn into that war and realized that the English regarded them as beneath them. It was this generation that signed the Declaration of Independence because they discovered that they were American settlers and nothing more. Virginia and Massachusetts were the center of gravity of the revolution.

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon captured their insistence that they were as good as any English nobleman. In Massachusetts there was John Adams, the second president of the United States, who descended from Puritan clerics.

The history of this period politically was defined by the struggle between the ancestors of men like Washington, victims of the Puritans, and men like Adams, victims of the Anglican Papacy, as they referred to it. The battle was fought in the 17th century and renewed in America.

The struggle between John Washington and the Puritans was embedded in the United States and defined the Civil War, the struggle between New England abolitionists and Southern gentlemen. If we were to ask the signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution whether all this was over their bitterness at England’s betrayal of them and contempt at their perfect replication of England, or if we were to ask the combatants of the Civil War whether this was another round of fighting between Southern Royalists and Northern Puritans, they might be startled.

The political issues were real. Yet there was a deeper reality, far older and more painful, that is undeniable. Seeing the courtly Washington and the brusque Adams face off would be like seeing John Washington’s father confront the Puritans at Oxford. (Much of this is incidentally stolen from my new book, “The Storm Before the Calm,” so I have plagiarized myself.)

The Southern search for a noble life created the plantations of the South, slavery and a mode of living they thought of as equal to that of any English Lord. The Northern search for honest labor as a lawyer, carpenter or ship builder is a reminder of the class that the Puritans spoke for. The anger toward England and each other undergirded the extraordinary vision of the founders. Just as two half brothers carried with them the sense of victimization and malice hidden under very real political lives, so too did these men hide their sense of betrayal.

In the inescapable past coupled with current necessity, the behavior of nations can be understood.

Beneath politics, there are the real and compelling needs of the citizens, that are not, as we might believe, about gross domestic product but a murky sphere in which the core of life exists.