Exploring the Orange Box

It’s been almost three years since the National Academy (’07 in da house!), so I’m not sure whether Will and Co. have progressed with the orange box or not.  Last I knew, there wasn’t any great philosopher linked to that great conundrum called civilization.

The word alone conjures the pulse of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”

At first thought, one word seems synonymous: empire.

Whether Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, or Indus, empires promote greed and xenophobia, excusing their behavior with riches and ethnocentrism.

Rudyard Kipling writes:

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild–

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Of course, Kipling’s infamous burden masks the exploitation of colonial subjects and their lands.  The poem verbalizes manifest destiny, those  magic words employed by empire to justify pillage.  (Subjects who can be assimilated into willing subjects are called children, while the devils’ resistance must be crushed.)

If Kipling’s poem illustrates the imperial compass, Sun Tzu’s brief, but powerful, The Art of War serves as the map for would-be dominion.  And here there be monsters: mafia, warlords, slayers, idols.  Certainly, some corporations might be added to that list, and it is interesting to note that Sun Tzu’s work remains a perennial “business” bestseller.

Hitler built his lies upon this template; he appealed broadly to a Master race, with ambitions too large for just the Germans.  Fueled by hatred, Hitler understood the fear of wilderness, remaking his scapegoats into aggressors so that his society would be just in their defense of the Aryan construct.  In the process, humanity fought back and, thankfully, won.

Greece’s Alexander may’ve been slightly better, in that he attempted to graft a braided culture of Hellenism onto Persia’s severed Gordian Knot.  (As Aristotle’s student, perhaps this was the yellow-box influence.  Still, this was an orange box with a firm “blue-box” fist, nothing close to constitutional government.)

In literature, George Orwell best explores the misconceived civilization.  The author knew the pitfalls of colonialism firsthand: as a policeman in Burma; then as a republican fighter in the Spanish Civil War, where he took a bullet to the throat.  Fortunately, Orwell did not just survive, but he lived to tell: he translated his being and becoming into print, illuminating abhorrence with truth.  1984‘s dystopia remains a phenomenal lens into the power of culture, while high schools in the U.S. have canonized Animal Farm for its political allegory.  Lesser known, but no less powerful, Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” relates the power struggle between ruler and subject.  The narrator, as a colonial officer in Mulmein, feels compelled to shoot an elephant, temporarily wild in heat:

To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

Human beings unable to escape such a complex might suffer the fall of Alexander Hamilton.  A poor, fatherless child of the British Caribbean, local leaders saw his potential and sponsored his education in New York.  He rose to become General Washington’s aide, then a founding member of the first Presidential cabinet.  As our first Treasurer, his principles allowed a young nation to flex incredible economic muscle, and later raised his countenance to the pantheon of U.S. currency.  More than any, his arc demonstrated the possibilities of America.

With his confessions of constructing a mighty American empire, the framer stands as a colossus, with one foot firmly in the orange box.  For me, the question yet remains where his other foot treads: the blue or the purple?  Reading Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention, it would be easy to peg Hamilton as the man who would be king.  However, I’m not so sure that Alexander Hamilton wasn’t playing Madison’s foil.  And, as proven by his work on The Federalist, he wasn’t so one-dimensional: that role belonged to Aaron Burr.

Hamilton recognized this dark side in his longtime rival.  In the historic, tie-breaking vote of 1800, he prevented Burr’s ascension to a would-be throne, proclaiming that at least Jefferson was honest.  Later, the pair’s duel at Weehawken would bring about a twin demise: Hamilton’s wound was fatal and took him in a day; while Burr’s wound was political, and would take three long years.

It must be said that Hamilton himself proved honest.  When enemies threatened to reveal his extramarital affair, he did the unprecedented, admitting his mistake publicly.  In the end, though, his reputation proved unable to withstand the tremors, and, more American sun than American son, Helios toppled.

No giant, Henry David Thoreau stands upon humbler ground.  And it is with Thoreau that I find the positive side to civilization: an honor worth upholding.  His words helped to fuel the abolitionist movement of the past in addition to the environmental movement of the present.  In fact, “Walden” and other excursions into the wilderness left the writer with a greater understanding of not just nature and humanity, but civilization as a whole.  Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” rippled, inspiring the great minds and non-violent activism of Gandhi and Martin Luther King: both rebels against empire and its churning mechanism and both willing to risk the disgrace of prison in the name of justice.

Whether Spartan slavery or Nazi genocide, no civilization can last through exclusion.  Even the United States had to reconstruct our civilization, in order to reunite our people as one truly free: a process that first quaked the earth with Civil War, and continues through milder aftershocks.

An example of recent controversy, the Confederate flag symbolizes the old-school, Dixie mentality that some try to explain as Southern honor.  The problem is that racism cannot be separated from the aristocracy: the crossed bars conjure images of burning crucifixes and stinging oppression.  The image only remains due to our respect for natural rights.  It is tolerated because our culture must be tolerant; for, to exclude, we would become that which we oppose.

Thoreau’s work illustrates the folly of walking the fence, a specialty of empire in its attempt to extract the most from any situation.  It’s the place where individual moral choices must take precedence over individual economic ones, for the time will always come when good must be chosen over power or the basic tenets of a civilization crumble.

In societies with a voice, Thoreau realized that one can not watch idly or ignore, for such languor corrupts the premise of a people.  Dr. King paraphrased it eloquently: “noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”  Could any notion better contradict the fallacy of empire than Thoreau’s theory spoken through the Drum Major for Peace?  It’s the very reason we can look at World War II and call it a good war, yet struggle to justify modern battles fought for other means.

Of course, the choice to be with us does not mean you must be against us, as suggested by President Bush.  Instead, real civilization models its behavior, leaving an open invitation to join when one is ready.  For more on this principle, please see  www.politicolor.com/2008/12/how-the-hobbes-stole-christmas/

The difference between “civilized society” and the great American experiment is our willingness to profess when we’re wrong.  Our version of honor lies in our ability to see and admit error, not to insist that we’re Right.  What makes the atrocities of Abu Ghraib so wretched is that Right is not the same as good.  The actions of our soldiers there came not under the panic of fire, but from an administration prepared to lower itself to terror.  Medieval behavior, both dishonorable and decidedly un-American, it shook down through the layers, all the way to our concept of civilization.

Our continuing re-write allows us to move forward, re-evaluate, and revise our core.  This process must remain open, democratic.  It is we: not us and them.  The scientific community has this notion right, with its open source sharing of knowledge and discovery, no matter what the language or political boundary.  This is why theory can be misunderstood: it claims not absolutes, yet remains open to new ideas.  As long as findings hold up to experiment, they join the hypothesis.

Like our Constitution, civilization must occasionally amend.  It must, for survival depends upon a tendency toward justice, not justification.  A static, authoritarian reputation only breaks; while a yielding, yet authoritative honor allows room to bend.