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Warring States

Filbert Catkins in January

The Indian civilization of the northwest reminds me of the Warring States (476 – 221 BCE) period in China. The Warring States was a dark interlude in the train of China’s history, which, unlike Western history, is a continuous sequence of dynasties. The government in China today is in a succession of dynasties that goes back at least to the Shang Dynasty whose traditional end was 1122 BCE. The Shangs left a literary legacy of inscriptions on ox scapulae and turtle shells that are an early form of the Chinese characters that are used today. The Shang was followed by the Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties. The Zhou left a few books and lengthy inscriptions on wonderful bronze castings. The Warring States were the last two hundred or so years of the Eastern Zhou. My mentor, Herrlee Creel, was one of the first historians to make use of Zhou bronze inscriptions, and I spent a few delightful years under his direction studying the Warring States, the chaotic period when the power of the Zhou kings was no longer adequate to establish order in the north China plain.

The Warring States is almost always described as a period of cruelty, treachery, and unprincipled ambition. The orderly civilization that Chinese historians saw in records of the Zhou dynasty disintegrated into a cluster of warring small states, each trying to get the best of the others. But the Warring States was the period when the great schools of Chinese philosophy and political theory became established. Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, and military strategy all evolved rapidly while the states warred. Revenge, spite, and bloody battles are found on every page of the history of the period, along with intense intellectual ferment and a desire to return to the orderly days of the Zhou.

The Warring States period was ended by the leader of the warring states, Chin. Chin unified the states into as single state in 221 BCE, recalling the glory of Zhou. Unfortunately, the first ruler of the unified state was a cruel tyrant and could not hold power. He was replaced by the Han Dynasty, which was the first dynasty for which we have a detailed written history. From the Han on, recording of dynastic history was an important function of government. This began a long succession of great historic dynasties. Although the current regime in China may not be ready to acknowledge it, they are the current representative of a long line of mighty dynasties.

I believe that the modern world that we enjoy today owes as great a debt to Warring States China as it does to the golden age of the Greek philosophers. Surprisingly, Socrates ( 469 BCE–399 BCE) and Confucius (551 BCE – 479 BCE) were almost contemporaries.

But back to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Before the coming of the white men, the Bostons as they were called, the northwest Indians lived in idyllic splendor. Unlike the Indians of plains who had to scramble for survival, on the northwest coast, food was abundant. Swarms of salmon, halibut, and sea mammals were easily harvested and preserved. Clams, oysters, crabs, and other seafood were lying on the beach. There was no struggle to survive.

The Indians were able to skip agriculture and move on directly to a settled life of huge long houses and mighty totemic art. And they warred continuously, fighting over territory, fishing grounds, and slaves. They were a collection of warring states. It is easy to speculate on what they could have accomplished if they had a written language, or a more organized religion, or indigenous iron, but that kind of speculation only leads to a round of back patting among Europeans who reaped the supposed benefits.

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Education

My grandfather was in his late teens when he hid under the straw in railroad car packed with the family’s cattle, farm equipment, and household goods for the trip from Blue Earth Minnesota to Bellingham. The railroad allowed one person to ride in the car to tend to the cattle. That place was taken by my grandfather’s older brother. Grandpa had to dive under the cattle bedding when the railroad inspectors came around. When the railroad car arrived at the siding in Bellingham, they opened the door, and a chicken, seeing Bellingham Bay, flew squawking out into the water and was never seen again.

Schooled enough to survive, my grandfather was not refined. He chewed tobacco, leaving a trail of brown saliva wherever he went. My mother said he never used an indoor toilet, preferring the woods. He seldom bathed, usually smelled of manure and wore overalls for all occasions occasions but church. For entertainment, my grandmother read to him in German.

My grandfather’s father, Gottlieb, was a devout Lutheran who pored over his cherished complete works of Martin Luther. He did not transmit his piety to any of his children except my grandfather, who was the least prepared or inclined toward theology. My grandmother told me the only time my grandfather rested was in church.

From Gottlieb to my grandfather, the family slipped down a notch in culture and refinement. In Germany, Gottlieb was an educated man without a heritage. He built his heritage by emigrating to America and using the skills he gained through education to become a landowner. Even in landowning, Gottlieb exceeded my grandfather. My grandfather owned forty acres. Gottlieb originally owned one hundred sixty acres, some of which he later sold.

It is easy to attribute this slip to the years spent in Minnesota. Gottlieb’s younger brother emigrated a few years after Gottlieb and joined him in the car yards. But the younger brother skipped Minnesota and went directly to Whatcom County. It was the younger brother’s reports of Whatcom County that brought Gottlieb. The younger brother’s children got more than a third grade education, graduating from high school and college, and eventually becoming teachers and university professors.

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Jack London: The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss is another non-fiction piece by Jack London that I enjoyed so much, I decided to post it in the Vine Maple Studio.

Winter sunshine
Winter sunshine

Jack London was fascinating and more influential than most people realize. I am not a Jack London fan by choice. In the seventies, I went through a phase in which I collected old paperback editions of London’s books. At first, it was a sort of nostalgia for the adventures I enjoyed as a boy. But eventually, I read one too many of his worst potboilers, and decided to drop the effort.

Now, I approach Jack London warily, but I happened to read The Cruise of Snark about a year ago and enjoyed it. Later, I posted it in Vine Maple Studio. This lead me to look again at The People of the Abyss when I happened to be looking through the Jack London list on Gutenberg, although with much initial doubt.

The book Black Like Me came out while I was in high school. It was popular among the intelligentsia of Ferndale High School, but I was repulsed: the masquerade demeaned both the masquerader and the subject of the masquerade. I was equally unimpressed when fifteen years later, Jerry Brown “spent the night in the ghetto.” Anyone who ventures into an impoverished milieu with a publishing contract or an election in mind is a target for charges of insincerity or worse.

I went through my own immersion experience, made more intense by my naiveté, when I was barely eighteen. I got on a train and rode from the farm that is home to the Vine Maple Studio to the south side of Chicago, staying for seven years. I gained no profound insight into the human condition, but I endured disconnection and bewilderment that came from forced interaction with lives that were constrained and driven by poverty that I could not have imagined without direct exposure.

The People of the Abyss is an account of Jack London’s months long sojourn in the slums of London’s East End at the turn of the nineteenth century. The East End was the most infamous slum of London, the backdrop for Oliver Twist and other Dickens novels, and the location of the Jack the Ripper murders, and a wellspring of crime, vice, and degradation. If there was a worse place on earth, Jack London would have argued the assertion down.

The book was, on one level, a journalistic stunt.

But as a journalistic stunt, The People of the Abyss had good literary precedent. Mark Twain used the same stunt in The Prince and the Pauper and he was preceded by centuries in the Arabian Nights. The idea echoes through literature and folk tales.

At some point, original motivations are replaced by the demands of events. Jack London may have begun with a publishers check in mind and a smug desire to flaunt his moral superiority, but in the course of his visit to the East End, he compounded a raft of ideas in a way that contemporary journalists would do well to study carefully and modern politicians, economists and philosophers should be wary of. Within Jack London’s writing, indictments lurk that cannot be dismissed with pleasing phrases about character and initiative.

The People of the Abyss can be found many places on the Internet, but may find the choice of font and spacing on Vine Maple Studio more readable than other versions. Check it out here.