Liberation
Conspiracies By Rebecca Solnit: Full Article
MOTHERJONES
February 14, 2005
Liberation Conspiracies
By Rebecca Solnit
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Mark Lombardi's art consists of colossal drawings of networks of power,
connecting politicians, capitalists, and corporations into intricate
maps, like medieval cosmology or kabbalah diagrams, whose huge arcs and
circles linking the small handwritten names are as visually beautiful as
they are politically daunting. His most famous work was about the BCCI
(Bank of Credit and Commerce International, also known as the Bank of
Crooks and Criminals) banking scandal. It linked up the Bin Laden and
Bush families long before Fahrenheit 9/11, even before the 2000 election
and Bush's illegitimate apotheosis as president.
New York critic Frances Richard wrote of this
work:
"Lombardi's drawings -- which map in elegantly
visual terms the secret deals and suspect associations of financiers,
politicians, corporations, and governments -- dictate that the more
densely lines ray out from a given node, the more deeply that figure is
embroiled in the tale Lombardi tells. The drawing is done on pale
beige paper, in pencil. It follows a time-line, with dates arrayed
across three horizontal tiers. These in turn support arcs denoting
personal and corporate alliances, the whole comprising a skeletal resume
of George W. Bush's career in the oil business. In other words, the
drawing, like all Lombardi's work, is a post-Conceptual reinvention of
history painting.."
After September 11, 2001, the FBI visited the Whitney
Museum to examine his drawings for clues they might yield about the
conspiracy that gave rise to the catastrophe.
Lombardi committed suicide in March of 2000, for
complex reasons, but it's easy to imagine him as a character in a Jorge
Luis Borges story dying of Borgesian reasons. For his drawings recall
Borges's library of Babel, his Garden of Forking Paths, the Zohar,
Zeno's paradox or the aphorism by Pascal Borges loved, "The
universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is
nowhere." Borges's parables and stories are attempts to grasp the
infinite complexity of the world, and his version of Lombardi would have
died of despair of ever approximating the reach and intricacy of these
networks.
Lombardi's work is often regarded as evidence of
sinister conspiracies by people who assume that "they" are
thus linked up but "we" are not. We are, actually, at least
when we try to achieve anything political. Politics is networks,
rhizomes, roots, webs, to use a few of the popular metaphors from the
increasingly popular studies of complexity. A more cheerful Lombardi
might have charted the links that connect Naomi Klein, the Argentina
Horizontalidad populist movements against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas,
the Yucatan campesinos who opposed the WTO in Cancun in 2003, the
internationalistas who joined them, the US campus-based anti-sweatshop
movement, the Sierra Club, Arundhati Roy, anti-Monsanto agriculturalists
in India and Europe, on to Nigerian activists now shutting the
operations of Chevron (based in San Francisco) and San Francisco
activists against Bechtel Corporation (also based here), which links us
back to Bolivian activists who beat Bechtel a few years ago. (Thanks to
the Internet, speaking of networks, the global justice movement has been
able to link causes and confrontations into an unprecedented
meta-community able to act in concert internationally.)
In fact, right-wing think-tanks are probably lining up
these affiliations and solidarities right now and portraying them as a
conspiracy, as they have before. That's the rule of thumb: When we talk,
it's a network; when they talk, it's a conspiracy. The sinister thing
about Lombardi's BCCI drawing isn't that all these people, banks, and
governments a e linked up, but that they're linked up to screw you, me,
and the world. That is to say, it's complexity that makes the drawing
itself overwhelming, but intent that makes the denizens of the drawing
scary.
Awakenings and Coincidences
One can imagine the characters of Adam Hochschild's wonderful new
history, Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire's Slaves, as drawn by Lombardi, such is the complexity of the
network Hochschild depicts while tracing the British antislavery
movement from Quakers in London to slave rebellions in the Caribbean,
from the 1780s when the movement began to the final, long-delayed
abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1838. The book
is both a gripping history of a particular movement and a beautiful
embodiment of the erratic, unlikely ways movements unfold -- an
unfolding that consists of multiple kinds of linkages. If Lombardi's is
post-conceptualist history painting, Hochschild's book is likewise a
kind of post-Great Man history writing, one with crowds, coincidences,
and ocean currents looming up behind the key activists he delineates so
beautifully.
One kind of linkage is coincidence. Another is
friendship and the affinities of interests and emotions upon which
friendships are based. Bury the Chains begins, in fact, with two
remarkable series of coincidences that deliver up as their results two
of the principal activists against slavery. Granville Sharp was the
youngest of eight siblings who played music together and shared an
evangelical piety. King George III thought he had the best voice in
England. His brother, William Sharp, the king's physician, provided free
medical care to the London poor. Jonathan Strong, a slave whose owner
had pistol-whipped him viciously about the head and then threw him out
on the street to die, came for treatment. Granville happened to be
visiting that morning, and the brothers got Strong into a hospital;
then, after his months of convalescence, they found him a job with a
pharmacist. One day his owner encountered on the streets of London his
former property healthy and fit, seized Strong, and sold him to a
Jamaican plantation owner, arranging for him to be jailed until he could
be shipped to the West Indies. The Sharp brothers intervened and managed
to free him. "With this case," writes Hochschild, "the
thirty-two-year-old Granville Sharp became by default the leading
defender of blacks in London, and indeed one of the few people in all of
England to speak out against slavery. And speak he would, vehemently,
for nearly half a century. The fight against slavery quickly became his
dominating passion."
Only one coincidence, the meeting with Strong, made
Sharp an activist. But the string of events that brought the most
pivotal activist into being was far stranger and more Lombardian. An
antislavery activist, Olaudah Equiano, a former slave from what is now
Nigeria via Barbados and Virginia whose autobiography later had a huge
impact on the movement, saw a letter in the Morning Chronicle and London
Advertiser on March 18, 1783. The letter recounted a case involving the
British slave ship Zong. Equiano called on Sharp, and Sharp made the
case a minor cause cilhbre. It was an insurance case, on the face of it.
The insurers challenged the claim of the Zong's captain that he had
ordered 133 African captives thrown overboard alive in the mid-Atlantic
because the ship's drinking water was running out. Jettisoning slaves
insured as cargo would have led to compensation under those
circumstances.
Human rights were never a consideration in the case.
But the chief mate, afflicted with pangs of conscience, testified that
there had been plenty of water. The murders took place to collect
insurance on slaves who were sick and dying and therefore would not, on
reaching land, become marketable commodities. The court found in favor
of the captain and the ship's investors. Sharp then wrote indignant
letters to several prominent clergymen, who mentioned the case in their
sermons and writings.
The case of the Zong was far from over, and as the
concerns it raised migrated onward through England, linkages began to
build that would spark a potent anti-slavery movement. One Church of
England clergyman who took up the case was Dr. Peter Peckard, who soon
after became Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. When it was his
turn to set the subject for the school's prestigious annual Latin
composition prize, he chose Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare? --
"Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?" It
was by no means a particularly likely choice. The Church of England's
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, governed in
part by divinity professors from Oxford and Cambridge, derived
significant revenues from Codrington, one of the biggest Barbados
plantations. The place relied on branding, whipping, murdering, and
constant terror to keep up the labor that worked the slaves to death.
Slavery was outside the moral universe that even those propagating the
gospel concerned themselves with, as Hochschild points out; the former
slaver who wrote "Amazing Grace" worried about all sorts of
minor sins long before he noticed that slavery might be a problem.
A scholarship student, Thomas Clarkson, won the 1785
Cambridge Latin Prize after devoting two months to researching and
writing about slavery. But the winning mattered little, except that it
drew attention to the essay and its writer, who would publish it in
English as an antislavery tract. The publisher Clarkson found was a
Quaker who introduced him to the few others, also Quakers, who not only
believed slavery should be abolished but were willing to work for the
great unlikelihood that someday it might be.
This chain of encounters and awakenings steered
Clarkson away from a religious career into a passionate championing of
the rights and humanity of the slaves in the British Empire. He quickly
became the most effective activist the movement would have, one who gave
the rest of his life -- nearly half a century -- over to the cause.
Writing, investigating, talking, riding tens of thousands miles on
horseback, he recruited, inspired, and connected the recruited and
inspired into a movement. The Quakers who had organized a little earlier
to abolish slavery had long needed a mainstream Anglican champion. In
Clarkson they found a superb one, in close sympathy with them; he was by
the end a Quaker in all but name.
Making a Movement
Some activists are born into their disposition and vocation, but many of
the most passionate lead ordinary lives until some injustice or atrocity
strikes them like lightning and they are reborn dedicated. Clarkson was
such an activist, and he even had a transformative moment like Saint
Paul on his way to Tarsus: riding to London, he got off his horse and
sat down "disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my
horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the
Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to
their end."
With luck and dedication, he became that person. His
movements and contacts among slave-ship doctors as well as theologians,
Liverpool as well as London, amount themselves to a network whose
complexity is comparable to some of Lombardi's diagrams. Like most
high-profile activists, he had a committee behind him -- nine Quakers,
Granville Sharp, and another Anglican -- who with him founded what was
almost unprecedented then and common now, a nongovernmental
organization, or as the shorthand for them goes, an NGO. (He also
circulated the famous diagram of slaves packed into the hull of a ship
that his Quaker colleagues published as a poster -- a diagram still
widely known and one of the great visual icons of inhumanity of all
times.)
At various moments during the antislavery campaigns,
there were widespread petitions to Parliament at a time when
"petitioning" was one of the few rights available to ordinary
citizens, sugar boycotts, since sugar was the principal West Indies
slave product; local antislavery groups and sympathetic
Parliamentarians; all the accoutrements, as Hochschild points out, of
later human rights movements. The main sympathetic Parliamentarian was
the wealthy, pious William Wilberforce, who opposed labor organizing and
other extensions of rights and powers to the underclasses, but devoutly
opposed slavery. (In the interim, he argued that whipping should not be
abolished, but done only at night: some compromise is strategic, but
some -- like the Democrats looking for a nicer version of the war -- is
moral compromise.) Timid and conventional, he made an odd pairing with
the radical, far-ranging Clarkson, but they remained friends for
life.
Compromise ran all through this movement, or rather
some of its members, while others were ardent revolutionists eager to
see all the rights of man -- and when women took over leadership in the
1820s, of women -- granted. In this movement and any other, the utility
of compromise is an arguable point (or one can argue instead for a kind
of symbiosis of unbending activists and back-room-dealing ones, whereby
the revolutionists extend the argument and make the reformers look
reasonable -- which is how the Sierra Club often looks at groups like
Earth First! -- and in due time, even revolutionists come to look
reasonable, as did abolitionists once they had won).
For example, the movement long campaigned against the
slave trade rather than the existence of slavery itself in the British
Empire, on the grounds that it was a more winnable battle -- and it was.
(British sugar plantations were so energetically murderous that they
required constant replenishment of the slave population from Africa,
which is why it looked as though British slavery, unlike slavery in the
United States, could be undone simply by closing down the maritime trade
in human beings -- i.e., the supply of fresh slaves.) The slave-trade
struggle was won in 1807, while the abolition of slavery took more than
another quarter century and even then limped forward with a six-year
interim period when the slaves' labor was somehow to further compensate
their masters, who had already been compensated in cash for loss of
ownership of their fellow human beings. The most radical antislavery
activist, Elizabeth Heyrick, had long before suggested that it was the
slaves who were due compensation for their lives and labor. Still, the
antislavery movement kept its eyes on the prize, clear that it was more
important to free the slaves by any means necessary than to punish
slavery's perpetrators.
Clarkson and his colleagues built a network
consciously and conscientiously, recognizing that in doing so they were
laying the foundations for the undoing of slavery. It stretched from the
vast numbers of ordinary citizens who signed petitions and followed
boycotts to the sympathetic witnesses who brought information back from
Africa for what were, in essence, the first official human rights
hearings in history, to the slaves themselves who turned up in London to
testify or rose up in the Caribbean. (One of the things that
distinguished the British abolition movement from the American was the
fierce, effective slave revolts that terrified slaveholders and played a
role on the road to abolition.) More fortuitous, or fortunate, or
mysterious is the string of coincidences that brought the Zong to trial,
the trial to Equiano's attention, Equiano into friendship with Sharp,
Sharp to write to Peckard, Peckard to set the Latin prize topic as
slavery, and Clarkson to be as inspired in his Latin as passionate in
his conscience. It's one of those for-want-of-a-nail conundrums: how
would it have come about had any element been absent?
Friendships and Atmospheres
Clarkson shows up on the periphery of other histories and other
networks. In the 1790s, he moved to England's Lake District and became
close friends with a poet who had also written a gold-medal-winning
composition on slavery at Cambridge, this time an ode in Greek in 1792:
the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Clarkson's wife became
Dorothy Wordsworth's close friend and key correspondent, and with this
leap from the advancement of human rights to the advancement of British
poetry, Hochschild bumps into a dizzyingly broad network of radical
ideas stretching from the French Revolution to the vast slave revolution
against the French in Haiti.
At that moment, some sense of what it means to be
human was shifting, and the antislavery movement was part of that shift,
as was the Romantic movement, with its cultivation of introspective
awareness and its enthusiasm for liberation and revolution. Clarkson
turns up briefly in Jonathan Holmes's Coleridge biography as someone who
supported him in the depths of his opium addiction, while Wilberforce
was close friends with Wordsworth's kindest uncle. Wordsworth himself
wrote a sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture, who led the Haitian slave
uprising, and William Blake and J. M. W. Turner both addressed slavery
in their visual art (the moral if not the aesthetic ancestors of
Lombardi). Others, such as the Wedgwood family, link the antislavery and
poetry movements while branching into the sciences, the invention of
photography, and beyond.
Hochschild's account of all this is certainly
testimony to the smallness of Britain's intelligentsia then, but also to
the largeness of ideas about human freedom that were moving through and
then beyond these networks, the ideas and passions that constitute the
atmosphere of an age. Of all the networks he deals with, this one made
up of ideas and ethical stirrings is the most important and the most
nebulous. The changed spirit and beliefs that link these people in the
first place are explicable up to a point and then ultimately mysterious.
Why is it that suddenly slavery, which had existed in one form or
another throughout history, becomes urgently intolerable not only to the
slaves but to privileged people an ocean away from most of the suffering
in Africa and the Americas? What had made the Zong's first mate testify
against his captain about the murder of those slaves? What made a
Cambridge student abandon his career in the church and give his life
over to a cause? What made tens or hundreds of thousands of anonymous
Britons give up sugar, take up letter-writing and committee-meeting? The
networks can be traced, but the stirrings remain mysterious.
Without popular opinion at least periodically rising
to meet them, Clarkson and the Quakers would have just been eccentrics
and historical footnotes, the rebellious slaves a sad side-story, rather
than begetters of a new era. Bury the Chains quotes Wilberforce as
writing in his diary "How popular Abolition is, just now! God can
turn the hearts of men." But it's clear that it was other men and
women, uprisings and revolts, books and pamphlets that did the turning,
that the change was mysterious, magnetic or catalytic, but far from
divine.
Consequences
In both Britain and the United States, women who became involved in the
antislavery movement began to question the enslavement of their gender,
and so goes another long trajectory of links and steps in the expansive
history of human rights these last two centuries. I have been reading
another book lately, still in manuscript, my friend Susan
Schwarzenberg's Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of
Disability. The book traces a group of Seattle-era mothers from the
birth of their mentally disabled children to the discovery that their
children were denied access to public education to those mothers'
engenderment of an educational rights movement.
That movement, with interim victories in Washington
State, culminated in the 1975 IDEA -- Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act -- some decades after these women decided to change the
world to make room in it for children like theirs, not quite two
centuries after those nine Quakers and Clarkson met to launch a
human-rights movement. The two stories are akin, with initial private
moments of realization, the interim building of public associations and
communities, and eventually the overhauling of society.
Bury the Chains is a kind of template for how the
world gets changed, sometimes, for the better. Hochschild's book, like
his King Leopold's Ghost before it, often reads like an exciting novel,
as one character chases another, or an idea, or a ballot issue across
the years. But it pauses periodically to take in the larger landscape of
change, and its original subtitle was The First International Human
Rights Movement.
The book begins with a kind of trumpet cry: "To
understand how momentous was this beginning, we must picture a world in
which the vast majority of people are prisoners. Most of them have known
no other way of life. They are not free to live or go where they want..
They die young. They are not chained or bound most of the time, but they
are in bondage, part of a global economy based on forced labor. Such a
world would, of course, be unthinkable today. But that was the world --
our world -- just two centuries ago, and to most people then, it was
unthinkable that it could ever be otherwise. At the end of the
eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in
bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison
uniforms, but of various systems of slavery or serfdom."
Midway through his story, he halts the narrative to
cast about for a reason why the British should have been so much more
ready than, say, the French to oppose literal slavery. Here, Hochschild
lands upon the essential enslavement of sailors in both the British Navy
and its merchant marine, with their press gangs, beatings, kidnappings,
horrific conditions and high mortality, which kept the empire whole and
the slave trade going. But why should empathy have been extended from
sailors to slaves? The answer would make this into another, more
speculative book.
The book that Hochschild gives us is valuable instead
for its magnificent portrait of how activism works -- by coincidences,
friendships, patience, and stubbornness, by carefully built networks and
belief systems that change slowly or suddenly like climate or the
weather. There is the protracted timeline of change: a preliminary state
in which almost no one cares about slaves; another moment when it seems
like everyone in England does; moments during the Napoleonic wars when
it seems like everyone except a few diehards is too frightened -- by
their own government more than threats from abroad -- to say anything
about slavery at all; then decades more to go until a final victory.
There are interim victories. There are moments of despair. Most of all
there are people giving over their lives to a battle that turns out to
take more than a lifetime for most of them. And then there are the
arguments over how the history will be written -- Wilberforce's sons
tried to write Clarkson out of it, and succeeded until 1989, when
biographer Ellen Gibson Wilson revived his stature as the pivotal figure
in the antislavery movement.
You can think of the nuclear freeze movement, which in
1982 had a million proponents gathered on its behalf in New York's
Central Park, though few of those stuck with it long enough to realize
the "peace dividend" that the collapse of the Soviet Empire
was supposed to spawn, or to push further the opportunities for
disarmament that arose. The current bout of nuclear proliferation can be
blamed in part on Bush, but it is due as well to those who expected a
three-year struggle rather than a sixty-year one; any eventual victories
will be due in large part to the dedicated minority who have not been
realistic, not gone home, not succeeded yet -- but might. Or think of
the anti-apartheid movement, which like the anti-slavery movement two
centuries before combined the nonviolent and the violent, governmental
and citizen action, domestic and foreign action, boycotts and
educational campaigns to dismantle, piece by piece, slowly, with
setbacks, a racist regime (but which, with the moderation that made
victory possible, though far less of a victory, never dismantled the
extreme financial injustices some call economic apartheid). That story,
however, is still unfinished. So, for the record, is the global history
of slavery. And what was once the British and Foreign Antislavery
Society, founded in 1839 to continue the good work after the signal
victory of the year before, is still active as Antislavery
International, based in Thomas Clarkson House in London.
Rebecca Solnit lives in a dense atmosphere of
conspiracies, digressions and marginalia somewhere in San Francisco. Her
most recent book, speaking of conspiracy, is Hope in the Dark: Untold
Histories, Wild Possibilities.
Copyright C2004 Rebecca Solnit
This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com, with an
introduction by Tom Engelhardt.
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