A Cultural Perspective Regarding Loyalism Part I: Some Theoretical Reflections
Studying Loyalism unfolds an alternative understanding of the American Revolution. In the traditional standard narrative of the American Revolution, most attention has been given to the revolutionary side; however, the intense focus on the revolutionary side neglects the fact that most people were not militant enough to be revolutionaries. In eighteenth century North American colonies, most people cared more about how to maintain their daily life than about the abstract theory of rights. Even among those who cared about politics, the numbers of Loyalists and Patriots were close. As John Adams recalled in 1813, “N. York and Pensilvania were so nearly divided, if their propensity was not against it, that if New England on one Side and Virginia on the other had not kept them in Awe, they would have joined the British.” Adams also quoted John Marshall saying that the southern states were also nearly equally divided. He then pointed out that, “Look into the Journals of Congress and you will See how Seditious how near rebellion were Several Counties of New York, and how much trouble We had to compose them.”[1] John Adams’ recollection many years after the Revolution might not be absolutely accurate, but it at least illustrated the complex nature of the political division on the eve of the American Revolution. Loyalists were not scarce minorities fighting against the main current of their time.
Scholars have attempted to explain Loyalism from many diverse perspectives, such as social classes, economic interests, local political factions, religious affiliations, social network, and political ideas.[2] But Loyalists included people from different economic, political, racial, and social backgrounds.[3] Therefore, the motives that behind the behaviors of Loyalists were complex and the line between Loyalists and Patriots was ambiguous. Loyalists and Patriots were not at the two extreme ends of political spectrum. Both groups culturally identified themselves as both Americans and Britons. They both upheld the value of liberty and the rights of British subjects. Loyalism was not only political and ideological, but also cultural. While Bernard Bailyn claimed the existence of the “ideological origins” of the American Revolution,[4] I do not aim to focus on the ideological origins of the Loyalists. Rather, I want to explore the cultural origin of the Loyalists, because it was not only their ideologies that made them choose to be Loyalists, but the cultural givens, or in Bourdieu’s word, habitus, shaped the way they thought, believed, and responded.
In August 16, 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his Loyalist son, William Franklin. It had been nine years since his last letter to his only son. When it came to their disagreement during the Revolution, he wrote, “Our Opinions are not in our Power; they are form’d and govern’d much by Circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible.” He was still angry with William’s decision, as he wrote in this same letter, “nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause, wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at Stake.”[5] Benjamin Franklin said that those opinions were formed by “inexplicable” and “irresistible” circumstances. What made these circumstances inexplicable and irresistible was the cultural givens that they possessed as they encountered the political crisis. Although they shared the same cultural assumptions in the beginning, their divergent experiences in the Imperial Crisis led them toward different directions.
Loyalism was not only political, but also cultural. Anglican Loyalists in New York made their decisions based on their religious worldview and the cultural assumptions that came along with this particular worldview. Loyal Whigs, those who protested the Stamp Act and Coercive Acts but did not want to be completely separated from the British Empire, decided to remain loyal to the British Crown against their friends and even family members. Besides the factors of social networks, political interests, pre-revolutionary local political factions, Loyal Whigs’ decisions were also based on the cultural givens that made sense of their world. By givens I mean deeply embedded, even pre-reflexive, assumptions and apperceptions about a proper political order. For Anglican Loyalists and Loyal Whigs, despite the difference among them, they made their final decisions basing on some shared and embedded assumptions. These taken-for-granted beliefs became the points of departure and the foundation for developing their understandings of the revolutionary situation.
Living in the same cultural milieu and accepting similar education, Loyalists and Patriots depicted two differing political agendas with two divergent interpretations drawn from the same cultural matrix. Some historians will argue such distinctions to be intellectual or ideological. But as we attempt to dig further, we have to delve into the sources of their ideological differences. Also, although Patriots and Loyalists shared similar educational backgrounds, and read the same political theories, they still came out with very different ideologies. For example, Thomas Jefferson had a Loyalist friend, John Randolph. They attended the College of William & Mary together, and they were both lawyers. When John Randolph left for England to run away from the Revolution, Jefferson wrote a letter asking John Randolph to leave his book collection with him.[6] Such connections between Loyalists and Patriots reminded us that education, social class, social network, and family connection were not the reasons of their eventual disparity. Their difference came from the embedded cultural givens.
Culture is a system of meanings, not primary as values. As members of society, people are taught to think and do things in a particular way. Such a shared framework of socially established practices, ideas, and institutions among the members of a particular society is culture.[7] Clifford Geertz argued that culture is the webs of significance man himself has spun, and the analysis of it is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.[8] When we study culture merely as value, we will find it difficult to explain cultural differences within a single society. When we look at culture as meanings, we can explore the applications of the language in which people with different values and political purposes can demonstrate cultural differences within a shared perspective.[9] When we view cultures as meanings, we also regard cultures as the codes we use to make sense of our lives.[10] People rely on these codes to make judgements that direct their arguments and behaviors. To interpret the motives and intents of New York Loyalists, we need to read their political and personal writings by looking for the meanings of their language within their particular cultural context, and recognizing the pre-reflexive cultural codes that influenced the way that people saw their world in the past.
Pierre Bourdieu offered another term to understand how such cultural codes become the embedded principles that people apply to see their worlds. He argued that the “habitus” was “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations” and that it “produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.”[11] He pointed out that habitus is deeply rooted in social and cultural structure, and constructs the way people behave. Bourdieu later pointed out that habitus, “being the product of history,” is an “open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures.” He claimed that, “there is a probability, inscribed in the social destiny associated with definite social conditions, that experiences will confirm habitus, because most people are statistically bound to encounter circumstances that tend to agree with those that originally fashioned their habitus.”[12] Habitus, therefore, is not fixed but subjected to changes.
Bourdieu’s concept of the relation between habitus and dispositions explains how cultural assumptions and codes influenced Loyalists’ political perceptions. In an introduction to Bourdieu’s book, John B. Thompson explained that, “The habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions, and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule.’ The dispositions which constitute the habitus are inculcated, structured, durable, generative and transposable.”[13] Habitus, therefore, is a useful tool to understand Loyalism because Loyalists were inclined to make their political decisions by a set of dispositions that were inculcated and structured, and their political alignments were the products that these dispositions generated. In other words, habitus, or cultural givens, played a crucial role in their political discourses and actions.
Searching for the relationship between interpretation and texts, Stanley Fish created the term “interpretive community.” In terms of how readers interpret texts, he explained, “interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as is usually assumed, arising from them.” In other words, the ways that we read the texts or, in other cases, understand our contemporary situation or crisis, are not decided by us after we encounter them, but are themselves the interpretations. He claimed, “The strategies in question are not his in the sense that would make him an independent agent. Rather, they proceed not from him but from the interpretive community of which he is a member; they are, in effect, community property, and insofar as they at once enable and limit the operations of his consciousness, he is too.” Fish argued that readers are not truly independent agents in their reading of the text, but are restricted in their own interpretive communities. He further pointed out that interpretive communities, rather than the text or the reader, “produce meanings and are responsible for the emergence of formal features.” He argued that reading strategies exist before the act of reading and “therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”[14] His statement seemed to imply the lack of human agency in producing interpretations. However, the interpretive communities were constituted by people. Therefore, even though people are influenced by the interpretive communities that they belong, they are also part of the communities that shaped the embedded strategies. They are not passively acted upon by the embedded presuppositions, but also play proactive roles in creating these presuppositions.
While shared cultural experiences could strengthen habitus and create interpretive communities, abrupt experiences, such as political crises or radical personal experiences, could also transform habitus and develop new interpretive communities. As Bourdieu said, habitus is “durable but not eternal.”[15] Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s triggered different political agendas among the colonists because their different experiences in the crisis developed into diverse dispositions that transformed their habitus. The ways that they interpreted the crisis were set by their habitus, and their interpretations ended up transforming their habitus, and forming various “interpretive communities.” Before 1760s, the American colonists were generally loyal to the British authority, to king and to the Parliament. The Imperial Crisis triggered by the changes of imperial policies after Seven Years’ War transformed the way people thought about politics. This transformation began with the ways they interpreted the sovereignty of the Parliament, and gradually extended to the ways they understood their relationship with king. The respective interpretive communities that people belonged to offered them the strategies to judge what they experienced.
Daniel Kahneman pointed out two modes of human thinking. He called them system 1 and system 2. System 1, according to Kahneman, “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” System 2, on the other hand, “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.” He argued that while people tend to believe that they use system 2 to choose their thoughts and actions, they are actually guided by system 1.[16] The automatic, or pre-reflexive operation of human minds that Kahneman called “system 1” actually demonstrates the way that cultural codes work in human minds. Cultural codes, or habitus, once were established, serve as the pre-reflexive framework within which people think and act upon their thoughts.
Jonathan Haidt also argued that pre-reflexive assumptions play an influential role in the procedures of people making moral judgments. He proposed that intuition is the main cause of moral judgments, and reasoning comes after these judgments to construct post hoc justifications.[17] Haidt claimed that intuition is rooted in people’s moral values. More than values, I think it is cultural codes in which values constitute part of them play a major role in framing human intuition. In Haidt’s research, he categorized moral values into six major moral foundations of politics: Liberty/oppression, care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.[18] He argued that, when Conservatives reflect on the issue of liberty or fairness, they at the same time consider the value of authority and loyalty. On the other hand, Liberals usually ignore the value of authority as they pursue the value of liberty and fairness. Haidt’s research established a theory illustrating that people prioritize their values to make judgements when they face moral and political dilemmas. While I agree with him that people make judgements based on their pre-reflexive assumptions, I contend that such priorities come not from values, but from the meanings generated by the embedded cultural givens.
In the example of the Franklins. Benjamin Franklin was really close to William Franklin. Benjamin brought William to London when he served as a colonial agent for several colonies, and endeavored to educate William to be a Briton. Even though they shared the same habitus in the beginning, their experiences in England and New Jersey government respectively transformed that habitus. Benjamin felt humiliated in a session of Whitehall before he went back to America and this experience became a turning point for him to give up his unquestioned loyalty to the British Empire.[19] William did not have this experience, and, on the contrary, his experience as a royal governor enhanced his commitment to the British imperial ideology. Their reshaped habitus led to the interpretive strategies they held to deal with the Imperial Crisis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] John Adams to Thomas McKean, 31 August 1813. Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6140 (Accessed on May 2, 2017).
[2] Wallace Brown’s The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965) analyzed the social composition of Loyalists. William H. Nelson’s The American Tory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961) also discussed Tory “rank and file.” Edward Countryman’s A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and Joseph S. Tiedemann’s Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763-1776 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) talked about the political factions in New York, and how that factional division developed into Loyalist and Patriots in New York. William Allen Benton’s Whig-Loyalism: An Aspect of Political Ideology in the American Revolutionary Era (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969) and Janice Potter’s The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983) studied the political ideas of Loyalists. Robert M. Calhoon’s The Loyalists in Revolutionary America 1760-1781 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) also talked about the details of the Loyalist political ideas. Loyalists and Community in North America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), edited by Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George A. Rawlyk placed Loyalists under the context of communities. Some articles in this book talked about the relationship between social network and Loyalism.
[3] Edward Larkin, “Loyalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 295. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 131-132.
[4] Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967).
[5] Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, August 16, 1784. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//framedNames.jsp;jsessionid=C3C6F7FC0B1D5B59F435325A2384E419 (accessed on July 20, 2016).
[6] “From Thomas Jefferson to John Randolph, 25 August 1775,” Founders Online http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0121 (accessed on Oct. 11, 2017).
[7] Michal Jan Rozibicki, Cultural and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 12-13.
[8] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
[9] Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Culture Troubles: Political and the Interpretation of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 22.
[10] Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Culture Troubles, 155.
[11] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78.
[12] Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J D Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Polity, 1992), 133.
[13] John B. Thompson, "Editor's Introduction," in Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 12.
[14] Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 13-4.
[15] Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J D Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 133.
[16] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 20-21, 31.
[17] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 46.
[18] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 177-8, 215. In his research on modern politics, he found that while Liberals care more about care and fairness and less about loyalty and authority, Conservatives care all these foundations at closer levels. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 184.
[19] Sheila L. Skemp, "Benjamin Franklin, Patriot, and William Franklin, Loyalist." Pennsylvania History 65:1 (Winter, 1998): 40-41.
Scholars have attempted to explain Loyalism from many diverse perspectives, such as social classes, economic interests, local political factions, religious affiliations, social network, and political ideas.[2] But Loyalists included people from different economic, political, racial, and social backgrounds.[3] Therefore, the motives that behind the behaviors of Loyalists were complex and the line between Loyalists and Patriots was ambiguous. Loyalists and Patriots were not at the two extreme ends of political spectrum. Both groups culturally identified themselves as both Americans and Britons. They both upheld the value of liberty and the rights of British subjects. Loyalism was not only political and ideological, but also cultural. While Bernard Bailyn claimed the existence of the “ideological origins” of the American Revolution,[4] I do not aim to focus on the ideological origins of the Loyalists. Rather, I want to explore the cultural origin of the Loyalists, because it was not only their ideologies that made them choose to be Loyalists, but the cultural givens, or in Bourdieu’s word, habitus, shaped the way they thought, believed, and responded.
In August 16, 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his Loyalist son, William Franklin. It had been nine years since his last letter to his only son. When it came to their disagreement during the Revolution, he wrote, “Our Opinions are not in our Power; they are form’d and govern’d much by Circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible.” He was still angry with William’s decision, as he wrote in this same letter, “nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause, wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at Stake.”[5] Benjamin Franklin said that those opinions were formed by “inexplicable” and “irresistible” circumstances. What made these circumstances inexplicable and irresistible was the cultural givens that they possessed as they encountered the political crisis. Although they shared the same cultural assumptions in the beginning, their divergent experiences in the Imperial Crisis led them toward different directions.
Loyalism was not only political, but also cultural. Anglican Loyalists in New York made their decisions based on their religious worldview and the cultural assumptions that came along with this particular worldview. Loyal Whigs, those who protested the Stamp Act and Coercive Acts but did not want to be completely separated from the British Empire, decided to remain loyal to the British Crown against their friends and even family members. Besides the factors of social networks, political interests, pre-revolutionary local political factions, Loyal Whigs’ decisions were also based on the cultural givens that made sense of their world. By givens I mean deeply embedded, even pre-reflexive, assumptions and apperceptions about a proper political order. For Anglican Loyalists and Loyal Whigs, despite the difference among them, they made their final decisions basing on some shared and embedded assumptions. These taken-for-granted beliefs became the points of departure and the foundation for developing their understandings of the revolutionary situation.
Living in the same cultural milieu and accepting similar education, Loyalists and Patriots depicted two differing political agendas with two divergent interpretations drawn from the same cultural matrix. Some historians will argue such distinctions to be intellectual or ideological. But as we attempt to dig further, we have to delve into the sources of their ideological differences. Also, although Patriots and Loyalists shared similar educational backgrounds, and read the same political theories, they still came out with very different ideologies. For example, Thomas Jefferson had a Loyalist friend, John Randolph. They attended the College of William & Mary together, and they were both lawyers. When John Randolph left for England to run away from the Revolution, Jefferson wrote a letter asking John Randolph to leave his book collection with him.[6] Such connections between Loyalists and Patriots reminded us that education, social class, social network, and family connection were not the reasons of their eventual disparity. Their difference came from the embedded cultural givens.
Culture is a system of meanings, not primary as values. As members of society, people are taught to think and do things in a particular way. Such a shared framework of socially established practices, ideas, and institutions among the members of a particular society is culture.[7] Clifford Geertz argued that culture is the webs of significance man himself has spun, and the analysis of it is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.[8] When we study culture merely as value, we will find it difficult to explain cultural differences within a single society. When we look at culture as meanings, we can explore the applications of the language in which people with different values and political purposes can demonstrate cultural differences within a shared perspective.[9] When we view cultures as meanings, we also regard cultures as the codes we use to make sense of our lives.[10] People rely on these codes to make judgements that direct their arguments and behaviors. To interpret the motives and intents of New York Loyalists, we need to read their political and personal writings by looking for the meanings of their language within their particular cultural context, and recognizing the pre-reflexive cultural codes that influenced the way that people saw their world in the past.
Pierre Bourdieu offered another term to understand how such cultural codes become the embedded principles that people apply to see their worlds. He argued that the “habitus” was “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations” and that it “produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.”[11] He pointed out that habitus is deeply rooted in social and cultural structure, and constructs the way people behave. Bourdieu later pointed out that habitus, “being the product of history,” is an “open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures.” He claimed that, “there is a probability, inscribed in the social destiny associated with definite social conditions, that experiences will confirm habitus, because most people are statistically bound to encounter circumstances that tend to agree with those that originally fashioned their habitus.”[12] Habitus, therefore, is not fixed but subjected to changes.
Bourdieu’s concept of the relation between habitus and dispositions explains how cultural assumptions and codes influenced Loyalists’ political perceptions. In an introduction to Bourdieu’s book, John B. Thompson explained that, “The habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions, and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule.’ The dispositions which constitute the habitus are inculcated, structured, durable, generative and transposable.”[13] Habitus, therefore, is a useful tool to understand Loyalism because Loyalists were inclined to make their political decisions by a set of dispositions that were inculcated and structured, and their political alignments were the products that these dispositions generated. In other words, habitus, or cultural givens, played a crucial role in their political discourses and actions.
Searching for the relationship between interpretation and texts, Stanley Fish created the term “interpretive community.” In terms of how readers interpret texts, he explained, “interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as is usually assumed, arising from them.” In other words, the ways that we read the texts or, in other cases, understand our contemporary situation or crisis, are not decided by us after we encounter them, but are themselves the interpretations. He claimed, “The strategies in question are not his in the sense that would make him an independent agent. Rather, they proceed not from him but from the interpretive community of which he is a member; they are, in effect, community property, and insofar as they at once enable and limit the operations of his consciousness, he is too.” Fish argued that readers are not truly independent agents in their reading of the text, but are restricted in their own interpretive communities. He further pointed out that interpretive communities, rather than the text or the reader, “produce meanings and are responsible for the emergence of formal features.” He argued that reading strategies exist before the act of reading and “therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”[14] His statement seemed to imply the lack of human agency in producing interpretations. However, the interpretive communities were constituted by people. Therefore, even though people are influenced by the interpretive communities that they belong, they are also part of the communities that shaped the embedded strategies. They are not passively acted upon by the embedded presuppositions, but also play proactive roles in creating these presuppositions.
While shared cultural experiences could strengthen habitus and create interpretive communities, abrupt experiences, such as political crises or radical personal experiences, could also transform habitus and develop new interpretive communities. As Bourdieu said, habitus is “durable but not eternal.”[15] Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s triggered different political agendas among the colonists because their different experiences in the crisis developed into diverse dispositions that transformed their habitus. The ways that they interpreted the crisis were set by their habitus, and their interpretations ended up transforming their habitus, and forming various “interpretive communities.” Before 1760s, the American colonists were generally loyal to the British authority, to king and to the Parliament. The Imperial Crisis triggered by the changes of imperial policies after Seven Years’ War transformed the way people thought about politics. This transformation began with the ways they interpreted the sovereignty of the Parliament, and gradually extended to the ways they understood their relationship with king. The respective interpretive communities that people belonged to offered them the strategies to judge what they experienced.
Daniel Kahneman pointed out two modes of human thinking. He called them system 1 and system 2. System 1, according to Kahneman, “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” System 2, on the other hand, “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.” He argued that while people tend to believe that they use system 2 to choose their thoughts and actions, they are actually guided by system 1.[16] The automatic, or pre-reflexive operation of human minds that Kahneman called “system 1” actually demonstrates the way that cultural codes work in human minds. Cultural codes, or habitus, once were established, serve as the pre-reflexive framework within which people think and act upon their thoughts.
Jonathan Haidt also argued that pre-reflexive assumptions play an influential role in the procedures of people making moral judgments. He proposed that intuition is the main cause of moral judgments, and reasoning comes after these judgments to construct post hoc justifications.[17] Haidt claimed that intuition is rooted in people’s moral values. More than values, I think it is cultural codes in which values constitute part of them play a major role in framing human intuition. In Haidt’s research, he categorized moral values into six major moral foundations of politics: Liberty/oppression, care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.[18] He argued that, when Conservatives reflect on the issue of liberty or fairness, they at the same time consider the value of authority and loyalty. On the other hand, Liberals usually ignore the value of authority as they pursue the value of liberty and fairness. Haidt’s research established a theory illustrating that people prioritize their values to make judgements when they face moral and political dilemmas. While I agree with him that people make judgements based on their pre-reflexive assumptions, I contend that such priorities come not from values, but from the meanings generated by the embedded cultural givens.
In the example of the Franklins. Benjamin Franklin was really close to William Franklin. Benjamin brought William to London when he served as a colonial agent for several colonies, and endeavored to educate William to be a Briton. Even though they shared the same habitus in the beginning, their experiences in England and New Jersey government respectively transformed that habitus. Benjamin felt humiliated in a session of Whitehall before he went back to America and this experience became a turning point for him to give up his unquestioned loyalty to the British Empire.[19] William did not have this experience, and, on the contrary, his experience as a royal governor enhanced his commitment to the British imperial ideology. Their reshaped habitus led to the interpretive strategies they held to deal with the Imperial Crisis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] John Adams to Thomas McKean, 31 August 1813. Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6140 (Accessed on May 2, 2017).
[2] Wallace Brown’s The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965) analyzed the social composition of Loyalists. William H. Nelson’s The American Tory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961) also discussed Tory “rank and file.” Edward Countryman’s A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and Joseph S. Tiedemann’s Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763-1776 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) talked about the political factions in New York, and how that factional division developed into Loyalist and Patriots in New York. William Allen Benton’s Whig-Loyalism: An Aspect of Political Ideology in the American Revolutionary Era (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969) and Janice Potter’s The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983) studied the political ideas of Loyalists. Robert M. Calhoon’s The Loyalists in Revolutionary America 1760-1781 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) also talked about the details of the Loyalist political ideas. Loyalists and Community in North America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), edited by Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George A. Rawlyk placed Loyalists under the context of communities. Some articles in this book talked about the relationship between social network and Loyalism.
[3] Edward Larkin, “Loyalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 295. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 131-132.
[4] Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967).
[5] Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, August 16, 1784. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//framedNames.jsp;jsessionid=C3C6F7FC0B1D5B59F435325A2384E419 (accessed on July 20, 2016).
[6] “From Thomas Jefferson to John Randolph, 25 August 1775,” Founders Online http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0121 (accessed on Oct. 11, 2017).
[7] Michal Jan Rozibicki, Cultural and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 12-13.
[8] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
[9] Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Culture Troubles: Political and the Interpretation of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 22.
[10] Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Culture Troubles, 155.
[11] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78.
[12] Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J D Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Polity, 1992), 133.
[13] John B. Thompson, "Editor's Introduction," in Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 12.
[14] Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 13-4.
[15] Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J D Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 133.
[16] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 20-21, 31.
[17] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 46.
[18] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 177-8, 215. In his research on modern politics, he found that while Liberals care more about care and fairness and less about loyalty and authority, Conservatives care all these foundations at closer levels. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 184.
[19] Sheila L. Skemp, "Benjamin Franklin, Patriot, and William Franklin, Loyalist." Pennsylvania History 65:1 (Winter, 1998): 40-41.
Comments
Post a Comment