From (Jewish) Michael Medved, some thoughts on the Pilgrims and the religious nature of America:
Most children learn that the Mayflower settlers came to the New World to escape persecution and to establish religious freedom. But the early colonists actually pursued purity, not tolerance, and sought to build fervent, faith-based utopias, not secular regimes that consigned religion to a secondary role. The distinctive circumstances that allowed these fiery believers of varied denominations to cooperate in the founding of a new nation help to explain America's contradictory religious traditions — as simultaneously the most devoutly Christian society in the Western world, and the country most accommodating to every shade of exotic belief and practice.
The communal system to which the Pilgrims had agreed before they left for the New World was likely framed in terms of Christian fellowship and sharing, but the particulars of their contract also reflected feudal thinking.
William Bradford's abandonment of communalism in the face of famine, which went against the contract he had signed, was a sort of intellectual breakthrough - an abandonment of European feudalism.
July 1620
The Pilgrims' contract with their financial backers, the London Merchant Adventurers Company, included conditions of seven years of joint stock and partnership and communal property, followed by a division and release from obligations . . . . A version of feudalism dominated for the first seven years.
Britain and continental Europe groaned under feudalism's remnants and its communal farming. The Lord of the Manor controlled his peasants -- told them where, when, and what they could do, and how they could do it. (Does that sound like some people we know in 2009?)
From old-world feudalism came the seeds of famine.
September 1621
The autumn harvest and hunt. The First Thanksgiving. Grand. Glorious. A product of the friendship and peace treaty with the impressive Wampanoag Sachem (chief) Massasoit and his people. A welcome respite from the hardship of that first winter, when half the Mayflower passengers died. And yes, there was turkey. Bradford wrote, "... there was great store of wild turkeys ..."
Were they now on easy street? Hardly. Communal farming brought discouragement and strife the next year.
A Meager Harvest, 1622
Now the welcome time of harvest approached, in which all had their hungry bellies filled. But it arose to a little, in comparison of a full years supply ...
"That they might not still thus languish in misery," 1623
Bradford wrote of the colony's distress at continuing famine:
All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.
The governor faced a choice. The colony would fail under seven years of communal farming, and the investors in London would not be repaid. The Pilgrims would become just another failed English colony, all memory of them to vanish.
Or -- find a better way, grow food, survive, pay their contractual debts. Bradford found that better way: He assigned each family a parcel of land to farm on their own.
Transformational, this paradigm shift. While the old world lay shackled by feudal communal farming, the new world broke free from feudalism's constraints.
Read the whole thing.
Because of the isolated circumstances of the Pilgrims, the negative effects of feudalism were seen in a rapid and stark manner. In long-established civilizations, it may take longer for the negative effects of excessive control over people's lives by government to lead to grave danger.
Feudalism was first established, in part, in order to provide protection from attack by marauders by "the Lord of the Manor" to the people living on his lands - theoretically, at least. There was a legitimate desire for security on the part of the people, and a desire on the part of the aristocracy to maintain power and wealth through the promise of protection.
The bargain typically went bad for the peasantry long before it went bad for the aristocracy. Yet the desire among "common people" to establish systems similar in some ways to feudalism persists, even when the powerful "aristocracy" is a governing class in a relatively free society. People want security. It's natural. It's important to keep in mind, however, that increasing our security nearly always means limiting our liberty. And then, sometimes, our security diminishes, too.
We need to think about how we balance these two values in various facets of life: Many people, for example, willingly give up a lot of personal freedom to provide security for small children. Little kids can really tie you down. But in other facets of life, liberty and flexibility may be more important in the long run than security.
Ironically, when people (adults) feel too secure about the larger society's ability to protect and care for them and/or about the larger society's ability to cover for their shortcomings, things start to fall apart.
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