The Doan Gang

My family doesn’t have particularly many claims to fame and fortune. One of my uncles on my father’s side (the Coopers) was John Broadus Watson, who invented behavioural psychology (and of the infamous ‘Little Albert’ psychology experiment, doubtless one of the reasons IRBs were created). However, my aunt, coming back from a Doane Family Association meeting in Massachusetts, told me that the Doane family (my mother’s side) had a branch which was also rather infamous and deserving of their own Wikipedia page. Naturally, I was interested to see who they were, and how we were related to them.

The relationship is pretty distant, though they are certainly present in the Doane family genealogy. My great-great-great-grandfather Adelbert Doane was the scion of three generations of Benjamin Doanes, then Simeon Doane, then Samuel Doan, then John Doan, Jr and Deacon John Done of Plymouth, Massachusetts (who had immigrated there in 1630 from London; prior to that he was very likely a shoemaker from Alvechurch, Worcs). One of John Doan Jr’s brothers was Daniel Doan, who went on to have a son and a grandson both named Daniel, the last of whom lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (a Loyalist Quaker enclave where the Coopers, my father’s family who came over later, were also fairly prominent). Daniel Israel Doan (the third one) had a son, Joseph, whose sons became quite infamous in Bucks County as the Doan Gang.

During the War of American Independence, these Doans were fiercely loyal to the Crown, particularly Moses Doan, who had quite a colourful history. Apparently a rather stubborn and wilful teenager, he had a falling-out with his father in 1770, after which he left home, defended a settlement from an attack in defence of a girl, Mary Doremy, who spurned his suit, and later briefly joined the local Wolf Indian tribe. By 1774, the local Committee of Safety was imposing taxes on the Quaker farmers of Bucks County to support Boston after the closure of the Harbour by the government; this action was outrageous enough that it caused Moses Doan’s brothers to join him in harassing and robbing the collection agents who were extorting money from the Quakers there. The career of the Outlaw Doans had begun; as legend has it, they inaugurated it by raiding the Doremy family – Moses’ brothers were beating Mary Doremy’s father when Moses walked in on them, stopped them and promised his former crush that they wouldn’t bother her family again.

This band of outlaws quickly attained the status of folk heroes in Bucks County, though they were just as quickly vilified by the rebel colonists as demons and debauchers. They grew infamous for robbing wealthy Whig families and particularly for stealing horses and selling them to the British; Moses Doan also earned a reputation as General Howe’s ‘Eagle Spy’ for the detail and accuracy of the information he supplied. Moses Doan in particular seemed to have taken on a kind of knight-errant code: he beat one of his own gang senseless for trying to rape the wife of one of the men they were robbing, and later he would assist a young woman whose husband had taken up the rebel cause at Valley Forge in obtaining flour (ultimately, by gunning down one of the British sentries to clear a path for her back to her home). His gang also was responsible for freeing a number of British prisoners-of-war from the rebel stockade in Lancaster, to the point where a Major Lee at the stockade himself posed as one of his own prisoners in order to uncover the spy ring by which the Doans were freeing them. On another occasion, Joseph Doan audaciously impersonated Lord Rawdon (a popular and distinguished guest among wealthy Pennsylvania residents on both sides of the conflict), in order to relieve one of Lord Rawdon’s hosts of his money and silverware. On one raid near Elizabeth, New Jersey, however, Abraham Doan (a cousin of Moses Doan) shot the local minister’s wife to death in her home, with her nine children huddled around her – however chivalric Moses Doan may have been, his gang was generally prone to excesses of all sorts. Their most infamous exploit, however, was the heist of £1,307 (about $2,000,000 today) from the Newtown Treasury in Bucks County, supposedly in retaliation for the surrender of Cornwallis three days previous. They buried the money near Wrightstown, but it was never recovered.

After the war was over, the Doans were relentlessly pursued. The new government had confiscated all of their father’s property in retaliation for their actions, so they could not return home, nor could they count on Loyalist support for their actions. Moses Doan was tracked to a tavern, where he fought with one of his childhood rivals, a Colonel William Hart, before surrendering to the authorities. However, after having been arrested and disarmed, he was shot lying prone by one Captain Robert Gibson. The others of the Doan gang were either arrested and hanged (Levi and Abraham Doan) or disappeared (Mahlon Doan) or fled to Canada (Joseph Jr. and Aaron Doan).

It’s always interesting to uncover this sort of family history, particularly when they were engaged in causes one sympathises with. (My own direct branch of the family tended to be, by all appearances, fairly apolitical, with a live-and-let-live philosophy.) It also leads me to wonder, given that the Coopers were also located in Bucks County, what relationship they had with the infamous Doan Gang – were they robbed by them, or did they support them? It might be interesting to find out.

Pointless video post - ‘Gryning’ by Fejd

So I have recently come across, via their page on Encyclopædia Metallum, the Swedish neofolk metal band Fejd, which features several members of the power metal outfit Nostradameus. Actually, it would probably be better described as ‘metal folk’, since it is all-acoustic music with what I would describe as a very metal sound: grooving bass leads, a pounding drumline, a generous filling-out from the other strings and wind instrumentation. It is really entertaining stuff, and I highly recommend this song in particular: ‘Gryning’ from their 2010 album Eifur. Keep an open mind and give it a spin; it truly is worth it!

Why I am a monarchist

It’s rather interesting to me, actually – the Jiang-Bell New York Times article, as well as several of the related discussions on the matter, have gotten me thinking about exactly why I have such a fond attachment to monarchical systems of government, and doctrines like the Mandate of Heaven and the Divine Right of Kings. I was rather intrigued to find that many of the reasons I have for being a monarchist are the same reasons my father has for being an American liberal (that is to say, economically interventionist and socially liberal). I don’t intend to put forward an entire apologia here, but rather just to lay out some of my own personal reasons for believing the way I do.

Firstly, as ironic as it may sound, I am a monarchist because I believe in the rightness of economic and legal equality (though I do not think either can be perfectly achieved). Every economic system has to have a set of rules which govern interactions and the distribution of what most people call ‘goods and services’, but which is really only physical energy. Not only ecosystems and geological tectonic systems, but also social structures which build themselves from the distribution of energy all align themselves along gradients; you will always have people who are higher up on the gradient and who are lower. The job of legal egalitarians is to ensure that the same set of rules applies to everyone on the gradient; the job of economic egalitarians is to ensure that the gradient is as ‘shallow-sloped’ as possible. Under a traditional system wherein one has kings and nobles and gentry and commoners, the institutional rulebook is all out in the open; even though there is ample opportunity to subvert it (as the British are particularly fond of doing), every person is knowledgeable of the rules they are playing by. You do not have the poor labouring under the falsehood of being (to paraphrase John Steinbeck) temporarily-embarrassed millionaires, nor do you have the millionaires (and heirs and heiresses of millionaires) pretending obscenely to be the hardworking salt of the earth, having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps with nothing more than the work of their own two hands.

As a result, it is much harder to be a legal egalitarian in an American-style republic than in a monarchy. We have a society where the wealthy are playing by an entirely different rulebook than the rest of us are, even though we have to piously pretend in public (and in dealing with other countries) as though everyone under the American legal system is already equal. If these gross perversities of the American culture are translated to a more traditional, ceremonious society where such roles are already out-in-the-open, the effects would be laughable, and would fool no one for even an instant. The end effect is that one can more accurately understand and describe the effects of luck and of hard work in determining social standing – and there is better basis for arguing for better and more humane treatment of poor people. Take Canada, for example: a nation founded on the basis of the monarchist political convictions of the United Empire Loyalists, which adopted for itself the ideology of ‘peace, order and good government’, which (as a result) does far better than we do on issues of legal, social and economic egalitarianism.

Second, the monarchy is a visible, living touchstone for civic engagement. My country does have a civic religion, but ironically it is a civic religion which celebrates detachment. The ideological commitments of the founders of the American republic make it much easier to articulate the ‘lone cowboy’ as the ideal American: someone who plays by his own rules and pursues his own self-interests (as crassly defined as possible), and screw everyone else who gets in his way. What makes this possible is the lack of any reference to common commitments outside of the rights due to each person under the law; the legal system, ultimately, is the only sacred scripture of the American civil religion – note the reverence with which both modern American liberals and modern American conservatives refer to the Constitution.

By contrast, one of the central elements of a civil religion where monarchy occupies a central place is the notion that there are common commitments. One is not just a constellation of negative rights and immunities; one is a subject (in both the philosophical and the political sense of the word), and a member of a community transcending the legal system. The position of a royal family within a society provides a ready reference to the kinship demands between one member of the society and another. This is not to say solidarity is impossible within a republican system (see Finland or Switzerland or Germany), or that it is automatic for a monarchy (take your pick of the Gulf states for examples of completely dysfunctional monarchies) – but the onus is upon republicans to create a mythology which encourages solidarity rather than detachment. The inequality and state of civic education within our own social experiment should serve as a useful cautionary tale to republicans about the need for such a mythology.

The third point is the notion of popular sovereignty. I addressed this briefly before in my previous post on the Jiang-Bell NYT piece; suffice it to say that the Iraq War, a murderous folly supported (at one point) by nearly three-quarters of the American public, utterly shattered my belief in the innate desirability of popular sovereignty. How popular an idea is, is no true measure of how good it is. Democratically-elected governments are capable of doing utterly heinous things: the Lord Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, the plebiscitary dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, the election and re-election of Andrew Jackson. The more so since they can point to the popularity of their heinous acts for justification. Monarchies may appear to be far less constrained in how far they are able to abuse their power, but tradition can make for a powerful check on would-be tyrants: none of the modern European states which have retained their monarchs have had much trouble with the monarchs abusing power (though their elected heads of government often do) in the past two hundred years or so.

But, just as with civic religion, it is not just having a tradition; rather the content of the tradition is what matters. In a state where apostolic Christian (or Muslim, or Confucian) authorities are constantly reminding the monarch that her power is temporary and contingent on her favour with God or with Heaven (and thus on their treatment of the poorest in society), that monarch is less wont to abuse her power within the state. A monarchy (or, for that matter, a republic) which does not have its share of Menciuses and Saint Sir Thomas Mores and other such dangerous radicals and prophets is all the more apt to become a tyranny. The doctrine of popular sovereignty has no such check. Whatever evil the elected leader does, is justified on the basis that the masses have demanded the leader, and thus whatever actions he takes. The opinion poll is the oracle of our times – but it is an oracle which demands no self-reflection.

Monarchy is not an easy thing to argue for in my own day and age, particularly from a left-leaning vantage point like my own. It comes loaded down with a lot of historical baggage, but ultimately I think it tends to be both realistic and moral – particularly the way it is practised in Western and Northern Europe and Japan.

Reclaiming sin?

On haligweorc Derek Olsen has a brilliant post concerning the way in which the Episcopal Church approaches (or rather, does not approach) the topic of sin. The author comments that he sees the language and ideational references to sin and redemption in a good deal of pop music, but doesn’t hear much on the topic within the Church as a whole, unless it is to speak collectively in reference to economic and governmental structures. Have we indeed lost the ability to speak about sin in the ECUSA, having sacrificed that ability upon an altar of ‘inclusivity’ and moralistic therapeutic deism? (Not to say that inclusivity is a bad thing, but it certainly isn’t the only thing worth keeping, of course.)

It is a valid worry, and one I tend to share. I can certainly see where Dr Olsen is coming from, and he makes a number of very good points about why we need an awareness of sin. But part of the reason I believe we tend to shy away from publicly talking about sin in (some realms of) the ECUSA is precisely the way it already tends to be handled in the popular discourse. And Dr Olsen does address this, I believe, when he says:

The cultural view is fuzzy and, I’d suggest, often wrong because it lacks Jesus and accompanying concepts of virtue and sanctification, but to say that people don’t “get” sin is factually incorrect.

But it goes further than this. Even if the ECUSA tends to talk only about social or structural sin, our society doesn’t have the vocabulary for dealing with the concept, which is an important one. Evangelical (and a good deal of mainline) Protestantism has acculturated itself to this dearth in the American self-awareness with rhetoric about having a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus (defined in wholly therapeutic, ‘me’-centred, health-and-wealth terms, naturally), and the way we talk about sin in atomised, aestheticised terms has followed suit. If there is a need for a reclamation of the language of sin, it has to start with the assertion that sin is not just you doing naughty things or thinking naughty thoughts. I think Dr Olson has it right that a good way to reintroduce a proper understanding of sin may be to use it to supplement our language of ‘right relationship’, provided that we do this in full awareness that each relationship has two sides, and that we need to introduce the language of ‘sin’ specifically to describe cases in which relationships become exploitative or unhealthy.

Actually, aside from these minor caveats, Dr Olson’s piece is quite unexceptionable, and well worth your time to read in full! I recommend checking it out.

EDIT: I may be offline and inactive for several days, as I will be heading up to see my grandfather and uncle and aunts in Vermont between now and Saturday night. I will update and comment if I can!

Missing the point

The recent theatre shooting in Aurora was a profound tragedy for the country as a whole, as each and every one of these assaults is. Each time something like this happens, whether the Giffords shooting or the Fort Hood shooting, the old feelings of disbelief, followed by grief and outrage, come back just as strong. And yet, each time, the same political actors continue to trot out the old arguments, with only minor variations on the same themes invariably regarding gun violence, video games and rock music, particularly in the United States. Though in this case, I have actually seen some novel examples when it came to the politicisation of this tragedy. You really kind of just have to shake your head and wonder about the sort of people who believe that the proper response to people abroad sincerely expressing their disbelief, grief and outrage over a tragedy like this one (as we ourselves do when it happens in, say, Norway) is to throw your chest out and say, ‘well, your country has mass murderers too, and at least MY country has a free press’ (as Justin Mitchell seems to think).

That rather misses the point, in a rather profound way. Expressions of this kind of defensive, knee-jerk chauvinism do not address the point that, as the statistics show, we are a brutally violent country when it comes to assault deaths per capita, right alongside Estonia and Mexico, and far out of proportion to our economic status and development, though it would seem that we are slowly but surely getting better (H/T to Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber for the link and statistics). (The assault deaths rate for China is not included here as China is not an OECD member, but China usually has between a quarter and a third of our intentional homicide rate per capita according to the UNODC data - between 1.12 and 2.0 per 100,000 as opposed to our between 5.0 and 5.6.)

The proper response to a tragedy on our own shores, then, is to ask what sorts of reasonable measures we can take to improve our society (because bragging to the China expat community about how we have it so much better over here because we can print the word ‘murder’ in a headline is probably not going to stop the next one from happening). Gun control, sadly, is likely the only issue that will end up being discussed - and it also has the vice of being the issue which is inevitably preëmpted by lobbies on both sides of the aisle with deep pockets matched only by shallow argumentation and lack of scruple. It also happens to be, if not irrelevant, then a single consideration among many: Canada has more guns per capita than we do, but a mere fraction of our per capita violent crime rate. Other equally or more relevant aspects - like the economic woes which only serve to exacerbate people’s sense of desperation and existential unease; like the lack of support for decent policing in many municipalities; like the dysfunctional way in which our society treats the poor and the mentally ill; or (indeed) like a sensationalistic free press corporate media oligopoly which, driven by profit and the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mentality, delights in telling us that we all need to be scared of each other, all of the time - are less sexy and less controversial, and thus more liable to slide under the public radar.

For now, though - grief and outrage are the justifiable reactions. Let’s just be sure that we can put them to use in the long haul, toward improving our culture and our economic structure so that it leaves fewer people out in the cold and dark. The survivors (all of us included, in the theological sweep of things) as well as the victims need our remembrance.

The candle needed in the home shouldn’t burn in the mosque

A few thoughts before church this morning. Naj has a spirited post up here on Neo-Resistance, regarding what (in her experience) Iranians truly value:

Democracy is just an "idea". In implementation, it is mediocre and full of fallacy!

What it produces is numbed and dumbed populace; who shy away from responsibility by casting a "free" ballot ... and then shying away from the havoc the elected politician is wreaking in the history of humanity... Democracy CANNOT come to be implemented even in its most pathetic form, when a country is under THREAT. So shed the hypocritical lamb skin--it doesn't fool anyone in Iran!

If you hear ANY Iranian condoning the sanctions, if you hear anyone rallying behind a neo-con, make sure you take a mental note of a Neo-Resistance stamp on them:

A S S H O L E !

And, to all the Americans (journalists, activists, congressdudes, spouses of some disgruntled Iranian, or career activists) who are so concerned about the violation of HUMAN RIGHTS and FREEDOM in Iran, I suggest you utilize your zeal to prevent massacres at your country, executed in the form of shooting rampage by constitutionally free men who kill in churches, cinemas, schools, and etc. Ok?

I approve of the neologism ‘congressdudes’, for one thing. But Naj is one of the most anti-regime Iranian bloggers in the ‘sphere - and because she is such a thoroughgoing opponent of Ahmedinejad, she is rightly suspicious of the liberalising power of democratic political institutions, particularly those institutions imposed by force.

Naj also recommended this post by Bill Woollam. Right now the pattern seems to be bearing itself out, and I do think profit is ultimately the end goal of such geopolitical pinball games (and perhaps silencing organised political dissent from neoliberal globalisation in sensitive regions), but it is not necessarily just the oil. In Yugoslavia, for example, it was to privatise and then buy up the remnants of the countries’ industries. Still, it is worth taking a look at his analysis of the process.

And Naj’s quote of the Iranian proverb, ‘The candle that is needed in the home shouldn’t burn in the mosque’, is quite a propos here. A bit like ‘first take the beam out of your own eye’. If we truly value the political self-sufficiency of the Iranian people, then we must have respect for Iranian institutions and rule of law; and the most valuable support we can give to those attempting valiantly to change the regime in Iran is to build horizontal relationships, and to listen to what it is that reformers in Iran actually want (and very few of them want help in the form of sanctions and bombs).

Dr Russell Arben Fox on same-sex marriage

Dr Fox of In Medias Res has a beautifully-written, eloquently-argued post up, exploring the arguments for and against same-sex marriage from a communitarian perspective (and eventually coming down on the ‘for’ side). It is very much worth reading in its entirety, but one of my favourite passages was here:

Yes, I can imagine, and can even find slightly persuasive, arguments which assert that same-sex marriage buys into an individualization of sexual identity, disconnected from larger wholes like families, and thus can only further contribute to a culture which already plays into male sexual independence and irresponsibility, which is almost invariably to the detriment of women. God knows I have see almost nothing good whatsoever in the world of hook-ups, out-of-wedlock births, child-abandonment, and male infantilization which I see around me, even here on my fairly conservative and religious college campus. But then the Marxist in me speaks up: Really? It's the individualization of sexual identity which has played the primarily role in the breakdown of effective, sexual-responsibility teaching norms? It's the fault of women entering the workforce and asking for a little sexual parity, and the legal and technological tools they made used of to achieve it, which has given us family breakdown and the feminization of poverty? You don't think it might also have just a little bit to do with, you know...JOBS?

My oldest daughter will probably have one more year at home, and then she'll be heading out into the world. She appears to take her religion--our family religion--seriously. She also appears to like boys. And most importantly, she has confidence and ambition and some real intelligence leading her on. When I look at what surrounds her, and the sexual snares and family dysfunction that she already knows plenty about through her friends, I see, for certain, the negative consequences of the Sexual Revolution. But I also see the ravages of globalization and financial capitalism, which have eviscerated the socio-economic basis for the post-Industrial Revolution family unit (a family unit that was, for certain, itself a historical construct, but for good or ill it was a workable one, one which carried us through most of the 19th and 20th centuries in good shape), erected in its place a--in my opinion--deeply condescending and class-reinforcing and service-oriented meritocracy, and then provided plenty of porn and computer games for all the men (and women...but mostly men) who have found themselves unable to climb that ever-shifting and frankly corrupt ladder... Opposing same-sex marriage will not only not do anything to address this situation; it will--again, in the case of the arguments I myself at one time found persuasive--rather oblige me to buy into a ideology of marriage and female happiness that would prevent me from preparing my daughters for this unfortunate world as equals. I can't do that. And with that realization, the realization that I cannot wink at sexual inegalitarianism...my ability to articulate a case against same-sex marriage disappeared. Just like that.

Now, this speaks to me very closely, because the side of the argument against same-sex marriage with which I sympathise most is precisely the cultural one and what it signifies, that one’s sexual identity can be divorced so completely (no double entendre intended) from one’s social identity in ways which have reductively individualistic consequences as to allow for it. Regardless of one’s position on the implications of natural-law and virtue ethics, Dr Fox is doing yeoman’s work here following up on the work of Phillip Blond, in attempting to separate and sift through the detritus of both paradigm shifts: the way modern Americans think about (and do, so to speak) sex and the way we think about and do economics. He deserves a lot of credit merely for taking on this task. And the case he ultimately ends up making amending his former stance is a convincing one.

But Dr Fox is right that the debate over same-sex marriage, and the question of the way in which we as a society treat homosexuals (and what sorts of contributions and responsibilities we will ask of them in return) is not going away anytime soon. He is absolutely right that we will still have arguments. My hope is that all of the arguments we have will be of this high calibre.