1.
Turner's Frontier Thesis: Frontier v. Closure
1990 marked the centennial of the official closing of the western frontier. In 1993 it will be one hundred years since Frederick Jackson Turner presented his "Frontier Thesis", one of the most descriptive and predictive theories explaining the development of the American Ethos or of society formation, past, present, and future.
Briefly, Turner's thesis posits that from its inception America was a civilization defined and modified by its frontier--defined in that people were drawn to America because it was a frontier promising refuge from poverty, tyranny, and servitude; modified in that the frontier would exert pressure on established forms of government to become more democratic.
The American colonists were Europeans bringing European traditions--habits of mind. Their settlements were closed systems (Jamestown, Boston, etc.) like those from which they fled-- with a difference. These commonwealths were closures with openings, boxes missing sides. They had frontiers, and with them, the promise to control their own lives.
The frontier was a lure to indentured servants, new immigrants, small landowners, those elements with the least at stake in the political order and the strongest will to evolve. As the new society took form in old hierarchies the poorest, weakest constituents pushed beyond the pale, to clear land and establish their own power. This constituted a challenge to authority, eroding tax support for government, depressing land values, and causing higher security costs for the colonizer, (factors which led the British Crown to issue the Proclamation of 1763).
But the Turner Frontier Thesis does more than show how the frontier democratized American society by offering a constant alternative in the way of free lands. It suggests a culture driven by its ideas of a frontier, which pulled at society like a magnetic field. It also has profound implications for the psychology of pioneers, who brought baggage--culture as well as clothing. The conflict between dealing with what they brought and wanted to become epitomizes the struggle of the individual against the custom to which society imposes conformity.
In this, the Frontier Thesis anticipates and correlates with Freud's analysis of society in Civilization and Its Discontents. Democracy, claimed Turner, was reborn at each stage of westward expansion. The frontier simultaneously offered freedom from closure and the possibility-- no, the inevitability-- of new closure. Pioneers fled closed societies only to recreate similar confinements based on the ones they left behind, since they had no other points of reference.
Finally, it is this frictional dichotomy between frontier and closure that has fueled American history and evolution, germinating such disparate conflicts as abolition v. slavery, gold v. silver, big business v. labor, energy industries v. conservation and anti- nuclear groups, pollution v. our means to measure it. The American frontier/closure goes beyond the Newtonian notion of action and reaction insofar as the American model carries its opposition within its seed, spins with it like a turbo as it produces new issues in which the contradiction can appear.
2.
Nichelessness
America has been the laboratory in which humans escaped one niche (prisoners in Georgia, Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Quakers in Pennsylvania, etc.) only to make another. Disgruntled with government, they established government; oppressed by religion, they oppressed others with their own. These nomads in revolt closed the frontiers not merely with axes, guns, and livestock, but with their traditions. A kind of Freudian introjection cursed them to recreate what they repudiated till they ran out of space.
There were subtle hazards to this frontier. Freedom quickly deepens from an acquired taste to an addiction. American pioneers not only rebelled against civilisation in their restless surge into the unknown, but against their own internalized need to settle and establish which reasserted itself at every phase.
This flight-fever afflicted the Oregon pioneers of Lilian Schlissel's Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey. Families migrated several times before setting out for Oregon. Many never arrived at their appointed termini or once arriving, continued drifting, let their property slip away and failed to leave legacies. Their desire to find El Dorado was warped by not finding it while their mainspring instincts for family and home were snapped by perpetual movement. As though flawed by internal gears with broken teeth, these conastoga-demons were condemned to departure without arrival.
This dybbuk-like wandering was like a taste of sweets turned to diabetes. It had long-term impact on the permutations of the family. Also changed was the role family would play in the individual's life. No longer the most solid institution, nor strongly rooted in place, the family would be a departure point, another closure to be fled. Such was a hazard of flight. Once in motion, it might be hard to stop.
But the quest for freedom need not only resemble Kafka's "Hunter Gracchus", floating on a barge on the sea of limbo for two thousand years. Perhaps the pioneer families, Gilgamesh, Eva of Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, and Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis are avatars of Pico della Mirandola's vision of free man, nicheless in the scheme of heaven and earth, fluctuating between god and man, victim and conquerer, human and beast.
3.
The Niche Mentality Asserts Itself
The wanderlust of many pioneers, the will to evolve that so often seems no more than a subcutaneous irritation, is often braked and overwhelmed by an equally powerful tendency in our species to repeat ourselves, to revert to habits of thought and practice as if they had DNA. This is the "niche", the closure of the human mind which orients, gives meaning or patterns to an individual's behavior.
"One of the central concepts of modern ecology is that of the niche. A niche involves not only location but also behavior; it is the behavioral space in which an organism moves and competes for resources."
Bateson and Goldby, Thinking About AIDS, p.11
The notion of "niche" is not only descriptive of a food chain but of the corporate ethos of our times, a new form of 19th Century "Social Organicism." The society is a machine and each individual serves a function within it. "Individual" itself signifies no more than a role, well or poorly played. Freud reinforces this idea: the individual apart from society he views as an escapist who must ultimately be crushed by reality.
We may find the notion of "Niche" comforting. It tells us everyone and everything has a purpose. "Niche" provides a temporal order, a modern "great chain of being." It relieves us, meanwhile of the responsibility of total freedom.
However, "niche" is also repulsive to the pioneer or Pico in us that makes us revolt at a preordained limitation. It limits the those hectares of freedom inside us, makes a lie of our desires to escape, which reminds us there is no escape.
Gilgamesh is a fragmentary account of the conflict between niche and frontier. The people of Uruk build walls, practice old crafts. Their slavish occupations are all that distinguish them from beasts. They are unhappily "niched" under a distracted and ambivalent king-god who violates them. Gilgamesh, too, is stuck in a niche that bores him, that of a demi-god.
Enkidu lives outside the human hierarchy. He has no niche, is neither man nor animal. Seduced by a woman, who shaves his body hair, Enkidu journeys to Uruk, meets Gilgamesh, fights him, and finds his place as Gilgamesh's friend, valet, and alter-ego, a role blessed by Ninsun, Gilgamesh's mother.
The niche Enkidu assumes involves consciousness, especially consciousness of death. It will be Enkidu's role to die for Gilgamesh when they flee their niche in Uruk to fight Humbaba and replace the gods.
Failing to unseat the deities, bereft of companion, Gilgamesh seeks immortality, to unhinge himself from the niche that nature has assigned him. He returns to Uruk, to supervise the tedious task of rebuilding the walls. Freedom has no meaning for him; it is merely wandering. One possible meaning of the story is that man has a niche which is determined by his mortality, sexuality, and functionality. In the end Gilgamesh returns from his unsuccessful quest for immortality, surveys the walls his people have built and is awed by their height:
And for a moment--just a moment--
All that lay behind him
Passed from view.
4.
The Rise of the Niche--The Corporate Jungle
In "Contributions of the West to American Democracy" Turner noted American democracy would be changed by four factors: the exhaustion of the frontier; the industrialization of American society; America's growth as a world power; and the alignment of the political parties along social issues. How would American democracy sustain itself without a frontier? What would happen to the American character shaped by the opportunity for free lands and flight?
"At the present time America presents a field for human effort
far more extensive than any sum of labor that can be applied to
work it. In America too much knowledge cannot be diffused..."
DeTocqueville, Democracy in America, pg. 307
While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the
earliest of the western advance, has been preserved as an ideal,
more and more of these individuals struggling each with the
other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger problems,
have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the
strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those
preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated
capital to control the fundamental resources of the
nation...(Their) success in consolidating economic power now
raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions
can survive.
Turner, The Contributions of the West to American Democracy
Because the frontier was "closed", or rather because it was still so vast and daunting in its openness, American democracy was obliged to accommodate the paramilitary corporation, which possessed the capital and organization to exploit the continent's resources. Turner knew, like DeTocqueville before him, that America's destiny was laissez-faire, with economic rather than military or political emphasis. America's frontier was no longer something to be settled but elaborated on, not discovered but filled in.
It was equally clear that the American government would align with corporate powers. In 1886, eight leftist leaders were hanged for the Haymarket Riot, though none were present for the police massacre. To break a strike of Pullman workers in 1894, President Cleveland issued the first "blanket injunction" against strikers, and jailed their leader, Eugene Debs for contempt of court. When this did not avail Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago, illegally. The Supreme Court meanwhile virtually endorsed rebates, stock manipulations, trusts and rail rate fixing in a series of decisions from 1886 till 1897 (`Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific vs. Ill.' `MN Rate Case'; `U.S. v. E.C. McKnight', etc.).
The frontier fenced, the challenge of American government and will, its new frontier, became managing the closure of America. The implications of a democracy ruled by an oligarchy of self-interested businessmen did not, however, suffice to make Turner pessimistic. Three years before Upton Sinclair showed the abuses of the meat-packing industry against workers and consumers, Turner was, with more hopefulness than judgment, lauding the democratic leanings of robber barons and quoting Andrew Carnegie's Triumph of Democracy.
"Thank God, these treasures are in the hands of an intelligent people, the Democracy, to be used for the general good of the masses, and not made the spoils of monarchs, courts, and aristocracy, to be turned to the base and selfish ends of a privileged hereditary class..."
Where did the economic leviathan fit with western individualism? Turner's attitude was "wait and see." American democracy, he claimed, was "the outcome of the experiences of the American people." Democracy itself became a frontier.
Modern politics is not a struggle of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force massed about central power houses.
Henry Adams, The Education of...
Turner's attempt to model robber barons in the clothes of the common man while assigning to them benign motives, seems ridiculous in the context of the life, times and political observations of Jurgus Rudkus, the hero of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.. A pioneer like the ones before, Jurgus flees one closure only to find himself in a niche at the dregs of another. Jurgus swaps manorial Lithuania for the aerobic environment of Chicago's Packingtown. Yet from his abject position, Jurgus, like most immigrants, confronts a frontier-- of language, custom and a moral code based on mercantile principles, in which everything including one's wife, health, word, loyalty, is for sale--illegal tender for the smallest gain that enables survival--that compels him to hold his niche or jangle loose of the survival chain.
The strength of "niche" in Jurgus' world is such that even when he has a C-note in his hand, it is soon stolen--for which he is arrested-- since no one believes he could have so much money. He participates in a political system in which, true to Gouverneur Morris' prediction, the poor sell their votes to those rich enough to pay for them.
Where brutality is virtue and immorality a morality of its own, the protagonist loses all he cares for, is beaten by cold, injury, and imprisonment only to experience his greatest power in the society that seeks his demise when he becomes a criminal and Republican, a peculiar transcendence which is not freedom so much as burlesque.
5.
Apathy: Niche-infection
"When they speared out all they could reach, they emptied the
vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and
dumped it in the truck. The floor was filthy, yet they set Antanas
with his mop slopping the pickle into a hole that connected with a
sink, where it was caught and used over and over forever..."
--The Jungle, p.61
"There were cattle which had been fed on "whiskey malt",
the refuse of the breweries and had become..."steerly"-- which
means "covered with boils." It was a nasty job killing these, for
when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash
foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man's sleeves were
smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever
to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes, so that he could see? It
was stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had
killed several times as many U.S. soldiers as all the bullets of
the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned,
it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars."
(p.99)
"They were regular alchemists at Durham's; they advertised a
mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a
mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken"...
Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically-
-who knows?...The things that went into the mixture were tripe,
and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and
finally, the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They put
these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but
the contents of the cans all came out of the same
hopper..." (p. 99)
Today's reader of The Jungle cannot fail to wonder how the American public tolerated eating sausages tainted by rat dung and that workers accepted such pestilential conditions without taking action. These bewildered readers have never seen the Judy Garland movie "Meet Me In Saint Louis."
No number of valid excuses-- the 19th Century public's ignorance of industrial change and the meaning of laissez-faire, with its hedonistic enjoyment of new pastimes like baseball and old ones like horseracing; the lack of agricultural work for unskilled laborers; a manpower glut due to immigration; the constant threat of economic depression --can assuage the irritation one feels toward the Gay Ninety's passivity toward corporate aggression. Nor does the reader easily accept the government's complicity in the hoodwinking and poisoning of the public, typified by the inspector who turns his back on tubercular beef in The Jungle.
Any day...one might see sharp-horned and shaggy haired creatures
running with the sheep--and yet, what job you would have to get
the public to believe that a good part of what it buys for lamb
and mutton is really goat's flesh! The Jungle, p 100
Gross apathy need amaze no one. Apathy is a reflexive attitude toward niche. When we perceive that we are unable to act on a grievance, we "steal something from the thief" by refusing to care about it. Nor need apathy be factored away by ignorance. Laws regulating food production existed then as now. The public turned its back on its health because it accepted its niche in a system in which consumers and producers were separated by a palimpsest of media-- advertising, public relations, newspapers-- that stroked the public's desire to believe all was well and permitted it to devote its thoughts to baseball, horseracing, and the tunes of the day.
The same reader who rebukes the 1890s public for rolling over for the trusts has no inkling of the collusion between federal researchers and pharmaceutical companies from which the latter reap billions in profit from tax-supported research (AZT), nor do they fathom to what extent all of our medical insurances have been wrecked, not by AIDS, per se, but by the inflated cost and inefficient delivery of health services that AIDS has only exposed.
We swallow corporate image-making while ignoring what corporations do in real life. As DuPont runs ads that extol their clean shattering windshield glass for sparing the face of a new bride caught in a traffic accident, the Wilmington (De) News-Journal runs a front page story (Memorial Weekend, 1991) reporting that a five hundred million dollar law-suit filed by a North Carolina family against the Dupont Company for poisoning the ground-soil of their seventeen acre farm.
Though better-educated to the dangers posed by corporate interests and the chemical and radioactive menace they have spawned than people one hundred years ago, we, too, are satisfied by our material advantages and diverted by the demands of sociability, the love of joining, our pastimes and spectacles. We do not pay heed to disasters-in-the-making-- economic, ecological, epidemiological, or nutritional. We take the wait-and-see attitude, as Turner did toward the "robber barons", and rely on our courts and environmental agencies to rectify a situation beyond our attempts to imagine or to solve.
6.
The Risk of Living & a New Frontier-- Measuring Risk
Today's readers of The Jungle are as likely to blame the Rudkuses for their predicament as sympathize with them, for this is how we are told to feel about failure in today's system. "After all," the reader asks,"what did they expect, coming from Lithuania with little money and no language skills? Pioneering requires risk which either works or fails." A niche for risk-taking exists in our culture and we view it as a choice of the individual.
The same hardened cynics are flabbergasted that corporations in 1991 operate plants that manufacture nuclear materials for bombs on sites where radioactive materials are stored in tanks from which they seep into soil and groundwater, condense in air, and might explode at any time, sending vapors into the atmosphere that enter our lungs, our pores or our stomachs, via food-stuffs. Suddenly, our risk is merely being here.
Niels Bohr, a Nobel laureate, maintained in 1939 that an atom
bomb could not be built without "turning the country into a
gigantic factory. A few years later, as Bohr was shown around
the secret sites of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller
wrote,"When Bohr came to Los Alamos I was prepared to say,`You
see...' but before I could open my moth, he said,`You see, I told
you it couldn't be done without turning the whole country into a
factory. You have done just that..."
The nuclear weapons complex is an industrial empire... Like
most industrial operations, these factories have generated waste,
much of it toxic...
Although the Weapons Complex was developed in World War II as
part of the Manhatttan Project, a major expansion occured in the
early 1950s...
Contamination of soil, sediments, surface water and
groundwater are extensive. At every facility there is contamination with radionuclides or hazardous chemicals...
Complex Cleanup: The Environmental Legacy of Nuclear Production (p.3)
Measurement is a frontier-- of investigation, a way of exploding closure. It is an unknown. Which statistic do we believe? Numbers are silent. We do not know how to assess dangers, the cost of damages, how to prepare for or avoid disaster.
Operated by Westinghouse since 1943, the Hanford, Washington site along the Columbia River might be struck by an explosion equal to 36 tons of TNT. In a worst-case scenario, radioactive strontium-90 and cesium 137 would be released into the atmosphere, "contaminating large areas within and possibly beyond the Hanford site boundaries."
But the projections of how this event would take place or why it would not have varied according to the measurer and the rod.
Westinghouse, the caretaker, insisted a tank explosion was unlikely. Vertical measurements indicated temperatures never exceeded 135NF. whereas reactions required a minimum temperature of 446N F.
The G.A.O. discredited the vertical measurements because the tanks are 75 ft. wide and the cyanides containing the heat-producing isotope, Cesium 137, may generate heat unevenly, in "hot spots" avoiding vertical-measure detection.
Even measuring the fallout of this disaster is as wide open as a prairie sky.
In 1987, the Department of Energy reported that an explosion would only "spray radionucleides as aerosols directly in the atmosphere that would expose persons off-site to radiation doses approximately equivalent to natural and man-made radiation sources."
Just your daily minimum requirement of radioactivity.
But in a 1990 Environmental Impact Statement, DOE conceded such an explosion would be a major accident "with potentially more damaging effect than those described in the 1987 report. The estimated radioactive dose level of 7.3 REMS (only 70 years of radioactive material living in the body, enough to kill approximately 1 additional person of every 160 exposed to this dose of radiation-induced cancer over an extended period of years), had not after all considered exposure pathways other than the inhalation pathway. Passing under a radioactive cloud, ingesting food grown in contaminated soil or water from contaminated surface water, factors that would add to the death count, were factors ignored.
In the final analysis, after years of maintenance and supervision, the DOE "has insufficient information for judging the probability of ferrocyanide explosion" in storage tanks at its plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington. The GAO advises the collection of more data.
"...although no consensus has been reached on how or where to
dispose of it, most of the waste generated in the past and much of
the wastes generated in the future is clearly destined to
remain... --for decades."
Most Americans are unaware of this threat at the fifteen weapons research and production sites. Even when they know the danger (in areas where the sites are located, as in New Mexico) they accept the facilities. Jobs are involved and income generated.
At any rate, the issue is beyond a simple `yea' or `nay.' It's a matter of sophisticated measurement. In our closure, instruments for measuring phenomena like economic disaster, pollution, climate, resource management, are a vast frontier in which decision makers and their would-be-watch-dogs get hopelessly lost.
The frontier of quantification not only pertains to hot spots in a nuclear storage tank. Explaining the third world's debt, estimated at one trillion plus (1988), in "Strategies for Sustainable Economic Development", Jim McNeil writes,"the traditional net flow of capital from the industrialized to the developing countries was reversed in 1984, more than forty three billion annually is now transferred in the other direction..." How is the earnest reader to make sense of this? Is the author suggesting that industrial lenders (us) are bad guys soaking the poor third-world, or have our banks merely made a very poor investment that is unlikely to pay out?
McNeil concludes that the industrialized nations retire the one trillion dollars of loans over ten years, at a juncture when our civilization is verging toward bankruptcy.
This solution might make us angry, it might stupefy us. But what is the alternative?
Solving global problems--weather, atmosphere, economics, resource management-- are so difficult, the problems themselves were created so distant from a layman's understanding and the sand-box of common sense, that we assume a bewildered apathy.
Closure makes us fatalistic. We feel powerless to free ourselves of threat. We trust in experts, government, technology and we get the sort of situation that exists at the Hanford Nuclear site in Washington or at the World Bank.
7.
Flight and Closure in Today's Attitudes
The new frontier may be an inventory of all that may destroy us, but the "niche" in us whispers it is futile. We know the problems but demand more data, forestalling decision. Our inconsistency is a symptom of this futility. We forgive the Polish debt and foreclose on senior citizens down the street. We build beach-side condos to escape urban pollution only to dump sewage in the sea. We demand better emissions standards for high-performance cars that we drive at high speeds that burn a gallon per mile. We allow unlimited immigration so long as it increases real estate value and multiplies the consumption of Coca Cola. We promote land development, whether or not public services and utilities exist to accommodate it. We trust in God and technology to clean up after us.
The world's problems have, like our society, evolved to overwhelming complexity. Resistance, like escape, is implausible. Acid rain, global warming, the rising ocean and the use of resources are pandemic. Ecologists insist systems are as open as the old American frontier, but living under the ultimatum to breathe, eat, and sleep, our world might as well be under glass, as hermetic as the plague-stricken town of Oran.
How does the "oration" mentality of man, the measure of all things, coexist or express itself in the context of a system which must be closed: the world of plague, aggression and biological determinism?
Can the American frontier coexist with the "niche", in which behavior, identity, and purpose are interpreted in a context of hierarchies and closure, in a world barely removed from Leviathan?
Balking at the deal of freedom for death, we settle for a life of discomfort and insecurity in an environment so violent, polluted, unpredictable, stressful, informationed and sensationed that we long to flee. Such moments occur at toll-booths, in traffic jams, or on thickly populated and smelly streets, when we are drenched in ozone-laden air.
This impulse to flight is no more than the expression of stress as we cope with codes of meaning outmoded by the conditions they are meant to illuminate, for there is no escape, just the anodyne of air-conditioning, bathroom fixtures, swimming pools, appliances, resources to neutralize contaminants. Manufacturers sell analgesics to their poisons. The air gives us emphysema but hospitals to which we retreat are the best in the world; stress produces head aches and heart failure, but aspirin desensitizes us to both. The aspirin gives us ulcers but we have tagamet. And so on.
"In analyzing the demographic transition, what requires explanation--the low birth rate of the present of the present or the high birth rates of the past? One view is that people have always wanted to be relieved of the burden of child rearing but did not have convenient (or effective) birth methods of birth control...
Nathan Keyfitz, "The Growing Human Population"
Global closure is not complete. All over the world people continue to seek a way through the nature-net. Population control is a basic defiance of laissez-faire, a new frontier in human values. People determine to cease defining themselves according to animal functions, refuse to sacrifice themselves to Malthusian equations, place themselves in the larger context of humanity and earth, or pursue the solitary aims and satisfactions of the self.
Yet, the U.S. now withholds foreign aid to countries where abortion is a birth control alternative. Our society subjugates this frontier in the name of our closure. Laissez-faire economists cite the third world's over-population as a key to its impoverishment; yet we prefer this niche of over-population death, disease, starvation to the frontier beyond biological necessity and our right-to-life taboo.
"A niche involves not only location but also behavior; it is the behavioral space in which an organism moves and competes for resources."
Most of us accept our niche. We do what we are told we do well, choose marketable occupations, settle where jobs beckon, live where we fit in. We also accept our niche to pollute the planet. According to Richard LoPinto's Pollution people have always polluted. Discharging sludge in the river seems more civilized than the medieval method of throwing ordure in the streets.
Some people try to escape their niche, like the woman at the Chinese laundry, who now sells sunglasses, candy, and coffee. But the power of "niche" is strong. People resist purchasing food or accessories at a Chinese laundry, even if it calls itself "Wash 'n Wanton". You rarely see customers leave with "A Pleasure to Serve You" cups.
Still others make "niche-think" work for them. An evening business student sat at the next PC in the Computer lab. She had just come from work. Her job was to buy properties and convert them to air strips. She had tried that day to convince a topless go-go bar owner to sell his lot. Once the ground is paved by asphalt it won't grow anything for hundreds of years, she said. How did she feel about destroying the ground for such a long time?
She shrugged.
"Nobody will find out for seventy-five years and I'll be dead by then."