Stasis and Stuff in Time and Conflict

I would like to bring your attention to a trend in western history which I believe many historians have already noted concerning the discourses of the past. I propose we take note of a trend in typology implicit in western history which has occurred in ancient and modern epochs. Since Herodotus sought to classify the territories of the Greek world and Polybius documented his timeless topographically-founded ethos; historians have grappled to represent change over time regarding the animus of organized power structures. Yet if we are prescient of resource-use history in western civilization, we must acknowledge this evolution, this need for resources which power-structures essentialize to sustain power. In other words, hegemony, or ideology, is not enough to explain the great contests which so regularly ensue in the western metanarrative. There is a more-basic material reality underneath the ideological currents of historical agency. I think a trend is extant in western histories: that a quest for material resources (which begins with typology and classification) often becomes an ideologically-founded endeavor. In historiographies of the West, I posit that material animus is often overshadowed by ideological agency. Thus, there is a dynamic between ideology and animus which underscores my supposition that, ideology became the agent which historians used to negotiate and justify the ubiquitous yet underdeveloped need for simple resources in their treatments. Basic human necessity, and historical pragmatism prompts us then to consider that just as Hannibal and his father Hamilcar topologized southern Iberia for land, resources, and labor, so too did the European settler-colonialists look upon North America with similar designs. In antebellum-era economies a great ideological debate emerged which was directly informed by “material” circumstances. Yet in each case just mentioned, the conflicts are most often treated in metanarratives as displays of great strategy, or extraordinary political, rhetorical and philosophical debates which fomented stasis. So, I posit that ideology is a last expression of the simple human need for resources: on Iberia, on the U.S., and on the Navajo Nation alike; resources determined the initial scope and trajectory of consumption on the one hand, and conflict on the other. In the case of the U.S. Civil War, a war for resources like iron, lumber, and labor evolved into a noble struggle for liberty indeed. In ancient Iberia, a war for control of the Mediterranean in the second and third-centuries B.C.E. between the adaptive-yet land-based Roman legions and the naval power of Carthage was largely determined by the resources which each Empire sought to control. Yet, it is the war designs of the Scipios and Carthaginians which are the main agents in this struggle which history remembers. I posit that the material resources which armored and paid Hannibal’s armies were just as important as the strategies that ensued in victory and defeat. That in the Civil War, the basic material necessity for iron and the machines of modernized warfare, and the need for labor to supply the armies and industries, prompted Lincoln’s ideological transformation from an ambivalent “free soil” advocate, to the abolitionist he has become over time in the legacy of his history. On the Navajo Nation, the 20th-century need for new materials of dominance inspired by WWII ultimately evolved into an international movement of nuclear proliferation during the Cold War. In this case too, in which a host of ideologies collided in a globalized capitalist and communist binary, the need for materials at home on the Colorado Plateau, was very much an ideological struggle for power and/or peace (whichever way you look at it). Paradoxically, just as wars for resources do indeed evolve into conflicts about ideology, so too do ideologies prompt the need for resources. If resources are in-fact bound to constructions of power in a free-market, does it follow then that the stuff of war is bound to constructions of liberty in a free-world? Only time will tell. Yet lest I digress further, I will end.