John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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PLOWBOY: The boom was on!

SHUTTLEWORTH: The boom, indeed, was on and it lasted in Webb's view for approximately 450 years. In round numbers, from about 1500 to 1950 four and a half centuries which, in Webb's sure hands, take on a logical and coherent dimension that they never had in history class.

The trouble with most studies of history, you know, is that they try to explain piecemeal with stories of individual leaders, battles, and countries what were really much larger movements across time and space. Webb, on the other hand, turns that approach right around. He concentrates first on outlining the major actors on the world's stage during those 45 decades and those actors were not people, wars, or countries. They were all the nations of Europe, which Webb calls the Metropolis, and all the newly found lands and riches, which he calls the Frontier. 

The interplay of the Metropolis upon the Frontier and vice versa is absolutely spellbinding in Webb's book. His history has hair on its chest. It's inhabited by real people ... Drake, Michelangelo, Luther, Samuel Colt, the Texas Rangers, and millions of others who — caught up in this overpowering flash flood of new wealth — were swept into a hitherto unknown appreciation of the individual, self-motivation, capitalism, and democracy. Which, by the way, is a tremendously important point that all the vested interests of Western culture — especially the powers that be here in the United States — do their best to ignore and hide.

PLOWBOY: What? That our most cherished institutions were, in reality, forced upon us?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Right. We unnecessarily flatter ourselves when we perpetuate the myth that — somehow, because we're very clever — we've "invented" democracy and capitalism and dynamic growth and fantastic machines and all the other concepts and developments we hold dear.

The truth of the matter is that it was the tremendous windfalls of land, gold, food, fibre, fuel, base metals, etc., which were suddenly dumped into Western man's collective lap that opened our eyes to — or rubbed our noses in — an appreciation of all these things.

It's difficult to develop a work ethic, you know, when there's not enough work — or wages or even food — to go around. It's extremely easy, on the other hand, to "discover" the virtues of hard work when — on every side — you see people getting rich exactly in proportion to the amount of labor they invest in claiming previously unclaimed land, furs, food, and seemingly limitless quantities of other real wealth.

Spread more land than can possibly be farmed, more gold than can be counted, more "work" — in the form of grabbing a share of an apparently endless bounty before a group of people any people, even the wretched serfs and debtors who were, in large measure, our ancestors and you'll find that all our most cherished concepts and discoveries practically invent themselves.

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