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God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World
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October 31, 2007
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| God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World |
IntroductionJOANNE MYERS: Good morning.
I’m Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs. On behalf of the
Carnegie Council, I would like to thank you all for joining us.
Today it
is a pleasure to welcome back a familiar voice, heard not once, but twice before
at our breakfast programs. Walter Russell Mead is a widely acclaimed
expert on global affairs, as a reading of his bio will attest to.
He
first spoke here upon the publication of his prize-winning book, Special
Providence, in December 2001, and then again in 2004, upon the release
of Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a
World at Risk.
Both of
these transcripts can be found on our Web site by visiting www.carnegiecouncil.org.
Today he is here to discuss
his latest work, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern
World, in which he examines the biggest geopolitical story of modern
times: the birth, rise, and continuing growth of Anglo-American
power.
What defines a great power? Conventional wisdom would tell
you that it is a nation or a state that has the ability to exert its influence
on a global scale. Great powers characteristically possess economic,
military, diplomatic, and cultural strengths. While different sets of
great or significant powers have existed throughout history, it is the rise of
two English-speaking powers, Great Britain and America, one following the other,
that have been so influential in world history over the last 300 years that Mr.
Mead will be discussing this morning. Sustained by favorable geography and
open-mindedness and tolerance for change, America, like Britain before it, built
a grand strategy that kept English-speaking nations at the pinnacle of global
power and prestige unmatched in times past.
Our speaker focuses on these
nations’ strengths and emphasizes how both Britain and America were not only
comfortable with embracing capitalism, but were able to incorporate an
individualistic and forward-looking religious structure that became the
foundation for this Anglo-American power, thus creating the modern world.
By reflecting on this past, Mr. Mead weaves together history, literature,
philosophy, and religion to unearth our cultural roots in order to find
meaningful patterns in the current flow of events, and he questions whether the
zenith of this Anglo-American power is already behind us, or do we still have a
role to play in world history.
Although there may be many books that
address various aspects of the British-American ascendancy, Mr. Mead writes that
the common history of these two nations in world affairs has not received the
attention it deserves. With the publication of God and Gold, I
believe it now has.
Please join me in welcoming a very special guest, a
recidivist of the Carnegie Council, Walter Russell Mead.
RemarksWALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Thanks very much for
that introduction. Thanks even more for an invitation. After two
visits here, you know all my flaws, so I am truly touched that so many people
would come here—so early in the morning, too—to hear me talk about this latest
book.
The germ of this book, the core of it, came to me one day when, as
one so often does, I was leafing through some old speeches of Oliver
Cromwell's—[Laughter]—and I came across a speech he made in Parliament in
1656, when he was asking for Parliament to support a war with Spain.
He
looks around the house and says, "Who are our enemies, and why do they hate
us?"
He answers, "It is the league of all the evil men on
earth."
"Why do they hate us? They hate us because they see, and I
say this in all modesty," he says, "that God’s truth is more practiced here in
this land than anywhere in the world, and the evil that is in them sees and
hates the good that God is doing here on this island."
That was really
quite astonishing, especially because I read this before September 11. At
that point, the point of comparison I made was to Ronald
Reagan’s "Evil Empire" speech about the Soviet Union to the National
Association of Evangelicals in 1983. I found, to my astonishment, that
when I put the two speeches side by side, the arguments are almost completely
parallel.
Reagan, for example, says, famously, "You can't make a deal
with the Communists. You can't negotiate in good faith, because Communist
morality believes that the spread of Communism is its highest moral imperative,
and therefore they will lie and cheat and steal to advance their
philosophy."
Cromwell said, "If you make a treaty with the papists, you
are bound and the papist is loose, because the treaty only binds as long as the
pope saith 'Amen' to it."
What he meant was that the sin of breaking a
treaty is perjury, and if the pope didn’t approve the treaty, he could just
forgive the Catholic prince for breaking the treaty. So there was no moral
force in the Catholic religion, said Cromwell, that could inspire confidence in
good dealing.
Cromwell went on to attack the human-rights record of the
Catholics around the world, talking about various kinds of
persecutions—conveniently, of course, overlooking certain regrettable incidents
that from time to time happened to Roman Catholics in Ireland under Cromwell's
rule. He said, "We’re not just fighting for us and our interests, but for
all of God's people."
Reagan says, "We are fighting for the cause of
liberty around the world."
Cromwell says, "What are we fighting
for?"
Quote: "Liberty, only that."
"Liberty," he says, "so
that English merchants in Spanish ports can carry Bibles in their pockets.
That’s all we want."
It goes on.
Reagan quotes Whittaker
Chambers to talk about, "Who was the first Communist? It was the
serpent in the Garden of Eden."
Amazingly, that turns out to have also
been the first Roman Catholic, that very dexterous and flexible
serpent.
At first, I thought maybe this was plagiarism at work. But
then I thought, Peggy Noonan, a good Irish-American, is not going to be
trawling the speeches of Oliver Cromwell for literary inspiration. In
fact, as you go through the record of what Anglo-Americans have said about their
enemies, from the time of Oliver Cromwell to the present day, you see a very
consistent line of discourse.
Joseph
Addison, writing about Louis
XIV, essentially says the same thing about French despotism that Oliver
Cromwell said about Spain. If you read, obviously, what Edmund Burke
said about the French Jacobins, what William Pitt the Younger said about Napoleon and Britain's struggle against the "evil empire" of
Napoleon, if you look at what Lloyd
George and Woodrow Wilson said about Imperial Germany in World War I, if
you look at what Churchill and Roosevelt said about Hitler and Tojo in World
War II, if you look at what American presidents from Truman to
the first
George Bush said about the Soviet Union, what you see is that we are
fighting for liberty against a power that is trying to promote an evil despotism
globally, that has a fifth column in the United States or England.
Cromwell, actually, didn’t use the phrase "fifth column." That
comes from the Spanish Civil War. He used the older, and, to me, more
troubling metaphor, "the Catholic interest in our bowels." It would have been
interesting to see Reagan try to use that one.
Obviously, we have seen it
again since September 11. It’s absolutely fascinating that, spontaneously,
a certain line of argument emerges.
I said, well, that’s what we say
about them. What do they say about us?
What you will find, if you
go back and look at what they say about us, so to speak, is that their vision is
not the same. They don't hate us for the same reason we hate them.
But they have, over 300 years, hated certain things.
They say, "You talk
about liberty, but it’s really just that you want to be free from all moral
restraint for your pursuit of greed. Your civilization has no human or
divine values in it. Everything is subjugated to making
money."
"Your Protestant Reformation? That was just to get the
monks off the land so the nobles could dispossess the peasants,
basically."
"Your dog-eat-dog Anglo-Saxon capitalism? You whine
about liberty; you crush the bread out of the poor. You write your
beautiful Declaration of Independence; you have slaves. Your
hypocrisy is completely without compare in the world"—obviously, Jefferson
and slavery.
Actually, it was Robert Ley, who was the head of the German labor office in
World War II under Hitler—he says, "For 300 years, absolutely nothing has
changed among the Anglo-Saxons since the time of Oliver Cromwell—unbelievably
hypocritical, greedier than anyone else, but talking much more loudly about how
good they are."
In some ways, actually, you find that the foreign view of
us is most brilliantly encapsulated in English in the poem in Alice in
Wonderland, “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” If you think of the
Walrus and the Carpenter as Britain and the United States, when the poem opens,
they are in a froth of Anglo-Saxon indignation. These ancient evils—trans
fats in cooking, bribery, unkind verbal epithets for low-status ethnic
groups—must be eliminated at once. Everyone else sort of thinks, "Well,
we'll live with them. They are not beautiful, but we would drive ourselves
crazy if we tried to get rid of them all at once."
You have the Walrus
and the Carpenter weeping because the beaches are covered with sand. Then
they start coming up with plans: "If seven maids with seven mops swept it
for half a year, do you suppose," the Walrus said, "they could get it
clear?" If enough NGOs had enough resources, could we get this job
done?
Then they decide to convene the oysters together. It’s
amazing how the agenda they propose for these discussions still sounds like
international negotiations today.
"The time has come," the Walrus
said, "to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing
wax—"
Shoes would be trade in manufactured goods; ships,
commerce, trade. Sealing wax was used on legal documents. So now we
have moved to services, free trade in services.
"—of
cabbages (agriculture) and kings (human rights), and why the
sea is boiling hot (global warming) and whether pigs have
wings." (Are genetically modified organisms proper to be
used?)
Now, what is interesting here is that after this philanthropic
opening and this glamorous discussion, what happens is that the oysters all get
eaten, and the Walrus and the Carpenter move on down the beach.
That is
basically what much of the world sees when they look at Anglo-American
protestations of liberty, reform, transparency, and so on and so forth.
I
don’t want to talk forever this morning. I know we all have things to get
to. But let me just say that it seems to me that the English-speaking
world, with the wind in its sails for the last 300 years, has been convinced
that this Anglo-American form of social organization, a combination of
capitalism, individualism, and some other things that we could mention—some
pleasant, some not so pleasant—is the equivalent of the universal force that Hegel saw
transforming human society and, bringing in Fukuyama’s recent book, The End of History. That is to say, this
Anglo-American way of organizing one’s activities was so efficient and
productive and powerful that no one could stand against it, and so it was
sweeping the world. Fukuyama saw, at the end of the Soviet Union, the end
of history because that was the last major attempt to organize an alternative
system, and it had been defeated.
It’s interesting, for one thing, how
old that vision is. You look at Tennyson’s
poem "Locksley Hall."
Did Paul Kennedy speak here when his
book The Parliament of Man came out?
You missed a trick
there. It’s a good book.
Tennyson had this vision that, brought in
by commerce, the federation of the world, the parliament of man would bring the
rule of law to the world. Truman actually carried that poem around in his
pocket all the years he was president and saw the United Nations as the
culmination of Tennyson’s hope.
Obviously, before World War I, you have
Norman
Angell, with what still remains the bestselling book in the history of
international relations, The Great Illusion, which talks about how war is no
longer helping anybody, and basically the spread of capitalism is making
great-power war impossible—a huge bestseller from 1911 to roughly 1914, when,
for some inexplicable reason, sales dropped. [Laughter]
Obviously,
again, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of history is just lurking
right over the horizon. It’s that pool of water we see glittering on the
highway in front of us as we barrel down the road. Over and over again, we
fall for it.
But there is another fact, which is that, over the last 300
years, we do win all these wars. From the time of Oliver Cromwell to the
present day, the English-speaking powers, collectively, have lost only one
great-power major war. I am not including things like the British being
kicked out of Sudan by the Mahdi or our own unpleasantness in Vietnam, and I make no
prophecies about Iraq. But in terms of the big wars that shaped the
foundations of the international order from one generation to the next, from the
time, basically, of Oliver Cromwell to the present day, the English have only
lost one war, and that was the American Revolution.
So, in fact, we do
keep winning—vulgar as this is to say. So there is some reason for this
pervasive optimism.
But then I ask in my book, God and Gold, why
is it that we are strong enough to win the wars, that our social form of
organization seems to overcome its rivals, but then we so consistently misread
what each victory means historically? Why are we so strong and so
wrong?
This debate has been playing out in recent years as the debate
between Fukuyama’s end of history and Sam
Huntington’s vision of a clash of civilizations. In fact, this is the latest
incarnation of a debate in Western culture that goes back at least to the 18th
century, where you have Kant and Hegel with this idea of cosmopolitan universalism and
then the dissent of Johann Gottfried Herder, the German nationalist writer and
romantic writer, who says, "Wait a minute. Cultures are different.
People don't all want the same things. Just because all you Jacobins in
France want to wear Phrygian caps and cut off everyone’s head doesn't mean that
we Germans like to do that."
He said that a language is not just a way of
communicating information. It is a philosophy. It is a way of seeing
the world. What is true in Paris is not necessarily true in Weimar.
What is true in Paris and Weimar isn't necessarily true in Peru or Delhi.
People do not want the same things.
For Herder, the vision of progress is
not this idea that we are all going to be like Sweden in the future, sort of a
cosmopolitan future. For Herder, it’s more like separate trees growing up
in a forest. The trees don’t converge as they grow. A pine tree is
still a pine at the top of the tree, and an oak tree is still an oak. They
may form a canopy, but each tree remains itself.
It seems to me that to
try to understand what is going on in the world today, you have to see that both
of these things are happening. It is not either/or; it’s both/and.
The power of the capitalist system, and particularly under its most competitive
Anglo-American form, is irresistible. It does just beat out other
things. Maybe other people can play the game better than we in the
future. That is a different issue. But this form of social
organization is the trump card in humanity’s game of whist, as Oliver Cromwell
would have said. (I don’t believe he believed in playing cards, Mr.
Cromwell.)
The point is, though, that while it is irresistible, other
people don’t necessarily like it. The more it spreads, the less they like
it and the more they resist it.
I am going to close with a story that I
think is full of importance for the world we live in today. It’s a story
from South African history. It took place in the late 1850s, when the
British had been, in their usual way, spreading out from their original
settlements, and they were impinging on the lands of the Xhosa people. On
one pretext or another, they kept defeating them. Finally, in 1856, they
take a bunch of land, and put a British garrison in the middle of Xhosa land,
and it’s clear that things are not the way they should be, from a Xhosa point of
view, and something must be done.
The culture really felt that it was on
the breaking point. This alien intrusion—overwhelming, irresistible,
incomprehensible, and profoundly unacceptable—was just in their face, and what
were they going to do?
One morning, a young woman, Nongqawuse, was
going down to water the flocks in the river. The Xhosa gods appeared to
her and they said, "Nongqawuse, the problem is not that the British gods are
better than your gods or that British ways are better than your ways.
That's not why you are in trouble. You are in trouble because you have
compromised. You haven't had faith. You have lost touch with your
ancestral ways. If you Xhosa will show your faith in the old gods, kill
all your cattle and burn all your stored foods, then the gods will replace the
destroyed cows with new cows, better cows, and more food than you burn.
Best of all, the British will sail back to England."
She told her
uncle. Her uncle told the chief of the Xhosa people, and they killed the
cattle. They killed 300,000 head of cattle, burned their food, and
one-third of the Xhosa people died in the ensuing famine.
This phenomenon
is not an unusual thing, as this Anglo-American system spreads. There have
been many cases where a people who feel that its culture and its identity is on
the point of being overwhelmed have resorted to the belief that if they could
just let their own authentic selves fully be, the invaders would be chased
back.
The Boxer Rebellion in China had many of these
characteristics.
In the 19th century, Carlist
ultra-Catholic forces, fighting a liberalizing Spanish monarch backed by the
British, who was introducing new ways—the Carlist soldiers, like the Boxers,
believed that their uniforms could become invulnerable to the evil British
bullets if they were blessed by the priests in the right way.
Think of
the ghost dancers among the Sioux in the 1890s, where again the
belief was, for some movements of the ghost dancers, if they danced the right
dances, the ghost shirts would be invulnerable, and also if they did this, the
whites would all go back across the Mississippi, and North America would be
divided between an Indian half and a white half—if they could just go back to
the ancestral ways, the ancestral religion, fully and wholeheartedly.
I
probably don’t have to draw too many conclusions for you here. Obviously,
in the old days, Nongqawuse could only kill her own cattle. She couldn’t
go to London and start killing the cows in Britain. Technology, fueled by
capitalism, has now made these movements of desperate resistance and
self-assertion in the face of change and transformation much more of an issue
for the rest of us, and are things that we all have to deal with. I
wouldn’t want to minimize the need to deal with the dangers that we face, from
movements that I think, in many ways, are ghost-dancing movements.
But I
think it’s also important to stress that this movement is only part of what
these cultures do at this moment of extremity and existential crisis. Yes,
you have the Boxer Rebellion in China, but you also have Sun
Yat-sen. In a sense, as one door closes, others begin to open.
Some people opt for desperate, reactionary reassertion of the old ways.
Others say, "If we are going to remain who we are, we have to find a way to make
this stuff work for us, not against us." The Japanese learned to do it in
the 19th century. Even in Japan, there were Samurai terrorists who
assassinated people who they thought were going to compromise with
Westerners.
If you think about Xhosa history, the most famous name in
Xhosa political history is not Nongqawuse; it’s Nelson
Mandela, who was born a little more than a generation after the cattle
killing.
So these moments of desperation are often a sign that a moment
of dynamism and creation and change is taking place. There may be a lot of
wrenching struggles in moving ahead. You can look at the history of
China. The Boxer Rebellion was, alas, not the end of China’s troubles, and
they may not be over yet. But a process was clearly under
way.
Those are some of the thoughts I have that I have tried to write
about in God and Gold—why we are strong, why we are wrong. And,
if we are wrong that our victories mean the universal victory of liberty and the
end of history, what actually is going on in the world? Those were the
questions I started with. I have given the best answer, at least to this
point, that I can give.
Thank you.
JOANNE MYERS:
Another fascinating and provocative discussion that I hope will raise many
questions.
I would like to open the floor to questions.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: Thank you for
waking us up this morning with so many great poems and tales.
Many people
are predicting that the 21st century will be the Asian century. You are a
historian; you are drawing upon the past. But what do you predict for the
future with the China that has passed the Boxer Rebellion and is coming on
stronger and stronger, with capitalism, but also with communism and a different
state system and many other values? What is going to happen—or with
India?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: I hold with Yogi Berra on
this. He once very famously said, "Prediction is dangerous, and especially
when it involves the future." [Laughter]
As usual, he was
right.
But I do think, from the Anglo-American point of view, the rise of
Asia is challenging and exciting—I think, on the whole, a good thing.
I
didn’t talk about the geopolitical strategies that have been part of the
Anglo-American way. Actually, in the book I talk about "The Protocols of
the Elders of Greenwich: The Secret Anglo-Saxon Plan to Rule the
World." Forget that Zion stuff; those guys are not ruling.
From an
Anglo-American point of view, it is a terrific thing. If there are going
to be nuclear superpowers in Asia, with 1 billion people, how convenient it is
that there are two and not just one.
A lot of people who talk about the
21st century have this idea at the back of their minds that it’s 1910, China is
the Germany of Europe, America is the global Britain, and we are about to be in
a struggle for our lives that will leave us gravely weakened. That is the
sort of picture that people see.
I actually look at Asia and see
something much more like 1815, where there are many different great powers,
middle-size powers, important, significant powers, and at least the possibility
exists for a stable international order in Asia that is based on a balance of
power, which is guaranteed by the United States.
This does not mean that
the United States engages in a contain-China policy. In my view, the rise
of India means that we don’t have to contain China. The realities of Asian
geopolitics mean that no country—not China, not India, not Japan, not even the
United States—can aspire to dominate that region.
On the other hand, what
it means is that the Asian superpowers that we see—yes, they are going to have
global interests. They are going to be big powers. They are going to
be important players in the world. But I think maybe the Americans will
continue to have a kind of unique global role because of the balance of power
that looks to me to be the foundation of Asian prosperity in the 21st
century.
QUESTION: Thank you, Walter, for a
fascinating talk.
I interviewed Fernand
Braudel shortly before his death, and he expressed a different idea on the
rise of the Anglo-Saxons. He said, "I feel much less free in Britain or
America. You are rigidly constrained by your work ethic, by your struggle
to get everything done. I feel freer in France or Italy, the Catholic
countries. We have much more leisure, much less control."
Two
questions. One is, would you agree? The other is, do you think that
our self-discipline, that of the Protestant and Anglo-American world, is
breaking down in the 21st post-modern century, as we have overconsumption in all
sorts of areas, whether it is calories per person or whether it is to our energy
consumption and other ways that we have been unable to restrain our
appetites?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: I guess what I
would say is, yes, it is true that a Frenchman likes French society better than,
in general, a Frenchman likes Anglo-American society. So I am not
surprised that Braudel was happier at home.
This is part of what I am
talking about, this Herderian logic, that different cultures have different
preferences and envision work in different ways, and the relationship of
personal self-fulfillment, and work in different ways.
I think, actually,
the deepest split is over future and tradition, change and tradition. In
most of the world, in quite different ways, but very strongly, there seems to be
a deep and inevitable gulf between the past and tradition—which is seen as the
home of family values, often of the sacred, of the encounter with God, who laid
down the way things should be way back in the good old days—and the inevitable
compromises and changes that you have to make in line with
modernity.
Again, a lot of this goes back to Oliver Cromwell and that
era. In Anglo-American culture, there is a tendency, actually, to see the
future as the place where you meet God. If you think about it, God’s call
to Abraham and Abraham's faithful response to it, which is sort of the core of
Protestant preaching and the pivot on which Protestant theology turns—God's call
to Abraham is, "Leave your father and your father’s house and go to a new land,
where I will show you the promise." So the sacred is in the unknown and
the new.
When Anglo-Americans are working really hard and doing things
radically different, their subjective experience is, "I am approaching
transcendence," whereas in many cultures around the world, when you live in this
kind of instrumental way, the feeling is, "I only want to do as much of this as
I can."
I actually talk in the book about a barrister in Gilbert
and Sullivan. He is really poor. He can’t get cases—a young
lawyer. He says, "I soon grew tired of third-class journeys and dinners of
bread and water. So I fell in love with a rich attorney's elderly, ugly
daughter." [Laughter]
For a lot of the world, capitalism is the
rich attorney's elderly, ugly daughter. The goal is to try to get as much
of the money while having as little to do with her as possible.
For this
reason, I think, because capitalism is the source of so much power in the world,
the Anglo-Americans, for some weird reason, actually fell in love her. I
compare American culture and British culture to Samuel
Johnson, who fell in love with an elderly, not particularly attractive
woman, and to Benjamin Disraeli, who fell genuinely in love with Mary Anne
Disraeli, an older woman whom people didn’t consider attractive, but whom he
genuinely loved.
Because we have fallen in love with the elderly, ugly
daughter, we are rich as hell. Because we actually do love her, we are as
happy as a Frenchman or an Italian, although we love to go over there and
look.
QUESTION: Politicians are well aware of the
dangers of public speaking and the effects of emphasis on certain aspects of
their speech when they meet various groups. Lawyers are known to be able
to argue either side of an issue. Recently, I heard you make some remarks
that accentuated the positives in your book. Could you reverse course and
focus on the positive aspects about the influence of Britain and America on the
world culture?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The positive
influence of Britain and America on world
culture?
QUESTIONER: Yes.
WALTER
RUSSELL MEAD: So you felt this was more of a negative thing this
morning?
QUESTIONER: Yes.
WALTER
RUSSELL MEAD: What can I tell you? I’m an Anglo-American
myself. I think that old lady is kind of good-looking, kind of cute, in
her own way.
I tend to think that this society, despite the inevitable
faults and shortcomings that any society has, has gone on to transform the
world. Also if you look back at world history, there have been all these
contests, for 300 years, against the various "empires of evil" that the
Anglo-Americans have fought against. Yes, people, from Cromwell and
Ireland to [the United States and] Abu
Ghraib, can make and have made a lot of atrocity propaganda against the
Anglo-Americans, and based often on things that actually happened, although
sometimes not.
When these old "evil empires," which lots of intellectuals
and great thinkers and cultural figures have celebrated—Thomas Mann
spoke up for the Kaiser in 1914—
But you know what? When the
Spanish Empire fell, nobody regretted it, except a few Spanish nobles.
When French absolutism crashed to the ground and Louis XIV failed to conquer
Europe, everybody in Europe, except for Louis XIV and maybe a few mistresses,
was happy about it. When Napoleon was defeated, no one tried to really
restore that again, except for his great-nephew, Napoleon III. Nobody wants it. When Prussian
militarism collapsed after 1914, the world was glad. The fall of Hitler
and Tojo was terrific. Nobody wants it back.
Again, a few people in
the Kremlin would like to see the Soviet Union back, but nobody else
does.
So in spite of all the cynicism, all the acknowledgment of the
failings and fallibility of the Anglo-Americans in these contests, there is very
little global nostalgia for the people we have defeated along the way. My
guess is that when the last suicide bomber lays down the last belt of explosives
and the last crazy fanatic decides to go to Harvard Business School—and may God
hasten that day—no one in the world is going to be sorry. The fall of the Taliban did
not inspire real outpourings of grief, even among a lot of very conservative
Muslims.
So, yes, I think there is a lot wrong with what we do. I
think we all should acknowledge that the oysters do have a point
sometimes. But, absolutely, look back over the last 300 years. If it
hadn’t been us, I don’t think it would have been anybody better, and I think, in
many cases, it would have been somebody a lot
worse.
QUESTION: First of all, thank you very
much.
I want to put my question rather differently from the last
one. I want to ask you whether you think there is an alternative for the
Anglo-American narrative, other than a triumphalist narrative which depends on
having enemies. Can there be a leader in the United States, without his or
her leadership being defined in terms of having enemies?
You referred
rather briefly to Paul Kennedy and The Parliament of Man. Instead
of Cromwell and Ronald Reagan—you did not invoke the present leader of the
United States — it seems to me that a lot of the politicians these days just
focus on having enemies, and so they present themselves in terms of their
ability to defeat enemies.
I am just wondering whether you think that is
the only narrative that can kind of carry the Anglo-American story
forward.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: I think it
depends. I think at the moment we actually do have some enemies, and I
don’t think you can get elected president of the United States unless people
think that you are serious about dealing with this problem. There are a
lot of different ways to approach that and to frame it.
But I think it’s
fascinating that even after everything that has happened in terms of the
failures of Bush’s strategy to elicit obvious success or deep public support,
certainly on the Republican side you have almost a competition to be tough,
particularly among the major candidates, and on the Democratic side the
candidate who is conspicuous for her toughness is stomping the opposition like
nobody’s business. I don’t remember polls like this, in an open race,
where there has been this—there has never been a national poll of Democrats that
Hillary wasn’t on top of. Her lead seems to be growing,
even as Obama and Edwards are trying to sharpen exactly some of the differences
that you are talking about.
So I have to say, at this moment in time, as
a practical matter for 2008, I don’t see much sign of a difference.
I
think, in a sense—let’s leave the British out of it for now—what the Americans
need to be able to do now is, if we can, try to do something other than
oscillate between triumphalism on the one hand—history is over, and we
won. Therefore, as I think you saw in the Clinton
years, we cut our foreign aid budgets. We cut back on all the instruments
of power, while we raised our demands of the world in terms of human rights, in
terms of solutions to different problems. Amazingly, sooner or later, that
will drive somebody crazy enough to do something to you.
I think we also,
by the way, do have to recognize that it is not simply our aggressive and
annoying foreign policy, from time to time, that creates enemies. It is
also the natural expansion of American economic ways. It is the way that
modernity, which we generate not exclusively or entirely, but which we are seen,
certainly, as the spear point of around the world, in a sense, is continually
committing acts of aggression on societies around the world that don’t want to
change and don’t welcome the necessity of doing it.
So this clash between
the universal logic of liberal democratic capitalism and the particular cultural
Herderian logic of the trees that just want to grow undisturbed in their own way
will, I think, over time generate opposition. What we need to do, I think,
is, after 300 years of this pattern, try to get a little smarter about it and
try to think more intelligently about, for instance, how we make it easier for
other people to find an alternative to outrageous resistance and cattle
killing.
The book does have that goal at heart, I think. That’s why
I wrote it.
QUESTION: Let me put your
killing-cattle hypothesis upside-down and play the devil’s advocate. Have
the Anglo-Americans been killing their cattle for centuries, as per young
soldiers dying in wars in the name of identity and
freedom?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Certainly a lot of
soldiers have died.
This morning I didn’t really talk about
Anglo-American geopolitical strategies. I do in the book. But one
thing that is notable is that, generally speaking, the Anglo-Americans have been
pretty good about getting other people to do the dying.
Part of the
advantage of being an offshore balancing power is—you think about World War II,
where the Soviet Union was the one that had, far and away, the biggest
casualties. Our casualties were about one-tenth of their military
casualties or something like that. I don’t have the numbers in front of
me.
In the Napoleonic Wars and other wars, the British actually—if you
compare, say, the 18th century, where the Austrians and the Prussians are duking
it out in two major wars over Silesia that bankrupt both countries—and the loss
in human lives is extraordinary—for this very attractive sausage-shaped province
in the Polish hills—the British, during that same period of time, not
bankrupting themselves and losing many fewer people, basically laid the
foundations of a global power system that still exists today.
Actually,
in terms of costliness, this geopolitical strategy has been more successful and
less expensive than others.
When you talk this way, it’s a little
strange, because human life is incommensurable. The rabbis say that you
kill one person and you kill a world. So to speak of the death of any
human being—to add them up and count them seems rather heartless. But it
still remains a valid historical observation that the British and the Americans
have, on the whole, suffered far fewer casualties in war than their opponents,
and they have won.
QUESTION: You really didn’t
talk about religion and the role religion has played in propelling America and
Britain forward. Could you discuss that a little
bit?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: I talked about it just a
little bit at the end. It is certainly worth saying a little bit
more.
One of the inquiries at the heart of this book is the question of
why the Anglo-Americans love that ugly girl. What is it about her or about
them that makes capitalist society and a work ethic and all these other things
so attractive?
I come down to, basically, I think, the religious culture
of the Anglo-American world. Henri
Bergson—do people know who Henri Bergson was? He was a French
evolutionary philosopher, who was the source for Karl Popper’s
open society and closed society. So he is a very important figure in this
way.
When Karl Popper took over the terms "open society" and "closed
society" from Bergson, he left out Bergson’s religious analysis of the two forms
of society. Popper, like a lot of people, saw closed, traditional society
as being what religion was all about. Religion, basically, is about
tradition. It’s about the old sacred. It’s about unchanging
ways. Popper, like many people of the Enlightenment, tended to see the
open society as what happens when reason triumphs over religion, which leaves
one with the sense that open society is always vulnerable, because we all know
from either our own personal experience or historical experience that reason
often loses in tugs of war inside the human breast. So if the only thing
holding your society up as an open one is the allegiance of people to reason
over religion, you are always threatened by theocracy, by fundamentalism, by
what have you, or just simply atavism of various kinds.
As an
evolutionary philosopher, for Bergson—if you think about a closed society, his
analogy was a hive of bees, as the perfect closed society. Every bee, by
instinct, knows where to buzz, and they all do what they are supposed to
do. Bees don’t deviate. There are no dissident "more honey for the
workers" marching through the hive. They just go out and do. Drones'
rights—they don’t do that.
Then he talks about animal societies, mammal
societies. Every moment of an otter's day is not programmed by its genetic
coding. It has fun from time to time, at least as far as we can
tell.
Obviously, human societies that are more tradition-bound are the
kinds of societies where custom, tradition, taboo reign, and in an open society,
people feel individually that they can do things differently.
For
Bergson, in human beings, because we are conscious, instinct just can’t act
directly the way it does in the bee. There actually has to be sort of a
conscious process going on. You start to violate a tribal taboo, and all
of a sudden you feel chilly or you have bad, scary dreams of the gods telling
you to stop or you might hear a voice—"watch out!"—those kinds of
experiences. Bergson calls that "static religion," the kind of religion
that enforces the traditions of a closed society.
But Bergson also says,
if you look at human nature and human history, what you see is that we have
radiated from Africa all over the world. We have gone from chasing baboons
on the savannah to living in igloos and hunting seals. There obviously has
to be change. We have to be able to change in order to accommodate
this. New techniques and new technologies were constantly circulating long
before capitalism. So human societies need to have change, as well as
stability.
In Bergson’s model, he believed that religion is also caught
up in this. There is an instinct for change in human beings, not just an
instinct for stability. He talks about dynamic religion. He used the
example of mystics, like St. Francis of Assisi, who is caught up by a new vision
of the world and goes on to live the kind of life that no one has ever lived
before and to bring new values into the world. Then other people catch the
vision. The vocabulary of how to be human grows, expands.
For
Bergson, this is not the triumph of reason over religion. Rather, there is
a way in which our—St. Francis is as God-inspired—it may be visions—think of the
call of Abraham: "Leave your father’s house." That is a very central
concept in human nature, if you think about it.
"Dynamic religion" is
Bergson’s term for the kind of religion that sort of promotes change and
invention in human society.
It seems to me that in Anglo-American
society, the balance in our religious culture tipped from a fairly static
form—there was a static religion punctuated by elements of dynamic religion, a
fairly typical religious formation in the Middle Ages. In the English
Reformation and Scottish Reformation, for a lot of different reasons, the
balance gradually shifted, so that you had basically a dynamic religious
culture, with elements of static religion in it. The center of gravity of
the religious culture of the English-speaking world changed.
We can go
into that some more. It’s not necessarily a doctrinal issue. But it
is, I think, very important for understanding why Anglo-American culture has
been so profoundly comfortable with a social system that rests on accelerating
change and the sort of progressive uprooting of all kinds of social identities
and traditions.
QUESTION: Since you mentioned the
metaphor of the beehive, would you like to introduce Charles
Darwin as a metaphor into changes and post-Bergson
thinking?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Bergson actually
was post-Darwin himself. When he called himself an evolutionary
philosopher, he was consciously attempting to incorporate Darwinian ideas into
his analysis of human nature and human history.
I am glad you mentioned
Darwin, because I think this may tie a lot of things together. In the book
I talk about what I call "the golden meme." It’s a vision of the way the world works that, I
think, helps explain why Anglo-American culture is what it is and does what it
does. It is historically rooted.
Look at English common law.
What happens around the 17th century is that the English start looking at their
system of law. What they discover is that their legal code and their
jurisprudence doesn’t come out of some eternal principles that they then
apply. What happens is that over hundreds of years, interpreting folk law
and customary law and all of these things, and a little bit of statute law from
time to time, they come up with this system. It comes up in all these
petty little disputes: Whose cow is it? Who has the right to collect
wood from those trees between Michaelmas and Christmas, or whatever it might
be?
Out of these thousands of little petty disputes, decided by all kinds
of judges over hundreds of years, emerges this very flexible framework of law
and jurisprudence that is then able to handle all kinds of new issues. So
the principles of property that arose in disputes over whose cow it was are now
used to settle hedge fund issues. And it seems to work.
Then they
looked at their political institutions and they saw something very
similar. No one planned the English constitution or the English
mixed-government system, but over hundreds of years, kings fought with
parliaments, lords fought with commons, regions fought the center. No one
planned it, but out of the jostling and controversies emerged a very stable and
flexible and—they liked it—very comfortable form of governance. The Irish
had a very different view of English history. But in any case, the English
were happy with it.
So this idea of an order emerging from a historical
process becomes really key to the way the Anglo-Americans look at the
world.
Think about Francis
Bacon’s move from deductive reasoning to inductive as the method for
science. Again, you don’t get big principles and then try to apply them to
little things. You let the facts tell you. You look at thousands of
little facts and you draw conclusions from those, the way that the principles of
the common law emerge from that process. The scientific method comes out
of that.
The Anglican Church—no one is going to say that somehow God
revealed to Henry VIII the way the church should be. Out of the
divorces of Henry VIII and then all the struggles of English politics, you get
the Church of England, which, for many English people, did seem like the one
true church of God. So in a historical, political process emerges an
order.
This is actually Newton’s
vision of gravity, when you think about it, too. Newton looks at the solar
system and he sees something very like English common law and the Anglican
Church. He sees that, out of the unforced workings of these particles
following the laws of their own nature, a stately order emerges.
You
think of Adam
Smith’s economics. Out of all the transactions and people following
their interests in a completely unplanned way, an order emerges.
Think of
our American constitutional system—Madisonian
constitutionalism, the three branches, the different interests. Without
any sort of directing hand, order, freedom emerges.
This is Darwin’s
evolution. Out of all of these animals just trying to survive, these very,
very complex ecosystems and very highly developed organisms appear.
So
this idea that the historical process, as if by the workings of an invisible
hand—and some people in the English-speaking world say that’s God and other
people just say it’s the Force or it’s just the way things are. You can be
either theistic or non-theistic and believe this and be comfortable with
this.
In terms of thinking of your own life being troubled by capitalist
changes—old industries dying, new ones being born, immigrants coming in,
transformation of society, women moving into the workplace, changes in personal
relations—if you basically believe at a deeper-than-gut level that an invisible
hand is bringing order out of this chaos, you are likely to accept it and go for
the ride, with less resistance than if you don’t believe this.
So in a
very, very deep, deep way, faith is actually the principle that animates this
whole thing. You can’t reproduce it, necessarily, by an act of will or
teach it. It’s true for some people and not true for others. But
this golden meme is an immensely powerful force in the way humans live.
The way different cultures in the world respond to the golden meme—the degree to
which they buy it, don’t buy it, are comfortable with it, uncomfortable with
it—has an awful lot to do with the way the world works
today.
JOANNE MYERS: Thank you.
If I have
done my math correctly, you write a book every three years, so I expect to have
you back in 2010.
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