Forum

Source; https://wethepeopleusa.ning.com/forum/topics/a-read-on-the-civilization-of-the-west 

The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall:
While thou shalt flourish great and free
The dread and envy of them all.
James Thomson

“The civilization of the West… Was not the result of some inevitable process through which other cultures will automatically pass. It emerged from a unique history in which chance and accident often played a vital part. The institutions and ideas that therefore provide for freedom and improvement in the material conditions of life cannot take root and flourish without an understanding of how they came about and what challenges they have had to surmount. Non-western people who wish to share in the things that characterize modernity will need to study the ideas and history of Western civilization to achieve what they want and Westerners who wish to preserve them must do the same.”—Donald Kagan

"What lies beyond the nation, the community of mankind, is too vague to inspire the benefits of devotion."--Reinhold Niebuhr

 

The American international system and American power is the heritage and predominance of Anglo-American culture and its English-speaking members. One that has been on the winning side in every major international conflict, including ones against greater concentrations of military and economic might, dating back to the late 1600’s. One that has changed the way the world lives, thinks, and organizes itself as much as any great civilization of the past. One that has been willing to tolerate the stress, uncertainty and inequality of outcomes associated with relatively free-markets, allowing it to consistently lead in technological development, functionally flexible financial markets, widespread prosperity, and individual freedom.

In other words, one superbly adapted to provide the economic, social, cultural, and political changes demanded by progress. A progress propelled by faith in the idea that originated in the tenants of its Judeo-Christian philosophy, that the world is built in such a way as to be capable of providing an evolving ordered form of a free and open society. A society that combines liberty with major scientific and technological advances necessary to unleash extraordinary historical affluence and prosperity. One that contains a distinctive political and moral worldview that is a strong force for developing a culture that makes people both not just individualistic but optimistic too.

Perhaps that is why Anglo-American powers are so frequently involved in attempting to resolve deplorable conditions, that are almost as old as humanity itself, where ever they may exist in the world. And why foreign opinion is often perplexed and confused about our evangelizing-like energies directed toward such worthy objectives.

Perhaps that is also why some of those outside Anglo-American societies exhibit a self-conscious, systemic hatred and fear of Anglo-American civilization, an old tradition in much of the world, dating back to the late 1600’s too. This hatred and ignorance, that we’ll term Waspophobia, has developed a rather nuanced bias explanation of Anglo-American civilization. One it defines as containing an all-encompassing worldview that’s inflexible, absolute, inhuman in its will to power, insolently, arrogant, hypocritical, intolerable, lazy, naive, and vulgar. One that philosopher Martin Heidegger even went so far as to mistakenly describe as a culture that reduces life to a consumption of meaningless products and meaningless events through and with human relationships empty of everything worthwhile. Or as Osama bin Laden restated in simpler terms, as one of: “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and usary...the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind.”  

Alas, all of that is just a rehashed theme that has been used to expediently place blame for virtually all the ills in societies outside of the Anglo-American ones. A theme whose roster of users include some rather infamous mass murderers, such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Hussein, and Kim Il Jon, to name just a few. 

Henri Bergson argued against the above by stating that humanity, which has an instinct for tradition and stasis, also has an instinct for growth, change and competition and ultimately the quest is the meaning of life. Abandoning the quest is materialistic. To turn aside from this challenge is to embrace a merely material existence and to abandon the values that make human life truly human. Societies that grasp this dynamic achieved material well-being too. Societies that resist this do not.

Nevertheless, world order is largely due to and rests on the power of the Anglo-American alliance. An Anglo-American cultural that has been the major, and at times, only force in the world defending and advancing liberty, protecting the weak, caring for the sick, providing for the poor, introducing what’s referred to as principles of morality, democracy, justice, and equality, at home and abroad.  All of which makes Waspophobia and the justification of it not only absurd but, down right dangerous, for all humanity.

Anglo-American strategic global policies believe in one world composed of many theaters, all linked by a global system resting on economic links as well as military strength. Whoever controls such can choose the architecture that shapes the world. The primary ambition of Anglo-American power then is not dominance in a particular theater, it is to dominate the structure that shapes the conditions within which the actors in the theaters live. To influence significantly, if not deterministically, what game is played. In this case, it is free-market capitalism operating under representative and limited government, a form of civilization organization far from perfect, just proven better than all the rest.

In Anglo-American free-market capitalism people generally have the right to do what they want. Local government is limited, civil society is vigorous. Speech and religions are free to practice, opportunities abound, behavior resulting in reward and risk exists. The non-Anglo-American forms of societal organization, essentially socialism, communism, fascism and monarchism are all, in varying degrees, opposed to all of the aforementioned and attempt to slow, halt or even reverse Anglo-Americanism.

Before going on let’s do a little background first. Henri Bergson postulated that there are only 2 basic types of social organization. The first is a ‘closed society’ meaning a community of individuals guided wholly by instinct and mainly static. There is nothing voluntary in these societies. In this form of society myth, legend, intuition, visions, poetry and awe all act to cause individuals to behave in ways conducive to the society. But since humans have a tendency to learn, grow and change, hence, Bergson’s second type, an "open society", a dynamic one based instead on ideals and aspirations rather than traditions and archaic rules, one where custom yields to conscience.

It is not the race of the individual but their beliefs and values that distinguish them. What becomes evident in examining open societies is that it is the mechanism responsible for human progress and development, that which provides a bettering of both the quantity and quality of life, for all members. And what is progress and development but change. And, as Marx described, capitalism is a social system built on change, that “…draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization…”  Free-market capitalism then is both a result of and motor for an open society.

Karl Popper elaborated further on open and closed societies. He found that closed societies exercise, for some, a powerful hold over the human mind. Fearing the prospects of freedom found in open ones, closed society proponents usually resist and usually eventually win out, except in the Anglo-American case. This is noticeable in the fact that as one moved from west to east, societal types go from open to closed types, coinciding with the Anglo-American influence. However, the significant aspect here is that the Anglo-American sphere, in general, exemplified that an open society is not a violation of human nature but, its fulfillment. 

And Capitalism is the ultimate form an open society takes. It is much more than just working hard or smarter. It is about risk-taking, embracing change, tolerating setbacks, and accepting the sometimes amoral or even immoral consequences of the impact an open society can have on beliefs and institutions. It means that in order to maintain the infrastructure and patterns necessary for a healthy open society requires, at base, acting in a rational way to achieve certain results. It is a system that demands behavior guided by reason. Yet humans cannot easily separate reason from interest and passions. More often than not we simply dress our conclusions in the color of reason. Bias, interest, and prejudice can twist reason to its own purpose. Consequentially, that tendency do such means that relying solely on the process of rationalization can be as cruel as any, maybe more so.

The Anglo-American experience has protected against this specific negative human tendency primarily through the guiding hand of religion, primarily a Judeo-Christian version that places the origin of humanity’s shortcomings and conflicts within human nature itself rather than in selected or yet to be refined or perfected economic or political ideologies. One that much more often than not, and certainly more so than all the other tried alternatives, can tame, channel, or quell those errant passions.

It is also from the recognition of that benefit of religion that another element becomes apparent when honestly examining open societies. That being that in most respects the most thoroughly modernized societies, by any definition that rests on economic and technological progress, are those that are significantly more religious than others. This manifests itself in the Anglo-American world, where a secular modernity was not able to overcome entrenched customary religion, through dynamic religion that infiltrated and supplemented static religion in the religious life of the Anglo-Ameriphones. The Anglo-Ameriphones owed their progress and especially much of the willingness to endure necessary suffering and sacrifice, including death at times, to dynamic religious convictions that transcended their immediate concerns and self.

The difference of this dynamic religion, for the Anglo-Ameriphones, was as Milton said: “Truth needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are shifts and defenses that error uses against its power.”  For Anglo-Americans, their religious belief was, on the one hand, that God exists and reveals his will regarding moral rules and religious doctrines to humans; on the other that human understanding of these revelations remains partial and subject to change. Change then, which came to be seen as permanent, necessary, and even sanctioned by the Anglo-American religions, made them a necessary tool and driver for development of a healthy open society in the Anglo-American world. Ones that acknowledge more fully the aspects of the human psyche and is therefore all the better for it.

The importance of all this is that Anglo-American world came to recognize early that reason, scripture, and tradition all have their uses but, any one of them unchecked will go too far and close a society. The belief that reason can discover a substantially perfect or complete social model defies the requirements of an open society as much as the belief that such a perfect model can be found in scripture or tradition alone. An open society must contain the paradox of being secular and religious, dogmatic, and free.

Embodying that paradox became possible in the Anglo-American culture through the individualistic tenets it found contained within Judeo-Christianity. Such a relationship with the transcendent, one not containing and resisting change and modernity, became increasingly important in a world of accelerating change and uncertainty. In turn the effort involved in engaging with an ever-changing world gave a fuller expression to religious faith and generated a set of values that became a source of individual guidance across the entire spectrum of one’s life, including one’s political views. This allowed the Anglo-American world to experience more radical and sweeping changes than virtually all of the rest of the world, across time. Yet, at the same time, these countries remain what they have long been: among the most stable political regimes in the modern world.

In fact, without such guiding behavior commonly found in Anglo-American society, as history has shown, choice, decision and control become removed from the bulk of society’s participants, driving towards an elitist system that losses touch with public sentiment and can, and have often, developed much death and destruction, often greater than the very things the alternative promised to deliver society from.

The lesson is that after centuries of experience with strong religion in the Anglo-American world, far from being dangerous, such behavior has strengthened the basis of an open society and enabled it to meet new challenges, significantly better than all the alternatives, including the collective forms, especially ones that share a common ancestry with Marxism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew that religion is simply too entwined with our moral and civil lives to ever be disentangled from it. Rousseau spoke of religion in terms of human needs instead of divine truth. That it brought with it the conscience of charity, of concern for one’s neighbors, virtue, humility, modesty, and wonder. Therefore, religion has its roots in needs that are both rational and moral. As such, a rigid or absolute separation of religion from politics is both impossible and foolish. “The mind decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing.”  We seem therefore to be theotropic creatures, with a yearning to connect our lives to something in the beyond. It was the attempt to eliminate such, starting with the atheism of the French Enlightenment, that turned men into beasts and continued to father such future permutations of itself, such as the aforementioned Marx’s Communism a century later.

In the aftermath of WWI, those defining themselves as progressive, eager to embrace changing the future, realizing this human need to believe in a transcendent, began generating potent theological-like justifications for repugnant---and godless---ideologies, such as Nazism and Communism. They believed that western civilization was on an upward one-way track, possible only through modern secularism, and that other societies would inevitably follow once enlightened by them, the progressives. Poverty, colonialism, or ignorance could be the only obstacles. And religion, to the progressives, was the incomprehensible existential feedstock nurturing those obstacles to be done away with.

Marxism then, the supposed most potent solution to obtaining modern secularism and to overcome the obstacles to it, grew dramatically, before its horrendous results destroyed its hold, in nations outside the Anglo-American sphere. It did so because it provided the missing Anglo-American framework by which people could understand and deal with the massive change, prosperity, and open society the modern world brings. Its ideology had no reason to believe in the proven successful Anglo-American faith in order and prosperity arising from the random and spontaneous interplay of millions of free individuals under the general rules of free-market capitalism. So instead, it came to rely on, build and export, usually with militant force, government leviathans; organizational forms that, since they can allow no other competing forms to exist, must eventually crush both the human spirit and body.

Yet despite proof all round that the Anglo-American formula has delivered great improvements in the quantity and quality of the lives of its beneficiaries, for centuries many foreigners came to despise, reject, resist, or misuse the blessing of its institutions and cultural norms. And some Anglo-Americans too came to do the same. Perhaps that’s because most Anglo-Americans have never known (thank your public-school education monopoly for that) or have forgotten how long and hard it was to build and develop those successful characteristics and traits.

Individuals also have a natural tendency to exaggerate their own importance in the scheme of things, to view themselves as the moral center of the world, which is what the analogy of the Judeo-Christian concept of Original Sin is all about. And the Judeo-Christian message on the concept of Original Sin incorporates the belief in self-redemption through self-change. Encountering and respecting other selves then, becomes a kind of education, we learn to limit our pretensions, to develop greater respect for learning and change and for other’s views and feelings.

Or maybe its because people derive their identity in part from the important groups to which they belong. Reinhold Niebuhr warned that when self-importance occurs through one’s group identity, the process of learning to question and check it is substantially diminished. In fact, the opposite occurs, it becomes greatly enhanced. Because of that we commit ourselves much stronger and deeper to the group, becoming less concerned about outsiders. The larger and grander the abstraction, the less critical we are of the group’s claims and the greater its propensity to become absurd. The noblest aspirations are undermined by a flaw (original sin) deep in our nature. The more assured we are the greater the danger.

And groups are much more fluid and unstable in the Anglo-American sphere. Perhaps it’s because complex tribal ties and dynastic obligations, traditional forms of defense, technological growth and habits ingrained during previous eras of weaker and less responsible societal institutions and government continue to shape the expectations of those who fail to favor and resist the Anglo-American formula. 

Niebuhr, recognizing the above human flaw, found that we can create a truer democracy (a better world) the “more we can overcome the pretension of embodying it perfectly.” This requires a complex mix of evil and good in actions, while avoiding being paralyzed by this into passivity or inaction (known as post-modern neo-liberal existential nihilism). A formula that creates a mentality and habit of the people to govern themselves, promote enterprise, readily join spontaneous and private activities in an ordered free society with growing human and social capital.

This amounts to a better but imperfect Anglo-American formula striving against an imperfect evil in an imperfect world, not able to achieve perfect victory or perfect justice but “just enough” to prevent further disaster and evil. By apprehending this with a sense of religious faith, pride diminishes and responsibility increases. In other words, the need to be firm in our convictions but continue to test their foundations and search for hidden assumptions and secret flaws. Tolerating a diverse and less uniform approach in global affairs is likely over time to lead to more effective and widely accepted institutions.

In the long run the choice to favor such formula, by those resisting, will in all likehood occur, if Francis Fukuyama is correct. Fukuyama believes that humanity is basically the same everywhere, the cultural differences they exhibit are developed and not given and essential. That is not to imply though that such adaptation will be quick nor not without costly even ruinous consequences for some.  For as Joseph Herder’s work points out, cultural is the stuff and substance of human nature, it shapes the way we understand and define ourselves, our goals and the world. Humanity may be equal but not the same, giving rise to different and sometimes conflicting perceptions and ideas. And danger can arise from this in many ways, even when: “To be the object of contempt or patronizing tolerance…the response is often pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues, as resentment and hostility towards the proud, the happy the successful.” –Isaiah Berlin 

“Develop and maintain an open, dynamic society at home; turn the economic energy of that society out into world trade; protect commerce throughout the world and defend the balance of power in the world’s chief  geopolitical theaters; open the global system to others, even to potential competitors in time of peace; turn the system against one’s opponents in time of war; promote free-market/free-government values  and institutions wherever one can…American strategy must always concern itself with these goals…Be cautious and prudent, but above all be globally engaged...Any diminution of America’s cultural vitality, commitment to liberty and enterprise, social mobility, and pluralism, and any serious decline in either the creativity of American religious faith or its denominational and theological diversity would…impair its ability to carry out that strategy.” ---Walter Russell Mead