In late January, 2005, within days of President Bush's Second Inaugural Address, I was asked to speak to the Republican leadership at the Greenbrier, WV, on the topic "What did the rest of the world hear when President Bush spoke [in that Inaugural Address] of 'freedom'?" Here are my after-the-event reflections on that experience. And, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I feel very much vindicated by all that has happened since.... Back, bemused, from the heart of the GOP It’s a quarter to three in the morning, and a bone-chilling -20°C at our new home in rural western New York state. After three minutes outside, my nasal hairs have acquired an accumulation of ice. Inside the darkness of my car, the shoe-scattered ice particles join their forerunners on the floor, too cold to melt into mere damp patches. Warily, I drive off into the night, towards the airport. After having been in the country merely a few months, I have somehow acquired an invitation to address a group of U.S. senators and congressmen — in fact, the Republican leadership — at their retreat in West Virginia. (The President’s going to be there, though not for my talk.) The blame lies entirely, it seems, with my latest book, Why the Rest Hates the West, which has been attracting more attention than I’m used to — quasi-anonymity having been the principal characteristic of my previous literary efforts. The chief of staff of one of the most senior Republican senators has picked it up, read it, liked it — and suddenly, here I am. At least this will be a chance to see some of the ‘big players’ at first hand. The journey encompasses a ninety-minute drive and two flights, followed by a $150 cab drive at someone else’s expense. The destination is The Greenbrier, a palatial resort in the Appalachians of the kind that is so far beyond the reach of us normal mortals as to escape our notice in the usual run of things. Upon arrival (all Lincolns and Cadillacs) the security is, unsurprisingly, very tight. I hardly know what I’ve been expecting. To be stripped down to my underwear, maybe. But, whether or not in deference to the temperature, we are spared that. Inside, everyone but me seems to know where they are supposed to be and what they are supposed to do. I am reduced to that ultimate male humiliation: actually having to ask. Should I just swan in to the lunch which is already underway and grab the first place that takes my fancy — or is there a ticket with my name on somewhere among the fifty-odd tables? The answer, it seems, is the former. I sit uneasily among senatorial and congressional families and staff members — uneasy, not because I am all that overawed but because everyone seems to know one another, and I know precisely no one. Where on earth was that nice lady who’d rung me and e-mailed me six weeks ago with my invitation to come here? On hearing that I am a Britisher, one of my congressional table-companions from Ohio expresses the view that The Guardian won the election for Bush. Correctly identifying Clark County, Ohio as the key ‘swing’ district in the key ‘swing’ state, that paper had encouraged its readers to contact residents of that precinct to persuade them to go for Kerry. The result was to produce a wildly disproportionate swing towards Bush in Clark County, which decided the state, which in turn.... You get the picture. The Guardian rails, quite rightly, against American interventions abroad. Perhaps it thinks itself justified in encouraging the social workers and lecturers-in-ex-polytechnics of Britain to do some intervening of their own. But its original diagnosis is the correct one. A bad right-wing idea does not become good because it has been appropriated in a left-wing cause. Neither do outside interventions become wise because they run from point B to point A rather than from A to B; they are unwise because they are counter-productive as a way of winning hearts and minds. As the time for the President to arrive approaches, perhaps a majority of the 400 people in the room cluster along the ‘rope-line’: the bedraped cable that serves as a space-demarcator between George W. Bush and the hordes with whom he must make small-talk as he creeps his way to the podium for his speech. Guided by two of my new half-acquaintances, I join the throng. Bush knows most of those present already, so the mini-conversations can pick up on real points of past contact. Even so, memory of a television production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar flashes through my mind as the President moves incrementally along the line. ‘Hail, Caesar! Please grant....’ I get my minute and a half of conversation with the Leader of the Free World, consisting (predictably enough under the circumstances) of stilted pleasantries on both sides. It reminds me that the Most Powerful Man on Earth is, like our own dear Queen, the least free person in his country. Everyone wants a piece of him; he can do nothing unattended or unprotected, and little that is unconstrained. He tells me that Britain is “a great country” (what else would he say?). But the reason for its greatness is more ominous: it “has backbone”, he tells me, reinforcing the point with a hand gesture. I would be a fool to interpret this in any other sense than a reference to Blair’s military support in Iraq. And so his speech bears out. On the positive side, it can be said that his opponents’ characterisation of him as a stumbling, insufficiently articulate, uninformed buffoon is utter rubbish. He speaks fluently for forty minutes and apparently without notes, ranging over almost the whole range of policy, and tripping over his words, inconsequentially and in a way that any of us might have done, maybe twice the whole time. If this is standard form, then the celebrated coverage of ‘Bush’s bloopers’ — the kind of stuff that implies he speaks a Texan dialect of Prescottian — is based on selective reportage, to say the very least. His references to a wide range of different countries and their leaders are both correct and pertinent. No ‘Grecians’ here. It’s the content that bothers me. To remain with the positive: on domestic policy, his programme seems entirely sensible, for the most part. Much of it might have been introduced by a Kerry administration — and the parts that wouldn’t have been, should have been. Tort law reform is a high priority: if this rate of litigation and this level of compensation awards keep up, he urges, no one at all will be willing to practise medicine in a few years; certainly none but the super-rich will be able to afford it. It occurs to my more mundane mind that it would also be handy if three hundred million Americans didn’t have to keep putting up with being served tepid coffee, since some dumb court awarded a woman record damages, a couple of years back, for scalding herself in that unloveliest of chain outlets, McDonald’s. The administration will exert downward pressure on abortion — though will not risk the failure that would ensue if an outright ban were to be attempted. Instead, “a culture of life” would be promoted in the coming years. So it’s the slowly, slowly approach. His profession of willingness to do something about the terrifying fiscal deficit seems to me to be a grudging acceptance of what anyone with any sense has been urging upon the President. Which is sad. The Britain of my youth was utterly blighted by the Keynesian myth that you could spend more in government services than you were willing to pay the political price for in raising tax revenues to match. Technocratic duckspeak assured us that the evidence of our eyes was somehow illusory. The dragon was only slain and economic sanity restored by the Thatcher revolution and its aftermath, when we finally balanced the budget, and slashed the size of government to what we were willing to pay for. Recently, in their enthusiasm to go yet further, right-wingers in the U.S. are falling off the other side of the horse (or is it the same side?) by depressing taxes lower than they’re willing to pay the political price of cutting government spending to meet. The economic boom thereby created, they have assured doubters, will somehow generate sufficient new tax revenues to keep the project defying the laws of fiscal gravity. (So: back to duckspeak.) But a bad left-wing idea does not become good when deployed to right-wing ends. On this topic, however, Bush now looks like a man prepared — grumpily and only just about — to do as he has been told by those around him who know better, rather than someone who has actually been persuaded of the obvious. But it is the first half of his speech that should confirm the worst fears of those of us who see the world sliding towards war. He believes with utter sincerity that everyone desires ‘freedom’ in the Western sense — and the American flavour of that sense, to boot. Non-Western dictatorships are compared uniformly to the modernist totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. That’s fair enough in respect of his reference to North Korea, but profoundly unhelpful in understanding most of the others. This campaign dominated his inaugural address last week (at the time of writing). It will dominate his State of the Union speech. His dismissals of objections are spurious and based on fundamental misunderstandings that typify Western incomprehension of the non-West and of the West’s own past. But he’s transparently sincere. We’re headed for big trouble. That evening over dinner, we are entertained by a self-styled ‘Christian conservative comedian’. And he’s very funny. Part of the humour is generated by self-conscious ranting, just like that practised by Andy Hamilton, Jeremy Hardy, Linda Smith, Mark Steele and all of the BBC’s other just-about-post-Marxists on behalf of the left. One of his parting shots is the observation that, in the world of Hollywood and entertainment, he is the only — but only — non-liberal, and literally the only political comic (of whom there are many) representing the outlook of half the American population. And that, he says, “is not liberty of speech: it’s intellectual fascism”. Yup. Good job we don’t have equivalent kinds of lock-out in Britain, then. Rudy Giuliani is the night’s speaker. Unencumbered by office, he can indulge in self-deprecating humour and rueful smiles. Democrats, he tells us, also have some good people and some good ideas. As the man doing the introductions reminds us, Giuliani’s policies reduced crime in New York by 57%. And murders by 65%. I reflect that there are literally thousands of New Yorkers walking around today — more than the numbers who died on 9/11 — who would have been dead without his vigorous assault upon crime. Just think about that. I mean really. His remarks on the relationship between the United Nations and the city of New York certainly give a new slant on American coolness towards that international body. Diplomatic immunity is a problem for host cities everywhere, but in New York the problem is of a different order: UN officials and diplomats owe the city between $35 million and $40 million in unpaid parking tickets. Every week, New York’s police chiefs showed him a list of the latest and most serious crimes in the city — and acts perpetrated by UN officials were regularly among these. “And yet”, he observes, “these are the people supposedly committed to furthering the rule of law around the globe, including in relations between countries.”
But despite all the good stuff, and though he mentions U.S. foreign policy only briefly, he nevertheless supports the President’s neocon imperialist campaign around the world. (But, of course, he doesn’t call it that.) I wonder how many military protectorates the Anglo-American forces can police at once. Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq. In a four-step procedure, we invade, we set up a provisional government, we start a process that will lead to local elections — and we continue to keep forces on the ground until the government so produced is stable, and can protect itself from militias and its minorities from majoritarian attacks. Except that the last phase of that procedure recedes endlessly over the horizon, and even the second and third phases are as blood-soaked as the first. The following morning I slip into conversation over breakfast with a senator from the Midwest and a congressman from the South. Without giving the least intimation of his personal religious opinion, the senator observes that the Democrats have a real problem in portraying themselves as anything other than inimical to religious faith and to the political and social concerns likely to come from it. On the rare occasions they even try to address this issue, he points out, they are so obviously faking it that they alienate the very people they’re trying to conciliate. It would certainly be true to say that Christianity is the preponderant worldview of these Republican politicians, even though it is their idealising of the U.S. constitution — rather than any Anabaptist insights about separation of church and state — that holds them back from moves towards a ‘Christian America’. My table companions on the Saturday night are exalted company indeed: Senators Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania) and Bill Frist (Tennessee) are two of the most senior GOP leaders in the upper house. They and their spouses are all active Christians. And they are also delightful company. It is part-and-parcel of politicians’ jobs, of course, to be charming and ingratiating to everyone, even to lowly academics and foreigners like me. But their unguarded comments, their conversations with one another, and their unconscious demeanour: these are revealing of their real concerns. Santorum and Frist are mildly anxious men, in the best possible sense: they worry about whether x, y or z is working out OK; they fret that the massive assistance package for Africa in respect of AIDS — for which Santorum was the prime mover behind the scenes — may run into practical problems at the point of delivering medicine on the ground. The opinion of Frist, who is an MD, is sought by the others at table as to the best way of ensuring the right stuff gets delivered in the right way. I later discover that Frist has recently been on a trip to East Africa with Franklin Graham (son of Billy) to monitor progress on this project. In short, these people are as far as it is possible to imagine from the smarmy, hand-in-glove-with-corporate-America types that Hollywood portrays them as being. The topic I have been given to speak on to the gathering at large is “What did the rest of the world hear when President Bush spoke, in his inaugural speech, of ‘freedom’?” To hardened readers of Why the Rest, my response will be predictable, but I am not setting out to mount a frontal assault on the neoconservative global campaign. A sneak attack will pay more dividends. But my mere raising of question marks over several issues is more than enough for an audience of this calibre to get the drift of my line of argument. In the time of open debate, the questions and critiques come thick and fast. Right-wing commentator David Horowitz comes in for a roof-level attack, and several senators join the assault. But if this is warfare, there is no acrimony in it. The one-on-one conversations and general chit-chattery over drinks are as friendly afterwards as before.
And what have I learned? That the impulse to turn the non-West into free-market democracies — and, in the short term, to turn Iraq into Belgium — is largely built, in the minds of its chief protagonists, on the foundations of an idealised, ‘heroic’ view of American history, and especially of the American Revolution. Its “truths” are “self-evident”; they apply to “all men”. If “any form of government shall become destructive of these ends” (freedom and democracy) then it is not just a “right” but a “duty” of the people to “abolish the forms to which they are accustomed”. (My quotations are from the Declaration of Independence.) And what will we do if the actual people on the ground don’t want to (because they value their present culture too highly; or because they do not wish for the paradise we proffer them; or because we have not even begun to understand the priorities and realities of non-Westerners’ lives)? Well, whether we recognise it or not, we are currently following the poisoned counsel of Rousseau (and the practice of socialists and nationalists since) in “forcing people to be free”. This will be a difficult dragon to slay. Most modern nations have their ‘heroic’ historical myths. Insofar as these help to convey meaning and a sense of belonging to the popular mind, their factual departures from von Ranke’s wie es eigentlich gewesen are tolerable. But when they come to threaten, err, world peace, then somehow, somewhere, even foreigners have to overcome their inhibitions and very proper sense of deference — and say something. But the deconstruction of such cherished myths will be an intolerable affront to my hosts — and they have been so kind. As the limo speeds a bemused historian back to the airport, I’m not at all sure I’m up to the task; not at all sure I’m up to any of this.
Missiology 101 Hello, Phil. I hear you’ve got to know this new fellow who has moved into your town lately, and I’ve been wondering what you think about him. He’s an immigrant, a missionary from a Muslim country, here to try and convert Americans to Islam. He certainly seems surprising, in some ways. He knows nothing about Christianity, or about what Christians believe. When someone asked him, he had no idea which country was on the other side of the United States’ northern border. And it was complete news to him that America had begun as a collection of British colonies, which rebelled against British rule and achieved independence in the eighteenth century. He doesn’t speak English, and is certainly taking his sweet time about learning it. But then, as he says (through an interpreter), some people just aren’t good at languages. In fact, self-deprecation seems to be his long suit. He keeps saying what a dummy he is, how naïve etc.. Though I notice that, when you give him information that will be useful to him, he almost makes a point of forgetting it again right away, as though he didn’t want to be contaminated by it — as if naïveté were a treasured part of his self-image. And then there’s the strange matter of American names. You can’t have failed to notice. As he explains, there is a custom in his country that all foreign names containing a simple ‘i’ sound have to be pronounced with ‘oo’. It’s not that the ‘i’ sound is difficult for him (there are plenty such names in his own country, for goodness’ sake); it’s just that they have a rule among themselves to pronounce all foreign names this way. So he calls Philadelphia ‘Fooladelphia’, and addresses you as ‘Fool’ — and, in the nicest, humblest possible way, he rather expects you to answer to it. And if you tackle him on this, he does his favorite ‘hurt feelings’ look, and says it’s the custom of his country, a part of his identity. And how could you try to take that away from him? So what I want to know is this: What do you think of this fellow, Phil? (or ‘Fool’?) Please don’t tell me merely that you expect him to be rather unsuccessful in converting Americans to Islam. I think we can take that much for granted. No: I’m playing the shrink here, with the big “So how do you Feel?” How do you feel about him? My guess is that, at a minimum, you will view him as a pitiable but also unwelcome intrusion into your town. Maybe you go further, and hold him in some degree of contempt for his attitudes. It’s possible you even go so far as to view him with actual anger and hostility. Since it’s hard to feel threatened by him (although his country is powerful, it’s nowhere near as powerful as the U.S., and people there are an awful lot poorer than they are here), I suspect that you go for the more moderate reactions toward him. If the relationships were reversed, though, and his was the more powerful and wealthier society that was influencing our daily lives in countless ways, I suspect that your reactions would move over toward the more virulent end of the spectrum. * * * * * Scratch all that. I just made it up. And anyway, you’re not Phil. So let me tell you instead about a young couple I really have met, who really were surprising, in exactly the ways our imaginary Muslim in Phil’s home town was surprising. And I have to say that it’s OK — not great, but still OK — not to have any idea who Cyril and Methodius were. Or whether Istanbul is at the eastern end of Turkey, or the western. Or which country Belgrade is in. Maybe you know none of those things. It’s not great to be ignorant about them, because they matter. But the world is a big place, and I’m sure you could easily find facts of equivalent importance about, say, western China, concerning which I would be equally ignorant. And anyhow, we’re in America. Indeed, it would still be OK not to know those things if we were in the U.S. and planning to start a business (or some political move, or do some Christian missions work) in, say, Peru or India. But this couple? They were missionaries in Macedonia. By that I mean, they had already arrived there. Now, Macedonia is a predominantly Orthodox country (Cyril and Methodius are the crucial figures in Slavic Orthodox history), that was under the rule of the Ottoman Turks for more than five centuries until just about within living memory. And it spent most of the twentieth century as part of Yugoslavia — which was ruled from the Serbian capital of Belgrade. And our couple knew nothing about these fundamental features of the country’s culture, religion, history, or geography. A missionary is a person who, to put it bluntly, goes somewhere to tell the locals what’s what. But our friends didn’t know what’s anything. We’ll take as read the fact that they didn’t know any of the language until they arrived. Who would expect anything else? And, of course, they pronounce the capital city of Skopje as ‘Skoapje’. You can say that’s the American pronunciation — like calling the Italian city of Firenze ‘Florence’ — if you want. Except that it wouldn’t be true. Because, even if we accept the unlikely assumption that they’d even heard of the city before they arrived, or had heard American pronunciations of it, they pronounced it that way straight away anyway, and ditto for smaller places that would have been completely off their radar. No: everyone around them in Macedonia says one thing — so they say another. It’s the custom, right? And my friend Kosta gets addressed if he were a beer mat: Coaster. Can we see that anything milder than furious outrage would be all together too kind a reaction by the unfortunate hosts? But our friends are not the exceptions: they’re typical. To be sure, I know counter-examples. There’s an American pastor who has lived in a small town of that country for nine years. He looks and dresses like a local, sends his kids to the local school, and speaks so well that many can’t even tell he’s a foreigner. But he’s the exception. The clueless young couple are the rule. So how should they respond to the points I just made? I’d tell you how they will respond — but you already know. Smile; look bewildered; make self-effacing jokes about what dummies they are; do something groovy that’ll entertain the local kids; look hurt and keep what they fondly imagine to be a ‘holy’ silence. But, whatever they do, make no change.
Greatly indebted...
By my calculations — and I’m good at this sort of thing — the U.S. public debt is now such that every American — man, woman, child, retiree, and baby — is currently paying $45 a week in interest (not a cent of repayment) on government debt. And it’s set to get worse. (That figure assumes loan interest rates in the ball park of 5% or so for the foreseeable future — which they will be, in the sense that they won’t be 2% and they won’t be 10%.) Not a soldier or a policeman or a square inch of blacktop in the public sector; not a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas in the private: just interest. You could add to that the fact that most Americans are in debt up to the gills on their own private account — but let’s not, because it would only depress us some more. Private responsibility is too much to hope for; let’s just look at the public sector armageddon. And frankly, that’s justified — because the government’s splurge is slightly bigger even than the private apocalypses that most citizens have been quietly accumulating for themselves. How did this happen? The long-term causes are several. America is a country in which all sing the virtues of small government — but they are virtues in which only Republicans really believe. It is a place that lauds itself as a land of egalitarianism, and of a hand up for the small guy — even if only Democrats do so with conviction. And all parties stress the importance of fiscal propriety and balanced budgets — though, like Anglicanism in Victorian Britain, nobody actually believes in that at all. The present eye-watering total of government debt — $14 trillion — has been a long time building. But it’s worth noting that two of its biggest contributors were the most vociferous champions of getting the state out of our hair: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Not that Democrats have anything to sneer about. For decades they have championed federal programs that will supposedly fix this, that, or the other problem — but either they have not had the courage to raise taxes sufficiently to pay for it all, or else they have been stymied by Republicans in Congress who successfully resisted tax hikes. Republican administrations, on the other hand, have sought to bear down on taxes — but either they have not had the courage to trim spending accordingly, or else they have been stalled by Democrats in Congress who successfully protected ‘their’ programs. (In the case of G.W.Bush, though, it was the foreign wars that, in no small part, pushed spending through the stratosphere.) The result is not all together a surprise: except for a blip in the year or so before 9/11, federal spending has been way ahead of federal revenues, and has now disappeared so far over the horizon as to be hardly within shouting distance of its supposed alter ego. That’s why all the screaming lately between President Obama and the Republicans in the House has made so little difference. The gap is just too big. Closing it even part of the way would demand just too big a sacrifice of everybody’s proclaimed principles (to say nothing of their less loudly proclaimed longtime practices). As we stand at the moment, there is a desperate need for cutbacks on a scale that no Democrat could contemplate, and of tax rises that no Republican could countenance. And it’s going to need to stay that way for decades to come. Everybody is going to hate it. $46,500 per person is one heck of a lot of debt. If you live in an average sized household of 3 people or so, in an average sized property, that means you owe pretty nearly the value of your house. For something you can’t see. It’s going to take a while for things to settle down. And being optimistic is hard. All the politicians have a vested interest in pandering to the public’s desire for it all just to go away, and so in perpetuating the state of denial. And, as in all countries, you particularly need to watch out for the ones who keep telling us how brutally honest they’re being with the voters. Just as, in negotiations between political rivals, last-minute stitch-ups are the default way of reaching deals (watch Obama and Boehner a few days from now), so perpetual teetering on the brink of collapse is the default way of living with problems so big we don’t know how to live with them. Who knows? Maybe something will turn up. Mr. Micawber for president, I say....
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 On being a historian — and the dangers of a life of luxury One of the first lessons I draw from History is how jolly lucky I am to be a historian. Ever since they appeared on earth, human beings have revered their ancestors and copied the past, so far as they knew it or perhaps just imagined it, without the luxury of being able to study it overmuch. They were too busy struggling to produce food and the other fundamentals of existence to have time, energy and resources left over for the kinds of occupations and activities from which I and most of my middle-class friends can nowadays make a living. (To be sure, they had time and resources for religious activities, but — contrary to postmodern secularist propaganda — that is one of the fundamentals of human existence.) And the luxury we have nowadays is all to the good. It is down to the peculiar strengths of Western societies that, from about the seventeenth century onwards, they broke free of the crushing constraints of traditional economies and the rigid social hierarchies that those economic realities made necessary. As a result, they have brought about a situation in which even the poorest Westerners today are, at least in material terms, more prosperous, healthier and longer-lived than kings in the premodern world. Individualistic freedoms (of trade, movement, and speech) have made us rich, and riches have made us ever more individualistic. There we have a history of the West since the Industrial Revolution, compressed into a single sentence. One of the many consequences of this widespread opulence is that I’m not unusual in being entirely ignorant of how to grow crops, how to raise animals (or to kill and butcher them), or to make clothes. I may be unable to feed, house and clothe myself, but it doesn’t really matter. Thanks to the wonders of free markets and the cash economy, I provide a different kind of service for which, luckily for me, significant numbers of people are prepared to pay. So we all live very comfortably and, by historical standards, securely. And that is not to be despised. But such comfort comes at a price. In the first place, I am tempted to view my ignorance as a sign of sophistication, and to despise those who make my fine life possible. Ignorance, as any indolent student will tell you, is ‘cool’ — not a badge of shame. I may be a rich baby, then — but I’m likely to be self-assertive about it. Since we have been super-rich for several generations now, we have come to take prosperity for granted. For us, death at a young age — or even anytime before our late 60s or so — seems to be an abnormal tragedy. If a relative dies young we do not merely grieve; our lives are devastated. We question the existence of God. The commonplace wisdom of the BCP that “In the midst of life we are in death” is beyond the comprehension of us, who can go through most of our lives without so much as seeing a dead body. Though we entertain ourselves with constant simulated violence on TV, if we witness a real killing, or a battle, we are far more prone than traditional people to suffer mental or emotional breakdown. We are less resilient than our forebears. Since no one will now starve if my family breaks up, a major bond that has held all families together is taken away. Upholding those bonds with the force of law now comes to seem oppressive, and so we amend our laws. As a result, families become ever more fragile. We move through several ‘partners’ or spouses during our lives — or, if we do not, we live with the insecurity that even our own marriage may prove more provisional than we had hoped. The atomised society that results from this leaves each of us emotionally more fragile. Few of us now live in the same town or region as our parents, let alone follow their trade or walk of life. Indeed, we have long since recreated the rites of passage into adulthood precisely in rebelling against our parents and their mores. For us, the received wisdom is that there is no received wisdom; whatever shape or meaning our lives may have will need to be invented by ourselves. This being so, a person does not have to be a philosopher or a genius to conclude that our lives have, in fact, no meaning. And the consolation for this troubling fact, a consolation for which we all grasp — educated and uneducated, Christian and pagan alike — is that of consumption. ‘Retail therapy’ may be a tacky phrase, but millions of us practise it — if only on our own chosen obsessions, whether movies, books, music or clothes. The possession of these things is what gives us a self-made identity (“I am a Goth”; “I am a bookish sort of person”; “I’m a sophisticate — just look at my clothes!”) in place of the old, given ones. But, since such identities are so clearly malleable and vulnerable to the ravages of age, the vagaries of relative economic status, and the whims of fashion, we are left vulnerable. Traditional people — those living under the threat of scarcity — were obsessed with their deepest fears: food and security. We — who live under threat of meaninglessness and with chronic sexual insecurity — are obsessed with ours: what we are to make of ourselves. We devour books about phobias, TV programmes about style makeovers, lectures and courses on counselling and psychology, autobiographic novels vilifying the writer’s parents, magazines about sexual strategems we should be pursuing. Our wealth has made traditional societies and the people who live in them all but incomprehensible to us. We want a stable family, of course, just as much as Indians do — but not if it stands in the way of my ‘right’ to do what I want now. We want the state to protect life and property, of course, every bit as much as Jordanians want these things — but not if that means enacting draconian measures to ensure it. We value ‘community’, we say, just as much as rural Africans — but the last thing we want is to be required to live in one place alongside the same people for the course of our entire lives. In other words, we really and truly want none of these things. Our wealth has made families dispensable and security largely taken for granted. Our obsession with community is precisely because we don’t have it and aren’t prepared to pay the price of having it. Our real concern is with how to stay entertained and tolerably sane (tolerably, at least, to ourselves) for eighty years or so. But if there’s one thing all that psychology could have taught us, it is that the self-directed person remains, in most respects, an infant. Growing up consists in becoming other-directed. That is why Jesus was the most grown-up person who ever lived; as Bonhoeffer put it, he was “the man for others”. And he calls his followers to be the same. How to resist babification? We could start by making a number of mental repudiations, and then some actual ones. If we understand that individuals are not autonomous, and were not intended by God to be so, then we can reinstate the value of duty — in our own lives and those of the people whom we influence. We could reframe all moral questions, whether public or private, away from a vocabulary of ‘rights’ and back to ‘duties’. And we could make a point of reinstating the appropriate vocabulary — duty, obligation, honour, dignity — in our conversations in ways that pressurise others to let them back in, too. We could consistently opt out of surveys, studies and magazine articles — ‘Check your IQ’; ‘Find your personality type’; ‘How good a lover are you?’ etc. — that serve merely to reinforce the cult of self-obsession whilst absolving us of responsibility for our actions. And we could encourage others to make the same refusals. Whilst Christians are not Stoics, we could at least treat the trials and tribulations that attend any human life with more calm, than our upbringing as babified Westerners has disposed us to do, recognising that our wealth or poverty, health or sickness, life or death are all sub specie aeternitatis — in the light of eternity. And that witness to a simple truth might just be catching. (This piece was first published on the website of LICC — the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity — in late 2008.)
Clever Germans and religious blind-spots
I’m thinking of spending my declining years (Oh, do shut up, Stephen!) establishing an Institute of Theology for Atheists. It would serve as a sort of adjunct for our universities and similar public bodies, so that its purblind denizens could apprise themselves of what were the fundamental features of their own historic culture before they dismantled it — or of current events, say, in Poland, or sub-Saharan Africa — without incurring the least imputation (if one might pardon the expression) amongst one’s acquaintance that one was deviating from the new, intolerant orthodoxy.
The need for such a public resource was brought home to me again today, and with some force. I have been reading Peter Watson’s excellent new offering The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century. It comes in at a hefty 992 pages, and he wants to tell us all about the massive contribution of Germany and the Germans to our intellectual life, especially from the 1760s to the twentieth century. And a jolly fine job he does of it. Even now, he insists, “The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German”. And he backs that up: the Germans invented the modern university, the seminar, and the PhD, a whole slew of modern academic disciplines — and even the idea of separate disciplines in the first place. By 1933, he reminds us, “Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans put together”.
Ah, yes, by 1933. Err, wasn’t that the year...? Yes, that was the year. No German would ever forget it, and no non-German would ever let them. And that, insists Watson, is our problem. Hitler and the Holocaust stand like a vast roadblock in our way, rendering invisible the pre-Nazi German past — not merely to foreigners like us, but to the Germans themselves. Blimey! It even has a knock-on effect upon perceptions of our own past. Just look at the imbalance in our school curricula, A-Level syllabuses, and popular publications. I realise that W.H.Smith is more or less uncontaminated by books these days, but just try visiting some other ‘popular’ bookshop-that-isn’t-really near you, and check out its so-called ‘History’ section. World War II battle stuff, all of it. In consequence of this fixation, if we look at pre-Hitler German history at all, everything-but-everything is misread as a sort of inevitable lead-up to You Know What. Watson has given himself a tough sell.
And so he spends a lengthy — and utterly masterful — ‘Introduction’ chapter in taking the roadblock out of our way. Watson spares nobody’s blushes, and does not give even the tiniest hint of minimising or exculpating Germany of the horrors of 1933-45. As a piece of both popular and academic historiography (the study of changing perceptions and interpretations of particular periods of the past), those first 38 pages are a master class, and I shall certainly be requiring them as student reading the next time I teach my course “Religion, Fascism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Europe” (which, with groaning predictability, is easily the most popular of my senior classes). My course is designed to confront the mindless clichés about the twentieth-century cataclysms and, in that struggle, Watson is clearly my newest friend. Before Hitler, there was a Germany that was truly worth the having — and we both can and should try to recover it.
Watson is clearly a Germanophile, and I can relate to that too, having been one myself for at least a couple of decades. I am not sure which of us blinked first, Germany or me, but by the late 1990s I realised that both of us had changed since my youthful infatuation, and in recent years I have retreated to a more measured ‘quite like it’.
In fact, I rather wish that Germany could somehow have been frozen into its early 1970s model (except the East, of course!), when it was still remorselessly efficient, obsessed with cleanliness, and merely in the apolitical stage of its recoil from the atrocities of the Nazi period. It all made such a delightful contrast to the shoddy, strike-plagued, chip-on-the-shoulder Britain of my youth! Since then, as Watson himself points out, that apoliticism — the desire to fight free from all political dogmatisms and to get on with making a decent life — has metamorphosed into a new dogmatism: the stain of the Nazi past is now to be repudiated by rejecting everything of which Nazism made a fetish. Muscular masculinity; motherhood; hearth-and-home domesticity; traditional folk customs and symbols by which one Volk could be distinguished from another; honour; duty; respectablity: all are now held to reek of fascism. Even the traditions to which Nazism (being itself a modernist creed) sat very cautiously — culture, classical conceptions of beauty, and ancient norms of every kind (including religion and morality) — of which it was occasionally prepared to pose as defender against the onslaughts of capitalism and communism, have come for that very reason to be held as oppressive. Those who defend them now are apparently but a step away from Holocaust-denial. Goodness, you yourself know this! If you are a person of the left, you believe it. If you are of the right, you have the queasy feeling that what you seek to defend is somehow tainted goods, from whose provenance you need constantly to distance yourself; after a while of thus debating through treacle, you may be tempted to give up, sensing (correctly) that the very terms of debate are somehow weighted against you.
To the generations that know no history but the Holocaust, our very civilisation is not a legacy from ancestors that we should pass on to future generations, but a catalogue of oppressions and cruelties of which genocide is the logical concomitant, and from which we must therefore release ourselves and everyone else. Or else, as the Greens might put it, we are a burden to the earth.
No wonder that Germany was the first country in Europe to register catastrophic, below-replacement birthrates (and became a trailblazer for Green success at the polls). People who do not believe in the value of their civilisation and way of life lose the urge to reproduce it, and give up on the expense and trouble of nurturing it in and through offspring. And who would be more likely to feel this way than the children of the Third Reich generation? In 1976, Der Spiegel magazine ran a cover headline that asked “Sterben die Deutschen aus?” “Are the Germans dying out?” And indeed they were. And now we all are. The historians of the early twenty-second century (if there are any) might well conclude that Hitler was the ironic victor of World War II, though not in any sense that he might have recognised. For the very virulence of the reaction against his poisonous legacy had itself led to the suicide of the societies he fought against. And of his own. Every defence of the past against the encroachments of modernity had come to be seen as somehow hopelessly contaminated by fascistic yearnings — and so simply had to be set aside. In consequence, the very mechanisms whereby Western civilisation had always reproduced itself — artistically, culturally, and even physically — as a bequest to the future simply fell away. And in that, as in so much else, Germany had taken the lead.
Anyway, back to Watson. The rest of his book is terrific, and in Chapter 1 he launches into important cultural changes in Germany during the eighteenth century. He highlights, of course, the emergence of Prussia as a truly remarkable state. And then he contends that “Germanness, as we now understand it” emerged during this period “and cannot be understood without a firm grasp of Pietism”, which was connected with the Prussian ethos of state service, and with the terrifying conscientiousness of its bureaucrats. Now this information had me salivating; as a church historian, I’ve long suspected something like this to be true, but have never managed to take the time out to verify it. So I was eager to see how Watson would make the connections for me. But this is where he let me — and all of us — down. Pages 45-47 are a small desert of mis-steps, mis-connections and mis-construals. And then, suddenly, theology out of the way, we are back to erudition and brilliance. This is so sad! Watson is no thirty-eight-year-old with a PhD in Grievance Studies from Brighton. He does not belong to the generation for whom ignorance of the differences between Christian traditions is not so much a matter of personal ‘cool’ pride as an essential condition of employability. Watson was born in 1943 (at the height of the Second World War), and so had his schooling in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the secularist bent of education was rather more low-key than it has since become. Yet for two and a half pages, this brilliant man appears to be talking in tongues about a thought world that is utterly alien to him. Every sentence appears to be written through a fog of bafflement and incomprehension. Watson is careful not to describe Christianity in hostile terms —but the sudden necessity of navigating its distinctions leaves him floundering. He describes Pietist theology as “radical” while his explication of its contents leaves it sounding like a confused mish-mash, hardly distinguishable from an indolent schoolboy’s generic description of ‘religion’. To take another example, the Reformed churches, apparently, emphasised the “inner light”, which made them more amenable to political control by princes than “the older, more orthodox, and more organized churches”. Goodness! Where to begin? Oh, and Protestantism’s pessimism about human nature “made it conservative and set against modernity”; if we wish to overturn overwhelming academic consensus in this fashion, we’ll need more than this passing phrase in which to do it. Having finished writing this article, I realised that I was betting my academic shirt on Watson not turning out, despite all appearances, to be a lifelong member of South Tooting Baptist. Or perhaps he would be one of that endearingly genteel type of Catholic who comes over all politely befuddled by the bemusing varieties of Protestantism. So, with no previous familiarity with Watson to fall back upon, I just thought I’d check online. And presto! Straightaway I found this quotation from an interview he gave to CBC news in 2007: “Religion has kept civilization back for hundreds of years, and the biggest mistake in the history of civilization is ethical monotheism, the concept of the one God. Let’s get rid of it and be rational.” Dawkins writ Deutsch? Yes, folks, I think we have the measure of our man. So: Does Pietism play a key role in the development of Prussian-ism — and so, by extension, of post-Bismarckian German-ness? I continue to suspect so. But because of this extraordinary selective blindness, not even the powers of Watson can confirm it or explain it to me. And until our intellectual class consents to lose its ‘cool’ enough to take seriously the very ideas it most detests — at least to the point of understanding them — then our brightest and best will continue to flounder in expounding even the things they care about most.
Despite this sudden tornado of incomprehension, The German Genius remains a work of, well, genius. As a guide — and for many readers, an initiation — to the immense contributions of Germans to our intellectual and cultural life, it is an entertaining and enlightening read. Just skip pages 45-47. And now, back to my plan for that Institute of Theology for Atheists.... Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (Simon and Schuster, 2010) ISBN 978-0743285537, 992 pp., £30 Green: Letters to the Editor (from 200Dear Sir, As part of my contribution to the (sustainable) forward thrust of Houghton towards becoming a truly Green ‘community’, I thought your readers might be interested to know of my latest scheme to improve the environment. It entails recycling freshmen. Near a grove between my house and the Equestrian Center, I have had a large trench dug, using non-fossil-fuel, organic diggers (illegal refugees from Buffalo), in which I have begun to compact large numbers of them. Most freshmen compost down nicely into a biodegradable mass; indeed, as is common knowledge, many actually arrived in Houghton pre-degraded, so to speak. Garnished with the occasional recalcitrant sophomore, they make a fine sight on a clear morning as one stares down at the resultant grey, dull, featureless mulch. This, obviously, is scarcely one whit removed from their original state. But after a full summer exposed to the blazing Houghton sunshine, the resultant ooze will be giving off enough malodorous gases to put any erstwhile denizen of Shen in mind of their lost youth — and will power the central heating systems of Allegheny right through the winter. The remainder makes excellent fertiliser the following spring. The scheme, of course, is not entirely without its snags. A few problem specimens turn out to be composed largely of inorganic materials. Those who had frequented fast food restaurants contain unacceptable levels of styrofoam. Others, overfed on candy, peanut butter, American jam and other such by-products of the petrochemical industry, require compacting with mechanical diggers — a course of action which is, in these straitened times, a waste of petrol. I shall be obliged, therefore, if any of your readers can give me tips on how we might make environmentally sound use of this irreduceable grit. Problems aside, I remain excited at the prospect of the new age we are now entering, and entirely confident that the new breed of environmentalists will be as full of fun and laughter as their twentieth-century socialist and feminist predecessors. Yours ecologically, Meic Pearse New Age (from 2008, Houghton Down Under) Although I am kept resolutely, and perhaps wisely, in purdah from Theology Dept. courses, for fear of contaminating them with my dubious deviations from the right-on attitudes that pass for orthodoxy (or at any rate, orthopathy), it nevertheless fell to my lot a few days ago to accompany some of our students on a trip that was part of their Christianity and Postmodernity module. It could not be helped; these students are in the Houghton Down Under Program, whose babysitter-in-chief I am, this time around. And an interesting experience it was. Just as none of Dr. Hegeman’s courses on Islam is complete, nowadays, without field trips to the Kasbah and the caves of Tora Bora, so Christianity and Postmodernity — at least in its upside-down incarnation — positively requires experience of a New Age event; in this case, it was a market held at St. [sic] Andrews, outside Melbourne. It took an hour to drive from our squalid accommodation to the leafy suburbs whose denizens have the wealth and leisure to concern themselves with the healing properties of crystals and the prognostications of ‘aura’ photographs. And as we burbled along in the minivan, I permitted myself what seemed (from my, entirely unjaundiced perspective) a few innocuous remarks about the event we were off to see. These nevertheless elicited a vigorous response from some of my passengers, including my beloved younger daughter — who is, so far as I am aware, the only Houghton student apparently permitted to strike a Professor of History. Or, at least, to have the punishment for doing so commuted to the next life (as I console myself), rather than the oh-so-deserving present one. We arrived, the minivan doors were opened, the students’ huff arrived, and they departed in it, leaving Mrs. Pearse (that august lady!) and myself to peruse the fair together at our leisure. As I had suspected, the New Age turned out to be a little older than its name implies. Certainly I had seen all this stuff back in about 1979 (so: when little more than a babe in arms) at the Pontardawe Folk Festival in South Wales. There were the same rainbow-striped woolly sweaters, the vests apparently lifted from the set of Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat, the profusions of facial hair (and that was just the women!), the odd sight of Rastafarian coiffure on Caucasians, the woolly hats in various shades of organic mud. The usual range of whole-grain apples, free-range peppers and (at a guess) recycled lettuces were on sale, but no meat. There were a couple of vendors of leather goods, though; it seems it’s OK to skin and wear our ruminant brethren — just not to eat them. (If an explanation of this apparent inconsistency exists, I fear I may be on the wrong astral plane to grasp it.) A large pile of brightly-colored Indian wraps was clearly aimed at the buy-this-for-your-girlfriend market; it was tended by three young ladies attempting to look sexy — and perhaps succeeding, in a feminist-wholefood kind of way. Nearby a barefoot young man sat cross-legged athwart a shawl-draped wallpapering table, playing a mandolin. But I moved swiftly on, since I had no wish to witness (for I am a tender soul, at heart) the impending instant, so clearly written in his karma, when the laws of gravity would reveal to him that wallpapering tables cannot long support anything heavier than a six-pint can of vinyl matt. Also cross-legged, but less perilously, sat customers on a rug at the chai tea stall. Further on, I marveled at the stands specializing in Ki and Ra. Yet another offered services in ‘Kinesiology’, a name that went a long way to assure me that all of this stuff was, after all, scientifically grounded. (The doubt occurred to me momentarily, though, that Kinesiology might be simply the study of Chinese civilization. But then I remembered: that was Sinology. ... Or was that the medical specialization dealing with sinuses?) It may have been the effects of all that joss-stick smoke, but I was starting to get confused. Something must have jogged my memory about Houghton’s community code and its strictures concerning intoxicating substances, though, so I thought it best to make my way back to the exit — but not before I had had my toenails read, my smaller organs embalmed in nut oil, and had consumed a tofuburger and a Tantric donut washed down with vegan coffee and fairly traded huckleberry juice. Or something like that. Full of wonder, I regained the minivan, a more enlightened Pearse. As for the students and their essays, I am sure they will all get As. But before they can write them, we shall have to get the little darlings back from the naturism and natural-yoghurt-making bootcamp (or rather, sandal camp) I saw them signing up for.... More anon.
(from 2007) |
